IIMS

Indian Institute for Montessori Studies

History of Language

Children in the elementary level are a ‘why’ child. It is an age which appeals for reasoning, imagination and
hence there is an importance to language. The primary child needs to know his place in time and space.
This includes all aspects of his society and culture and therefore history of language is offered to the child.
It is important to study history because, in order for us to understand what is going on in the present, we
need to have the knowledge of what has happened in the past. Knowing our past also helps us to shape our
future. Language is not only a vehicle for the expression of thoughts, perceptions, sentiments, and values
characteristic of a community; it also represents a fundamental expression of social identity.  Language
retention helps maintain feelings of cultural kinship. By giving the children the history of language, we
instill the values of tolerance and respect in our children.

We start by asking the child to write in various styles of writing in the world. We could take a particular
poem or song which is familiar to the child and ask the child or show the child the various styles of writing.

Ex- HUMPTY DUMPTY.

We could write the first sentence in proper English style. One in Urdu style, one in Egyptian, one in
Japanese style, one in Chinese style etc.,

We should allow the children to decipher the script and the text.

Also we need to help the child understand that the language and script are two different things. This can be
shown by writing a sentence spoken in English in English, local language and also in Hindi, and vice versa
thus depicting the obvious difference.

We also need to give the story within 30 minutes.

STORY

You all know about the various civilizations like Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indus etc., and the way people
migrated to settle in river valleys for fertile land. Following these civilizations, there were the Roman
empires, Greek kingdoms among others who have greatly influenced the language we call English.

Let us see how this language came about.

Once upon a time, about 1500 years ago, the Celts were living in today’s England. They were attacked by a
German tribe called the Angles. They were the first ones or pioneers for today’s English displacing the
native Celts. Around 300 BC, the Roman Civilization began and this extended all over Europe. This empire
collapsed around 450 AD. Once the Romans moved out of Britain, another group of people called Saxons
began a migration to this island. Though the Saxons were dominant, the two groups merged over time, and
the new nation was called England, their language, Anglo-Saxon became English. These people were
functionally illiterate. They used runic alphabets. They scratched inscriptions on ceremonial stones called
runes. They were uncultured pagans. They contributed TUES, WEDNES, THURS, FRIDAY to our
vocabulary. Not many words were left by the Romans and the Celts. However, the Anglo-Saxons brought
many words from the Romans which they picked up in the Europe, like street, pillow, inch, table etc.,

In 597 AD, St.Augustine and his band of 40 minks converted King Ethelbert of Kent at Canterbury into a
Roman Catholic. That is why the Archbishop of England to this day is still referred to as the Archbishop of
Caterbury. Christianity brought in more literacy with it. The language at that time had inflection of the
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nouns, adjectives, pronouns like I, me, mine, gender confusions (like Hindi, there were only 2 genders),
strong verbs, there were no silent letters no phonetic complications.

Almost 200 years later the Vikings raided the Scandinavia and Denmark. They brought around 1400
Scandinavian names and 1500 words survive to this day like the leg, skull, meek, rotten, husband, sky etc.,
along with some old English words. Some synonyms too came from them like wish/want; craft/skill etc.,.
Meaning and pronunciation of the root words also changed sometimes like scatter/shatter, skirt/shirt,
they/them all these had their roots with the Scandinavian words.

Middle English

In 1066, William the conqueror conquered Norman. Normans were Vikings settled in the Northern France
around 200 years ago. They gave around 10,000 words to English. French was the court language till 1399.
Till then no ruler spoke English. It was considered as the language for the commoners. It was King Henry
the 4th who made the official court language. Some words from the Normans were justice, prison, marriage,
parliament etc.,. By this time, 85% of the Anglo-Saxon language had died out. What remained was the most
fundamental one like drink, for, but, and, in, on etc.,.

In the 15th century, William caxton set up a printing press. It was during this time that the language was
simplified, like, the inflections were dropped, the pronouns were precisely defined, adjectives were given a
distinct status, verbs, plural forms, tenses all these were clearly sorted and defined.

Dramatic increase of vocabulary happened during this period due to new experiences. It was also the period
of Renaissance and Reformation, during which time, the art and literature saw a huge boom. Words were
created by error like pea came from pease, beg came from beggar. Words were also adopted from other
parts of the world like, shampoo from India, ketchup from china, sofa from Arabic, potato from Haiti etc.,.
As many as 50 languages contributed to English. Sometimes they were modified before they were used. The
great poet Shakespeare himself created more than 1800 new words like, majestic, obscene, countless, hurry
etc.,.

Over the period meanings of words have also changed. As in tell. Tell earlier meant count, today only the
banker giving out cash is called a teller.

