MODULE 5: HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

THE DARWINIAN PERSPECTIVE

▪ In the late 1830’s, Darwin started searching at the beginning of language.
▪ He observed the proximity and sameness between sounds of animals and the different natural
utterances and gestures that human beings produce when venting out strong feelings.
▪ He focused on the observable interrelatedness between words and sounds.
▪ Darwin admitted that language sets man apart from lower animals.
▪ Darwin started searching at the beginning of language.

LESSON 3: THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FAMILY TREE

▪ The earliest known Indo-European language is the common ancestor of modern English and
Western languages (Grey, 2019).
▪ Based on the many texts that language experts and researchers delved on they deduced that the
east of Turkey was once occupied. The group split, with one group voyaging to Asia and the other
sub-group towards the west of Europe.
▪ The two main sub-groups scattered into smaller groups and settled in the different sections in
Asia and Europe where their languages developed separately.

INDO EUROPIAN
• Linguists have often used trees and branches as metaphors to explain and map the connections
between language groups.
• Despite being close geographically, the tree highlights the distinct linguistic origins of Finnish
from other languages in Scandinavia. Finnish belongs to the Uralic language family and shares roots
with some indigenous tongues in Scandinavia such as Sami.
-the bigger the leaves are, the wider and there’s a lot
people using this kind of language

• The European arm of the tree splits off into Slavic, Romance, and Germanic branches. Here you
can see the relationship between different Slavic languages. You can also spot some of Britain’s
oldest languages clustered together.
 SLAVIC- includes the •Russian, •Ukrainian, •Belarusian, •Lithuanian, •Slovak/Slovakian,
•Polish, •Czech, •Bosnian, •Serbian, and •Bulgarian.

 ROMANCE- includes the •Romanian, Catalan, •Corsican Sardinian, •Latin.

 GERMANIC – includes the •Albanian, •Gaelic, •Welsh, ang the •Cornish.

•The size of the leaves on the trees is intended to indicate – roughly – how many people speak each
language. It shows the relative size of English as well as its Germanic roots.

• The left side of the tree maps out the Indo-Iranian languages. It shows the connections between Hindi
and Urdu as well as some regional Indian languages such as Rajasthani and Gujarati.

LESSON 4: OLD, MIDDLE, AND MODERN ENGLISH

OLD ENGLISH

• This period started around 450 A.D. During this time, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who composed the
West Germanic settlers arrives in Southern Britain. They carried with them some dialects like the
language varieties that produced the Dutch, Frisian, and German.

• This Germanic influence is prevalent in the vocabulary we use every day such as come (cuman in Old
English) old (eald in Old English), and heart (heorte in Old English).

• Irregular verbs were also formed such as drink-drank-drunk. In the same manner, several Old English
pronunciations are kept in today’s spellings e.g., knight (Old English cniht, German Knecht).

• Old English, a.k.a. Anglo-Saxon, was not fully influenced by the language of the Celts which was widely
spoken by the occupants of the British Isles.

• Latin was brought to Britain by the Romans and strengthened by the conversation of the Anglo-Saxons
to Christianity, it created a remarkable event for it served as the basis of the writing system and
provided a wide range of new words (e.g., school and mass).
• The Old English text is prevalent during the start of the Anglo-Saxon’s epic, Beowulf (Lohr, 2019).

MIDDLE ENGLISH (1100-1500)

• During this period, development in terms of the pronunciation of unstressed syllables found at the
ends of the words caused the merging of most inflections.

• The influence of Norman and French people went a long way. French prestige dominated the
vocabulary in court, church, education, and law. The words for farmed animals (mutton, beef, pork)
translated in modern French into (mouton, beouf, porc) were from native words like sheep, swine, and
cow

•The loan or borrowed words referred to the meat of animals consumed by wealthy French speakers,
while the native or Old English words referred to living animals.

• Norman also changed the way words were spelled and written using the French conventions.

OLD ENGLISH WORD FRENCH WORD

• is, cwcn • ice, queen

MODERN ENGLISH

• This period marked the introduction of printing.

• Caxton’s preference of the East Midlands/London’s English variety for the earliest printed books
towards the end of the 15th century influenced the formation of the standardized English language
variety with acceptable grammatical forms and vocabulary, fixed spelling, and punctuation conventions.

• The perception of the correctness of this standardized variety was supported by the codification
attempts of Johnson’s dictionary and many other prescriptive grammarians during the 18th century

• In this period, among the borrowed words from Greek and Latin were critic, education, consciousness,
and metamorphosis.

•English is currently used worldwide as native tongue, second or foreign tongue due to imperial and
colonial activity, educational and cultural prestige, the interracial slave trade and international business
for economic reasons.