An Outline History of the English Language
An Ou t l i n e Hi s t o r y o f t h e En g l i s h La n g u a g e
by Frederick T. Wood
(An Imprint of Laxmi Publications Pvt. Ltd.) BANGALORE • CHENNAI • COCHIN • GUWAHATI • HYDERABAD JALANDHAR • KOLKATA • LUCKNOW • MUMBAI • RANCHI • NEW DELHI INDIA • USA • GHANA • KENYA AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
© 2015 by Laxmi Publications (P) Ltd. All rights reserved including those of translation into other languages. In accordance with the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise. Any such act or scanning, uploading, and or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the copyright holder’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained from the publishers. Printed and bound in India Typeset at Shubham Composer First Edition: 1941; Second Edition: 1969; Revised Edition: 2015 ISBN 978-93-5138-093-1
Limits of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and the author make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties. The advice, strategies, and activities contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. In performing activities adult supervision must be sought. Likewise, common sense and care are essential to the conduct of any and all activities, whether described in this book or otherwise. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable or assumes any responsibility for any injuries or damages arising herefrom. The fact that an organization or Website if referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers must be aware that the Internet Websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. All trademarks, logos or any other mark such as Vibgyor, USP, Amanda, Golden Bells, Firewall Media, Mercury, Trinity, Laxmi appearing in this work are trademarks and intellectual property owned by or licensed to Laxmi Publications, its subsidiaries or affiliates. Notwithstanding this disclaimer, all other names and marks mentioned in this work are the trade names, trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
& Bangalore 080-26 75 69 30
& Chennai 044-24 34 47 26, 24 35 95 07
& Cochin 0484-237 70 04, 405 13 03
& Guwahati 0361-254 36 69, 251 38 81
Published in India by & Hyderabad 040-27 55 53 83, 27 55 53 93 Branches & Jalandhar 0181-222 12 72
& Kolkata 033-22 27 43 84
(An Imprint of Laxmi Publications Pvt. Ltd.) & Lucknow 0522-220 99 16 113, GOLDEN HOUSE, DARYAGANJ, & Mumbai 022-24 91 54 15, 24 92 78 69 NEW DELHI - 110002, INDIA Telephone : 91-11-4353 2500, 4353 2501 & Ranchi 0651-220 44 64 Fax : 91-11-2325 2572, 4353 2528 www.laxmipublications.com C— [email protected] Printed at: Contents
Preface to the Second Edition vii Preface to the First Edition viii I The Origin of Language 1–7 II The Descent of the English Language 8–16 III The Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period 17–41 IV The Middle English Period 42–67 V The Renaissance and After 68–81 VI The Growth of Vocabulary 82–113 VII Change of Meaning 114–147 VIII The Evolution of Standard English 148–157 IX Idiom and Metaphor 158–171 X The Foreign Contribution 172–193 XI Conclusion 194–208 Bibliography 209–210 Index of subjects 211–215 Index of words and phrases 217–230
Preface to the Second Edition
In the present edition minor changes have been made throughout the book, but the more radical and extensive ones occur in the second half of it. A number of examples that had become somewhat dated by the lapse of time, or had been treated as neologisms, have been removed, and many new words that have come into English over the past twenty-five years have been added. The influence of American English upon that of Great Britain has been dealt with at greater length than before, and the chapter on Standard English has been considerably revised in the light of the changing attitude towards the whole conception of a ‘standard’ of speech. Something has been said on the ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ debate, and on the influence of television and present-day journalism on both the spoken and the written forms of the language. Finally, the bibliography has been revised and brought more up to date by the inclusion of works which have appeared since the book was originally published in 1941.
Frederick T. Wood March, 1967 Preface to the First Edition
The present book has been written in the belief that there is room for a work which will serve as an introduction to the history of the English language for those who have little or no previous knowledge of the subject. A number of excellent treatises by specialists in this branch of English studies already exist (a selection of them is given in the bibliography), but for the most part they are not books for the beginner. Either they are too detailed for his requirements, or they assume, and demand, a certain amount of previous knowledge which he does not possess. There are, too, several very competent and interesting books on etymology and the history of words, but this is only one side of language study. The present volume claims to be no more than an outline and an introduction, but at the same time it seeks to treat all the more important aspects of the subject—vocabulary, grammar, syntax, pronunciation, sound-change, etymology, etc.—in as simple, clear and methodical a way as possible. The type of reader I have had in mind is, on the one hand, the young student who is required by certain examining bodies to have some acquaintance with the history of the English language for the purpose of their Higher School Certificate and similar examinations, and, on the other, the more general reader who wishes to know something of how his mother-tongue has developed. For this reason I have tried to avoid a too academic approach to the subject and have striven rather to give it a living interest by keeping the attention, even when dealing with past developments, upon English as it is spoken and written today. Thus in touching upon sound-changes, for instance, mention has been made only of those which have left a definite mark upon the English of the twentieth century and help to explain its chief characteristics, as well as its apparent anomalies or peculiarities; those which are of historical interest only have been excluded. Words chosen for discussion and illustration have been selected on the same principle. Preface ix
Obviously, the more languages a student of English can read, the better equipped will he be for his task and the easier and the more vitally real will it become for him. But here again I have assumed no more than would normally be acquired as the result of a grammar school education: that is to say, a working knowledge of French and Latin, none of Old English, and little of Middle English outside Chaucer. Should it happen that one is acquainted with any other languages, especially German, so much the better. In dealing with pronunciation and sound-change, too, as far as possible the employment of phonetics has been avoided. Instead an attempt has been made to indicate sounds by reference to similar ones in present-day English words. My debt to such authorities as Jespersen, Bradley, Wyld and Weekley will be evident throughout the text, often when no specific mention is made of it; and like all students of, and writers upon, the English language, I have had frequent recourse to the Oxford Dictionary, whose help has been indispensable. I must also thank a number of personal friends for valuable assistance: viz., my colleagues Mr. D. H. Carding-Wells and Mr. J. A. Over for advice on the Spanish and Italian contributions respectively, Mr.G. A. Birkett, Head of the Department of Russian in Sheffield University, for help with Russian words in English, Dr. Imrich Tarjan for collaboration on Czech and Hungarian words, and Dr. Clarice E. Tyler for reading the entire typescript and offering a number of valuable suggestions.
