Context Flashcards
The Celts
Southern Europe from around 12,000 years ago
Immensely successful at spreading through western europe
Celts of the La Teine culture enter the British isles from about 500-100 B.c.
Language gradually broke into separate Celtic langs; The Brythonic - Welsh, Cornish and Cumbria. The Gouldelic- Irish, Scots Gaelic.
Purely a phonological language but became a written one after Roman conquest, adopted Roman script.
Teh traces of Celtic
- Lexis and grammar- nil
- About 30 original Celtic words (often domestic) rug, rasher, rafter
- Tag questions
- Some place names
- Words taken later from Welsh, Scots, Gaelic
Roman occupation 43 AD-410 AD
- Conquest 43 AD
- Language of the Roman army, governors and administration, of a Romano-British upper class
The Roman withdrawal
- The last Roman forces left Britain in 410 AD
- South and east coasts were already suffering from Germanic invaders.
Traces of Latin
- Directly, very few: Latin and Celtic had existed in parallels, not blending
- The use of Latin in the alphabet
- Indirectly the influence is enormous; the Roman occupation brought Britain int the latin using world and became the language of the court, law, medicine and adminstration.
- Latin- derived words are 29% of modern English vocab
Anglo-Saxon Germanic
- The Germanic invaders:
- the invaders spoke various dialects of West Germanin
- Occupied the East and South coast, other areas remained Celtic
- Disparante tribes of Angles, Saxons, jukes, and Frisians…late fourth and early fifth century A.D.
- After the withdrawal of the Roman army, the raids turned into settlement by conquest
Romane-British Celtic war
- Celts emigrated to Celtic fringe (Scots, Ire, Wales)
- As tribes merged into larger kingdoms and eventually one, the various dialects also merged into standard form: Old English or Anglo Saxon.
The persistance of Latin;
- Remained in use for official purposes, all the more after the pagan Anglo-Saxons were Christianised.
The Germanic language
Anglo-Saxon was used for writing Englands first epic poem produced in the British Isles, Beawulf.
Germanic makes up around 26% of the dictionary vocabulary items of the modern English language but far in the percentage of actual spoken or written words.
More commonly used words (percentage of: first hundred 97%, first thousand 57%, second 39%)
The Viking Norse
Language of Vikings (800 A.D – 1000 A.D) forming Old Norse- contribution is limited to the English language.
Under pressure from land, raiders from Scandinavia (Norway + Denmark( attacked the east and south coasts of England, the coasts of Scotland and the islands and the coasts of Ireland from the late eighnth century.
As had been the vase with the Anglo-Saxon, raiding turned increasingly to settlement by conquest and by the mid-ninth century a Viking Kingdom had been established in the North.
Traces of norse
Norse has left behind a very large number of place-names
There are only about 300 Norse derived words in modern English (including shirt, skirt, window)
The normans
Duke William of Normandy has a claim to the English throne when it fell vacant in 1066, they defeated the Anglo-Saxons
Ownership of Land moved from the English nobility to the Norman nobility, creating a small ruling class of Normans controlling majority of Anglo-Saxons
Reconnects English with the Latin branch of the family.
Norman french
Spoke the dialect of the Longue d’eouil, the modern version of medieval French. They continued to speak this among themselves but had to communicate with the English majorly.
The two languages existed in parallel but the two interacted, with Norman French words entering English, while English influenced Norman, creating Anglo-Norman
Traces of Norman
We became a non-inflected Indo-European language
About 29% of the dictionary root words in English (modern) are of French origin
The French was relatively unaffected (that is, with few changes in the form of words according to it’s role)
Under the influence of French English became slowly less inflected
Anglo-Saxon- less inflected than caletic and Latin in verbs
Middle English (c.1100-1430)
From the twelfth to the fourteenth century English developed further into the Middle English
‘Chancery English’ the form used for official purposes in London, gradually spread.
Norman was dominant language in 1066
English became more widely used by the educated upper class and by 1423, English was used universally again.
This English was completely different to the Old English, became known as Middle English.
Middle English features
Grammar:
Became much simpler, reflecting the way two languages had to co-exists
- Inflections disappeared (all plurals ended -es, -en, or –s)
- French Lexis - Especially legal, religious and administrative.
- Pronunciation - Great vowel shift
- Latin words- Thousands of Latin words found in French, replaced Old English terms. An estimated 85% of Old English words.
Early modern English
From.the fifteenth centur into the sixth tenth, as total government became more centralised and more powerful.
The English of London increased in influence and the Language became more standardised.
The introducing of printing in the late 1470’s accelerated this process.
By mid-16th English had became recognisable as the modern language.
Early modern English
In 1476 William caxton brought the printing press to Britain.
Texts now mass produced, movement towards standardisation. In terms of spelling and pronunciation.
Many Greek and Latin texts were translated into English.
Caxton chose the East Midlands (London, Oxford and Cambridge) dialect to print works. Soon became the most prestigious form.
Features of modern english
European Renaissance: Needed new terms for concepts e.g. Psychology
World exploration: Brought words from Africa, Asia etc
Shakespeare: Coined around 1700 new words e.g. courtship and eyeball. (Either coined them or was first to write them down)
The printing press
William Caxton, 1476
Helped to standardise the English language
Before the printing press, there were several dialects across England, meaning that there was great regional diversity between English speakers.
The language of print was based on the London dialect. Different regions began to write in this form. This meant that the written form of English language became standardised.
Phonetics – early modern English period
- The letter ‘I’ and ‘y’ are used interchangeably to represent the same phonetic sound - /I/
Gyven -> given
Vylonce -> Violence
- The final ‘silent’ –e was much more commonly found, not only as a marker of a ‘long’ vowel in the preceding syllable (as in ‘take’)
Often this has no phonetic function, and sometimes after an unnecessarily doubled final consonant.
- U and v were variations of the same letter
The form v was used at the beginning of a word and u in all other positions, regardless of whether the sound was a vowel or a consonant.
