History of English

Reestablishment of English
The situation changed after 1200
A feeling of rivalry developed between the 2 countries and finally anti-foreign movement resulted into the Hundred Years’ War.

Reestablishment of English
During two centuries after Norman Conquest French was necessary for upper classes, in the 13th and 14th centuries its maintenance became quite artificial.
The spread of English among upper classes was making steady progress.

Reestablishment of English
The tendency to speak English was becoming stronger even in such conservative institutions as church and university.
The 14th century Oxford and Cambridge needed students to construe and translate in both English and French

Reestablishment of English
The fact which helped English to recover its former prestige was the rise of substantial middle class, as well as of two other important groups – craftsmen and merchants.

Reestablishment of English
In 1352 the mayor and the aldermen of London ordered that the trial would be in English not in French
In 1362 an important step was taken toward restoring English in the country, namely in legal system.

Reestablishment of English
The last step that the English language had to make its gradual ascent was its employment in school. It had to meet the competition with Latin and French.

Middle English
Linguistic characteristics
Fast and considerable changes in grammar and vocabulary.
Decay of inflectional endings.
Losses among strong verbs
Strong Verbs become weak
Loss of grammatical gender

Middle English
Linguistic characteristics
Of the 10.000 words adapted from Norman French , ¾ are still in use: justice, jury, damage, prison, marriage, sovereign, parliament, prince, viscount, baron etc.
But king & queen are of Germanic origin.

Loans from Norman French
The Norman flood brought us
picture, question, treasure, mercy, suspense,
reception, immediate, pure, crime, subtle, exempt, suffice, mirror, music, defend,
control, journal, multiply, journey, region, country, office and countless others.

Loans from Norman French
Practically all of English words beginning with /v/ are of Norman French origin:
virtue, vanity, vowel, virgin, vassal, vault, vary, value, vacant, vanquish, vermin and very.

Loans from Norman French
Native English words never contain the digraph
, and almost all words containing it come from Norman French:
oil, coin, boil, join, point, poison, soil, cloy, toil, loyal, royal, joy, poise, foil, destroy, alloy, ointment and others.

Loans from Norman French
Norman French contributed practically the entire traditional vocabulary of linguistics:
language, sentence, question, noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, tense, case, participle, infinitive, subject, object and many more.

Loans from Norman French
In fact, even such everyday Old English words as andwlita, ea, weald and berg disappeared from the language, replaced by their French equivalents face,river, forest and mountain.
Old English dal was reduced to a regionalism, dale, and the normal word became valley.

Native English
Personal pronouns, grammatical words, number names, most body-part names, most kinship terms, names of basic materials, most names of natural phenomena and of geographical features, everyday verbs and adjectives – all are native English:
me, you, and, the, with, to, in, not, two, seven, head, heart, arm, foot, man, woman, child, father, mother, daughter, stone, wood, iron, gold, sun, moon, star, wind, rain, snow, tree, road, path, stream, ford, bridge, come, go, think, believe, speak, wonder, live, laugh, stink, red, black, old, young, new, little and short.

Middle English
By the end of the Middle English period, the Germanic element in the English vocabulary had been firmly put in the shade by a Romance and Italian lexical invasion of unprecedented proportions.

Middle English
French Influence on the Vocabulary
The peak of borrowing was the last quarter of the 14th century, when over 2.500 French words are identified.

Middle English
French Influence on the Vocabulary
Governmental and Administrative words:
Crown, state, empire, reign, royal, authority, majesty, tyrant, oppress, assembly, tax, revenue
Ecclesiastical words
Religion, theology, baptism, sermon, passion, clergy, pastor, hermit etc.

Middle English
French Influence on the Vocabulary
Law
Arrest, blame, convict, legacy, executor, evidence, fine, prison, etc.
Army and Navy
Army, navy, battle, combat, siege, ambush, retreat, banner, defend etc.

Middle English
French Influence on the Vocabulary
Fashion, Social life, Meals
Collar, gown, robe, garment, lace, blue, brown, scarlet, jewel, ivory, diamond, sapphire, pearl, amethyst, topaz, oyster, salad, olives, toast, biscuit, grape, orange, pastry, tart, jelly

Middle English
French Influence on the Vocabulary
Synonyms at Three Levels due to mixture of Latin, French and native elements:
Ask- question- interrogate
Holy – sacred- consecrated
Time- age- epoch
Rise – mount- ascend
Goodness – virtue - probity
( English – French- Latin)

Lexical alternatives
Germanic French Latin
Climb ascend
Fast firm secure
Fire flame conflagration
House mansion
Kingly royal regal

Middle English
-ful was used to generate adjectives from nouns: full of +N = beautiful, graceful, merciful;
in Middle English there have been lots of adj

Middle English
The French -able suffix combined with English roots to produce findable, speakable, makeable, unknowable
In discovering used as a noun we have a French prefix and an English suffix sandwiching a French word.

