 The history of English - Middle English (2/2) and Modern English (1/2)

 Modern English (2/2)

The History of english:

-old
-middle
-modern

OLD ENGLISH 450-1150

Ang-saxon invasion
 Angles
 Saxons
 Jutes
 Frisians
 Celts had to moved
Ang -sax tribes Denmark and Northern Germany also spoke a dialect Western ( німец)

The Heptarchy-unity of country

-West saxon and Kentish in the South
-Anglian in the North
Christianization
-St. Augustine
-597AD

Latin
-educated ruling classes
-Church functionaries
-Church dignitaries and ceremonies:
-priest, vicar, altar, mass, church, bishop, pope, nun, angel, verse, baptism, monk, eucharist,
candle, temple, presbyter
-Domestic words
fork, spade, chest, spider, school, tower, plant, rose, lily, circle, paper, sock, mat, cook
- ecclesiastical Latin loanwords
chorus, cleric, creed, cross, demon, disciple, hymn, paradise, prior, sabbath

Old English literature

-Northumbria
-Caedmon( poet) Caedmon’s Hymn
- 7 th Century
Old English: the language
-Many genders, forms, inflections
- Common words: water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, be, of,
he, she, you, no, not
-sk=sh
Skield-shield Disk-dish Skip-ship
The Scandinavian invation
- Norsemen
- Danes+ Norwegians
- 8th to 11th c.
The Scandinavian invasion
-Alfred the Great (848-899)
-878: treaty between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings
-Danelaw
-Danish influence

Danish influence
- many place names ending in
-by, -gate, -stoke, -kirk, -thorpe, thwaite, -toft
Whitby, Grimsby, Ormskirk, Scunthorpe, Stoke Newington, Huthwaite, Lowestoft, etc
- "son" ending on family names Johnson, Harrison, Gibson, Stevenson
- Anglo-Saxon equivalent "ing"
Manning, Harding

Old Norse
-direct alternatives or synonyms Pronouns: they, them, their
-Anglo-Saxon cratt and Norse skill Loss of inflections: prepositions: to, with, by
wish and want
dike and ditch
sick and ill
raise and rear
wrath and anger

MIDDLE ENGLISH 1150-1500

William the Conqueror
1066
William the Conqueror, duke of Normandie, invades England.
Victory at the battle of Hastings
He becomes King.

The Norman Conquest

- French nobility + high clergy
- first Latin then French became the official language of England
French = spoken by the aristocracy
English = the language of the people
Latin = the written language.

The Norman influence

10,000 words
abstract nouns ending in the suffixes "
'-age "-ance/- ence" "ant/-ent", "-ment", "ity" and "-tion"
starting with the prefixes
"con-", "de-", "ex-". "trans-" and "pre-".

The Norman influence

- Crown and nobility (e.g. crown, castle, prince, count, duke, viscount, baron, noble,
sovereign, heraldry)
- Government and administration (e.g. parliament, government, governor, city)
- Court and law (e.g. court, judge, justice, accuse, arrest, sentence, appeal, condemn,
plaintiff, bailiff, jury, felony, verdict, traitor, contract, damage, prison)
- War and combat (e.g. army, armour, archer, battle, soldier, guard, courage, peace, enemy,
destroy)
- Authority and control (e.g. authority, obedience, servant, peasant, vassal, serf, labourer,
charity)
- Fashion and high living (e.g. mansion, money, gown, boot, beauty, mirror, jewel, appetite,
banquet, herb, spice, sauce, roast, biscuit)
- Art and literature (e.g. art, colour, language, literature, poet, chapter, question)

BUT
Ang-sax words
Cyning-king
Cwene-queen
Erl-earl
Chiht-knight
Ladi- lady
lord

The Norman influence

Humble trades retained their Anglo-Saxon names (e.g. baker, miller, shoemaker, etc)
Skilled trades adopted French names (e.g. mason, painter, tailor, merchant, etc).
Animals in the field kept their English names (e.g. sheep, cow, ox, calf, swine, deer)
Animal as food had French names (e.g. beef, mutton, pork, bacon, veal, venison,

The Norman influence

-French word completely replaced an Old English word
-Sometimes French and Old English components combined to form a new word: gentleman.
-Sometimes, both English and French words survived, but with significantly different
senses

