HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND GLOBLE ENGLISH

Unit two and three focus on the development of Middle and Modern English and foreign influences on those English, the role of English and distinguish the differences between the Old Eng

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

AND GLOBLE ENGLISH

(for Internal Use)

Lưu Chí Hải Nguyễn Thị Vân Đông HANOI – 2019

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 7

UNIT ONE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH WITH CHRONOLOGY AND OLD ENGLISH 9

1 The old English period (449-1100) 9

2 Sone key events in the old English period 9

3 Britain before the English 10

4 The coming of the English 11

5 The English in Britain 13

6 The first Viking conquest 14

7 The second Viking conquest 16

8 The Scandinavians become English 17

9 The golden age of old English 17

10 Dialects of old English 18

11 Old English phonology 18

12 Morphology 22

13 Syntax 23

EXERCISES 24

UNIT TWO: MIDDLE ENGLISH 26

1 Introduction

2 Middle English Creole hypothesis

3 Decay of inflectional endings 27

4 The noun

5 The adjective 29

6 The pronoun 30

7 The verb 31

8 French influence on the vocabulary 33

EXERCISES 35

UNIT THREE: MODERN ENGLISH 38

1 Definition 38

2 Development 39

3 Outline of changes 41

EXERCISES 43

UNIT FOUR: LIST DIALECTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND

STANDARD ENGLISH 46

1 Introduction 47

2 By continent 47

3 Creoles 53

4 Constructed: 53

5 Manual encodings: 56

6 Code-switching: 56

7 Standard English 57

EXERCISES 58

UNIT 5: INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH 61

1 Historical context 61

2 English as a global language 64

3 English as a lingua franca in foreign language teaching 65

4 Varying concepts: 67

EXERCISES 70

UNIT SIX: ENGLISH IN ENGLAND 70

1 General features 73

2 Change over time 76

3 Overview of regional accents 77

4 Southern England 78

5 South West England 79

6 East Anglia 80

7 Midlands 80

8 Northern England 82

9 Examples of accents used by public figures: 85

10 Regional English accents in the media: 88

EXERCISES 89

UNIT SEVEN: AMERICAN ENGLISH AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN BRITISH AND AMERICAN ENGLISH 91

1 Introduction of American English 91

2 Definition of American English 91

3 Historical background 91

4 Regional variation 93

5 American and British English differences 96

EXERCISES 101

UNIT EIGHT: AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH 104

1 History 104

2 Phonology and pronunciation 106

3 Variation: 109

4 Vocabulary 110

5 Grammar: 115

6 Spelling and style 116

EXERCISES 117

UNIT NINE: CANADIAN ENGLISH 120

1 Introduction 120

2 History 120

3 Historical linguistics 121

4 Spelling tendencies 122

5 Dictionaries 124

6 Phonology and phonetics 125

7 Grammar 132

Date and time notation 132

8 Vocabulary 132

9 Attitudes towards Canadian English 142

EXERCISES 143

UNIT TEN: ENGLISH PRESENT AND FUTURE 144

1 The History of the English Language as a Cultural Subject 144

2 Influences at Work on Language 145

3 Growth and Decay 146

4 The Importance of a Language 146

5 The Importance of English 147

6 The Future of the English Language 148

7 English as a World Language 151

8 Assets and Liabilities 153

9 Cosmopolitan Vocabulary 154

10 Liabilities 155

EXERCISES 157

References 159

INTRODUCTION

This book is designed for the major students at the Faculty of English, Hanoi Open

University The book ‘History of the English Language’ is a comprehensive

exploration of the linguistic and cultural development of English, from the OLd Ages

to present day The book provides students with a balanced and up-to-date overview of the history of the English language and the trend of English in the future It also provides students with varieties of English, the linguistic change, the influences of others languages on English, the notion of dialect and variation across geographical and social boundaries, the ways in which words change meanings and the ways English borrows new words… It is also a process of concerning English as an official language and the status of a standard English

The book includes 10 units In unit one, we focus on the brief history of English

with chronology and Old English We begin with the study of why English we use today We also describe the spread of English in its empire Unit two and three focus

on the development of Middle and Modern English and foreign influences on those English, the role of English and distinguish the differences between the Old English, Middle English, Modern English In unit four, we provide list of dialects of the English language in the world and some concepts of standard English The concepts of international English are introduced in unit five as well as its historical context of developing it Unit six and seven focus on the dialects of English in England and America and some differences between them The lectures explore the rise of American dialects, differences between American and British pronunciation and usage, and the emergence of distinctive American voices in literature, social criticism, and politics Unit 8 discusses about typical characteristics of English in Australia Canadian English is mentioned in the unit 9 In this unit the historical context and the varieties of English in Canada are the information that we would like to introduce The English present and future is the last unit In this unit, we would like to inform the importance of the English language and the possible future of English in world

UNIT ONE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH WITH CHRONOLOGY AND OLD ENGLISH

Objectives: Upon completion of this lecture, you should be able to:

1 Define just what OE is and when and where it was spoken

2 Identify the major regional dialects and historical periods of OE

3 Describe the major features of OE

4 Recognize why the English appeared in England

5 Describe some characteristics of old English

1 The old English period (449-1100)

The history of English language is a long period and very complication This parallels the history and socio-culture of England The recorded history of the English language begins, not on the Continent, where we know its speakers once lived, but in the British Isles, where they eventually settled During the period when the language was spoken in Europe, it is known as pre-old English, for it was only after the English separated themselves from their Germanic cousins that recognize their speech as a distinct language and begin to have records of it

Periodization:

- Pre - historical/pre - Roman

- Old English (450 - 110 AD)

- Middle English (110 - 1500)

- Modern English (1500 - present)

2 Some key events in the old English period

The following events during the Old English period significantly influenced the development of the English language

 449 Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians began to occupy Great Britain, thus changing its major population to English speakers and separating the early English language from its Continental relatives This is a traditional date; the actual migrations doubtless began earlier

 597 Saint Augustine of Canterbury arrived in England to begin the sion of the English by baptizing King Ethelbert of Kent, thus introducing the influence of the Latin language

conver- 664 The Synod of Whitby aligned the English with Roman rather than Celtic Christianity, thus linking English culture with mainstream Europe

 730 The Venerable Bede produced his Ecclesiastical History of the English

People, recording the early history of the English people

 787 The Scandinavian invasion began with raids along the northeast seacoast

 865 The Scandinavians occupied northeastern Britain and began a campaign

to conquer all of England

 871 Alfred became king of Wessex and reigned until his death in 899, ing the English against the Scandinavians, retaking the city of London, estab-lishing the Danelaw, securing the kingship of all England for himself and his successors, and producing or sponsoring the translation of Latin works into English

rally- 987 Elfric, the homilist and grammarian, went to the abbey of Cerne, where

he became the major prose writer of the Old English period and of its Benedictine Revival and produced a model of prose style that influenced following centuries

