Fayoum University

Department of English Language and Literature

Selected readings compiled & edited by

Dr. Ahmed F. Zeidan

 ‫سأضرب ف طول البالد وعرضها ‪...‬‬
‫أنل مرادي أو أموت غريبـا‬
‫فإن تلفت نفسي فلله درهـ ــا ‪...‬‬
‫وإن سلمت كان الرجـوع‬
‫ق ـ ـ ـ ـري ـ ـ ـ ـب ـ ـ ـ ـ ـا‬

‫‪2‬‬
Contents
List of abbreviations 7

I. The English language present and future

The history of English as a cultural subject 9

Factors that contributed to the development of English 10

Internal and external influences on the development of English 11

Two important grammatical features of the English language 18

English as a World Language 20

II. The Indo-European Family of Languages

Language typology and language family 26

Dialectical differentiation 29

The discovery of Sanskrit 31

Grimm’s Law 33

The Indo-European family and the Germanic beginnings 36

The Germanic branch 39

Cognate words in the Indo-European languages 42

3
Inflections of the Indo-European languages 40

Some verb inflections 45

Some noun inflections 48

Grammatical characteristics of Germanic languages 50

III. Old English (450- 1100 A.D.)

The languages in England before English 56

Pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain 60

The Celts 61

The Roman invasion 62

The Latin language in Britain 64

The Germanic conquest 66

The language of Old English 72

Orthography of Old English 73

Pronunciation of Old English 75

Features of OE vocabulary 78

Old English Grammar 80

4
Middle English (1100- 1500)

Historical background 86

Middle English: a Period of Great Change 89

Vocabulary changes in Middle English 90

Decay of Inflectional Endings 93

Middle English Nouns 94

Middle English Adjectives 98

Middle English Pronouns 100

IV. Modern English (1500- Present)

Early Modern English (1500- 1800) 105

Late Modern English (1800- Present) 106

The English language in America 108

Archaic features in American English 111

Early changes in the vocabulary of American English 113

Pronunciation of American English 117

5
6
 List of abbreviations
The following abbreviations were used throughout the various
chapters of the book

A.D. Anno Domini (dates after the birth of Christ)

B.C. Before Christ.
ME Middle English
ModE Modern English
OE Old English
ON Old Norse
PDE Present Day English
PIE Proto Indo-European
CHAPTER 1

The English Language Present

and Future

8
Introduction

The ‘History of the English language’ is one of the fundamental

courses forming the linguistic background of a student at the
English language. It studies the rise and development of English,
its structure and peculiarities in the old days, its similarity to other
languages of the same family and its unique, specific features. It
is a diachronistic view of the language, that is aimed at
understanding the very essence of the language that seems to be
so unique in many respects today. In contrast to synchronistic
approach with its study of a language as a system of interrelated
phenomena, separate aspects of the language are going to be
investigated, and with due respect to synchronic studies, paying
due attention to some periods (that is, each of the periods will be
studied in detail and separate phenomena will be analyzed).

Actually, the usual criticism to diachronic studies is that

they lack a system. In historical studies only separate facts are
investigated, for in reality, we are never sure that some written
records lost in the course of time might (or might not) contain
some other data for analysis. But practically, all material is rarely
treated even in the most advanced studies of the present-day
language, and we agree that it is just sufficient material that is

9
needed. With adequate tools of investigation, we still can trace all
the changes within the language as a system. So, the aim of the
course is the investigation of the development of the system of the
English language. We are going to have a close look at the major
stages of development of the language, the influence of various
linguistic and non-linguistic factors on the language and, in the
long run, try and formulate what makes this language, once a
language of one of the many not very significant European
communities, now almost a Lingua Franca, a means of
communication on the global scale however willing or unwilling
should the peoples and politicians be to admit it.

Imagine that you have stomach ache and you go to the

doctor. The doctor would ask you to describe your symptoms - you
groan, clutch your stomach - and also to describe the relevant
background to your symptoms. You would probably be asked such
questions as: When did the trouble start? Have you eaten anything
that might have caused it? Has it affected your appetite . . . your
bowels? By investigating the medical history relevant to your
present state, the doctor can learn more about your stomach ache.
I say relevant because obviously a doctor would not ask you such
a question as: Has your big toe been hurting? Now, the case with
language is similar. By investigating the history which is relevant
10
to the present state of the English language, we can gain insight
into that language, we can begin to explain how it got to be as it
is. For example, we can explain why it is that we have such
apparently crazy spelling: how it is that words come into
existence; why it is that sometimes we seem to have a choice of
words to express more or less the same thing (e.g., fortunate and
lucky); where the confusing (e.g., student's or students') came
from; why it is that we don't all talk like the queen or the people
on the BBC; and so on. By looking at how English has changed,
and the factors that have influenced those changes, we can begin
to answer questions like these.

The subject matter of the course is the changing nature of

the language through more than 15 hundred years of its existence.
It starts with a close view at the beginnings of the language,
originally the dialects of a comparatively small number of related
tribes that migrated from the continent onto the British Isles, the
dialects of the Indo-European family - synthetic, inflected
language with a well-developed system of noun forms, a rather
poorly represented system of verbal categories, with free word
order and a vocabulary that consisted almost entirely of words of
native origin. The phonological system of the language was also
much simpler, with a strict subdivision of vowels into long and
11
short, comparatively few diphthongs and an underdeveloped
system of consonants.

What is the English language nowadays? Speaking in more

general terms, it is the native (and state) language of the population
of several countries - Great Britain, where, as we can see, it arose
and formed into a developed national language, and several former
colonies of this empire - The United States of America, Australia,
New Zealand and partly Canada (though for a layman it is the
language of Canada). With a certain part of the population of the
South African republic the total number of the citizens of these
countries will hardly reach half a billion native speakers. Can we
compare it with such mega-communities as China, for instance?
We do not in the least depreciate the significance of the Chinese
language, or any other language of the world, but what then makes
the English language a socio-linguistic factor now? Is it the
influence of the USA or Great Britain? To a certain extent we may
admit that might be the cause, but - only to a certain extent. There
are some purely linguistic factors that facilitated this process.

Being a historical discipline, this subject is going to use the

material of historical science - the development of the language is
in close relation to the development of the country - so the

12
milestones in English history are to be reviewed. In our reference
to history, we are going to distinguish linguistically relevant
historic events, or, to be more precise, some more linguistically
relevant events as against some others which might have been very
significant for the country but left much a paler effect on the
development of the language. So, the very settlement of the Anglo-
Saxon tribes on the isles, for example, is of paramount linguistic
importance - the language became isolated from the continental
Germanic dialects and began its separate existence. Numerous
feuds and wars that the English carried on with other countries had
some impact on the language, but none can be compared with the
Norman Conquest of Britain, which was probably one of the
mightiest factors of its drastic change from a language relatively
immune to foreign elements to one of the most receptive languages
in the present-day world.

Technical inventions might have had enormous significance

for the development of the language. For instance, the invention
of the loom for the weavers changed England into an industrial
state, gave an incomparable impulse to its economic development,
but as far as the language is concerned it cannot be compared with
the invention of the printing press, that served as a mighty
conserving factor to medieval spelling. No matter how the sound
13
system changed, the spelling preserved the older shape of the
words. If previously, spelling had changed to reflect changes in
pronunciation, printing froze the spelling: we spell essentially the
way Caxton did. Its importance in spreading literacy and the
standard norm, thus transforming a language of many dialects into
a national language is Indisputable. The same can be said about
such inventions of the early 20th century as radio and television.

Language families
The process of change in a language often leads to divergent
development. Imagine a language which is spoken only by the
population of two small adjacent villages. In each village, the
language will slowly change, but the changes will not be identical
in the two villages, because conditions are slightly different.
Hence the speech used in one of the villages may gradually
diverge from that used in the other. If there is rivalry between the
villages, they may even pride themselves on such divergences, as
a mark of local patriotism. Within the single village, speech will
remain fairly uniform, because the speakers are in constant
contact, and so influence one another. The rate at which the speech
of one village diverges from that of the other will depend partly
on the degree of difference between their ways of life, and partly
on the intensity of communication between them. If the villages
14
are close together and have a good deal of inter-village contact, so
that many members of one village are constantly talking with
members of the other, then divergence will be kept small, because
the speech of one community will be constantly influencing the
speech of the other. But if communications are bad, and members
of one village seldom meet anybody from the other, then the rate
of divergence may well be high. When a language has diverged
into two forms like this, we say that it has two dialects.
Suppose now that the inhabitants of one of the villages pack
up their belongings and migrate en masse. They go off to a distant
country and live under conditions quite different from their old
home, and completely lose contact with the other village. The rate
at which the two dialects diverge will now increase, partly because
of the difference of environment and way of life, partly because
they no longer influence one another. After a few hundred years,
the two dialects may have got so different that they are no longer
mutually intelligible. We should now say that they were two
different languages. Both have grown by a process of continuous
change out of the single original language, but because of
divergent development there are now two languages instead of
one. When two languages have evolved in this way from some
earlier single language, we say that they are related. The

15
development of related languages from an earlier parent language
can be represented diagrammatically as a family tree, thus:
As we shall see later, this kind of diagram is in some ways
inadequate, and we must certainly avoid thinking of languages as
if they were people. But as long as we bear this in mind, we shall
find that family trees are a convenient way of depicting the
relationships between languages.

Dialectal Differentiation

As previously remarked, where constant communication takes

place among the people speaking a language, individual differences
become merged in the general speech of the community, and a
certain conformity prevails. But if any separation of one community
from another takes place and lasts for a considerable length of time,
differences grow up between them. The differences may be slight if
the separation is slight, and we have merely local dialects. On the
other hand, they may become so considerable as to render the
language of one district unintelligible to the speakers of another. In
16
this case, we generally have the development of separate languages.
Even where the differentiation has gone so far, however, it is usually
possible to recognize a sufficient number of features which the
resulting languages still retain in common to indicate that at one time
they were one. It is easy to perceive a close kinship between English
and German. Milch and milk, brot and bread, fleisch and flesh,
wasser and water are obviously only words that have diverged from
a common form. In the same way a connection between Latin and
English is indicated by such correspondences as pater with English
father, or frāter with brother, although the difference in the initial
consonants tends somewhat to obscure the relationship. When we
notice that father corresponds to Dutch vader, Gothic fadar, Old
Norse faðir, German vater, Greek patēr, Sanskrit pitar-, and Old
Irish athir (with loss of the initial consonant), or that English brother
corresponds to Dutch broeder, German bruder, Greek phrātēr,
Sanskrit bhrātar-, Old Slavic bratŭ, Irish brathair, we are led to the
hypothesis that the languages of a large part of Europe and part of
Asia were at one time identical.

1.2 Factors that contributed to the development of English?

The English language of today reflects many centuries of

development (See Figure 1.1). Many political and social events

17
have, in the course of English history, so profoundly affected the
English people in their national life and had in turn a recognizable
effect on their language.

