Baca Juga
A glance at the history of English
As we have seen, English belongs to the Germanic group of languages, originally spoken in continental Europe. The ancestor of English spoken on the continent is called Pre-Old English. The separation of this language from the rest of the Germanic family took place in the 5th century, when the tribes known as Saxons, Angles and Jutes left the continent and invaded Britain, which was then inhabited by various Celtic peoples, who – according to medieval chronicles – were currently at war with each other. The name English, as the invaders’ descendants later started to call themselves, derives from the name of the Angles. Different tribes settled in different regions, establishing a basis for dialectal differences.
1. Old English
Old English, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, differed from Modern English at all linguistic levels. The phonological system included certain phonemes that are not present in Modern English, while others which now belong to the English phoneme system were not used then or were used only as variants of other sounds pronounced in specific environments. Morphologically, a very important characteristic of Old English was a verbal and nominal inflection system rather rich in comparison with the Modern English one. Nouns were classified for grammatical gender (Masculine, Feminine or Neuter), inflected for several grammatical cases (Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative) both in the PLURAL and the SINGULAR. Adjectives were likewise inflected and they had to agree with the nouns they modified in number, case and gender. Verbal morphology also showed a greater variety of endings than today. Syntactic patterns were in many ways different as well. For example, unlike in Modern English, questions and negative sentences were formed without the do auxiliary. Clauses in which the object preceded the verb were common, though the today familiar subject–verb–object order was also possible.
2. Middle English
The next period, MIDDLE ENGLISH, which started at the end of the 11th century, was ushered in by the political event known as the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Normans were French speaking people, who, after defeating the English at the battle of Hastings, took over all political power in Britain. As a result, the English-speaking aristocracy was replaced by a French-speaking one. This created a totally new sociolinguistic situation for English, which continued to be spoken as “the language of the people” but lost its earlier status as the language of the royal court, the law, etc. Still, the necessity of communication between the ruling Normans and the oppressed Saxons led to the gradual emergence of a new form of language, neither Anglo-Saxon, nor French, but a new English language, which in time became the language of a nation comprising the descendants of both Saxons and Normans. The inflectional suffixes of verbs, nouns and adjectives were greatly reduced in number. This morphological change was the result of a phonological change: namely, that the vowels of unstressed syllables all became /e/, which later changed into /_/. The change levelled many of the formerly different morphological forms of verbs, nouns and adjectives. One result was the reinterpretation of the remaining s ending found in the plural forms of certain nouns as a general plural morpheme. Another development affected the syntax of the language: clauses with subject-verb-object order gradually gained ground until SVO became the dominant word order pattern. These and other changes, however, did not take place in a uniform way all over the area where English was spoken. Dialectal differences were significant throughout the whole Middle English period.
It is easy to suspect that the vocabulary of Middle English contained a huge number of words of French origin – and many of these words are still part of the English language. Have you ever wondered why the living animals are called cow, pig and sheep in English while their meat is beef, pork and mutton, respectively? The answer is that the living animals have names of Anglo-Saxon origin, while the names of the meat from them are French loanwords – a curious division, which points out the social differences: those who looked after the animals were Anglo-Saxons, while those who ate them were mainly Normans. Still, the changes that took place in Middle English are much greater than simply the replacement of a part of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary by French loanwords: very significant changes happened in the grammar as well.
3. Modern English
The Great Vowel Shift
English entered its next period called MODERN ENGLISH in about 1500.
At the beginning of this period (known as Early Modern English) a series of important changes happened in the vowel system of English. These changes together are called the Great Vowel Shift. It included the raising of long vowels, which means that they started to be pronounced with a tongue position one step higher than before. This explains why English spelling differs so strikingly from other European spelling systems in the representation of vowels: why, for example, the vowel of feed (/i:/) is spelt with the letter e in English. The reason is that it goes back to the one step lower /e:/ sound and the spelling still preserves the pre-Vowel Shift situation. A similar change explains the spelling of present-day /u:/ in boot as well. The originally “highest” long vowels, original /i:/ and /u:/, instead of being raised, became diphthongs (see Ch. 2 Phonetics & Phonology). So, the /aI/ in divine goes back to long /i:/, as the spelling still shows. Similarly, the vowel in house or town originates in /u:/; although this time the origin is not indicated in spelling.
