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This material incorporates and utilizes diachronic and synchronic perspectives on the English language and is based on the findings of historical linguistics, socio-linguistics, descriptive and anthropological linguistics, the recent achievements and research into English as a World Language. It also provides additional data on the important issues of language change and variation in modern English. It focuses on the history of the English language, tracing changes in its inflections, syntax, phonology, spelling and lexicon.

* These data are supplemental.  They do not replace the textbook or class sessions.

Тема 1

The Indo-European Family of Languages

  Two definitions of Indo-European:      A.  Indo-European refers to the hypothetical language spoken by a society that probably lived around the Ural Mountains between 5000 and 3500 B.C. When referring to this (or any) hypothetical language, linguists use the prefix "proto"; hence, the technical term for the language is "proto Indo-European."  The theory is that many of our languages today were once dialects of this "mother tongue."  The existence of Indo-European accounts for the similarity of words in such languages as French, German, Czech, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, etc.      B.  Indo-European refers also to those languages which once were dialects of the language described above and which cover a large part of Europe and part of Asia.

English can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European language. Scholars estimate this old language goes back to about 5,000 years ago. Here is the route English took coming into modern times:

• Indo-European

• Germanic

• West Germanic

• Old English

• Middle English

• Modern English

Today, the Indo-European languages have spread across large portions of the globe. They include diverse tongues like English, Russian, French, Latin, and Hindi. While English is very different from Hindi, for instance, they both come ultimately from the same source: Indo-European.

The Indo-European languages fall into two general branches. At some time in the distant past, the original Indo-European speakers migrated westward and eastward from a location north of the Middle East. We can trace those migrations by looking at vocabulary in each language, and gradually seeing the sound changes that took place over time as the tribes drifted further apart.

The Indo-European tribes that migrated westward tended to pronounce words with hard /k/ sounds--a velar stop. On the other hand, those that migrated eastward pronounced similar words with /s/ or /sh/ sounds--a fricative sound. Likewise, the westward travelers tended to have certain vowel sounds transform into /e/ sounds while the eastward travelers tended to switch to /a/ sounds over time, and the labio-velar stops in westward traveling tribes tended to turn into velar sounds. Philologists have named the two branches Centum and Satem. Centum is the ancient word for "one hundred" in Latin, a language in the western branch of Indo-European. Satem is the ancient word for "one hundred" in Avestan, a language in the eastern branch of Indo-European. The two words illustrate the major changes in a single word as the Indo-European tribes drifted in two different general directions.

Below, you will see two charts showing the two branches of Indo-European languages..

Indo-European language and people

English is classified genetically as a Low West Germanic language of the Indo-European family of languages. The early history of the Germanic languages is based on reconstruction of a Proto-Germanic language that evolved into German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and the Scandinavian languages.

In 1786, Sir William Jones discovered that Sanskrit contained many cognates to Greek and Latin. He conjectured a Proto-Indo-European language had existed many years before. Although there is no concrete proof to support this one language had existed, it is believed that many languages spoken in Europe and Western Asia are all derived from a common language. A few languages that are not included in the Indo-European branch of languages include Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian; of which the last three belong to the Finno-Ugric language family.

Speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) lived in Southwest Russia around 4,000 to 5,000 BCE. They had words for animals such as bear or wolf (as evidenced in the similarity of the words for these animals in the modern I-E languages.) They also had domesticated animals, and used horse-drawn wheeled carts. They belonged to a patriarchal society where the lineage was determined through males only (because of a lack of words referring to the female's side of the family.) They also made use of a decimal counting system by 10's, and formed words by compounding. This PIE language was also highly inflectional as words had many endings corresponding to cases.

The spread of the language can be attributed to two theories. The I-E people either wanted to conquer their neighbors or look for better farming land. Either way, the language spread to many areas with the advancement of the people. This rapid and vast spread of the I-E people is attributed to their use of horses for transportation.