Rise of English
-In the 13th century, king John Lackland lost Normandy and English became more frequent
in the aristocracy.
-From the 14th century, English became progressively the official language of the country.
-London: business and commercial centre of England

Dialects of England
Mercian
Oxford in 1167
Cambridge in 1209
East Midlands
Stigmatization of other dialects: lack of social prestige/education

Language change
-Loss of inflections
-Stress shift and loss of suffixes
-Unstressed "schwa"
-Word order became more important
-By Chaucer
-SVO
-The "Ormulum"
-Biblical text
-late 12th century
-phonetic' spelling

Passage from the "Ormulum"

Middle English
Piss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum,
Forr bi batt Orrm itt wrohhte.
Icc hafe wennd inntill Ennglissh
Goddspelless hallghe láre,
Affterr batt little witt batt me
Min Drihhtin hafebb lenedd.
Modern English
This book is named Ormulum,
because Orm created it.
I have turned into English
the Holy Gospels' lore,
according to that little wit that
My Lord has granted me

History and ME
-English emerged as the language of England
- The Hundred Year War against France (1337 - 1453)
-The Black Death (1349 - 1350 )
Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Canterbury Tales
1380s
First great works of English literature
Chaucer and new words
-500 different French loanwards
-2000 new words
-paramour, difficulty, significance, dishonesty, edifice, ignorant
-churlish, friendly, learning, loving, restless, wifely, willingly
-absent, accident, add, agree, bagpipe, border, box, cinnamon, desk, desperate, discomfit,
digestion, examination, finally, flute, funeral, galaxy, horizon, infect, ingot, latitude, laxative,
miscarry, nod, obscure, observe, outrageous, perpendicular, princess, resolve, rumour,
scissors, session, snort, superstitious, theatre, trench, universe, utility, vacation, Valentine,
village, vulgar, wallet, wildness > Yuliia Konopelniuk: John Wycliffe's Bible

John Wycliffe’s Bible

-1384
-John Wycliffe (Wyclif)
-Translation of "The Bible"
-vernacular English
-1,000 new English words
barbarian, birthday, canopy, child-bearing, communication, cradle, crime, dishonour,
emperor, envy, godly, graven, humanity, glory, injury, justice, lecher, madness, mountainous,
multitude, novelty, oppressor, philistine, pollute, profession, puberty, schism, suddenly,
unfaithful, visitor, zeal, etc
Chaucer's pronunciation
-Similar consonants
-/r/ is rolled
-/h/ sometimes dropped
•Consonant combinations, such as "kn,"
• Similar short vowels
• The long vowels are regularly and strikingly different. This is due to what is called The Great Vowel
Shift.
The Great Vowel Shift
-Systemic changes of long vowels
-late Middle English period (roughly the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare)
-Radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries
-Otto Jespersen: "The great vowel shift consists in a general raising of all long vowels" (A Modern
English Grammar, 1909).
A chain shift
Consonant changes
-The Old English consonant /×/ disappeared
-"-burgh", "-borough", "brough" or "bury"
-Some consonants ceased to be pronounced at all
-the final "b" in words like dumb and comb
-the "I" between some vowels and consonants such as half, walk, talk and folk
-the initial "k" or "g" in words like knee, knight.
-Beginning of postvocalic /r/ vocalization (better, bard)
Fricatives [fl, [0], and [s]
• In V_V, voiceless fricatives become voiced
OE > ME
Ras [ra:s] (rose) risan [rizan] (to rise) > rose, rise
Wif, wifas > wife, wives
This voicing does not happen after geminated consonants: Cyssan > kiss
Gemination
-Simplification of geminated consonants in the north (13th c) and spread to the rest of the country in
the early 15th c.
They were kept in the spelling
Before they disappeared, they caused the clipping (shorter duration) of the preceding vowel.
Big -> bigger
Put -> putting
Man › manned
Phonemicisation of the voicing contrast in Middle English
-The voicing opposition becomes phonemic in Middle English and voiced and voiceless consonant
appear in all the postions
- Word initial
-OE feder » Midole English vader

MODERN ENGLISH 1500-1945

Fewer changes
-Absence of invasions
-Apparition of the notion of a norm
Grammarians
-From the 18th century onwards.
-Introduce regularity, logic and stability in the language
-Introduced rules and distinctions

Diffusion of the norm

-Introduction of the English Printing Press (invented by Gutenberg in 1450, first English one
in London by Caxton in 1478); which fixes orthography
-Development of reading among the upper class (18th century)
- Development of literacy (end of the 19th c)
- Development of the mass media (20th century): radio and TV spread the same norm. >

Early Modern English

Tudor English 1453 - 1660
Classical English 1660 - 1815

Tudor English 1453 - 1660

Christopher Marlowe / William Shakespeare/ Francis Bacon/ Ben Jonson/ John Milton / the
Renaissance/ the "Elizabethan Era" / the "Age of Shakespeare".