Figure 1.1: A timeline of the development of the English

language

1.2.1 Internal and external influences on language change

Traditionally, it has been claimed that languages change in response
to internal and external influences.
Military invasions remain an important factor that influences
the development of any language in general and the English language
in particular. The Roman invasion of Britain in 597, for instance,

18
brought England into contact with Latin civilization and made
significant additions to the English language vocabulary. Similarly,
the Scandinavian invasions resulted in a considerable mixture of the
two peoples and their languages. The Norman Conquest in the 11 th
century by an army of French soldiers led by Duke William II
of Normandy1, made English for two centuries the language mainly
of the lower classes while the nobles and those associated with them
used French on almost all occasions. And when English once more
regained supremacy as the language of all elements of the
population, it was an English greatly changed in both form and
vocabulary from what it had been in 1066.
Externally influenced changes result more from the social and
cultural contexts in which languages are used. Thus, the Hundred
Years’ War2, the rise of an important middle class, the Renaissance,
the development of England as a maritime power, the expansion of
the British Empire, and the growth of commerce and industry, of
science and literature, have, each in their way, contributed to the
development of the language. References in scholarly and popular

1
. Later came to be known as William the Conqueror.
2
. An extended struggle between England and France in the 14th–
15th century over a series of disputes. The struggle involved several
generations of English and French claimants to the crown and
actually occupied a period of more than 100 years.
19
works point to the fact that the political and cultural history of the
English language is not simply the history of the ‘British Isles’ and
of ‘North America’ but a truly international history of quite divergent
societies, which have caused the language to change and become
enriched as it responds to their own special needs.
External changes may also result from some kind of language
contact: speakers of different languages coming into contact,
resulting in changes to the languages that they speak. The effects of
contact can vary. For this reason, Thomason and Kaufman (1988:
74–6) proposed a “borrowing scale,” a five-point scale ranging from
the relatively minor effects on a language that result from “casual”
contact to the more extensive effects that can result from “very
strong cultural pressure.”
Throughout its history, English has had contact with many
languages, resulting in varying degrees of change in the language.
Latin, for instance, has heavily influenced English. During the Old
English period, as a result of the introduction of Christianity into
England, English borrowed from Latin words such as mass, abbot,
altar, priest and candle. These borrowings are fairly low on
Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988: 74) borrowing scale, since they
entered English for “cultural and functional” reasons: to provide
words not currently in English necessary for describing new
concepts. Higher up on the borrowing scale (level 3 of 5) are Latin
20
prepositions borrowed into English and converted into suffixes, and
Greek and Latin words borrowed into English that have maintained
their native inflections. For instance, the Latin preposition sub
(meaning ‘under’) is now an English prefix found in words such as
subzero or subhuman. Over time, these prefixes can be found on
words not derived from Latin. The word postgame (as in “The athlete
gave a postgame interview”) is derived from the Latin preposition
post (meaning ‘after’) and the Germanic word game. Latin words
such as medium/media and datum/data contain Latin inflections (-
um and -a) marking these nouns as neuter and, respectively, singular
and plural. Of course, over time these words have become reanalyzed
so that now one hears sentences such as The media has too much
power, where media is not analyzed as a plural but instead as a
singular collective noun, a noun designating a single entity
composed of individuals. Because these borrowings involve changes
in structure (rather than mere additions to English vocabulary), they
represent a fairly significant influence on the structure of the English
language.
Internally influenced changes result from natural processes
that all languages undergo: if it were possible to protect a language
from any external influences (e.g., contact with other languages) by
putting it in a hermetically sealed bottle, the language would still
change, since there are systematic mechanisms of change that are
21
purely internal to language. There are many examples of internal
processes that languages undergo as they change. To explain why
English has lost so many inflections over time and changed from a
fusional language to an isolating language, Whaley (1997: 138)
describes a cyclic process that all languages undergo. English is in
one stage of the cycle, experiencing “morphological loss” as it very
gradually transitions from a fusional to an isolating language. Other
languages are at other stages, moving from isolating to agglutinative
or agglutinative to fusional. Labov (1994) classifies the Great Vowel
Shift in English as a type of chain shift, a sound change that involves
vowels in a language changing places, with some vowels replacing
others. As noted earlier, vowels were either raised or became
diphthongs. This shift is not isolated to the Great Vowel Shift, but
part of a more general pattern of sound change found in many
languages.
Although internal and external influences are often regarded
as distinct motivations for language change, they are not necessarily
mutually exclusive. For instance, the loss of the relative pronoun
whom in English is, on the one hand, a consequence of a more
general process that all languages can potentially undergo: the
gradual movement from a fusional to an isolating language. On the
other hand, the loss could also be attributed to contact with other

22
languages, such as French, that lack an elaborate morphology for
case.
Because English has experienced mainly “casual to intense
contact” (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988, p. 76) from other
languages, it has undergone changes that have not fundamentally
altered the language. However, other languages have been affected
more dramatically by language contact to the point that some of them
have undergone language death.

1.3 Two important grammatical features of the English

Language
An important feature that the English language possesses to a
preeminent degree is that English possesses to a preeminent degree
is inflectional simplicity. Within the Indo-European family of
languages, it happens that the oldest, classical languages—Sanskrit,
Greek, and Latin—have inflections of the noun, the adjective, the
verb, and to some extent the pronoun that are no longer found in
modern languages such as Russian or French or German. In this
process of simplifying inflections, English has gone further than any
other language in Europe. Inflections in the noun as spoken have
been reduced to a sign of the plural and a form for the possessive
case. The elaborate Germanic inflection of the adjective has been
completely eliminated except for the simple indication of the
23
comparative and the superlative degrees. The verb has been
simplified by the loss of practically all the personal endings, the
almost complete abandonment of any distinction between the
singular and the plural, and the gradual discard of the subjunctive
mood. The complicated agreements that make German difficult for
the nonnative speaker are absent from English.
Another grammatical feature that makes English different
from all other major European languages is having adopted natural
(rather than grammatical) gender. In studying other European
languages, the student must learn both the meaning of every noun
and also its gender. In the Romance languages, for example, there
are only two genders, and all nouns that would be neuter in English
are there either masculine or feminine. Some help in these languages
is afforded by distinctive endings that at times characterize the two
classes. But even this aid is lacking in the Germanic languages,
where the distribution of the three genders appears to the English
student to be quite arbitrary. Thus, in German sonne (sun) is
feminine, mond (moon) is masculine, but kind (child), mädchen
(maiden), and weib (wife) are neuter. The distinction must be
constantly kept in mind, since it not only affects the reference of
pronouns but also determines the form of inflection and the
agreement of adjectives. In the English language, all this was
stripped away during the Middle English period, and today the
24
gender of every noun in the dictionary is known instantly. Gender in
English is determined by meaning. All nouns naming living creatures
are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and
all other nouns are neuter.

References
Fishman, A. (1992). Sociology of English as an additional language.
In The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures (Ed.), B.
Kachru.
Kachru, B. B. (1988). The Sacred Cows of English. English Today,
16.
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal
Factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Thomason, S. G. and T. Kaufman (1988). Language Contact,
Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

25
CHAPTE R 2

The Indo-European Family of

Languages

26
2.1 Language typology and language families

I
n talking about a language family, we use metaphors like
“mother” and “daughter” language and speak of degrees of
“relationship” just as though languages had offspring that could
be plotted on a genealogical, or family-tree, chart. The terms are
convenient ones; but, in the discussion of so-called linguistic
families that follows, we must bear in mind that a language is not
born, nor does it put out branches like a tree- nor, for that matter,
does it die except when every single one of its speakers dies, as has
happened to Gothic, Cornish, and a good many other languages. We
speak of Latin as a dead language, but, in fact, it still lives in various
developments as Italian, French, Spanish, and the other Romance
languages. In the same way, Proto-Indo European continues in the
various present-day Indo-European languages.
Hence, the terms families, ancestor, parent and other
genealogical expressions when applied to languages must be
regarded as no more than metaphors. Language are developments of
older languages rather than decedents in the sense in which people
are descendants of their ancestors. Thus, Italian and Spanish are
different developments of an earlier, more unified language, Latin.
Latin, in turn, is one of a number of developments of a still earlier
language called Italic. Italic, in its turn, is a development of Indo-
European. Whether or not Indo-European has affinities with other
27
languages spoken in prehistoric times, and is hence a development
of an even earlier language, sometimes called Nostratic, is moot.
And whether all human languages can be traced back to a single
original speech, Proto-World, is even more so; for we are quite in
the dark about how it all began.

2.3 The Discovery of Sanskrit.

According to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, the

European languages and Sanskrit, the oldest language of the Indian
sub-continent, were tied to a common source. When a systematic
resemblance was discovered in both roots and verbs and in grammar
forms, by comparing similar features of the European languages and
Sanskrit, a common source language was reconstructed named
Proto-Indo-European.
In this respect, the most important discovery leading to the
hypothesis of the existence of an earlier source from which different
languages may have descended was the recognition that Sanskrit, a
language of ancient India, was one of the languages of the group.
This was first suggested in the latter part of the eighteenth century
and fully established by the beginning of the nineteenth.
It is probably very difficult to appreciate how similar the wide
variety of Indo-European languages are. This is partly simply

28
because the relations we are talking about stem from a period almost
10,000 years ago, and for which we have no direct evidence. The
way we overcome this is by searching for what are called cognate
forms. These are words which share meanings over different
languages and which appear to have similar shapes. It is easier, for
example, to see the resemblance between the English word brother
and the Sanskrit bhrātar-than between brother and frāter. Thus, if
we search for cognates in Sanskrit (an ancient language of India),

Greek, Latin and English, we find the following words for ‘father:

Figure 2.1: Forms of the word ‘father’ in some languages

The Sanskrit forms particularly permit us to see that at one time this
verb had the same endings (mi, si, ti, mas, tha, nti) as were employed
in the present tense of other verbs, for example:

29
2.4 Grimm’s Law

A further important step was taken when in 1822 a German

philologist, Jacob Grimm, formulated an explanation that
systematically accounted for the correspondences between certain
consonants in the Germanic languages and those found for example
in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. His explanation, although
subsequently modified and in some of the details of its operation still
a subject of dispute, is easily illustrated. Below are some examples
of cognate forms from English, Dutch and German, and alongside
them the corresponding French words:

30
 According to Grimm, a p in Indo-European, preserved as such
in Latin and Greek, was changed to an f in the Germanic languages.
Thus, we should look for the English equivalent of Latin piscis or
pēs to begin with an f, and this is what we actually find, in fish and
foot respectively. What is true of p is true also of t and k: in other
words, the original voiceless stops (p, t, k) were changed to fricatives
(f, þ, h). So Latin trēs=English three, Latin centum=English hundred.
A similar correspondence can be shown for certain other groups of
consonants, and the consequently Sanskrit bhárāmi (Greek)=English
bear, Sanskrit dhā=English do, Latin hostis (from *ghostis)=English
guest. And the original voiced stops (b, d, g) changed to voiceless
ones in the Germanic languages, so that Latin cannabis=English
hemp (showing also the shift of initial k to h), Latin decem=English
ten, Latin genu=English knee. In High German, some of these
consonants underwent a further change, known as the Second or
High German Sound-Shift. It accounts for such differences as we see

31
in English open and German offen, English eat and German essen.
Formulation of these correspondences is known as Grimm’s Law.
The cause of the change is not known. It must have taken place
sometime after the segregation of the Germanic from neighboring
dialects of the parent language. There are words in Finnish borrowed
from Germanic that do not show the change and that therefore must
have resulted from a contact between Germanic and Finnish before
the change occurred. There is also evidence that the shifting was still
occurring as late as about the fifth century B.C.
It is often assumed that the change was due to contact with a
non-Germanic population. The contact could have resulted from the
migration of the Germanic tribes or from the penetration of a foreign
population into Germanic territory. Whatever its cause, the
Germanic sound-shift is the most distinctive feature marking off the
Germanic languages from the languages to which they are related.
Certain apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law were subsequently
explained by Karl Verner and others. It was noted that between such
a pair of words as Latin centum and English hundred the
correspondence between the c and h was according to rule, but that
between the t and d was not. The d in the English word should have
been a voiceless fricative, that is, a þ. In 1875, Verner showed that
when the Indo-European accent was not on the vowel immediately
preceding, such voiceless fricatives became voiced in Germanic.
32
 In West Germanic the resulting ð became a d, and the word
hundred is therefore quite regular in its correspondence with centum.
The explanation was of importance in accounting for the forms of
the preterite tense in many strong verbs. Thus, in Old English, the
preterite singular of cweþan (to say) is ic cwoeþ but the plural is we.
In the latter word the accent was originally on the ending, as it was
in the past participle (cweden), where we also have a d.3 The
formulation of this explanation is known as Verner’s Law, and it was
of great significance in vindicating the claim of regularity for the
sound-changes that Grimm’s Law had attempted to define.

