THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH - An introduction - M. Lemmens
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THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
An introduction
M. Lemmens
2010 - 2011
2007-2008
Ces cours sont strictement réservés à l’usage privé des utilisateurs du Service d’Enseignement à Distance de Lille. Ils ne sont pas destinés à une
utilisation extérieure. Toute personne qui s’en servirait à d’autres usages ou qui en ferait une reproduction intégrale ou partielle sans le
consentement du S.E.A.D. de Lille s’exposerait aux poursuites judiciaires et aux sanctions pénales prévues par la loi.
Ces cours sont strictement réservés à l’usage privé des utilisateurs du Service d’Enseignement à Distance de Lille. Ils ne sont pas destinés à une utilisation extérieure. Toute personne qui s’en servirait à d’autres usages ou qui en ferait une reproduction intégrale ou partielle sans le consentement du S.E.A.D. de Lille s’exposerait aux poursuites judiciaires et aux sanctions pénales prévues par la loi.
INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH ..................................................................................3
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................3
1.1. Historical linguistics..................................................................................................................3
1.2. Linguistic change .......................................................................................................................4
1.3. The Indo-European language family .......................................................................................9
1.4. The Germanic languages ........................................................................................................10
1.5. A short history of English.......................................................................................................14
1.5.1. The Britons (Celts) .......................................................................................................14
1.5.2. The Roman invasions and settlement .......................................................................15
1.5.3. The Germanic invasions .............................................................................................15
1.5.4. The Scandinavian invasions.......................................................................................17
1.5.5. The Norman Conquest and its aftermath (1066-1200)............................................19
1.5.6. The Re-establishment of English (1200-1500) ..........................................................19
1.5.7. Cultural invasions........................................................................................................21
CHAPTER 2. OLD ENGLISH ..................................................................................................................23
2.1. General characteristics ............................................................................................................23
2.2. Spelling and Pronunciation....................................................................................................24
2.3. Important Sound Changes .....................................................................................................26
2.4. The synthetic character of OE ................................................................................................28
2.4.1. OE Nouns......................................................................................................................28
2.4.2. OE adjectives ................................................................................................................28
2.4.3. OE Pronouns..................................................................................................................29
2.4.4. OE Verbs .......................................................................................................................29
CHAPTER 3. MIDDLE ENGLISH ...........................................................................................................31
3.1. Morphology: loss of inflections .............................................................................................31
3.1.1. ME nouns ......................................................................................................................31
3.1.2. ME personal pronouns................................................................................................32
3.1.3. ME demonstrative pronouns & articles....................................................................33
3.1.4. ME interrogative pronouns ........................................................................................33
3.1.5. ME adjectives................................................................................................................33
3.1.6. ME verbs .......................................................................................................................34
3.2. Important Sound Changes .....................................................................................................34
CHAPTER 4. Early Modern English ..................................................................................................37
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................41
APPENDICES ..........................................................................................................................................43
A1.1: Overview of the IE languages..............................................................................................43
A1.2: Spread of the IE-languages ..................................................................................................44
A1.3: Location of the Centum & Satem languages .....................................................................44
Ces cours sont strictement réservés à l’usage privé des utilisateurs du Service d’Enseignement à Distance de Lille. Ils ne sont pas destinés à une
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M. Lemmens Introduction to the history of English ii
A2: Home of the Angles, Saxons & the Jutes ................................................................................45
A3: The Old English dialects............................................................................................................45
A4: Selective overview of Kings of England .................................................................................46
A5: Overview of OE inflections ......................................................................................................47
Ces cours sont strictement réservés à l’usage privé des utilisateurs du Service d’Enseignement à Distance de Lille. Ils ne sont pas destinés à une
utilisation extérieure. Toute personne qui s’en servirait à d’autres usages ou qui en ferait une reproduction intégrale ou partielle sans le
consentement du S.E.A.D. de Lille s’exposerait aux poursuites judiciaires et aux sanctions pénales prévues par la loi.INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
Maarten Lemmens
2010- 2011
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
When you look at English in different stages of its history, you will probably be impressed with
the changes that it has gone through. Consider the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer from the
Wessex Gospels (approx. 990 A.D.) and compare it to the Modern English equivalent:
OE Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod
Lit. gloss Father our thou that art on heaven, be thy name hallowed
ModE Our Father who are in heaven, hallowed be your name
The differences between Old English (OE) and Modern English (ModE) are quite striking and
pertain to all levels of the language: spelling, lexicon, word order, morphology and
pronunciation (even if the latter can only be reconstructed). At the same time, if you look at the
literal gloss of the Old English, you will still be able to understand most of the OE words. In
other words, OE is different, yet if you know some of the things that have happened to it, it
becomes relatively straightforward (even if some aspects may still be difficult for contemporary
speakers).
Before looking into all these aspects in more detail, this chapter will first present some key
notions in historical (or diachronic) linguistics and the mechanisms of linguistic change. In a
second part of the chapter, we situate English in relation to the other Indo-European languages
in general and the other Germanic languages in particular.
