Questions on The History of English Language

1. How did English appear in England?

 English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian
languages brought to Britain in the mid 5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon
migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the
Netherlands.
 Their language, now called Old English, originated as a group of Anglo-
Frisian languages which were spoken, at least by the settlers, in England and
southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic
languages (and, possibly, British Latin) that had previously been dominant.
 Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
established in different parts of Britain.
 Old English contacted with the North Germanic languages spoken by the
Scandinavian Vikings who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the
8th and 9th centuries, which led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical
simplification. The Anglian dialects had a greater influence on Middle English.
 After the Norman conquest in 1066, Old English was replaced, for a time,
by Anglo-Norman (also known as Anglo-Norman French) as the language of
the upper classes.
 Middle English was spoken to the late 15th century. The system of
orthography that was established during the Middle English period is largely
still in use today. Later changes in pronunciation, however, combined with the
adoption of various foreign spellings, mean that the spelling of modern English
words appears highly irregular.
 Early Modern English – the language used by William Shakespeare – is
dated from around 1500. It incorporated many Renaissance-era loans from Latin
and Ancient Greek, as well as borrowings from other European languages,
including French, German and Dutch. Significant pronunciation changes in this
period included the ongoing Great Vowel Shift, which affected the qualities of
most long vowels. Modern English proper, similar in most respects to that
spoken today, was in place by the late 17th century.
 In short, There are three periods of English:
• Old English or Anglo-Saxon to c. 1150.
• Middle English to c. 1500.
• Modern English to today.
2. What is Middle English and why did many historians say English is not
creole?
- Middle English is the English used from about 1100 to about 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, and the ruling and business classes.
- 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.
- It was the language of the great poet Chaucer (c1340-1400), but it would
still be difficult for native English speakers to understand today.
● Many historians say English is not creole because:
- It retains a high number of irregular verbs, just like other Germanic
languages, a linguistic trait that is usually the first to disappear in creoles.
- It is simply a mixed language (not the same thing as a Creole). The fact
that English lost its cases and inflections has nothing to do with it being deemed
Creole. All the Romance languages have lost many inflections and cases and
tenses when compared to their predecessor, Vulgar Latin.
3. Why do historians of English tend to divide the stages of the language's
development into Old, Middle, and Early Modern English? What
distinguishes these different forms of the language from each other?
Historians of English tend to divide the stages of the language’s
development into Old, Middle, and Early Modern English because of the
foundation of the UK:

 Old English: is the language of the Anglo-Saxons (up to about 1150), a

highly inflected language with a largely Germanic vocabulary, very
different from modern English.

 Middle English: refers to the dialects of the English language spoken in

parts of the British Isles after the Norman conquest (1066) until the late
15th century.
 Early Modern English: is the stage of the English language used from the
beginning of the Tudor period until the
English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle
 English in the late 15th century to the transition to Modern
English during the mid-to-late 17th century.

Also, the development of the language was connected closely with English
literature.
+ The history of Old English was oral tradition literature. The famous poem was
the song of Beowulf.
+ Middle English was associated with the printing house of William Caxton, the
beginning of the long process of standardization of spelling.
+ Early Modern English with Shakespeare, a genius of the English language.

We can distinguish these different forms of the language from each other by
some factors such as spelling, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

-Spelling:

Old English originally used a runic system, but this was replaced by a version
of the Latin alphabet.

Middle English developed a standard towards the end of the period, with the
invention of the printing press.

-Pronunciation:

Old English: Old English had some silent letters.

Middle English: All written letters were pronounced in Middle English.

Modern English: Some letters are not pronounced in Modern English. For

example, K in “knight” is silent.

-Grammar:

Old English: The word order and the sentence structure were rather free.

Middle English: Middle English has the same sentence structure as the Modern
English (Subject-verb-object).

Modern English: Modern English follows the subject-verb-object sentence

structure.

-Vocabulary:

Old English vocabulary was influenced by Latin and Germanic languages.

Middle English everyday vocabulary mostly remained Germanic, but specific
fields such as law and religion were influenced by Old French.

