Professor: Students:

Maican, Gabriel Mendible Valeria

Marín Belén
 INTRODUCTION IN THE
HISTORY OF ENGLISH

✣ The English language really started with the invasion of Britain during the 5th century.
Three Germanic tribes, the Jutes, Saxons and Angles were seeking new lands to conquer,
and crossed over from the North Sea. It must be noted that the actual English language
had yet to be created as the inhabitants of Britain spoke various dialect of the Celtic
language.
✣ During the invasion, the native Britons were driven north and west into lands we now
refer to as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The word England and English originated from
the Old English word Engla-land, literally meaning “the land of the Angles” where they
spoke “Englisc”

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 PROTO ENGLISH

× Languages are constantly evolving and it can be difficult to define when a language actually began.
Many people consider that English started to take shape when several Germanic tribes, served in
the Roman military, such as the Tungri, Batavi, Menapii and Frisii served in Britain (Britannia)
under Roman command. Including the Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes who started trading with
the Roman Empire. Over a period of centuries, these tribes adopted words from Latin, including
several that are still in use in English today, such as ‘camp’, ‘cook’, ‘fork’ , cheese, dragon,
giant, gem, inch, kettle, kitchen, linen. and even ‘pillow’. In addition to this, they started using
other non-Latin words that the Romans themselves had adopted, like ‘butter’, ‘wine’, anchor, cat,
chest, devil, dish and sack.

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 × The languages spoken by the Germanic people who initially settled in Britain were part of the West
Germanic branch of the Germanic language family. They consisted of dialects from the Ingvaeonic
grouping, spoken mainly around the North Sea coast, in regions that lie within modern Denmark, north-west
Germany and the Netherlands. Due to specific similarities between early English and Old Frisian, an
Anglo-Frisian grouping is also identified.
× These dialects had most of the typical West Germanic features, including a significant amount of
grammatical inflection. Vocabulary came largely from the core Germanic stock, although due to the
Germanic people extensive contacts with the Roman world, the settlers' languages already included a
number of loanwords from Latin. For instance, the predecessor of Modern English “wine” had been
borrowed into early Germanic from the Latin “vinum”.

× Legend has it that around 449AD, the then king of the indigenous Celtic language-speaking Britons, Vortigern,
invited some of the Angles to help him fight the Picts, who inhabited much of what is now Scotland. It was
thought that the Angles were given land in south-east England in return, where they were joined by Saxons and
Jutes. However, this version of events is no longer widely accepted – not least because the Anglo-Saxon
language has many features of the Frisian languages which originated in northern Germany and around
Denmark. It is thought that these tribes in fact had a greater influence.

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× Whatever drew these Germanic tribes to Britain, it was certainly the case that many of them
settled there and that they had a great influence on the language that eventually evolved into
modern English.

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 OLD ENGLISH (450-1100
AD)
The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain developed into
what we now call Old English. Old English did not sound or look like English today.
Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old
English roots. The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old English. Old
English was spoken until around 1100.

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× The invading tribes dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survive
largely in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. The dialects spoken by the invaders formed what is now
called Old English, and eventually Anglo-Saxon. Later, it was strongly influenced by the North
Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who invaded and settled mainly in the north-
east of England. Many pairs of English and Norse words coexisted giving us two words with the
same or slightly differing meanings. For example:

NORSE ENGLISH
anger wrath
fro from
skill craft
ill sick

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× The new, and the earlier, settlers spoke languages from different branches of the Germanic
family; many of their lexical roots were the same or similar, although their grammars were
more distinct, including the prefix, suffix and inflexion patterns for many of their words. The
Germanic language of these Old English speaking inhabitants of Britain was influenced by
contact with the Norse invaders, which may have been responsible for some of the
morphological simplification of Old English, including loss of grammatical gender and
explicitly marked case. The introduction of Christianity added another wave of Latin and
some Greek words. The Old English period formally ended with the Norman conquest, when
the language was influenced to an even greater extent, by the Norman-speaking Normans.

× 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.

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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 extant 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.

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✣ Noun and adjective paradigms contained four cases—nominative, genitive, dative,
and accusative—while pronouns also had forms for the instrumental case. Old
English had a greater proportion of strong verbs (sometimes called irregular verbs
in contemporary grammars) than does Modern English.

