Universidad de San Carlos de

Guatemala Escuela de Ciencias

Lingüísticas
Técnico en Traducción y Correspondencia
Internacional 5to. Semestre
Estudios Comparados
Lcda. Andrea Alejandra López B.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH

The history of the

English language
really started
with the arrival of
three Germanic
tribes who
invaded Britain
during the 5th
century AD.
These tribes, the
Angles, the
Saxons and the
Jutes, crossed the
North Sea from
what today is
Denmark

and northern
Germany. At that
time the
inhabitants
of
Britain spoke a
Celtic language.
But most of the
Celtic speakers
were pushed
West
and North by the invaders - mainly into what is now Wales, Scotland and
Ireland. The Angles came from "Englaland" and their language was called
"Englisc" - from which the words "England" and "English" are derived.

Old English (450-1100 AD)

The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain
developed into what we now call Old English. Old English did not sound or look
like English today. Native English speakers now would have great difficulty
understanding Old English. Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly
used words in Modern English have Old English roots. The words be, strong and
water, for example, derive from Old English.

Middle English (1100-1500)

In 1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy (part of modern France),
invaded and conquered England. The new conquerors (called the Normans)
brought with them a kind of French, which became the language of the Royal
Court, and the ruling and business classes. For a period there was a kind of
linguistic class division, where the lower classes spoke English and the upper
classes spoke French. In the 14th century English
became dominant in Britain again, but with many French words added. This
language is called Middle English. It was the language of the great poet
Chaucer (c1340-1400), but it would still be difficult for native English speakers
to understand today.
Modern English
Early Modern English (1500-1800)
Towards the end of Middle English, a sudden and distinct change in
pronunciation (the Great Vowel Shift) started, with vowels being pronounced
shorter and shorter. From the 16th century the British had contact with many
peoples from around the world.
This, and the Renaissance of Classical learning, meant that many new words
and phrases entered the language. The invention of printing also meant that
there was now a common language in print. Books became cheaper and more
people learned to read. Printing also brought standardization to English.
Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the dialect of London, where most
publishing houses were, became the standard. In 1604 the first English
dictionary was published.

Late Modern English (1800-Present)

The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is
vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from two
principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology created a
need for new words; secondly, the British Empire at its height covered one
quarter of the earth's surface, and the English language adopted foreign words
from many countries.

Varieties of English
From around 1600, the English colonization of North America resulted in the
creation of a distinct American variety of English. Some English pronunciations
and words "froze" when they reached America. In some ways, American
English is more like the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is.
Some expressions that the British call "Americanisms" are in fact original
British expressions that were preserved in the colonies while lost for a time in
Britain (for example trash for rubbish, loan as a verb instead of lend, and fall for
autumn; another example, frame-up, was re-imported into Britain through
Hollywood gangster movies). Spanish also had an influence on American
English (and subsequently British English), with words like canyon, ranch,
stampede and vigilante being examples of Spanish words that entered English
through the settlement of the American West. French words (through
Louisiana) and West African words (through the slave trade) also influenced
American English (and so, to an extent, British English).
Today, American English is particularly influential, due to the USA's dominance
of cinema, television, popular music, trade and technology (including the
Internet). But there are many other varieties of English around the world,
including for example Australian English, New Zealand English, Canadian
English, South African English, Indian English and Caribbean English.

Retrieved from: https://www.englishclub.com/history-of-english/

 Important Facts about English

If you are an English speaker! Congratulations. You speak a language that

straddles the globe like nothing before. Statistically, English is unlikely to be
your first language and you are likely to be from an educated background.

Even if you are an English speaker, maybe there are some important facts
about this language that you do not know.

1. It is the only major language without an academy to guide it: L’Académie

française, based in Paris, is in charge of overseeing the French language.
Part of its job is suggesting alternatives for the English words that are
pouring into French. That’s how email became courriel.
For Spanish there is the Real Academia de la Lengua Española. German has
the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung. There is no equivalent to L’Académie
for English.

There are political reasons for this. The closest Britain ever came to having
a language academy was at the start of the eighteenth century, when
Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift was lobbying hard for an academy
because “our Language is extremely imperfect… its daily improvements are
by no means in proportion to its daily corruptions (and) in many instances it
offends against every Part of Grammar.” Queen Anne supported the idea
but died before a decision could be made, and the issue was largely
forgotten.

In the USA, a bill for the incorporation of a national academy was

unsuccessfully introduced into congress in 1806. Fourteen years later, an
American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres was launched with John
Quincy Adams as president, but broke up after two years after receiving
little political or public support.

Nowadays, the only English-speaking country to have a language academy

is South Africa. Because the English language has become so ubiquitous
without any guidance, there is little prospect of anyone starting an academy
any time soon.

2. More than 1 billion people are learning English as you read this: according to
the British Council, around 1 billion people around the world were learning
English in 2000. This figure is now likely to be significantly higher.

3. 96 of the 100 most common English words are Germanic: of the hundred most
frequently used words in English, 96 have Germanic roots. Together, those
100 words make up more than 50% of the Oxford English Corpus, which
currently contains over 2 billion words found in writing around the world.

