The Roots of English: Focus Questions

Chapter 1
The roots of English
Focus questions
• What is the origin of the English language?
• What language(s) is it most closely related to?
The legendary printer, editor and translator William Caxton, who introduced printing
in England in 1476 and influenced the emergence of a standard language, said this about
the state of the language:
And certaynly our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and
spoken whan I was borne. … Certaynly it is harde to playse euery man by cause of
dyuersite & chaunge of langage.
(Preface to Eneydos [1490])
This could just as well have been voiced by a contemporary observer of the language.
The present-day observer might, for example, react to the sentence Everyone in the street
was shocked when they heard the news, having learnt that everyone should be followed by
he/she, or be utterly confused by the different vowel qualities in accents of English:
the word pen, as pronounced by a New Zealander, is easily perceived as pin by British
speakers.
For a deeper understanding of today’s English with its infinite variation, it is, in fact,
worthwhile travelling even further back in history than Caxton’s time. In this chapter,
Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
we would like to outline the early history of the English language in England; that is,
from its first appearance up to the emergence of a standard language. The standard his-
tory was established by the great historian Bede, writing in Latin about ad 700. The
native people of the British Isles were largely Celtic, but in the southern parts of Great
Britain, they were under Roman rule from around ad 43 to around the year ad 410,
so we can suppose that many spoke Latin as well as a Celtic language. About ad 450,
Bede says, groups of Germanic settlers began coming into the country, driving the
indigenous population into ‘corners’ such as Wales and Cornwall. The invaders, who
probably came from Northern Germany and Denmark, represented three main tribes
of people known as Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The Angles, from whose name the word
English is derived, settled in the North, the Saxons in the South – their name living on
Melchers, Gunnel, et al. World Englishes, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/thammasat-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5784324.
Created from thammasat-ebooks on 2021-08-05 04:24:06.
2 The roots of English
in today’s Sussex, Essex and Middlesex – and, according to Bede, the Jutes in a small
area in the South-east, including Kent and the Isle of Wight. These settlers were later
referred to as Anglo-Saxons, and their language, although not documented substantially
until about 300 years later, constitutes the roots of English. In fact, there may have been
Germanic-speaking people in southern England earlier than ad 450, even in Roman
times, and it is likely that the Celtic speakers intermarried and merged with the Anglo-
Saxons, rather than being driven out as a body of people.
The distinct groups of settlers must have produced a dialectally varied language.
Some of these early ‘tribal’ differences can even be traced in rural dialects today; for
example, /f/ and /s/ at the beginning of words or syllables in the standard language
correspond to /v/ and /z/ in the south-west of England (cf. Section 4.1.5.1). ‘Cider
from Somerset’ may, for example, be presented as Zider vrom Zummerzet in local adver-
tising. A few of the words featuring this dialectal characteristic have been adopted in
the standard language, such as vixen, ‘female fox’, and vat (‘large container for liquids’)
(related to German Fass, Swedish fat).
One of the most important reasons for linguistic variation and change is the degree
of contact with speakers of other languages or dialects. Contacts with the indigenous
Celtic population did not, however, result in many borrowings of words into English,
even though the native people would have had a more adequate, traditional vocabulary
at their disposal to describe and categorize the world around them. Such evidence as
there is survives chiefly in place names: river names such as Thames, Avon and Wye,
and place-name elements such as crag, ‘steep and rugged rock’, and cumb, ‘deep valley’
(cf. Ilfracombe). Admittedly, there are also Celtic borrowings of another type in English
now, such as whisky, ‘the water of life’, and galore, ‘lots of ’, but these are of a much later
date. It should also be added that in some parts of Britain which are, or have been,
Celtic strongholds (parts of Scotland, Cornwall), regional dialects of English have fair-
sized elements of Celtic in them. A more thorough account, not restricted to vocabu-
lary, of the impact of this substratum, that is, ‘underlying language’, will follow in
Sections 4.2–4. However, recent ongoing research suggests that the Celtic influence
on English – on all levels of language – has been much more substantial than hitherto
believed (Filppula 2008). Aspects of English, it is argued, can be explained by calling it
‘Germanic in the mouths of Celtic speakers’.