Middle English
French introduced Latin-derived suffixes
de-,dis- en, ex-, pre-, pro-, -able, -ence, -ant, ity, -ment, -tion (spelt as -cion)

Middle English
Every word developed its range of collocations:
royal blue, Royal Highness, Royal Shakespeare Company; blood royal, banners royal
Regal look/ performance/confidence

Middle English
Dialects
Northern
East Midland
West Midland
Southern

Middle English
Dialects
Prof. Barber noticed “Early Middle English texts give the impression of a chaos of dialects, without any common conventions in pronunciation or spelling, and wide divergence in grammar and vocabulary”

Middle English
Rise of Standard English
East Midland type of English, particularly dialect of its metropolis became the basis of Standard English.
1) It was less conservative than the Southern dialect and less radical than Northern dialect.

Middle English
Rise of Standard English
2) The East Midland district was the largest and the most populated dialect area
3) The presence of Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the area
4) The importance of London as the capital of England

Middle English
Trilingualism VS Standard English
By the 16th century, trilingualism would have been restricted to a specialised, chiefly legal elite. But earlier educated English people were naturally trilingual:
English was their mother tongue,
Latin was the required language of church, was necessary in political-legal matters.
French was necessary for administrative matters and to be fashionable throughout Western European society.

Middle English
As the Middle English progressed,
legal English,
philosophical English,
medical English,
literary English,
parliamentary English and other varieties started to appear.

The Renaissance1500-1650
The Problem of Orthography
No generally accepted system that anyone could conform to
Adaptation of borrowings (brevity< brevitas, external< externus)

Middle English
Casualness of usage and style was a hallmark of the Middle and early Modern English periods. Chaucer sometimes used daughters, or doughtren, or doughtres. He appeared to settle on whichever form first popped into his head, even at the risk of being inconsistent from one paragraph to the next.

Spelling Fluctuation
At this time, and for centuries afterwards, such fluctuation in spelling within a single document was commonplace.
With the introduction of printing into England in the 1470s, English spelling began to grow more consistent, since the printers found it convenient to choose particular spellings and to stick to these as far as possible. But standardisation was a slow process.
William Shakespeare, for instance, spelled his own name in several different ways – and fluctuation in spelling was still common in the seventeenth century, and far from rare in the eighteenth.

Spelling Fluctuation, potato
the word potato.
This word was taken into English in the 16th century, via Spanish from the native American language Taino. In the 16th century, we find all of the following spellings in use in English: botata, batata, battata, potato, potaton, potade, patata, potatoe and the bizarre potatus, a confused Latinism.
By the 17th century, only some of these were still in use, but then we find the further spellings partato, potado, potata, pottato and puttato.

Spelling Fluctuation, potato
the word potato
By the 18th century, this variation had been narrowed down to just three choices: potato, patata and potatoe.
By the 19th century, only potato and potatoe were still in the running. The frequency of this second choice is one reason that we require the plural form potatoes today, even though we have finally settled on the singular form potato.

Royal Chancery Standard
In the early 1400s, young men who had been educated first in English rather than French began to take their places within the royal administration. By 1420–30, these men were now in positions of considerable authority. In using a written English derived from the practices of a limited number of London schools, a new, highly influential, ‘house style’ began to spread in the administration. This house style – dubbed Chancery Standard after the Royal Chancery by scholars – was quickly exported outside government.

Royal Chancery Standard
People wishing favours would naturally write in a way intended to be ingratiating to the centre; the fact that the new style was inevitably seen as the ‘voice of the king’ could not have hindered its spread. By 1500, the Chancery Standard had become the primary, and soon after the only, acceptable form of written English.

The Renaissance1500-1650
Words from the Romance languages:
Chocolate, bizarre, detail, duel, entrance, progress, tomato, vogue, essay, shock, equip, volunteer

The Renaissance1500-1650
Thomas More introduced the words:
absurdity, acceptance, anticipate, contradictory, durable, exaggerate, explain, detector, frivolous, monopoly, paradox, pretext

The Renaissance1500-1650
Among Shakespearean words we find
antipathy, catastrophe, critical, demonstrate, emphasis, extract, meditate, modest,

Shakespeare
Shakespeare coined 2000 words and gave us countless phrases:
to be or not to be,
to be cruel to be kind,
flesh and blood,
cold comfort,
remembrance of things past,
the sound and the fury,
vanish into thin air,
in my mind’s eye etc…

History of English and its present
Much of English vocabulary was lost
Change of meaning in numerous words:
Shakespearean English VS Current English
foolish nice
a cold in the head rheumatism

The emergence of linguistic lexicon 1500-1700
Alphabet (1580) gave rise to alphabetarian, alphabetic, alphabetically
Linguist (skilled in the usage of languages)→ a student of languages; linguacity, linguacious, linguister, none of the derivatives survived

The emergence of linguistic lexicon 1500-1700
Colon
Comma
Dissonance
Lexicon
Parenthesis
Philological
Pronoun
Rhetoricise
Substantive
trope

The 18th century
Development of Progressive Verb Forms
In Shakespearean times one would ask ‘What do you read?’ not ‘What are you reading’.
‘The bridge is being built’ was unknown.