1.1. Historical linguistics
A useful distinction that was suggested by the Swiss linguist De Saussure is that between
synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Synchronic linguistics is the study of the language system
at a given point in time, e.g., language of Shakespeare, 19th century American English, etc. (C-D
in Fig. below). Diachronic linguistics, on the other hand, is the study of the evolution of a
language through time, e.g., the transition of ME to ModE (axe A-B in the figure below).
C
A B diachronic
D
synchronic
Figure 1 : Diachronic (AB) and synchronic (CD) study of language
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Historical linguistics is faced with a serious methodological hurdle, as for older periods, there
is only written evidence, which furthermore is usually quite fragmentary, both quantitatively
(relatively few texts have survived) and qualitatively (mostly formal register; different dialects,
etc.). Written evidence only contains indirect evidence about the pronunciation (orthographical
corrections, rhyme schemas, occasional comments by writers) even if spelling combined with
phonological regularities allow us to reconstruct the pronunciation. In other words, the available
data may not (and mostly is not) representative of the language at a given moment in time. At
the same time, quite a lot of Old English texts have survived, especially in the West-Saxon
dialect (which became sort of a standard language during King Alfred’s reign), which allows us
to build a fairly good idea of that particular language.
1.2. Linguistic change
Linguistic change is inevitable and affects the language at all levels, from phonology (sound
changes) to syntax. Let us take up the different levels in turn.
Over time, the pronunciation of a language changes; this may even happen within a person’s
life span.1 The divergence of spelling and pronunciation is often (but not always!) a direct result
of that change, where the spelling is the “frozen” pronunciation of the past. Consider the
spelling of Modern English make or time whose main vowels (a and i) do not correspond in
pronunciation to what could be expected in a Latin-based alphabet, predicting a pronunciation
that is closer to French pâte and disque. As it happens, this spelling-pronunciation divergence is a
systematic one in English and is the result of a major change that took place in the transition
from Middle English to Modern English (1450 till 1800), know as the Second Great Vowel Shift
(cf. Chapter 4).
Changes in spelling are a relatively minor issue from a linguistic point of view, but clearly a
major issue from a socio-political point of view. The motivations for spelling changes can be for
linguistic reasons (changing pronunciation; for instance, the spelling oa as in coat is one that was
created to reflect the changed pronunciation of long o into a diphthong), for practical reasons
(e.g., luu → lov(e) ) or for economical reasons (e.g., many -ough endings arose because (German)
printers, who were paid by the letter, added these to make a bigger profit). The most striking
spelling changes that affected English are probably the loss of runic symbols (e.g., ð and Þ) and
the introduction of non-phonemic spelling (see below)
In the domain of the lexicon, new words enter the language almost every day. Some of these
are created by exploiting specific mechanisms of word creation, such as derivation or
compounding, a process that was extremely productive in Old English (cf. Chapter 2). Other
words enter the language via borrowing from other languages, which English has used
extensively in the course of its history. For example, the English words balcony, cellar, skirt, noble,
and landscape are all loanwords.2 At the same time, many words disappear from the language
(e.g., Old English wendan “to turn” or wang “field, place, world”) or shift their meaning (e.g.,
knight or car).
1
Drawing on early recordings, the English phonetician John Wells has for instance demonstrated how the Queen’s
pronunciation of certain vowels has changed in the course of her reign.
2
balcony < Italian, cellar < Latin, skirt < Danish, noble < French, landscape < Dutch.
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In the domain of morphology, a typical change is the loss of inflections and word endings, as
illustrated by the transition from Old English (a highly inflected language) to Modern English
(few inflections). This affected adjectives and nouns (loss of case markings, convergence or
disappearance of the different word classes), verbs (loss of different inflections for number, e.g.,
iċ sang “I sang” vs. we sungon “we sang” or þu lufast “you love” vs. he lufað “he loves”). The loss
of inflectional endings as well as the considerable lexical changes (in particular the replacement
of OE words by French words) makes Old English quite different from Modern English, so
much so that even English speakers have to study it.
Another morphological evolution that occurs in many different languages is the tendency to
regularise irregular forms. What counts as “irregular” is, of course, itself often the outcome of
historical processes; for example, what are often called “irregular verbs” in English, such as take-
took-taken or sing-sang-sung were at some point highly regular systems (using vowel change or
“Umlaut” to build (some of) the past tenses).3 However, because of various changes in the
English system, many of these forms became less systematic (i.e., more irregular) and one can
observe a growing tendency for verbs to change from the strong declension (the Umlaut-system)
to the weak system (using the –ed ending). The verbs laugh and climb, for instance, had as past
tense low and clomb respectively, which in Present Day English follow the weak system (laughed,
climbed).
Also in the domain of syntax considerable changes can take place. Certain syntactical
structures disappear and new ones arise. A classical example for English is the rise of the DO-
support for yes/no-questions and for negatives which did away with the earlier patterns that
are now only acceptable with auxiliaries. In Old English, a construction like Com þa se engel
(“Came then the angel?”) was the normal way of asking a yes/no-question and negation was
mostly built with the negative particle ne, e.g., Ne com he (“Not came he”). In Modern English,
we need the auxiliary do for both constructions: Did the angel then come? and He didn’t come.
Another important syntactic change that affected English, is that the word order became
fixed in the transition from OE to Early Modern English. This change is actually related to the
loss of inflectional endings: if you have case markings that indicate the syntacto-semantic roles
of a constituent in a sentence (e.g. whether an NP is the subject or the object of the sentence), the
actual order does not really affect the interpretation, whereas in Modern English it has become
quite essential to understand the sentence correctly. Consider the following OE sentence:
(1) Se guma sloh þone wyrm
The woman slew the serpent/dragon4
There are two different forms of the definite article, se and þone ; the former is the nominative
case (used for the subject), the latter is the accusative case, used for the object. In other words, if
you change the order of the sentence, e.g., þone wyrm sloh se guman, the subject and object NPs
are still recognised as such. In Modern English, this is not so, as different word orders entail
different role assignments; compare: The man bit the dog with The dog bit the man. Notice further
3
The existence of strong verbs is something that is shared by all Indo-European languages (cf. Latin capere-cepi-captum); the rise
of the weak verbs (with a dental suffix, like ed in English or –te/-de in Dutch) is exclusive to the Germanic languages.
4
OE wyrm, or rather its variant wurm, is the basis for ModEng worm; notice that its Swedish cognate orm still means “snake”.
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that in OE the case markings are not restricted to the articles, but also the nouns and adjectives
are marked for case; for example if you want to say in OE that it was the dragon who killed the
woman, you would have the following:
(2) Se wyrm sloh þone guman
The dragon slew the woman
Notice how the noun guma is marked differently from the earlier example: in (1) is in the
nominative case (guma), whereas in (2) it is in the accusative case (guman). For wyrm, in contrast,
the difference is not marked, as it is a word for which the nominative and the accusative are the
same. The reason for this is that the two nouns belong to different word classes, determined by
their gender: guma is feminine, whereas wyrm is masculine. Other words, such as sċip “ship” are
neuter. More about OE word classes and their inflections below.
In this context, it is worthwhile to mention a specific type of linguistic change that has
become quite popular as a field of study in the last decades, namely grammaticalization. In
simple terms, grammaticalization concerns the development of a linguistic item to something
that is more grammatical. This can be either the evolution of a content word to a grammatical
word or that of a grammatical form to one that is even more grammatical. The first type can be
illustrated by the English modals, such as can or will. In OE, these were full verbs (meaning
respectively “have the physical capacity” and “want”) which could be used autonomously; in
Modern English, they have become more grammatical (i.e., auxiliary verbs) that can only occur
with a main verb, e.g. I can sing or He will write a letter. In other words, these lexical verbs have
grammaticalised to auxiliaries. These changes do not happen over night of course, but evolve
over a certain number of decades. Also, some of the semantics of the original forms may be
preserved (as is clearly the case for can and will), but the degree to which this is still true varies
considerably. Other good examples of the first type of grammaticalization (lexical >
grammatical) are certain prepositions and adverbials such as in front of, notwithstanding
(contraction of not + with “against” + standing), during (original -ing form, cf. French durant,
pendant), etc.
The second type of grammaticalization (grammatical item > more grammatical item) can be
the case where a grammar word becomes a suffix. This is for example what underlies the dental
past tense suffix in the Germanic languages which is derived from a form of the auxiliarised
verb “do”. Similarly, the French endings of the future tense (-ai, -as, -a, etc.) are actually derived
from the different forms of the verb avoir. More correctly, this construction already existed in
late Latin, e.g., cantare habeo (“sing-INF have.1-sg”; i.e. “I have to/will sing). The evolution
essentially was the following:
[[VERB] + habere/avoir] > [VERB + habere/avoir] > [VERB + SUFFIX]
The point here is that the verb habere/avoir first became reinterpreted as an auxiliary forming a
single unit with the verb (phase two) and then, in a next step, grammaticalised further to
become suffixes that merely express future tense and have little link with the original meaning
of avoir (even if it is not too difficult to reconstruct the semantic path). The evolution in fact
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moves from an analytical or periphrastic encoding of the future tense (using grammatical
constructions) to a synthetic one (using verb inflections). In modern French, the “future proche”
(je vais manger) is a periphrastic variant to express the future.
The above discussion has clearly illustrated how language change occurs at all levels of the
language. Apart from simply observing these changes, the interesting question is why languages
actually change.