 991 Olaf Tryggvason invaded England, and the English were defeated at the Battle of Maldon

 1000 The manuscript of the Old English epic Beowulf was written about this

3 Britain before the English

When the English migrated from the Continent to Britain in the fifth century

or perhaps even earlier, they found the island already inhabited A Celtic people had been there for many centuries before Julius Caesar’s invasion of the island

in 55 B.C And before them, other peoples, about whom we know very little, had lived on the islands The Roman occupation, not really begun in earnest until the time of Emperor Claudius (A.D 43), was to make Britain - that is, Britannia - a part of the Roman Empire for nearly as long as the time between the first permanent English settlement in America and our own day It is therefore not surprising that there are so many Roman remains in modern England Despite the long occupation, the British Celts continued to speak their own language, though many of them, particularly those in urban centers who wanted to “get on,” learned the language of their Roman rulers However, only after the Anglo-Saxons arrived was the survival of the British Celtic language seriously threatened

After the Roman legionnaires were withdrawn from Britain in the early fifth century (by 410), Picts from the north and Scots from the west savagely attacked the unprotected British Celts, who after generations of foreign domination had neither the heart nor the skill in weapons to put up much resistance These same Picts and Scots, as well as ferocious Germanic sea raiders whom the Romans called Saxons, had been a considerable nuisance to the Romans in Britain during the latter half of the fourth century

4 The coming of the English

The English derived from Indo-European Language Family

English is one of a large group of languages spoken over most of Europe and also in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Northern India and Srilanka They developed from a parent language probably spoken somewhere in Eastern Europe or Western Asia around 5000 years ago

O NE OF THE LEAVES IS THE E NGLISH LANGUAGE ,E NGLISH

T HE BRANCH IT HAS COME FROM IS W EST G ERMANIC,

WHICH GROWS OUT OF

G ERMANIC, WHICH COMES FROM THE ROOTS OF

T HE I NDO -E UROPEAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES

The Roman army included many non-Italians who were hired to help keep the Empire in order The Roman forces in Britain in the late fourth century probably included some Angles and Saxons brought from the Continent Tradition says, however, that the main body of the English arrived later

According to the Venerable Bede’s account in his Ecclesiastical History of the

English People, written in Latin and completed around 730, almost three

centuries after the event, the Britons appealed to Rome for help against the Picts and Scots What relief they got, a single legion, was only temporarily effective When Rome could or would help no more, the wretched Britons still according

to Bede ironically enough called the “Saxons” to their aid “from the parts beyond the sea.” As a result of their appeal, shiploads of Germanic warrior-adventurers began to arrive

The date that Bede gives for the first landing of those Saxons is 449 With it the Old English period begins With it, too, we may in a sense begin thinking of Britain as England, the land of the Angles for, even though the long ships carried Jutes, Saxons, Frisians, and doubtless members of other tribes as well, their descendants a century and a half later were already beginning to think of themselves and their speech as English (They naturally had no suspicion that it was “Old” English.) The name of a single tribe was thus adopted as a national

name (prehistoric Old English *Angli becoming Engle) The term Anglo-Saxon

is also sometimes used for either the language of this period or its speakers These Germanic sea raiders, ancestors of the English, settled the Pictish and Scottish aggressors’ business in short order Then, with eyes ever on the main chance, a complete lack of any sense of international morality, and no fear

proceeded to subjugate and ultimately to dispossess the Britons whom they had come ostensibly to help They sent word to their Continental kinsmen and friends about the cowardice of the Britons and the fertility of the island; and in the course of the next hundred years or so, more and more Saxons, Angles, and Jutes arrived “from the three most powerful nations of Germania,” as Bede says,

to seek their fortunes in a new land

We can be certain about only a few things in those exciting times The invading newcomers came from various Germanic tribes in northern Germany, including the southern part of the Jutland peninsula (modern Schleswig-Holstein) So they spoke a number of closely related and hence very similar Germanic dialects By the time Saint Augustine arrived in Britain to convert them to Christianity at the end of the sixth century, they dominated practically all of what is now known as England As for the ill-advised Britons, their plight was hopeless Some fled to Wales and Cornwall, some crossed the Channel to Brittany, and others were ultimately assimilated to the English by marriage or otherwise Many doubtless lost their lives in the long-drawn-out fighting

The Germanic tribes that came first, Bede’s Jutes, were led by the mously named brothers Hengest and Horsa (both names mean ‘horse,’ an important animal in Indo-European culture and religion) These brothers were reputed to be great-grandsons of Woden, the chief Germanic god, an appropriate genealogy for tribal headmen Those first-comers settled principally in the southeastern part of the island, still called by its Celtic name of Kent Subsequently, Continental Saxons were to occupy the rest of the region south of the Thames, and Angles, coming presumably from the hook-shaped peninsula in Schleswig known as Angeln, settled the large area stretching from the Thames northward to the Scottish highlands, except for the extreme western portion (Wales)

synony-5 The English in Britain

The Germanic settlement comprised seven kingdoms, the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy: Kent, Essex, Sussex, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria, the last, the land north of the Humber estuary, being an amalgamation of two earlier kingdoms, Bernicia and Deira (see the

accompanying map) Kent early became the chief center of culture and wealth, and by the end of the sixth century its King, Ethelbert, could lay claim to hegemony over all the other kingdoms south of the Humber Later, in the seventh and eighth centuries, this supremacy was to pass to Northumbria, with its great centers of learning at Lindisfarne, Wearmouth, and Jarrow (Bede’s own monastery); then to Mercia; and finally to Wessex, with its brilliant line of kings beginning with Egbert (Ecgberht), who overthrew the Mercian king in 825, and culminating in his grandson, the superlatively great Alfred, whose successors

after his death in 899 took for themselves the title Rex Anglorum ‘King of the

Hippo of the same name who wrote The City of God more than a century earlier

The apostle to the English and his fellow bringers of the Gospel, who landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent, were received by King Ethelbert courteously, if at the beginning a trifle warily Already ripe for conversion through his marriage to a Christian Frankish princess, in a matter of months Ethelbert was himself baptized Four years later, in 601, Augustine was consecrated first archbishop of Canterbury, and there was a church in England

Christianity had actually come to the Anglo-Saxons from two directions from Rome with Saint Augustine and from the Celtic Church with Irish missionaries Christianity had been introduced to the British Isles, and particularly to Ireland, much earlier, before the year 400 And in Ireland Christianity had developed into a distinctive form, quite different from that of Rome Irish missionaries went to Iona and Lindisfarne and made converts in Northumbria and Mercia, where they introduced their style of writing (the Insular hand) to the English For a time it was uncertain whether England would

