Thesis on "History Evolution of the English Language"

Thesis 10 pages (3444 words) Sources: 5 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

English by Time

To borrow from Robert McCrum, co-author of "The Story of English," English, which embodies a set of principles, has had a great influence on the world: "In a very real sense it contains, encoded within it, an innate declaration of independence. www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5013771159" ("Spreading the Word; Restore" A19)

Language is an ever changing, evolving and organic element of culture. Within the spoken and written word of any given language, at any given time and in any given society are countless clues as to the nature of that society and what is and is not important to it. English is no exception to this rule, as it has evolved substantially over the last as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it, speaking in Washington in 1999, "The values of liberty, a bold sense of adventure and ability to adapt and change are mirrored in this language, four-fifths of whose vocabulary was borrowed from other languages. www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5013771159" ("Spreading the Word; Restore" A19)

Despite the impression that language is a fixed element of life, as we visually see it on the printed page, language is an organic, living aspect of how sound is produced, and sound a much more mutable element is in constant flux from time to time and place to place.

He is likely to forget that writing is only a conventional device for recording sounds and that language is primarily speech. Even more important, he does not realize that the Latin of Cicero or the French of Voltaire is the product of centuries of development and that language as long as it lives and is in actual use is in a constant state of change.

Baugh 17)

Williams in Origins of the English Language points out that language is much like history, where individuals in the modern expect the "truth" of history to be a set of facts that detail exactly what happened, when and how in a linear and unchanging way, within the past, when in reality, "Such histories have never existed and never will." (3) Such language has never existed either, as one can trace the reflection of language as common shorthand for sound through history with relative ease.

Old words die out, new words are added, and existing words change their meaning. Much of the vocabulary of Old English has been lost, and the development of new words to meet new conditions is one of the most familiar phenomena of our language. Change of meaning can be illustrated from any page of Shakespeare. Nice in Shakespeare's day meant foolish; rheumatism signified a cold in the head. Less familiar but no less real is the change of pronunciation. A slow but steady alteration, especially in the vowel. Sounds, has characterized English throughout its history. Old English st-n has become our stone; c? has become cow.

Baugh 3)

English is evolutionary and has demonstrated many period of rapid and subtle change that are evident in its spoken and written form, finally to culminate into what many would consider a global language.

England before English

Many people have a difficult time divorcing England from English, as if the region were dominated by its "native language for its entire historic record, and this is simply not the case. England has a historic history and prehistoric history as a region that has been occupied for probably longer than we can trace but at least 50,000 years, by conservative modern estimates.

Baugh 47) Prior to the adoption and development of English the region was populated by people with a variety of unknown languages, but as Baugh points out undoubtedly they had languages, as all society as far back as can be traced has some form of sound communication akin to a language. Sadly, very little is known about the languages of these earlier times.

Baugh 47) English according to Baugh has in fact only been the common language of England for about fifteen hundred years.

Baugh 47)

Borrowed Vocabulary

One aspect of English that will become notable in nearly every period of it history is the fact that so much of the English language in both character and vocabulary is borrowed form other languages. Cultural melting, wars, conquests and simple exposure or ease of use and the relative flexibility of spoken English to adopt words and syntax from other languages have combined to produce a calico of a language. Many consider this one of English's greatest assets. Baugh traces the calico nature of the language in a relatively fluid manner, both concisely and comprehensively.

English is classified as a Teutonic language.... It belongs to the group of languages to which German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian also belong. It shares with these languages similar grammatical structure and many common words.

Baugh 9)

Conversely Baugh is also quick to point out that unlike other Teutonic languages its similarities tend to end with a few words and grammatical structure.

A more than half of its vocabulary is derived from Latin. Some of these borrowings have been direct, a great many through French, some through the other Romance languages. As a result, English also shares a great number of words with those languages of Europe which are derived from Latin, notably French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. All of this means that English presents a somewhat familiar appearance to any one who speaks either a Germanic or a Romance language....To a lesser extent the English vocabulary contains borrowings from many other languages. Instead of making new words chiefly by the combination of existing elements, as German does, English has shown a marked tendency to go outside her own linguistic resources and borrow from other languages. In the course of centuries of this practice English has built up an unusual capacity for assimilating outside elements.

Baugh 9)

Lastly Baugh offers a modern post-colonial example of the phenomena in the language as he makes a list of several words which can only have come from the Americas, and yet still find themselves in most of the spoken language today. "We do not feel that there is anything 'foreign' about the words chipmunk, hominy, moose, raccoon, skunk, all of which we have borrowed from the American Indian."

Baugh 9)

Old English

The first forms of written English are in the form of Old English, though a great deal of this language has been lost, and/or replaced by its newer cousins. What is known about Old English is limited understandings of how many dialects of the language were spoken and where they were spoken.

We can distinguish four dialects in Old English times: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. Of these Northumbrian and Mercian are found in the region north of the Thames settled by the Angles. They possess certain features in common and are sometimes known collectively as Anglian. But Northumbrian, spoken north of the Humber River, and Mercian, between the Humber and the Thames, likewise possess each certain distinctive features. Unfortunately we know less about them than we should like since they are preserved mainly in charters, runic inscriptions, a few brief fragments of verse, and some interlinear translations of portions of the Bible. Kentish is known from still scantier remains and is the dialect of the Jutes in the southeast.

Baugh 60)

From this basic regional understanding the leavings of history have left Old English and a modern understanding of it to a limitation of a single dialect, that of the West Saxon dialect.

It was the dialect of the West Saxon kingdom in the southwest. Nearly all of Old English literature is preserved in manuscripts transcribed in this region. With the ascendancy of the West Saxon kingdom the West Saxon dialect attained something of the position of a literary standard, and both for this reason and because of the abundance of the materials it is made the basis of the study of Old English.

Baugh 60)

It was also during this period that the Scandinavian cultures greatly influenced the English language. Some of this influence remains but much of it has been lost due in part to the revolution that the Norman conquest brought to language and culture and the preeminence of other vocabulary offerings from other languages in many cases the new words could have supplied no real need in the English vocabulary. They made their way into English simply as the result of the mixture of the two races. The Scandinavian and the English words were being used side by side, and the survival of one or the other must often have been a matter of chance.

Baugh 118)

So as they were accepted they were again lost. Baugh speaking of the short lived dominance of West Saxon as a unifying or standard English was short lived

Such a start as it had made toward becoming the standard speech of England was cut short by the Norman Conquest which, as we shall see, reduced all dialects to a common level of unimportance. And when in the Middle English period a standard… READ MORE

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