A.D.

450-1150, Old English (AngloSaxon) Period

The dark fifth century was historically an interlude of crucial importance because it was then that the foundations of an English nation took place
In A.D. 450, receiving no aid from Rome to fight off the Picts and Irish, the British Celts appealed to the Jutes for help. A British chieftain named Vortigern, hard-pressed by the marauding Irish and Picts, decided to adopt the hazardous Roman tactic of importing mercenaries. Vortigern made an agreement with two chieftains of the jutes, Hengist and Horsa, offering land and pay in return for aid against his northern enemies. The Jutes defeated the Picts and Irish and then helped themselves to British territory in the southeastern quarter which became The Kingdom of Kent (from the original Celtic place-name Cantion).
Can we know exactly when the English language started?

It is never easy to pinpoint exactly when a specific language began, but in the case of English we can at least say that there is little sense in speaking of the English language as a separate entity before the AngloSaxons went to Britain. Little is known of this period with any certainty, but we do know that Germanic invaders arrived and settled in Britain from the northwestern coastline of continental Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. The invaders all spoke a language that was Germanic (related to what emerged as Dutch, Frisian, German and the Scandinavian languages, and to Gothic), but we will probably never know how different their speech was from that of their continental neighbors.

It is fairly certain that many of the settlers would have spoken in exactly the same way as some of their north European neighbors and that not all of the settlers would have spoken in the same way. The reason that we know so little about the linguistic situation in this period is because we do not have much in the way of written records from any of the Germanic languages of north-western Europe until several centuries later. When Old English writings began to appear in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries; there is a good deal of regional variation, but not substantially more than that found in later periods. This was the language that Alfred the Great referred to as "English" in the ninth century. The Celts were already living in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, but there are few obvious traces of their language in English today. Some scholars have suggested that the Celtic tongue might have had an underlying influence on the grammatical development of English, particularly in some parts of the country, but this is highly speculative. The number of loanwords known for certain to have entered Old English from this source is very small. Those which survive in modern English include brock (badger), and coomb (a type of valley), plus many place names.
The invaders came from Jutland and southern Denmark

West Germanic invaders from Jutland and southern Denmark: the Angles (whose name is the source of the words England and English), Saxons, and Jutes, began populating the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. They spoke a mutually intelligible language, similar to modern Frisian; the language of northeastern region of the Netherlands, which is called "Old English". Four major dialects of Old English emerged, Northumbrian in the north of England, Mercian in the Midlands, West Saxon in the south and west, and Kentish in the Southeast.

These invaders pushed the original, Celtic-speaking inhabitants out of what is now England into Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland; leaving behind a few Celtic words. These Celtic languages survive today in Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland and in Welsh. Cornish, unfortunately, is now a dead language. The last known native Cornish speaker, Dolly Pentreath, died in 1777 in the town of Mousehole, Cornwall. The majority of words in modern English come from foreign, not Old English roots. In fact, only about one sixth of the known Old English words have descendants surviving today; however, this is deceptive because Old English is much more important than these statistics would indicate. About half of the most commonly used words in modern English have Old English roots. Words like be, water, and strong, for example, derive from Old English roots.
An Anglo-Saxon inscription dated between 450 and 480 AD is the oldest sample of the English language.

During the next few centuries four dialects of English developed: Northumbrian in Northumbria, north of the Humber Mercian in the Kingdom of Mercia West Saxon in the Kingdom of Wessex Kentish in Kent

During the 7th and 8th Centuries, Northumbria's culture and language dominated Britain. The Viking invasions of the 9th Century brought this domination to an end (along with the destruction of Mercia). Only Wessex remained as an independent kingdom. By the 10th Century, the West Saxon dialect became the official language of Britain. Written Old English is mainly known from this period. It was written in an alphabet called Runic, derived from the Scandinavian languages.

.D. 731, Teutonic tribes settled in Britain: Saxon, Frisians, Jutes, and Angles eventually forming Englaland (Land of the Angles)

Various Teutonic tribes combined to produce small kingdoms

In time, various tribes combined either for greater strength or under the influence of a powerful leader to produce small kingdoms. Seven of these were eventually recognized: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex; and are referred to as the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. The groupings were not very permanent, sometimes two or more being united under one king; at other times, kingdoms being divided under separate rulers. In about A.D. 477 and A.D. 495, The Saxons and Frisians left Germany for Wessex, Essex, and Sussex (in the south and south-east of England). Around A.D. 547, the Jutes settled in Kent; while the Angles went north into East Anglia (south-east England), Mercia (central area of England), and up to Northumbria (northern England).

Dates are approximations according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (A.D. 731). The results of these unions can hardly be called a united nation, but West Saxon kings were able to maintain their claim to be kings of all the English, and under Alfred (871-899), Wessex attained a high degree of prosperity and considerable enlightenment.
The language during this time was Germanic

The vocabulary of this period was almost purely Teutonic (Germanic). There were no Latin, French, or loan words from the Greek entering the language during this time. During the eighth century "seven shadowy kingdoms" emerged from the chaos of embattled Britain. Known as the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, they were: Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia; which were settled by

the Angles. Then there was Kent, settled by the Jutes; and Essex, Sussex, and Wessex, settled by the Saxons. Although, apparently, each of the Teutonic tribes had its own dialect, whose traces persist today in variations of northern, midland, and southern idioms and inflections; the settlers as a whole were relatively homogeneous in culture and in speech. In the beginning, their Celtic victims referred to them collectively as Saxons, and Latin writers of the period called them Saxones and their expropriated domain as Saxonia. Perhaps because of the political and cultural supremacy of the Northumbrian and Mercian settlements in the seventh century, the terms Angli and Anglia became dominant; referring not solely to the Angles in the north, but to all of the immigrant Teutons on the island.
By A.D. 700, the language of Britain was known as Englisc

In A.D. 601, a few years after the arrival of St. Augustine and his forty monks at the Kentish court of King thelberht in the first historic mission from Rome, Pope Gregory referred to thelberht as Rex Anglorum. By A.D. 700, the language of the entire land was known as Englisc; the people were called Angelcynn, "kin of the Angles". It was not until about the year A.D. 1000, however, that the country as a whole became known as Englaland, "land of the Angles". The shift of the initial a in Angle to the e in England is known to linguists as a "front mutation", and is related to the similar shift of Frankish to French, and the evolution of the singular man to the plural men. The language which the Teutonic invaders bought to their adopted British home completely replaced Latin; except in the Catholic Church, and drove the Celtic tongue forever to the north and west.