4. How did Old English differ from Modern English? Can you explain this
with reference to both grammar and vocabulary?
How did Old English differ from Modern English?
- The argument of calling ME a creole comes from the reduction in inflected
forms from OE to ME.
-The grammatical simplifications observed in pidgins, creoles and other contact
languages.
Can you explain this with reference to both grammar and vocabulary?
Old English was a much more inflected language than Modern English.
Inflections are changes in words, usually at the ending, that indicate how the
word is to be used. We have just a few inflections left in Modern English. An
example is our way of making possessives. Changing “Bob” to “Bob’s” is an
inflection. Old English went through a long process of dropping inflections, but
still used them for things like indicating if a noun was a subject, direct object, or
indirect object.
Modern English mostly uses word order to accomplish this. Subjects go before
verbs, adjectives and adverbs go before the words they modify, indirect objects
can go before or after a direct object, but if the direct object comes second we
use a word like “to” to show it.
“The big yellow dog gave me a kiss.” “The big yellow dog gave a kiss to me.”
Those are pretty much the only two ways that sentence will make sense. Try to
change to word order and the meaning becomes unclear fast. In Old English,
you could have changed the word order because the word endings told you
which word was in which role.
Vocabulary is another matter. English has picked up a huge number of words
from other languages. However, the core vocabulary comes straight from Old
English. Out of the 50 most common words in English, 49 are OE derived. So
our core vocabulary remains, there is just an awful lot added to it.

5. What factors caused Old English to develop into Middle English and in
what ways did the language change?
-Two main factors:
 +The Norman invasion. The Norman invasion introduced a great many
French loanwords, some 40% of English vocabulary by Chaucer’s time. The
case system of nouns and adjectives and verb declensions simplified too;
whether as a result of Norman influence is not certain; it happened in the North
Germanic languages without foreign influence, and so the simplification could
have been a natural internal process.
+Political unification. Political unification led to an amalgamation of the
many separate languages and dialects into one under the pressure of the need for
everyone to communicate. Such a process can be observed in the current
lessening of the differences between US and British English.
The changes of this period influenced English both in its grammar and
vocabulary:
+The grammatical simplifications observed in pidgins, creoles and other
contact languages.
+Old English has many inflectional forms of its nouns, pronouns,
adjectives, and verbs; on the contrary, Middle English simplified these
inflectional forms.

6. What reasons caused Middle English to develop into Modern English

and in what ways did the language change?
5 reasons:
-The invention of the process of printing from movable type: It occurred in
Germany about the middle of the fifteenth century, was destined to exercise a
far-reaching influence on all the vernacular languages of Europe. Introduced
into England about 1476 by William Caxton, printing made such rapid progress
that a scant century later it was observed that manuscript books were seldom to
be seen and almost never used.

-The rapid spread of popular education: Education was making rapid progress
among the people and literacy was becoming much more common. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth century, there arose a prosperous trades class with
the means to obtain an education. As a result of popular education, the printing
press has been able to exert its influence on language.
-The increased communication and means of communication: The exchange of
commodities and the exchange of ideas in the different parts of the world are
both stimulating to language. Later, the expansion of the British Empire and the
extension of trade enlarged the English vocabulary. Transportation and the mass
media have been influential in the intermingling of language and the lessening
of the local idiosyncrasies.
-The growth of specialized knowledge: the growth of specialized knowledge,
has been important not only because new knowledge often requires new
vocabulary but also because, in the early centuries of the modern period, Latin
became less and less the vehicle for learned discourse. Both trends accelerated
strongly during the seventeenth century. The rapid accumulation of new
knowledge was matched by a rapid trend away from publishing specialized and
learned works in Latin.
-The emergence of various forms of selfconsciousness about language:
+ At the individual level, as people lift themselves into a different
economic or intellectual, or social level, they are likely to make an effort to
adopt the standards of grammar and pronunciation, just as they try to conform
to fashions and tastes in dress and amusements. People are also careful of their
speech and of their manners.
+ At the public level, a similar self-consciousness has driven issues of
language policy, for example, the sixteenth-century defense of English and
debates about orthography and the enrichment of the vocabulary.