What causes languages to change? A distinction should be made between language external
and language internal factors. As the term suggests, language external factors are not linked to
the language properties as such, but rather to the world in which it is used. We live in a world
that constantly changes, new things are invented every day, others disappear. Logically, the
language that we speak follows suit. Words that refer to things or events that no longer exist
often simply disappear from the language and we create or borrow new words to refer to new
things and actions. For example, television, AIDS, email or bunji-jumping are words that came into
the language in this way. Alternatively, we recycle (and adapt) existing words to refer to new
things. When cars were invented, automobile was a word that came into being (a combination of
Greek auto “self” and Latin mobile “moving”), yet quickly in English the existing word car
(originally borrowed from Norman French “carre”, 1301)5 came to be used instead (the first
attestation in that usage is from 1896), thereby shifting its meaning from “wheeled vehicle” to
“self-moving motorized 4-wheeled vehicle” which is now the word’s basic meaning.6
Also other major socio-economical events may have an influence on a language. For English,
some major events that helped shape the language are the conquest of a large part of the country
by the Danes (from the 8th till the 11th century) or the Norman conquest (starting in 1066, after
the battle of Hastings). In both cases, there was a massive influx of people speaking a different
language (Danish and Norman French respectively), which obviously left their own mark on the
language. Further details on these events and their influence on English will be given in
subsequent chapters in this course book.
Occasionally, you may even find deliberate attempts at changing the language. While
prescriptive grammar (which imposes a certain norm of “correct” language use) usually does
not conform to how people actually speak, it may sometimes lead to an actual change in this
language use, although this is rather exceptional.
Many of the external language changes described involve lexical changes, i.e. the emergence
or disappearance of word referring to objects or actions. While these are important, they do not
tell the whole story, since language seems to change all by itself, so to speak. Suppose you
discover an isolated group of people speaking a certain language, untainted by contact with
other languages and cultures. If you were to observe these people for a longer period of time,
5
The date refers to the year in which this word was first attested in a written document in English; usually this means that the
word had been around for some time prior to that date in the spoken language.
6
Actually, the references to automobile were first with the compound motor car which gradually became abbreviated to car.
This is not to say that the word auto(mobile) is not used anymore, but it is usually reserved for more formal or technical prose.
Notice that in another Germanic language, Dutch, the cognate kar still refers to non-motorized wheeled vehicles and cannot be
used to refer to an automobile (unless jokingly), for which the standard word is auto or wagen (the latter being related to
English wagon).
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you would see that also this language changes over time.7 In other words, it seems that there is
something inherent in language that triggers change. How else would you explain the rise of the
future tense suffixes in French, derived from a complex VERB+avoir construction? Clearly, no
inventions or invasions by foreign people lie at the basis of this evolution. But is it really true
that a language in and by itself contains the seeds of change? Actually, it is not. It is not the
language per se that causes the change, but rather language use.
When you learn a language, you learn its different linguistic constructions in particular
contexts of use. The more common a given context, the more frequent you are going to
reproduce the linguistic construction (word or phrase) that expresses that context. As for any
other human activity, repetition leads to gradual change. This can simply be automation and
increased efficiency. The rise of the French future tense suffixes is perhaps a good example of
that. But language is much more than just automation of course, since it is a basic tool for
communication and for making meaning. So we are constantly interpreting and re-interpreting
the utterances that we hear, which contains the seeds of change, especially on the semantic level
and reinterpretation of grammatical structures.
But there are some other aspects of language use that cause a language to change. Any speech
community is made up of several individual speakers that each may have a slightly different
variant of the language (idiolects). People are constantly engaged in different interpersonal
exchanges; the idiolectal difference may give rise to subtle changes in the language. Such
differences are of course often reinforced by socio-economical factors, i.e., the need of a certain
group of people to distinguish themselves from others, e.g., upper vs. lower classes,
native/aboriginal vs. non-native/non-aboriginal, men vs. women, children vs. parents.
Even while these changes happen without speakers being aware of them, language internal
changes strangely enough seem to follow some clear regular patterns, across languages. For
instance, morphological changes in a language all seem to evolve towards inflectional simplicity
(loss/collapsing of endings, paradigmatic levelling). Similarly, languages generally change from
the synthetic to the analytic type. Also, grammaticalization tends to be unidirectional, i.e. lexical
→ grammatical or grammatical → more grammatical, but not vice versa; e.g. once a “lexical” verb
(e.g., will) has become a modal auxiliary, it will not evolve towards a new lexical verb (i.e. with
specific lexical content, full paradigmatic potential, etc.). Also in the phonological domain there
are some “universally” recurring patterns, such as the tendency for long vowels to become
diphthongised or the loss of vowel quality (reduction) in the syllable becomes unstressed, to
name but two changes that have been important for English as well.
In sum, language change is simply unavoidable and affects the language at all its levels, from
phonology to grammar and semantics. Even today, English is changing constantly. Talking
about Old English, Middle English or Present Day English is thus a fiction, albeit a very
convenient one.
