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J. JOHN SEKAR
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE
Origin of the English language
The English language is an off-shoot of the Germanic branch of
the Indo-European family of languages. It is the language of the
Germanic invaders who settled in the British Isles. The island was
originally inhabited by a people called Celts. After occupying Gaul in
Normandy, Julius Caesar attempted to subjugate the Britons in 54 BC
but failed. It was only in AD 43 that the Roman Emperor Claudius
succeeded in occupying Britain, and this continued for four centuries.
The fall of the Roman Empire and the withdrawal of Roman Legions
from Britain (AD 410) opened way to the invaders from the North
who got themselves settled in the English Isles, mostly in
Northumbria. The Angles and Saxons who invaded Britain in AD 477
called Celts Wealas (foreigners!) and drove them to Ireland and
Wales. Remnants of Celtic can be found only in certain place names
like ‘Thames, Avon, Dover, London, Kent’, etc. These Germanic
invaders settled down in various parts of present-day England and
gave the name ‘English’ to their language and ‘England’ to their land,
both derived from Angles, one of the Germanic tribes. The early
specimens of their language were based on Anglais and Saxon, and
for a period it was referred to as Anglo-Saxon. It was only later that
the word English (c.1000) got fixed. Early literature of this period
revolved around pagan (non-Christian) and secular themes like
seafaring, war etc. as in Beowulf, Seafarer.
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In the second phase, the Danes invaded England (AD 787) and
defeated the settlers in a series of battles. The Northmen (Danish-
Norwegian) came as plunderers, destroyed religious places and ended
up as rulers of a substandard part of England. But in the battle of
Ethandum at Wessex, King Alfred the Great withstood the savagery
of the Danes Vikings (AD 878). When the Danes were defeated, King
Alfred turned his attention to ‘learning.’ He established schools,
colleges and imported teachers from the continent. This led to the
West Saxon dialect of English developing into a standard medium of
literary expression (around AD 900). The best piece of literature of
this period is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, a history of the Germanic
tribes (Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Frisians, and Danes) from AD 850 to
1150.
The Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms were fighting with each other as
well as against the invaders and as a consequence no one political
centre or linguistic focus emerged out of the internecine wars. At the
time of Viking forays into the English Isles the five little kingdoms
within a nation developed a sort of national tongue—a
conglomeration of several varieties of spoken English and rudiments
of literacy. Lack of political centralization also reflected a lack of
linguistic centralization. Unlike their cousins on the continent, the
colonisers developed two distinct traits: they used their own
language(s) for all secular and many religious purposes, while on the
continent literate activity was confined to the monasteries and that too
in Latin only. Secondly, their writings were mostly in the vernaculars
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for official communication, marriage, land transactions, court, etc.

This greatly facilitated the emergence of a local literate vernacular(s).
It was only after the Norman invasion that the forces of centralization
triumphed. In other words, building up of institutional structures and
consolidation of a standard language had begun. But strangely, like in
India, it happened under a foreign rule and through a foreign cultural
medium. The functions and domains of language increased after a
centralised political system dominated the society. New institutions,
technologies, disciplines, etc. started emerging which in turn led to
the expansion of functions as well as domains of the vernacular
language.
Christianity was brought to Britain by the invading Romans in
AD 54 but it spread only after the arrival of St. Augustine around AD
600. The king of Kent permitted St. Augustine to establish a Church
in Canterbury and preach Christianity. That is why even today the
Bishop of Canterbury is the head of Christianity in England. As a
result of the spread of Christianity, religious literature flourished in
the Old English period. Instead of Runic script which they brought
with them, the settlers used Roman script for their language. This has
an important bearing on the evolution of language and writing. In
particular, the missionaries from Rome and Ireland introduced literacy
through the Roman script. By the time the Scandinavians invaded
England there developed such a strong literacy vernacular that it could
not be swayed by the language of the preliterate invaders. However,
because of the large number of invading Scandinavian tribes who
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ultimately settled in the Northumbrian and southern coastal regions,