In A.D. 597, St. Augustine arrived in England with 40 priests from Italy All that remained of the Christian influence and Christian thought from the decades of the Roman occupation went northward and westward after the Teutonic invasions
Elements of the once well-established British church still remained in the outposts and hidden sanctuaries in the wilds of Wales; and the candles of faith were kept alight in Ireland by the disciples of St. Patrick and in Scotland by St. Columba from his rocky refuge on the isle of Iona off the stormy western coast. The gulf between the warlike heathen Saxons and the warlike Christian Celts was too profound to be bridged until the advent of St. Augustine in Kent in A.D. 597. The new faith was far from new in Britain, but this date of 597 marked the beginning of a systematic attempt on the part of Rome to convert the inhabitants and to make England a Christian country. The spreading of the faith had an extensive effect on the language of the land. Latin words started to emerge from the cloisters and entered the everyday speech of the people. Only a few were assimilated without change. Most of the words became adaptation to suit them to the Anglo-Saxon ear and tongue.
The spreading of the faith had an effect on the language of Britain because Latin was the language of learning and religion

It is significant that the Christian missionaries were allowed considerable freedom in their labors. Within a hundred years of the landing of Augustine in Kent, all of England is said to have become Christian. Latin words began to emerge from the cloisters and entered the everyday speech of the people. The introduction of Christianity meant the building of churches and the establishment of monasteries.

Latin, the language of the services and of ecclesiastical learning, was once more heard in England. Schools were established in most of the monasteries and larger churches. Some of these became famous through the possession of great teachers and from them trained men went out to set up other schools at other centers. To summarize, the church as the carrier of Roman civilization influenced the course of English life in many directions, and, as is to be expected, numerous traces of this influence are to be seen in the vocabulary of Old English
Such words as those which follow were just the beginning of the introduction of Latin into English:

angel (Middle English), engel (Old English), Angelus (Latin) devel (Middle English), deofol (Old English), diabolus (Latin) priest (Middle English), preost (Old English), presbyter (Latin)

The Latin alphabet was brought over from Ireland by Christian missionaries. This has remained the writing system of English since that time.

Of about 30,000 words from the original Old English (Teutonic), only about 15 percent have survived the influences of time, change, Latin, and French. These 15 percent remain the important basic building-blocks of our language: man, wife, child, house, eat, meat, sleep, fight, live, drink, father, sister, brother, numbers; such as 1-10, and basic grammatical elements; plus other essential words. During this period, the vocabulary of Old English consisted of an Anglo Saxon base with borrowed words from the Scandinavian languages (Danish and Norse) and Latin. Latin gave English words like "street, kitchen, kettle, cup, cheese, wine, angel, bishop, martyr, candle".

The Vikings added many Norse words: "sky, egg, cake, skin, leg, window" (wind eye), "husband, fellow, skill, anger, flat, odd, ugly, get, give, take, raise, call, die, they, their, them". Celtic words also survived mainly in place and river names (Devon, Dover, Kent, Trent, Severn, Avon, Thames). Many pairs of English and Norse words coexisted giving us two words with the same or slightly different meanings. Here are a few examples: Norse anger nay fro raise ill bask skill skin dike skirt scatter skip English wrath no from rear sick bathe craft hide ditch shirt shatter shift

From the introduction of Christianity in 597 to the close of the Old English period was over five hundred years

During all this time, Latin words must have been making their way gradually into the English language. It is likely that the first wave of religious feeling which resulted from the missionary zeal of the seventh century, and which is reflected in the intense activity in church building and the establishing of monasteries during this century, was responsible also for the rapid importation of Latin words into English vocabulary.
In A.D. 657-680, Caedmon, lay brother at the monastery of Whitby, wrote what became known as "Caedmon's Hymn" which is the first English poem whose authorship is known

Caedmon was the earliest Christian poet of England known by name

According to Bede, he was an uneducated herdsman who in his old age received a divine call in a dream to sing of the Creation. A gentle and self-effacing cowherd, one night Caedmon became miraculously endowed with the gift of song. An angel appeared to him in a dream as he lay in the straw near his cattle, and told him: "Your mission on earth is to tell the story of the Scriptures and to sing praises to the glory of God." From being a herdsman, he became a monk at Whitby under the rule of St. Hilda, where he turned other biblical themes into vernacular poetry; however, the original hymn of the Creation, only nine lines long, is the only extant poem that can be attributed to him with any certainty. Although we do not have his poems on Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, etc.; the poems on these subjects which do exist were very likely inspired by his example.
The literature of Old English indicated the richness of the AngloSaxon period through its poetry and prose.

The literature of Old English indicates the richness of the AngloSaxon period through its poetry and prose. English was the first European language, after the fall of Rome, to develop polished literary prose. More than half of the Anglo-Saxon poetry was concerned with Christian topics. Translations and paraphrases of books of the Old and New Testaments, legends of saints, and devotional and didactic pieces constitute the bulk of this verse.
In the 7th century, the language of the entire land was known as Englisc

"Beowulf", written about 700-750, and later revised in about A.D. 1000, is considered the greatest single literary work of Old English and started the interaction of language and literature

The scene of the poem is set in Denmark and Sweden. Beowulf himself, the hero, is a wholly fictitious character, and as fiction also,

based on folk tale, we must regard the narrative as a whole which rests upon the struggles of Beowulf against three creatures of evil. His first adversary was Grendel, a monstrous creature who had brought grief and misery to the Danish court by his nightly attacks on Heorot, the great hall of the Danish king Hrothgar. His second fight was against Grndel's mother whom he attacked and slew in a lair hidden deep beneath a pestilential mere whose bloodstained waters were filled with venomous reptiles. Beowulf's third and final victory, which cost him his own life as well as his opponent's, was over a dragon which had been enraged by an attempt to rob it of part of a treasure which it was guarding.
Excerpts from Roman Britain and Early England, 55 B.D.-A.D. 871 by Peter Hunter Blair; Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd.; Edinburgh, 1963, page 20.