Tudor English 1453 - 1660

-deliberate borrowings
-Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) = the language of education and scholarship

-genius, species, militia, radius, specimen, criterión, squalor, apparatus, focus, tedium, lens,
antenna, paralysis, nausea
-horrid, pathetic, pungent, frugal,area, complex, concept, invention, technique, temperature,
capsule, premium, system, expensive, notorious, gradual, habitual, insane, ultimate, agile,
fictitious, physician, anatomy, skeleton, orbit, atmosphere, catastrophe, parasite,
sarcasm, paradox, chaos, crisis, climax

1526, William Tyndale printed his 'New Testament'

1549, the "Book of Common Prayer"
1611: the Authorized, or King James, Version of "The Bible"

The King James Bible

-Conservative version
-digged for dug, gat and gotten for got, bare for bore, spake for spoke, clave for cleft, holpen
for helped, wist for knew, etc
-archaic forms: brethren, kine and twain.
-The "-eth" ending is used throughout for third person singular verbs, even though ". es" was
becoming much more common by the early 17th century
-ye is used for the second person plural pronoun, rather than the more common you.

William Shakespeare
late 16th and early 17th century
verification of nouns (= conversion):
Whe pageants us vit out-herods Herod dog them at the heels the good Brutus ghosted ~ Lord
Angelo dukes it well uncle me no uncle
William Shakespeare
vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some counts)
2,000 neologisms or new words
-bare-faced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial,
gnarled, homicide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, countless, submerged, vast, lack-lustre,
bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated, assassination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hot-blooded,
laughable, dislocate, accommodation, eventful, pell-mell, aggravate, excellent, fretful,
fragrant, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy

William Shakespeare
Fixed word order: SO
complex auxiliary verb system
Variable past tenses: clomb/climbed, clew/clawed, shove/shaved, digged/dug, etc.
Plural noun endings: just -s and -en
Verb ending:
"en" (loven) > " eth" (e.g. loveth, doth, hath, etc) > "-es" (loves) > Yuliia Konopelniuk:

International trade
16th and 17th Century
loanwords were absorbed from the languages of many other countries throughout the world >

Classical English: 1660 - 1815

Daniel Defoe
Jonathan Swift
Alexander Pope
Henry Fielding
(William Wordsworth, Byron, Shelly, Keats)

Classical English: 1660 - 1815

-Development of the press: The Tater in 1709, The Guardian in 1711.
-Gradually the whole country will start to practice English according to a uniform model
-Interest in philosophy and languages
- The first English grammars appeared, first descriptive then prescriptive:
- English Grammar, by Lindley Murray in 1795
- First dictionaries, including the 'Dictionary of the English language' by Samuel Johnson in
1755

Late Modern English

Late Modern English: 1815 -1945
Contemporary English: 1945 – 2020

Late Modern English

Industrial revolution
Expansion of science and technology.
Enrichment of the lexicon according to new technical and scientific data.

The Industrial Revolution

neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries.
Latin and Greek
oxygen, protein, nuclear and vaccine
-lens, refraction, electron, chromosome, chloroform, caffeine, centigrade, bacteria,
chronometer, claustrophobia

Development of education
In 1880: compulsory education up to 10 years
14 years in 1914, 15 years in. 1944
Multiplication of middle-class public schools
Multiplication of universities
standardization

Contemporary English: 1945 - 2020

-enrichment of the lexicon of science and technology
-The influence of American English
• American dominance in economic and military power, as well as its overwhelming
influence in the media and popular culture

RP and dialects
-language snobbery in England
-1917, Daniel Jones introduced the concept of Received Pronunciation (sometimes called the
Queen's English, BBC English or Public School English)
-educated middle and upper classes
Radio in the 1920s
Television in the 1930s
Regional accents were further denigrated and marginalized
Some change since 1945