It was in 1640 that the books became available for the general public. Regular spellings became important.
Before that time, there were no silent letters. Walk was walk and was pronounced fully. However, from then
on pronunciation changed.

Once Industrial revolution took place, education became available even to the common man and the power
of the middle class increased. This was the period for passion for classical languages. So spellings that were
simple again became complex. Ex- rime became rhyme, doute became doubt, perfet became perfect, det
became debt.

Jhonson’s dictionary had 43,000 words. In 1961, the Random house released a dictionary consisting of
450,000 words. In 1989, the oxford English dictionary was released with 615,000 words. Words were needed
for new objects seen in the new world, for new technology, new materials created from animals, plants etc.

We could also give the difference of American and Britain English. Students could give the examples.

We could give the children few words example of how they came into being. Like ‘correct’ which was
spelled thus by the 7th president who was semi-illiterate.
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History of Script

People wrote in different ways. It was not important to write in any fixed way as people wrote short jottings,
later it ran in all kinds of directions.

At this point the child could be given a poem to write in various styles. Each sentence could be written in
different styles like ancient Greek, Chinese (top to bottom right to left), Japanese (top to bottom, left to write)
Mexicans (bottom to top), Urdu (right to left), Brahmi (left to right).

There are 400 main scripts in the world today, many of them cousins. Writing began with painting.

Then there were ideograms. A character symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used
to say it are ideograms. Ex- eyes with tears indicate sorrow. Students also could contribute.

Then came the pictograms. They are the pictorial symbols for a word or phrase. Pictographs were used as
the earliest known form of writing. The examples for the same have been discovered in Egypt and
Mesopotamia from before 3000 BC.

We could get the pictures to indicate the same to the students. We could also tell the story of script from the
view point of the Egyptians and Mesopotamia. How the script slowly was simplified should be given to the
child. Child could write his name in such various scripts and also deciphering the same.

Development of script in English:

After the Egyptians, the phonecians near the mediterranian sea, around 1000 BC gave 22 letters which were
named after the familiar objects in Hebrew. There were no vowels.
Alpha meaning oxhead, Beth meaning house, Gimel meaning camel.
Greeks gave alphabets like alpha, beta, gama. It was in 400 BC that there were 24 alphabets from the Greek
language. The words like Drama, music, arithmetic etc are from Greek language.
The language of the Romans was latin. They had 21 letters A B C D E F I H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X.
They used C for both ‘c’ and ‘g’ sounds. They added Y Z after the conquest of Greece. Then U, W, J were
added instead of second I. Later G was also added thus making it 26 letters.
The English language was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th
century. This alphabet was brought to what is now England, along with the proto-form of the language
itself, by Anglo-Saxon settlers. Very few examples of this form of written Old English have survived, these
being mostly short inscriptions or fragments.
Illiterate tribals called Teutons and Vandals took over most of Europe after fall of Roman Empire and
settled in different parts of the continent. Depending on the area they were called Angles, Saxons, Franks.
Later, they took to Christianity and used some amount of Latin words with their own tongue and used the
same script for writing their new language.
The Latin script, introduced by Christian missionaries, began to replace the Anglo-Saxon futhorc from
about the 7th century, although the two continued in parallel for some time. Futhorc influenced the
emerging English alphabet by providing it with the letters thorn (Þ þ) and Wynn (Ƿ ƿ). The letter eth (Ð ð)
was later devised as a modification of Dee (D d), and finally yogh (Ȝ ȝ) was created by Norman scribes from
the insular g in Old English and Irish, and used alongside their Carolingian g.
Manuscripts contained all writing initially. King Charlemagne from France who was illiterate, invited
English monk Aluchin to teach him. He encouraged literacy. Another ruler, King Alfred who learnt literacy
later set up the Oxford University. In 100AD paper was invented. Arabs stole technology and started a
factory in Baghdad in 1795. Calligraphy was a contribution from the Arabs. Printing was introduced by
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Johannes Gutenberg in Germany during the 15th century. Books reached the middle calss once they became
low cost. There was no longer the domain of the aristocracy or religion linked.
The a-e ligature ash (Æ æ) was adopted as a letter its own right, named after a futhorc rune æsc. In very
early Old English the o-e ligature ethel (Œ œ) also appeared as a distinct letter, likewise named after a
rune, œðel. Additionally, the v-v or u-u ligature double-u (W w) was in use.
In the year 1011, a writer named Byrhtferð ordered the Old English alphabet for numerological purposes. He
listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet (including ampersand) first, then 5 additional English letters,
starting with the Tironian note ond (⁊) an insular symbol for and:
( A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z & ⁊ Ƿ Þ Ð Æ = old english)
In the orthography of Modern English, thorn (þ), eth (ð), Wynn (ƿ), yogh (ȝ), ash (æ), and ethel (œ) are
obsolete. Latin borrowings reintroduced homographs of ash and ethel into Middle English andEarly
Modern English, though they are not considered to be the same letters but rather ligatures, and in any case
are somewhat old-fashioned. Thorn and eth were both replaced byth, though thorn continued in existence
for some time, its lowercase form gradually becoming graphically indistinguishable from the minuscule y in
most handwriting. Y for th can still be seen in pseudo-archaisms such as "Ye Olde Booke Shoppe". The
letters þ and ð are still used in present-day Icelandic and Faroese. Wynn disappeared from English around
the 14th century when it was supplanted by uu, which ultimately developed into the modern w. Yogh
disappeared around the 15th century and was typically replaced by gh.
The letters u and j, as distinct from v and i, were introduced in the 16th century, and w assumed the status
of an independent letter, so that the English alphabet is now considered to consist of the following 26
letters:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
The variant lowercase form long s (ſ) lasted into early modern English, and was used in non-final position
up to the early 19th century.
The ligatures æ and œ were until the 19th century (slightly later in USA) used in formal writing for certain
words of Greek or Latin origin, such as encyclopædia and cœlom, although such ligatures were not used in
either classical Latin or ancient Greek. These are now rendered as "ae" and "oe" in all types of writing,
although in American English, a lone e has mostly supplanted both (for example, encyclopedia for
encyclopaedia, and fetus for foetus).