It is a poem of some 3,000 lines belonging to the type known as the folk epic, which is to say, a poem that, whatever it may owe to the individual poet who gave it final form, embodies material which existed over a long period among the people. It is a narrative of heroic adventure relating how a young warrior, Beowulf, fought the monster Grendel, which was ravaging the land of King Hrothgar, slew it and its dam (female parent of an animal), and years later met his death while ridding his own country of an equally destructive foe, a fire-breathing dragon. The theme seems somewhat fanciful to a modern reader, but the character of the hero, the social conditions pictured, and the portrayal of the motives and ideals which animated men in early Teutonic times make the poem one of the most vivid records we have of life in the heroic age. It was not an easy life. It was a life that called for physical endurance, unflinching courage, and a fine sense of duty, loyalty, and honor. The poem is said to contain a valuable record of customs and values from a harsh and heroic time. It embodies the message: Make your best effort at whatever you do. A good name and example, and fame after

death, are all anyone can win in this world. It is the courage to strive, not just success, which ultimately reveals and ennobles the true hero

in A.D. 731, the Venerable Bede, a monk at Jarrow, wrote a very important work called the Ecclesiastical History of the English People . . . in Latin
Bede made Latin an important part of learning in England by writing about grammar, poetry, astronomy, Greek and Latin literature, arithmetic, and Biblical exegesis. All of the subjects were written in Latin.
The achievements of the Northumbrian renaissance lay in many fields

Although the achievements of the Northumbrian revival lay in many fields; such as, art, architecture, poetry, paleography, and manuscript illuminations, the supreme achievement of the age was the scholarship of the Venerable Bede (673-735). In the writings of Bede, particularly his History of the English Church and People, the intellectual tradition of Western Europe attained a level unequaled since the fall of Rome; and it remains to this day our principal source of knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England in those dim and distant times. Bede was a product of the Roman-Benedictine tradition and he spent his life under the Benedictine rule at Jarrow, where he was an outstanding monk, or someone who was worthy of being imitated. He was also a superb scholar whose investigations profited enormously from the fine library that Benedict Biscop had installed in the monastery in 681. Bede regarded his theological writings as his most important work, but his fame in later centuries rests primarily on his writings about history. Bede's broad historical vision and his sense of structure and unity, set his work apart from the dry annals and credulous saints' lives which typified the historical writing of his day.

It was Bede's purpose to narrate the miraculous rise of Christianity in Britain and its crucial role of imposing coherence and purpose on the chaos of human events. In Bede's hands, the history of the British people and the AngloSaxons, and the rise of Christianity among them, acquired shape and direction.
Bede was one of the first to propose a calendar that would reckon the years backward and forward from the "birth of Christ"

English historian, theologian, and scientist; Bede is considered to have been the greatest master of chronology in the Middle Ages. It is characteristic of this man who regarded Christianity as the supreme organizing force in history that he should be the first major historian to use the Christian era as his chronological base; that is, to date events not in terms of kings' reigns or lunar cycles, but in terms of Christ's birth. Bede is said to have taken the idea from a sixth-century scholar, the Roman monk Dionysius Exiguus. So, it is that Bede's sense of chronology and historical development resulted in the division of history into the two eras, B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (anno Domini, "in the year of our Lord"). Bede is also given credit for giving his contemporaries the concept of an "English People". At a time when England was divided into numerous individual kingdoms, and loyalties were limited to one's clan or local lord, Bede conceived the notion of a single English race and made it the subject of his history. The Normans were quick to take advantage of the situation, and the English were soon in full retreat. During the night, they were fleeing in all directions, seeking safety under the cover of darkness, and William was left victorious. While William had won the battle of Hastings and eliminated Harold and his followers, he had not attained the English crown, yet. It was only after he had burnt and pillaged the southeast of England that the citizens of London decided that any more resistance would be useless. Accordingly, they capitulated, and on Christmas day, 1066, William was crowned king of England.

From 1066-1200, the Norman Conquest and the settlement of England

The Norman Conquest changed the whole course of the English language. There was a loss of the Old English word-stock and the addition of thousands of words from French and Latin
A.D. 1150-1500 is considered to be the Middle English Period

The Norman on the left is thinking: "Vous tes des barbares" ("You barbarians"). Unlike the Vikings, the Normans did not assimilate with the local population and had nothing but scorn for local customs and language. All governing classes spoke French.
The Norman Conquest and Middle English

William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England and the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 A.D. The new overlords spoke a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman. The Normans were also of Germanic stock; "Norman" comes from "Norseman", and Anglo-Norman was a French dialect that had considerable Germanic influences in addition to the basic Latin roots. Prior to the Norman Conquest, Latin had been only a minor influence on the English language, mainly through vestiges of the Roman occupation and from the conversion of Britain to Christianity in the seventh century (ecclesiastical terms such as priest, vicar, and mass came into the language this way), but now there was a wholesale infusion of Romance (Anglo-Norman) words. The influence of the Normans can be illustrated by looking at two words, "beef" and "cow". Beef, commonly eaten by the aristocracy, derives from the Anglo-Norman, while the Anglo-Saxon commoners, who tended the cattle, retained the Germanic cow.

Many legal terms, such as indict, jury, and verdict have AngloNorman roots because the Normans ran the courts. This split, where words commonly used by the aristocracy have Romantic roots and words frequently used by the Anglo-Saxon commoners have Germanic roots, can be seen in many instances. Sometimes French words replaced Old English words; "crime" replaced firen and "uncle" replaced eam. In other times, French and Old English components combined to form a new word; such as, the French "gentle" and the Germanic "man" formed gentleman. It is useful to compare various versions of a familiar text to see the differences between Old, Middle, and Modern English. Take for instance this Old English (c.1000) sample: French English close shut reply answer odour smell annual yearly demand ask chamber room desire wish power might wrath / ire anger Because the English underclass cooked for the Norman upper class, the words for most domestic animals are English (ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, deer) while the words for the meats derived from them are French (beef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, venison). The Germanic form of plurals (house, housen; shoe, shoen) was eventually displaced by the French method of making plurals: adding an "s" (house, houses; shoe, shoes). Only a few words have retained their Germanic plurals: men, oxen, feet, teeth, children.

French also affected spelling so that the cw sound became qu; for example, cween became "queen". Modern English began around the 16th Century and, like all languages, is still changing. One change occurred when the "th" of some verb forms became "s" (loveth, loves; hath, has). Auxillary verbs also changed (he is risen, he has risen). English was banned from all polite and official usage, and practically ceased to be a written language. Only the monks at Peterborough continued to record the events of English history in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The chronicle is considered to be the first history in the English language to use the dating system Anno Domini, "In the Year of our Lord"; that is, in the year after the Nativity (the birth of Jesus Christ); or A.D. This system of dating with A.D. is credited to the monk Dionysius Exiguus, who lived in the first half of the 6th century. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was probably begun in the reign of Alfred the Great (871-899). It included events from the time of Julius Caesar to 1145 A.D. and it is the basic source of information for the history of Anglo-Saxon England. In the early 1200's, England had a trilingual composition. French was the literary and courtly language; Latin was the language of the church and legal documents; English was the language of communication among the common people. During the thirteenth century certain events of history combined to lift the English language from its humble estate as the vernacular of a conquered people and to impel it on its slow climb back to ascendancy as the national tongue. By mid-century a large proportion of the nobility no longer thought of themselves as Normans but essentially, and politically, as English. The slogan was "England for the English" and the outcome was a linguistic, as well as a political, victory for the English because Henry III was forced to agree to the appointment of a commission for reform of the government whose proposals were embodied in the "Provisions of Oxford".

