Introducing English Studies

Tonya Krouse, Tamara F. O'Callaghan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350055421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théorie de la critique littéraire

From literary studies to digital humanities, Introducing English Studies is a complete introduction to the many fields and sub-disciplines of English studies for majors starting out in the subject for the first time. The book covers topics including: · history of English language and linguistics
· literature and literary criticism
· cinema and new media Studies
· composition and rhetoric
· creative and professional writing
· critical theory
· digital humanities The book is organized around the central questions of the field and includes case studies demonstrating how assignments might be approached, as well as annotated guides to further reading to support more in-depth study. A glossary of key critical terms helps readers locate essential definitions quickly when studying and writing and revising essays. A supporting companion website also offers sample assignments and activities, examples of student writing, career guidance and weblinks.

1

History of the English Language

The English language has an immense wealth of vocabulary to which we are constantly adding as new words are created in response to cultural developments in such areas as technology, politics, social media, journalism, and music. Some words are used for a limited period of time, and others become part of our permanent vocabulary. Each year, members of the American Dialect Society (ADS), an organization founded in 1889 to study the English language particularly in North America, nominate and then select by vote the word or phrase that has been particularly prominent over the past year. Examples of words that have been chosen recently include dumpster fire, #blacklivesmatter, hashtag, google, app, tweet, plutoed, subprime, bailout, truthiness, metrosexual, WMD, and 9/11. At first glance, these words may not seem to have much in common, or we may not understand why they would be grouped together. However, a quick scan of the words listed above reveals their association with significant cultural preoccupations in the early twenty-first century, including war, terrorism, economic crises, technological developments, social media, racial tensions, political challenges, scientific revision, and gendered stereotypes. The yearly nominations and their connection to specific historic events at national and global levels demonstrate how language change is normal, ongoing, and even entertaining. Perhaps more importantly, these words also reveal how we can better understand the significance of written and spoken English by intentionally examining the English language and its historical development.

Although few students come to the English major with a knowledge of the History of the English Language (HEL) and its importance for English Studies, most students are aware that words have power and that they, as savvy users of English, need to differentiate between informal and formal registers of the language, especially in their academic writing. As a field of the broader discipline of English Studies, HEL can give students the tools to understand how language, at a fundamental level, grounds our ideas about interpretation and communication. At the heart of English Studies is language: language is not just a tool for writing text; it is the text’s fundamental essence. This chapter will address how an understanding of the historical development of English as a language is foundational to English Studies.

Key Questions

1. What is History of the English Language, and why are we studying history and language in an English course?

2. Why does everyone else have an accent?

3. What do we mean by “good” and “bad” English, and who decides?

4. What are the conventions of HEL scholarship? What kinds of research and interpretation do HEL scholars do?

5. What is HEL in the twenty-first century? How does it connect to English Studies, more broadly conceived?

What Is History of the English Language, and Why Are We Studying History and Language in an English Course?

History of the English Language, or HEL (pronounced “hell”) as it is jokingly called, provides an overview of the historical development of the English language and an introduction to historical linguistics. Whereas the field of linguistics in English Studies focuses primarily on language structure at a particular moment in time, HEL focuses on both the “internal” history of language—sounds, inflection, and word order—and the “external” history of language—the political, social, and intellectual forces that influence language—over time. By understanding something of the English language’s history, we can better understand English’s current and future changes as well as appreciate the power and politics of language in general. We can also become more sophisticated readers and writers of English: understanding this history of our language can help us to understand dialect in a regional novel, to create a fully developed character or concretely articulated image in our own fiction or poetry, or to communicate effectively in a workplace or community setting.

To begin, our understanding of this field can benefit from a brief overview of how English evolves over time. Although many mistakenly believe that English has its origins in Latin because Britain was once part of the Roman Empire, that is not true. We know that early Britain was inhabited by the Picts, Scots, and Celts who had their own language when Julius Caesar first crossed the English Channel from Gaul (present-day France) in 55 BCE. Despite Caesar’s famous statement “Veni, vidi, vici [I came, I saw, I conquered]” upon arriving on British shores, it was not until Roman troops under Emperor Claudius invaded Britain in 43 CE that Britain actually came under Roman rule. The Romans subjugated the native inhabitants, destroying their communities and driving many of the survivors into Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland. Those who remained were enslaved and may have eventually intermarried, thereby losing their cultural and language identity. Latin was the language used by the Romans in Britain, but when the Romans withdrew in the fifth century, Latin did not leave the legacy we might expect. It simply did not take hold in Britain as it did in the Roman Empire elsewhere in continental Europe. This absence would have a significant impact on the development of the English language.