In contrast to the limited evidence of Celtic influence on the vocabulary of English, the
influence of Latin is certainly pervasive. To begin with, this influence may be explained by
the fact that Latin was not the language of conquered people, but of a higher civilization,
from which the Anglo-Saxons had a great deal to learn. Some of the early Latin loan-
words may actually have been adopted even before the Anglo-Saxons left the Continent.
Examples of such early loans are cheese, pepper, street, pound, wall and camp.
With the introduction of Christianity in ad 597, the Latin influence made itself
noticeable in many spheres of life. First, all the words pertaining to the Church were
introduced: altar, angel, candle; also, a certain number of words connected with learning
and education which reflects another aspect of the Church’s influence: school, master,
grammatical. Second, many words connected with everyday life, such as names of articles
of clothing and household utensils, were introduced: sock, chest, sack, cap, as well as words
denoting foods: beet, pear, radish. Third, new names for trees, plants and herbs often
replaced the Anglo-Saxon words: pine, lily, fennel. The influence of Latin again made
itself felt during the Renaissance (around 1500–1650 in Britain), affecting scientific and
T he roots of English 3
scholarly writing in particular, and it has remained strong to this day. Obviously, since
Classical Latin is no longer a living language, its present-day impact could hardly be
viewed as ‘borrowing’; rather, the Latin element has been integrated into the English
system. This integration includes affixes productive in word-formation, such as re-, in-,
inter-, -fy (reshuffle, incapacitate, interdisciplinary, rectify).
Towards the end of the eighth century, speakers of English, especially in the north-
eastern parts of the British Isles, began to come into contact with speakers of yet another
language variety, namely the Viking invaders from Denmark and Norway. Violence
and barbarity characterized many of the invaders and their encounters with the English
population, but there was, of course, also a great deal of peaceful contact and mutual
benefit, and many individuals became permanent settlers. Language contact was rela-
tively easy because Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse were fairly closely related; both were
Germanic languages and shared a common stock of vocabulary. There were, however,
marked differences in the grammatical systems. According to some recent theories,
Englishmen and Scandinavians can be assumed to have got around certain commu-
nication problems by simplifying the language, for example, by dropping quite a few
inflectional endings. This is, actually, one of the factors that have been brought forward
to explain how English developed into the ‘ending-less’ language it is today. The mod-
ern Scandinavian standard languages and English share some quite unusual features like
‘preposition-stranding’ (That’s the door she went through), and this may be the result of
mutual influence in this period.
Although not as massive as that of Latin or French, the Scandinavian influence has
been substantial and has, characteristically, affected many everyday words which are
close to the core of the language. The very pronunciation of the k’s and g’s in the fol-
lowing words, where Old English equivalents would have had fricatives, is a sign
of Scandinavian origin: sky, bask, whisk, skirt, kid, give, egg. Certain common place-
name elements are Scandinavian, such as -by, -thorpe and -toft for ‘a piece of ground’
(cf. Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Lowestoft). Old Norse has even influenced English pronominal
usage, which is quite sensational in terms of patterns of borrowing: the pronouns they,
their, them are Scandinavian loans, having replaced Anglo-Saxon forms that had grown
too similar to other pronouns to keep them distinct.
In certain dialects spoken in typical ‘Viking areas’, that is, basically what was known
as the Danelaw, the influence has been particularly marked; in Yorkshire, for example,
the following Scandinavian-based words of an everyday character are widely known:
lake ‘play’, neaf ‘fist’, lathe ‘barn’, teem ‘empty’. Owing to the close relationship between
the languages in contact, it can, however, sometimes be quite difficult to determine
which words are truly Scandinavian. A case in point is bairn ‘child’, which is often
brought up as an example of a Scandinavian word; yet similar-sounding forms are – or
were – found in most Germanic languages. Since the use of bairn tends to be restricted
to the northern parts of Britain, it is not unlikely that it has been reinforced by the close
contacts with Scandinavia.
In Shetland and Orkney, which were under Scandinavian rule up to 1469, well
over 95 per cent of the place names and a substantial part of the vocabulary in the
traditional dialects is Scandinavian. A few telling examples of Shetland vocabulary
are: ouskeri is a ‘tool for baling out water’ (cf. Swedish öskar), plagg for ‘garment’
(cf. Swedish plagg), scarf for ‘cormorant’ (a bird, cf. Swedish skarv), du as a less formal
word of address than you.