The 17th- 18th century English Dictionaries
From the 17th century on, dictionaries of English began to be written, and the decisions of the lexicographers (dictionary-writers) helped to provide some further stabilisation.
Even so, by the time of American independence in 1783, English spelling was still not fully fixed: there were still a number of words with multiple spellings.

The 17th- 18th century
1755 A Dictionary of English Language
by Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson - -ize – ise
English has a verb-forming suffix -ize, of Greek origin (realize, civilize, satirize, demonize, finalize and hospitalize etc).
Traditionally, this suffix was spelled -ize in English, and it still is in American English, where nothing has happened.
In French, however, the spelling –izer gave way centuries ago to the changed spelling -iser, as in French civiliser ‘civilise’. As so often, what the French were doing induced the British to do the same, and so many British writers began to write realise and civilise.
By Johnson’s day, these new spellings had become common, and Johnson gave them his seal of approval.

The 17th- 18th century
Samuel Johnson - theatre, centre
Much the same thing has happened with another familiar group of words spelled differently on the two sides of the Atlantic: the group represented by the words theatre and centre. The traditional English spellings of these are theater, center, and so on, and these spellings were well established by the 17th century.

The 17th- 18th century
Samuel Johnson - theatre, centre
But, of course, the French spellings of these words are théatre, centre, and so on. Eager to claim some of the prestige of French for their own language, British writers began using the French spellings in English, and again Dr Johnson approved the new spellings.
But the older spellings remain undisturbed in American English, where they are likewise the only possibilities.

British VS American Spelling
Why did these French-inspired changes in spelling find no lasting foothold in American English?
The breadth of the Atlantic Ocean was no doubt one factor. But there was another one, much more important: Noah Webster (1758–1843).

The 19th century and after
Influences affecting English
The growth of Science
Automobile, Film, Broadcasting, Computer

Brief History of English
Factors that contributed to the development
The 100 years war
Rise of middle class
The Renaissance
The Development of English as maritime power
The expansion of the British Empire
The growth of commerce and industry
The growth of science and literature
Economic & technical superiority & English

Present of English
With over 1.5 billion speakers of English around the globe , the English of England is today a tiny minority dialect of ‘World English’.

Present of English
Varieties of English and
variability of English nowadays
English as a global language
World Englishes (Caribbean English, Indian English, Singlish, Konglish, Frenglish, Spanglish etc.)

Present of English
Many terms have evolved to characterize nonstandard varieties of English - scientific, objective, popular, impressionistic, insulting:
Regional dialects Modified standards
Nonstandard speech Creoles
Pigeons Vernaculars
Code-mixing Substandard speech
Country talk Argot
Lingo Broken English
Gutter speech

Standard English
Most English speakers do not speak Standard English.
A significant number of English authors do not write in Standard English.
And a large number of those using English in computer-mediated communication do not use it either.
(David Crystal The Stories of English)

Rivals of English
English is more used but less loved,
French is more loved but less used

English as a world language
Assets and liabilities
1. Cosmopolitan vocabulary – borrowing from numerous languages

English as a world language
borrowings
Native American languages
Moose
Raccoon
Chipmunk
skunk

English as a world language
borrowings
Dutch
Brandy
Landscape
Measles
uproar

English as a world language
borrowings
Italian
Balcony
Duet
Granite
Opera
Piano
Umbrella
volcano

English as a world language
borrowings
Spanish
Alligator
Cargo
Contraband
Cork
Hammock
Mosquito
Sherry
Tornado
vanilla

English as a world language
borrowings
Greek
Acme
Acrobat
Anthology
Barometer
Catastrophe
Chronology
Elastic
Magic
tactics

English as a world language
borrowings
Persian
Caravan jasmine turban
Divan paradise spinach
Khaki check
Mogul chess
Shawl lemon
Sherbet lilac

English as a world language
borrowings
Russian
troika
Samovar
Glasnost
perestroika

English as a world language
borrowings
Brasilian Portuguese
lambada
Basque
bizarre
Ukrainain
yarmulke
Catalan
aubergine, paella, barracks

English as a world language
borrowings
Philippine
yo-yo
Czech
pistol, polka, robot
Egyptian
basalt, ebony, gum, ibis, ivory, pharaoh

English as a world language
borrowings
Hawaiian
muu-muu (long loose dress) AmE
Irish Gaelic
whisky
Finnish
sauna

English as a world language
borrowings
Also borrowings from :
Hebrew
Hungarian
Hindi-Urdu
Bengali
Malay
Chinese etc.

English as a world language
Assets
2. Inflectional simplicity
Inflections of nouns and verbs were reduced to indication of plural forms, within adjectives to indication of comparative and superlative degrees
3. Natural Gender

English as a world language
Assets
4. Simplification of Tense Forms
5. No conjugation of verbs, no declension of nouns, adjectives, numerals, no case