История английского языка. Часть I. Конспект лекций. Учебно-методическое пособие

ЧАСТНОЕ ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЕ УЧРЕЖДЕНИЕ ВЫСШЕГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ

ЮЖНЫЙ ИНСТИТУТ МЕНЕДЖМЕНТА КАФЕДРА ЛИНГВИСТИКИ И ПЕРЕВОДА

The English Language:

Historical Background

Part I

А Course of Lectures

Краснодар 2014

УДК 81-26

ББК 81.2 Англ.

Ч 90

Рецензенты:

Соловьев Г.В. доктор филологических наук, профессор, заведующий кафедрой электронных СМИ и новых медиа Кубанского государственного университета;

Cтетюха Н.В. кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры лингвистики и перевода Южного института менеджмента;

Ч 90 История английского языка. Часть I. Конспект лекций.

Учебно-методическоепособие/Составитель: Чумичева Н.В. –Краснодар: Южный институт менеджмента, 2014. - 64 с.

Учебно-методическое пособие адресовано студентам направления «Лингвистика» профиля «Перевод и переводоведение». Лекционный курс охватывает ключевые моменты истории английского языка, сопровождающиеся таблицами, примерами и иллюстрациями, делает теоретические положения дисциплины «История первого языка» более наглядными и запоминающимися, а четкость и компактность изложения материала позволяет студентам уделить больше внимания содержательной стороне курса. Рекомендуется в качестве основного или вспомогательного материала как для самостоятельной работы студентов,такидляиспользованияпреподавателямивузаязыковыхпрофилей.

Рекомендовано к печати Научно-методическим советом ЮИМ

(протокол № 8 от 08.04.2014)

© Издательство ЮИМ, 2014

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INTRODUCTION

Languages, like nations, have their own history. Studying the rise and growth of the language is no less exciting than studying the world history. But the South Institute Of Management curriculum includes the History of the English language not only with the purpose of satisfying our curiosity; if you are going to become a translator, a linguist – in a word you study English professionally – you cannot do without firm and regular knowledge in this subject, because one cannot explain the structure and peculiarities of the contemporary English language without knowing the main lines of its centuries-old development.

Every student of English knows what extreme difficulties one has to face while mastering the English spelling. How can it be explained that one and the same sound, like for example [i:], is denoted in different ways in the words ‘mete’, ‘meat’, ‘meet’? Why does the same combination of letters designate different sounds as in thewords‘trouble’,‘south’,‘bouquet’?Whyaretheresixlettersintheword‘knight’ while only three sounds are pronounced: [n - ai - t]? You will be able to answer all these questions when you get acquainted with the history of the English language.

One should not think , though, than the course of the history of English pursues only a pragmatic aim. While doing this subject you will learn how the language develops and enriches itself, how it accumulates means for subtle semantic distinctions,howitabsorbsandassimilateselementsfromotherlanguages.Studying the history of English will help you understand how the language lives and grows, it will help you form your own linguistic outlook.

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ACOURSE OF LECTURES

The causes and mechanisms of the linguistic changes.

It is language, more obviously than anything else, that distinguishes humankind from the rest of the animal world. Humans have also been described as tool-making animals; but language itself is the most remarkable tool that they have invented, and is the one that makes most of the others possible. The most primitive tools, admittedly, may have come earlier than language: the higher apes sometimes use sticks as elementary tools, and even break them for this purpose. But tools of any greater sophistication demand the kind of human co-operation and division of labour which is hardly possible without language. Language, in fact, is the great machinetool which makes human culture possible [1].

Other animals, it is true, communicate with one another, or at any rate stimulate one another to action, by means of cries. Many birds utter warning calls at the approach of danger; some animals have mating-calls; apes utter different cries to express anger, fear or pleasure. Some animals use other modes of communication: manyhaveposturesthatsignifysubmission,topreventanattackbyarival;hive-bees indicate the direction and distance of honey from the hive by means of the famous bee-dance; dolphins seem to have a communication system which uses both sounds and bodily posture. But these various means of communication differ in important ways from human language.Animals’cries are not articulate.This means, basically, that they lack structure. They lack, for example, the kind of structure given by the contrast between vowels and consonants, and the kind of structure that enables us to divide a human utterance into words. We can change an utterance by replacing one word by another: a sentry can say ‘Tanks The English Language approaching from the north’, or he can change one word and say ‘Aircraft approaching from the north’or ‘Tanks approaching from the west’; but a bird has a single indivisible alarm-cry, which means ‘Danger!’This is why the number of signals that an animal can make is very limited: the Great Tit has about thirty different calls, whereas in human language the number of possible utterances is infinite. It also explains why animal cries are very general in meaning. These differences will become clearer if we consider some of the characteristics of human language.

