A Contribution Towards a Very Brief Essay on the History of Standard Written English (for ESL Students)
Created | Updated Jul 26, 2008
England was inhabited by Celtic tribes since the Iron Age, as most of continental Europe, but English language belongs to the Germanic group of Indo-European languages, it began as a common language three thousand years ago in the Elbe River region (Elbe is one of the major waterways of central Europe. It runs from the Czech Republic through Germany to the North Sea, just west of Denmark (A History of the English Language). Three Germanic tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes came to the British Isles in the 5th century AD, just after the Roman Empire abandoned the area (410 c.e.) and displaced the Celtic language spoken by the natives living there. The Celts social system was been badly hit by the Romans domination, as almost elsewhere in Europe. To day influence of Celt language are confined in Wales an Brittany. We can say that the Roman heritage was strong. Word as street (strata/lastricun, “paved”); wine (vinum, “wine”); mile (mille passuum, “a thousand paces”); inch (uncia, “twelfth part”); table (tabula, “board”); chest (cista, “box”) and pillow (pulvinus, “cushion”) – only for an example are still in use.
Old English was the result, and four major dialects emerged: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. Northumbrian, spoken in the area that is now northeast England and southern Scotland, was the primary culture and language of Britain until the Viking Invasions in the 9th century AD. The Viking invasions introduced many new words into Old English. By the 10th century AD, the West Saxon – developed in the area between London and Cornwall – had become Britain's language of culture. The language consisted of an Anglo-Saxon base with borrowed words from the Scandinavian language and Latin remnants. The Latin heritage was due to the importance of the Church as center of learning. Other later Latin influences (other than the political developments told below) were the cultural appeal of the Italian Renaissance and the fact that until 1800 Latin was the vehicular language of culture. As a result it’s estimate than almost 60% of English vocabulary is of Romance (Neo-Latin) origin. Of curse in the everyday use Saxon words are more used than Neo Latin one, but in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, between the firsts words 26 are of Romance etymology an only 21 Saxon (and of these 5 are the articles “the” and “a”). We return to this in short time.
“Beowulf” is an Old English heroic epic poem of anonymous authorship, dating as recorded in the Nowell Codex manuscript from between the 8thto the 11th century, and relates events described as having occurred in what is now Denmark and Sweden. Commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature, Beowulf has been the subject of much scholarly study, theory, speculation, discourse, and, at 3183 lines, it has been noted for its length.
A major shift happened when, as result of dynastic turmoil a Norman duke, William the Conqueror (1027/8 – 1087), invaded and conquered England in 1066. In those time England was a Saxon state that still bore many of the characteristics of the older Germanic kingship. The earls were as powerful as the king himself, and were rivals as often as allies. The king's army consisted of his household, his barons and their retainers, and a general levy of the Saxon peasantry. The Church was centered more on the monastery than on the cathedral. And England looked more to the North Sea than across the Channel. Normandy, on the other hand, was developing as a feudal state, at least under William. After a struggle as soon he reached the power he held his barons under much closer control, and was both wealthier and more powerful than any of them. The duke controlled the Church, too, through its central power of the Archbishop of Rouen. Yet, despite real differences, the fates of the two were tangled together, and this led to the eventual conflict that the Norman superior organization won at Hastings.
As a result the Old English nobility was wiped out, and the Duke established French domination. What is called Anglo-Norman (that was in reality a dialect of a Neo-Latin language, French) became the language of the aristocracy and the government, no English king even speaks English until Henry IV (1399-1413 c. e.) while the language of the common masses remained English.
Anglo-Norman is the language spoken by the Normans, government and law were conducted in Anglo-Norman (AN): consequently many AN terms introduced to English, e. g.: jury, justice, felony, marriage, prison, parliament. Thus, this is a period during which a great amount of classical vocabulary is infused into English. The most striking differences between Anglo-Saxon (AS) and Anglo-Norman terminology are that AS names the simple trades as: miller, baker, shoemaker, while AN names skilled trades: mason, painter, tailor. AS is the language for animal names: sheep, cow, ox, and AN the one for meat names: mutton, beef, veal. From this situation comes out the astonishing fact that many animals bore a Saxon name alive, e.g. “pig”, while a Neo-Latin name when served as food: “pork”. The class that raised the first was’t the one eating it.
