Unit – I Language and Linguistics – Shs5006

SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH UNIT – I LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS – SHS5006 UNIT-1 ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE Indo-European: Indo-European is just one of the language families, or proto- languages, from which the world's modern languages are descended, and there are many other families including Sino- Tibetan, North Caucasian, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Niger- Congo, Dravidian etc. The English language, and indeed most European languages, traces it original roots back to a Neolithic (late Stone Age) people known as the Indo- Europeans or Proto-Indo-Europeans, who lived in Eastern Europe and Central Asia Spread of Indo-European Languages Between 3500 BC and 2500 BC, the Indo-Europeans began to fan out across Europe and Asia, in search of new pastures and hunting grounds, and their languages developed - and diverged - in isolation. By around 1000 BC, the original Indo-European language had split into a dozen or more major language groups or families, the main groups being: Hellenic Italic Indo-Iranian Celtic Germanic Armenian Balto-Slavic Albanian GERMANIC The Germanic, or Proto-Germanic, language group can be traced back to the region between the Elbe river in modern Germany and southern Sweden some 3,000 years ago. The early Germanic languages themselves borrowed some words from the aboriginal (non-Indo-European) tribes which preceded them, particularly words for the natural environment (e.g. sea, land, strand, seal, herring); for technologies connected with sea travel (e.g. ship, keel, sail, oar); for new social practices (e.g. wife, bride, groom); and for farming or animal husbandry practices (e.g. oats, mare, ram, lamb, sheep, kid, bitch, hound, dung). CELTS The earliest inhabitants of Britain about which anything is known are the Celts (the name from the Greek keltoi meaning "barbarian"), also known as Britons, who probably started to move into the area sometime after 800 BC. Despite their dominance in Britain at an early formative stage of its development, the Celts have actually had very little impact on the English language, leaving only a few little-used words such as brock (an old word for a badger), and a handful of geographical terms like coombe (a word for a valley) and crag and tor (both words for a rocky peak). ROMANS Britain remained part of the Roman Empire for almost 400 years, and there was a substantial amount of interbreeding between the two peoples, although the Romans never succeeded in penetrating into the mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland. Although this first invasion had a profound effect on the culture, religion, geography, architecture and social behavior of Britain, the linguistic legacy of the Romans’ time in Britain was, like that of the Celts, surprisingly limited. This legacy takes the form of less than 200 “loanwords” coined by Roman merchants and soldiers, Such as piper(pepper), candel (candle), cetel (kettle), disc (dish), cycene(kitchen), ancor (anchor), plante (plant), rosa (rose) win (wine), butere (butter), caese (cheese sacc (sack), catte (cat), etc. JUTES Around 430AD, the ambitious Celtic warlord Vortigern invited the Jutish brothers Hengest and Horsa (from Jutland in modern-day Denmark), to settle on the east coast of Britain to form a bulwark against sea raids by the Picts, in return for which they were "allowed" to settle in the southern areas of Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.But the Jutes were not the only newcomers to Britain during this period. Other Germanic tribes soon began to make the short journey across the North Sea. The Angles (from a region called Angeln, the spur of land which connects modern Denmark with Germany) gradually began to settle in increasing numbers on the east coast of Britain, particularly in the north and East Anglia. The Frisian people, from the marshes and islands of northern Holland and western Germany, also began to encroach on the British mainland from about 450 AD onwards. Still later, from the 470s, the war-like Saxons (from the Lower Saxony area of north-western Germany) made an increasing number of incursions into the southern part of the British mainland. Over time, these Germanic tribes began to establish permanent bases and to gradually displace the native Celts. THE ANGLO-SAXONS The early Christian missionaries introduced the more rounded Roman alphabet (much as we use today), which was easier to read and more suited for writing on vellum or parchment. The Anglo-Saxons quite rapidly adopted the new Roman alphabet, but with the addition of letters such as ("wynn"), þ (“thorn”), ð (“edh” or “eth”) and 3 (“yogh”) from the old runic alphabet for certain sounds not used in Latin. later became "uu" and, still later, "w"; About 400 Anglo-Saxon texts survive from this era, including many beautiful poems, telling tales of wild battles and heroic journeys. VIKINGS By the late 8th Century, the Vikings (or Norsemen) began to make sporadic raids on the east cost of Britain. They came from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although it was the Danes who came with the greatest force. Notorious for their ferocity, ruthlessness and callousness, the Vikings pillaged and plundered the towns and monasteries of northern England - in 793, they sacked and looted the wealthy monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria - before turning their attentions further south.By about 850, the raiders had started to over-winter in southern England and, in 865, there followed a full- scale invasion and on-going battles for the possession of the country. Norman Conquest The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England) invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and court. William crushed the opposition with a brutal hand and deprived the Anglo-Saxon earls of their property, distributing it to Normans (and some English) who supported him. The conquering Normans were themselves descended from Vikings who had settled in northern France about 200 years before (the very word Norman comes originally from Norseman).However, they had completely abandoned their Old Norse language and wholeheartedly adopted French (which is a so-called Romance language, derived originally from the Latin, not Germanic, branch of Indo-European), to the extent that not a single Norse word survived in Normandy. However, the Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences, usually called Anglo- Norman or Norman French, which was quite different from the standard French of Paris of the period, which is known as Francien. The differences between these dialects became even more marked after the Norman invasion of Britain, particularly after King John and England lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France in 1204 and England became even more isolated from continental Europe. Anglo-Norman French became the language of the kings and nobility of England for more than 300 years (Henry IV, who came to the English throne in 1399, was the first monarch since before the Conquest to have English as his mother tongue). While Anglo-Norman was the verbal language of the court, administration and culture, though, Latin was mostly used for written language, especially by the Church and in official records. For example, the “Domesday Book”, in which William the Conqueror took stock of his new kingdom, was written in Latin to emphasize its legal authority.However, the peasantry and lower classes (the vast majority of the population, an estimated 95%) continued to speak English - considered by the Normans a low-class, vulgar tongue - and the two languages developed in parallel, only gradually merging as Normans and Anglo-Saxons began to intermarry. It is this mixture of Old English and Anglo- Norman that is usually referred to as Middle English. Franciscan The Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English (about three-quarters of which are still in use today), including a huge number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-age”, “-ance/-ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and “-tion”, or starting with the prefixes “con-”, “de-”, “ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”. Perhaps predictably, many of them related to matters of crown and nobility. (e.g. crown, castle, prince, count, duke, viscount, baron, noble, sovereign, heraldry); of government and administration (e.g. parliament, government, governor, city); of court and law.During the reign of the Norman King Henry II and his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in the second half of the 12th Century, many more Francien words from central France were imported in addition to their Anglo-Norman counterparts (e.g. the Francien chase and the Anglo Norman catch; royal and real; regard and reward; gauge and wage; guile and wile; guardian and warden; guarantee and warrant). Regarded as the most cultured woman in Europe, Eleanor also championed many terms of romance and chivalry (e.g. romance, courtesy, honour, damsel tournament, virtue, music, desire, passion, etc). Middle English After Normans English was the language mainly of the uneducated peasantry that many of the grammatical complexities and inflections of Old English gradually disappeared. By the 14th Century, noun genders had almost completely died out, and adjectives, which once had up to 11 different inflections, were reduced to just two (for singular and plural) and often in practice just one, as in modern English. The pronounced stress, which in Old English was usually on the lexical root of a word, generally shifted towards the beginning of words, which further encouraged the gradual loss of suffixes that had begun after the Viking invasions, and many vowels developed into the common English unstressed “schwa” (like the “e” in taken, or the “i” in pencil).

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