The History of English

An Introduction

Stephan Gramley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429863219
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The History of English: An Introduction provides a chronological analysis of the linguistic, social, and cultural development of the English language from before its establishment in Britain around the year 450 to the present. Each chapter represents a new stage in the development of the language from Old English through Middle English to Modern Global English, all illustrated with a rich and diverse selection of primary texts showing changes in language resulting from contact, conquest and domination, and the expansion of English around the world.

The History of English goes beyond the usual focus on English in the UK and the USA to include the wider global course of the language during and following the Early Modern English period. This perspective therefore also includes a historical review of English in its pidgin and creole varieties and as a native and/or second language in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Australasia.

This new edition of The History of English has been thoroughly revised and updated throughout, and features:

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• chapter introductions and conclusions to assist in orientation;

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• over 90 textual examples demonstrating linguistic change accompanied, as necessary, by translations and/or glosses;

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• study questions on the social, cultural, and linguistic background of the periods and topics, as well as recommendations for further reading and topics for further study;

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• over 100 figures, tables and maps to support and illuminate the text;

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• 18 pages of colour plates depicting exemplary texts, relevant artifacts, and examples of language usage, including Germanic runes, the opening page of Beowulf, the New England Primer, and the Treaty of Waitangi;

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• a brand-new companion website hosting further articles on linguistic, historical, and cultural phenomena which go beyond the scope of the book, additional sample texts, exercises, and audio clips.

The History of English is essential reading for any student of the English language, and will be of relevance to any course addressing the origins of the English language.

PART I

Before Britain

CHAPTER ONE

The origins of English (before 450)

CONTENTS

1.1 The origins of human language

1.2 Language change

1.3 Changes in Germanic before the invasions of Britain

1.4 The world of the Germanic peoples

1.5 The Germanic migrations

1.6 Summary

Study questions

Topics of interest for further study

Further reading

Chapter overview

This chapter:

● explores some basic points about the origins of human language;

● asks how so many languages came about and looks at how some of them are related to each other;

● reviews the main principles of language change – internal and external change, including creolization;

● examines the Germanic tribes in Roman times and the influence of Latin, the language of the Romans, on the language spoken by those Germanic tribes which carried what was to become the English language to Britain.

1.1 The origins of human¹ language

According to some calculations, the capacity for language – which is surely one of the most clearly human features we have – emerged approximately 145,000 years ago (± 70,000) (Bickerton 1990: 175). The emergence of human speech depended on both suitable physiological change in what were to become the organs of speech and on changes in the structure of the brain to allow humans to work with the complexity of language neurologically (ibid.: chap. 8). Furthermore, widespread opinion (e.g. Bickerton 1990: 4; Bloomfield 1933: 3; Chomsky 1968: 100; Diamond 1992: 141; Sapir 1921: 23) sees the acquisition of a capacity for language as a unique phenomenon. As such, it was then passed on to the descendants of the first group of speakers.

Just how this mooted first language may have looked is unknown, but the multiplicity and diversity of languages spoken in today’s world indicate one of the unchanging principles of human language – change: out of one, many have developed. One of these many languages is English, itself a grouping of often very different varieties spoken all over the world by both native and non-native speakers. Just how many speakers is a widely debated question, as is the question of what a native and what a non-native speaker is (see the discussion in Chapters 7 and 13). It is the aim of this book to explore how English came into being and developed the enormous amount of diversity which the label “English” covers.

1.1.1 Divergence, change, and the family (tree) model (link: models of change)

Among those who study language (as such, i.e. not “just” individual languages, but language in general), historical linguists have tried to trace the development from an assumed first or proto-language to our own day with its 5000–7000 languages. This is done by extrapolating backwards from the known to the unknown in a process of historical reconstruction which is applied to pronunciation and known as the comparative method (link: example of reconstruction). It notes the similarities between, for example, the family of languages which are labeled Germanic, such as English, Dutch and Icelandic, or between ones such as French, Spanish, and Italian, which are known as Romance (or Romanic) languages, indicating that their ancestor language was spoken by the Romans. The comparative method tries to use the forms which known languages share to figure out how the language they developed from might have looked. In the case of French, Spanish, and Italian, these languages “descended” from the earlier “parent” language, Latin. Consequently, their history is well known, since Latin is documented by the many texts still available today. By tracing developments from Latin to its successor languages we can make general assumptions about the kinds of change which are likely to have taken place and their principles. For English, Dutch, Icelandic as well as other Germanic languages such as German, Yiddish, Frisian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Faroese there is no documented earlier language. Yet historians of language assume that the same kinds of principles apply here as to Latin and the Romance languages and that this allows us to reconstruct a language known as Proto-Germanic. An example of how this works is given in §1.1.2.

1.1.2 Proto-languages: the comparative method and language families

A proto-language refers in this context to an earlier form of a language (or group of languages such as the Germanic languages) for which there is no documentary evidence, but whose “daughter” languages are known. By extrapolating from the daughter languages using plausible regularities in sound change it is possible to “reconstruct” the proto-language (reconstructed forms are preceded by an asterisk). If we take the words for the number 10 in some of the Germanic languages, we find, for example, North Germanic Swedish tio and Danish ti and West Germanic Dutch tien, English ten, and German zehn. By observing that the North Germanic languages generally lost final nasals, we can restore /n/. This puts Old Norse (ON) -tjan (used in compounds) on a level with the ancestor of West Germanic Dutch, English, and German. The next step is to restore the two-syllable nature of the five, which we see in bisyllabic ON tiu,² Middle High German zëhen and Old English tīene (trisyllabic /tiːenə/), and Middle Dutch tien /tiən/. We also know that German <z> (pronounced /ts/) regularly corresponds to English and Dutch /t/ (= part of the Second Germanic Sound/Consonant Shift, as seen in German zu–English to or Zinn–tin). Now all five are on a par, and we can, ignoring the vowels, re-construct Proto-Germanic *tehun – bisyllabic, beginning with /t/and ending with /n/. By employing further comparative steps we can arrive at Greek déka and Latin decem. From here the path leads to (Proto-)Indo-European ((P)IE; see Table 1.1) *dékm- via Grimm’s Law (§1.3.2), which shows a correspondence between IE /d/ and Germanic /t/ as well as between IE /k/ and Germanic /h/.

Table 1.1 The Indo-European language family

Proto-Indo-European
Armenian	Armenian
Albanian	Albanian
Balto-Slavic	Baltic: Latvian, Lithuanian; West Slavic: Czech, Polish, Slovak; East Slavic: Russian, Ukrainian; South Slavic: Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Macedonian (etc.)
Celtic	Welsh, Gaelic, Breton (etc.)
Germanic	Dutch, Frisian, English, German; Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish (etc.)
Hellenic	Greek
Indian	Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Panjabi, Urdu (etc.)
Iranian	Baluchi, Farsi (Persian), Kurdish, Pasto
Italic (Romance)	Catalan, French,...