But, on the contrary little AN grammar permeates AS, e.g. no verb endings and only a few examples of word order as in body politic, court martial, attorney general, notary public, heir apparent, battle royal, proof positive. Under Norman kings, English is greatly simplified as it is the language of peasants who care little for linguistic subtleties therefore, changes in grammar are uncontrolled, e. g. all but complete loss of noun and verb endings (this making the big difference with German), nouns: only possessives and plurals (-s), verbs: past tense (-ed), 3rd singular present verbs (-s)
There was also a vast reduction in native Anglo-Saxon vocabulary as a result a lot of AS vocabulary is lost/replaced by AN terms, only about 4500 AS words left in English (ca. 1% of English). But as these are the most common words (as: man, woman, child, brother, sister, house, sleep, eat, drink, love, fight, to, at, in, on, with), about 80% of words on any page is Anglo-Saxon and the “big” words tend to be Latinate.
This new blend of AN and AS is called “Middle English”. Until 1200, England was a bilingual country, integration between the strata of society low and slow. An external occurrence changed all.
The Black Death, or Black Plague, was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, widely thought to have been caused by a bacterium named Yersinia pestis (Bubonic plague). The pandemic is thought to have begun in Central Asia or India and spread to Europe during the 1340s. The total number of deaths worldwide is estimated at 75 million people; approximately 25-50 million of which occurred in Europe.The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population. It may have reduced the world's population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400. It was a shock to all European society, taking away one third of the population. Its aftershock lead to the European expansion, increased the importance of the laboring and merchant classes, and by doing so, increased in the Anglo Norman kingdom the importance of the English language. Around the 14th century, the Great Vowel Shift started, it would last until the 17th century and change the pronunciation of many words. The printing press invented by William Caxton in 1475 pushed the spoken and written form of English to a standardized form. Most of the publishing houses were located in London, and as a result, the London dialect became the standard form. All the forms of English we have referred to until now are today unreadable also for well educated born English speakers. The top English author now is Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – c. 1400). He was poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished frame narrative “The Canterbury Tales”. Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars as being the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French or Latin.
Early Modern English came about in the 1500s. During the Renaissance, the revival of classical scholarship brought classical Latin and Greek words into the language. Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) and the Bible also helped to standardize Early Modern English. The King James Version of the Bible (1611) was written, as a result of the King's standardization of Protestant worship, and for three hundred years it would be the standard bible in English. Shakespeare's works introduced a variety of clichés and words into the language. In 1632, Parliament enacted the Statute of Pleading, which closed the linguistic divide between the nobility and the commoners and replaced French with English as the language of the law. The King James Version and Shakespearian forms of English (also called Elizabethan) are today understood by well educated born English speakers, as they are part of the cultural tradition, but a less known works of the time can be challenging.
Late Modern English came about in the 1800s as a result of the Age of Reason, the Victorian Age, the settling of the Americas, and the Industrial and Scientific Revolution. The Age of Reason had a strong emphasis on order and regulations, and a strong central government used English as the national language for all purposes. Although the first English dictionary was published in 1604 and many dictionaries were available in the first part of XVIII century, there was open dissatisfaction with them. In 1741 David Hume claimed: "The Elegance and Propriety of Stile have been very much neglected among us. We have no Dictionary of our Language, and scarce a tolerable Grammar." In 1746, a group of publishers approached Dr. Samuel Johnson about creating a dictionary. He did manage to finish it in nine years. What Johnson's dictionary does offer are insights into the 18th century and "a faithful record of the language people used". Furthermore, Johnson's Dictionary is more than a reference book; it serves as a work of literature unto itself.
With the expansion of the British Empire, new words from abroad also became part of the English language. Nabob pajama, and more than other kangaroo entered the vocabulary. The Victorian Age further standardized grammar its maximum achievement being “The Oxford English Dictionary” (OED), that was one of the biggest editorial tasks in the history of linguistic.
The settling of the Americas added Native American, Spanish, French, and West African words to the English language, and the many discoveries and inventions of the Industrial and Scientific Revolution also added new words to the language. Many of the new words used to describe new inventions and discoveries were created from Latin and Greek roots, however a few were created from English roots. The difficulties a non native, and a native speaker too, can find reading an author fron Johnson to Virginia Woolf are more about style than vocabulary or grammatical construction.
American English (indicated as: AmE, AE, AmEng, USEng, en-US), also known as United States English or U.S. English was developing already before the independence. American English and British English (indicated as: BrE) differ at the levels of phonology, phonetics, vocabulary, and, to a lesser extent, grammar and orthography. The first large American dictionary, “An American Dictionary of the English Language”, was written by Noah Webster in 1828; Webster intended to show that the United States, which was a relatively new country at the time, spoke a different dialect from that of Britain.
In many ways, compared to England’s English, North American English is conservative in its phonology. To day English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic and non-rhotic, depending on when the sound typically represented in spelling with the letter R is pronounced. Rhotic speakers pronounce written /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ only if it is followed by a vowel sound (see "linking and intrusive R"), and not always even then.