Germanic Languages

The subgroup of Germanic languages contains many differences that set them apart from the other I-E languages:

1. Grimm's Law (or the First Sound Shift) helps to explain the consonant changes from P-I-E to Germanic.

• a. Aspirated voiced stops became Unaspirated voiced stops (Bʰ, dʰ, gʰ became b, d, g)

• b. Voiced stops became Voiceless stops (B, d, g became p, t, k)

• c. Voiceless stops became Voiceless fricatives (P, t, k became f, θ, x (h))

Verner's Law explains other exceptions that Grimm's law does not include.

2. Two Tense Verbal System: There is a past tense marker (-ed) and a present tense marker (-s) on the verb (without using auxiliary verbs.)

3. Weak Past Tense: Used a dental or alveolar suffix to express the past (such as -ed in English, -te in German, or -de in Swedish.)

4. Weak and Strong Adjectives: Each adjective had a different form whether it was preceded by a determiner or no determiner.

5. Fixed Stress: The stress of words was fixed on the first syllable.

6. Vowel Changes (Proto Germanic)

• Short o to short a (Latin: hortus, English: garden)

• Long a to long o (Latin: mater, OE: modor)

7. Common Vocabulary: Words developed that hadn't been used before, such as nautical terms (sea). Others include rain, earth, loaf, wife, meat and fowl.

Celtic Inhabitants of Britain

The first inhabitants of the British Isles were not English speakers at all. They were part of an ethnic grouping known as the Celts.However, not many Celtic loan words survived to become a part of Anglo-Saxon English. The Old English word rice--a noun meaning "kingdom" (cf. Ger. Reich), is almost certainly Celtic in origin, but this word was probably adapted by Germanic tribes on the continent long before the Anglo-Saxons settled in Britain. A few other Old English words such as ambeht ("servant"), and dun ("hill, down") might be Celtic loan-words, but scholars are still uncertain. Algeo (277) suggests about a dozen other Celtic words are probably genuine borrowings from the Celtic peoples during the Anglo-Saxon period, including these mostly archaic terms:

• bannuc ("a bit")

• binn ("basket, crib")

• bratt ("cloak")

• brocc ("badger")

• cine ("gathering of parchment leaves")

• clugge ("bell")

• dry ("magician")

• gabolrind ("geometric compass")

• luh ("lake")

• mind ("diadem")

The Anglo-Saxons borrowed these words and used them for a few centuries, but these later fell out of common use. They simply didn't "stick" linguistically.

In general, two types of Celtic loan words were likely targets of permanent Anglo-Saxon adaptation before the Norman Conquest:

(1) Toponyms or place-names. For instance, Cornwall, Carlisle, Avon, Devon, Dover, London, and Usk are all originally Celtic names. Other places like Lincoln and Lancaster are semi-Celtic in origin; i.e., they have a -coln ending that originally comes from Latin colonia or a -caster ending that originally comes from Latin castra via Celtic ceaster, which were Latin loan words the Celts borrowed from the Romans, but which in turn the Anglo-Saxons adopted as loan-words from Celtic languages. Many Celtic toponyms are hidden in the first syllable of other modern names, such as the first syllable of Lichfield, Worcester, Gloucester, Exeter, Winchester, and Salisbury. Other general geographic features--cumb (a combe, a valley) and torr (projecting hill or rock, peak, as in modern Glastonbury Tor)--attach themselves to a large number of place-names.

(2) Latin words the Celts borrowed from Rome, which were in turn borrowed by the Anglo-Saxon invaders--including words like candle (Latin candelere, "to shine") and ass (Latin asinus).

Possibly the word cross and the verb cursian (which gives us and the Anglo-Saxons the ability "to curse") were originally Celtic words--though cross may have been borrowed from the Old Norse. Less used today, the word "anchorite" comes from Celtic ancor ("hermit").

Ironically, the largest number of Celtic borrowings occurred not during the Anglo-Saxon period, when the Angles and Saxons first lorded it over the conquered Celts, but they occurred centuries later during the Middle English period. Algeo notes these Johnny-come-lately Celtic terms include Scots Gaelic words--such as clan and loch. In the 17th century or thereafter, Scots Gaelic also offered words like bog, cairn, plaid, slogan, and whiskey. Welsh words like crag also appeared at about this time. In the 17th century, Irish Gaelic offered English words such as banshee, blarney, colleen, and shillelagh. More recently, words like cromlech and eisteddfod have entered English from Welsh as well (277), leading up to perhaps a couple hundred Celtic loan words if we generously count second- and third- hand borrowings of originally Celtic words imported from Romance languages like French, Italian, and Spanish sources later in the Renaissance.