Whitby in 664, where preference was given to the Roman customs of when to celebrate Easter and of how monks should shave their heads Those apparently trivial decisions were symbolic of the important alignment of the English Church with Rome and the Continent

Bede, who lived at the end of the seventh century and on into the first third

of the next, wrote about Christianity in England and contributed significantly to the growing cultural importance of the land He was a Benedictine monk who spent his life in scholarly pursuits at the monastery of Jarrow and became the most learned person in Europe of his day He was a theologian, a scientist, a biographer, and a historian It is in the last capacity that we remember him

most, for his Ecclesiastical History, cited above, is the fullest and most accurate

account we have of the early years of the English nation

6 The first Viking conquest

The Christian descendants of Germanic raiders who had looted, pillaged, and finally taken the land of Britain by force of arms were themselves to undergo harassment from other Germanic invaders, beginning late in the eighth century, when pagan Viking raiders sacked various churches and monasteries, including Lindisfarne and Bede’s own beloved Jarrow During the first half of the following century, other disastrous raids took place in the south

In 865 a great and expertly organized army landed in East Anglia, led by the unforgettably named Ivar the Boneless and his brother Halfdan, sons of Ragnar

Lothbrok (Lodbrok ‘Shaggy-pants’) According to legend, Ragnar had refused

his bewitched bride’s plea for a deferment of the consummation of their marriage for three nights As a consequence, his son Ivar was born with gristle instead of bone This unique physique seems to have been no handicap to a brilliant if rascally career as a warrior Father Ragnar was eventually put to death in a snake pit in York On this occasion his wife, the lovely Kraka, who felt no resentment toward him, had furnished him with a magical snake-proof coat; but it was of no avail, for his executioners made him remove his outer garment

During the following years, the Vikings gained possession of practically the whole eastern part of England In 870 they attacked Wessex, ruled by the first

Ethelred with the able assistance of his brother Alfred, who was to succeed him

in the following year After years of crushing defeats, in 878 Alfred won a signal victory at Edington He defeated Guthrum, the Danish king of East Anglia, who agreed not only to depart from Wessex but also to be baptized Alfred was his godfather for the sacrament Viking dominance was thus confined to Northumbria and East Anglia, where Danish law held sway, an area therefore known as the Danelaw

Alfred is the only English king to be honored with the sobriquet “the Great,” and deservedly so In addition to his military victories over the Vikings, Alfred reorganized the laws and government of the kingdom and revived learning among the clergy His greatest fame, however, was as a scholar in his own right

He translated Latin books into English: Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral

Care, Orosius’s History, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and Saint

Augustine’s Soliloquies He was also responsible for a translation of Bede’s

Ecclesiastical History and for the compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle -

the two major sources of our knowledge of early English history

Alfred became the subject of folklore, some probably based on fact, such as the story that, during a bad period in the Danish wars, he took refuge incognito

in the hut of a poor Anglo-Saxon peasant woman, who, needing to go out, instructed him to look after some cakes she had in the oven But Alfred was so preoccupied by his own problems that he forgot the cakes and let them burn When the good wife returned, she soundly berated him as a lazy good-for-nothing, and the king humbly accepted the rebuke

The troubles with the Danes, as the Vikings were called by the English, though they included Norwegians and Swedes, were by no means over But the English so successfully repulsed further attacks that, in the tenth century, Alfred’s son and grandsons (three of whom became kings) were able to carry out his plans for consolidating England, which by then had a sizable and peaceful Scandinavian population

7 The second Viking conquest

In the later years of the tenth century, however, trouble started again with

who was soon joined by the Danish king, Svein Forkbeard For more than twenty years there were repeated attacks, most of them crushing defeats for the English, beginning with the glorious if unsuccessful stand made by the men of Essex under the valiant Byrhtnoth in 991, celebrated in the fine Old English

poem The Battle of Maldon As a rule, however, the onslaughts of the later

Northmen were not met with such vigorous resistance, for these were the bad

days of the second Ethelred, called Unrxd (‘ill-advised’) (Rxd means ‘advice,’

but the epithet is popularly translated as ‘the Unready.’)

After the deaths in 1016 of Ethelred and his son Edmund Ironside, who vived his father by little more than half a year, Canute, son of Svein Forkbeard, came to the throne and was eventually succeeded by two sons: Harold Harefoot and Hardicanute (‘Canute the Hardy’) The line of Alfred was not to be restored until 1042, with the accession of Edward the Confessor, though Canute in a sense allied himself with that line by marrying Ethelred’s widow, Emma of Normandy She thus became the mother of two English kings by different fathers: by Ethelred, of Edward the Confessor, and by Canute, of Hardicanute (She was not the mother of either Edmund Ironside or Harold Harefoot.)

sur-The Scandinavian tongues of those days were enough like Old English to make communication possible between the English and the Danes who were their neighbors The English were quite aware of their kinship with

Scandinavians: the Old English epic Beowulf is all about events of Scandinavian

legend and history And approximately a century and a half after the composition of that literary masterpiece, Alfred, who certainly had no reason to

love the Danes, interpolated in his translation of the History of Orosius the first

geographical account of the countries of northern Europe in his famous story of the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan

8 The Scandinavians become English

Despite the enmity and the bloodshed, then, there was a feeling among the English that, when all was said and done, the Northmen belonged to the same

“family” as themselves, a feeling that their ancestors could never have had regarding the British Celts Although a good many Scandinavians settled in England after the earlier raids, they had been motivated largely by the desire to

pillage and loot However, the northern invaders of the tenth and early eleventh centuries seem to have been much more interested in colonizing, especially in East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk), Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Westmorland, Cumberland, and Northumberland So the Danes settled down peaceably enough in time and lived side by side with the English; they were good colonizers, willing to assimilate themselves to their new homes As John Richard Green eloquently sums it up, “England still remained England; the con-querors sank quietly into the mass of those around them; and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ”

What of the impact of that assimilation on the English language, which is our main concern here? Old English and Old Norse (the language of the Scandinavians) had a whole host of frequently used words in common, among

others, man, wife, mother, folk, house, thing, winter, summer, will, can, come,

hear, see, think, ride, over, under, mine, and thine In some instances where

related words differed noticeably in form, the Scandinavian form has won out,

for example, sister (ON systir, OE sweostor)

9 The golden age of old English

It is frequently supposed that the Old English period was somehow gray, dull, and crude Nothing could be further from the truth England after its conversion to Christianity at the end of the sixth century became a veritable beehive of scholarly activity The famous monasteries at Canterbury, Glastonbury, Wearmouth, Lindisfarne, Jarrow, and York were great centers of learning where men such as Aldhelm, Benedict Biscop, Bede, and Alcuin pursued their studies The great scholarly movement to which Bede belonged is largely responsible for the preservation of the old English period (449-1100) classical culture for us The cathedral school at York, founded by one of Bede’s pupils, provided Charlemagne with leadership in his Carolingian Renaissance,

in the person of the illustrious English scholar Alcuin (Ealhwine), who introduced the tradition of Anglo-Saxon humanism to western Europe

