450 – 1150 Old English

1150 – 1500 Middle English

History of English Language – Part -1 1500 - onwards Modern English

Some sources of English words (OED)

Latin 24,940
French 9,470
Scandinavian 1,530
Spanish 1,280
Dutch 860
Arabic 615
Turkish 125
Hindi 120
Hungarian 26
Cherokee 1–3

Around 400 million people use English as their first language, and approximately 1500 million are fluent
speakers of English .The two major countries where English is the national language are Britain and the
USA. Countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa also use English as first language
and many other countries use English as a strong second language and official language.

The roots of English

If we trace history of English Language we can see that in its ultimate origins lie in Anglo-Saxon England.
The Anglo-Saxon speakers of English came to Britain early in the fifth century from the lands across the
North Sea, from present-day Denmark and the Netherlands .The Anglo-Saxon invaders came from three
tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. The earliest settlements were in East Anglia and the
southeast, with a steady spread along the Thames valley, into the midlands, and northwards through
Yorkshire and into southern Scotland. English was a dialect of the Germanic branch of Indo-European.
Indo-European refers to a group of languages, some with present-day forms, such as English, Welsh,
French, Russian, Greek and Hindi, Latin, and Sanskrit, which are all believed to have a common single
source. We do not have texts of Germanic, which is usually held to have existed in a generally common
core between about 500 BC and about. The most accepted view is that Indo-European originated in the
southern steppes of Russia, although an alternative view holds that it spread from modern-day Turkey.

The Indo-European languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the
Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia. Just as languages such as Spanish, French,
Portuguese and Italian are all descended from Latin, Indo-European languages are believed to derive
from a hypothetical language known as Proto-Indo-European, which is no longer spoken.

It is highly probable that the earliest speakers of this language originally lived around Ukraine and
Southern Russia, then spread to most of the rest of Europe and later down into India. The earliest
possible end of Proto-Indo-European linguistic unity is believed to be around 3400 BCE.

As the Proto-Indo-European language did not havea writing system, we don’t have physical evidence of
the existance of that language. Linguists have tried to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language
and they were, to an extend ,succesful in providing a general picture of what Proto-Indo-European
speakers had in common linguistically.

Branches of Indo-European Languages

The Indo-European languages have a large number of branches: Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic,
Celtic, Germanic, Armenian, Tocharian, Balto-Slavic and Albanian.

If you compare the forms language by language, then a number of features should become clear:

where Sanskrit, Greek and Latin have /p/, English has /f/

where Sanskrit, Greek and Latin have /t/, English has /θ/ (= OE þ)

where Greek and Latin have /k/, and Sanskrit has /´s/, English has /h/

Sanskrit Greek Latin Old English PD English

pita_ pate_r pater fæder father
tr´ayas treˆıs tr¯es þr¯eo three
´sat´am he-kat´on centum hund hundred
k´as t´ıs quis hw¯a who

Early history: immigration and invasion

English belongs to the Germanic branch of Indo-European and it came to Britain through Germanic
speakers. When these speakers came to Britain, the island was already occupied, and by two groups,
theceltics and saxons.

At the beginning of the fifth century Celtic speakers occupied all parts of Britain. Until around 410, there
were Latin speakers since parts of Britain belonged to the Roman Empire. The withdrawal of Rome
from Britain in 410 was one of themajor reason for the Germanic settlement. Therefore obvious Celtic
influence on English was minimal, except for place- and river-names.

The Saxons, on the other hand, were a group of confederate tribes which may have included the Angles.
During the fifth century it is likely that the settlements were on the coast and along valleys, but within
about a century settlement was extensive throughout the country.

An important step was taken when in 1822 a German philologist, Jacob Grimm, formulated an
explanation that systematically accounted for the correspondences between certain consonants in the
Germanic languages and those found for example in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. According to his
explanation a p in Indo-European is preserved as it is in Latin and Greek, but changed to an f in the
Germanic languages. Thus we should look for the English equivalent of Latin piscis or pēs to begin with
an f, and this is what we actually find, in fish and foot respectively.What is true of p is true also of t and
k: in other words, the original voiceless stops (p, t ,k) were changed to fricatives (f, þ, h). So Latin
trēs=English three, Latin centum=Englis hundred.
Old English

In 55 BC Juluis Ceaser decied to conqure Britian but it was not materialised and later in 43 AD empereor
Clauduis conqured Britian and it was followed by the Romanisation of the province. Many small cities
and towns followed Roman life style and among them included the use of Latin language. All the
writings found from this period, majority of which are military and official documents, are in Latin. In
449 invaded England and many settlers migrated from their continental home in Denmark region and
made made Britian their home.The account of these invasions are found in Ecclesiastical History of
English People by Bede and Anglo Saxon Chronicle.

Old English language, also called Anglo-Saxon, language spoken and written in England before 1100; it is
the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. Scholars place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group
of West Germanic languages.

The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons lived in Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, respectively, before settling in
Britain. Four dialects of the Old English language are known: Northumbrian in northern England and
southeastern Scotland; Mercian in central England; Kentish in southeastern England; and West Saxon in
southern and southwestern England. Mercian and Northumbrian are often classed together as the
Anglian dialects. Most Old English writings are in the West Saxon dialect; the first great period of literary
activity occurred during the reign of King Alfred the Great in the 9th century.