During the Romano-Celtic Period, the Romans dominated England. However, English acquired few words from Latin at this time, mostly words having to do with the Roman soldiers, such as Winchester and Lancaster which come from the Latin "castra," camp. We know that place names that end in --"chester" or --"caster" once were a Roman "castra." Other words such as "street" from the Latin "strata" came into English at this time.

Then the Roman soldiers left England, called back to defend what was left of the Roman Empire from the Germanic invaders. As we know, they failed. So, about 476 A.D. we say the Roman Empire fell.

The Old English Period(449 - 1066 CE)

Now with the Roman soldiers gone, England was quite vulnerable to attack. The first to come from across the North Sea were the Jutes from Jutland in Denmark. Not just one ship came, but many came day after day. Later came a group called the Angles who became dominant. Then a group called the Saxons who were also powerful. As the Angles and the Saxons fought and neither could completely overcome the other, they finally reached a compromise. Thus we have another name for the Old English Period known as the Anglo-Saxon Period.

It was during this period that someone wrote down an epic tale of a hero named Beowulf of their old country. A marvelous tale of a hero who is asked to get rid of the monster Grendel. Of course, he does. The old story was memorized and probably sung and accompanied on a lute before someone, we don't know who, wrote it down.

Another important piece of writing at this time was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which King Alfred the Great ordered to be written, to give an account from where they had come to their present time.

English during this time was an inflected language. Like Latin, it had many cases for the nouns, and the endings gave meaning to the words, not word order. By the time of the Middle English Period, most of the word endings had been dropped. This was the greatest change from Old English to Middle English.

About 90% of our most common words come from Old English. Words like our personal pronouns: I, me, he, she, him, her, us, them; forms of the verb "be": is, am, are, was, were; other verbs that change spelling in their principal parts such as go, went, gone, sing, sang, sung; and small words such as the, in, of, etc.

Old English dialects

The Old English language (also called Anglo-Saxon) dates back to 449 CE. The Celts had been living in England when the Romans invaded. Although they invaded twice, they did not conquer the Celts until 43 CE and Latin never overtook the Celtic language. The Romans finally left England in 410 CE as the Roman Empire was collapsing, leaving the Celts defenseless. Then the Germanic tribes from the present-day area of Denmark arrived. The four main tribes were the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. These tribes set up seven kingdoms called the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy that included: Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, and East Anglia. Four dialects were spoken in these kingdoms: West Saxon, Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian. The Celts moved north to Scotland, west to Ireland and south to France, leaving the main area of Britain.

In 731 CE, Bede wrote the "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" in Latin. It detailed the sophisticated society of the Germanic tribes. They had destroyed the Roman civilization in England and built their own, while dominance shifted among the kingdoms beginning with Kent and Northumbria. They aligned with the Celtic clergy and converted to Christianity. Laws and contracts were written down for a sense of permanence and control. The Tribal Hidage, a list of subjects who owed tribute to the king, was written during the Mercian period of power.

Alfred the Great was the king of Wessex from 871-899 while Wessex was the dominant kingdom. During his reign, he united the kingdoms together and commissioned the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, a historical record of important events in England that continued 200 years after his death. Alfred also settled a truce with the Vikings who repeatedly invaded the area. The Treaty of Wedmore was signed in 878 CE and this "Danelaw" gave the northeast half of England to the Danes for settlement. However, because the languages were so similar, the Danes quickly assimilated and intermarried into the English society.

The letters used by Anglo-Saxon scribes were sometime very like and sometimes very unlike those used in modern English. These differences are in both shape and function. The following symbols are not in use today:

æ ash (æsc), which represents the vowel in Modern English 'hat'

þ thorn, which represents Modern English 'th'

ð eth (or ðæt), which also represents Modern English 'th'. Capital ð is written Ð.

Although the Danes brought their own writing system with them, called the Futhorc, it was not used in England. It is commonly referred to as Runes.