History of Indian Languages

Language changes every 30 kms. New dialects are created. It changes with time, with socioeconomic strata,
with educational status.

Sanskrit is the language of the intellectuals. It is very scientific and full of rules. People found it tough to
learn. So Prakrit and pali came into being. Depending on the area, it was called Magadhi, Vaidarbhi or
Ardhamagadhi. These dialects added local languages and evolved into various languages. Mother script was
common to all except for Urdu. Urdu’s mother script was Brahmi. From it came dialects of Hindi. Need for
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oral tradition initially in phonetic languages, for change of pronunciation (say long and short sounds) made
difference to meaning. It was a crime to write Vedas. Rules of grammar, intonation, splitting of words were
all taught from guru to disciple. (give examples of errors- madya and Madhya)

There were different kinds of education that existed. One, for the basic literacy; one, for local temple
school; one, for college level; one for the Agraharas and one for the Universities for post-graduation. The
subjects studied were the Vedas, philosophy, literature, maths, astronomy and some other.

The need for recording started only in the 12th century, when the old education system was disrupted by the
incursion of the Muslims. Up to then it was only oral tradition of education system. The palm leaf
manuscripts were created around this time, which was under the influence of calligraphy. Printing in India
was introduced by the Portugese in 1550s. Social novels, plays, short stories essays were created which was
part of new forms of literature.

History of Kannada language

Pre-old Kannada (or Purava HaleGannada) was the language of Banavasi in the early Common Era,
the Satavahana and Kadamba periods and hence has a history of over 2000 years. The written tradition of
Kannada begins in the early centuries of Common Era. The earliest examples of a full-length Kannada
language stone inscription (shilashaasana) containing Brahmi characters with characteristics attributed to
those of proto-Kannada in Hale Kannada (lit Old Kannada) script can be found in the Halmidi inscription,
usually dated c. 450 C.E., indicating that Kannada had become an administrative language at that time. 

Kannada is a Southern Dravidian language and according to Dravidian scholar Sanford Steever, its history
can be conventionally divided into three periods; Old Kannada (halegannada) from 450–1200 A.D., Middle
Kannada (Nadugannada) from 1200–1700 A.D., and Modern Kannada from 1700 to the present. Kannada is
influenced to an appreciable extent by Sanskrit. Influences of other languages such as Prakrit and Pali can
also be found in Kannada language.
The sources of influence on Kannada grammar appear to be three-fold; Pāṇini's grammar, non-Paninian
schools of Sanskrit grammar, particularly Katantra and Sakatayana schools, and Prakrit grammar. Literary
Prakrit seemed to have prevailed in Karnataka since ancient times. The vernacular Prakrit speaking people,
may have come in contact with the Kannada speakers, thus influencing their language, even before
Kannada was used for administrative or liturgical purpose. Kannada phonetics, morphology, vocabulary,
grammar and syntax show significant Sanskrit and Prakrit influence.
Some examples of naturalised (tadbhava) words of Prakrit origin in Kannada are baṇṇa derived
from vaṇṇa, arasu (king), and from Sanskrit, varṇa (color), hunnime (new moon)
from puṇṇivā, paurṇimā (full moon), and rāya from rāja (king). Kannada has numerous borrowed (tatsama)
words such as dina, kopa, surya, mukha, nimiṣa, anna.