The king accepted the provisions in a historic proclamation issued in English, French, and Latin; the first official document to include the English language since the Norman Conquest. Devotion to England and its ancient vernacular now developed such strength that Henry's son, the great and energetic Edward I, was able to rally the support of Parliament in 1295 for war against France by declaring that it was Philip's "detestable purpose, which God forbid, to wipe out the English tongue." In 1337-1453, during the Hundred Years' War, French became the language of England's enemy.
The Black Death, 1348-1350

In 1348-1350, the Black Death cut the population of England by almost half, causing serious labor shortages. As a consequence, the importance of the working classes, of artisans and craftsmen, was greatly enhanced; wages increased and the resultant ascendancy of the yeoman in the country and the bourgeois in the town; both of whom only spoke English, further abetted the use of the native tongue.
Hundreds of Latin and French teachers and scholars died during the Black Death plague

Faced with a lack of academicians versed in French and Latin, many schools resorted to English as a common medium of instruction. By 1385, the practice became general, and even universities and monastic institutions started to conduct their curricula, or academic courses, in English. The emergency action induced by the Black Death engendered an educational reaction. Alarmed by the decline in what today would be called "language skills", school-masters prepared and published manuals and workbooks of French grammar. Oxford and Cambridge enacted statutes (legal decisions) requiring students to construe, or to interpret, and compose in both English and French "lest the French language be entirely disused."

Concerned with the new insularity, or isolation, of English education; Parliament decreed that all "lords, barons, knights, and honest men of good towns," should teach their children French. The historical significance of these developments lay in the fact that by the fifteenth century, the ability to speak French had come to be regarded as an accomplishment. In schools and universities, French was taught, like Latin, as an ancillary (unimportant) language requisite to the cultural wardrobe of the properly educated person. Government officials who lacked this accessory had to retain on their staffs a "secretary in the French Language". The linguistic balance had shifted forever.

A.D. 1350-1400 was a period of great literary production in Britain

In 1384, John Wycliffe made an important translation of the Bible into English
Latin words continued to be absorbed by such writers as John Wycliffe (also: Wyclif, Wiclif, et al.), an ardent reformer of the Church, who insisted that Holy Writ should be available in the vernacular, and produced his translation of the Bible. Wycliffe and his associates are credited with more than a thousand Latin words not previously found in English. Since many of them occur in the so-called Wycliffe translation of the Bible and have been retained in subsequent translations, they have passed into common use. Caxton helped to stabilize the language by standardizing spelling and using East Midland (London) dialect as the literary form which became the standard modern English of Britain. Wycliffe's translation of the Bible has such words as "generation" and "persecution", which did not appear in the earlier Anglo-Saxon version. Anglo-Saxon compounds like "handbook" and "foreword" were dropped from the language in favor of the foreign "manual" and "preface" (many centuries later, they were reintroduced as neologisms, and objected to by purists unskilled in linguistic history).

Wycliffe is credited with making English a competitor with French and Latin; his sermons were written when London usage was coming together with the East Midlands dialect, to form a standard language accessible to everyone, and he included scientific references; such as, those referring to chemistry and optics. Wycliffe was noted for criticizing the wealth and power of the Catholic Church and upheld the Bible as the sole guide for doctrine; his teachings were disseminated by itinerant preachers and are regarded as precursors of the Reformation.

William Tyndale, the man who first printed the New Testament in English
The Roman Catholic church in England had forbidden vernacular English Bibles in 1408, after handwritten copies of a translation by John Wycliffe (an earlier Oxford scholar) had circulated beyond the archbishop's control. Some of the manuscripts survived and continued to circulate, but they were officially off-limits. Translating the Bible into English without permission of the Catholic church was a serious crime, punishable by death. William Tyndale was born into a well-connected family in Gloucestershire, England, around 1494. We don't know much about his early life, but we know that he received an excellent education, studying from a young age under Renaissance humanists at Oxford. By the time he left Oxford, Tyndale had mastered Greek, Latin, and several other languages (contemporary accounts say he spoke eight). He also had become an ordained priest and a dedicated proponent of church reform; a "protestant", before that word existed. All he needed now was a vocation. He found one, thanks in part to Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus, one of Europe's leading intellectual lights, had caused a stir in 1516 by publishing a brand-new Latin translation of the New Testament--one that departed significantly from the Vulgate, the "common" Latin translation the Catholic church had used for a millennium. Knowing that many readers saw the Vulgate as the immutable Word of God, Erasmus decided to publish his source text (a

New Testament in Greek, compiled from sources older than the Vulgate) in a column right next to his Latin translation. It was a momentous decision. For the first time, European scholars trained in Greek gained easy access to biblical "originals." Now they could make their own translations straight from the original language of the New Testament. In 1522, Martin Luther did just that, translating from the Greek into German. In England, Tyndale decided to publish an English Bible--one so accessible that "a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture" than a priest. One problem: the Catholic church in England had forbidden vernacular English Bibles in 1408, after handwritten copies of a translation by John Wyclif (an earlier Oxford scholar) had circulated beyond the archbishop's control. Some of the manuscripts survived and continued to circulate, but they were officially off-limits. Translating the Bible into English without permission was a serious crime, punishable by death.
The Word of God made into English

Undeterred, Tyndale tried to win approval for his project from the bishop of London. When that didn't work, he found financial backers in London's merchant community and moved to Hamburg, Germany. In 1526, he finally completed the first-ever printed New Testament in English. It was a small volume, an actual "pocket book," designed to fit into the clothes and life of that ploughboy. That made it fairly easy to smuggle. Soon Bible runners were carrying contraband scriptures into England inside bales of cloth. For the first time, English readers encountered "the powers that be," "the salt of the earth," and the need to "fight the good fight"--all phrases that Tyndale turned. For the first time, they read, in clear, printed English, "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen." Infuriated, the bishop of London confiscated and destroyed as many copies of Tyndale's New Testament as he could. Meanwhile, English authorities called for Tyndale's arrest. He went into hiding, revised his New Testament, and (after learning Hebrew) began translating the Old Testament, too. Before long, copies of a small volume titled The First Book of Moses, called "Genesis" started showing up on English shelves.