2.5 The Indo-European Family and Germanic beginnings

English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European

family of languages. Indo-European is the major linguistic family of
the world, in that languages belonging to it have the widest
geographic distribution and are spoken by the greatest number of
people. Several thousand years ago, the "ancestral" language from
which the Indo-European language are all descended was the
language of a comparatively small group of primitive people,
apparently cattle-raising nomads of a Stone Age culture. The
breakup of this Proto Indo-European into a number of dialects is
thought to have occurred around 3000 B.C. or earlier, when the

33
original speakers supposedly began to migrate from east central or
southern Europe.

As seen above, the languages thus brought into relationship by

descent or progressive differentiation from a parent speech are
conveniently called a family of languages. Various names have been
used to designate this family. In books written a century ago, the term
Aryan was commonly employed. It has now been generally
abandoned and when found today is used in a more restricted sense
to designate the languages of the family located in India and the
plateau of Iran. A more common term is Indo-Germanic, which is

34
the most usual designation among German philologists, but it is open
to the objection of giving undue emphasis to the Germanic
languages. The term now most widely employed is Indo-European,
suggesting more clearly the geographical extent of the family. The
parent tongue from which the Indo-European languages have sprung
had already become divided and scattered before the dawn of history.
When we meet with the various peoples by whom these languages
are spoken they have lost all knowledge of their former association.
Consequently, we have no written record of the common Indo-
European language.
By a comparison of its descendants, however, it is possible to
form a fair idea of it and to make plausible reconstructions of its
lexicon and inflections. The surviving languages show various
degrees of similarity to one another, the similarity bearing a more or
less direct relationship to their geographical distribution. They
accordingly fall into eleven principal groups: Indian, Iranian,
Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic,
Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian.

35
Figure 2.2: Endo-European Family of Languages

These are the branches of the Indo-European family tree, and we

shall look briefly at the Germanic Branch in more detail.
2.5.1 The Germanic Branch
The common form that the languages of the Germanic branch
had before they became differentiated is known as Germanic or
Proto-Germanic. It antedates the earliest written records of the
family and is reconstructed by philologists in the same way as is the

36
parent Indo-European. The languages descended from it fall into
three groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic.

The principal language of East Germanic is Gothic. By the

third century, the Goths had spread to the shore of the Black Sea.
Except for some runic inscriptions in Scandinavia, it is the earliest
record of a Germanic language we possess.
North Germanic is found in Scandinavia, Denmark, Iceland,
and the Faroe Islands. Runic inscriptions from the third century
preserve our earliest traces of the language. In its earlier form, the
common Scandinavian language is conveniently spoken of as Old
Norse. From about the eleventh century on, dialectal differences
become noticeable. The Scandinavian languages fall into two

37
groups: an eastern group including Swedish and Danish; and a
western group including Norwegian and Icelandic. Of the early
Scandinavian languages, Old Icelandic is by far the most literary.
Iceland was colonized by settlers from Norway about A.D. 874 and
early preserved a body of heroic literature unsurpassed among the
Germanic peoples.
West Germanic is of chief interest to us since it is the group
to which English belongs. It is divided into two branches, High and
Low German, by the operation of a Second (or High German)
Sound-Shift analogous to that described above as Grimm’s Law.
This change, by which West Germanic p, t, k, d, etc. were changed
into other sounds, occurred about A.D. 600 in the southern or
mountainous part of the Germanic area but did not take place in the
lowlands to the north. Accordingly, in early times, we distinguish as
Low German tongues Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old English. The
last two are closely related and constitute a special or Anglo-Frisian
subgroup. Old Saxon has become the essential constituent of modern
Low German or Plattdeutsch; Old Low Franconian, with some
mixture of Frisian and Saxon elements, is the basis of modern Dutch
in the Netherlands and Flemish in northern Belgium; and Frisian
survives in the Netherland province of Friesland, in a small part of
Schleswig, in the islands along the coast, and other places. High
German comprises a number of dialects (Middle, Rhenish, and East
38
Franconian, Bavarian, Alemannic, etc.). It is divided chronologically
into Old High German (before 1100), Middle High German (1100–
1500), and Modern High German (since 1500). High German,
especially as spoken in the midlands and used in the imperial
chancery, was popularized by Luther’s translation of the Bible
(1522–1532) and since the sixteenth century has gradually
established itself as the literary language of Germany.

2.6 Grammatical features of Indo-European Languages:

Inflectional endings and grammatical case
All the Indo-European languages are inflective- that is, all
are characterized by a grammatical system based on modifications
in the form of words, by means of inflections (that is, endings and
vowel changes), to indicate such grammatical functions as case,
number, tense, person, mood, aspect, and the like. The older
inflectional system is very imperfectly represented in most modern
languages: English, French, and Spanish, for instance, have lost
much of the inflectional complexity that was once characteristic
of them; German retains considerably more, with its various form
of the noun and the article and its strong adjective declension.
Sanskrit is notable for the remarkably clear picture it gives us of
the older Indo-European inflectional system; it retains much that

39
has been lost or changed in the other Indo-European languages, so
that its forms show us, even better than Greek or Latin can what
the system of Indo-European must have been.

Some Verb inflections

When allowance is made for the regularly occurring sound
changes, the relationship of the personal endings of the verb in the
various Indo-European languages becomes clear. For example, the
present indicative of the Sanskrit verb corresponding to English
bear runs as follows:

The only irregularity here is the occurrence of –mi in the first

person singular, as against –X in the Greek and Latin forms cited
immediately below. It was a peculiarity of Sanskrit to extend –mi,
the regular first person ending of verbs that had no vowel affixed
to their roots, to those that did have such a vowel.

40
 Leaving out of consideration for the moment difference in
vowels and in initial consonants, compare now the present
indicative forms as they have developed from Indo-European into
Greek and Latin, with special regard to the personal endings:

Comparison of the personal endings of the verbs in these

and other languages leads to the conclusion that the Indo-
European endings were as follows (the Indo-European
reconstruction of the entire word is given in parentheses):

Note now in Gothic and early Old English the Germanic

development of these personal endings:

41
Some noun inflections
Indo-European nouns were inflected for eight cases: nominative,
vocative, accusative, dative, ablative, locative, and instrumental.

42
These cases are modifications in the form of nouns, pronouns, and
adjectives that show the relationship of such words to other words
in a sentence. Typical uses of the eight Indo-European cases (with
Modern English examples) were as follows:
 Nominative: subject of a sentence (They saw me.)
 Vocative: person addressed (Officer, I need help.)
 Accusative: direct object (they saw me)
 Genitive: possessor or source (Shakespeare’s play.)
 Dative: indirect object, recipient (Giver her a gift).
 Ablative: what is separated (He abstained from it.)
 Locative: place where (We stayed home.)
 Instrumental: means, instrument (She ate with chopsticks.)
The full array of cases is preserved in Sanskrit but not generally in
the other descendant languages, which simplified the noun
declension in various ways. The paradigms in the accompanying
table above show the singular and plural of the word for ‘horse’ in
Proto-Indo-European and five other Indo-European languages.

43
2.7 Grammatical characteristics of Germanic languages
The Germanic group of languages has features in common with
the other branches of Indo-European family, which are all
inflectional and have a common word stock. But the Germanic
group has its own individual characteristics that make it quite
distinctive. These are 1) the development of a weak verb
conjugation along with the strong conjugation, 2) the twofold
declension of the adjective as strong and weak, 3) a fixed stress
accent, and 4) a regular shifting of consonants.
In comparing the Modern English verb, as representative of
the Germanic verb, with the Latin verb, as representative of
another Indo-European group, one can see the distinguishing
characteristics of the Germanic verb. English verbs are of two
classes: (1) the weak class, or conjugation, comprises the majority
of verbs and is therefore called “regular”; a verb of this class forms
its past tense and past participle by adding –ed, -d, or –t to the
present or infinitive stem, as in work, worked, worked. (2) The
strong class forms its tenses by an internal change of the radical
vowel of the verb, as in drink, drank, drunk. Latin; however,
expresses an idea by changing the form of the root of the verb, as
in the verb ‘navigare’ “to navigate”: navigo (I navigate), navigas
(You navigate), navigabamus (We have navigated). Latin verbs

44
fall into conjugations distinguished by the vowel of the present
active infinitive. There is no principle of tense formation in Latin
so simple as that characterizing the English (Germanic) verb.
Just as the Germanic verb developed a twofold
classification, so the Germanic adjective developed a twofold
declension. The simple principle of it is that when a demonstrative,
a possessive pronoun, or the definite article preceded the adjective
or when it was used substantively (as a noun), it was declined in
one way, called “weak”. Otherwise, it was declined in another way
called “strong”. For example, the forms corresponding to wise in
the modern English expressions ‘wise men’ and ‘these wise men’
are wise menn and wisan menn in Old English, and weise Manner
and diese weisen Manner in Modern high German. Modern
English does not distinguish between the weak and the strong
forms, having lost all declension of the adjective. But the earlier
presence in English of the two forms shows that English belongs
to the Germanic group- because of its history, not because of its
present usage.
The third trait characterizing the Germanic languages is the
fixed accent. In Germanic, the stress became fixed upon the root
syllable, whereas the word stress in Indo-European was free or
variable. In Modern English, we can generally recognize native

45
words, as distinguished from those that have been borrowed from
some non-Germanic tongue, by observing the stressed syllable
when affixes are added in forming new words. For example,
compare Modern English friend, friend’.ly, friend’.ship,
friend’.liness, un.friend’.ly with pure’, purify’, purifica’tion, and
to cinema’, ceinemat’ograph, cinematog’raphy, and
cinematograph’ic. The native word friend keeps the accent on the
root syllable, but pure and cinema, borrowed from Latin and
Greek, respectively, shift the accent as affixes are added.
The fourth distinctive feature of the Germanic languages is
the almost regular shifting, according to a certain pattern, that
particular Indo-European consonants underwent in these
languages. For example, p became f, and t became th, as seen in
the Latin ‘pater’ and English ‘father’. Linguists became aware of
this consonant shift as a result of studies in the early 19 th century.
This knowledge has helped them in grouping the Germanic
languages, in discovering the derivation and history of
vocabularies, and in finding out which words are borrowed and
which are native.

46
CHAPTER 3

Old English (450-1100 AD)

48
Old English (450-1100 AD)

Periods in the History of the English Language

The English language is to a certain extent rare in the

sense that we actually can find a starting point of its
development. Usually, the rise of languages comes naturally
through the splitting and merging of dialects in some hidden
latent way. With English, we may easily see when the first
Anglo-Saxon settlers in those distant times brought the
language into the conditions whereby any other influence
from related languages became obstructed.

The beginnings of the English language are traced back

to the year 449, when coming to help their Celtic ally, two
Germanic chieftains, Hengist and Horsa, brought their
tribesmen to the Isles. History prior to that event is marked by
the turbulence of the Roman Empire. The Romans had finally
withdrawn to their homeland to check the onslaught of the
Barbarian tribes. Having been kept in submission for several
hundred years, the Celtic inhabitants of the isles, could not
make good use of their independence: and spent years
fighting for supremacy. Having relatively equal forces,
49
neither could win easily, and one of the Celtic leaders invited
the neighboring Germanic tribe of the Jutes from the
continent. W. Churchill writes about this "Imitating a
common Roman practice, the dominant British chief sought
to strengthen himself by bringing in a band of mercenaries
from over the seas. They proved a trap. Once the road was
open fresh fleet loads made their way across and up the rivers.

So, starting as a language separated from the rest of the

Germanic linguistic area, it has been functioning for more
than a millennium and a half; and there can be traced several
periods within its history. Various approaches to delimiting
the periods have been put forward. The basis of subdivision
of Hie may be purely historical, based on some outstanding
linguistically relevant events. There is a tradition of
recognizing the Old English period (449-1066), the Middle
English (1066-1475), and New English 15th century onwards,
the framing events being Anglo-Saxon Conquest - the
Norman Conquest; The Norman Conquest- the invention of
the printing press, and the end of the War of the Roses.
Usually in this subdivision of periods they distinguish a
subperiod - Early New English, the period between the 15th
and mid-17th century - the period of Renaissance in the
50
English culture, the one which is represented by numerous
works of the classics of English literature and philosophy.