incipient bilingualism started emerging. As a consequence, the
invaders’ language made strong inroads into the intimate chambers of
English grammar. For example, the pronominal paradigm
incorporated Scandinavian ‘they, them, she’ replacing Old English /hi
(heo), him (heo)/ respectively. This is mainly due to the shift of
language from Danish-Norwegian to English by a good number of
invading Scandinavians. This became possible as their language was
only oral and they considered English to be a more standard language
because of its literacy in spite of the fact that they held power over a
vast territory of England in the central part called Danelaw.
Indo-European Family of Languages
Where constant communication takes place among the people
speaking a language, individual differences become merged in the
general speech of the community, and certain conformity prevails.
But, if any separation of one community from another takes place,
and lasts for a considerable length of time, differences grow up
between them. The differences may be slight if the separation is
slight, and there may be merely local dialects. On the other hand, they
may render the language of one district unintelligible to the speakers
of another. In this case we generally have the development of separate
languages. Even where the differentiation has gone so far, it is usually
possible to recognize a sufficient number of features which the
resulting languages still retain in common to indicate that at one time
they were one. For instance, it is easy to perceive a close kinship
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between pater of Latin with father of English. When we notice that

father corresponds to Dutch vader, Gothic fadar, Old Norse fadir,
German Vater, Greek pater, Sanskrit pitar-, we are led to the
hypothesis that the languages of a large part of Europe and part of
Asia were at one time identical.
The most important discovery leading to this hypothesis was the
recognition that Sanskrit, a language of ancient India, was one of the
languages of the group. It was fully established by the beginning of
the 19th c. The extensive literature of India reaching back further than
that of any of the European languages, preserves features of the
common language much older than most of those Greek or Latin or
German. What is more important is that Sanskrit preserves an
unusually full system of declensions and conjugations by which it
became clear that the inflections of these languages could likewise be
traced to a common origin.
A further important step was taken when in 1822 a German
philologist, Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), following up a suggestion of a
Danish contemporary, Rask (1787-1832), formulated an explanation
which systematically accounted for the correspondences between
certain consonants in the Germanic languages and those found for
example in Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.
The IE family of languages (9 branches) are divided into
a) Satem = eastern division (Indian, Iranian, Albanian,
Armenian, Balto-Slavonic)
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b) Centum = western division (Greek, Latin, Celtic,

Teutonic)
The Teutonic branch from which English is descended is
characterised by certain distinctive features. They make languages
such as English, German to stand out from other languages of the IE
family. Some of the distinguishing qualities of the Teutonic branch
are
a) its verbal system
b) the word-accent
c) the stress of sound changes = the First Sound Shifting
Rask had discovered certain correspondences between some
consonants of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and those of the Teutonic
languages like English and Gothic. Grimm studied these
correspondences more closely and formulated a law which included
the following series of sound changes.
1. The IE Vd aspirated plosives /bh/, /dh/, /gh/ were shifted to Vd
plosives /b/, /d/, /g/ in Teutonic.
bhrata (S) ---→ brother
bhu ---→ be
madhya ---→ middle
dha ---→ do
(g)hamsa ---→ goose
2. The IE Vd plosive /b/, /d/, /g/ were shifted to Vl plosives /p/, /t/,
/k/ in Teutonic.
turba (L) ---→ thorp
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dasam (S) ---→ ten