A human language is a signalling system. The written language is secondary and derivative. In the history of each individual, speech or signing is learned before writing,andthereisgoodreasonforbelievingthatthesamewastrueinthehistoryof

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the species. There are communities that have speech without writing, but we know of no human community which has a written language without a spoken or signed one.

Languages sometimes die out, usually because of competition from another language. For example, Norn, a Germanic language related to Old Norse, was introduced to Orkney and Shetland by Viking settlers, and spoken there until the eighteenth century.

Its use began to decline from the fifteenth century, when Norway ceded the islands to Scotland, and Scots was increasingly used instead. When a language officially becomes ‘extinct’ is sometimes difficult to determine: for instance, many histories of English state that Cornish ‘died out’in 1777 when the last native speaker died. However, a small number of speakers continued to use and write in the language, and by the middle of the nineteenth century a revival was in process. The revival gathered pace in the twentieth century, a number of people now use it as first language, some 1,000 use it as their everyday language, and 2,000 others speak it fluently. Cornish is now recognized as an official language of the United Kingdom, and as a Minority Language within the European Union.

Alanguagecanalsobecomedeadinanotherway.NobodytodayspeaksClassical LatinasspokenbyJuliusCaesar,orClassicalGreekasspokenbyPericles,ortheOld Icelandic spoken by the heroes of the Norse sagas. So Classical Latin and Classical Greek and Old Icelandic are dead languages. But, although dead, they have not died: theyhavechangedintosomethingelse.PeoplestillspeakGreekasalivinglanguage, and this language is largely a changed form of the language spoken in theAthens of Pericles. The people who live in Rome today speak a language that has developed by a process of continuous change out of the language spoken there in the The English Language timeof Julius Caesar, though Modern Italiandevelopedout of the everyday language of the ancient Roman market-place and of the common soldiery, rather than out of the upper-class literary Latin that Caesar wrote. And the people who live in Iceland today speak a language that has developed directly out of the language of the great Icelandic sagas of the MiddleAges. In fact all living languages change, though the rate of change varies from time to time and from language to language. The modern Icelander, for example, does not find it very difficult to read the medieval Icelandic sagas, because the rate of change in Icelandic has always been slow, ever since the country was colonized by Norwegians a thousand years ago and Icelandic history began. But the English, on the contrary, find an English

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document of the year 1300 very difficult to understand, unless they have special training; and an English document of the year 900 seems to them to be written in a foreignlanguage,whichtheymayconclude(mistakenly)tohavenoconnectionwith Modern English.

The extent to which the English language has changed in the past thousand years can be seen by looking at a few passages of English from different periods. Since it is convenient to see the same material handled by different writers, we have chosen a short passage from the Bible, which has been translated into English at many different times. The passage is from chapter XV of the Gospel according to Luke, and is the end of the story of the Prodigal Son.

Hereitisfirstinatwentieth-centurytranslation,theNewEnglishBible,published in 1961:

“Now the elder son was out on the farm; and on his way back, as he approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the servants and asked what it meant. The servant told him, ‘Your brother has come home, and your father has killed the fatted calf because he has him back safe and sound.’But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and pleaded with him; but he retorted, ‘You know how I have slaved for you all these years; I never once disobeyed your orders; and you never gave me so much as a kid, for a feast with my friends. But now that this son of yours turns up, after running through your money with his women, you kill the fatted calf for him.’ ‘My boy,’ said the father, ‘you were always with me, and everything I have is yours. How could we help celebrating this happy day?Your brotherherewasdeadandhascomebacktolife,waslostandisfound.’Youmayfeel that there is a certain unevenness of manner about that, but at any rate it is twentiethcentury English, with little archaic or affected about it.