Each of the periods is marked by a set of specific

features of phonology, grammar and vocabulary, and may
be also defined in these terms. Henry Sweet classified them
as The Period of Full Endings, the Period of Levelled Endings
and the Period of Lost Endings. His classification is arbitrary
to some extent - true, in the Old English period any vowel
could be found in the ending, and the majority of the parts of
speech are connected with the other words in the sentences by
means of endings. Still, not all Indo-European (endings of the
changeable parts of speech are found in the language of the
period, the paradigms are significantly simplified as
compared with, say, (Latin or even with the Gothic grammar;
the period of levelled endings in .reality contains the levelled
vowel in the ending, but at the same time lots of endings were
already lost; the period of lost endings - present-day language,
|W we know, is not totally devoid of endings, for some of the
paradigmatic I farms are still made by means of endings,
scarce as they are.

51
 Early New English - known as Shakespeare's English -
lasted for a century and a half - a time span far exceeding the
life of the great Englishman - is represented by numerous
writings of a whole bunch of prominent thinkers, writers,
scientists (suffice it to mention such names as Christopher
Marlowe, Edmund Spencer, Francis Bacon, Richard Hakluyt,
James Shirley, Philip Sidney, John Webster, Ben Jonson,
Michael Drayton, William Warner who were Shakespeare's
contemporaries). This period is characterised by co-existence
of numerous almost equal in meaning forms that was one
more turbulent period of the making of the language, when
not the strict rules but the authority of the user of the form
was decisive in the choice of forms.

Classical classifications give the New English period as

beginning with mid-17 century. Really, almost all the
grammatical forms that are found in the language had been
formed by that period; the major phonetic changes had
already taken place; the ability to pick whatever lexeme
wherever possible was already developed. The language in
later years did not change as far as its structure and categories
are concerned. Though the form of expression changed from
century to century, it seems to be just a pure object of stylistic
52
analysis and the study of territorial variants of the language
and idiosyncrasies of style of the authors.

Specifically, a fourth, "post-Modem" period of English

(we may call it Late New English) may have originated in
1876 or 1877 with Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the
telephone and Thomas Alva Edison's invention of the
phonograph. These machines, along with a few others that
have followed - radio, talking pictures, television - were able
to do for the spoken word what the printing press did for the
written word. Before 1876, speakers could be heard only by
those within earshot; now, however, a speaker may have a
virtually unlimited audience, situated anywhere on the Earth
or even in outer space. Just as printing standardized spelling,
one result of the latest communications breakthrough has
been a leveling of differences in the pronunciation of English.
People no longer hear the speech only of those from their own
neighborhood or village. Instead, a whole nation listens to the
Mime newscasters every evening.'

British English (the brand of English spoken in Great

Britain) and American English (spoken in the United States)
diverged as soon as the American colonies were founded at

53
the start of the 17th century. Nonetheless, because of the
constant interchange of people and books across the ocean,
American English never developed beyond being a dialect of
English. With the advent of records, cinema, radio, and
television, the two brands of English have even begun to draw
back together again. Britons and Americans probably speak
more alike today than they did 50 or 60 years ago.

Canadian English, Australian English, South African

English, and many other dialects of English scattered around
the world are coming increasingly to resemble one another.
Within each dialect area, subdialects are also losing their
distinctive characteristics. Within the United States, for
example, the speech of Northerners and Southerners is
becoming less obviously distinctive. Although the English
language is becoming more uniform, this does not mean that
it will come to a rest once all dialectal differences are gone.
Languages never stop changing, and English is no exception.

54
3.2 Pre- Anglo-Saxon Britain

Britain before the English

When the English migrated from the Continent to

Britain in the fifth century, they found the island already
inhabited. A Celtic people had been there for many centuries
before Julius Caesar’s invasion of the island in 55 B.C. The
subsequent occupation, not really begun in earnest until the
time of the Emperor Claudius almost a century later (A.D. 43)
was to make Britain; that is, Britannia, a part of the Roman
Empire for nearly as long as the time between the first
permanent English settlement in America and our own day. It
is therefore not surprising that there are so many Roman
remains in modern England, some of them discovered in the
very heart of London only in the course of clearing away the
rubble of World War II bombings or in excavating for the
building boom of the 1980s. Despite the long occupation, the
British Celts continued to speak their own language, though
many of them, particularly those in the towns and cities who
wanted to “get on”, learned to speak and write the language
of their Roman rulers_ Latin. It was not until Britain became

55
England that the survival of British Celtic was seriously
threatened.
After the Roman legionnaires were withdrawn from
Britain in the early fifth century (by 410) when troubles began
in their homeland, Picts from the north and Scots from the
west savagely attacked the unprotected British Celts, who
after generations of foreign domination had neither the heart
nor the skill in weapons to put up much resistance. These
same Picts and Scots, as well as ferocious Germanic sea
raiders whom the Romans called Saxons, had earlier been a
very considerable nuisance to the Roman soldiers and their
commanders during the latter half of the fourth century.
3.2.1 Celts

English does not originate in Britain. Long before the Germanic

tribes that became the English people arrived, Britain was
inhabited by various Celtic tribes, of which the Britons were
one. The history of the Celtic tribes stretches back more than a
couple of thousand years. However, the impact of the Celtic
languages on English has been rather minimal. In fact, the
predominant legacy is in placenames.

56
The placenames below all have some distant Celtic link:

- Cities: Belfast, Cardiff, Dublin, Glasgow, London, York

- Rivers: Avon, Clyde, Dee, Don, Forth, Severn, Thames,
- Regions: Argyll, Cumbria, Devon, Dyfed, Kent,

The English language has its roots in the language of the

second wave of invaders: the Germanic dialects of the tribes
of northwestern Europe who invaded Britain in the fifth

century, after the Romans had withdrawn. According to the

Venerable Bede (a monk at Jarrow writing in the eighth
century), the year AD 449 saw the arrival of three tribes -
Angle, Saxon and Jutish. Map 1.1 shows where these tribes

57
are thought to have come from (there is particular uncertainty
about the location of the Jutes).

Collectively, these Germanic settlers are usually referred

to as the Anglo-Saxons, but from the very beginning writers
of these Anglo-Saxon tribes referred to their language as
Englisc (derived from the name of the Angles). What
happened to the native Celtic-speaking tribes of Britain?
There was certainly no dramatic conquest by the Anglo-
Saxons, but a rather slow movement from the east of Britain
to the west, taking place over some 250 years. Where the
Anglo-Saxons settled there is evidence of some integration
with the local population. However, the Anglo-Saxons never
got as far as the northern and western extremes of Britain. The
Celtic languages - notably Cornish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic
- proceeded relatively independently of English in what are
today, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. Each established its
own literary tradition, and, excepting Cornish, which died out
in the eighteenth century, are living languages today.

3.2.2 The Roman invasion

It was in A.D. 43 that the Emperor Claudius decided to

undertake the actual conquest of the island. With the

58
knowledge of Caesar’s experience behind him, he did not
underestimate the problems involved. Accordingly, an army
of 40,000 was sent to Britain and within three years had
subjugated the peoples of the central and southeastern
regions. Subsequent campaigns soon brought almost all of
what is now England under Roman rule. The progress of
Roman control was not uninterrupted. A serious uprising of
the Celts occurred in A.D. 61 under Boudicca (Boadicea), the
widow of one of the Celtic chiefs, and 70,000 Romans and
Romanized Britons are said to have been massacred. Under
the Roman Governor Agricola (A.D. 78–85) the northern
frontier was advanced to the Solway and the Tyne, and the
conquest may be said to have been completed. The Romans
never penetrated far into the mountains of Wales and
Scotland. Eventually they protected the northern boundary by
a stone wall stretching across England at approximately the
limits of Agricola’s permanent conquest. The district south of
this line was under Roman rule for more than 300 years.

Romanization of the Island

It was inevitable that the military conquest of Britain should

have been followed by the Romanization of the province.

59
Where the Romans lived and ruled, there Roman ways were
found. Four great highways soon spread fanlike from London
to the north, the northwest, the west, and the southwest, while
a fifth cut across the island from Lincoln to the Severn.
Numerous lesser roads connected important military or civil
centers or branched off as spurs from the main highways.

By the third century, Christianity had made some

progress in the island, and in A.D. 314, bishops from London
and York attended a church council in Gaul. Under the
relatively peaceful conditions that existed everywhere except
along the frontiers, where the hostile penetration of the
unconquered population was always to be feared, there is
every reason to think that Romanization had proceeded very
much as it had in the other provinces of the empire. The
difference is that in Britain the process was cut short in the
fifth century.

3.3 The Latin Language in Britain

Among the other evidences of Romanization must be

included the use of the Latin language. A great number of
inscriptions have been found, all of them in Latin. The
majority of these proceed no doubt from the military and

60
official class and, being in the nature of public records, were
therefore in the official language. They do not in themselves
indicate a widespread use of Latin by the native population.
Latin did not replace the Celtic language in Britain as it did in
Gaul. Its use by native Britons was probably confined to
members of the upper classes and some inhabitants of the
cities and towns.

Occasional graffiti scratched on a tile or a piece of

pottery, apparently by the worker who made it, suggest that
in some localities Latin was familiar to the artisan class.
Outside the cities there were many fine country houses, some
of which were probably occupied by the well-to-do. The
occupants of these also probably spoke Latin. Tacitus tells us
that in the time of Agricola the Britons, who had hitherto
shown only hostility to the language of their conquerors, now
became eager to speak it. At about the same time, a Greek
teacher from Asia Minor was teaching in Britain, and by A.D.
96 the poet Martial was able to boast, possibly with some
exaggeration, that his works were read even in this far-off
island. On the whole, there were certainly many people in
Roman Britain who habitually spoke Latin or upon occasion
could use it. But its use was not sufficiently widespread to
61
cause it to survive, as the Celtic language survived, the
upheaval of the Germanic invasions. Its use probably began
to decline after 410, the approximate date at which the last of
the Roman legions were officially withdrawn from the island.
The few traces that it has left in the language of the Germanic
invaders and that can still be seen in the English language
today will occupy us later.

The Old English Period

Historical background

The background against which the English language was

forming included long years of pre-written functioning of the
language. Angles, Saxons and Jutes did well in peace-making
on the island. Very soon the remnants of the Celtic population
were subjugated, or ousted into the outskirts of the Isles - to
the North (Scotland), or to the West (Cornwall and Wales).
The invaders felt comfortable on the new territory.

About the year 449, an event occurred that profoundly

affected the course of history. In that year, as traditionally
stated, began the invasion of Britain by certain Germanic tribes,
the founders of the English nation. For more than a hundred
years, bands of conquerors and settlers migrated from their

62
continental homes in the region of Denmark and the Low
Countries and established themselves in the south and east of
the island, gradually extending the area they occupied until it
included all but the highlands in the west and north. Eventually,
the invaders established seven kingdoms.
The seven kingdoms formed by the newcomers were
the following - Jutes, the earliest to come, formed the
kingdom of Kent, Saxons - Essex, Wessex and Sussex, and
Angles had the kingdoms of East Anglia, Northhumbria and
Mercia. These seven principal concurrent Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms in the 7th and 8th centuries are known under the
general name – ‘Heptarchy’. Though they were supposed to
be allies, still the struggle for supremacy was not uncommon,
and some four of them managed to gain supremacy at various
times – first Kent, then Mercia and Northumbria. These latter
reached the height of their importance in the pre-written
period; some later documents of literature as well as the
remains of material culture were ruthlessly destroyed during
the raids of the Scandinavians. So, for instance,
Northumbria's rich cultural life was destroyed by these raids
in the 9th century. The Midlands offered better conditions for
economic prosperity, but the frontier position as to the

63
Scandinavians did its bit, and what we have more or less well
represented in writings is the Wessex dialect.

The dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and

Frisians at the lime of their initial settlement in Britain were,
of course, no different from the dialects spoken in their
Germanic homelands. As the generations passed, and as the
Anglo-Saxons became relatively isolated from their European
cousins, spoken language evolved into the dialects mentioned
above.

