The History of English: An introduction

Hi, and thank you for reading my blog. You will be pleased to know that I am back in the Blogosphere after a long summer break. My next few articles are going to follow a series, documenting the origins of the English language, and the many changes it has undergone since its humble beginnings.

As we shall see, English has risen from relative obscurity to the most widely spoken language in the world in the space of about 1,500 years. In that time, English has changed to such an extent that the varieties of English that were spoken in 500 AD would be completely incomprehensible to our ears. Understanding the written works of Shakespeare can be a little challenging, so you can imagine how much harder it would be to understand somebody who lived over a thousand years prior to that!

The English language has undergone numerous changes over the years, some of which are trivial and others of which are striking. In terms of vocabulary, English has gained a great deal of loanwords from other languages, while conversely, many native words have been lost or replaced. The meaning of some words has changed over time, too.

Also, English has undergone many sound changes. To give one example of many, English once had the 'ch' sound in German acht, or the Spanish 'j' in ojo (Crystal, 2003); this is a sound that linguists call the voiceless velar fricative. This sound no longer occurs in English, except in dialectal Scottish pronunciations of loch. Wherever you find a <gh> combination, as in though, enough and right, there was once a velar fricative.  

The language has also undergone many other sound changes; probably one of the most famous examples is Great Vowel Shift, which altered the pronunciation of the English long vowels.

English has also undergone changes in its morphology (roughly, word endings) and its syntax (the way in which sentences are constructed; roughly: word order).

In terms of morphology, Old English, which was spoken from roughly 450  - 1200 AD, had many more inflections (word endings) than does Modern English. 

An inflection is the modification of a word to express a change in tense, number, gender, case, etc. We still have the -s plural and the -'s possessive ending on nouns, and the past tense -ed inflection on verbs, but by and large, English has lost the rich set of inflections it once had.

The written language has also changed, although it hasn't always kept up with changes in pronunciation.

Due to the various changes it has undergone, English now looks very different to its Germanic cousins; even its closest relatives Dutch, German and Frisian do not appear to resemble English very much. But modern English doesn't even look much like the varieties of English that were spoken over a thousand years ago.

To give you a taste of what English looked like over a millennium ago, here is an extract from an Old English poem, The Battle of Maldon, which describes a battle that the Anglo-Saxons fought against the Danes in 991:

"hige sceal þe heardra heorte þe cenre
mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað
her lið ure ealdor eall forheawen
god on greote a mæg gnornian
se ðe nu fram þis wigplegan wendan þenceð"

A relatively direct translation of the passage would be:

The mind must be the firmer, the heart must be braver, 

the courage must be the greater, as our strength grows less. 

Here lies our lord all cut to pieces, 

the good man on the ground. 

If anyone thinks now to turn away from this war-play, may he be unhappy forever"

(Translation from anglik.net - see footnote for full reference)

What is this crazy language?

As you can see, very little of the extract is comprehensible to us, though you might be able to make out the odd word. Heorte looks a bit like heart, for example, and if you bear in mind that the <þ> and <ð> characters are now represented as <th> in Modern English, then you can see that þis is indentical to this. Also, þenceð, or thenceth, doesn't look that different to think.

The second word in the first and second line, sceal, looks a bit like shall, although it is translated as must in this passage. When you consider that <sc> represents the 'sh' sound in ship, the link between sceal and shall comes even clearer.

But on the whole, Old English is completely incomprehensible to us. It needs to be studied like a foreign language. So, in this series of articles, I am going to show the ways in which English has changed - and stayed the same - over the years.

In my next entry, I am going to go into some more detail about the origins of English - where the ancestors of the first English speakers came from, how they interacted with the people already living in Britain, and how Old English arose from a collection of different dialects.

References:

http://www.anglik.net/oldenglish.htm (2011) 

Crystal, D. (2003) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge