HIS110 - The History of English - An Overview

[0:03] Hello! In this short e-lecture, I would like to introduce all those students with little or no background in linguistics to the development of English through time. The development of English can be subdivided into five periods. The beginning, that is the time before the English arrived. The Old English period from 600 to 1100, the Middle English period from 1100 to 1500, the Early Modern English period from 1500 to 1700, and the period of present-day English from 1700 until today.

[0:40] So let's move back in time and start more than 2,000 years ago. The first Indo-European speakers to arrive on the landmass, now called England, were probably the Celts. We do not know exactly the date of their arrival, But they were already on the British Isles several centuries earlier. before the birth of Christ. Beginning in 55 BC, Julius Caesar, The Roman emperor... made several attempts to invade Britain.

[1:11] But it was not before 50 after Christ... That most of the land was under Roman domination. Except... for the northern part, which remained unconquered. Hadrian's Wall represents the borderline. England became Rome's westernmost outpost and was gradually Romanized. In 410 a.C., the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain, leaving chaos. The Picts raided from the north, and the Scots from Ireland, while the Jutes and the Saxons attacked the eastern coasts.

[1:51] Throughout the 5th and 6th century, - The Britons were slowly driven back into the mountain areas of Cumbria and Wales. Germanic speaking tribes replaced the Celtic peoples. The earliest period in the history of the English language is referred to as the Old English period. And the origin of this Old English period goes back to the 5th century, after Christ when Germanic tribes invaded Britain. These tribes were The Saxons.

[2:24] the angles, and the jutes. Linguistically, the Old English period is generally defined as from 600 to 1100 after Christ. Due to the strong Germanic and especially the strong Saxon influence, the Old English period is often also referred to as Anglo-Saxon English. Its geographical extension was approximately identical with today's area of England. Like its ancestor languages, Old English was synthetic, with numerous agglutinating tendencies.

[2:59] It inherited most phonological and morphological properties from Germanic, and had a relatively free word order. Let's listen to an example. Zephlood ut yevat "Thaflotan stoden Yerovah" Vikinga fellah Who is Jernah? "Het sa helitha" 好嘞啊。 held on fabricia we in we have no See where's Hatton Wulfstan?

[3:34] Kavne with his kuna. That was Kael and Sulu. Sey so'ne forman man mit his Franken aufschert. Fair Baldly cost on thob' rich a stope. Ver stodon mit wolfstane wiegen und forchte, Alvaro And Makos, "Modi et veem" "Sa nolden acsam fordas leam gewirken, "Akif has lice, with tha fynd verden" "Tzahuile, Zehi, Webnah, Weldon Mostyn.

[4:17] The beginning of the Middle English period coincides with the Battle of Hastings. The key event in the Norman conquest of England when William, Duke of Normandy, after the battle known as William the Conqueror, defeated the English under King Harold II in October 1066. The Norman conquest brought massive changes to England's political and social structures, and it had an enormous impact on the English language. After the Norman conquest, England's social and political structures underwent dramatic changes, such as an almost complete replacement of the English aristocracy by a Norman aristocracy.

[4:58] English largely lost its status and became the language of the lower classes. especially among the nobility in literature, law and in official documentation, it essentially disappeared as a written language. The year... 1204 marks the turning point when King John, nicknamed John Lackland, lost his English possessions in France, leading to a gradual decline of French as an official language in England. By the 13th and 14th centuries, even the children of the English nobility no longer learned French as their native language.

[5:36] English had become the new medium of instruction. Although French remained the official language of England well into the 14th century, two events of that time sealed its fate. The first was the black death. When between 1348 and 1351, one third of the people in England died. This led to enormous labour shortages and an increase of the prestige of English, which was the language of the working class.

[6:08] Another event was the Hundred Years' War from 1337 to 1453, which led to a loss of all continental holdings without which the English, no longer had important reasons for learning and using French. The end of the Middle English period is marked by several historical incidents where the first two had an enormous impact on the development of English. the introduction of the printing press to England in 1476 by William Caxton, which led to standardization of the English language and the beginning of colonization after 1500 after the discovery of America in 1492, which eventually led to a global spread of the English language.