An event of paramount importance in the life of the Old

English was the introduction of Christianity. Pope Gregory
the Great sent a mission to the Isles, and since 597
Christianity comes into the life of the islanders. It is not the
first time that the Christian religion landed here - Romans
were Christians by the times they left Great Britain, and so
were the Celts. Actually, Ireland had been Christian since the
2nd century AD, but that was far from the territory of the
Heptarchy, and the barbarians that replaced the Romans were
heathen. They had their heathen Gods, and even the days of
the week are loan-translated from the Latin, following the
Roman tradition to name the days of the week by the names

64
of the Pagan gods we have in Old English. Christianity came
to England from Kent; and so, Canterbury remains the
religious centre of the country. England received the Latin
alphabet and educated people. It brought monasteries with
their schools and chronicles. Now the English history was
written by the Englishmen themselves, in their own language.

The difference between the dialects was found in

phonology, choice of words and in the use of some
grammatical forms. The system of writing in Old English was
changed with the introduction of Christianity. Before that, the
English used the runes - symbols that were very vague, that
might at the same time denote a sound, a syllable or a whole
word.

Runic inscriptions that came down from the oldest

settlers on the isles are few, and the language (as it is
interpreted) is not what might be called Old English- it was
rather an ancient language which might be very close to the
languages of other Germanic tribes. The story of runes might
be very Interesting in itself, yet we are not concerned with the
story of the development of the English language, and what
we are going to study here was written in an alphabet dating

65
back to the 7th century; it was Latin alphabet with few
specifically English additions. Some English sounds had no
counterpart in Latin, so three signs developed from runes
were added, plus ligature as æ now well known as a
transcription symbol.

The Latin alphabet was carried throughout medieval

Europe by the Roman Catholic church - to the Irish and

66
Merovingians in the 6th century and the Anglo-Saxons and
Germans in the 7th. The oldest surviving texts in the English
language written with Latin letters date back to c.700 So the
letters of the Old English alphabet were as follows, and they
denoted the following sounds:

3.5 The language of Old English

Some linguistic Characteristics of Old English.

The Old English Period, in our study is the period from the
fifth up to mid-eleventh century. It is characterised by the
existence of the language in the form of several dialects,
according to the seven kingdoms that existed on the island;
the vocabulary of each of them is comparatively
homogeneous and contains mostly words of native origin
(Indo-European, Germanic and specifically English). The
connection of words in the utterance is performed through a
ramified system of endings, hence word order is relatively
free. Common Indo-European traits, such as double negation
or formation of impersonal sentences without any subject in
the nominative case are quite common.

67
Old English Morphology

Old English morphology was that of a typical inflected

if somewhat simplified Indo-European language. Parts of
speech included noun, pronoun, adjective, numeral and verb;
all of which formed their paradigmatic forms by inflections,
suffixes, and sound interchange. There were no analytical
formations. Nouns in Old English retained only four of the
Indo-European 8 cases, adjectives, partly pronouns and
numerals agreed with the nouns they modified in number,
gender and case. The Old English had two adjective
declensions, a strong and a weak. The weak forms were used
generally after demonstrative pronouns, and possessive
adjectives; the strong were used independently. The
comparison of adjectives and adverbs in Germanic differs
from that in the Romance languages. Generally, -r and -st
endings are added: long, longer, longest.

Free stress (accent) became recessive, and precise

accent rules became dominant, with the first root syllable
carrying the stress. Umlauting, a process of modifying vowel
sounds, took place extensively in formation of paradigmatic
forms (man - men; fot -fet) and word building. A system of

68
strong verbs developed as the result of voweJ alternation
(ablaut), and a unique way of forming the past tense using
dental suffix for weak verbs (ealdian – ealdode to grow old)
was created. The number of strong verbs in Germanic is
steadily being reduced, and the system does not seem to
permit the creation of new strong verbs. Conversely, the
number of weak verbs is increasing.

Old English Noun

Nouns in Old English had the categories of number,

gender and case. Gender is actually not a grammatical
category in a strict sense of the word, lor every noun with all
its forms belongs to only one gender (the other nominal parts
of speech have gender forms); but case and number had a set
of endings. Nouns used to denote males are normally
masculine - mann. fæder, broðor (man, father, brother).
Naturally, those denoting females should be all feminine, -
modor, sweostor, cwe-ne. (mother, sister, queen). Yet, there
are curious exceptions, such words as mædʒen (maid), wíf
(wife) are neuter. And wífman (woman) is masculine, because
the second element of the compound is masculine.

69
 There are two numbers - singular and plural, and four
cases- nominative, genitive, dative and accusative.
Comparing with what we have now we can see that number
proved to be a stable category, relevant for rendering the
meanings and expressing the true state of things in reality.
Case is supplanted by other means to express the relations
between the words in an utterance, whereas gender
disappeared altogether.

The nouns in Old English are commonly classified as

belonging to strong and weak declension, within each of these
groups there are several subgroups.

Features of OE vocabulary

The full extent of the Old English vocabulary is not known to

present day scholars. There is no doubt that there existed more
words in it. Surely, some Old English words were lost
altogether with the texts that perished; some might not have
been used in written texts as they belonged to some spheres
of human life which were not of great interest (some
colloquial words, for instance). Modern estimates of the total
vocabulary range from 30 000 words.

70
 OE vocabulary is mainly homogeneous. Loan words
(that is, words that are borrowed from other languages) are
fairly insignificant. Native words, in their turn can be
subdivided into: a) Common Indo- European words, which
were inherited from the common Indo-European language.
They belong to the oldest layer and denote the names of
natural phenomena, plants and animals, agricultural terms,

names of parts of the human body, terms of kinship; verbs

belonging to this layer denote the basic activities of Old
English man, adjectives indicate the basic qualities; personal
and demonstrative pronouns and most numerals are of this
origin too. b) Common Germanic words are the words than
can be found in all Germanic languages, old and new, eastern,
western and northern. Here belong such words, for instance,
as:
71
c) Lexical borrowings. Loan-words, or borrowings were not
so frequent in Old English. They are: Celtic (taken from the
substratum languages) and Latin. Celtic element is not very
significant, and is mainly reduced to the the following:

dim (down), dun (dun), binn (bin). These may occur as

separate words, but a great many are found only as elements
of place-names (amhuin - river: Avon, Evan, uisge water in
names beginning with Exe-, üsk-, Esk-, (later - whiskey).
Some common names of people are of Celtic origin, too -
Arthur (noble), Donald (proud chief), Kennedy (ugly head).
Latin words in Old English are usually classified into
two layers. Some were taken into Germanic languages in pre-
British period, during contacts of the Germanic tribes through
wars and trade; these words are found in many Germanic

72
languages (we take Present-day German for comparison).
These include:
Traditionally, to this first layer we refer the place names
containing Latin stems cester- Lat. castra (camp) - Chester,
Manchester, Winchester, Worcester, Leicester, Lancaster,
coln - Lat. colonia (from colere to cultivate, inhabit) -
Lincoln, Colchester, port -Lat. port (gate) - Portsmouth,
Bridport, Devonport. There are lots of hybrid formations
which are now familiar placenames in Britain-

- Man-Chester York-shire Ports-mouth

- Win-chester Corn-wall Wool-wich

- Lan-caster Devon-shire Green-wich
The second layer of the Latin borrowings is connected with
the introduction of Christianity, and denotes religious notions
plus some notions connected with the cultural and social
phenomena which appeared in society after this event. A
significant portion of religious terms are not specifically
Latin, for they were borrowed into it from Greek, so we may
find similar words in other languages:

73
 Old English New English Latin Greek
Apostol Apostle Apostolus Apostolos
biscop bishop episcopus Episcopos
deofol devil Diabolus Diabolos
antefn anthem antiphona Antiphona

3.5.4 OE Grammar

Old English is chiefly distinguished from later stages in the

history of English by greater use of a larger set of inflections in
verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, and also (connected with
this) by a rather less fixed word order; it also preserves grammatical
gender in nouns and adjectives.

An example:
‘Ðunor cymð of hætan & of wætan. Seo lyft tyhð þone wætan
to hire neoðan & ða hætan ufan.’

may be translated word-for-word as:

Thunder comes from heat and from moisture. The air draws
the moisture to it from below and the heat from above.

74
 - The nouns hæte, ‘heat’, and wæta, ‘moisture’, both
have the inflection -an in the first sentence, because
both are in the dative case, governed by the
preposition of ‘from The forms of the definite article
agree with these nouns, but you will note that they are
different in each instance, þone wætan ‘the moisture’
(direct object), but ða hætan ‘the heat’ (also direct
object). The difference arises because wæta ‘moisture’
is masculine but hæte ‘heat’ is feminine, and the article
(like other adjectives) agrees in gender as well as case.

 The majority of words that constitute Modern English do not

come from Old English roots (only about one sixth of known
Old English words have descendants surviving today), but
almost all of the 100 most commonly used words in modern
English do have Old English roots. Words like “water,”
“strong,” “the,” “of,” “a,” “he” “no” and many other basic
modern English words derive from OE.
With the establishment of the English nation and their
language, the English history started to be recorded and
literature to be written. Several written works have survived

75
 from the Old English period. The most famous is a heroic epic
poem called "Beowulf".

Figure: The beginning of the epic poem Beowulf, with

original old English text.

It is the oldest known English poem and it is notable for its

length - 3,183 lines.

 OE witnessed the appearance of the linguistic

phenomenon of compounding.

– dæg ‘day’ + red ‘red’ = dægred ‘dawn’

– beor ‘beer’ + scipe ‘ship’ = gebeorscipe ‘banquet’
76
– ban ‘bone’ + hus ‘house’ = banhus ‘body’
– fisces ‘fish’ + eþel ‘home’ = fisceseþel ‘sea’
– seol ‘seal’ + bæþ ‘bath’ = seolbæþ ‘sea’

Check the text below:

A careful reading of the above text reveals a number of facts

about the vocabulary of OE.

 Firstly, there are a lot of differences between OE and

Modern contemporary English. Whereas it is easily
conceivable that a word like "heavens" has naturally

77
developed from OE 'heofonan', and "earth" from 'eorðan'; it
is difficult though to say that "truly" has naturally developed
from 'soðlice, or "abyss" from 'nywelnesse.

78
CHAPTER 4

Middle English (1100-1500 AD)

79
 Middle English (1100-1500)

T
he Middle English (ME) period is typically
characterized as one of great change, both social and
linguistic: the ancient Germanic structures of Old
English and of Anglo-Saxon society were tempered with, or
displaced by, the Romance influences of the Norman duchy
and the Parisian court; and the seeds of modern English
society, and of modern English language usage, were sown.
The event often cited as a starting point for this transitional
period is the Norman Conquest of 1066, which effectively put
England into the hands of new and foreign overlords, starting
with William, Duke of Normandy.

4.1 Historical background

Traditionally it is considered that the Middle English period
begins from the year 1066, the most significant event in
English history, the event that changed the official,
prevalently Germanic language of the population into a
colloquial tongue, an adulterated with numerous borrowings
and utterly spoiled vernacular, which had to lead continuously
and strenuously struggle to survive, and when it at last re-

80
emerged as an official state language it was changed beyond
recognition. Much can be said about the reasons and the
processes that took place in this period, and historical
background, of course, is of paramount importance to
understand why it happened. A brief survey of historic events
of the period is needed, to get a better understanding of the
linguistic consequences of these events.
 The Scandinavian Invasion (the Viking adventure)
The event that preceded the Norman conquest and paved the
way to it was the Scandinavian invasion. This event is
probably less memorable, yet it prepared the ground for
further changes in the society as well as in the language.
Scandinavians (and their language is known as Old
Norse) were old rivals of the English, and were troubling
Anglo-Saxons ever since their settlement on the Isles. They
occasionally raided into their territory, looted the
monasteries, and in many respects interfered with the life of
the local population. Through the so-called Wedmore peace
treaty King Alfred of Wessex in 878 yielded a considerable
part of the country to economic control of the Danes so that
the latter could come and levy taxes from the population; the
territory was called Danelaw.