The culture of the north of England in the seventh and eighth centuries spread over the entire country, despite the decline that it suffered as a result of

energy and ability of Alfred the Great, that culture was not lost; and Alfred’s able successors in the royal house of Wessex down to the time of the second Ethelred consolidated the cultural and political contributions made by their distinguished ancestor

Literature in the Old English period was rich in poetry Cadmon, the first English poet we know by name, was a seventh-century herdsman whose visionary encounter with an angel produced a new genre of poetry that expressed Christian subject matter in the style of the old pagan scops or bards

The epic poem Beowulf, probably composed in the early eighth century (though

not written down until much later), embodied traditions that go back to the Anglo-Saxons’ origins on the Continent in a sophisticated blending of pagan and Christian themes

Prose was not neglected either Bede contributed to scholarship and literature in the early eighth century and King Alfred’s in the late ninth Elfric was a tenth and early eleventh-century Benedictine monk He was the most important prose stylist of classical Old English His grammar, glossary, and colloquy were basic texts for education long after his death

As for the English language, which is our main concern here, it was certainly one of the earliest highly developed vernacular tongues in Europe-French did not become a literary language until well after the period of the conquest The English word stock was capable of expressing subtleties of thought as well as Latin English culture was more advanced than any other in western Europe, so the notion that Anglo-Saxondom was a barbarian culture is very far from the reality

10 Dialects of old English

Four principal dialects were spoken in Anglo-Saxon England: Kentish, the speech of the Jutes who settled in Kent; West Saxon, spoken in the region south

of the Thames exclusive of Kent; Mercian, spoken from the Thames to the Humber exclusive of Wales; and Northumbrian, whose localization (north of the Humber) is indicated by its name Mercian and Northumbrian have certain characteristics in common that distinguish them from West Saxon and Kentish,

so they are sometimes grouped together as Anglian, those who spoke these

dialects being predominantly Angles The records of Anglian and Kentish are scant, but much West Saxon writing has come down to us, though probably only

a fraction of what once existed

Although standard Modern English is primarily a descendant of Mercian speech, the dialect of Old English that will be described in this unit is West Saxon During the time of Alfred and for a long time thereafter, Winchester, the capital of Wessex and therefore in a sense of all England, was a center of English culture, thanks to the encouragement given by Alfred himself to learning Though London was at the time a thriving commercial city, it did not acquire its cultural or political importance until later

Most of the extant Old English manuscripts all in fact that may be regarded

as literature are written in the West Saxon dialect However, we are at no great disadvantage when we compare the West Saxon dialect with Modern English because differences between Old English dialects were not great Occasionally a distinctive Mercian form (labeled Anglian if it happens to be identical with the Northumbrian form) is cited as more obviously similar to the standard modern

form, for instance, Anglian ald, which regularly developed into Modern English

old The West Saxon form was eald

The Old English described here is that of about the year 1000—roughly that

of the period during which Elfric, the most representative writer of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, was flourishing This development of English, in which most of the surviving literature is preserved, is called late West Saxon or classical Old English That of the Age of Alfred, who reigned in the later years

of the ninth century, is early West Saxon, though it is actually rather late in the early period

The Old English period spans somewhat more than six centuries In a period

of more than 600 years many changes are bound to occur in sounds, grammar, and vocabulary The view of the language presented here is a snapshot of it toward the end of that period

11 Old English phonology

The inventory of classical Old English (Late West Saxon) surface phones, as

Cited from A history of the English language edited by Albert C

Baugh & Thomas Cable (2002)

The sounds enclosed in parentheses in the chart above are not considered to

be phonemes:

when geminated (doubled)

 [ŋ] is an allophone of /n/ occurring before /k/ and /ɡ/

 [v, ð, z] are voiced allophones of /f, θ, s/ respectively, occurring between vowels or voiced consonants

 [ç, x] are allophones of /h/ occurring in coda position after front and back vowels respectively

 [ɣ] is an allophone of /ɡ/ occurring after a vowel, and, at an earlier stage of the language, in the syllable onset

 the voiceless sonorants [ʍ, l̥ , n̥, r̥] are analysed as realizing the sequences /hw, hl, hn, hr/

The above system is largely similar to that of Modern English, except that [ç,

x, ɣ, l̥ , n̥, r̥] (and [ʍ] for most speakers) have generally been lost, while the voiced affricate and fricatives (now also including /ʒ/) have become independent phonemes, as has /ŋ/

Vowels – monophthongs

unrounded rounded unrounded rounded

Cited from A history of the English language edited by Albert C

Baugh & Thomas Cable (2002)

The mid front rounded vowels /ø(ː)/ had merged into unrounded /e(ː)/ before the Late West Saxon period During the 11th century such vowels arose again, as monophthongisations of the diphthongs /e(ː)o/, but quickly merged again with /e(ː)/ in most dialects

Diphthongs

First element Short (monomoraic) Long (bimoraic)

Cited from A history of the English language edited by Albert C

Baugh & Thomas Cable (2002)

The exact pronunciation of the West Saxon close diphthongs, spelt ⟨ie⟩, is

disputed; it may have been /i(ː)y/ or /i(ː)e/ Other dialects may have had different systems of diphthongs; for example, Anglian dialects retained /i(ː)u/, which had merged with /e(ː)o/ in West Saxon

Sound changes

Some of the principal sound changes occurring in the pre-history and history

of Old English were the following:

 Fronting of [ɑ(ː)] to [æ(ː)] except when nasalised or followed by a nasal consonant ("Anglo-Frisian brightening"), partly reversed in certain positions by later "a-restoration" or retraction

 Monophthongisation of the diphthong [ai], and modification of remaining

 Diphthongisation of long and short front vowels in certain positions ("breaking")

 Palatalisation of velars [k], [ɡ], [ɣ], [sk] to [tʃ], [dʒ], [j], [ʃ] in certain front-vowel environments

 The process known as i-mutation (which for example led to

modern mice as the plural of mouse)

 Loss of certain weak vowels in word-final and medial positions, and of medial [(i)j]; reduction of remaining unstressed vowels

 Diphthongisation of certain vowels before certain consonants when preceding a back vowel ("back mutation")

 Loss of /h/ between vowels or between a voiced consonant and a vowel, with lengthening of the preceding vowel

 Collapse of two consecutive vowels into a single vowel

 "Palatal umlaut", which has given forms such as six (compare German sechs)

