Appunti lingua inglese II

English Language II D – Lawson

What is English?

English is a global language, but...

When and where was it born?

How did it evolve? How did it spread around the globe? What languages are related to English? What other languages influenced English? The last one is even evolving today. The Celtic language was one of the first known to be recorded in Britain before the following invasions of the island by the Angles, the Saxons, the Normans, and the Vikings. Celtic tribes (coming from Europe) lived in Britain in the Iron Age for over 500 years until the arrival of the Romans. The Celts in Europe: they covered a vast way of the continent and Ireland and most of England.

The Roman invasion

Another important moment was when Julius Caesar conquered Britain in 55 BC and Claudius in 43 AD, but it wasn't permanent or really influential. Influence is limited to England. Latin was never the language of the people, it was only the language of the ruling class (pre-Christianity). Rome introduced Latin words in commerce, religion, army, some places' names, etc. Christianity introduced more Latin in the English language later on.

Periodisation in the history of English

• Old English (450-1100)
• Middle English (1100-1500)
• Early Modern English (1500-1700)
• Late Modern English (1700-1900/1950)

These periods are a convenient way of reference to a "typical" state of language, but the dates are arbitrary. They should only really be used as a general guide.

Stage one: Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

The structure of English has changed dramatically during the last millennium. This change was caused by internal (structural) and external (political, social, and cultural) factors. Old English language, also called Anglo-Saxon, is the language spoken and written in England prior to 1100; It is the ancestor of both Middle English and Modern English. Scholars and historians place Old English (OE) in the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages. It involved both linguistic structure (spelling, lexis, pronunciation, grammar) and language use (genre conventions, forms of address, etc.).

Different Germanic tribes coming from current Denmark conquered Britain in 449 AD. The Angles and the Saxons were very important and gave English its basic vocabulary and structures. English is Teutonic in essence. Here you can see the flows: The structure of English has changed drastically during the last millennium; this change caused by internal (structural) and external (political, social, and cultural) factors.

449: the traditional start of the OE period; this date is given by Bede in “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People” (Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, completed in 731) 5th and 6th centuries: the settlement of England by three Germanic-speaking tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes). These tribes spoke languages or dialects of the West-Germanic branch of the Germanic language family. The Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain, speaking similar Germanic languages and preferring to speak their own languages rather than the Celtic language spoken by the Britons.

Old English regional variation-dialects

• Northumbrian was spoken in northern England and south-eastern Scotland;
• Mercian was spoken in central England;
• Kentish in south-eastern England;
• West Saxon in southern and south-western England;

Mercian and Northumbrian are frequently classed together as the Anglian Dialects, most extant Old English texts are in the West Saxon dialect. The first great period of literary activity in England occurred during the reign of Alfred the Great in the 9th century.

Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

The basis for Old English and the English language was formed by the common core of the dialects of these tribes of invaders. The linguistic consequences of Christianization (starting at the end of 6th century): the runic writing did not disappear, but gradually abandoned after the Roman alphabet had been introduced by the Christian monks.

The Roman alphabet was adopted to write down the sounds of OE, but the twenty-three Latin letters were insufficient to reproduce all OE sounds. So extra letters had to be borrowed from the Germanic runic alphabet to write down distinctive OE sounds. In adapting the Latin alphabet to Old English the monks used the phonetic way: every letter was pronounced, there were no “silent” letters, for example “know”->”cnawan” or “write”->”writan”

New words were usually created by “native means”, for example by using elements of the existing word stock together with a large inventory or prefixes (elements which are added at the beginning of a word) and suffixes (elements which are added at the end of a word). Together prefixes and suffixes are called affixes. A prefix will only modify the meaning of the word, a suffix could alter the meaning and ensure that the word fits grammatically into a sentence. So with a suffix we can make a word into a noun, an adjective, or an adverb.

Old English word formation

The most common process of word-formation were derivation (prefixation, suffixation) and compounding. A morpheme is a “linguistic building block” and we can use a combination of morphemes to make words. Derivation is characterized by the addition of an affix, what we can also call a bound morpheme, to a base. Compounding consists of the combination of two or more lexemes to form a new word. For example:

The OE lexicon was exceptionally transparent: the meaning of the derived or compounded word could be easily deduced.

Old English lexis

This native resourcefulness accounts for a fairly low proportion of loanwords in OE (approximately 3%). The OE vocabulary was purely Germanic, although some foreign influence was exerted especially by Latin.

The University of St Andrews (Scotland) has created an online resource of 500 OE words that can be considered core words; You can access it here: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~cr30/vocabulary/

Old English core vocabulary

Most of OE Germanic words disappeared at a later stage in the history of the language: 85% of the estimated 30,000 recorded OE lexical words are no longer in use.

