The History of the English Language

A Sourcebook

David Burnley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317883395
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This second edition of The History of the English Language- A Sourcebook provides a comprehensive and accessible guide to the origins and development of the English language. First published in 1992, the book contains over fifty illustrative passages, drawn from the oldest English to the twentieth century. The passages are contextualised by individual introductions and grouped into the traditional periods of Old English, Early Middle English, Later Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. These periods are connected by brief essays explaining the major linguistic developments associated with each period, to produce a continuous outline history.
For this new edition Professor Burnley has expanded the outline of linguistic features at each of the main chronological divisions and included more selections and illustrations. A new section has also been included to illustrate the language of advertising from the 18th century to the present. The book will be of general interest to all those interested in the origins and development of the English language, and in particular to students and teachers of the history of the English language at A-level and university.

Old English

(700–1100)

Old English, and Anglo-Saxon, are names used by modern scholars for the written version of a language used in England from the departure of the Romans until some time after the Norman Conquest. Its speakers referred to it as Englisc, the language of the Angles, who were the major ethnic group consistently identified among the Germanic settlers of Britain in early sources. These people must have spoken a language closely similar to that used by other Germanic peoples along the North Sea coast from Denmark to the Rhine, but in a period of some seven centuries following the earliest settlement their language underwent major developments. Direct written evidence of these is available only from the last four hundred years of this evolution, and indeed the vast majority of our information about Old English is preserved in manuscripts written in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Apart from the runic alphabet, which had been used in earlier Germanic society for inscriptions on all kinds of objects, from weapons to standing stones, the earliest speakers of English, despite artistic skills evident in archaeological discoveries like those at Sutton Hoo and from Kentish cemeteries, were both pagan and illiterate. The coming of Christianity in AD 597 introduced Latin literacy to England, which was followed by attempts to render the English language in the letters of the Latin alphabet – those which survive to the present day. Old English forms of the Latin letters in the Hiberno-Saxon script were very different from modern printed forms, as can be seen in the case of the <s> and <r> in the facsimile (p. 21), and in addition Old English used some letters no longer found in English: ‘eth’ <ð> and ‘yogh’ <ʒ> (the latter is usually printed as <g> in modern editions, but is retained in this book to permit a more valid comparison between the spelling systems of Old and Middle English) were derived from Irish Latin, ‘thorn’ <þ> and ‘wynn’ <p> were runes (the latter printed as <w> in modern editions), and the Latin digraph ‘ash’ <æ>. Thorn and eth are equivalent to <th> in the modern spelling system and indeed <th> is not unknown in early Old English. The letters <v>, <z> and <q> were not normally used in Old English texts, and their roles were filled respectively by <f>, <s> and the digraph <cp>. The letter <j> was not used (Scragg 1974: 8).

The scribes who wrote the manuscripts which are our only source of information about Old English lived in various parts of England and wrote a version of the language which they spoke every day. Consequently OE manuscripts, especially from the earlier period, preserve evidence of dialectal variation in the pronunciation and grammar of the language. Modern scholars (Campbell 1969:1–22; Toon 1992) have distinguished several groupings: West Saxon (the language of King Alfred and England south of the Thames but excluding Kent) is distinct from non-West Saxon, which includes both Kentish and Anglian. Kentish is phonologically separate from the other dialects, and Anglian is in turn divided into Northumbrian (spoken from the Humber to the Forth) and Mercian in the Midlands. No clear evidence survives for the languages of Sussex, Essex or East Anglia, and an unrelated Celtic language, closer to Welsh, was spoken until quite late in the Lake District, the Welsh marches, and the British kingdom of Elmet close to Leeds in the old West Riding of Yorkshire. From the late ninth...