Spreading the Word

Tyndale never finished his Old Testament. He was captured in Antwerp in 1535 and charged with heresy. The next year, he was executed by strangulation and burned at the stake. Yet others picked up his work, and Tyndale's version of the Word lived on. In fact, practically every English translation of the Bible that followed took its lead from Tyndale; including the 1611 King James Version. According to one study, 83 percent of that version's New Testament is unaltered Tyndale, even though a team of scholars had years to rework it. The reason is simple. Tyndale's English translation was clear, concise, and remarkably powerful. Where the Vulgate had Fiat lux, et lux erat, Wyclif's old version slavishly read "Be made light, and made is light". Tyndale's translation of the same passage is still familiar to nearly every reader of English: "Then God said: 'Let there be light', and there was light." Subsequent English writers may have been more original, but none wrote words that reached more people than these.

In 1340-1400, Geoffrey Chaucer helped make English the dominant language of Britain
He is credited with combining the vocabularies of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, French, and Latin into an instrument of precise and poetic expression.

William Caxton, in 1476, was the first to use Gutenberg's invention in England
The Modern-English Period is dated from A.D. 1500 to the present

The invention of the printing press expanded education, communications, and the awareness of social problems which resulted in a new epoch of universal knowledge and interests.
The Renaissance, 1500-1650

The Renaissance was a revival of classical literature; the purifying of Latin diction and grammar, the revival of Greek, and a return from Middle Age compilation to the old classical texts.

Italian humanists from 1393 onward went to Constantinople to learn Greek and brought Greek manuscripts back with them.

The next wave of innovation in English came with the Renaissance

The revival of classical scholarship brought many classical Latin and Greek words into the Language. These borrowings were deliberate and many bemoaned the adoption of these "inkhorn" terms, but many survive to this day. Shakespeare's character Holofernes in Loves Labor Lost is a satire of an over enthusiastic schoolmaster who is too fond of Latinisms. Many students having difficulty understanding Shakespeare would be surprised to learn that he wrote in "modern English"; but, as can be seen in an example of the Lord's Prayer, Elizabethan English has much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer. Many familiar words and phrases were coined or first recorded by Shakespeare, some 2,000 words and countless catch-phrases are his. Newcomers to Shakespeare are often shocked at the number of cliches contained in his plays, until they realize that he coined them and they became cliches afterwards. "One fell swoop," "vanish into thin air," and "flesh and blood" are all Shakespeare's. Words he bequeathed to the language include "critical," "leapfrog," "majestic," "dwindle," and "pedant."
Two other major factors influenced the language and served to separate Middle and Modern English

The first was the Great Vowel Shift. This was a change in pronunciation that began around 1400. While modern English speakers can read Chaucer with some difficulty, Chaucer's pronunciation would have been completely unintelligible to the modern ear. Shakespeare, on the other hand, would be accented, but understandable. Long vowel sounds began to be made higher in the

mouth and the letter "e" at the end of words became silent. Chaucer's Lyf (pronounced "leef") became the modern life. In Middle English "name" was pronounced nam-a, "five" was pronounced feef, and "down" was pronounced doon. In linguistic terms, the shift was rather sudden, the major changes occurring within a century. The shift is still not over, however, vowel sounds are still shortening although the change has become considerably more gradual. The Renaissance resulted in a demand for translations of Greek and Latin literature, but the translators could not find sufficient words in English to express the deeper literary and philosophical concepts of the classical writers.
Here are various versions of a familiar text to see the differences between Old, Middle, and Modern English.

As a result of the many translated books, Greek and Latin were assimilated into English through writing, not by conversation as were the Scandinavian and French languages.

American English
Also significant beginning around 1600 AD was the English colonization of North America and the subsequent creation of a distinct American dialect. Some pronunciations and usages "froze" when they reached the American shore. In certain respects, American English is closer to the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is. Some "Americanisms" that the British criticize are actually originally British expressions that were preserved in the colonies while lost at home; such as, fall as a synonym for autumn, trash for rubbish, frame-up which was reintroduced to Britain through Hollywood gangster movies, and loan as a verb instead of lend.

The American dialect also served as the route of introduction for many native American words into the English language

Most often, these were place names like Mississippi, Roanoke, and Iowa. Indian-sounding names like Idaho were sometimes created that had no native-American roots; but, names for other things besides places were also common. Raccoon, tomato, canoe, barbecue, savanna, and hickory have native American roots, although in many cases the original Indian words were mangled almost beyond recognition. Spanish has also been great influence on American English. Armadillo, mustang, canyon, ranch, stampede, and vigilante are all examples of Spanish words that made their way into English through the settlement of the American West. To a lesser extent French, mainly via Louisiana, and West African, through the importation of slaves, words have influenced American English. Armoire, bayou, and jambalaya came into the language via New Orleans. Goober, gumbo, and tote are West African borrowings first used in America by slaves. At least half of all business deals in the world are estimated to be conducted in English. Two thirds of all scientific papers are written in English. Over seventy percent of all mail, is written and addressed in English. Most international tourism and aviation is conducted in English.

English writers used Greek and Latin to present their ideas in art, philosophy, literature and especially, in science
They helped English bloom with imported words from Latin, Greek, Italian, etc.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), made use of the largest vocabulary of any writer in any age! He made use of hundreds of new words from Greek and Latin

Late-Modern English (1800-Present)

The principal distinction between early-modern and late-modern English is vocabulary. Pronunciation, grammar, and spelling are largely the same, but Late-Modern English has many more words. These words are the result of two historical factors. The first is the "Industrial Revolution," or "Evolution," and the rise of the technological society. This necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not previously existed. The second was the British Empire. At its height, Britain ruled one quarter of the earth's surface, and English adopted many foreign words and made them its own. The industrial and scientific revolutions created a need for neologisms (new words) to describe the new creations and discoveries. For this, English relied heavily on Latin and Greek. Words like oxygen, protein, nuclear, and vaccine did not exist in the classical languages, but they were created from Latin and Greek roots. Such neologisms were not exclusively created from classical roots though, English roots were used for such terms as horsepower, airplane, and typewriter. This burst of neologisms continues today, and are perhaps most visible in the field of electronics and computers. "Byte, cyber-, bios, hard-drive", and "microchip" are good examples.
The rise of the British Empire and the growth of global trade served not only to introduce English to the world, but to introduce additional words into English.