7
Notice that such communities have been discovered in the course of time. Often people assume that such communities have
preserved the “pure” or “original” state of their language (as it has been unaffected by other languages), but this is of course
plainly false in view of the language inherent tendency to change.
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1.3. The Indo-European language family
When speakers of a single speech community spread out geographically, resulting in clearly
separated groups, language differentiation of what once was a single language is almost
inevitable. These differences can be minor (cf. the different dialects in England) or quite
substantial, possibly leading to different (yet perhaps still related) languages. While in the
former case the relationship between the different varieties may still be relatively
straightforward, this is less so when the varieties have evolved into different languages. In that
case, it is often necessary to check systematic correspondences (lexical, syntactic and/or
phonological) between the different languages. This is especially true if there is no more trace of
the “ancestor language” that they all started from.
That is certainly the case for the Indo-European (hence IE) language family that spans a wide
range of languages, including Sanskrit, Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) Slavic
languages (Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, etc.), Romance languages (French, Spanish, Latin, etc.)
and Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, etc.). A full overview of the IE languages is
given in Appendix 2. On the basis of systematic lexical correspondences (cf. Table 1 below) and
systematic structural correspondences, it has been possible to isolate the IE languages from other
speech families.8
LANGUAGE
English mother father three new bear
German Mutter Vater drei neu gebaren
Dutch moeder vader drie nieuw baar
Gothic — faðar Þreis nujis baira
Russian matj — tri novyj beru
Lithuanian mótyna — trys nāujas —
Latin mater pater trēs novus ferō
Sanskrit mātar pitar trayas navya bharāmi
Indo-European *māter *pαter *treies *neṷo/*noṷo *bhéremi
Table 1 : Some examples of Indo-European lexical similarities9
Indo-European was spoken about 5000 years ago (in the Caucasus region) by people whose
mother tongue belongs to the IE family; there is no presupposition that there is one unitary
origin, only that they share many similarities. There are no written records of this language or
language group; it has been reconstructed by linguistics on the basis of systematic
correspondences; the reconstructed character is by convention indicated by the *). To the non-
specialist, these correspondences may not be immediately obvious; while certainly interesting,
8
Notice that not all languages spoken on the European continent are IE languages; for example, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian
and Basque are non-IE languages. Next to IE, other large language families spoken on the earth are for example, Semitic
language family, Bantu-language family, Ural-Altaic languages (whence Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, etc.), Japanese-Korean
languages, etc.
9
The macron ( ̄ ) over a vowel is a modern (but pre-IPA) notation to indicate that the vowel is long ; this was not present in the
original manuscripts (if dealing with attested words).
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we will not be very much concerned with these here, but concentrate on some of the major
distinctions that are relevant to the history of English.
The first important distinction is that between two large groups, the satem and centum-
languages; the terms come from the words for the number "one hundred" in representative
languages of each group (Latin centum and Avestan satem). They illustrate the different
development of IE prepalatal /k/ which developed to /k/ in centum-languages, whereas it
developed to /s/ in the satem-languages. English finds its origin in the former group, but it may
not be intuitively obvious how the initial /k/ (as illustrated by Latin centum), developed into the
(Modern) English /h/ as in hundred. (Mind: this is not to say that English hundred has been
derived from Latin; the latter is simply used to illustrate the older IE pattern!).
In order to understand that evolution (which is more systematic than you might think at
first), you have to realise that English belongs to the family of Germanic languages, which had a
different evolution than other centum-languages, such as the Italic, the Celtic or the Greek
languages.
1.4. The Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are distinguished from the other IE languages by the so-called First
Germanic sound-shift, also known as Grimm’s law (after the German philologist Jacob Grimm),
a set of regular changes explaining how the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops they
developed in Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the IE family) in
the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic
stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other IE languages (Grimm used mostly
Latin and Greek for illustration). As it is presently formulated, Grimm's Law consists of three
parts, which must be thought of as three consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift:
1. Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.
2. Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless.
3. Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops lose their aspiration and change into plain
voiced stops.
Schematically, this can be represented as in the Table 2 below. Here are some further examples
of Grimm’s law in addition to those mentioned in Table 2.