81
 Chronicles, translations of Latin works on geography,
the beginnings of grammar, numerous religious texts and
finally the very text of the most significant epic poem,
Beowulf, are dated back to the years of King Alfred and the
Danelaw. The Scandinavians, for their part, not only came to
collect money but comprehended that the very territory of the
islands was much more suitable for living and economic
activity and moved and settled there. They mixed with the
local population, and without much effort penetrated into that
community. Their languages were similar, so mutual
understanding was not specifically difficult, only some
simplification was needed as is usual when languages differ
in particulars - these particulars, i.e., endings and other
unnecessary details might be omitted without significant
effort.
This resulted in the 1013 Scandinavian invasion of
King Sweyn, and the additional almost 30 years of
Scandinavian rule. King Sweyn started the process, and in
1016 his son Canute (or Knut) became the ruler of England.
The invasion was not utterly ferocious; there were victims and
many people were killed, but seeing that there was no
prospect for further resistance, king Aetherled fled to

82
Normandy, and the whole country was controlled by the
Scandinavians.
The invaders came with their families, intermarried and
intermixed with the local population, and finally were
absorbed ethnically and linguistically by it; the relations
between the languages were considerably equal, and the
influence of the Scandinavian on the English language was
moderate. The lexical borrowings of this period came equally
in many spheres of life and sometimes they denoted some
things really absent in the Old English. So, during the
invasion such words were borrowed from the Old Norse as
they, them, their; ill, ugly, ransake; skate, sky, skirt, skill, skin,
scatter, egg, give, guess, guest. Such words as shirt coexists
with skirt, shatter with scatter, shin with skin; but the words
now are different in meaning.
Sometimes it was only new meaning from the
Scandinavian that replaced the original meaning of an Old
English word: dream that meant joy acquired the meaning
dream in a sleep; holm, formerly ocean acquired the meaning
island, plöh changed from cultivated land to plough; deyen
(to die) was borrowed and Old English verb that had that
meaning steorfan acquired a new meaning of to starve. So,

83
the English language of the period that preceded the Norman
conquest was significantly changed and simplified, and the
drastic changes that followed fell onto the prepared linguistic
soil.

The Norman Conquest (French-speaking Normans come to

England)
Following the Conquest many other Normans crossed
the channel, and enlarged the population of England. The
approximate number of French settlers was about 200 000.
After the Civil war in the reign of king Stephen 1135-1154
new settlers made use of the anarchy in the country and seized
the remaining lands. They spoke French. For almost three
centuries the French language was the official language of the
English kingdom; it was the language of the royal court, the
church, courts of law, army and the castle. Education, as it
was mainly controlled by the church was also in French,
though the Latin language was traditionally also taught.
Towns and cities spoke French, and English was
debased to the speech of common churls from the country; it
was mainly spoken and mutilated beyond recognition by the
efforts of mutual understanding of the uneducated peasants

84
and uneducated French soldiers, and the French population in
general. A good knowledge of French was the sign of higher
standing and gave a person a certain social prestige. Probably,
some considerable part of the English population was already
bilingual. A curious situation occurred when a nobleman was
less expert in languages than common peasants. Several
stories bear evidence that in some strained circumstances
when a mighty bishop had to flee away from the anger of his
sovereign Richard Cœr de Lion, he to his utter surprise found
out that common people, addressing him in English could
speak French and understand him, while he was unable to
speak or understand their language.
The three hundred years of French domination affected
the English language enormously. However, an important
question here has to be asked. Why didn't the English
language die altogether? Why was it not absorbed into the
dominant Norman tongue? Three reasons are usually given
First, it was too well established, too vigorous, and too hard
to be replace. The English speakers demographically
prevailed, and they were not going to stop speaking it just
because they were conquered. Second - to quell the natural
resentment of their English subjects, the Normans picked up

85
some English to survive, and in this case the co-existence of
the English and the Normans was more lost most of the
English possessions in France.

Linguistic features of Middle English

Middle English Vocabulary
The changes in the vocabulary in the Middle English period
were mainly quantitative. This is the period when new words
and new morphemes were actively borrowed and promptly
assimilated grammatically. This made the vocabulary of the
late Middle English quite different from that of the other
Germanic languages.
French borrowings were especially numerous. They
came quite naturally into the language in Middle English.
Some spheres of life were for years if not centuries controlled
by the French speaking elite. Some words came into English
by way of oral communication of the conquerors with the
native population. It was the language of school education, so
all educated people knew and used the French words in order
to make their ideas more precise, the more so because there
was actually no English counterpart for many of them at the
time. In some cases, the borrowings ousted native English

86
words, but frequently they coexisted with the native words,
having only stylistic coloring. The farther north, the lower the
number of French borrowings were observed.
The words of French origin penetrated in the spheres of
life controlled at those times by the Normans. As can be seen,
they were adopted very early, only some of them are dated by
14th or 15th century: They were numerous in the sphere of
government, court, jurisdiction:
aquiten (acquit)
attourne (attorney)
baroun (baron)
condempnen (condemn)
counceil (council)
counte (count)
court (court)
crime (crime)
due (duke)
estat (state)
gaiole, jaile (jail)
gouvernement (government)
juge (judge)
prechen (preach)

87
preien (pray)
pulpit (pulpit)
religioun (religion)
sacrifice (sacrifice)

The names of domestic animals remain of native origin,

for they lived in the country and English shepherd took care
of them (ox, cow, calf sheep, swine (pig) are all native
English) - but such words as beef, veel (veal), moton (mutton),
porc (pork), bacoun (bacon)- that is the meat of those very
animals were already processed and sold by a town bocher
(butcher).
Another development of the vocabulary of the English
language at that period was the co-existence of two parallel
forms of many words: the English native form and the French
counterpart. French borrowings have the status of literary
words whereas native English words were common everyday
vernacular. This can be seen when we compare such pairs of
synonyms:
beginnen - commencen (commence)
comen - arriven (arrive)
do- act

88
 harm - injurie (injury)
help - ayde (aid)
husband/wife - spous/spouse (spouse)
room - chambre (chamber)
speech ~ discours (discourse)
toun - citee (city)
wisshen - desiren (desire)
libertie- freedom

4.2 Middle English: a Period of Great Change.

The Middle English period (1150–1500) was marked
by momentous changes in the English language, changes
more extensive and fundamental than those that have taken
place at any time before or since. Some of them were the
result of the Norman Conquest and the conditions which
followed in the wake of that event. Others were a continuation
of tendencies that had begun to manifest themselves in Old
English. These would have gone on even without the
Conquest, but they took place more rapidly because the
Norman invasion removed from English those conservative
influences that are always felt when a language is extensively
used in books and is spoken by an influential educated class.
89
 The changes of this period affected English in both its
grammar and its vocabulary. They were so extensive in each
department that it is difficult to say which group is the more
significant.
4.3 Vocabulary changes in Middle English

The Norman French in 1066 differed more strikingly

linguistically as well as culturally from the Anglo Saxons than
did the Danish conquerors of a few centuries earlier. Unlike
the situation with the Norse invasions, the Normans looked
upon the conquered Anglo-Saxons as social inferiors. French
became the language of the upper class; Anglo-Saxon of the
lower class.

As a result, after the Norman invasion, many Anglo

Saxon words narrowed in meaning to describe only the
cruder, dirtier aspects of life. Concepts associated with
culture, fine living and abstract learning tended to be
described by new Norman words. Thus, many new doublets
appeared in English that were stylistically marked: cow/beef,
calf/veal, swine/pork, sheep/mutton, deer/venison,
sweat/perspire. Compare Anglo-Saxon work, hard, to
Norman French leisure and profit. (In contrast, Norse/Anglo-

90
Saxon doublets like raise/rear, etc., were stylistically neutral,
since both peoples held an equal social position.)

Consequently, the Norman invasion initiated a vast

borrowing of Latin-based words into English. Entire
vocabularies were borrowed from Norman French:

1) governmental: count, heraldry, fine, noble, parliament.

2) military: battle, ally, alliance, ensign, admiral, navy, aid,

gallant, march, enemy, escape, peace, war (cf. guerilla).

3) judicial system: judge, jury, plaintiff, justice, court, suit,

defendant, crime, felony, murder, petty/petit, attorney,
marriage (Anglo-Saxon wedding), heir.

4) ecclesiastical: clergy, altar, miracle, preach, pray, sermon,

virgin, saint, friar/frere.

5) cuisine: sauce, boil, filet, soup, pastry, fry, roast, toast.

6) new personal names: John, Mary (Biblical Hebrew and

Greek names) and Norman French (Charles, Richard)

91
 As Anglo-Saxon and the Norman French gradually
merged throughout the later Middle Ages and the Normans
and Anglo-Saxons became one society, the speakers of
English tried to effect some linguistic reconciliation between
the older Anglo-Saxon words and the newer Norman French
words. Many modern English phrases and sayings still
include a word from Norman French alongside a synonymous
Anglo-Saxon: law and order, lord and master, love and
cherish, ways and means. These doublet phrases capture this
attempt to please everybody who might need to be pleased.

The Norman French influx of words into English was

on an unprecedented scale. No other European language has
a vocabulary as mixed as English. It has been estimated that
only 15% of modern English vocabulary date back to the time
of Old English. The period of Middle English came to a close
by about 1450, by the time the two languages of Norman and
Anglo-Saxon had merged into a single linguistic form.
Actually, what happened was that the more numerous Anglo-
Saxon speakers triumphed over the Norman French, who
came to adopt English in place of French. However, the

92
English of 1500 contained a tremendous number of Norman
French words.

Decay of Inflectional Endings.

The changes in English grammar may be described as a

general reduction of inflections. Endings of the noun and
adjective marking distinctions of number and case and often
of gender were so altered in pronunciation as to lose their
distinctive form and hence their usefulness. To some extent
the same thing is true of the verb. This leveling of inflectional
endings was due partly to phonetic changes, partly to the
operation of analogy. The phonetic changes were simple but
far-reaching. The earliest seems to have been the change of
final -m to –n wherever it occurred, i.e., in the dative plural of
nouns and adjectives and in the dative singular (masculine
and neuter) of adjectives when inflected according to the
strong declension. Thus, mūðum (to the mouths) >mūðun,
gōdum>gōdun. This -n, along with the -n of the other
inflectional endings, was then dropped (*mūðu, *gōdu). At
the same time, the vowels a, o, u, e in inflectional endings
were obscured to a sound, the so-called “indeterminate
vowel,” which came to be written e (less often i, y, u,

93
depending on place and date). As a result, a number of
originally distinct endings such as -a, -u, -e, - an, -um were
reduced generally to a uniform -e, and such grammatical
distinctions as they formerly expressed were no longer
conveyed. Traces of these changes have been found in Old
English manuscripts as early as the tenth century. By the end
of the twelfth century they seem to have been generally
carried out. The leveling is somewhat obscured in the written
language by the tendency of scribes to preserve the traditional
spelling, and in some places the final n was retained even in
the spoken language, especially as a sign of the plural (cf. §
113). The effect of these changes on the inflection of the noun
and the adjective, and the further simplification that was
brought about by the operation of analogy, may be readily
shown.
4.5 Middle English Noun
By the end of the twelfth century, levelling and inflectional
reduction to schwa (and –e) had largely erased the case,
number and gender inflectional paradigms of OE nouns. In
the case of inflectional endings with a final nasal, such as the
plural dative –um, the nasal appears to have been lost before
the vowel change to schwa.