gelu (L) ---→ cold
3. The IE Vl plosives /p, t, k/ became shifted to Vl fricatives /f, θ,
h/ in Teutonic.
Piscis (L) ---→ fish
pita (S) ---→ father
tres (L) ---→ three
canis (L) ---→ hand (OE)
The causes of the sound shifting are not clearly known. It is
supposed that it was the result of the Teutonic people’s contact with
non-Germanic population. The Germanic sound shift was occurring as
late as the 15th c A.D.
After the formulation of Grimm’s Law, it was noticed that there
was an apparent exception to it. In a pair of words like ‘centum’ (L)
and ‘hundred’ (E), there is no correspondence between ‘c’ of centum
and ‘d’ of hundred. /t/ should have become / θ /.
Karl Verner explained the reason for exception noticed in
Grimm’s Law. /t/ in ‘centum’ did not change into / θ / in ‘hundred,’
since the Grimm’s law formulated that the Vl plosives in Indo-
European Languages were shifted to the Vl fricatives /f, θ, h/ in
Teutonic.
Verner studied the words from IE and Teutonic and revealed the
fact that the Grimm’s Law does not operate in the case of all Teutonic
words which contain IE Vl plosives /p, t, k/. In the place of the Vl
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fricatives in Teutonic, say, / d / in ‘hundred/ instead of / θ /, many

words have voiced plosive – as in ‘hundred.’
As sound laws do not admit of exceptions, the inference was
that there was some combinative factor at work which resulted in the
voicing of these Vl fricatives in Teutonic. Though Grimm could not
discover this combinative factor, Verner, Grimm’s disciple,
discovered after 40 years that when the IE accent did not fall on the
vowel immediately preceding the consonants in question, these Vl
fricatives became voiced plosives in Teutonic.
cen `tum …….> `hundred
The languages thus brought into relationship by descent or
progressive differentiation from a parent speech are conveniently
called a family of languages. Various names such as Aryan, Indo-
Teutonic, Indo-Germanic, Indo-European have been used to designate
the family to which the English group belongs. The term now most
widely employed is Indo-European, suggesting more clearly the
geographical extent of the family. The parent tongue from which the
Indo-European languages have sprung had already become divided
and scattered before the dawn of history. Though there is no written
record of the common Indo-European language, the surviving
languages show various degrees of similarity to one another, the
similarity bearing a more or less direct relationship to their
geographical distribution. They accordingly fall into nine principal
groups:
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Indian
The oldest literary texts preserved in any Indo-European
language are the Vedas or sacred books of India. The language in
which they are written is known as Sanskrit. This language is also
found in certain prose writings containing directions for the ritual,
dogmatic commentary, and the like (the Brahmanas), meditations for
the use of recluses (the Aranyakas), philosophical speculations (the
Upanishads), and rules concerning various aspects of religious and
private life (the Sutras).
The use of Sanskrit was later extended to various writings
outside the sphere of religion, and under the influence of native
grammarians, the most important of whom was Panini in the 4 th c
B.C. was given a fixed literary form. In this form it is known as
Classical Sanskrit. Classical Sanskrit is the medium of an extensive
Indian literature including the two great national epics, the
Mahabharata and the Ramayana, a large body of drama.
Alongside of Sanskrit there existed a large number of local
dialects in colloquial use, known as Prakrits. A number of these
eventually attained literary form, one in particular, Pali, about the
middle of the 6th c B.C. becoming the language of Buddhism. From
these various colloquial dialects have descended the present languages
of India and Pakistan. The most important of these are Hindi, Bengali,
Punjabi, and Mahrati. A form of Hindi with a considerable mixture of
Persian and Arabic is known as Hindustani and is widely used for
intercommunication throughout northern India.
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Iranian
Northwest of India and covering the great plateau of Iran is the
important group of languages called Iranian. The Indo-European
population which settled this region had lived and probably travelled
for a considerable time in company with the members of the Indian
branch. Such an association accounts for a number of linguistic
features which the two groups have in common. Subsequent
movements have carried Iranian languages into territories as remote
as southern Russia and central China. The earliest remains of the
Iranian branch fall into two divisions, an eastern and a western,
represented respectively by Avestan and Old Persian. Avestan is the
language of the Avesta, the sacred book of the Zoroastrains.
Armenian
Armenian is found in a small area south of the Caucasus Mountains
and the eastern end of the Black Sea. Armenian is not linked to any
other special group of the Indo-European family by common features
such connect Indian with Iranian. It occupies a somewhat isolated
position. Armenian is known to us from about 5th c A.D. through a
translation of the Bible in the language. There is a considerable
Armenian literature, chiefly historical and theological, extensive
rather than important. The Armenians for several centuries were under
Persian domination and the vocabulary shows strong Iranian influence
that Armenian was at one time classed as an Iranian language.
Numerous contacts with Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, and
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Aramaic) with Greek, and with Turkish have contributed further to