4 The roots of English
In 1066, the Norman Conquest occurred and had a great effect on English, meaning
that the language was obscured and perhaps at risk of replacement in the two centuries
following this event. During this period, the use of English was socially restricted; it
was not used at court, in church or in government administration. Such restriction gen-
erally tends to be an indication that a language variety is endangered. English, however,
turned out to be a survivor; although it was seen by many as a crude peasant language,
others grew to view it as a marker of ethnicity and national identity. It was formally
reinstated in 1362, when the king’s speech at the opening of Parliament was delivered
in English. In the same year, an Act was passed making English instead of French the
official language of the law courts.
English started to be written again at the end of the eleventh century in different
forms from the Old English which had been a fairly standardised written language
before the Conquest. It has been suggested that these new forms reflect the speech of
ordinary people even before the Conquest, and that their differences from standardised
Old English reflect the influence of Celtic and Scandinavian languages on the everyday
language of Anglo-Saxon England and Scotland.
During its heyday in Britain, however, French had an enormous impact on the lin-
guistic repertoire and on the English language itself. As already suggested, it was the
most prestigious language variety. The following is a much-quoted remark made by
the late-thirteenth-century chronicler Robert of Gloucester: ‘Bote a man conne Frens,
me telþ of him lute’ (‘unless a man knows French, people think little of him’) (Wright
1887:544).
French was the language of law, administration, business and sophisticated life, and
this is reflected, for example, in the following borrowings, picked from among the
10,000 that were adopted from the time of the Norman Conquest up to about 1500:
judge, cordial, faith, faint, veil. It is interesting that French words were introduced to denote
the meat from certain animals, whereas the names of the animals remained English:
pork from pigs, veal from calves, mutton from sheep, venison from deer. This is generally
explained by the fact that French cooking was seen as superior.
In the period immediately following the Conquest, loanwords were from Norman
French, rather than from a Parisian standard. Some of these words were borrowed again
in their Parisian French form and came to be used in a slightly different way from
their Norman counterparts – another factor which has enriched the English language.
Examples of such pairs are warrant ‘guarantee’ and warden ‘guardian’. It is also worth
pointing out that the French influence on the English language has continued over the
centuries, but has been mostly restricted to certain areas, such as etiquette, literary ter-
minology, fashion and cookery. The influence has also made itself noticeable in certain
grammatical structures and the placement of stress in French-based words such as canal,
hotel, antique.
In addition to borrowings from the sources mentioned so far, English has, in various
periods, been influenced by many other languages: Dutch/Low German – for example,
with regard to boating terms – High German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish,
Hindi and Afrikaans. Since these influences tend to be connected with certain varieties of
English, they are highlighted in Chapter 4, which also deals with the considerable histori-
cally based regional variation in the British Isles, including the special case of Scots.
Towards the end of the fifteenth century, when English was firmly reinstated as the
language of power and the art of printing began to exercise an influence on the style of
T he roots of English 5
writing, a standard language began to emerge. Earlier, writing had been clearly dialectal
and extremely varied with regard to spelling, vocabulary and grammar. The developing
standard was London-based – in particular, it reflected the language of the prosper-
ous middle-class businessmen who had moved into London from an area north-east of
the city. The influential University of Cambridge in that area is also believed to have
played an important role here. Not until the eighteenth century, however, were English
spelling and grammar codified in a standard form; this happened when the legendary
Dr Samuel Johnson published his famous dictionary in 1755. As for a standard of pro-
nunciation, it hardly existed before the latter half of the nineteenth century, when pub-
lic school usage made a certain southern accent more prestigious than other varieties.
Review questions
1 Why do you think the Celtic element in English is so limited?
2 Why was it comparatively easy for the English and the descendants of Scandinavians
to communicate?
3 In what way did French ‘endanger’ English after the Norman Conquest? Where
might English be ‘endangering’ other languages at present?
Further reading
Hogg, R. and Denison, D. (2006) (eds) A History of the English Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.

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Chapter 1

The roots of English

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