A Brief History of

English

-Paul Roberts
• No understanding of the English language
can be very satisfactory without the notice of
the history of the language. But we have to
make do with just a notion.
• The history of English is long and
complicated, and we can only hit the high
spots.
• The history of our language begins a little after
600 C.E. Everything before that was pre-history,
which means that we can guess at it but can’t
prove much.
• For a thousand years or so before the birth of
Christ, the language of our linguistic ancestors was
part of the Germanic branch of the Indo-
European family.
• At the time of the Roman Empire-say, from the
beginning of the Christian era to around 400
C.E/- the speakers of what was to become
English were scattered along north coast of
Europe.
• The names given to the tribe who got to English
are Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Also refer as Anglo-
Saxons.
• Anglo-Saxons’ first contact with civilization was rather
thin acquaintance with the Roman Empire on whose
borders they lived.
• Roman merchants and traders travelled among the tribes
that caused this period saw the first of our so many
borrowed words from Latin.
• Kettle, wine, cheese, butter, cheap, plum, gem, bishop, church were
the borrowed words at this times.
• Anglo-Saxons still had a long way to go, in the
fourth century the Roman power weakened badly
that the Anglo-Saxons began to attach Britain.
• The Romans has been the ruling power in Britain since
43 C.E.
• They have subjugated the Celts whom they found living
there and had succeeded in settling up a Roman
administration.
• In Scotland, Whales, and Ireland the Celts remained free
and wild, they made periodic forays against the Romans
in England.
• Even in England the Roman power was
thin.
• Latin did not become the language of the
country as it did in Gaul and Spain, mass
of people continued to speak Celtics.
• In the fourth century, troubles multiplied for
the Romans in Britain.
• In 410 C.E. the last Roman ruler in England ,
bent on becoming the emperor, left the island
and took the last legions with him.
• Not much is surely known about the arrival of the
Anglo-Saxons in England.
• According to the best early source, the eight-
century historian Bade, the Jutes came in 449 in
response to a plea from the Celtics king,
Vortigern, who wants their help against the Picts
attacking the north.
• The Angles, Saxons and Jutes were long time securing
themselves in England.
• On the period of King Arthur, who was not entirely
mythological, a Romanized Celt, a general, but not
probably a king , fighting went on for as long as a
hundred years before the Celts Celts were all killed.
• By 550 or so the Anglo-Saxon were finally established,
English was in England.
• We have no record of the English language until
after 600, when the Anglo-Saxon were converted
to Christianity and learned the Latin alphabets.
• In 597 within forty years, the conversion began.
• The civilization didn’t amount to much in the year
600, but it was certainly, superior anything in
England up to the time.
 THREE PERIODS OF THE HISTORY OF
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
• Old English ----runs from the earliest record-i.e. seventh century- to about
1100
• Middle English– runs from 1100 to 1450 or 1500 to the present day
• Modern English
Early Modern ---runs from 1500 to 1700
Late Modern ---runs from 1700 to the present
• When England came to history, it was divided into several more or
less kingdoms, some of which at times exercised a certain amount
of control over the others.
• The most advanced kingdom was Northumbrians, the area between
the Humber River and the Scottish Border.
• By 700 C.E. the Northumbrians had developed a respectable
civilization, the finest in Europe. Sometimes called the Northumbians
Renaissance and was the first of the several renaissance.
• It is in this period that the best of the Old English literature was
written including the epic poem Beowulf.
• In the Eight century, Northumbian power declined, and the
center of the influence moved southward to Mercia, the
kingdom of Midlands.
• A century later shifted again, and Wessex, the country of the
west Saxons, became the leading power.
• The most famous king of the West Saxons was Alfred the
Great, who reigned in the second half of the ninth century,
dying 901.
• The great bulk of Old English writing which has come down
to us is the West Saxon dialect of 900 or later.
• In the ninth and tenth centuries, the Norsemen
travelled and attack and plundered at their will and
almost with impunity.
• The Norsemen ravaged Italy and Greece, settled in
France, Russia and Ireland, colonized Iceland and
Greenland, and discovered America several
centuries before Columbus.
• After many years of hit-and-run raids, the Norsemen
landed an army on the east coast of England in the year
886.
• The long struggle ended in 877 with a treaty by which a
line was drawn roughly from the Northwest of England
to the Southwest that was called Danelaw.
• Norse was at this time not so different from English as
Norweigian or Danish is now.
• The speakers of English could understand, more or less, the
language of the new comers who had moved into eastern
England.
• There was considerable interchange and word borrowing, the sky,
give, law, egg, outlaw, leg, ugly, scant, crawl, scowl, take, thrust were
examples of the words that were borrowed first by the eastern
and northern dialects and then in the course of hundreds of years
made their way into English grenerally.
• It must be true- that the Norsemen
influenced the sound structure and the
grammar of English.
 Example of Old English