✣ Old English word helpan, present infinitive of the verb help, healp, past
singular; hulpon, past plural; holpen, past participle

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× Nouns: cynn 'kin', hand, god, man(n), word.
× Pronouns: hē, ic 'I', mē, self, wē.
× Verbs: beran 'bear', cuman 'come', dyde 'did', sittan 'sit', wæs
'was'.
× Adjectives: fæst 'fast', gōd 'good', hālig 'holy', rīce 'rich', wīd 'wide'.
× Adverbs: ær 'ere', alle 'all', nū 'now', tō 'too', ðǣr 'there'.
× Prepositions: æfter 'after', for, in, on, under.
× Articles: ðæt 'that', ðis 'this'.
× Conjunctions: and, gif 'if'.

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12
 ✣ Phonology of the Old English is as follows in actually

Labiode Postalve
Bilabial Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
ntal olar
Stop p b t d k g
Affricate tʃ (dʒ)
Nasal m n (ŋ)
Fricative f (v) θ (ð) s (z) ʃ (ç) (x) (ɣ) h
Approxi
r j w
mant
Lateral
approxi l
mant

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 Short Long
Monophthongs
Front Back Front Back

Close i y u iː yː uː

Mid e (ø) o eː (øː) oː

Open æ ɑ æː ɑː

Diphthongs Short ( monomoraic) Long (bimoraic)

First element is close iy iːy

Both elements are mid eo eːo

Both elements are open æɑ æːɑ

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 IMPORTANT FIGURES OF OLD ENGLISH

✣ Alfred, King: The most famous of Old English kings, called ‘Alfred
the Great’. He was a West-Saxon and assumed the leadership of his
community in 871.

✣ Bede, The Venerable: English monk and historian. Bede is known to

posterity as the author of ” Bede's Ecclesiastical History of
England" which is the main historical source for the Old English
period.
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 × Pronunciation

White Black

Gray Black

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 MIDDLE ENGLISH (1100-1500)

In 1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy (part of modern France), invaded and conquered
England. The new conquerors (called the Normans) brought with them a kind of French, which became
the language of the Royal Court. For a period there was a kind of linguistic class division, where the
lower classes spoke English and the upper classes spoke French. In the 14th century English became
dominant in Britain again, but with many French words added. This language is called Middle English.

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× For about 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and their nobility
spoke only a variety of French called Anglo-Norman. English continued to be the language of the
common people. More pairs of similar words arose. French English close shut reply answer odour
smell annual yearly demand ask chamber room desire wish
× 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) 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,
teeth, children. French also affected spelling so that the cw sound came to be written as qu ( cween
became queen). Among the changes was an increase in the use of the unique aspect of English
grammar, the ‘ continuous’ tenses, with the suffix-ing.

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× It was not till the 14 th century that English became dominant in Britain again. In 1399,
King Henry IV became the first king of England since the Norman Conquest whose
mother tongue was English. By the end of the 14 th century, the dialect of London had
emerged as the standard dialect of what we now call Middle English. Chaucer wrote in
this language

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 The history of Middle English is often divided into three periods:
× Early Middle English, from about 1100 to about 1250, during which the Old English
system of writing was still in use
× The Central Middle English period from about 1250 to about 1400, which was marked
by the gradual formation of literary dialects, the use of an orthography greatly
influenced by the Anglo-Norman writing system, the loss of pronunciation of final
unaccented -e, and the borrowing of large numbers of Anglo-Norman words; the period
was especially marked by the rise of the London dialect
× Late Middle English, from about 1400 to about 1500, which was marked by the spread
of the London literary dialect and the gradual cleavage between the Scottish dialect and
the other northern dialects.

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 The dialects of Middle English are usually divided into three large
groups: (1) Southern (subdivided into Southeastern, or Kentish, and
Southwestern), chiefly in the counties south of the River Thames; (2)
Midland (corresponding roughly to the Mercian dialect area of Old
English times) in the area from the Thames to southern South
Yorkshire and northern Lancashire; and (3) Northern, in the Scottish
Lowlands, Northumberland, Cumbria, Durham, northern Lancashire,
and most of Yorkshire.

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22
 English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and
Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings
and the stylistic register of those words which survived from Old English. The core vocabulary
of Middle English comprised the monosyllabic words for basic concepts, bodily functions, and body
parts inherited from Old English and shared with the other Germanic languages. These words
include: God, man, tin, iron, life, death, limb, nose, ear, foot, mother, father, brother, earth, sea, horse,
cow, lamb.

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✣ In particular, vowel letters normally have values much closer to what is typical in modern
continental European languages, than to the values that they have in modern English.

× For example, the i in fīn ‘fine’ represents a long monophthong similar to that in
modern English meet, while the e in mēten ‘to meet’ represents a sound more similar
to that in modern English make (but a monophthong, not a diphthong).

