History and evolution of the English language

English by Time

To borrow from Robert McCrum, co-author of "The Story of English," English, which embodies a set of principles, has had a great influence on the world: "In a very real sense it contains, encoded within it, an innate declaration of independence. www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5013771159" ("Spreading the Word; Restore" A19)

Language is an ever changing, evolving and organic element of culture. Within the spoken and written word of any given language, at any given time and in any given society are countless clues as to the nature of that society and what is and is not important to it. English is no exception to this rule, as it has evolved substantially over the last as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it, speaking in Washington in 1999, "The values of liberty, a bold sense of adventure and ability to adapt and change are mirrored in this language, four-fifths of whose vocabulary was borrowed from other languages. www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5013771159" ("Spreading the Word; Restore" A19)

Despite the impression that language is a fixed element of life, as we visually see it on the printed page, language is an organic, living aspect of how sound is produced, and sound a much more mutable element is in constant flux from time to time and place to place.

He is likely to forget that writing is only a conventional device for recording sounds and that language is primarily speech. Even more important, he does not realize that the Latin of Cicero or the French of Voltaire is the product of centuries of development and that language as long as it lives and is in actual use is in a constant state of change.

Baugh 17)

Williams in Origins of the English Language points out that language is much like history, where individuals in the modern expect the "truth" of history to be a set of facts that detail exactly what happened, when and how in a linear and unchanging way, within the past, when in reality, "Such histories have never existed and never will." (3) Such language has never existed either, as one can trace the reflection of language as common shorthand for sound through history with relative ease.

Old words die out, new words are added, and existing words change their meaning. Much of the vocabulary of Old English has been lost, and the development of new words to meet new conditions is one of the most familiar phenomena of our language. Change of meaning can be illustrated from any page of Shakespeare. Nice in Shakespeare's day meant foolish; rheumatism signified a cold in the head. Less familiar but no less real is the change of pronunciation. A slow but steady alteration, especially in the vowel. Sounds, has characterized English throughout its history. Old English st-n has become our stone; c? has become cow.

Baugh 3)

English is evolutionary and has demonstrated many period of rapid and subtle change that are evident in its spoken and written form, finally to culminate into what many would consider a global language.

England before English

Many people have a difficult time divorcing England from English, as if the region were dominated by its "native language for its entire historic record, and this is simply not the case. England has a historic history and prehistoric history as a region that has been occupied for probably longer than we can trace but at least 50,000 years, by conservative modern estimates.

Baugh 47) Prior to the adoption and development of English the region was populated by people with a variety of unknown languages, but as Baugh points out undoubtedly they had languages, as all society as far back as can be traced has some form of sound communication akin to a language. Sadly, very little is known about the languages of these earlier times.

Baugh 47) English according to Baugh has in fact only been the common language of England for about fifteen hundred years.

Baugh 47)

Borrowed Vocabulary

One aspect of English that will become notable in nearly every period of it history is the fact that so much of the English language in both character and vocabulary is borrowed form other languages. Cultural melting, wars, conquests and simple exposure or ease of use and the relative flexibility of spoken English to adopt words and syntax from other languages have combined to produce a calico of a language. Many consider this one of English's greatest assets. Baugh traces the calico nature of the language in a relatively fluid manner, both concisely and comprehensively.

English is classified as a Teutonic language.... It belongs to the group of languages to which German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian also belong. It shares with these languages similar grammatical structure and many common words.

Baugh 9)

Conversely Baugh is also quick to point out that unlike other Teutonic languages its similarities tend to end with a few words and grammatical structure.

A more than half of its vocabulary is derived from Latin. Some of these borrowings have been direct, a great many through French, some through the other Romance languages. As a result, English also shares a great number of words with those languages of Europe which are derived from Latin, notably French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. All of this means that English presents a somewhat familiar appearance to any one who speaks either a Germanic or a Romance language....To a lesser extent the English vocabulary contains borrowings from many other languages. Instead of making new words chiefly by the combination of existing elements, as German does, English has shown a marked tendency to go outside her own linguistic resources and borrow from other languages. In the course of centuries of this practice English has built up an unusual capacity for assimilating outside elements.

Baugh 9)

Lastly Baugh offers a modern post-colonial example of the phenomena in the language as he makes a list of several words which can only have come from the Americas, and yet still find themselves in most of the spoken language today. "We do not feel that there is anything 'foreign' about the words chipmunk, hominy, moose, raccoon, skunk, all of which we have borrowed from the American Indian."

Baugh 9)

Old English

The first forms of written English are in the form of Old English, though a great deal of this language has been lost, and/or replaced by its newer cousins. What is known about Old English is limited understandings of how many dialects of the language were spoken and where they were spoken.

We can distinguish four dialects in Old English times: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. Of these Northumbrian and Mercian are found in the region north of the Thames settled by the Angles. They possess certain features in common and are sometimes known collectively as Anglian. But Northumbrian, spoken north of the Humber River, and Mercian, between the Humber and the Thames, likewise possess each certain distinctive features. Unfortunately we know less about them than we should like since they are preserved mainly in charters, runic inscriptions, a few brief fragments of verse, and some interlinear translations of portions of the Bible. Kentish is known from still scantier remains and is the dialect of the Jutes in the southeast.

Baugh 60)

From this basic regional understanding the leavings of history have left Old English and a modern understanding of it to a limitation of a single dialect, that of the West Saxon dialect.

It was the dialect of the West Saxon kingdom in the southwest. Nearly all of Old English literature is preserved in manuscripts transcribed in this region. With the ascendancy of the West Saxon kingdom the West Saxon dialect attained something of the position of a literary standard, and both for this reason and because of the abundance of the materials it is made the basis of the study of Old English.