- bh → b: SKR bhrātā GOT brōþar ENG brother
- dh → d (=[ð]) → d: SKR: vidhàva GOT viduwo Eng widow
- g → k: GR gunè (“woman”), ENG queen; LAT gelu, ENG cold
- p→f: LAT pater, OE fæder, ON faðer, GM Vater
- k→X/h: LAT in coelis, OE on heofonum, ON in hifne, GM im himmel
- t→Þ: LAT nomen tuum; OE: Þin nama (cf. ENG thine), ON nafn Þin
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IE GERMANIC EXAMPLES
Voiced aspirated Voiced
stops Glides Stops IE vs. English
labial bh → b b IE *bharami / bear
dental dh → d d IE *dha / do
velar gh → g g IE *ghostis / guest
Voiced stops Voiceless stops Latin vs. English
labial b → p cannabis / hemp
dental d → t decem / ten
velar g → k genu / knee
Voiceless aspirated Voiceless Glides Latin vs. English
stops
labial p(h) → f piscis / fish
dental t(h) → T tres / three
velar k(h) → X centum / hundred
Table 2 : Grimm’s law
There are exceptions and refinements to this general rule. For example, the IE clusters sp, st and
sk were not affected by this rule, which explains, for example, LAT stare GOT standan ENG stand
or LAT pisces GOT fisks (cf. Modern Swedish fisk ; in Old English fisc this cluster was
pronounced [S] (palatalisation), giving Mod Eng. fish). Another important other correction
concerned the influence of word stress, as formulated in Verner’s law (first formulated by the
linguist Karl Verner in 1875). This regularity explains why the middle /t/ of the Latin pater
(representing the IE consonant) find its equivalent in Proto-Germanci *fađēr (instead of expected
*faþēr). Curiously, the structurally similar family term *bhrehtēr “brother” developed as
predicted by Grimm's Law (Gmc. *brōþēr , cf. GOT broÜþar). Verner’s solution was that the
apparently unexpected voicing of voiceless stops occurred if they were non-word-initial and if
the vowel preceding them carried no stress in IE.
The details of the evolution from IE to Proto-Germanic will not concern us here. What is to be
remembered is that many of the languages spoken on the European continent and Asia share a
common ancestry which can be discovered via systematically comparing the different forms in
these languages. Within the group of IE languages, one branch, Proto-Germanic, which would
later diverge into the different Germanic languages, started to develop into a certain direction
via systematic sound changes described by Grimm’s and Verner’s law, which took place
probably during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe from ca. 500 BC. There are no
written documents of Proto-Germanic so all the forms have been reconstructed on the basis of
the comparative method of old as well as modern forms of the languages. Most of this linguistic
work (generally known as philology) was carried out in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Proto-Germanic developed into different Germanic languages; how exactly these different
branches originated is still fairly much unresolved, but it is clear that this is linked to the big
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tribal movements that went on from 500 BC onwards, but especially between 200 and 700 A.D.
(also known as the Migration period). The Germanic tribes were initially located in what is
nowadays Southern-Scandinavia and Northern Germany and began to spread out southward in
different phases, as indicated in Figure 2 below.
Legend
██ Settlements before 750BC
██ New settlements until 500BC
██ New settlements until 250BC
██ New settlements until AD 1
Fig. 2: Early Germanic settlements (750 BC – 1 AD)10
From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are divided into three groups,
West, East and North Germanic, even if it still remains fairly unclear how this split actually
came about, given that the only evidence we have are scarce runic inscriptions.11 An overview
of the historical development of the different Germanic languages is given in Table 3 below.
The branch of East Germanic includes Gothic, Burgundian, Vandalic and Lombardic
(although the latter straddles the border between East and West Germanic). During the
Migration period (also called Völkerwanderung "migration of nations"), roughly from 300 till 700
A.D., the Germanic tribes spread our over the entire European continent, conquering land of the
decaying Roman Empire. Their extensive settlement can still be seen in some place names: the
name Andalusia, for example, is derived from the name of the Germanic tribe Vandals (that even
went as far as Northern Africa) and Catalonia is derived from Gotalonia (land of the Goths). In
the 5th century, the Visigoths actually ruled over a large part of France and the Iberian
peninsula. The Burgundians gave their name to a region in France (Burgundy); the Lombards
(or Longobardi) ended up in Northern Italy around 750 and established a long-lasting reign
there, giving their name to the region Lombardy (of which Milan is the capital). The Ostrogoths
established a kingdom in Italy around 425 A.D. and in 488 king Theoderic the Great conquered
all of Italy.12 Strikingly, all these languages have died out. The latest attestation of Gothic was in
10
This figure has been copied from the Wikepedia-entry for “Germanic languages”; in general, great care is to be taken with the
information found in this open source, but this particular entry contains fairly accurate facts about the Germanic languages’
characteristics and genesis.
11
The earliest full text is a 4th century Gothic Bible translation by a bishop called Ulfila (his name is Gothic for “little wolf”). It is
often used for comparative purposes. At the same time, this text cannot be taken as representative, since Ulfila seemed to
have drawn up his own grammatical rules and alphabet, which makes the language somewhat unnatural.
12
Note that these migrations, which occurred over several centuries, did not follow a straight line from Germany-Prussia to,
e.g., the Iberian peninsula.
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the 16th century, on the Crimean peninsula (in the Black Sea, now Ukraine). The Crimean Gothic
died out in the 18th century.