12 Morphology

Nouns decline for other demonstratives are þes ("this"), and ġeon ("yon")

These words inflect for case, gender, number Adjectives have both strong and weak sets of endings, weak ones being used when a definite or possessive determiner is also present

Verbs conjugate for three persons: first, second, and third; two numbers: singular, plural; two tenses: present, and past; three moods: indicative, subjunctive, and imperative; and are strong (exhibiting ablaut) or weak (exhibiting a dental suffix) Verbs have two infinitive forms: bare, and bound; and two participles: present, and past The subjunctive has past and present forms Finite verbs agree with subjects in person, and number The future tense, passive voice, and other aspectsare formed with compounds Adpositions are mostly before but often after their object If the object of an adposition is marked in the dative case, an adposition may conceivably be located anywhere

in the sentence

Remnants of the Old English case system in Modern English are in the forms of a few pronouns (such as I/me/mine, she/her, who/whom/whose) and in

the possessive ending -'s, which derives from the masculine and neuter genitive ending -es The modern English plural ending -(e)s derives from the Old English -as, but the latter applied only to "strong" masculine nouns in the nominative and accusative cases; different plural endings were used in other instances Old English nouns had grammatical gender, while modern English has only natural gender Pronoun usage could reflect either natural or grammatical gender when those conflicted, as in the case of ƿīf, a neuter noun referring to a female person

In Old English's verbal compound constructions are the beginnings of the compound tenses of Modern English Old English verbs include strong verbs, which form the past tense by altering the root vowel, and weak verbs, which use

a suffix such as -de As in Modern English, and peculiar to the Germanic languages, the verbs formed two great classes: weak (regular), and strong (irregular) Like today, Old English had fewer strong verbs, and many of these have over time decayed into weak forms Then, as now, dental suffixes indicated the past tense of the weak verbs, as in work and worked

13 Syntax

Old English syntax is similar to that of modern English Some differences are consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection, allowing freer word order

 Default word order is verb-second in main clauses, and verb-final

in subordinate clauses, being more like modern German than modern English

 No do-support in questions and negatives Questions were usually formed

by inverting subject and finite verb, and negatives by placing ne before

the finite verb, regardless what verb

 Multiple negatives can stack up in a sentence intensifying each other (negative concord)

 Sentences with subordinate clauses of the type "when X, Y" (e.g "When I

got home, I ate dinner") don't use a wh-type conjunction, but rather a type correlative conjunction such as þā, otherwise meaning "then" (e.g þā X,

th-þā Y in place of "when X, Y") The wh-words are used only

as interrogatives and as indefinite pronouns

 Similarly, wh- forms were not used as relative pronouns Instead, the indeclinable word þe is used, often preceded by (or replaced by) the appropriate form of the article/demonstrative se

EXERCISES

I QUESTIONS FOR CONSIDERING

1 What is the name of the language family English originated from?

2 What were the most important results of the Roman occupation in the period of old English?

3 Why and how did Latin become an important part of the English language?

4 Where did English first develop from?

5 Where were the Germanic settlement comprised?

6 Who were the Vikings and what was their influence on the English language?

7 What did Alfred contribute to England?

At the height of Anglo-Saxon culture, Alfred brings peaceful coexistence among

8 Which event was happened in 10th century?

9 What are the main points of the golden age of old English?

10 How was Anglo-Saxon Poetry influenced English at that time?

2 MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS

Choose the best answer for each question

1 Which language did people in England speak before English appeared?

2 When was English first brought to England?

A 2nd & 3th centuries B 3th &4th centuries

C 5th &6th centuries D 6th &7th centuries

3 Which sentence is true?

A New waves of Germanic invaders and settlers come from Norway and Denmark starting in the late 8th century

B New waves of Germanic invaders and settlers come from Norway and Denmark starting in the late 9th century

C New waves of Germanic invaders and settlers come from Norway and Denmark starting in the early 8th century

D New waves of Germanic invaders and settlers come from Norway and Denmark starting in the late 9th century

4 What influenced on the British Isles when Norman conquered in 1066?

A Nothing

B They brought only language to Britain

C They brought new rulers, new culture, society and language

D They brought new rulers, new culture, society

5 Which has influenced English writing down to the present day?

A Culture B King James Bible C Economy D Politics

6 How long did the old English last?

7 How many kingdoms were there in the first Anglo-saxon period?

A 7 kingdoms B 5 kingdoms C 6 kingdoms D 9 kingdoms

8 What kinds of people were the Vikings from Scandinavia?

A Explorers, traders, warrior B Politicians, traders, warriors

C Explorers, preachers, warriors D Explorers, workers , warriors

9 When did the kings of Denmark and Norway have come to view England as ripe for the plucking and begin to prepare an attack?

10.When did the Roman Empire collapse in England?

A 8th century B Ca 600 C 5th century D 4th century

UNIT TWO: MIDDLE ENGLISH

Objectives: Upon completion of this lecture, you should be able to:

1 Describe the major features of middle English and the changing from OE

to ME

2 Describe the major dialects of ME

3 Summarize the differences between Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME)

4 Describe how French influences on English

1 Introduction

The Middle English period (1150-1500) was marked by momentous changes

in the English language, changes more extensive and fundamental than those that have taken place at any time before or since Some of them were the result

of the Norman Conquest and the conditions which followed in the wake of that event Others were a continuation of tendencies that had begun to manifest themselves in Old English These would have gone on even without the Conquest, but they took place more rapidly because the Norman invasion removed from English those conservative influences that are always felt when a language is extensively used in books and is spoken by an influential educated class The changes of this period affected English in both its grammar and its vocabulary They were so extensive in each department that it is difficult to say which group is the more significant Those in the grammar reduced English from a highly inflected language to an extremely analytic one Those in the vocabulary involved the loss of a large part of the Old English word-stock and the addition of thousands of words from French and Latin At the beginning of the period English is a language that must be learned like a foreign tongue; at the end it is Modern English

2 Middle English Creole hypothesis

The Middle English creole hypothesis is the concept that the English

language is a creole, i.e a language that developed from a pidgin The vast differences between Old and Middle English have led some historical linguists

to claim that the language underwent creolisation at around the time of the Norman Conquest The theory was first proposed in 1977 by C Bailey and

K Maroldt and has since found both supporters and detractors in the academic world Different versions of the hypothesis refer to creolisation through contact between Old English and Norman French, between Old English and Old Norse,

or caused by large numbers of people switching from speaking British Celtic languages to speaking English

