English language and literature studies

War, Isolation, And English

English is often referred to as a "bastard" language due to the fact that it has so many sources. Though technically a Germanic language there is also a heavy Latinate influence that occurred over the millennia of English's spread, beginning in the time that Romans first set foot on the British Isles and continuing through direct and indirect influence from French, Spanish, and other romance languages; so much so that now less than half of the words in the modern English lexicon are actually etymologically rooted in the Germanic family (Marsh, 89). This kind of change is inevitable in any language where the speaking population is not in total isolation, and even then language may still adapt and develop as society changes. The unique history of the British Isles and the subsequent history and influence of the English-speaking world, however, makes the development of English especially volatile and interesting. It was Great Britain's mixture of geographical isolation and extreme centrality in terms of world events for much of its history that forced its unique evolution; more specifically, it was the history of warfare and occupation within and radiating from the British Isles and the later British Empire that made English the eclectic language it is today.

The association of war with English and the isolation of the British Isles both began playing into the history of the English language in the fifth century, with a series of invasions from the Germanic tribes of the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, all of whom spoke a similar language (English Club, par. 1). The Celtic peoples who populated the island at the time were pushed across the sea to Ireland, and north to Scotland and west to Wales on the main island, establishing the Germanic peoples and their language as the supreme and dominant force on the British Isles (English Club, 2). Neither the Celts nor the Germanic peoples who pushed them out were especially peaceful people, and it was only through intense bloodshed that English began to exist in such a concentrated form. This form, however, called Old English by today's scholars, is not even recognizable to the lay reader as English (Merriam Webster, par. 6). Many of its words appear to have much more in common with modern day German than they do with English. In fact, at this point in the language's history and for several centuries to come, English was not the official name of the language -- Marsh notes that the collective peoples occupying the main portion of the large island of Britain "often spoke of themselves as Saxons, [and] of their language as the Saxon speech" (Marsh, 44). The label of English for the language -- and England for the country -- was derived from the name of the Angles tribes (Anglik.net, par. 4). Though the Germanic tribes are usually referred t as the Anglo-Saxons, history has rewarded only one of these groups with a language.

Though it was war -- or at least bloody intertribal fighting -- that established Old English, it was isolation that allowed it to evolve in its own way, free for a time from being superseded by the more common romance languages on the European mainland. This did not mean that the English language and the peoples on the British Isles were completely without outside influence, however, but their isolation did restrict this influence to the scant effects of the Latin brought over with Christianity (Marsh, 56). Because of the island's isolation, English remained largely unchanged from the seventh century, from when the earliest written records of the language date, to the eleventh century (Merriam Webster). Though the words are definitely Germanic, the syntax of the early Anglo-Saxon language was unlike anything evidenced in mainland Europe, giving Old English a unique start in addition to a fertile place in which to evolve, increasing the effects of the language's isolation (Marsh, 47).

It was in the eleventh century that war again caused a major shift in the English language, though its effects were not immediate. In 1066, William the Conqueror and his army of Normans established themselves as the dominant power in Britain, and the form of French they brought with them quickly became the language of the powerful classes in British society, while the lower classes still spoke English (English Club, 3). For the second time in just over five-hundred years, a major conquest of the Isle of Britain was conducted by an invading tribe with a foreign tongue. This time, however, the existing language and people were not replaced, but instead the Latin influence of the Norman tongue began to seep into English, creating the first elements of a "bastard" tongue (Anglik.net, 6). Words such as "beef" and "cow" illustrate how the class difference that existed at first between speaker of the Norman and Anglo-Saxon languages eventually resulted in a language with a greater diversity of words than any other -- cow has a Germanic root, and was originally an Anglo-Saxon word, whereas beef is Latinate, and was spoken by the Normans, but now both are common English words (Anglik.net, 7). This effect only deepened when English came back into grace.

Isolation in the period following the Norman conquest was not so intense, but it was enough of a presence to allow English to romanticize slowly, absorbing and adding Norman elements rather than being replaced by them (Merriam Webster, 13). Certainly, the grammatical structure of the developing language did not find its root in Latin or the romance languages. Despite Marsh's assertions that the early Anglo-Saxon tongue had nothing in common with contemporary mainland grammatical structures, Albert Baugh and Thomas Cable assert that modern English has a definite grammatical relationship with the other Germanic languages (Baugh and Cable, 9). They all agree, however, that one of the benefits of English as a world language is in the breadth of its vocabulary and the subtle shades of meaning it is capable of, which would not be the case without the multiple sources of Middle English and the geographical ability of the language to ferment, as it were, into the intoxicatingly accurate and yet elusive language that it is today (Baugh and Cable, 9; Marsh, 93).