Latin became the language of an original literature culture in the monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England, which was distinguished especially by its illuminated manuscripts of parchment.

3 periods of Latin influence on the OE vocabulary

1. Continental borrowing (ca. 170 words): contacts between the Germanic tribes and the Roman empire on the Continent (mainly Roman traders and armies). A global language requires the movement of people. Back in the days, the people traveled either to conquer, to invade, or for trade. Borrowed items are mainly connected with war and trade (camp “battlefield/battle”, weall “wall”, win “wine”).
2. Borrowing during the first centuries of settlement: insignificant Latin influence passed on by the Romanised Celtic Britons who spoke a form of Latin (ceaster “town”, port “harbor”, which are names we can see also today for example in names of towns).
3. Borrowing due to the influence of the Christian religion (Christianization): a more extensive borrowing from Latin, with several hundred words entering OE.

597: Arrival of Christian missionaries

In 597 Christian missionaries began to arrive in Britain. They brought scripts from the Bible as well as manuscripts all written in Latin; thereby adding a vast amount of Latin vocabulary to Old English. Scribes began to write manuscripts, writing words the way they sounded as there was no standard spelling: each scribe would provide proofs of the various dialects of Old English.

Vocabulary referring to the matters of religion, education, and learning

Maesse “mass”, altare “altar”, scol “school”

The 10th-century monastic revival: the so-called Benedictine Reform (2nd half of the 10th century). Its main aims were to improve education, establish schools and encourage learning among monks and the clergy.

Lindisfarne Gospel

One of the great masterpieces of medieval western art. Dated conventionally to the first decades of the 8th century, the manuscript is adorned with beautiful carpet-pages, miniatures of the evangelists, and decorated with initials. It contains the usual prefatory material and canon-tables, followed by texts of the Gospels of Sts Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The colophon added at the end of the volume declares that the scribe was Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne (from 698 to 721), that the book was bound by Æthelwald, and that the metalwork and jewels of its cover were made by Billfrith the Anchorite. The text of the whole manuscript is also notable for containing an interlinear Old English gloss, added by Aldred, provost of Chester-le-Street 970.

New Latin importations

We can describe them as learned, scientific character vocabulary typical of written, formal and educated language (for example literary and medical terms).

Old English vs Modern English: a predominantly synthetic language vs a largely analytic language

Old English

Synthetic language that marks grammatical categories and syntactic functions in a sentence mostly by means of inflectional endings, which are groups of letters that change the meaning of a word and they can tell many things indeed depending on the inflectional ending. OE was a morphologically complex language: most word classes in OE changed their form to express grammatical meaning. In OE, nouns, adjectives, personal and demonstrative pronouns were inflicted for case, number, and gender. There are four cases which are:

• Nominative
• Genitive
• Dative
• Accusative

OE verb inflection followed the categories of person (first, second, third), number (singular, plural), and mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative). Four classes of verbs were distinguished. Old English was not static. No living language is static. Its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, sometime after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is an arbitrary process. Baugh, in his book on the history of English language (published in 1951) dates Old English from 450 to 1150, and it was a period of full inflections, a synthetic language. Perhaps around 85% of Old English words are no longer in use, but those that survived are the basic elements of Modern English (Baugh 1951).

OE word order, that is the sequence of the constituents in a sentence, could be fairly flexible. The most common recurrent patterns were:

• Subject-Verb-Object order
• Verb-Subject-Object order
• Subject-Object-Verb order

How many words in current English derive from OE? Practically all of the most common words in English come from Anglo-Saxon: the pronouns, the prepositions, the articles, and the auxiliary verbs. Basically, the framework of the language. If you pick most of the one-syllable words (a, it, friend, world, etc.) and many of the two-syllable words (water, under, after, etc.) you have chances that you have picked a word that has been around since Anglo-Saxon times. According to a study cited by McCrum (in The Story of English), all of the first hundred of the most common words in English are of Anglo-Saxon origin. This means that Anglo-Saxon provides the building blocks of the language we still use today.

Modern English

Analytic language marks grammatical categories and syntactic functions in a sentence mainly by using other means, for example, word-order, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs. In modern English, the dominant pattern is the S-V-O order. Although it’s possible to use the Verb-Subject-Object order (the inverted word order) only in:

• Interrogative sentences
• Conditional clauses without
• Declarative sentences that begin with negative or restrictive words (for example words like never, rarely, scarcely, hardly, not only)

In modern English, syntactic functions are marked by word-order and prepositions. While OE had an elaborate system of inflectional endings for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns, Modern English is extremely poor in inflections.