Hindi, and the other languages of the Indian subcontinent, provided many words; such as, "pundit, shampoo, pajamas," and "juggernaut". Virtually every language on Earth has contributed to the development of English, from Finnish (sauna) and Japanese (tycoon) to the vast contributions of French and Latin.

The British Empire was a maritime empire, and the influence of nautical terms on the English language has been great. Words and phrases like "three sheets to the wind" and "scuttlebutt" have their origins naval terminology. Finally, the 20th century saw two world wars, and the military influence on the language during the latter half of this century has been great. Before the "Great War", military service for English-speaking people was rare; both Britain and the United States maintained small, volunteer, military organizations. Military slang existed, but with the exception of nautical terms, rarely influenced standard English. During the mid-20th century, however, virtually all British and American men served in the military. Military slang entered the language like never before. "Blockbuster, nose dive, camouflage, radar, roadblock, spearhead", and "landing strip" are all military terms which made their way into standard English. Languages that have contributed words to English include Latin, Greek, French, German, Arabic, Hindi (from India), Italian, Malay, Dutch, Farsi (from Iran and Afganistan), Nahuatl (the Aztec language), Sanskrit (from ancient India), Portuguese, Spanish, Tupi (from South America), and Ewe (from Africa).
The list of borrowed words is enormous

The vocabulary of English is said to be the largest of any language today. Even with all these borrowings the heart of the language remains the Anglo-Saxon of Old English. Only about 5000 or so words from this period have remained unchanged, but they include the basic building blocks of the language: household words, parts of the body, common animals, natural elements, most pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs. Grafted onto this basic stock was a wealth of contributions to produce, what many people believe, is the richest of the worlds languages.

What are the origins of the English Language?

The history of English is conventionally, if perhaps too neatly, divided into three periods usually called Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, and Modern English. The earliest period begins with the migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century A.D., though no records of their language survive from before the seventh century, and it continues until the end of the eleventh century or a bit later. By that time Latin, Old Norse (the language of the Viking invaders), and especially the Anglo-Norman French of the dominant class after the Norman Conquest in 1066 had begun to have a substantial impact on the lexicon, and the well-developed inflectional system that typifies the grammar of Old English had begun to break down. The following brief sample of Old English prose illustrates several of the significant ways in which change has so transformed English that we must look carefully to find points of resemblance between the language of the tenth century and our own. It is taken from Aelfric's "Homily on St. Gregory the Great" and concerns the famous story of how that pope came to send missionaries to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity after seeing Anglo-Saxon boys for sale as slaves in Rome: Eft he axode, hu re eode nama wre e hi of comon. Him ws geandwyrd, t hi Angle genemnode wron. a cw he, "Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for an e hi engla wlite habba, and swilcum gedafena t hi on heofonum engla geferan beon." A few of these words will be recognized as identical in spelling with their modern equivalentshe, of, him, for, and, onand the resemblance of a few others to familiar words may be guessednama to name, comon to come, wre to were, ws to wasbut only those who have made a special study of Old English will be able to read the passage with understanding. The sense of it is as follows: Again he [St. Gregory] asked what might be the name of the people from which they came. It was answered to him that they were named Angles. Then he said, "Rightly are they called Angles because they have the beauty of angels, and it is fitting that such as they should be angels' companions in heaven." Some of the words in the original have survived in altered form, including axode (asked), hu (how), rihtlice (rightly), engla (angels), habba (have), swilcum (such), heofonum (heaven), and beon (be). Others, however, have vanished from our lexicon, mostly without a trace, including several that were quite common words in Old English: eft "again," eode "people, nation," cw "said, spoke," gehatene "called, named," wlite "appearance, beauty," and geferan "companions." Recognition of some words is naturally hindered by the presence of two special characters, , called "thorn," and , called "edh," which served in Old English to represent the sounds now spelled with th. Other points worth noting include the fact that the pronoun system did not yet, in the late tenth century, include the third person plural forms beginning with th-: hi appears where we would use they. Several aspects of word order will also strike the reader as oddly unlike ours. Subject and verb are inverted after an adverba cw he "Then said he"a phenomenon not unknown in Modern English but now restricted to a few adverbs such as never and requiring the presence of an auxiliary verb like do or have. In subordinate clauses the main verb must be last, and so an object or a preposition may precede it in a way no longer natural: e hi of comon "which they from came," for an e hi engla wlite habba "because they angels' beauty have."

Perhaps the most distinctive difference between Old and Modern English reflected in Aelfric's sentences is the elaborate system of inflections, of which we now have only remnants. Nouns, adjectives, and even the definite article are inflected for gender, case, and number: re eode "(of) the people" is feminine, genitive, and singular, Angle "Angles" is masculine, accusative, and plural, and swilcum "such" is masculine, dative, and plural. The system of inflections for verbs was also more elaborate than ours: for example, habba "have" ends with the -a suffix characteristic of plural present indicative verbs. In addition, there were two imperative forms, four subjunctive forms (two for the present tense and two for the preterit, or past, tense), and several others which we no longer have. Even where Modern English retains a particular category of inflection, the form has often changed. Old English present participles ended in -ende not -ing, and past participles bore a prefix ge- (as geandwyrd "answered" above). The period of Middle English extends roughly from the twelfth century through the fifteenth. The influence of French (and Latin, often by way of French) upon the lexicon continued throughout this period, the loss of some inflections and the reduction of others (often to a final unstressed vowel spelled -e) accelerated, and many changes took place within the phonological and grammatical systems of the language. A typical prose passage, especially one from the later part of the period, will not have such a foreign look to us as Aelfric's prose has; but it will not be mistaken for contemporary writing either. The following brief passage is drawn from a work of the late fourteenth century called Mandeville's Travels. It is fiction in the guise of travel literature, and, though it purports to be from the pen of an English knight, it was originally written in French and later translated into Latin and English. In this extract Mandeville describes the land of Bactria, apparently not an altogether inviting place, as it is inhabited by "full yuele [evil] folk and full cruell." In at lond ben trees at beren wolle, as ogh it were of scheep; whereof men maken clothes, and all ing at may ben made of wolle. In at contree ben many ipotaynes, at dwellen som tyme in the water, and somtyme on the lond: and ei ben half man and half hors, as I haue seyd before; and ei eten men, whan ei may take hem. And ere ben ryueres and watres at ben fulle byttere, ree sithes more an is the water of the see. In at contr ben many griffounes, more plentee an in ony other contree. Sum men seyn at ei han the body vpward as an egle, and benethe as a lyoun: and treuly ei seyn soth at ei ben of at schapp. But o griffoun hath the body more gret, and is more strong, anne eight lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this half; and more gret and strongere an an hundred egles, suche as we han amonges vs. For o griffoun ere wil bere fleynge to his nest a gret hors, 3if he may fynde him at the poynt, or two oxen 3oked togidere, as ei gon at the plowgh. The spelling is often peculiar by modern standards and even inconsistent within these few sentences (contr and contree, o [griffoun] and a [gret hors], anne and an, for example). Moreover, in the original text, there is in addition to thorn another old character 3, called "yogh," to make difficulty. It can represent several sounds but here may be thought of as equivalent to y. Even the older spellings (including those where u stands for v or vice versa) are recognizable, however, and there are only a few words like ipotaynes "hippopotamuses" and sithes "times" that have dropped out of the language altogether. We may notice a few words and phrases that have meanings no longer common such as byttere "salty," o this half "on this side of the world," and at the poynt "to hand," and the effect of the centuries-long dominance of French on the vocabulary is evident in many familiar words which could not have occurred in Aelfric's writing even if his subject had allowed them, words like contree, ryueres, plentee, egle, and lyoun. In general word order is now very close to that of our time, though we notice constructions like hath the body more gret and three sithes more an is the water of the see. We also notice that present tense verbs still receive a plural inflection as in beren, dwellen, han, and ben and that while nominative ei has replaced Aelfric's hi in the third person plural, the form for objects is still hem.

