History of English

A Resource Book for Students

Dan McIntyre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000298406
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Routledge English Language Introductions cover core areas of language study and are one-stop resources for students.

Assuming no prior knowledge, books in the series offer an accessible overview of the subject, with activities, study questions, sample analyses, commentaries and key readings – all in the same volume. The innovative and flexible 'two-dimensional' structure is built around four sections – introduction, development, exploration and extension – which offer self-contained stages for study. Each topic can also be read across these sections, enabling the reader to build gradually on the knowledge gained. This revised second edition of History of English includes:

? a comprehensive introduction to the history of English covering the origins of English, the change from Old to Middle English, and the influence of other languages on English;

? increased coverage of key issues, such as the standardisation of English;

? a wider range of activities, plus answers to exercises;

? new readings of well-known authors such as Manfred Krug, Colette Moore, Merja Stenroos and David Crystal;

? a timeline of important external events in the history of English.

Structured to reflect the chronological development of the English language, History of English describes and explains the changes in the language over a span of 1, 500 years, covering all aspects from phonology and grammar, to register and discourse. In doing so, it incorporates examples from a wide variety of texts and provides an interactive and structured textbook that will be essential reading for all students of English language and linguistics.

Section D
EXTENSION

READINGS IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH

If you have already read sections A, B and C of this book you will be well aware that the history of English is long and complex. This relatively short book spans over 1,500 years of linguistic, social and political history. Not surprisingly, it is impossible for it to cover every aspect of the development of English throughout this time. Indeed, I have not attempted to do this. Instead, I have tried to provide enough of an overview of the language at each of its stages of development for you to be able to grasp the major aspects of its history, and to give you enough background knowledge to be able to go off and explore the history of English in more depth for yourself. To do this you will need to read widely. The eight readings in this section are intended to supplement the information contained in the rest of this book and to provide a springboard for exploring the topics covered in more detail. The readings vary in terms of type, length and complexity. Some are extracts from books and some are extracts from articles published in scholarly journals. Some deal with aspects of linguistic form while others are concerned with wider social events and how these impacted on English. In each case I have tried to choose readings that complement and expand on the material covered in sections A, B and C, and which also give a flavour of the wide range of approaches to the study of the history of English. In the ‘Issues to consider’ section that follows each reading, I have listed questions for consideration and, in some cases, particular activities to carry out. Where appropriate, I have provided a commentary on these activities, though many are open discussion questions. In considering your answers, re-read the corresponding units in sections A, B and C.

Except for the last one, all of the readings have been abridged. After you have read and feel comfortable with the abridged versions, I recommend tackling the full versions if you can get hold of them. And once you have finished section D, there is a list of further reading at the end of this book that offers advice on what to read next.

D1 VOCABULARY AND MEANING IN OLD ENGLISH

This first reading follows up specifically on the introduction to the linguistic features of Old English outlined in B1 and C1. The late Professor Christian Kay worked in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Glasgow (including Professor Michael Samuels, whose work on Middle English dialectology we discussed in A5.1) on a 40-year project that eventually resulted in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. In this extract from her contribution to the book English Historical Linguistics, she explains the nature of the Old English lexicon. My reason for choosing this particular extract is that, although the structure of Old English grammar may seem initially confusing to learners unfamiliar with synthetic languages, vocabulary can sometimes pose much more of a problem than grammar (Mitchell 1995). The more you know about the Old English lexicon, then, the easier it will be to read Old English texts and understand the earliest form of the English language.

D1.1 Old English: semantics and lexicon

Christian Kay (reprinted from Bergs, A. and Brinton, L. J. (eds) (2015) English Historical Linguistics, pp. 313–25. Berlin: De Gruyter.)

[…]

3. The nature of the lexicon

Figures derived from A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay 2000) give a total of around 34,000 separate word forms in Old English, less than half the number that might be found in a modern desk dictionary. The total rises to 50,700 meanings if polysemy and the occasional case of homonymy are taken into account. For comparison, DOE: A to G online (Cameron et al. 2007), which covers the first eight of the 22 letters of the OE alphabet, contains 12,568 headwords. In TOE, nouns predominate at just over 50%, followed by verbs at 24% and adjectives at 19%. The OE figures will undoubtedly change as editing of DOE progresses.

Any examination of the OE lexicon reveals its essentially Germanic character. Words often have cognate forms in other Germanic languages, for example modern German Erde, See, Mutter, Fuss, gut, or Swedish jord, sjö, moder, fot, god. The differences between cognate languages, and the differences between old and modern versions of the same language, show how word forms develop and diverge over the years.

Compared with Modern English, Old English contains very few words borrowed from foreign languages. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain, their language already contained some words borrowed from Latin through contact with Roman activities on the European mainland. These include coper ‘copper’, strǣt ‘road’, and wīn ‘wine’. Following the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, Latin terms increasingly appear in the vocabulary of religion and education as well as in more general areas where new commodities, ideas or practices were introduced. From the several hundred words recorded, examples include abbod ‘abbot’, sealm ‘psalm’, scōl ‘school’, discipul ‘disciple, student’, plante ‘plant’. Many individual plant-names, often for plants useful in medicine, were borrowed from Latin. Religious influences also came from France, and a few French loans are recorded late in the OE period, notably prūd ‘proud, arrogant’, leading to derived forms such as oferprūt ‘haughty’ and woruldprūdo ‘worldly pride’. Native words, however, might continue to be preferred over synonymous foreign ones. Discipul was a relatively rare word in OE; the word used in the Anglo-Saxon Gospels and elsewhere was the native leorningcniht. They might also be more productive: unlike plante, native wyrt ‘plant, herb’ generates a host of compounds, such as wyrtcynn ‘species of plant’.

A mere handful of words, perhaps around 20 in all (Hogg 1992a: 3), were borrowed into the general language from the Celtic-speaking people who already inhabited Britain. The best known of these are probably brocc ‘brock, badger’ and āncor ‘anchorite, hermit’. According to Breeze, however, many Celtic loans in English remain to be discovered: he puts forward a case for, among others, OE syrce ‘coat of mail’ and trum ‘strong’ (Breeze 2002: 175–176). Less controversial is the fact that many place-names in certain parts of the British Isles are Celtic in origin. A more significant contact, linguistically at least, was with the Old Norse (ON) language of the Scandinavian Vikings, who raided, and later settled in, much of the east and north of the country. Unusually, and probably because of the cognate nature of the two languages and the fact that transmission occurred during everyday spoken interaction, Scandinavian-derived words replaced their OE counterparts in core areas of the language, resulting in Modern English words such as take (OE (ge)niman), sky (OE lyft) and the pronoun they (OE hīe). Often the cognate words were very similar in form, as OE sweostor and ON syster, the latter giving Modern English sister. Because such words were likely to have been restricted to casual spoken use in the early stages, only a few of them appear in the OE written record, but many more are found in early Middle English. Thus, take (OE tacan) is recorded in the OED late in the OE period, but sky is not listed until the 13th century, although it was probably in use before then.

A full account of foreign borrowings into Old English is given in Baugh and Cable (1993: 72–104) and Kastovsky (1992: 299–338). Words throughout this paper are generally given in the form found in Clark Hall’s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1960); Clark Hall’s brief definitions are also followed.

3.1 Lexical structure: affixation

Basic OE words tended to be short forms of one or two syllables. Stress fell on the root sy...