500 BC - 200 AD AD 200–700 700–1150 1150–1350 1350–1500 1500–1700 present
Old Icelandic Late Old Icelandic Icelandic
Old West Norse Middle Norwegian Norwegian
Old Norwegian
NORTH-GERMANIC Proto-Norse Old Faroese Faroese
Early Old Danish Late Old Danish Danish
Old East Norse
Early Old Swedish Late Old Swedish Swedish
Gothic
Burgundy ---
EAST-GERMANIC
Vandalic ---
(Lombardic) Crimean Gothic ---
Old High
Old High Gm Middle High Gm. Early New High Gm. German
German
Old Frankish Old Low Franconian Middle Dutch Dutch
WEST-
GERMANIC Old Low Old Low Saxon Middle Low Saxon Plattdeutsch
German Old Frisian Middle Frisian Frisian
Anglo-
Frisian Old English Middle English Mod. English
Table 3: (Simplified) Historical overview of the Germanic language family
The branch of North Germanic languages split up in the Early Middle Ages (between 700
and 1100 A.D.) between Old West Norse (which developed into Norwegian and into Icelandic)
and Old East Norse (from which Swedish and Danish evolved); Färoese spoken by the people
on the Faroe Islands evolved from Old Norwegian. Even today, the North Germanic languages
are characterised by considerable similarities (much higher than between the other Germanic
languages) and even by some degree of mutual intelligibility. The reason for this is that they
divided up much more recently than the other Germanic languages.
The branch of West Germanic languages is where we will eventually find English. The West
Germanic branch split up between High and Low German, a distinction referring to the higher
mountainous area of Southern Germany where the former was spoken, which would eventually
give rise to Modern German. Old Low German, spoken in the flatlands (hence “low”) of
Northern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, comprises Old Saxon, Old Franconian
(which will develop into Modern Dutch) and Anglo-Frisian, which is the common basis
leading eventually till Frisian and English.
Table 3 above also indicates the main periods that are traditionally distinguished for English
(our focus of interest):
Old English (OE): 450 – 1150 (Anglo-Saxon period);
This is the period of full inflections in the language (synthetic language type) and when
runic symbols are still used.
Middle English (ME): 1150 – 1500 (Anglo-Norman period);
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This is the period of levelled inflections (morphological simplification, due to vowel
reduction), the levelling of unstressed vowels to /ə/ (e.g., OE stanas → ME stones or OE
nosu → ME nose) and the (massive) influx of French vocabulary. Also spelling is
romanised.
Modern English (ModE): 1500 – 1800
This is the period of lost inflections, with further simplification of morphology and further
grammaticalization.
Present-Day English (PDE): 1800 – now
English as we know it now.
Obviously, the dates that distinguish the different periods in the history of English are
somewhat arbitrary dividing lines, often linked to some historical event. Notice that in the table
above the distinction between Modern and Present-Day English is not made. The four-fold
distinction takes into account some recent changes (like the rise of the progressive, the
progressive perfect (have been building), etc.) and is as such a more accurate division. Recall,
however, that even today, English continues to change.
1.5. A short history of English
In the following section, we present a summary account of the history of English, focussing on
the language external events that helped shape the language. The more language-internal
developments are discussed in the subsequent chapters. It is important to note that while we
start our description with the earliest settlements on the British Isles, the birth of English (or
Englisc as it was called) is to be situated in the 5th century.
1.5.1. The Britons (Celts)
The first inhabitants of Britain whose language is known to us are the Celts, they probably came
to England between 2000 B.C. (Stone Age) and 500 B.C. (Iron Age). There were certainly peoples
that inhabited the British Isles before the Celts, but almost nothing is known of their original
culture and language, some remnants may remain in the names of some geographical features,
such as the rivers Clyde, Tamar and Thames. It is still not known what languages were spoken by
the peoples of Ireland and Britain before the arrival of the Celts.
The first group of Celts that settled were the Gaelic Celts, they themselves were later driven
to Ireland and Isle of Man by later Celtic invaders, the Brythonic Celts. The linguistic remnants
of the Gaelic Celts are Erse (Irish), Gaelic (Scottish) and Manx. Later, also the Brythonic Celts
were driven westward to Wales and Cornwall, and some even crossed to Brittany by the
Germanic invaders. The linguistic remnants of the Britannic Celts are Welsh, Cornish, and
Breton.
Linguistic influences:
Relatively few linguistic traces of Celtic have survived in present-day English, which is quite
understandable given the low influence of the Celts on later Anglo-Saxon society. Some traces
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have been preserved in OE, mostly in place names (e.g., Dundee, London, York, Exe (cf. also
Exeter), Avon, Dover, Salisbury, Kent, Thames).
1.5.2. The Roman invasions and settlement
Before the Germanic invasions, the Romans invaded the country. This happened in two phases,
with different impact. The first invasion was by Julius Caesar in 55-54 B.C.; it had little success
and very little impact on the country and its language. The second phase was more important to
the further evolution of the country. In 43 A.D. Claudius managed to conquer a large part of the
country and there was a true Roman settlement, even if it wasn’t without some uprisings, e.g.,
Boadicea’s uprising in 61 A.D. when allegedly 70,000 Romans and Romanized Celts were killed.