All the same, the number of inflections for nouns, adjectives, and verbs has been greatly reduced, and in most respects Mandeville is closer to Modern than to Old English. The period of Modern English extends from the sixteenth century to our own day. The early part of this period saw the completion of a revolution in the phonology of English that had begun in late Middle English and that effectively redistributed the occurrence of the vowel phonemes to something approximating their present pattern. (Mandeville's English would have sounded even less familiar to us than it looks.) Other important early developments include the stabilizing effect on spelling of the printing press and the beginning of the direct influence of Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek on the lexicon. Later, as English came into contact with other cultures around the world and distinctive dialects of English developed in the many areas which Britain had colonized, numerous other languages made small but interesting contributions to our word-stock. The historical aspect of English really encompasses more than the three stages of development just under consideration. English has what might be called a prehistory as well. As we have seen, our language did not simply spring into existence; it was brought from the Continent by Germanic tribes who had no form of writing and hence left no records. Philologists know that they must have spoken a dialect of a language that can be called West Germanic and that other dialects of this unknown language must have included the ancestors of such languages as German, Dutch, Low German, and Frisian. They know this because of certain systematic similarities which these languages share with each other but do not share with, say, Danish. However, they have had somehow to reconstruct what that language was like in its lexicon, phonology, grammar, and semantics as best they can through sophisticated techniques of comparison developed chiefly during the last century. Similarly, because ancient and modern languages like Old Norse and Gothic or Icelandic and Norwegian have points in common with Old English and Old High German or Dutch and English that they do not share with French or Russian, it is clear that there was an earlier unrecorded language that can be called simply Germanic and that must be reconstructed in the same way. Still earlier, Germanic was just a dialect (the ancestors of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were three other such dialects) of a language conventionally designated Indo-European, and thus English is just one relatively young member of an ancient family of languages whose descendants cover a fair portion of the globe.

TThe island of Britain has not been successfully invaded since 1066 A.D. Before that date, however, the island had been occupied by Rome, the Anglo-Saxons and the Danish. The first incursions by Julius Caesar into Britain in 55 and 54 B.C. The dominant group in Britain were a Celtic people whose language is the ancestor of modern Welsh and Breton. When the British Celts were finally subdued by the Roman Emperor, Claudius, 43 A.D. ; Britain nominally became part of the Roman Empire , though it was not fully brought in line until 78 A.D. under the governor Agricola. Roman influence never penetrated the culture of the British Celts the way it did their continental neighbors, and Romes influence was negligible in the Pictish north and Celtic west. When Rome found itself under attack in the early fifth century the legions were recalled. Britain, after more than three centuries of dependence on Romes military might, found herself vulnerable, first to the northern Picts, then to the Saxon mercenaries hired to defeat the Picts. According to legend, in 449 A.D. the British overlord, Vortigern, invited the Jutish brothers Hengist and Horsa into Britain to fight the Picts, offering them land in Kent as payment. A daughter of Hengists was given in marriage to Vortigern, as part of

the alliance. Although the Jutes kept their bargain, insofar as they beat back the Picts, they also recognized the opportunity offered in the fertile soil and military weakness of Britain. In what was part invasion, part migration, the Jutes sent across the sea to their families, and along with invading tribes of Angles and Saxons, the Germanic people managed to kill or displace the natives and occupy the country. Over the next one hundred years the invasions gave way to a period of settlement. The Celtic view of this period is immortalized in literature as the Arthurian cycle. The native Celts were either killed by the invaders, or pushed back into Wales, Cornwall, and across the English channel into Brittany, taking their Celtic language with them. The dominant language of southern Britain (now England, from Angle-land) came to be that spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. The three main dialects, Northumbrian, Mercian, and West Saxon, corresponded with the three major kingdoms that vied for ascendancy. The first to exert its influence was Northumbria, followed by Mercia and finally Wessex. It is the West Saxon dialect that is most often referred to as Old English and that was the most prominent dialect at the time of the Norman conquest in 1066. At the time of the original Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the fifth century, the language contained approximately 100 Latin words that had been taken into the language before the AngloSaxons left the continent, mainly terms dealing with trade or the military. By the time of the Norman Conquest, Old English had been further enriched by words drawn from ecclesiastical Latin brought in by the conversion of the English to Christianity by St. Augustine in 597 A.D In the mid eighth century a new wave of Northmen turned their attention toward England, this time the Danish Vikings. What began first as coastal raids developed into a full scale invasion by the middle of the ninth century during the ascendancy of the kingdom of Wessex. Although the Danes made great headway into England, they were pushed back into what became known as the Danelaw by the West Saxon king, Alfred the Great, by the end of the ninth century. Partly because of the political supremacy of Wessex and partly due to the highly literate court of Alfred, the West Saxon dialect was the strongest English dialect at the opening of the tenth century. Much, but not all, of the Old English literature which survives, such as, Beowulf and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles is in the West Saxon dialect. This trend continued until 1066 when Edward the Confessor died childless and William, Duke of Normandy landed in England to press his claim to the English throne, based on Edwards promise to make the Duke his heir. In 1066, during the Battle of Hastings, the English king, Harold, was killed by a Norman arrow. William, now the Conqueror, installed a new Norman aristocracy, replacing, executing, or intermarrying the English nobility with the French. Norman French became the language of the English upper class, while the lower class continued to speak English. This division lasted until increasing tension between the Anglo-Norman royalty and French king, who was overlord to the Norman dukes, led to the eventual loss of Normandy and separation of English and French aristocracy. This loss, coupled with a growing sense of English national identity and the Hundred Years