Some versions of the hypothesis propose multiple creolization events, with later ones reinforcing and broadening simplifications introduced by earlier ones The argument in favour of calling Middle English a creole comes from the extreme reduction in inflected forms from Old English to Middle English The system of declension of nouns was radically simplified and analogized The verb system also lost many old patterns of conjugation Many strong verbs were reanalysed as weak verbs The subjunctive mood became much less distinct Syntax was also simplified somewhat, with word order patterns becoming more rigid These grammatical simplifications resemble those observed in pidgins, creoles and other contact languages, which arise when speakers of different languages need to communicate Such contact languages usually lack the inflections of either parent language, or drastically simplify them However, many say that English is probably not a creole because it retains

a high number (283) of irregular verbs, just like other Germanic languages, a linguistic trait that is usually first to disappear among creoles and pidgins

It is certain that Old English underwent grammatical changes, e.g the collapse of all cases into genitive and common However, the reduction of unstressed vowelsto schwa, due to a fixed stress location, contributed to this process, a pattern that is common to many Germanic languages The process of case collapse was also already under way in Old English, e.g in strong masculine nouns, where the nominative and accusative cases had become identical Thus the simplification of noun declension from Old English to Middle English may have had causes unrelated to creolization, although creolization may have caused the grammatical changes to occur more rapidly

The changes in English grammar may be described as a general reduction of inflections Endings of the noun and adjective marking distinctions of number and case and often of gender were so altered in pronunciation as to lose their distinctive form and hence their usefulness To some extent the same thing is true of the verb This leveling of inflectional endings was due partly to phonetic changes, partly to the operation of analogy The phonetic changes were simple but far-reaching The earliest seems to have been the change of final -m to -n wherever it occurred, i.e., in the dative plural of nouns and adjectives and in the dative singular (masculine and neuter) of adjectives when inflected according to the strong declension Thus mudum (to the mouths) > mudun, godum > godun This -n, along with the -n of the other inflectional endings, was then dropped (*mudu, *godu) At the same time, the vowels a, o, u, e in inflectional endings were obscured to a sound, the so-called “indeterminate vowel,” which came to

be written e (less often i, y, u, depending on place and date) As a result, a number of originally distinct endings such as -a, -u, -e, - an, -um were reduced generally to a uniform -e, and such grammatical distinctions as they formerly expressed were no longer conveyed Traces of these changes have been found in Old English manuscripts as early as the tenth century By the end of the twelfth century they seem to have been generally carried out The leveling is somewhat obscured in the written language by the tendency of scribes to preserve the traditional spelling, and in some places the final n was retained even in the spoken language, especially as a sign of the plural The effect of these changes

on the inflection of the noun and the adjective, and the further simplification that was brought about by the operation of analogy, may be readily shown

4 The noun

In early Middle English only two methods of indicating the plural remained fairly distinctive: the -s or -es from the strong masculine declension and the -en (as in oxen) from the weak And for a time, at least in southern England, it would have been difficult to predict that the -s would become the almost universal sign of the plural that it has become Until the thirteenth century the -

en plural enjoyed great favor in the south, being often added to nouns which had not belonged to the weak declension in Old English But in the rest of England

the -s plural (and genitive singular) of the old first declension (masculine) was apparently felt to be so distinctive that it spread rapidly Its extension took place most quickly in the north Even in Old English many nouns originally of other declensions had gone over to this declension in the Northumbrian dialect By

1200 -s was the standard plural ending in the north and north Midland areas; other forms were exceptional Fifty years later it had conquered the rest of the Midlands, and in the course of the fourteenth century it had definitely been accepted all over England as the normal sign of the plural in English nouns Its spread may have been helped by the early extension of -s throughout the plural

in Anglo-Norman, but in general it may be considered as an example of the survival of the fittest in language

Middle English retains only two distinct noun-ending patterns from the more complex system of inflection in Old English The Early Middle English

nouns engel("angel") and name ("name") demonstrate the two patterns:

Strong

(engel) Singular Plural

Weak (name) Singular Plural

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Some nouns of the engel type have an -e in the nominative/accusative

singular, like the weak declension, but otherwise strong endings Often these are

the same nouns that had an -e in the nominative/accusative singular of Old English (they, in turn, were inherited from Proto-Germanic ja-stem and i-stem

nouns.) The distinct dative case was lost in early Middle English The genitive survived, however, but by the end of the Middle English period, only the strong

-'s ending (variously spelt) was in use

The strong (e)s plural form has survived into Modern English The weak

-(e)n form is now rare and used only in oxen and, as part of a double plural, in

children and brethren Some dialects still have forms such as eyen (for eyes), shoon (for shoes), hosen (for hose(s)), kine (for cows), and been (for bees)

5 The adjective

In the adjective the leveling of forms had even greater consequences Partly

as a result of the sound-changes already described, partly through the extensive working of analogy, the form of the nominative singular was early extended to all cases of the singular, and that of the nominative plural to all cases of the plural, both in the strong and the weak declensions The result was that in the weak declension there was no longer any distinction between the singular and the plural: both ended in -e (blinda> blinde and blindan>blinde) This was also true of those adjectives under the strong declension whose singular ended in -e

By about 1250 the strong declension had distinctive forms for the singular and plural only in certain monosyllabic adjectives which ended in a consonant in Old English (sing glad, plur glade) Under the circumstances the only ending which remained to the adjective was often without distinctive grammatical meaning and its use was not governed by any strong sense of adjectival inflection Although it is clear that the -e ending of the weak and plural forms was available for use in poetry in both the East and West Midlands until the end of the fourteenth century, it is impossible to know the most usual status of the form in the spoken language Certainly adjectival inflections other than -e, such as Chaucer’s oure aller cok, were archaic survivals by the close of the Middle English period

6 The pronoun

The decay of inflections that brought about such a simplification of the noun and the adjective as has just been described made it necessary to depend less upon formal indications of gender, case, and (in adjectives) number, and to rely more upon juxtaposition, word order, and the use of prepositions to make clear the relation of words in a sentence This is apparent from the corresponding decay of pronominal inflections, where the simplification of forms was due in only a slight measure to the weakening of final syllables that played so large a part in the reduction of endings in the noun and the adjective The loss was greatest in the demonstratives Of the numerous forms of se, seo, p&t we have

only the and that surviving through Middle English and continuing in use today

A plural tho (those) survived to Elizabethan times All the other forms indicative

of different gender, number, and case disappeared in most dialects early in the Middle English period The same may be said of the demonstrative pes, peos, pis (this) Everywhere but in the south the neuter form pis came to be used early

in Middle English for all genders and cases of the singular, while the forms of the nominative plural were similarly extended to all cases of the plural, appearing in Modern English as those and these

In the personal pronoun the losses were not so great Most of the distinctions that existed in Old English were retained However the forms of the dative and accusative cases were early combined, generally under that of the dative (him, her, [t]hem) In the neuter the form of the accusative (h)it became the general objective case, partly because it was like the nominative, and partly because the dative him would have been subject to confusion with the corresponding case of the masculine One other general simplification is to be noted: the loss of the dual number A language can get along without a distinction in pronouns for two persons and more than two: the forms wit