94
 Nouns did, however, continue to mark plurals and
genitives, using inflections inherited from OE declensional
patterns and extending them to paradigms to which they did
not historically belong. Thus, ME plural forms (apart from
historically ‘irregular’ forms such as i-mutated and zero-
marked plurals, as in feet and deer) were generally formed
with either –es (from OE –as, a-stem declension) or –en (from
OE –an, n-stem declension). The use of these inflections
tended to conform to dialectal divisions in ME: southern
dialects appear to have favoured the –en plural, while the –es
plural was used elsewhere, particularly in the northern
dialects. Thus, ME texts record alternate plurals such as
deoflen and deuils, kine and cows, eyen and eyes. As we
know, –en eventually ceased to be employed as a productive
plural marker.
The genitive singular –es inflection (from OE –es, a-
stem declension) was also extended to general use with ME
nouns, but was indistinguishable in writing and speech from
the plural –es inflection where the latter was used: eorles, for
example,
could mean ‘earls’ or ‘earl’s’. However, context would have
helped disambiguate such instances, so we know that eorles,

95
for example, is a genitive in the extract from the
Peterborough Chronicle quoted in Example 4.2 (a) because it
occurs in conjunction with sunu (eorles sunu). This formula
of possessor noun-genitive inflection _ possessed noun has of
course continued into modern English (with the introduction
of the apostrophe in spelling).
Some nouns in ME, however, did not carry genitive
marking, such as those which denoted family relationships
and ended in _-er_, as in fader bone ‘father’s murderer’,
nouns which had been feminine in OE (his lady grace), and
proper names, as in Adam kynde, God hert (Burrow and
Turville-Petre, 1996: 24).
The ME corpus also indicates increasing use of other
types of possessive marking. Of-phrases, as in _e termes of
Jude, began to appear, as well as a his genitive, which would
become more popular in the Early Modern Period. In the latter
construction, his functioned as the possessive marker, as in
Seint Gregore hys bokes Dialoges ‘St. Gregory’s books The
Dialogues’ (Burrow and Turville-Petre, 1996: 40).
The only inflections retained in the noun were those
marking the plural and the possessive singular. In the former
the s-plural had become so generalized that except for a few

96
nouns like sheep and swine with unchanged plurals, and a few
others like mice and feet with mutated vowels, we are scarcely
conscious of any other forms. In the sixteenth century,
however, there are certain survivals of the old weak plural in
-n. Most of these had given way before the usual s- forms: fon
(foes), kneen (knees), fleen (fleas). But beside the more
modern forms Shakespeare occasionally has eyen (eyes),
shoon (shoes), and kine, while the plural hosen is occasionally
found in other writers. Today, except for the poetical kine and
mixed plurals like children and brethren, the only plural of
this type in general use is oxen. Thus, in early Middle English
only two methods of indicating the plural remained fairly
distinctive: the -s or -es from the strong masculine declension
and the -en (as in oxen) from the weak.
One other construction affecting the noun becomes
established during this period, the group possessive: the Duke
of Gloucester’s niece, the King of England’s nose, somebody
else’s hat. The construction is perhaps illogical, since even a
king may be considered to have some rights to his nose, and
the earlier construction was the Duke’s niece of Gloucester,
etc. But the expressions Duke of Gloucester, King of England,
and the like, occurred so commonly as a unit that in the

97
fifteenth century we begin to get the sign of the possessive
added to the group. Instances are not common before the
sixteenth century, and the construction may be thought of
properly as belonging to the modern period. Nowadays we
may say the writer of the book’s ambition or the chief actor
in the play’s illness.

4.6 Middle English Adjectives

In the adjective, the leveling of forms had even greater

consequences. Because the adjective had already lost all its
endings, so that it no longer expressed distinctions of gender,
number, and case, the chief interest of this part of speech in
the
modern period is in the forms of the comparative and
superlative degrees. In the sixteenth century these were not
always precisely those now in use. For example, comparatives
such as lenger, strenger remind us that forms like our elder
were once more common in the language. The two methods
commonly used to form the comparative and superlative, with
the endings -er and -est and with the adverbs more and most,
had been customary since Old English times. But there was

98
more variation in their use. Shakespearian comparisons like
honester, violentest are now replaced by the analytical forms.
A double comparative or superlative is also fairly frequent in
the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: more
larger, most
boldest, or Mark Antony’s This was the most unkindest cut of
all. The chief development affecting the adjective in modern
times has been the gradual settling down of usage so that
monosyllables take -er and -est while most adjectives of two
or more syllables (especially those with suffixes like those in
frugal, learned, careful, poetic, active, famous) take more and
most.
Partly as a result of the sound-changes already
described, partly through the extensive working of analogy,
the form of the nominative singular was early extended to all
cases of the singular, and that of the nominative plural to all
cases of the plural, both in the strong and the weak
declensions. The result was that in the weak declension there
was no longer any distinction between the singular and the
plural: both ended in -e (blinda> blinde and blindan>blinde).
This was also true of those adjectives under the strong
declension whose singular ended in -e. By about 1250 the

99
strong declension had distinctive forms for the singular and
plural only in certain monosyllabic adjectives which ended in
a consonant in Old English (sing. glad, plur. glade). Under
the circumstances the only ending which remained to the
adjective was often without distinctive grammatical meaning
and its use was not governed by any strong sense of adjectival
inflection. Although it is clear that the -e ending of the weak
and plural forms was available for use in poetry in both the
East and West Midlands until the end of the fourteenth
century, it is impossible to know the most usual status of the
form in the spoken language. Certainly adjectival inflections
other than -e, such as Chaucer’s oure aller cok, were archaic
survivals by the close of the Middle English period.

4.7 Middle English Pronouns.

The sixteenth century saw the establishment of the personal
pronoun in the form that it has had ever since. In attaining this
result three changes were involved: the disuse of thou, thy,
thee; the substitution of you for ye as a nominative case; and
the introduction of its as the possessive of it.
(1) In the earliest period of English the distinction
between thou and ye was simply one of number; thou was the

100
singular and ye the plural form for the second person pronoun.
In time, however, a quite different distinction grew up. In the
thirteenth century the singular forms (thou, thy, thee) were
used among familiars and in addressing children or persons
of inferior rank, while the plural forms (ye, your, you) began
to be used as a mark of respect in addressing a superior.
(2) Originally a clear distinction was made between the
nominative ye and the objective you. But because both forms
are so frequently unstressed, they were often pronounced
alike [jə] A tendency to confuse the nominative and the
accusative forms can be observed fairly early, and in the
fourteenth century you began to be used as a nominative. By
a similar substitution ye appears in the following century for
the objective case, and from this time on the two forms seem
to have been used pretty indiscriminately until ye finally
disappeared.
(3) In some ways the most interesting development in
the pronoun at this time was the formation of a new
possessive neuter, its. As we have seen above, the neuter
pronoun in Old English was declined hit, his, him, hit, which
by the merging of the dative and accusative under hit in
Middle English became hit, his, hit. In unstressed positions

101
hit weakened to it, and at the beginning of the modern period
it was the usual form for the subject and object. His, however,
remained the proper form of the possessive. Although it was
thus identical with the possessive case of he, its occurrence
where we should now use its is very common in written
English down to the middle of the seventeenth century.
If grammatical gender had survived in English, the
continued use of his when referring to neuter nouns would
probably never have seemed strange. But when, with the
substitution of natural gender, meaning came to be the
determining factor in the gender of nouns, and all lifeless
objects were thought of as neuter, the situation was somewhat
different. The personal pronouns of the third person singular,
he, she, it, had a distinctive form for each gender in the
nominative and objective cases, and a need seems to have
been felt for some distinctive form in the possessive case as
well.
One other general simplification is to be noted: the loss
of the dual number. A language can get along without a
distinction in pronouns for two persons and more than two;
the forms wit, and their oblique cases did not survive beyond
the thirteenth century, and English lost the dual number.

102
 It will be observed that the pronoun she had the form
hēo in Old English. The modern form could have developed
from the Old English hēo, but it is believed by some that it is
due in part at least to the influence of the demonstrative sēo.
A similar reinforcing influence of the demonstrative is
perhaps to be seen in the forms of the third person plural, they,
their, them, but here the source of the modern developments
was undoubtedly Scandinavian. The normal development of
the Old English pronouns would have been hi (he), here, hem,
and these are very common. In the districts, however, where
Scandinavian influence was strong, the nominative hi began
early to be replaced by the Scandinavian form þei (ON þeir),
and somewhat later a similar replacement occurred in the
other cases, their and them. The new forms were adopted
more slowly farther south, and the usual inflection in Chaucer
is thei, here, hem.

103
Modern English (1800- Present)

CHAPTER 5

Modern English (1500- Present)

Modern English (1500- Present)

Modern English
5.1 Early Modern English (1500-1800)

T
he next wave of innovation in English came with
the Renaissance. The rediscovery of classical
scholarship created an influx of classical Latin and
Greek words into the language.

Two other major factors influenced the language and

served to separate Middle and Modern English. The first was
the Great Vowel Shift. This was a change in pronunciation
that began around 1400. Vowel sounds began to be made
further to the front of the mouth and the letter "e" at the end
of words became silent. Chaucer's Lyf (pronounced "leef")
became the modern life. In Middle English name was
pronounced "nam-a," five was pronounced "feef," and down
was pronounced "doon."

The last major factor in the development of Modern

English was the advent of the printing press. William Caxton
brought the printing press to England in 1476. Books became
cheaper and as a result, literacy became more common.
Finally, the printing press brought standardization to English.

105
Modern English (1500- Present)

The dialect of London, where most publishing houses were

located, became the standard. Spelling and grammar became
fixed, and the first English dictionary was published in 1604.

5.2 Late-Modern English (1800-Present)

The principal distinction between early- and late-modern

English is vocabulary. Pronunciation, grammar, and spelling
are largely the same, but Late-Modern English has many
more words. These words are the result of two historical
factors. The first is the Industrial Revolution and the rise of
the technological society. This necessitated new words for
things and ideas that had not previously existed. The second
was the British Empire. At its height, Britain ruled one
quarter of the earth's surface, and English adopted many
foreign words and made them its own.

The industrial and scientific revolutions created a need

for neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries.
For this, English relied heavily on Latin and Greek. Words
like oxygen, protein, nuclear, and vaccine did not exist in the
classical languages, but they were created from Latin and
Greek roots. Such neologisms were not exclusively created

106
Modern English (1500- Present)

from classical roots though, English roots were used for such
terms as horsepower, airplane, and typewriter.

Also, the rise of the British Empire and the growth of

global trade served not only to introduce English to the
world, but to introduce words into English. Hindi, and the
other languages of the Indian subcontinent, provided many
words, such as pundit, shampoo, pajamas, and juggernaut.
Virtually every language on Earth has contributed to the
development of English, from Finnish (sauna) and Japanese
(tycoon) to the vast contributions of French and Latin.

Finally, the military influence on the language during

the latter half of twentieth century was significant. Military
slang existed, but with the exception of nautical terms, rarely
influenced Standard English. During the mid-20th century,
however, a large number of British and American men served
in the military. And consequently military slang entered the
language. Blockbuster, nose dive, camouflage, radar,
roadblock, spearhead, and landing strip are all military terms
that made their way into Standard English.