The effect of the Roman settlement was a gradual Romanization of the Celtic culture, which
lead to the building of roads (from London to other areas), houses, temples, bath houses,
theatres, etc. Not all of Britain was under the Roman domination, the North (Scotland)
remained untouched; Hadrian’s wall was built in 122 A.D. to protect the region from the
“barbaric” Picts in the North.
Linguistic influences:
Due to the Roman occupation, eventually quite a number of (Celtic) people spoke Latin;
however, few of those words made it into the English language via Celtic transmission, e.g., port
(Lat. portus) or mount (Lat. montus); this once again follows logically from the low influence of
Celtic on the later Anglo-Saxon society. Some of the words of Latin origin came into English via
earlier contacts of the Germanic tribes (still on the continent, cf. next section).
The largest influx of Latin words came later in three waves: the first two, both affecting Old
English, came via Christianity; the last one, occurred in the Renaissance (affecting Early Modern
English) characterised by a high interest in the ancient Roman and Greek cultures. This gave
rise to an incessant influx of learned words from Latin and Greek (often in their French form).
1.5.3. The Germanic invasions
The first invasions of Germanic tribes the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, who had their home
on the region of Denmark and the Low Countries (cf. map in Appendix), occur around 449; they
basically started on the invitation of the (Romanised) Celts who, after the Romans had left, were
left defenceless against the Picts and the Scots, invading the country from the north. The first
(forcible) settlements occur in Southeast (Kent) by the Jutes; later by Saxons (Wessex, Sussex,
Essex, Middlesex); then by the Angles (East Anglia). All in all, the Germanic invasions and
settlements lasted approximately one century! The nature of these settlements was quite
different from the Roman settlement, too: instead of ruling the population as the Romans did,
the Germanic invasions lead to the dispossession of the (Romanized) Celts; a form of “ethnic
cleansing”: they burnt towns and other elements of Roman civilization. Old English will arise
from the fusion of the Germanic languages spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
The Germanic invaders had essentially a society organised in tribal or family structures and
their kingdoms were not particularly stable. Of these, 7 kingdoms are generally recognized as
important: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex. In the 7th cy.
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the kingdom of Northumbria (north of the river Humber) had some political leadership and
dominance; in the 8th cy. it was the kingdom of Mercia (between the Humber and the Thames)
that was dominant; in the 9th cy. Wessex was the dominant kingdom. The West-Saxon kings
gained supremacy and became “the kings of all the English”, with its peak under King Ælfred’s
reign (871-889) who managed to stop the Danish invaders (cf. below).
King Ælfred’s reign marks the period of (relative) stability and prosperity for Wessex,
especially at the end of his reign, and the Anglo-Saxon culture thrives. Many documents that
were produced in those times have survived until this day. One of the most important texts was
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of annals in Old English narrating the history of the
Anglo-Saxons; it started in the late 9th century, at the end of the reign of King Ælfred the Great,
and at some places was continued till the 11th century. (The most well-known copy of the
manuscript is the Peterborough Manuscript). Under King Ælfred’s instigation, many important
Latin texts were translated, such as Consolatio Philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy) a
philosophical work by Boethius and Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, telling the
history of the Church of the English People. It is considered to be one of the most important
original references on Anglo-Saxon history. These Anglo-Saxon texts are on of the major sources
for the study of OE.
Linguistic influences:
As mentioned above, many Latin loan words came into Old English during this period, via
the christianization process or (not unrelated) via schools, especially during King Alfred’s reign.
Many loan words thus have to do with church life or scientific domains. Let us look at these two
waves in some more detail.
(i) Most Latin words that were borrowed in the OE period occurred after the reintroduction of
Christianity in Britain in 597, in a systematic attempt to Christianize the country by Pope
Gregory the Great who sent St. Augustine as missionary to England, accompanied by a
group of 40 monks. Within a hundred years after the landing of St. Augustine in Kent, all of
England had been Christianised. The Church had a profound impact on English life and
society, and obviously also on the vocabulary. Some examples:
words concerning the church and its workings: abbot, altar; angel, candle, canon, hymn;
disciple, epistle, cleric; mass, minister, nun, pope, priest, martyr, temple, noon, offer, organ,
psalm, rule, etc.
words concerning domestic life, pertaining to clothing: cap, sock, silk, purple, mat; food:
pear, radish, oyster, lobster, mussel, cook (n); trees and plants: plant, pine, lily, myrrh, fennel
words pertaining to education and learning: school, master, grammatical, verse, gloss
other words: fever, elephant, circle, giant;
some verbs: temprian (temper, Lat. temperāre), tyrnan (turn, Lat. tornare)
(ii) A second group of Latin words entered into Old English during the revival of learning
initiated by King Ælfred. They differ from the earlier borrowings in that they were of a less
popular kind and that they often express ideas of scientific or learned character, e.g.
words relating to religion e.g., apostle, cell, cloister, demon, idol, prophet, sabbath, etc.;
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