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× In grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to
convey grammatical information. The grammar was radically different from that Old
English

Reduction of Inflections

The Noun: there were only two ways of showing plurality--s or es, (partly as a result of
reduction of vowels in unstressed final syllables)

Adjective: Weak declensions no longer showed a “distinction” between the singular and
the plural

The Pronoun: There was more of a reliance on the “juxtaposition, word order, and the use
of prepositions to make a clear relation of words in a sentence.”

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27
 IMPORTANT
FIGURES OF
MIDDLE ENGLISH
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The major poet of England in the late Middle Ages and the
most significant writer before Shakespeare. The linguistic importance of
Chaucer is that he established the dialect of London (south-east midlands) as
the input form for the standard in the late Middle English period.

Norwich, Julian of: An English mystic of the 14th century. Her language
was East Midlands. Julian was the first woman in England to have a
book published.

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 MODERN ENGLISH
(1500-PRESENT)

× Early Modern English (1500-1800)

Towards the end of Middle English, a sudden and distinct change in pronunciation (the Great Vowel
Shift) started, with vowels being pronounced shorter and shorter. From the 16th century the British had
contact with many people from around the world.

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× This, and the Renaissance of Classical learning, meant that many new words
and phrases entered the language. The invention of printing also meant that
there was now a common language in print. Books became cheaper and
more people learned to read. Printing also brought standardization to
English. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the dialect of London,
where most publishing houses were, became the standard.

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× This result in shorter words. For
example, the vowels in the words
“mite,” “meet,” and “mate”
started sounding less like the
vowels in the words, “thief,”
“fete,” and “palm” so that the
words became pronounced
phonetically.
× Diphthongs, or two vowels
combined to make one sound,
also replaced many long
vowels. For example, the vowel
“i” which had previously been
used to spell out the “ee” sound,
was now replaced and spelled as
“ee.”
× In addition, vowel sounds that had been
distinct from one another began to sound
identical. For example, “may” and “main”
though spelled differently, began to make the
same vowel sounds.
× Furthermore, some short vowel sounds were
replaced with diphthongs. For example, the
short vowel “u” was replaced with “ou” and
“oo” in words like “double” and “blood.”
The short vowel “e” was replaced with “ea”
in words such as “bread” and the metal,
“lead.”
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✣ In terms of grammar, much stayed the same
from the previous period of Middle English.
By the end of this period, “you” became
more common than the previously used
“thou” for one person and “ye” for multiple
persons in Old English. “You” took on both
the subject and object functions of the word
so that distinctions between the three forms
were no longer used.

✣ Adjectives lost their endings except for the

comparative and superlative forms. “It” and
“who” began being used as the neuter and
relative pronoun forms. The third person
singular verb forms added an “es” to their
endings rather than “eth.” For example,
“goeth” became “goes.”

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✣ Along with this verb trend, many strong verbs
became weak verbs.

✣ In addition, suffix endings, which denoted a

word’s function (known as inflectional
endings), began to disappear.

✣ The contraction of “will” into I’ll, she’ll, and

we’ll was one of the earliest and most
common contractions

✣ Shakespeare used contractions as well such as

it’s for “it is." The contractions, we’re, they’re
and there’s are also found in his writing. Also
he created more than 1600 words that are still

✣ used

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 LATE MODERN ENGLISH
(1800-PRESENT)
The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern
English is vocabulary-pronunciation, grammar and spelling remained
largely unchanged. It has many more words, arising from two
principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology
created a need for new words; secondly, the British Empire at its
height covered one quarter of the earth's surface, and the English
language adopted foreign words from many countries. This period
starts with the Augustan Age, a period of peace and imperial
grandeur – which begins after the Restoration period (1660-1690)

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✣ Although the pronunciation and grammar of Early Modern English continued into the late
modern age, the vocabulary of English grew considerably, leading to the creation of Late
Modern English. The English language started to spread all around the world due to the
development of Britain’s new colonies.

✣ At the same time, the English language expanded to accommodate many new foreign words
within its vocabulary. For example, Late Modern English contains many words borrowed from
Hindi and other Indian languages, such as ‘pajamas’, ‘bungalow’ and ‘shampoo’.