Faeder ure [thorn] u[eth]e eart on heofonum si [thorn] in

nama gehalgd. Tobecume [thorn]in rice. Gewur[eth]e
[thorn]in willa on eor[eth]an swa on heofonum. Urne
gedaeghwamlican half slye us to daeg. An forgyf us ure
gyltas swa swa we forgyfa[thorn] urum glyenduum. And ne
gelaed [thorn]u us on cost nunge ac alys of yfele.
So[eth]lice.
• The differences between Old English and Modern English are
merely differences in orthography.
• The sign æ is what Old English writers used for a vowel sound
like that in modern hat or and. The th sounds of modern thin or
then are represented in Old English by [thorn] or [eth].
• Ure is the ancestor of modern our.
• Hlaf is modern loaf.
• Old English had some sounds which we do not have, like the
sound represented by y does not occur in Modern English.
• In grammar, Old English was much more highly inflected than Modern
English is.
• Old English nouns had four cases: nominative, genitive, dative,
accusative. Adjectives had five-all these and an instrumental case
besides.
• Present day English has only two cases from nouns-common case and
possessive case. Adjectives now have no case system at all.
• We now use more rigid word order and more structure words (preposition,
auxiliaries, and the like) to express relationships than Old English did.
• In vocabulary Old English is quite different from Modern
English.
• Most of the Old English words are what we may call native
English; that is, words which have not been borrowed from
other languages but which have been a part of English ever
since English was a part of Indo-European.
• Old English did contain borrowed words.
• The great majority of Old English words were native English.
• Of the words from The American College Dictionary
only about 14 percent are native.
• Of the thousand most common words in Englilsh,
some 62 percent are native English.
• The Modern Vocabulary is very much Latinized
and Frenchified, the Old English Vocabulary was
not.
• Between the year 1000 and 1200 various important changes took
place in the structure of English and Old English became Middle
English.
• The political event which facilitated these changes was the
Norman Conquest. The word Normans came originally from
Scandinavia.
• In the year 1066, led by Duke William, they crossed the Channel
and made themselves master of England. For next several
hundred years, England was ruled by kings and whose first
language was French.
• French became the language of the
court, the language of nobility, the
language of the polite society, the
language of literature, but it did not
replace the English language as the
language of the people.
• English, though survived s the national
language, was profoundly changed after
the Norman Conquest.
• Ever before 1066 the case system of
English nouns and adjectives was
becoming simplified.
•French ceased, after hundred
years ago or so, to be native
language of very many people in
England.
•French word came
into English, all sorts
of them.
• All of the example mentioned and more were poured into
English vocabulary between 1100 and 1500., until that
time, many people must have had more French words
than English at their command.
• Most of the high frequency words-the pronouns, the
prepositions, the conjunctions, the auxiliaries, as
well as a great ordinary nouns and verbs and
adjectives-were not replaced by borrowing.
• Middle English, then, was still Germanic language,
but it differed from Old English in many ways.
• Languages don’t become simpler; they merely
exchange one kind of complexity for another.
• Modern language is not a simple language, as any
foreign speakers who try to learn it will hasten to
tell you.
Famous passage from the General Prologue to the
Canterbury Tales, fourteenth century

Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse.

That of hir smyling was ful simple and coy;
Hir gretteste oot was but by Seint Loy;
And she was cleped madame Eglentyne.
Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne.
Entuned in hir nose ful seemly,
And Frenshe she spak ful faire and fetisly,
After the scole of Stratford-ate-Bowe,
For Frenshe of Parys was to hirse unknowe.
• Sometimes between 1400 and 1600 English
underwent a couple of sound changes which
made language of Shakespeare quite different
from that of Chaucer.
• Incidentally, these changes contributed much
to the chaos in which English Spelling now
finds itself.
• One change was the elimination of a
vowel sound in certain unstressed
positions at the end of words.
• The change was an important one because
it affected thousands of words and gave
different aspects to the whole language.
•The Great Vowel Shift was a
systematic shifting of half a
dozen vowels and diphthongs in
stressed syllables.
• The vowel shift has meant also that we
have come to use an entirely different set
of symbols for representing vowel sounds
that is used by the writers of such
languages as French, Italian or Spanish, in
which no such vowel occurred.
• These two changes, then, produced basic
differences between Middle English and
Modern English.
• One of the developments that had an affect
upon the language was the invention of
printing, an invention introduced to England
by William Caxton in the year 1472.
•The period of Early Modern
English- that is, the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries-was also the
period of the English Renaissance,
when people developed.
•The greatest writer of the Early
Modern English period is of
course Shakespeare, and the
best-known book is the King
James Version of the Bible,
published 1611.
•Sound changes have take place
between Early Modern
English and the English of the
present day.
•The history of English since 1700
is filled with many movements
and counter movements, of
which we can notice only a
couple.
• In a part a product of the wish to fix and establish the language
was the development of the dictionary.
• The first English Dictionary was published in 1603; it was a list
of 2,500 words briefly defined.
• Samuel Johnson published his English Dictionary in 1775.
• In America, Noah Webster published his dictionary in 1828.
• The twelve volume Oxford English Dictionary, compiled in the
course of seventy-five years through the labour of many
scholars.
•Another product of the
eighteenth century was the
invention of “English
Grammar”.
• The most important force in the
development of English in the modern
period has been the tremendous
expansion of English-speaking peoples.
• In 1500 English was minor language,
spoken by a few people on a small island.
Thank You!!