What are the origins of the English Language?
https://ramamohanraocheruku.blogspot.com/2021/08/what-are-origins-of-english-language.html
We, for
the reasons best known to God crave for English, whether we endeavour to
thoroughly know it or not. To start with, in simple language, English is prone
to changes indefinitely unlike our Indian Languages whose mother is Sanskrit.
The Ashtadhyayi of Panini which is the grammar text that dictates everything
regarding the language so comprehensively that no other language in the world
has such a vast grammar. To brush out
our apprehensions on this European language, which is seldom used in Germany, Japan,
China, Korea, France, Italy Greece etc. I submit the little I know about the
language.
The
history of English is conventionally, if perhaps too neatly, divided into three
periods usually called Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, and Modern
English. The earliest period begins with the migration of certain Germanic
tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century A.D., though no
records of their language survive from before the seventh century, and it
continues until the end of the eleventh century or a bit later. By that time
Latin, Old Norse (the language of the Viking invaders), and especially the
Anglo-Norman French of the dominant class after the Norman Conquest in 1066 had
begun to have a substantial impact on the lexicon, and the well-developed
inflectional system that typifies the grammar of Old English had begun to break
down.
The
following brief sample of Old English prose illustrates several of the
significant ways in which change has so transformed English that we must look
carefully to find points of resemblance between the language of the tenth
century and our own. It is taken from Aelfric's "Homily on St. Gregory the
Great" and concerns the famous story of how that pope came to send
missionaries to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity after seeing
Anglo-Saxon boys for sale as slaves in Rome:
Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode Nama wære þe hi of
comon. Him wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi Angle genemnode wæron. Þa cwæð he,
"Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and
swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon."
A few
of these words will be recognized as identical in spelling with their modern
equivalents—he, of, him, for, and, on—and the resemblance of a few
others to familiar words may be guessed—nama to name, comon tocome,
wære to were, wæs to was—but only those
who have made a special study of Old English will be able to read the passage
with understanding. The sense of it is as follows:
Again he [St. Gregory] asked what might be the name
of the people from which they came. It was answered to him that they were named
Angles. Then he said, "Rightly are they called Angles because they have
the beauty of angels, and it is fitting that such as they should be angels'
companions in heaven."
Some
of the words in the original have survived in altered form, includingaxode
(asked), hu (how), rihtlice (rightly), engla (angels), habbað (have), swilcum
(such), heofonum (heaven), and beon (be). Others,
however, have vanished from our lexicon, mostly without a trace, including
several that were quite common words in Old English: eft "again," ðeode "people,
nation," cwæð "said, spoke," gehatene "called,
named," wlite "appearance, beauty," and geferan "companions."
Recognition of some words is naturally hindered by the presence of two special
characters, þ, called "thorn," and ð, called "edh," which
served in Old English to represent the sounds now spelled with th.
Other
points worth noting include the fact that the pronoun system did not yet, in
the late tenth century, include the third person plural forms beginning
with th-: hi appears where we would use they. Several
aspects of word order will also strike the reader as oddly unlike ours. Subject
and verb are inverted after an adverb—þa cwæð he "Then said
he"—a phenomenon not unknown in Modern English but now restricted to a few
adverbs such asnever and requiring the presence of an auxiliary
verb like do or have. In subordinate clauses
the main verb must be last, and so an object or a preposition may precede it in
a way no longer natural: þe hi of comon"which they from
came," for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað "because
they angels' beauty have."
Perhaps
the most distinctive difference between Old and Modern English reflected in
Aelfric's sentences is the elaborate system of inflections, of which we now
have only remnants. Nouns, adjectives, and even the definite article are
inflected for gender, case, and number: ðære ðeode "(of)
the people" is feminine, genitive, and singular, Angle "Angles"
is masculine, accusative, and plural, and swilcum "such"
is masculine, dative, and plural. The system of inflections for verbs was also
more elaborate than ours: for example, habbað "have"
ends with the -að suffix characteristic of plural present
indicative verbs. In addition, there were two imperative forms, four
subjunctive forms (two for the present tense and two for the preterit, or past,
tense), and several others which we no longer have. Even where Modern English
retains a particular category of inflection, the form has often changed. Old
English present participles ended in -ende not -ing, and
past participles bore a prefix ge- (as geandwyrd "answered"
above).