[6:59] And then of course the inauguration of Henry VIII in 1509, who eventually cut the links to Rome and the Catholic Church. So by 1500... English had begun to obtain a new position from a regional European language to a global system of communication. Due to Latin and French influences, a new language had evolved by the mid 14th century. Middle English was Germanic at the core, but had an extensive Roman vocabulary.

[7:31] Furthermore, in Middle English, the structural complexity of Old English had disappeared. The many linguistic developments which identify the Middle English period are most evident in the poetry and prose of the second half of the 14th century. Let's listen to an example from Middle English from The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer. One that April, with his show-resorter, The druht of March hath parsed to the rotor and bathed every vein in switched liqueur of which virtue, engendered is the floor, Juan Zephyrus, Eek, with his sweet breath in spiritus In every halt and haste.

[8:23] the tenderer Kropos and the younger Sona "Hath in the ram" He's halve kurs, Ihr Honor. And small folds make melodies "Nazlepen alve nicht." with open ear. so pricketh him Nature in here courages Than a long gone folk to go on pilgrimages. and palm-rests for to saken strongest round us To fern halves.

[8:55] "Cul in sundry Londis" The beginning of the early modern English period coincides with the ascendancy... of Henry the 8th to the throne in 1509. The end of the early modern English period is marked by the completion of the great vowel shift and the beginning of the scientific age at around 1700. Most influential with regard to early modern English were the works of William Shakespeare. For this reason, early modern English is often alternatively referred to as Shakespearean English.

[9:30] By the end of the Middle English period, most of today's syntactic and morphological patterns had been established. Early modern English was fairly analytic, The word order had already become quite fixed to subject-verb-object due to a reduced inflectional system, and of the five Old English cases, only two had survived. The great change that classifies early modern English as a new period is mainly phonological in nature. Between 1450 and 1650, five of the seven long vowels of Middle English were raised, and two became diphthongized.

[10:11] This great vowel shift finally made English intelligible to the modern ear. The revival of classical scholarship during the Renaissance brought Latin and Greek loanwords into the language. Scientific writers were often in need of new words and thus borrowed in abundance from these languages. Not all of these borrowings, though, survived. Anyway, let us illustrate early modern English using an example from Shakespeare's set of sonnets. Here is sonnet number 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

[10:49] Though eart more lovely and more temperate, Roof winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lays hath all too short a date. Some tame to hot... The eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed. And every fair from fair sometime declines By chance our nature's changing course untrimmed. But thy eternal sumer shall not fad, nor lose possession of that fair thou ost, Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shed.

[11:29] when in eternal lanes to tame though grossed So long as man can breathe or eyes can see. So long lives this. And this... gives life to thee. By about 1700, the English language differed only slightly from present day English. The most important development was external. It concerned the position of the English language among the languages of the world. From a regional language, it developed to the most widely used language of our time.

[12:03] The first significant step in the progress of English towards its status as a global language, did not take place before the end of the 16th century. By the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, In 1603, literature had boomed through the works of Spencer, Marlowe and Shakespeare, and Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh had laid the foundation for expanding the English influences in the New World. Today, the spread of English around the world is often defined in terms of three concentric circles: The inner circle, refers to traditional, historical and sociolinguistic origins of English, where it is used as a first or native language.

[12:47] the outer circle includes countries colonized by Britain and the United States, where English is spoken as a second language, and where it plays an important historical and governmental role in multilingual settings. The countries in the expanding circle, did not institutionalize English as an official language, but recognized the importance of English as a foreign language. Well, in so far, As there has ever been such a thing as a world language, English is one today.

[13:24] During less than 300 years, English developed from a regional language to a global language. Today, English constitutes the most widely used individual language with more than 300 million native speakers worldwide. and more than $1.5 billion. official users. Thanks for your attention.