It will be observed that the pronoun she had the form heo in Old English The modern form could have developed from the Old English heo, but it is believed by some that it is due in part at least to the influence of the demonstrative seo A similar reinforcing influence of the demonstrative is perhaps to be seen in the forms of the third person plural, they, their, them, but here the source of the modern developments was undoubtedly Scandinavian The normal development of the Old English pronouns would have been hi (he), here, hem, and these are very common In the districts, however, where Scandinavian influence was strong, the nominative hi began early to be replaced

by the Scandinavian form pei (ON peir), and somewhat later a similar replacement occurred in the other cases, their and them The new forms were adopted more slowly farther south, and the usual inflection in Chaucer is thei, here, hem But by the end of the Middle English period the forms they their, them may be regarded as the normal English plurals

Apart from some leveling of inflections and the weakening of endings in accordance with the general tendency, the principal changes in the verb during the Middle English period were the serious losses suffered by the strong conjugation This conjugation, although including some of the most important verbs in the language, was relatively small as compared with the large and steadily growing body of weak verbs

While an occasional verb developed a strong past tense or past participle by analogy with similar strong verbs, new verbs formed from nouns and adjectives

or borrowed from other languages were regularly conjugated as weak Thus the minority position of the strong conjugation was becoming constantly more appreciable After the Norman Conquest the loss of native words further depleted the ranks of the strong verbs Those that survived were exposed to the influence of the majority, and many have changed over in the course of time to the weak inflection

Losses among the Strong Verbs

Nearly a third of the strong verbs in Old English seem to have died out early

in the Middle English period In any case about ninety of them have left no traces in written records after 1150 In other words, more than a hundred of the Old English strong verbs were lost at the beginning of the Middle English period

But this was not all The loss has continued in subsequent periods Some thirty more became obsolete in the course of Middle English, and an equal number, which were still in use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, finally died out except in the dialects, often after they had passed over to the weak conjugation or had developed weak forms alongside the strong Today more than half of the Old English strong verbs have disappeared completely from the standard language

Strong Verbs That Became Weak

The principle of analogy—the tendency of language to follow certain patterns and adapt a less common form to a more familiar one—is well exemplified in the further history of the strong verbs The weak conjugation offered

a fairly consistent pattern for the past tense and the past participle, whereas there

was much variety in the different classes of the strong verb We say sing—sang—sung, but drive—drove—driven, fall—fell—fallen, etc At a time when English was the language chiefly of the lower classes and largely removed from the restraining influences of education and a literary standard, it was natural that many speakers should apply the pattern of weak verbs to some which were historically strong At all events the fifteenth century shows only about a dozen new weak formations and in the whole modern period there are only about as many more

In none of the many verbs which have thus become weak was the change from the strong conjugation a sudden one Strong forms continued to be used while the weak ones were growing up, and in many cases they continued in use long after the weak inflection had become well established Many strong verbs also had weak forms (blowed for blew, knowed for knew, teared for tore) that did not survive in the standard speech, while in other cases both forms have continued in use (cleft—clove, crowed—crew, heaved—hove, sheared— shore, shrived—shrove)

As a general rule, the indicative first person singular of verbs in the present tense ends in -e ("ich here" I hear), the second person in -(e)st ("þou spekest" thou speakest), and the third person in -eþ ("he comeþ" he cometh/he comes)

(þ (the letter 'thorn') is pronounced like the unvoiced th in "think", but, under certain circumstances, it may be like the voiced th in "that") The following table

illustrates the conjugation pattern of but one dialect

ich singe sang baþe baþede am wæs have hadde will wolde

þu singest songest baþest baþedest art were hast haddest wilt woldest

he/sche/hit singeþ sang baþeþ baþede is wæs haþ hadde will wolde

we/ȝe/þei singen songen baþen baþeden aren weren haven hadden wollen wolden

Participle singende ȝesungen baþende baþede bende ȝeben havende ȝehad willende ȝewolde

Plural forms vary strongly by dialect, with Southern dialects preserving the

Old English -eþ, Midland dialects showing -en from about 1200 and Northern forms using -es in the third person singular as well as the plural

The past tense of weak verbs is formed by adding an ed(e), d(e) or

-t(e) ending The past-tense forms, without their personal endings, also serve as

past participles with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: i-, y- and sometimes bi-

Strong verbs, by contrast, form their past tense by changing their stem vowel

(binden becomes bound, a process called apophony), as in Modern English

8 French influence on the vocabulary

While the loss of inflections and the consequent simplification of English grammar were thus only indirectly due to the use of French in England, French influence is much more direct and observable upon the vocabulary Where two languages exist side by side for a long time and the relations between the people speaking them are as intimate as they were in England, a considerable transference of words from one language to the other is inevitable As is generally the case, the interchange was to some extent mutual A good many English words found their way into the French spoken in England We are naturally less interested in them here, because they concern rather the history of the Anglo-Norman language Their number was not so large as that of the French words introduced into English English, representing a culture that was regarded as inferior, had more to gain from French, and there were other factors involved The number of French words that poured into English was unbelievably great There is nothing comparable to it in the previous or subsequent history of the language

Although this influx of French words was brought about by the victory of the Conqueror and by the political and social consequences of that victory, it was neither sudden nor immediately apparent Rather it began slowly and continued with varying tempo for a long time Indeed it can hardly be said to have ever stopped The large number of French words borrowed during the Middle Ages has made it easy for us to go on borrowing, and the close cultural relations between France and England in all subsequent periods have furnished a constant

opportunity for the transfer of words But there was a time in the centuries following the Conquest when this movement had its start and a stream of French words poured into English with a momentum that continued until toward the end

of the Middle English period

In this movement two stages can be observed, an earlier and a later, with the year 1250 as the approximate dividing line The borrowings of the first stage differ from those of the second in being much less numerous, in being more likely to show peculiarities of Anglo-Norman phonology, and, especially, in the circumstances that brought about their introduction When we study the French words appearing in English before 1250, roughly 900 in number, we find that many of them were such as the lower classes would become familiar with through contact with a French-speaking nobility (baron, noble, dame, servant, messenger, feast, minstrel, juggler, largess) Others, such as story, rime, lay, douzepers (the twelve peers of the Charlemagne romances), obviously owed their introduction into English to literary channels The largest single group among the words that came in early was associated with the church, where the necessity for the prompt transference of doctrine and belief from the clergy to the people is sufficient to account for the frequent transfer of words In the period after 1250 the conditions under which French words had been making their way into English were supplemented by a new and powerful factor: those who had been accustomed to speak French were turning increasingly to the use

of English Whether to supply deficiencies in the English vocabulary or in their own imperfect command of that vocabulary, or perhaps merely yielding to a natural impulse to use a word long familiar to them and to those they addressed, the upper classes carried over into English an astonishing number of common French words In changing from French to English they transferred much of their governmental and administrative vocabulary, their ecclesiastical, legal, and military terms, their familiar words of fashion, food, and social life, the vocabulary of art, learning, and medicine In general we may say that in the earlier Middle English period the French words introduced into English were such as people speaking one language often learn from those speaking another;

learning to speak English, they were also such words as people who had been accustomed to speak French would carry over with them into the language of their adoption Only in this way can we understand the nature and extent of the French importations in this period