107
Modern English (1500- Present)

5.3 The English Language in America

The English language was brought to America by colonists

from England who settled along the Atlantic seaboard in the
seventeenth century. It was therefore the language spoken in
England at that time, the language spoken by Shakespeare and
Milton and Bunyan. In the peopling of this country three great
periods of European immigration are to be distinguished. The
first extends from the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 to the
end of colonial times. This may be put conveniently at 1787,
when Congress finally approved the Federal Constitution, or
better, 1790, when the last of the colonies ratified it and the
first census was taken. At this date the population numbered
approximately four million people, 95 percent of whom were

108
Modern English (1500- Present)

living east of the Appalachian Mountains, and 90 percent

were from various parts of the British Isles.
The second period covers the expansion of the original
thirteen colonies west of the Appalachians, at first into the
South and into the Old Northwest Territory, ending finally at
the Pacific. This era may be said to close with the Civil War,
about 1860, and was marked by the arrival of fresh
immigrants from two great sources, Ireland and Germany.
The failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1845 precipitated
a wholesale exodus to America, a million and a half emigrants
coming in the decade or so that followed. At about the same
time the failure of the revolution in Germany (1848) resulted
in the migration of an equal number of Germans. Many of the
latter settled in certain central cities such as Cincinnati,
Milwaukee, and St. Louis or became farmers in the Middle
West.
The third period, the period since the Civil War, is
marked by an important change in the source from which our
immigrants have been derived. In the two preceding periods,
and indeed up to about 1890, the British Isles and the
countries of northern Europe furnished from 75 to 90 percent
of all who came to this country. Even in the last quarter of the

109
Modern English (1500- Present)

nineteenth century more than a million Scandinavians, about

one-fifth of the total population of Norway and Sweden,
settled here, mainly in the upper Mississippi valley. But since
about 1890 great numbers from Southern Europe and the
Slavic countries have poured in. Just before World War I,
Italians alone were admitted to the number of more than
300,000 a year, and of our annual immigration of more than
a million, representatives of the east and south European
countries constituted close to 75 percent. Outside the patterns
of European immigration was the forced immigration of
Africans through the slave trade that began in the seventeenth
century and continued until the mid-nineteenth.
There are presently some 25 million African Americans
in the United States, mostly settled in the South and in the
larger cities of the North. Finally, one should note the influx
during the mid-twentieth century of Mexican, Puerto Rican,
and other Hispanic immigrants. Extreme economic
imbalances among the countries of the Western Hemisphere
have caused a sharp increase in migration, both legal and
illegal, to the United States during the past two decades.
For the student of the English language the most
interesting period of immigration to America is the first. It

110
Modern English (1500- Present)

was the early colonists who brought us our speech and

established its form. Those who came later were largely
assimilated in a generation or two, and though their influence
may have been felt, it is difficult to define. It is to these early
settlers that we must devote our chief attention if we would
understand the history of the English language in America.
5.3.1 Archaic Features in American English
A second quality often attributed to American English
is archaism, the preservation of old features of the language
that have gone out of use in the standard speech of England.
American pronunciation as compared with that of London is
somewhat old-fashioned. It has qualities that were
characteristic of English speech in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The preservation of the r in General
American and a flat a in fast, path, etc. are two such that were
abandoned in southern England at the end of the eighteenth
century. In many little ways standard American English is
reminiscent of an older period of the language. Most
Americans pronounce either and neither with the vowel of
teeth or beneath, while in Britain an alternate pronunciation
has developed since the American colonies were established
and the more usual pronunciation is now with an initial

111
Modern English (1500- Present)

diphthong [aI]. The American use of gotten in place of got as

the past participle of get always impresses the British of today
as an old-fashioned feature not to be expected in the speech
of a people that prides itself on being up-to-date. It was the
usual form in Britain two centuries ago. American English has
kept a number of old words or old uses of words no longer
used in Britain. Americans still use mad in the sense of angry,
as Shakespeare and his contemporaries did, and they have
kept the general significance of sick without restricting it to
nausea. They still speak of rare meat, whereas the British now
say underdone. Platter is a common word in the United States
but is seldom used anymore in Britain except in poetry.
Americans have kept the picturesque old word fall as the
natural word for the season. They learn autumn, the word used
in Britain, in the schoolroom, and from books. The American
I guess, so often ridiculed in England, is as old as Chaucer
and was still current in English speech in the seventeenth
century. If we were to take the rural speech of New England
or that of the Kentucky mountaineer, we should find hundreds
of words, meanings, and pronunciations now obsolete in the
standard speech of both England and this country. There can
be no question about the fact that many an older feature of the

112
Modern English (1500- Present)

language of England can be illustrated from survivals in the

United States.

5.3.2 Early Changes in the Vocabulary of American English

When colonists settle in a new country they find the
resources of their language constantly taxed. They have no
words for the many new objects on every hand or the constant
succession of new experiences that they undergo.
Accordingly, in a colonial language changes of vocabulary
take place almost from the moment the first settlers arrive.
When the colonists from England became acquainted with the
physical features of this continent they seem to have been
impressed particularly by its mountains and forests, so much
larger and more impressive than any in England, and the
result was a whole series of new words like bluff, foothill,
notch, gap, divide, watershed, clearing, and underbrush.
Then there were the many living and growing things that were
peculiar to the New World. The names for some of these the
colonists learned from Native Americans, words like moose,
raccoon, skunk, opossum, chipmunk, porgy, terrapin; others
they formed by a descriptive process long familiar in the
language: mud hen, garter snake, bullfrog, potato bug,

113
Modern English (1500- Present)

groundhog, reed bird. Tree names such as the hickory and live
oak, and the locust are new to colonial English, as are sweet
potato, eggplant, squash, persimmon, and pecan.
Contact with Native Americans brought into English a
number of words having particular reference to their way of
life: wigwam, tomahawk, canoe, toboggan, mackinaw,
moccasin, wampum, squaw, papoose. These are Native
American words, but we have also English words formed at
the same time and out of the same experience: war path,
paleface, medicine man, pipe of peace, big chief, war paint,
and the verb to scalp. Native American words for Native
American foods were taken over in the case of hominy,
tapioca, succotash, and pone. The latter is still heard in the
South for corn bread, the kind of bread the Native Americans
made. The individual character of our political and
administrative system required the introduction of words such
as congressional, presidential, gubernatorial, congressman,
caucus, mass meeting, selectman, statehouse, land office.
Many other words illustrate things associated with the new
mode of life—back country, backwoodsman, squatter,
prairie, log cabin, clapboard, corncrib, popcorn, hoe cake,
cold snap, snow plow, bobsled, sleigh.

114
Modern English (1500- Present)

As indicated above, the colonists got a number of the

words they needed ready-made from the languages of the
Native Americans. They got some, too, from other languages.
From the French colonists they learned portage, chowder,
cache, caribou, bureau, bayou, levee, and others; from the
Dutch cruller, coleslaw, cookie, stoop, boss, scow; from
German noodle, pretzel, smearcase, sauerkraut. More
interesting, however, are the cases in which colonists applied
an old word to a slightly different thing, as when they gave
the name of the English robin to a red-breasted thrush, applied
the word turkey to a distinctive American bird, and transferred
the word corn to an entirely new cereal. Indian corn was
known in England only from the accounts of travelers, and
naming its various features seems to have taxed the ingenuity
of the first Americans. Maize, the West Indian name that came
into England through the Spanish, was seldom used by the
American settler. Henry Hudson called it Turkish wheat, a
designation found in French and Italian and among the
Pennsylvania Germans. But the colonists used the common
English word corn, which in England is used of any kind of
grain, but especially of wheat. At first they prefixed the
distinguishing epithet “Indian,” but this was soon dropped,

115
Modern English (1500- Present)

and consequently corn means something quite different in

England and in America today. There were other difficulties.
Tassel and silk were natural descriptions of the flower, but the
ear was more troublesome. The cob was known in Virginia
as the husk or huss, and John Smith calls it the core. The outer
covering, which we generally call the husk today, was
variously known as the hose, the leaves, and the shuck. The
latter word survives in the sociable activity of corn-shucking,
the equivalent of the New England husking bee. In an instance
like this we catch a glimpse of the colonists in the very act of
shifting and adapting their language to new conditions, and
we find them doing the same thing with rabbit, lumber,
freshet, and other words that have a somewhat different
meaning in American and English use.
American speakers were perhaps at their best when
inventing simple, homely words like apple butter, sidewalk,
lightning rod, spelling bee, crazy quilt, lowdown, and know-
nothing, or when striking off a terse metaphor like log rolling,
wire pulling, to have an ax to grind, to be on the fence.
Americans early manifested the gift, which they continue to
show, of the imaginative, slightly humorous phrase. To it we
owe to bark up the wrong tree, to face the music, fly off the

116
Modern English (1500- Present)

handle, go on the war path, bury the hatchet, come out at the
little end of the horn, saw wood, and many more, with the
breath of the country and sometimes of the frontier about
them. In this way America began her contributions to the
English language, and in this period also we see the beginning
of such differentiation as has taken place between the
American and the British vocabulary. Both of these matters
will be dealt with in their later aspects below.

5.3.3 Pronunciation of American English

The earliest changes in the English language in
America, distinguishing it from the language of the mother
country, were in the vocabulary. These have already been
mentioned. From the time when the early colonists came,
however, divergence in pronunciation began gradually to
develop. This has been due in part to changes that have
occurred here but has resulted still more from the fact that the
pronunciation of England has undergone further change and
that a variety of southern English has come to be recognized
as the English received standard. At the present time
American pronunciation shows certain well-marked
differences from English use. Perhaps the most noticeable of
117
Modern English (1500- Present)

these differences is in the vowel sound in such words as fast,

path, grass, dance, can’t, half. At the end of the eighteenth-
century southern England began to change from what is called
a flat a to a broad a in these words, that is from a sound like
the a in man to one like the a in father. The change affected
words in which the vowel occurred before f, sk, sp, st, ss, th,
and n followed by certain consonants.

In parts of New England, the same change took place,

but in most other parts of the country the old sound was
preserved, and fast, path, etc., are pronounced with the vowel
of pan. In some speakers there is a tendency to employ an
intermediate vowel, halfway between the a of pan and father,
but the “flat a” must be regarded as the typical American
pronunciation.

118
Modern English (1500- Present)

119
Modern English (1500- Present)

Next to the retention of the flat a, the most noticeable

difference between English and American pronunciation is in
the treatment of the r. In the received pronunciation of
England this sound has disappeared except before vowels. It
is not heard when it occurs before another consonant or at the
end of a word unless the next word begins with a vowel. In
America, eastern New England and some of the South follow
the English practice, but in the Middle States and the West the
r is pronounced in all positions. Thus in the received standard
of England lord has the same sound as laud and there is

pronounced [ðεə] with the indeterminate vowel [ə] as a glide

at the end. The American r is either a retention of older

English pronunciation or the result of north-of-England
influence in our speech. It has caused more comment than any
other distinction in American pronunciation.
There are other differences of less moment between
English and American pronunciation, because they concern
individual words or small groups of words. Thus in England
been has the same sound as bean but in America is like bin.
Leisure often has in America what is popularly called a long
vowel but in England usually rhymes with pleasure. There,

120
Modern English (1500- Present)

too, the last syllable of words like fertile and sterile rhymes
with aisle. American English has kept the common
eighteenth-century pronunciation with a short vowel or a
mere vocalic l. The British pronunciation of either and neither
is sometimes heard in America, as is process with a close o.
But Americans do not suppress the final t in trait or
pronounce an f in lieutenant. The pronunciation of figure with
[jər] would be considered pedantic in Britain, according to
Fowler, who also confirms the pronunciation of ate as et,
while noting that the American pronunciation has been
growing there. In the United States figger and et would betray
a lack of cultivation.
A more important difference is the greater clearness
with which Americans pronounce unaccented syllables. They
do not say secret′ry or necess′ry. Bernard Shaw said he once
recognized an American because he accented the third
syllable of necessary, and the disposition to keep a secondary
stress on one of the unaccented syllables of a long word is one
of the consequences of our effort to pronounce all the
syllables.
Conversely, the suppression of syllables in Britain has
been accompanied by a difference at times in the position of

121
Modern English (1500- Present)

the chief stress. The British commonly say centen′ary and

labor′atory, and adver′tisement is never advertise′ment.
There is, of course, more in speech than the quality of the
sounds. There is also the matter of pitch and tempo.
Americans speak more slowly and with less variety of tone.
There can be no gain-saying the fact that American speech is
a bit more monotonous, is uttered with less variety in the
intonation, than that of Britain.
The differences between British and American
pronunciation are not such as should cause any alarm for the
future, any fear that the British and Americans may become
unintelligible to each other. As already said, the difference in
the pronunciation of the o in lot, top, and so on is one that
often escapes the notice of the lay person. The pronunciation
of the r may continue to stir mutual curiosity, but the
difference between the broad a and the flat a affects fewer
than 150 words in common use. Other differences are
sporadic and on the whole negligible.

122