Now let us look at the same passage as it appeared in the famous King James Bible of the year 1611: “Now his elder sonne was in the field, and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musicke & dauncing, and he called one of the seruants, and asked what these things meant. And he said vnto him, Thy brother is come, and thy father hath killed the fatted calfe, because he hath receiued him safe and sound. And he was angry, and would not goe in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.And he answering said to his father, Loe, these many yeeres doe I serue thee neither transgressed I at any time thy commandement, and yet thou neuer gauest mee a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: but as soone as this thy sonne was come, which hath deuoured thy liuing with harlots, thou hast killed for

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him the fatted calfe.And he said vnto him, Sonne, thou art euer with me, and all that I haue is thine. It was meete that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is aliue againe: and was lost, and is found.” We have no great difficultyinunderstandingthatpassage,butneverthelesstherearenumerouswaysin which it differs from present-day English. In its vocabulary, there are words which seemtousarchaic,oratleastold-fashioned:nigh‘near’,meete‘fitting’,transgressed ‘broke, violated’, commandement ‘commands, orders’. One word looks familiar, but has an unfamiliar meaning: liuing does not mean ‘living’ in our sense of the word, but rather ‘income, property, possessions’. This sense still exists in the phrase ‘to make a living’. In grammar, we notice the use of the personal pronoun thou and its accusative thee, together with the associated pronoundeterminer thy: and after thou the verbs have the inflection -est or -st (gauest, hast). The use of thou in the passage infactshowsthedisadvantageofusingtranslationsforourillustrativematerial,forit does not reflect normal English usage in 1611. In Shakespeare’s time, a father could address his son as thou, but the son could not, like the son in the passage, say thou in return without insulting his father: he would have to say you or ye. The usage in the passage is due to the influence of the original Greek. The passage uses the relative pronoun which (‘thy sonne …which hath deuoured’) where we would use who. In word-order, notice the sequence Verb– Subject–Object in ‘neither transgressed I … thy commandement’, and similarly Verb–Subject order in ‘therefore came his father out’. The perfect tense of the verb to come is formed with the auxiliary be, not have: ‘Thy brother is come’, ‘this thy sonne was come’, where we would say ‘has come’, ‘had come’. In the noun phrases this thy sonne and this thy brother, the determiner this and the pronoundeterminer thy occur together before the noun; today we would say ‘this son of yours’, ‘this brother of yours’. The spellings of the passage are quite close to modern ones, except for the use of u and v, which are not used to distinguish vowel from consonant: v is always used at the beginning of a word (vnto), and u is always used elsewhere (serue, out, thou). Notice, however, the spelling of dauncing, which does rather suggest a different pronunciation from dancing.

There is in fact plenty of evidence to show that pronunciation in 1611 differed in many ways from pronunciation today, even when the spellings are the same. The vowels in particular were different, as we shall see later. As our third example we can take the same passage as rendered by John Wycliffe, the first person to translate the entire Bible into English. Wycliffe died in 1384, and his translation probably dates from the last few years of his life. Like many Middle English texts, the

