Lecture 1.

History of the English Language

The subject matter of any course is always concerned with its place among other linguistic disciplines, its ties with other linguistic and “extra-linguistic”, or rather, non-linguistic research data.

History of the EL is a fundamental course forming the linguistic background of a specialist in West-European, and particularly, English philology. It studies the rise and development of E, its structure and special features in the old days, its similarity to other languages of the same family, and its unique, specific character that singles it out from the latter. In the HEL most of facts are studied diachronically, in contrast to synchronistic approach with its description of a language as a system of interrelated phenomena.

In all historical studies only separate facts are investigated. Because in reality we are never sure that some written records lost in the course of time might (or might not) contain some other data for analysis. But with adequate tools we can still trace all the changes within a language system. So the aim of the course is the research of the development of the system of the EL.

We’ll have a close look at the major stages of the development of the language, the influence of various both linguistic and non-linguistic factors on the language and, in the long run, define what makes this language, once a language of one of the many insignificant European communities, originally the dialects of several related tribes that migrated to what we call now the British Isles, which spoke the dialects of Indo-European family – synthetic, inflected language with a well-developed system of noun forms, poorly represented system of verbal categories, with free word order and a vocabulary consisting entirely of the words of native origin, - grow into a means of communication on the global scale, now almost Lingua Franca (1).

Mighty factors affected the EL, converting it into prevalently analytical one, with scarcity (скудность) of nominal forms and a verbal system incomparable to any other European language in its segmentation of a verbal component. Its vowel system is rich, its vocabulary is enormous, it has more borrowings than any other tongue, and is magnificently flexible in expressing new notions.

Nowadays, English is native in a number of countries, though it is hardly spoken by half a billion citizens. In this respect it can’t be compared to Chinese, Hindu or even Spanish. What is the reason of its might? Was it due to the might of the British empire or today’s might of the USA? Yes, to a certain extent, but there are purely linguistic factors that facilitated this process.

The language has become a unique tool for mutual understanding among peoples on all continents with its lion’s share of the information on the Internet; it’s an international language of sports competitions and air traffic controllers, international congresses and beauty contests, international business (Incoterms), politics and diplomacy. Pop singers from many countries use it (guess who don’t) in order to increase their popularity and become globally recognized.

Approximately 380m people speak it as their first language and two thirds as their second language (who?). A billion people are learning it, and about a third of the world’s population are in some sense exposed to it. It is predicted that by 2050 half of the worls will be more or less proficient in it.

So, we can accept that the subject matter of the course is the changing nature of the English language through more than 15 hundred years of its existence.

The study of the English language requires the knowledge of related subjects; and, to some extent, the information of some of the subjects already studies. It is assumed that linguistic terminology and notions of general linguistics have been studied in the introductory university courses, such as “Introduction into linguistics”. The course touches upon historical phonology as a branch of science dealing with the sound system of the oldest written records (phonology, but not phonetics, can investigate the differences between the sounds of the dead languages though we have never heard them), historical morphology, historical syntax and historical lexicology. We’ll treat only a few aspects of style as it is not equally represented in written documents.

As a historical discipline this subject is going to use the material of history, because the development of the language is in close relation to the development of the country. But, naturally, we are going to distinguish linguistically relevant historic events in comparison to those which might have been very significant for the country but left much poorer imprint (what it is as a psychological term?) on the development of the language. For example, the settlement of Anglo-Saxon tribes on the isles is of paramount linguistic importance – the language became isolated from the continental Germanic dialects and started its separate existence. Numerous feuds (дл. междоусобная вражда; феод, владение) and wars had some impact on the language but not as deep as the Norman Conquest of Britain. The latter was probably the mightiest factor of its drastic change from a language relatively immune to foreign elements, - to one of the most receptive in the present-day world.

Various technical inventions might have had different significance for the development of the language. For instance, the invention of the loom, and later, the shuttle, for the weavers changed England into an industrial state and gave and incomparable impulse to its socio-economic development. But it can’t be compared to the invention of the printing press, that served a mighty conserving factor to medieval spelling. (about conservation agents – how could Normandy peacocks be brought to the tables of Roman nobility celebrations in summer?). Naturally, the sound system changed but the spelling preserved the old shape of words. If previously spelling had changed to reflect pronunciation, printing froze the spelling: we spell now essentially the way Caxton did. __________________________________

1/ Пиджин для ограниченного общения в какой-либо сфере, напр. торговле; составлен из романских, греческого и восточных языков, служащих для общения в восточном Средиземноморье.

The study of the ELH may seem now somewhat outdated, having little importance for experts working with the EL. And really, English-speaking experts are doing pretty well without knowing ELH. A pragmatically-minded student may wonder in what way it may help him in his future work. We can really master the language without knowing anything about its history. There are a lot who are able to communicate with people in English and even translate or interpret from one language into another, but that won’t make them linguists. Because for linguists language is the object of study, not merely a means of communication. For a layman language is full of rules and exceptions to be remembered. For a linguist they are the result of systematic changes on various stages of its development.

The ELH will give an answer to many exceptions and irregularities of English grammar and spelling. Rules and exceptions will fit into a certain system or paradigm when You know the history. How else can You explain one and the same word may be a noun and a verb (love, smoke, finger for instance), or why there are different ways of forming the plurals of the noun, or irregular verbs, and why are similar in forming past tense and participles, and others are not, and what made modal verbs defective, why the English word order is direct, and what happened to the common Indo-European way of expressing negation. We will analyze some words existing in several phonetic variants (as vase), some similar in meaning but different in form words (chorus and choir, fancy and fantasy, sir and senior, and such pairs as three and trio, eat and edible, acre and agronomist).

Synthetic and analytical features of the language are studied in this course; the process of gradual change of an Indo-European synthetic language with cases and declensions into a language with numerous analytical forms (that can be treated as word-combinations) is viewed in its development.

Lecture 2.