History of English

Jonathan Culpeper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134758487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

History of English: * covers the development of the English language from the 5th century to the present day
* contains a `mini-corpus' of texts, used for exercises and to illustrate points raised in the commentary
* introduces key linguistic concepts
* provides `discussion points' to generate debate
* involves readers in collecting and analysing their own data

1THE BIRTH OF ENGLISH: CLUES IN PLACENAMES

The most important factor in the development of English has been the arrival of successive waves of invaders and settlers speaking different languages. The history of placenames in Britain is closely connected to the dominance of various languages at various points in time.

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 place-names. The placenames below all have some distant Celtic link:

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

Rivers: Avon, Clyde, Dee, Don, Forth, Severn, Thames, Usk

Regions: Argyll, Cumbria, Devon, Dyfed, Glamorgan, Kent, Lothian

EXERCISE

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1.1 Consider the list of placenames above. What areas of the British Isles seem to be well represented? Can you guess why this might be?

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We cannot be sure what these placenames might have originally meant. Like many other placenames, they pre-date written records, which are preserved in significant quantities only from about AD 700. Indeed, the study of the history of placenames in general is characterised by guesswork. With Celtic placenames we can compare words in surviving Celtic languages, such as Welsh, or consider the geography of the places in question. Thus, we can be fairly certain about the meaning of the following Celtic placename elements:

Pen (Welsh pen) = top, hill (e.g. Pendle)

Lin (Welsh llyn) = pool (e.g. Lincoln)

Etymology

To study the history of words, whether placenames or any other type of word, is to study their ETYMOLOGY. Etymology will be an important issue in both Units 4 and 5.

The first invaders of Britain were the Romans, who arrived in ad 43 and occupied much of Britain for roughly the next 400 years. The Romans often Latinised existing Celtic placenames, rather than inventing completely new names. London is a Celtic placename supposedly based on the personal name Londinos, meaning ‘the bold one’. The Romans seem to have simply made this more like Latin by changing it to Londinium. Few placenames surviving today are straightforwardly based on single Latin words. One example is Catterick, which is derived from Latin cataracta (= a waterfall). Nevertheless, there are a few important Latin placename elements, notably:

castra = a camp, walled town (e.g. Lancaster)

portus = port (e.g. Portsmouth)

via strata = paved way, a ‘street’ in a town (e.g. Stratford)

The English language has its roots in the language of the second wave of invaders: the Germanic dialects of the tribes of north-western 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 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). This and subsequent invasions account for some of the current diversity in the languages and dialects of Britain. We shall look at the history of the various English dialects more closely in Unit 10. 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.

MAP 1.1 Angle, Saxon and Jutish Invasions

Thousands of English placenames were coined by the Anglo-Saxons in this early period. Common placename elements include:

burh = fort (e.g. Canterbury)

dun = hill (e.g. Swindon)

feld = open land (e.g. Macclesfield)

ford = river crossing (e.g. Oxford)

tun = farm, village (later developing into ‘town’) (e.g. Eton)

ing = place of (e.g. Clavering)

ingas = followers of (e.g. Hastings, Reading)

ham = settlement, homestead (e.g. Northam)

hamm = enclosure, land in a river bend (e.g. Chippenham)

The final four elements give rise to potential difficulties in deciding the meaning of Anglo-Saxon placenames, since the modern place-name spelling may not distinguish the original elements. In distinguishing ham and hamm, sometimes the only solution is to check the local landscape, in particular to see whether a river is present. This problem of spelling disguising the roots of words is in fact a more general problem in the study of placenames, and, indeed, in the study of words in general. We always need to be cautious in drawing conclusions.

Compounding

Let’s consider how placename elements combine to form place-names. Swindon, for example, is created by combining the words swine (= pigs) and dun (= hill). This process of joining words to form other words is called COMPOUNDING. We will look at this process in more detail in Unit 5. Note that by investigating placenames we can learn about the culture and economy of the time. Swindon is a hill where, presumably, pig farming used to take place. A dominant trend in Anglo-Saxon placenames is that they take on the name of the tribal leader. For example, the first elements of the placenames Macclesfield, Hastings and Chippenham come from the personal male names Maeccel, Haesta and Cippa. This trend highlights the fact that Anglo-Saxon society was patriarchal: power was concentrated in the hands of the leader, who, judging by placenames, was usually male.

In the ninth century, Britain saw the beginning of a third wave of invaders – the Scandinavian Vikings. Arriving from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, they soon took over the east of England and were only halted when King Ælfred, the king of Wessex in the southwest, won a decisive victory over the Danish King Guthrum in 878. The following year a treaty was drawn up whereby the Danes retreated to the east of a line running roughly from Chester to London, an area which became known as Danelaw (see Map 1.2).

The significance of this boundary is that it had the effect of increasing dialectal differences between the north and the south. These differences between north and south are still apparent today, and we will consider them further in Unit 10. One can also see the effect this boundary had on placenames. Words derived from Scandinavian languages (Old Norse and Old Danish) frequently appear in northern and north-eastern placenames – the shaded areas in Map 1.2. Common placename elements include:

by = village (e.g. Kirkby or Kirby, Crosby)

thorp = village (e.g. Milnthorpe)

thwaite = glade, clearing (e.g. Hawthornthwaite)

Aspects of Scandinavian society are sometimes reflected in placenames. The following placenames all contain words indicating a particular rank in Scandinavian society.

Holderness = hold’s or yeoman’s headland

Dringhoe = dreng’s or free tenant’s mound

Lazonby (Lazenby) = leysingi’s or freedman’s village

As with Anglo-Saxon plac...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Using this book
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The birth of English: clues in placenames
• 2 Investigating change in English
• 3 Spellings and speech sounds
• 4 Borrowing words
• 5 New words from old
• 6 Changing meanings
• 7 Punctuation
• 8 Grammar I: nouns
• 9 Grammar II: verbs
• 10 Dialects in British English
• 11 Standardisation
• 12 World Englishes
• Appendix I: reading an OED entry
• Appendix II: phonetic transcription
• Appendix III: a ‘mini-corpus’ of texts
• Appendix IV: some answers
• Appendix V: general reading
• Index