Sources and methods of language history

The history of the language is reconstructed on the basis of written records of different periods. The earliest extant written texts in English date back to the end of the VII century. The earliest surviving records of other Germanic languages go back to the IV or III century of our era. The history of English was reconstructed by philologists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, on the evidence of these and later texts.

The pre-written history of English and cognate languages was first studied by methods of comparative linguistics evolved in the 19th century. By applying these methods linguists discovered the kinship of what is now known as the Indo-European family of languages and grouped them into Germanic, Slavonic, Romance, Celtic and others. It will be repeatedly shown how comparison of existing and reconstructed forms is used to demonstrate differences and similarities of languages, and how reconstructed forms help to understand later development in the language.

Modern linguistics has improved on the methods of -comparative linguistic research applied in the 19th century and has worked out new ways and procedures of linguistic investigation. Thus the past history of a language can be reconstructed by studying its dialectal or non-literary forms (dialects often preserve words, forms or pronunciations that have become obsolete in the literary standard). Likewise, the recently formulated method of "internal reconstruction" studies language history from internal sources alone.

One should not think, however, that the application of various new methods and the achievements of comparative linguistics have revealed all there is to know about the history of the English language. There are still many unresolved problems pertaining to all periods of the history of the English language; many questions have not yet been looked into; many aspects of the evolution of English will have to be considered again with the help of newer methods or interpreted from new angles.

The origin and position of english lamong other languages of the world

The earliest source of the English language as a prehistoric language that modem scholars call Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was probably spoken about 5,000 years ago by people who lived in the area north of the Black Sea, in southeastern Europe. These people migrated through the centuries and gradually developed new languages. One group migrated west and divided into groups who spoke languages that were the ancestors of the Germanic, Creek, and Latin tongues. The Germanic languages developed into English, Danish, Dutch, German, Norwegian, and Swedish. The ancient Greek language became modern Greek, and early Latin grew into French, Italian, and Spanish.

About 2500 languages are spoken in the world. They may be classified in different ways, acc. to diff. classifications.

The classification or languages according to their kinship is called the genealogical classification. According to this classification languages were divided into "families".

A family consists of languages which developed from the tribal dialects of ancient people. Having lost touch with each other these dialects developed into separate tongues of the same family.

The Germanic languages are divided in their turn into north-Germanic (Scandinavian, Old Horse) West Germanic (English, German Dutch etc.) and East-Germanic to which Gothic belongs.

Hittite [‘hıtaıt] member of an ancient people who lived in the area of modern Turkey and Syria between about 900 and 700 BC.

There are twelve branches within the indo-European family of languages, they are the following: 1) Indian, 2) Iranian, 3) Armenian, 4) Hellenic or Greek, 5) Italian or Romanic, 6) Albanian, 7) Germanic or Teutonic, 8) Baltic, 9) Slavonic, 10) Celtic, 11) Hittite, 12) Tocharian, (the last two being dead languages).

The English language belongs to the West-Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages.

The classification of languages based on the morphological structure of the word is called the morphological classification. According to this classification languages are divided into those, which have affixes and those, which have no affixes.

1. Languages that have affixes fall into two groups: a) agglutinative and b) inflected.

In agglutinative languages each affix has only one grammatical or lexical meaning. For example: in Kazah the suffix "lar " expresses plurality; "bala" -a child, “balalar” children. "At" -"a horse", "at tar" - horses (here assimilation takes place) "at-tar-da" -on the horses (the affixes ta/da-exprese the idea of place).

In agglutinative languages affixes do not become merged with the root or other affixes, their boundaries are always distinct. Agglutinative languages are Ugro-finish, Turkish etc.

In inflected languages affixes are polysemantic. Let us take for example the English suffix "s" (plural of nouns, third person singular of verbs, the Possessive Case). Besides, several affixes may express the same grammatical meaning. For example the Russian plural of nouns may be expressed in different ways as well as the English. Inflected languages are all Indo-European languages. According to morphological classification English is also inflected language.

Languages which have no affixes and are characterized by lack of inflection, are called isolating, sometimes amorphous such as Chinese, Vietnamese etc.

Besides inflected, agglutinative, and isolating languages there are the so-called polysynthetic or incorporated languages. In such languages a word is a whole sentence. The languages of American Indians belong to this group.