In contrast to Modern English, Old English had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) in the noun
and adjective, and nouns, pronouns, and adjectives were inflected for case. Old English had a greater
proportion of strong verbs (sometimes called irregular verbs in contemporary grammars) than does
Modern English. Many verbs that were strong in Old English are weak (regular) verbs in Modern English
(e.g., Old English helpan, present infinitive of the verb help; healp, past singular; hulpon, past plural;
holpen, past participle versus Modern English help, helped, helped, helped, respectively).

The Anglo-Saxon or Old English Language

About 400 Anglo-Saxon texts survive from thisperiod, including many beautiful poems, telling tales of
wild battles and adventerous journeys. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is “Cædmon's
Hymn”, which was composed between 658 and 680, and the longest was the ongoing “Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle”. The most popular work of the period is the long epic poem “Beowulf” .

“Beowulf” may have been written any time between the 8th and the early 11th Century by an unknown
author or authors, or, most likely, it was written in the 8th Century and then revised in the 10th or 11th
Century. It was probably originally written in Northumbria, although the single manuscript that has
come down to us contains a mix of Northumbrian, West Saxon and Anglian dialects. The 3,182 lines of
the work shows that Old English was already a fully developed poetic language by this time, with a
particular emphasis on alliteration and percussive effects. Even at this early stage the variety and depth
of English vocabulary is evident. For example, the poem uses 36 different words for hero, 20 for man, 12
for battle and 11 for ship. There are also many interesting compound words, such as hronrad (literally,
whale-road, meaning the sea), banhus (bone-house, meaning body) and beadoleoma (battle-light,
meaning sword). Of the 903 compound nouns in “Beowulf”, 578 are used once only, and 518 of them
are known only from this one poem.

Old English was a very complex language, at least in comparison with modern English. Nouns had three
genders (male, female and neuter) and could be inflected for up to five cases. There were seven classes
of “strong” verbs and three of “weak” verbs, and their endings changed for number, tense, mood and
person. Adjectives could have up to eleven forms. Even definite articles had three genders and five case
forms as a singular and four as a plural. Word order was much freer than today, the sense being carried
by the inflections . Although it looked quite different from modern English on paper, once the
pronunciation and spelling rules are understood, many of its words become quite familiar to modern
ears.

Many of the most basic and common words in use in English today have their roots in Old English,
including words like water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, be, of, he, she,
you, no, not, etc. Interestingly, many of our common swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin and
most of the others were of early medieval provenance. Care should be taken, though, with what are
sometimes called "false friends", words that appear to be similar in Old English and modern English, but
whose meanings have changed, words such as wif (wife, which originally meant any woman, married or
not), fugol (fowl, which meant any bird, not just a farmyard one), sona (soon, which meant immediately,
not just in a while), won (wan, which meant dark, not pale) and fæst (fast, which meant fixed or firm,
not rapidly).

During the 6th Century the Anglo-Saxon consonant cluster "sk" changed to "sh", so that skield became
shield. This change affected all "sk" words in the language at that time, whether recent borrowings from
Latin (e.g. disk became dish) or ancient aboriginal borrowings (e.g. skip became ship). Any modern
English words which make use of the "sk" cluster came into the language after the 6th Century (i.e. after
the sound change had ceased to operate), mainly, as we will see below, from Scandinavia.

Then, around the 7th Century, a vowel shift took place in Old English pronunciation in which vowels
began to be pronouced more to the front of the mouth. The main sound affected was "i", hence its
common description as "i-mutation" or "i-umlaut" (umlaut is a German term meaning sound alteration).
As part of this process, the plurals of several nouns also started to be represented by changed vowel
pronunciations rather than changes in inflection. These changes were sometimes, but not always,
reflected in revised spellings, resulting in inconsistent modern words pairings such as foot/feet,
goose/geese, man/men, mouse/mice, as well as blood/bleed, foul/filth, broad/breadth, long/length,
old/elder, whole/hale/heal/health, etc.

It is estimated that about 85% of the 30,000 or so Anglo-Saxon words gradually died out under the
cultural onslaught of the Vikings and the Normans who would come after them, leaving a total of only
around 4,500. This represents less than 1% of modern English vocabulary, but it includes some of the
most fundamental and important words (e.g. man, wife, child, son, daughter, brother, friend, live, fight,
make, use, love, like, look, drink, food, eat, sleep, sing, sun, moon, earth, ground, wood, field, house,
home, people, family, horse, fish, farm, water, time, eyes, ears, mouth, nose, strong, work, come, go, be,
find, see, look, laughter, night, day, sun, first, many, one, two, other, some, what, when, which, where,
word, etc), as well as the most important “function” words (e.g. to, for, but, and, at, in, on, from, etc).
Because of this, up to a half of everyday modern English will typically be made up of Old English words,
and, by some estimates, ALL of the hundred most commonly-used words in modern English are of
Anglo-Saxon origin although pronunciations and spellings may have changed significantly over time.