The
period of Middle English extends roughly from the twelfth century through the
fifteenth. The influence of French (and Latin, often by way of French) upon the
lexicon continued throughout this period, the loss of some inflections and the
reduction of others (often to a final unstressed vowel spelled -e)
accelerated, and many changes took place within the phonological and
grammatical systems of the language. A typical prose passage, especially one
from the later part of the period, will not have such a foreign look to us as
Aelfric's prose has; but it will not be mistaken for contemporary writing
either. The following brief passage is drawn from a work of the late fourteenth
century called Mandeville's Travels. It is fiction in the
guise of travel literature, and, though it purports to be from the pen of an
English knight, it was originally written in French and later translated into
Latin and English. In this extract Mandeville describes the land of Bactria,
apparently not an altogether inviting place, as it is inhabited by "full
yuele [evil] folk and full cruell."
In þat lond ben trees þat beren wolle, as þogh it
were of scheep; whereof men maken clothes, and all þing þat may ben made of
wolle. In þat contree ben many ipotaynes, þat dwellen som tyme in the water,
and somtyme on the lond: and þei ben half man and half hors, as I haue seyd
before; and þei eten men, whan þei may take hem. And þere ben ryueres and
watres þat ben fulle byttere, þree sithes more þan is the water of the see. In
þat contré ben many griffounes, more plentee þan in ony other contree. Sum men
seyn þat þei han the body vpward as an egle, and benethe as a lyoun: and treuly
þei seyn soth þat þei ben of þat schapp. But o griffoun hath the body more
gret, and is more strong, þanne eight lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this
half; and more gret and strongere þan an hundred egles, suche as we han amonges
vs. For o griffoun þere wil bere fleynge to his nest a gret hors, 3if he may
fynde him at the poynt, or two oxen 3oked togidere, as þei gon at the plowgh.
The
spelling is often peculiar by modern standards and even inconsistent within
these few sentences (contré and contree, o [griffoun] and a
[gret hors], þanne and þan, for example). Moreover,
in the original text, there is in addition to thorn another old character 3,
called "yogh," to make difficulty. It can represent several sounds
but here may be thought of as equivalent to y. Even the older
spellings (including those where u stands forv or
vice versa) are recognizable, however, and there are only a few words
like ipotaynes "hippopotamuses" and sithes "times"
that have dropped out of the language altogether.
We may
notice a few words and phrases that have meanings no longer common such
as byttere "salty," o this half "on
this side of the world," andat the poynt "to hand,"
and the effect of the centuries-long dominance of French on the vocabulary is
evident in many familiar words which could not have occurred in Aelfric's
writing even if his subject had allowed them, words like contree,
ryueres, plentee, egle, and lyoun.
In
general word order is now very close to that of our time, though we notice
constructions like hath the body more gret and three
sithes more þan is the water of the see. We also notice that present
tense verbs still receive a plural inflection as in beren, dwellen,
han, and ben and that while nominative þei has
replaced Aelfric's hi in the third person plural, the form for
objects is still hem.
All
the same, the number of inflections for nouns, adjectives, and verbs has been
greatly reduced, and in most respects Mandeville is closer to Modern than to
Old English.
The
period of Modern English extends from the sixteenth century to our own day. The
early part of this period saw the completion of a revolution in the phonology
of English that had begun in late Middle English and that effectively
redistributed the occurrence of the vowel phonemes to something approximating
their present pattern. (Mandeville's English would have sounded even less
familiar to us than it looks.)
Other
important early developments include the stabilizing effect on spelling of the
printing press and the beginning of the direct influence of Latin and, to a
lesser extent, Greek on the lexicon. Later, as English came into contact with
other cultures around the world and distinctive dialects of English developed
in the many areas which Britain had colonized, numerous other languages made
small but interesting contributions to our word-stock.
The
historical aspect of English really encompasses more than the three stages of
development just under consideration. English has what might be called a
prehistory as well. As we have seen, our language did not simply spring into
existence; it was brought from the Continent by Germanic tribes who had no form
of writing and hence left no records. Philologists know that they must have
spoken a dialect of a language that can be called West Germanic and that other
dialects of this unknown language must have included the ancestors of such
languages as German, Dutch, Low German, and Frisian. They know this because of
certain systematic similarities which these languages share with each other but
do not share with, say, Danish. However, they have had somehow to reconstruct
what that language was like in its lexicon, phonology, grammar, and semantics
as best they can through sophisticated techniques of comparison developed
chiefly during the last century.
Similarly,
because ancient and modern languages like Old Norse and Gothic or Icelandic and
Norwegian have points in common with Old English and Old High German or Dutch
and English that they do not share with French or Russian, it is clear that
there was an earlier unrecorded language that can be called simply Germanic and
that must be reconstructed in the same way. Still earlier, Germanic was just a
dialect (the ancestors of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were three other such
dialects) of a language conventionally designated Indo-European, and thus
English is just one relatively young member of an ancient family of languages
whose descendants cover a fair portion of the globe.
Swasti.