4. …but most words that have entered the language since 1066 have Latin origins:
if English is your first language but you find French or Spanish easier to
understand than German, you are not alone. This may seem strange when
English and German are on the same branch of the Indo-European language
tree. The Renaissance, which started in Italy and reached England via
France, was a massive source of new vocabulary. New ideas, or old ideas
rediscovered, started flooding out of the southern cities but there were no
words to describe them in English. So the language adopted or adapted the
Latin words. During the Renaissance, the English lexicon roughly doubled in
size.
 The shift away from the Germanic languages, however, had started much
earlier, because…

5. For more than a century, the English aristocracy couldn’t speak English: William
the Conqueror tried to learn English at the age of 43 but gave up. He didn’t
seem especially fond of the land he had conquered in 1066, spending half of
his reign in France and not visiting England at all for five years when in
power. Naturally, French- speaking barons were appointed to rule the land.
Within 20 years of the Normans taking power in England, almost all of the
local religious institutions were French-speaking. The aristocrats brought
with them large retinues and were followed by French tradesmen, who
almost certainly mixed bilingually with the English tradesmen. In turn,
ambitious Englishmen would have learned French to get ahead in life and
mix with the new rulers. Around 10,000 French words entered English in the
century after the Norman invasion.
There is little to suggest that aristocrats themselves spoke English. It isn’t
until the end of the 12th Century that we have evidence of the children of
the English aristocracy with English as a first language. In 1204, the
English nobility lost their estates in France and adopted English partly as
a matter of national pride!

6. …which is why Latin words sound more prestigious than Germanic ones: think
about the difference between a house (Germanic) and a mansion (French),
or between starting something and commencing, between calling something kingly
or regal. English has a huge number of close synonyms, where the major
difference is the level of formality or prestige. The prestigious form is almost
always the Latin one.
The names of animals and meats also reflect this phenomenon. The old story
goes that, in English, the animals have Germanic names but the cooked meats
have French ones. For example, swine is Germanic but pork is French, sheep is
Germanic but mutton is French. Was this because the English speakers worked
on the farms whereas the French speakers ate the produce? It’s certainly
possible.

7. The concept of “correct” spelling is fairly recent: there are many reasons why
English spelling is so erratic including the lack of an academy, the contributions
of Noah Webster and the introduction of William Caxton’s printing press just
before major changes in pronunciation. But the idea of correct or incorrect
spelling wasn’t really considered important until the 17th Century when the
first dictionaries were published. Even then, it was largely a debate for
academics and writers.
Shakespeare, for example, was liberal in his spellings of words, often using
multiple variants within a single text; his name itself has been spelt in many
different ways over the centuries.

8. One man is largely responsible for the differences between American and British
spelling: Noah Webster, whose name you still find on the front of many
American dictionaries, was a patriotic man. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut
in 1758, he believed that a great emerging nation such as the USA needed a
language of its own: American English.
Webster found the English in the textbooks of the time to be corrupted by the
British aristocracy, with too much French and Classical influence. He was
to write American books for American learners, representing a young, proud
and forward-thinking nation.
Between 1783 and 1785, he produced three books on the English language for
American schoolchildren. During his lifetime, 385 editions of his Speller were
published. The modern US spelling of color was initially spelt in the British way,
colour, but this changed in later editions. Other differences include the US
spelling of center as opposed to the British centre, and traveler instead of
traveller. Webster wanted to make spelling more logical, as befitting a nation
that was founded on progressive principles. This is a rare example of a
dictionary writer trying to lead the English language instead of describe it.
In Britain, the use of “Americanisms” is almost guaranteed to upset people. But
not all Americanisms are what they seem. For example…

9. -ize is not an American suffix: there is a popular belief that words

such as popularise/ize, maximise/ize and digitise/ize have different spellings in
British and American English.
Look at that z – isn’t it snazzy? It’s got to be American, hasn’t it?
Not according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which rejects the French s for a
good old British z.

10. The English language will change a lot during your lifetime, like it or not!:
the only thing that is consistent in language is change. When a language stops
changing, it becomes purely academic, like Latin or Ancient Greek.
New words are being coined all the time. If you asked someone twenty years
ago whether they had googled the person they had just friended on facebook,
they would stare at you blankly (spell-check still gives them wiggly red lines of
disapproval).
Vocabulary changes more rapidly than grammar, but even English grammar is
evolving. For example, the dative whom is increasingly being replaced by who.
Who can you blame? Decades ago, this would have jumped off the page as a
grammatical error, but doesn’t it look ok now?
Similarly, in the first part of this post, “Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift”
is an example of grammar that would have sounded very strange even fifty
years ago. Did it seem strange to you?
One thing is certain: with well over a billion people speaking English around the
world and, for the first time, most of them speaking it as a second language,
there are plenty of changes to come!

Hammond, A. (2013). Ten things you might not have known about the
English language. Oxford University Press, ELT Global Blog.
Retrieved from: https://oupeltglobalblog.com/2013/05/09/ten-things-you-
might-not-have-known- about-the-english-language/