Baugh 60)

It was also during this period that the Scandinavian cultures greatly influenced the English language. Some of this influence remains but much of it has been lost due in part to the revolution that the Norman conquest brought to language and culture and the preeminence of other vocabulary offerings from other languages in many cases the new words could have supplied no real need in the English vocabulary. They made their way into English simply as the result of the mixture of the two races. The Scandinavian and the English words were being used side by side, and the survival of one or the other must often have been a matter of chance.

Baugh 118)

So as they were accepted they were again lost. Baugh speaking of the short lived dominance of West Saxon as a unifying or standard English was short lived

Such a start as it had made toward becoming the standard speech of England was cut short by the Norman Conquest which, as we shall see, reduced all dialects to a common level of unimportance. And when in the Middle English period a standard English once more began to arise it was on the basis of a different dialect. (60)

The Norman conquest had forever altered the face of history and the face of the English language.

Middle English

The period thought of as the Middle English period roughly from 1150-1500 is a period that is demonstrative of the massive changes associated with the Norman conquest. Though there is some evidence that French did not completely overtake English in common or official use the language had a great influence upon English via the Normans and the elasticity of the language at its source.

The Middle English period (1150-1500) was marked by momentous changes in the English language, changes more extensive and fundamental than those that have taken place at any time before or since. Some of them were the result of the Norman Conquest and the conditions which followed in the wake of that event. Others were a continuation of tendencies that had begun to manifest themselves in Old English. These would have gone on even without the Conquest, but took place more rapidly because the Norman invasion removed from English those conservative influences that are always felt when a language is extensively used in books and is spoken by an influential educated class. The changes of this period affected English in both its grammar and its vocabulary. They were so extensive in each department that it is difficult to say which group is the more significant. Those in the grammar reduced English from a highly inflected language to an extremely analytic one. 1 Those in the vocabulary involved the loss of a large part of the Old English word-stock and the addition of thousands of words from French and Latin. At the beginning of the period English is a language which must be learned like a foreign tongue; at the end it is Modern English.

Baugh 189)

The fact that English still remained or returned as the dominant language in England after the conquest is testament to the idea that the language did not go completely out of use during the Norman period. Document history is testament to the resurgence of English as the written language of choice on the Island.

The first English documents discovered in the British Museum and Public Record Office belong to the second third of the fourteenth century. 1 it is true these are not frequent until the reign of Henry VI (1422-1461), but they point to the coming supremacy of English. The oldest private records in English yet found in the British Museum belong to the years 1375 and 1381, these being original documents of Wiltshire, preserved in London. The oldest London documents are of 1384 and 1386. The earliest petition to Parliament in English is one from the Mercers of London, bearing the date of 1386. 2 the earliest English will in the London Court of Probate is of the year 1387, 3 while the earliest statutes of the Guilds written in English date from 1389. 4 as another evidence of the disuse of French, it may be noted that from 1385, the eighth year of Richard II, Latin was commonly used instead of French, although for some time before this the latter had been almost exclusively used. The first English "Answers" by the king to petitions and bills in Parliament are of 1404. From the time of Henry VI (1422) private records are commonly in English.

Emerson 73)

Emerson in his very brief but comprehensive retracing of the document history stresses that English did again reign supreme, likely in part to its continued vernacular use as proof of the fact that the Norman conquest did not seem to go about, in any concerted way to erase English from the region, as some other conquests in Europe had done. England is absent of the kind of cultural cleansing that form complete alterations in language and education.

Colonial Period

Events associated with the dominance of the English in the colonial world were significant in the way that the language developed, yet it is also clear that the far reaching effect on the language is less than its effect on the world, as it has spread to a large degree, an issue which will be discussed later in this work.

Baugh 356) Yet, this is with the exception of the colonization of America by England, as this event over time profoundly effected the language, which has become its own dialect as a result of use and exposure to variations in isolation of the UK. Subsequently the dominance of America over the world, and especially the world of technology, progress and international business has furthered the spread of American English across the world.

Baugh 406)

Scientific/Industrial Changes

Many experts on the English language are quick to point out that modern changes in the English language are due in part to rapid industrialization and scientific progress, as such periods are common sources of new vocabularies and vocational word usage. Baugh when speaking about the colonial period and how the events of it changed the nature of English stressed that this period was not as influential culturally as it was scientifically.

Some of these events and changes are reflected in the English vocabulary. But more influential in this respect are the great developments in science and the rapid progress that has been made in every field of intellectual activity in the last hundred years. Periods of great enterprise and activity seem generally to be accompanied by a corresponding increase in new words. This is the more true when all classes of the people participate in such activity, both in work and play, and share in its benefits.

Baugh 357)

Changes and adaptations in science, industry and even leisure activities have forever altered the landscape of the English language, adding vocabularies where such are needed to express new ideas, concepts and objects.

A the great developments in industry, the increased public interest in sports and amusements, and the many improvements in the mode of living, in which even the humblest worker has shared, have all contributed to the vocabulary. Among recent circumstances affecting the life of almost every one have been the world wars and the troubled periods following them. We shall find them also leaving their mark on the language.

Baugh 357)

This transitions this work into what can only be called modern English and further into what will later be defined as Global English.

Modern English

Though Baugh stresses the evolutionary nature of modern English through industry and cultural development Emerson stresses that modern English has actually seen only limited change and adaptation, beyond vocabulary.

Compared with English in the Old and Middle periods, the history of the modern standard speech is exceedingly simple. First, the language of London has remained the standard written form since its establishment, subject only to the changes incident to any language. There has been since Middle English times no great revolution affecting language materially, no conquest by a foreign nation such as that of the Danes or the Normans in the Old English period. Nor has there been any such radical change from within, as that by which West Saxon English in the oldest age was finally replaced by Midland English as the standard speech of later times.