History of English Flashcards
Main stages in the development of English
- Old English
- Middle English
- Early Modern English
- Late Modern English
- Present Day English
Old English
[450-1066] – English still retains its grammatical cases and complex verb conjugation; its vocabulary is primarily Germanic, language of the Anglo-Saxons. Poetry includes alliteration.
Middle English
[1066-1450] – due to influence from the Vikings from the Danelaw, English loses its word endings, thus brining an end to grammatical cases and complex verb conjugation [Final weakening]. This period is trilingual – English for common matters, French for crème de la crème, Latin for religion and education. Introduction of rhymed poetry.
Early Modern English
[1450-1650] – what some like to call Shakespearian English – Renaissance English. Promulgated by the creation of the printing press and increased social mobility. French loss the prestige. The Great Vowel Shift. Appearance of American English (rhotic still). Standardisation of spelling.
Late Modern English
[1650-1950] – English globalized due to the British Empire’s spread – creation of varieties of Englishes.. Rhoticity loss.
Why do languages change?
- Sociolingustic (external) causes
- Psycholingustic (internal) causes
Sociolingustic (external) causes
(a) Language contact with other nations (French, Old Norse, but also English in other languages)
(b) Social and cultural changes (the case of you)
(c) Conceptual and technological developments (computers, duh)
(d) Dialect contact within the language (North would influence the South)
Psycholingustic (internal) causes
(a) Imperfect learning/usage; internalizing mistaken usage (literally)
(b) Principle of ease/least effort/minimization of effort/people are lazy (final weakening?)
(c) Analogy
(i) Borrowing words and giving them similar grammatical form in English, as would be with verbs borrowed from French (imagine-imagined, acquired the known, regular form from
(ii) Frequency principle – if an exception in grammar is used rarely, it might disappear
Sporadic changes
creation of a new lexical item, pronunciation change of a given word, etc. – not affecting the “linguistic surroundings”.
Systematic changes
a gradual change that may affect an entire system/subsystem in a language. English has examples such as the GVS or IB
Grammaticalization in English
a process wherein lexical words change into function words;
This can be observed in e.g. the OE word willan, in the meaning of to want; Ić wille gan, I want to go, paired with an infinitive gan, through the process of semantic bleaching, evolved into the function word will, marker of future.
Why does the spelling of Present Day English bear little correspondence to contemporary pronunciation?
The spelling has systematized (EME, by e.g. the institution of Royal Chancery, and print), but the pronunciation continued to evolve and shift – even undergoing such paradigm shifts as the Great Vowel Shift, which altered the pronunciation of all the vowels. Already in the 16th century, scholars were realizing that the spelling no longer fits the pronunciation, as can be inferred from the writings of John Hart, who petitioned for just that.
Change of English from an inflectional to an analytical system
- The Vikings come
- They settle
- They slur a lot (not curse, they just can’t talk)
- They cause an inflectional breakdown
- Before the inflectional breakdown, English was inflectional
- But as inflections were no more, you could no longer put random words in random places and expect people to know which grammatical cases they were in
- Thus, the order was fixed for clarity – because people didn’t understand you otherwise!
Foreign languages that influenced English
- Old Norse – due to coexistence with the Anglo-Saxons in the North, as they’ve been granted space to live in the Danelaw. Their influence includes: (1) influx of every day vocabulary (e.g. egg, knife, skirt), even some doublets (skirt from ON, shirt from OE); (2) inflectional breakdown – the loss of grammatical inflections, thusly breaking the case system, fixing the word order, destroying grammatical gender, and more;
- Latin – (1) initially, few borrowings, mainly appearing through the Celtic Transmission; (3) Later, due to Christianization, religious words would appear in the English lexicon, as well as those related to science – and as long as science would be dominated by Latin, there would be Latin loanwords in English. (29%)
- French – although French did not influence grammar, it had massive influence on the lexicon. When in 1066 the Normans took over England, there was few of them, but they represented the elite – so naturally i.a. culture, politics, social life were dominated by the French terminology. Nowadays, still 29% of the lexicon. (food names)