War, led to the resurgence of the English tongue as the language of the upper classes. The re-establishment of English was gradual, but as England moved into the fourteenth century, English was used as the native tongue by the majority of the population in a number of dialects. Most of these dialects are recorded in written documents, but the one dialect that assumed the most importance was the Mercian dialect of London. London was the hub of government, commerce and literature in England in the Middle Ages so it was this dialect which conferred prestige and grew in popularity. The other dialects in use during the fourteenth century include the north-western dialect of the "Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight"; yet, it was the London dialect of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," now liberally endowed with words of French origin, that developed into English as we know it today
Five Events that Shaped the History of English Philip Durkin, Principal Etymologist at the Oxford English Dictionary, chooses five events that shaped the English Language. The Anglo-Saxon Settlement It's never easy to pinpoint exactly when a specific language began, but in the case of English we can at least say that there is little sense in speaking of the English language as a separate entity before the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain. Little is known of this period with any certainty, but we do know that Germanic invaders came and settled in Britain from the north-western coastline of continental Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. The invaders all spoke a language that was Germanic (related to what emerged as Dutch, Frisian, German and the Scandinavian languages, and to Gothic), but we'll probably never know how different their speech was from that of their continental neighbours. However it is fairly certain that many of the settlers would have spoken in exactly the same way as some of their north European neighbours, and that not all of the settlers would have spoken in the same way. The reason that we know so little about the linguistic situation in this period is because we do not have much in the way of written records from any of the Germanic languages of north-western Europe until several centuries later. When Old English writings begin to appear in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries there is a good deal of regional variation, but not substantially more than that found in later periods. This was the language that Alfred the Great referred to as English in the ninth century. The Celts were already resident in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, but there are few obvious traces of their language in English today. Some scholars have suggested that the Celtic tongue might have had an underlying influence on the grammatical development of English, particularly in some parts of the country, but this is highly speculative. The number of loanwords known for certain to have entered Old English from

this source is very small. Those that survive in modern English include brock (badger), and coomb a type of valley, alongside many place names. The Scandinavian Settlements The next invaders were the Norsemen. From the middle of the ninth century large numbers of Norse invaders settled in Britain, particularly in northern and eastern areas, and in the eleventh century the whole of England had a Danish king, Canute. The distinct North Germanic speech of the Norsemen had great influence on English, most obviously seen in the words that English has borrowed from this source. These include some very basic words such as take and even grammatical words such as they. The common Germanic base of the two languages meant that there were still many similarities between Old English and the language of the invaders. Some words, for example give, perhaps show a kind of hybridization with some spellings going back to Old English and others being Norse in origin. However, the resemblances between the two languages are so great that in many cases it is impossible to be sure of the exact ancestry of a particular word or spelling. However, much of the influence of Norse, including the vast majority of the loanwords, does not appear in written English until after the next great historical and cultural upheaval, the Norman Conquest. 1066 and after The centuries after the Norman Conquest witnessed enormous changes in the English language. In the course of what is called the Middle English period, the fairly rich inflectional system of Old English broke down. It was replaced by what is broadly speaking, the same system English has today, which unlike Old English makes very little use of distinctive word endings in the grammar of the language. The vocabulary of English also changed enormously, with tremendous numbers of borrowings from French and Latin, in addition to the Scandinavian loanwords already mentioned, which were slowly starting to appear in the written language. Old English, like German today, showed a tendency to find native equivalents for foreign words and phrases (although both Old English and modern German show plenty of loanwords), whereas Middle English acquired the habit that modern English retains today of readily accommodating foreign words. Trilingualism in English, French, and Latin was common in the worlds of business and the professions, with words crossing over from one language to another with ease. You only have to flick through the etymologies of any English dictionary to get an impression of the huge number of words entering English from French and Latin during the later medieval period. This trend was set to continue into the early modern period with the explosion of interest in the writings of the ancient world. Standardization

The late medieval and early modern periods saw a fairly steady process of standardization in English south of the Scottish border. The written and spoken language of London continued to evolve and gradually began to have a greater influence in the country at large. For most of the Middle English period a dialect was simply what was spoken in a particular area, which would normally be more or less represented in writing - although where and from whom the writer had learnt how to write were also important. It was only when the broadly London standard began to dominate, especially through the new technology of printing, that the other regional varieties of the language began to be seen as different in kind. As the London standard became used more widely, especially in more formal contexts and particularly amongst the more elevated members of society, the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized, as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education. In the same period a series of changes also occurred in English pronunciation (though not uniformly in all dialects), which go under the collective name of the Great Vowel Shift. These were purely linguistic sound changes which occur in every language in every period of history. The changes in pronunciation werent the result of specific social or historical factors, but social and historical factors would have helped to spread the results of the changes. As a result the so-called pure vowel sounds which still characterize many continental languages were lost to English. The phonetic pairings of most long and short vowel sounds were also lost, which gave rise to many of the oddities of English pronunciation, and which now obscure the relationships between many English words and their foreign counterparts. Colonization and Globalization During the medieval and early modern periods the influence of English spread throughout the British Isles, and from the early seventeenth century onwards its influence began to be felt throughout the world. The complex processes of exploration, colonization and overseas trade that characterized Britains external relations for several centuries led to significant change in English. Words were absorbed from all over the world, often via the languages of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. At the same time, new varieties of English emerged, each with their own nuances of vocabulary and grammar and their own distinct pronunciations. More recently still, English has become a lingua franca, a global language, regularly used and understood by many nations for whom English is not their first language. The eventual effects on the English language of both of these developments can only be guessed at today, but there can be little doubt that they will be as important as anything that has happened to English in the past sixteen hundred years.