What is an inflection? Inflection, in linguistics, is the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case. English inflection indicates noun plural (cat, cats), noun case (girl, girl’s, girls’), third person singular present tense (I, you, we, they buy; he buys), past tense (we walk, we walked), aspect (I have called, I am calling), and comparatives (big, bigger, biggest). Remnants of the earlier inflectional system of Old English may also be found (e.g., he, him, his).

Who came after the Normans?

The Viking Age

At the turn of the 8th century, people in present-day Scandinavian Countries like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark began to leave their homes and travel to other parts of the world (as far as North America to the west, Lapland to the north, and the Mediterranean world to the south).

The Viking Age in Anglo-Saxon English

The period of the Viking invasions was between ca. 787 and 1042:

• 1st phase: consists basically of expedition by small bands of Viking warriors, who attacked and plundered English towns and monasteries. To plunder: a violent way of stealing.
• 2nd phase: took place after across 850. There were attacks done by larger and well-organized Viking forces.
• 3rd phase: was approximately until 1042. So basically at the end of the 10th century there were fresh large-scale attacks by the Vikings, which led the rule of Danish Kings.

The Old Norse word vikingr meant an overseas expedition, and a vikingr was someone who went on one of these expeditions.

Traust me, þó (though) it may seem oddi at first, we er still very líkligr to use the same words the Vikings did in our everyday speech. Þeirra (their) language evolved into the modern-day Scandinavian languages, but þeir (they) also gave English the gift of hundreds of words.

[A note on the letter þ: the Old Norse letter, called thorn, makes the same sound as the “th” in “thin”.]

Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

The 2nd phase: End of 9th c. - the Treaty of Wedmore marks the border between the so-called Danelaw and Wessex, so this treaty led to the creation of this distinct geographical area: This was the area of Danelaw and was under Danish rules. What you can see from this map is that the Vikings arrived from the east coast but actually they managed to make a geographical penetration in the British island.

3 phases of the Viking invasion:

• 1st phase: ca. 787 to ca. 850 regular raids around the coastline of England
• 2nd phase: ca. 850 until end of 10th century consisted primarily in large-scale invasions, occupation, and settlement. England was partitioned between Vikings and English.
• 3rd phase: end of 10th century until 1042 there were four Viking kings between 1013 and 1042, including King Cnut, who was the king of Denmark and England.

Old English lexic

The OE vocabulary was purely Germanic, although some foreign influence was exerted especially by Latin. Scandinavian was the other major influence on the OE vocabulary. Norse influence may also have contributed to an important grammatical change, which mainly occurred in English between the 11th and 14th centuries, and which marked the transition to Middle English (ME) (conventionally dated c.1100-1500).

OE had indicated many grammatical categories and relationships by attaching inflections (endings) to word roots, in a similar way to Latin or German. Thus, in the OE clause ‘he wanted to find the man’, the –e on wolde indicates a 3rd person singular subject: ‘he wanted’; the –n on guman indicates that ‘the man’ is the object, not the subject of the verb; and the –an on findan indicates an infinitive: ‘to find’.

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, an early North Germanic language not that dissimilar to Anglo-Saxon and roughly similar to modern Icelandic. What we can notice is that apparently a lot of accents and pronunciations in northern England even today are heavily influenced by Old Norse, to the extent that they are largely intelligible in Iceland. Over time, Old Norse was gradually merged into the English language, and many Scandinavian terms were introduced.

Only around 150 Norse words appear in Old English manuscripts of the period, but many more became assimilated into the language and gradually began to appear in texts over the next few centuries. In all, up to 1,000 Norse words were permanently added to the English lexicon, among them, some of the most common and fundamental in the language, including skull, skin, leg, neck, freckle, sister, husband, fellow, wing, bull, score, seat, root, bloom, bag, gap, knife, dirt, kid, link, gate, sky, egg, cake, skirt, band, bank, birth, scrap, skill, thrift, window, gasp, gap, law, anger, trust, silver, clasp, call, crawl, dazzle, scream, screech, race, lift, get, give, are, take, mistake, rid, seem, want, thrust, hit, guess, kick, kill, rake, raise, smile, hug, call, cast, clip, die, flat, meek, rotten, tight, odd, rugged, ugly, ill, sly, wrong, loose, happy, awkward, weak, worse, low, both, same, together, again, until, etc. Old Norse often provided direct alternatives or synonyms for Anglo-Saxon words, both of which have been carried on (e.g. Anglo-Saxon craft and Norse skill, wish and want, dike and ditch, sick and ill, whole and hale).