EXERCISES

1 QUESTIONS FOR CONSIDERING

1 How do you know the words “ Creole” and “Pidgin”

2 Why did French replace the English at that time?

3 Who spoke English at that time?

4 Why did many say E is not creole?

5 What are the French influences on E?

6 Why did E reappear in England?

7 What did the grammar change in the middle E?

8 How did the declension of adjectives change in the middle English?

9 What effect did the decay of inflections have upon grammatical gender in

Middle English?

10 Why did large number of French words still borrow after the victory?

2 MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS

Choose the best answer for each question

1 When did English become dominant in Britain again?

A In the 14th century B In the 15th century

C In the 16th century D In the 17th century

2 Which sentence is true?

A Old English did sound or look like English today

B Old English didn’t sound or look difference English today

C Old English did sound or look difference English today

D Old English didn’t sound or look like English today

3 Which has influenced English writing down to the present day?

A Culture B King James Bible C Economy D Politics

4 Which sentence is true?

A The period from 1500 to about 1650 is called Early Modern English

B The period from 1500 to about 1650 is called Early Old English

C The period from 1500 to about 1650 is called Lately Modern English

D The period from 1500 to about 1650 is called Lately Old English

5 Which languages did the grammatical simplifications observed in?

A creoles and Celtic B pidgins, creoles

C other contact languages D pidgins, creoles and other contact languages

6 What did the verb system lose?

A The strong verbs B Many old patterns of conjugation

C The number of irregular verbs D The weak verbs

7 How many grammatical genders do most Romance languages have?

8 Which gender did not old Germanic languages use?

A Masculine B feminine C neuter D common neuter

9 In the personal pronoun, the losses were…

A Most of the distinctions that existed in Old English were retained

B Lost so great

C Old English were not retained to middle English

D Lost a few

10 How did the form of the nominative singular use?

A Not extended to all cases of the singular

B Used for few cases of the singular

C Extended to many cases of the singular

D Used for all cases of the singular

UNIT THREE: MODERN ENGLISH

Objectives: Upon completion of this lecture, you should be able to:

1 Summarize the historical background of the modern English

2 Describe the ways in which the English vocabulary expanded in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

3 Recognize words from this period in Modern English

4 Describe the changes of Phonology & Syntax

Modern English (sometimes New English or NE as opposed to Middle

English and Old English) is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, which began in the late 14th century and was completed in roughly 1550

With some differences in vocabulary, texts from the early 17th century, such

as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered

to be in Modern English, or more specifically, are referred to as using Early Modern English or Elizabethan English English was adopted in regions around the the world, such as North America, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Australia and New Zealand through colonisation by the British Empire

Modern English has many dialects spoken in many countries throughout the world, sometimes collectively referred to as the anglosphere These dialects include American English, Australian English, British English (containing English English, Welsh English and Scottish English), Canadian English,

Caribbean English, Hiberno-English, Indian English, Pakistani English, Nigerian English, New Zealand English, Philippine English, Singaporean English, and South African English

According to the Ethnologue, there are almost 1 billion speakers of English

as a first or second language English is spoken as a first or a second language in

a large number of countries, with the largest number of native speakers being in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland; there are also large populations in India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Southern Africa It "has more non-native speakers than any other language, is more widely dispersed around the world and is used for more purposes than any other language" Its large number of speakers, plus its worldwide presence, have made English a common language ("lingua franca") "of the airlines, of the sea and shipping, of computer technology, of science and indeed of (global) communication generally"

2 Development

Modern English evolved from Early Modern English which was used from the beginning of the Tudor period until the Interregnum and Restoration in England The works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible are considered to be in Modern English, or more specifically, are referred to as using Early Modern English or Elizabethan English By the late 18th century the British Empire had facilitated the spread of Modern English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language Modern English also facilitated worldwide international communication English was adopted in North America, India, parts of Africa, Australia, and many other regions In the post-colonial period, some of the newly created nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted

to continue using Modern English as the official language to avoid the political difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others Early Modern English

1 Politically, under the rule of the Tudor Dynasty and Stuart Dynasty

3 Culturally, the Renaissance

Shakespeare (1590-1610): hundreds of new words appear for the first time in his work: addiction, assassination, comply, consign, denote,compulsive, discontent, domineering, exhale, generous, hostile, investment, luggage, obscene, pious, protester, retirement,survivor, supervise, tranquil, unreal, useful

Phrases from Shakespeare: breathe one’s last, cheer up, foregone conclusion, good riddance,household name, salad days, seamy side, tower of strength, etc

- Printing also brought standardization to English

- Spelling and grammar became fixed

- Most publishing houses were, became the standard

- In 1604 the first English dictionary was published

The effects of printing

Literacy spreads as books become cheap and accessible･

Printing influences standardization:･Printed documents originate in London, home of standard dialect･

Practical need to print only one version of a book (not multiple dialect versions)･Begins fixing of spellings (though inconsistency remains for centuries)･

The printed word gains authority over handwritten documents･

Prestige of document content: religious, scientific, literary, governmental Power of elites to control what gets printed

Late Modern English (1800-Present)

The main difference between EME and LME is vocabulary LME has many words, arising from two principal factors:

- The Industrial Revolution and technology

- The British Empire

Post Modern English

By the 18th Century, the British colonies and its international trade both had greatly developed There were many English vocabularies borrowed from India, Cuba, the West Indies, South Americ… Because of the absorbed from its colonies and other countries, it makes English expression come into a more

From 19th to 20th century

Language vocabulary is always a reflection of social life This is the great changes have taken place in every field of social life, especially in science and technology, the expension of English vocabulary has become significant and increasing

1945 – present:

- American political,economic,military supremacy

- English has greater impact than ever on other languages, become second language and a scientific lingua franca

- British and American broadcasting media make the language accessible to more and more people,which makes long-established European cultures feel threatened

- New waves of immigrants to the U.S.The newcomers repeat the pattern of earlier settlers,enrich the language and lose their language

"Like", "same as", and "immediately" are used as conjunctions

"The" becomes optional before certain combinations of noun phrase and proper name