The Anglo-Saxons and Old English

The departure of the Romans left the Celtic people defenseless against the Picts and Scots, who almost immediately invaded from the north of Britain. Desperate, the Celts turned to their sometime trading partners, the Germanic tribes, for help. The Germanic tribes came from the northwestern coastline of continental Europe and consisted of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, all of whom spoke closely related German dialects. They quickly drove the Picts and Scots back north. However, the Germanic tribes ultimately wanted Britain for themselves, so they also drove the Celts into Wales, Cornwall, and across the Channel into Brittany, France. The Germanic dialects spoken by the new conquerors became the basis for the English language, which is why English is a member of the Germanic language family along with German, Dutch, and Frisian. When Old English writings, such as the epic poem Beowulf, were first written down in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, there was considerable regional variation in the language. We do not know much about this English in its earliest form because few written records survive.

When speakers of Present-Day English encounter Old English writing, they might mistake it for a foreign language because it has distinct features not found in English today. The Old English alphabet does not have the letters “v” or “z” but does have two unique ones, þ (thorn) and ð (eth), to represent the “th” combination of Present-Day English. The language is also characterized by non-rigid word order: inflectional endings on nouns, pronouns, adjectives, articles, and verbs indicate the grammatical function of words in a sentence, so word order does not contribute as significantly to meaning in Old English as it does in Present-Day English. Inflection also meant that end rhyming in poetry was extremely difficult to achieve, so alliteration was used instead.

We may think that English today does not inherit this feature of inflection from Old English, but it does. Just look at our pronouns. We have very different pronoun forms for the subject, object (direct or indirect), and possessive. Consider the following sentences:

Mary likes Bob. Bob likes Mary.

She likes him. He likes her.

In the sentences on the first line, the noun forms are the same where they are the subject or direct object of the sentence. However, change those nouns to pronouns, and we see something quite different. Those different pronoun forms are a holdover of the inflected forms in Old English.

We also see the legacy of Old English in some of our verbs. Old English had many verbs that indicated the past tense by a modification of the root vowel: what we now call irregular verbs, such as sing-sang-sung. Even some of our regular verbs indicate that they once used the vowel modification to indicate the past tense. The verb melt-melted-melted follows the regular verb pattern in Present-Day English, but look down the opening of a volcano and you see molten (not melted) lava. Since Old English seldom borrowed vocabulary from other languages, it relied on compounding to create new words. Therefore, leohtfæt (“light” + “fat”) is translated as lamp and dægred (“day” + “red”) as dawn.

The Vikings and Old Norse

By the eighth century, Viking raiders began to attack the Christian descendants of the Germanic tribes. These invaders spoke Old Norse and had settled into northern and eastern Britain by the mid-ninth century. England was even ruled by a Danish king, Canute, in the eleventh century. Therefore, we might expect Old Norse to have had a significant influence on the development of the English language, but it did not. Old Norse encouraged the loss of inflection in Old English. There was some borrowing of vocabulary from Old Norse, such as wife, husband, happy, anger, awe, foot, leg, and freckles. However, because Old English and Old Norse were likely mutually intelligible, the incorporation of numerous loanwords from Old Norse into Old English may not have been necessary. Why adopt a word from another language if you already have an equivalent?

The French and Middle English

If the Vikings had a limited influence on the development of the English language, the French had quite the opposite effect when they invaded England in 1066. A dispute over the English throne led to the Battle of Hastings between the two claimants, King Harold and William, Duke of Normandy. William was the victor, becoming William the Conqueror and William I of England, with the result that French became the language of the English court and the aristocracy. The English needed to learn enough Norman French to communicate, but they were only expected to learn more if they entered the professional classes. Because the Normans probably never exceeded more than two percent of the population in England, the English language persisted alongside Norman French. In the end, this allowed the English language to survive and thrive as Middle English, the English of the later Middle Ages.

This later medieval period marked a change in the grammar and vocabulary of English more extensive than at any time in history. Some changes were the direct result of the Norman Conquest, while others were already in progress but developed more rapidly under the Normans. The most significant grammatical change was the increased decay of inflection. The endings of nouns and adjectives marking distinction of number, case, and often grammatical gender altered in pronunciation and thus lost their distinctive form and usefulness. There is a simi...