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passage uses two different kinds of letter g, namely ȝ and g. The ȝ (called ‘yogh’) is descended from Old English script, whereas g was used in writing Latin in the Anglo-Saxon period, and came to be commonly used in writing English after the Norman Conquest. In the passage, ȝ usually corresponds to a modern y, as in ȝeeris ‘years’; but in neiȝede ‘drew nigh, approached’, it corresponds to a modern gh, and was probably pronounced [c] (like the consonant of Modern German ich). The punctuation of the passage has been modernized. Forsoth his eldere sone was in the feeld, and whanne he cam and neiȝede to the hous, he herde a symfonye and a crowde. And he clepide oon of the seruauntis, and axide what thingis thes weren. And he seide to him, Thi brodir is comen, and thi fadir hath slayn a fat calf, for he receyued him saf. Forsoth he was wroth, and wolde not entre. Therfore his fadir gon out, bigan to preie him.And he answeringe to his fadir seide, Lo, so manye ȝeeris I serue to thee, and I brak neuere thi commaundement, thou hast neuer ȝouun a kyde to me, that I schulde ete largely with my frendis. But aftir that this thi sone, which deuouride his substaunce with hooris, cam, thou hast slayn to him a fat calf. And he seide to him, Sone, thou ert euere with me, and alle myne thingis ben thyne. Forsothe it bihofte to ete plenteously, and for to ioye: for this thi brother was deed, and lyuede aȝeyn: he peryschide, and he is founden. This is much more remote from Modern English, especially in vocabulary. There are many words and phrases which, while perfectly comprehensible, sound archaic or old-fashioned, like forsoth ‘indeed’ and wroth ‘angry’. There are also words which are quite strange to the modern reader, like neiȝede ‘approached’ and clepide ‘called’. There are familiarlooking words with unfamiliar meanings, like symfonye ‘musical instrument’, crowde ‘fiddle’, largely ‘liberally, plenteously’, thyngis ‘goods’and for ‘because’(in ‘for he receyued him saf’). In grammar, there are noun-plural endings in -is (thyngis, hooris, etc.), verb-plural endings in -en or -n (weren, ben), verb past-tense endings in -ide (clepide, axide, etc.) and past participles ending in -n (comen, founden). In spelling, only u occurs in the passage, not v, but in Wycliffe’s time they tended to be used interchangeably, and not distributed as they are in the 1611 passage: the use of v initially and u elsewhere was a printer’s convention, which in England lasted until about 1630, but manuscripts often use the two letters indiscriminately. The passage also uses i instead of j (ioye); the letter j was in fact merely a variant of i, and the modern vowel–consonant distinction in their use was not established until about 1630. There are also numerous words where the spelling suggests a pronunciation different from our own – whanne ‘when’, oon ‘one’, etc. – though of course this

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piece of evidence alone is not sufficient for us to determine their pronunciation. The word-order of the passage, however, is very close to that of presentday English.

Forourfinalexample,wegobackbeforetheNormanConquest,toamanuscript oftheearlyeleventhcentury.AlthoughAnglo-Saxonmanuscriptsdonotdistinguish short and long vowels, we mark long vowels by putting a macron (short horizontal line) over them, while short vowels are left unmarked. The symbol t (called ‘thorn’) is equivalent to the modern th: the symbol a (called ‘ash’) is pronounced like the vowel of the word hat in RP. The punctuation is modernized.As the English of this period is difficult for the modern reader, we give only the opening of the passage. Sōtlicē his yldra sunu was on acere; and hē cōm, and tā hē tām hūse genēalǣhte, hē gehȳrde tane swēg and tat wered. tā clypode hē ānne tēow, and ācsode hine hwat tat wǣre. tā cwat hē, tīn brōtor cōm, and tīn fader ofslōh ān fatt cealf, fortām te hē hine hālne onfēng. Part of the difficulty of this lies in the number of unfamiliar words: tā ‘when, then’, genēalǣhte ‘approached’, swēg ‘noise’, wered ‘multitude, band’, tēow ‘servant’, ofslōh ‘killed’, fortām te ‘because’, hine ‘him’, onfēng ‘received’; these are all words that have died out from the language. In the later passages, some of them are replaced by words borrowed from French after the Norman Conquest (approached, servant, received). Even words which have survived may be used in an unfamiliar sense: the word acere has developed into our acre, but means ‘field’, and hālne has become our whole, but means ‘well, safe’. Even words unchanged in meaning appear in unfamiliar spelling, like yldra sunu ‘elder son’, and were obviously pronounced differently from their modern counterparts. The passage also differs from present-day English in the way words change their endings according to their grammatical function in the sentence. This could be demonstrated from many words in the passage but three brief examples will suffice. The word for ‘field’ is acer, but after the preposition on it has to add the ending -e (pronounced as an extra syllable), and so in the text we have the expression on acere.The expression for ‘the house’is tat hūs, but ‘to the house’is tām hūse, and this is the form that appears in the text; acere and hūse are the dative case of the nouns acer and hūs. The normal word for ‘was’is was, as in the first sentence of the passage, but there is also a form ware (the so-called subjunctive form) which has to be used in certain constructions, like‘ācsodehinehwattatwǣre’(‘askedhimwhatitwas’).Thisformis occasionally still used in Modern English, for instance in the phrase ‘if I were rich’.

The passage also differs from present-day English in word-order. Translated literally word for word it runs as follows: Indeed, his elder son was in field; and

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