give the vocabulary a rather mixed character.
Greek (Hellenic)
The entrance of Hellenes into the Aegean was a gradual one and
proceeded in a series of movements by groups speaking different
dialects of the common language. They spread not only through the
mainland of Greece, absorbing the previous populations, but into the
islands of the Aegean and the coast of Asia Minor. The earliest great
literary monuments of Greek are the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the
Odyssey, believed to date from 8th c B.C. Of the five principal dialects
of the Greek language, Attic, the dialect of the city of Athens, is much
the most important. It owes its supremacy partly to the dominant
political and commercial position attained by Athens in 5 th c, partly to
the great civilization which grew up there.
In Athens were assembled the great writers of Greece – the
dramatists Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles in tragedy,
Aristophanes in comedy, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides,
the orator Demosthenes, the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Largely
because of the political and cultural prestige of Athens the Attic
dialect became the basis of a koine or common Greek which from 4th
c superseded the other dialects; the conquests of Alexander
established this language in Asia Minor and Syria, in Mesopotamia
and Egypt, as the general language of the eastern Mediterranean for
purposes of international communication. It is chiefly familiar to
modern times as the language of the New Testament and, through its
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employment in Constantinople and the Eastern Empire, as the

medium of an extensive Byzantine literature.
Albanian
Northwest of Greece on the eastern coast of the Adriatic is the small
branch named Albanian. Its vocabulary is so mixed with Latin, Greek,
Turkish, and Slavonic elements owing to conquests and other causes
that it was formerly classed with the Hellenic group.
Italic
The Italic branch has its centre in Italy, and to most people Italy
in ancient times suggests Rome and the language of Rome, Latin. But
Latin was only one of a number of languages once found in this area.
The geographical situation and agreeable climate of the peninsula
seem frequently and at an early date to have invited settlement, and
the later population represents a decided mixture of races.
The various languages which represent the survival of Latin in
the different parts of the Roman Empire are known as the Romance or
Romanic languages. The five principal tongues forming the group are
French, Italian, Spain, Portuguese and Rumanian. The Romance
languages, while representing a continuous evolution from Latin, are
not derived from the Classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil. Classical
Latin was a literary language with an elaborate and somewhat
artificial grammar. The spoken language of the masses, Vulgar Latin
(the common people) differed from Classical Latin not only in being
simpler in inflection and syntax but a certain extent divergent in
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vocabulary. It was naturally the Vulgar Latin of the market-place and

camp that was carried into the different Roman provinces.
Balto-Slavic
The Balto-Slavic branch covers a vast area in the Eastern Europe.
The Baltic languages are Prussian, Lettic, Lithuanian, Bulgarian,
Serbian, Czech, Russian and Polish. The Slavic languages constitute a
more homogeneous group than the languages of some of the other
branches, and in a number of respects preserve a rather archaic aspect.
Teutonic
The common form which the languages of the Teutonic branch had
before they became differentiated is known as Primitive Teutonic or
Primitive Germanic. The languages descended from it fall into three
groups: Gothic, Scandinavian and West-Germanic. In its earlier form
the common Scandinavian language is conveniently spoken of as Old
Norse. The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: an eastern
group including Swedish and Danish, and a western group including
Norwegian and Icelandic. West Teutonic divides into three branches:
Old High Germanic, Old Low Germanic and Old Saxon.
Celtic
The Celtic languages formed at one time one of the most extensive
groups in the Indo-European family. At the beginning of the Christian
era the Celts were found in Gaul and Spain, in Great Britain, in
Western Europe. The language of the Celts in Gaul who were
conquered by Caesar is known as Gallic.