Frederick T. Wood Sheffield September, 1941
Chapter I The Origin of Language
efore setting out to make a study of the development of the English Blanguage over the past fifteen hundred years or more, there are one or two elementary facts concerning language in general that we should get clearly into our minds. It may perhaps be felt that they are sufficiently obvious to most intelligent people to render any mention of them unnecessary; but they are, nevertheless, apt to be overlooked, and since it is impossible to appreciate fully the significance of the various forces which have been at work behind and within our language, governing, determining and directing its evolution, unless we are first of all aware of these few essential facts concerning language in general, they are set down here as briefly and as concisely as possible. The first thing to realise is that language is primarily something that is spoken, not written. The introduction of a system of recording thought and speech by writing (and later by printing) was a very important step forward, and without it we should be very largely ignorant of the ways of life and the modes of thought of our ancestors. We should be completely shut off from the great minds of the past, and it would be quite impossible for us to undertake such a study as the present one, since we should have no means of knowing anything about the language of the people who lived in this country five hundred or a thousand years ago, and still less should we be in a position to relate that language to the tongues spoken in other countries. The only means we have of knowing the kind of language used by Julius Caesar or by King Alfred the Great—the words they 2 An Outline History of the English Language employed and the grammatical structure of their speech—is by studying such contemporary written documents as have survived; and in the main that will still be the method employed by future generations when they wish to investigate the language of our own age, though they will have an additional convenience in the invention of the gramophone and the tape- recorder. Now because of this necessity of relying on written documentary records for linguistic research and because reading and writing have come to occupy so large a place in our daily lives, there has grown up a tendency to think of language in terms of the written or printed word.1 But printing and writing are only substitutes for speech. In its primary sense language, as the term implies, is oral. That printing and writing have certainly had an influence on the development of language—usually displaying a conservative tendency, inimical to too rapid change or innovation—we shall see at a later stage of this book; but in the last resort what is written is determined by what is said.2 Secondly, we must realise that language is (and always has been) evolutionary, not static. Change is constantly going on. If we look at a passage from Chaucer (who was writing towards the end of the fourteenth century) and compare it with the English that is spoken and written today, it is obvious that the language has altered considerably in the intervening five hundred years or more; and if we go even further back to the early Anglo-Saxon period, we find an even greater difference. In fact, Anglo-Saxon is much more unlike Chaucer’s English than Chaucer’s English is unlike ours.3 The same is revealed by a comparison of modern
1 This is probably behind the practice, more frequent in the nineteenth century than today, of writing the indefinite article as an before a letter u, even if it is pronounced with the y sound; e.g. an universal law, an unique specimen, etc. Even Cardinal Newman called his famous work The Idea of an University. 2 I am, of course, aware that we speak of ‘sign language’, ‘deaf and dumb language’, etc. and that many authorities consider that the earliest language was not spoken but rather a matter of gesture (see pp. 6–7); but in applying the term language to these methods of communication we are really using it metaphorically; and in any case they all lie outside the sphere of linguistic study. The term language, as used of historical times, refers solely to communication by means of speech or writing, and of these two the former is the basic and primary one. 3 For a specimen of Chaucer’s English, see p. 46, and of Anglo-Saxon, pp. 19–20. The Origin of Language 3
French with Old French, or of the Latin of Caesar, Vergil and Ovid with its present-day descendant, modern Italian. These facts are really too self-evident to need pointing out. But though this evolutionary factor is obvious and generally recognised, there is frequently a tendency to assume that it is a thing of the past, and that, in all ‘civilised countries’ at least, language has now become more or less set and fixed, so that the English, the French or the German of today will be the English, the French or the German of two centuries hence, except that new words will be added to express new ideas and new inventions. This is far from the truth. Certainly there are agencies at work which will make change less easy than it has been in the past, but there are also others that will facilitate it; and that change is still going on, in pronunciation, in grammar and in the actual significance attached to words, anyone who has reached middle-age can prove from his own experience. Grammatical constructions which were looked upon as barbarisms and distinctly ‘bad English’ in his schooldays are now tolerated; words which twenty years ago were regarded as slang have now attained to respectability; a few ‘reformed’ spellings are creeping in, while partly from what might be termed ‘natural causes’, partly because of American influence exerted through the cinema and the television, and partly through the attempts of the B.B.C. to establish a ‘correct standard’ for its announcers, the pronunciation of a number of words is in process of modification. It seems reasonable to assume that the farther back in the history of language we go, the easier and more rapid was the process of change, for those forces making for conservatism were less active. When men lived in small, isolated communities, often leading a wandering life, when they felt no necessity for recording what they said or thought, there was probably more fluidity about their speech than at a later age. So it happens that the greatest and perhaps some of the most important developments in the history of language took place at a period when the documentary evidence from which they might be studied is practically non-existent. In the third place, it should be realised that speech or language is the distinguishing characteristic of man as such and is one of the chief attributes which differentiate him from the other animal species. Every tribe or race of human beings speaks a language of some kind. The lower animals merely An Outline History of the English Language
40% OFF
Publisher : Laxmi Publications ISBN : 9789351380931 Author : Frederick T.Wood
Type the URL : http://www.kopykitab.com/product/11073
Get this eBook