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✣ Although Late Modern English includes words
from many languages, the largest number of
words come from French and Latin.
✣ By about 1700, the main changes in
pronunciation that made up the Great Vowel
Shift were all completed, at least in the south of
England.
✣ Third-person forms like ”loveth” had
disappeared from ordinary educated speech.
✣ The pronouns thou and thee and the
corresponding verb-forms like ”lovest ” had
disappeared from standard usage, except in
special registers, such as religious usage.
✣ Auxiliary ”do” had come to be used as we use
it today
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✣ The industrial revolution: The industrial revolution had a strong impact on the English language
with many new words coined from these technological advancements. New words were invented
to name new industrial techniques, machinery, products and technology.

× Some words that entered the language around this time include: electricity, camera, telegraph,
pulley, train, engine, reservoir and combustion.

× New words also came about by using old words together in new ways to create a new meaning.
For example: typewriter, horsepower, airplane and railway all arrived in Late Modern English.

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✣ The advancement of Science: In the 17th and 18th centuries, new scientific discoveries meant
that more new words had to be invented to describe the new findings; many of the words of this
industrial age were borrowed from Latin and Greek.

✣ Words borrowed from French, Latin or Spanish may have been already borrowed at a previous
time in English language history, causing a new meaning and/or pronunciation to develop.

✣ For example, the word ‘chef’ and the word ‘chief’ are both borrowed from French. ‘Chef’ was
borrowed by Late Modern English, whereas ‘chief’ came into the language during the time
of Middle English. This is why the same root has resulted in two distinct words with different
meanings in English today.

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✣ Many of the new words that came into the English
language during the scientific revolution have a
Latin or Greek root. For example: ‘oxygen’,
‘nuclear’ and ‘vaccine’.

✣ New words also came from the field of medicine,

such as ‘ambulance’, which has a French root but
was originally derived from Latin.

✣ We can see the influence of classical languages on

new vocabulary today used in the world of science
and computers, including ‘byte’, ‘micro’ and
‘cyber’.

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Origins of English

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✣ In the Late Modern age, the First World War and Second World War added many new words
and slang phrases, which were used originally by soldiers and came straight from the trenches.

✣ The second World War introduced the words: ‘booby trap’, ‘basket case’, ‘to be in a flap’,
‘zigzag’, ‘souvenir’, ‘browned off’, ‘gubbins’, ‘flak’, ‘fed up’, ‘dud’, ‘lousy’, ‘crummy’, ‘cushy’,
‘no man’s land’, ‘dekko’ and ‘Blighty’ (both these last words are derived from Hindi).

Late Modern English also adopted other military-derived words that we use today,
including: ‘ambush’, ‘spearhead’, ‘melee’, ‘radar’, ‘siege’, ‘camouflage’ and ‘sortie’,
along with the aeronautical-related terms ‘nose dive’ and ‘landing strip’.

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42
 IMPORTANT FIGURES OF MODERN ENGLISH

✣ Ascham, Roger: [Early Modern Period] Author of a

work Toxophilus (1545) in which he criticized the inordinate
number of borrowings from classical languages (Latin and
Greek) flooding into English at the time.

✣ Cockerham, Henry: [Lexicography] One of the English

lexicographers who produced The English Dictionarie (1623)
a guide to the ‘hard words’ of the language.

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 VOWEL
Old English Middle English
CHANGES
Early Modern English
Modern English Modern spelling Examples
(c. 900 AD) (c. 1400 AD) (c. 1600 AD)
oʊ oak, boat, whole,
ɑː ɔː oː oa, oCe
əʊ (UK) stone
æː, æːɑ ɛː eː ea heal, beat, cheap
iː
eː, eːo eː iː ee, -e feed, deep, me, be
iː, yː iː əi or ɛi aɪ iCe ride, time, mice
oː oː uː uː oo, -o moon, food, do
uː uː əu or ɔu aʊ ou mouse, out, loud
a æ æ a man, sat, wax
ɑ, æ, æɑ
aː ɛː eɪ aCe name, bake, raven
e ɛ ɛ e help, tell, seven
e, eo
ɛː eː iː ea, eCe speak, meat, mete
i, y ɪ ɪ ɪ i written, sit, kiss
ɒ
o ɔ o god, top, beyond
ɑ (US)
o
oʊ
ɔː oː oa, oCe foal, nose, over
əʊ (UK)
buck, up, love,
ɤ ʌ
u ʊ u, o wonder
ʊ 44ʊ full, bull
The vowel changes over time can be seen in the following example words, showing the
changes in their form over the last 2,000 years:

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Interrogative pronouns

First person personal pronouns

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Second person personal pronouns
Old and Middle English singular to the
Modern English archaic informal

Formal and informal forms of the second person singular and plural

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