Most North American speech is rhotic, as English was in most places in the 17th century. While written AmE is standardized across the country, there are several recognizable variations in the spoken language, both in pronunciation and in vernacular vocabulary. General American is the name given to any American accent that is relatively free of noticeable regional influences.
Australian English (AuE, AusE, en-AU) is the form of the English language used in Australia. In 1827 Peter Cunningham, in his book “Two Years in New South Wales”, reported that native-born white Australians of the time — known as "currency lads and lasses" — spoke with a distinctive accent and vocabulary, with a strong Cockney influence. Australian English is (and in this it differs from AmE) a non-rhotic dialect. Similar to New Zealand English bears some resemblance to dialects from the Southeast of England, particularly those of Cockney and Received Pronunciation. Like most dialects of English it is distinguished primarily by its vowel phonology.
Bibliography
I do not put a bibliography as a lot of the fact written here can be checked with a research engine. Of the comments I assume total responsibility as they are not intended other than personal opinions.
Old English was the result, and four major dialects emerged: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. Northumbrian, spoken in the area that is now northeast England and southern Scotland, was the primary culture and language of Britain until the Viking Invasions in the 9th century AD. The Viking invasions introduced many new words into Old English. By the 10th century AD, the West Saxon – developed in the area between London and Cornwall – had become Britain's language of culture. The language consisted of an Anglo-Saxon base with borrowed words from the Scandinavian language and Latin remnants. The Latin heritage was due to the importance of the Church as center of learning. Other later Latin influences (other than the political developments told below) were the cultural appeal of the Italian Renaissance and the fact that until 1800 Latin was the vehicular language of culture. As a result it’s estimate than almost 60% of English vocabulary is of Romance (Neo-Latin) origin. Of curse in the everyday use Saxon words are more used than Neo Latin one, but in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, between the firsts words 26 are of Romance etymology an only 21 Saxon (and of these 5 are the articles “the” and “a”). We return to this in short time.
“Beowulf” is an Old English heroic epic poem of anonymous authorship, dating as recorded in the Nowell Codex manuscript from between the 8thto the 11th century, and relates events described as having occurred in what is now Denmark and Sweden. Commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature, Beowulf has been the subject of much scholarly study, theory, speculation, discourse, and, at 3183 lines, it has been noted for its length.
A major shift happened when, as result of dynastic turmoil a Norman duke, William the Conqueror (1027/8 – 1087), invaded and conquered England in 1066. In those time England was a Saxon state that still bore many of the characteristics of the older Germanic kingship. The earls were as powerful as the king himself, and were rivals as often as allies. The king's army consisted of his household, his barons and their retainers, and a general levy of the Saxon peasantry. The Church was centered more on the monastery than on the cathedral. And England looked more to the North Sea than across the Channel. Normandy, on the other hand, was developing as a feudal state, at least under William. After a struggle as soon he reached the power he held his barons under much closer control, and was both wealthier and more powerful than any of them. The duke controlled the Church, too, through its central power of the Archbishop of Rouen. Yet, despite real differences, the fates of the two were tangled together, and this led to the eventual conflict that the Norman superior organization won at Hastings.
As a result the Old English nobility was wiped out, and the Duke established French domination. What is called Anglo-Norman (that was in reality a dialect of a Neo-Latin language, French) became the language of the aristocracy and the government, no English king even speaks English until Henry IV (1399-1413 c. e.) while the language of the common masses remained English.
Anglo-Norman is the language spoken by the Normans, government and law were conducted in Anglo-Norman (AN): consequently many AN terms introduced to English, e. g.: jury, justice, felony, marriage, prison, parliament. Thus, this is a period during which a great amount of classical vocabulary is infused into English. The most striking differences between Anglo-Saxon (AS) and Anglo-Norman terminology are that AS names the simple trades as: miller, baker, shoemaker, while AN names skilled trades: mason, painter, tailor. AS is the language for animal names: sheep, cow, ox, and AN the one for meat names: mutton, beef, veal. From this situation comes out the astonishing fact that many animals bore a Saxon name alive, e.g. “pig”, while a Neo-Latin name when served as food: “pork”. The class that raised the first was’t the one eating it.
But, on the contrary little AN grammar permeates AS, e.g. no verb endings and only a few examples of word order as in body politic, court martial, attorney general, notary public, heir apparent, battle royal, proof positive. Under Norman kings, English is greatly simplified as it is the language of peasants who care little for linguistic subtleties therefore, changes in grammar are uncontrolled, e. g. all but complete loss of noun and verb endings (this making the big difference with German), nouns: only possessives and plurals (-s), verbs: past tense (-ed), 3rd singular present verbs (-s)
There was also a vast reduction in native Anglo-Saxon vocabulary as a result a lot of AS vocabulary is lost/replaced by AN terms, only about 4500 AS words left in English (ca. 1% of English). But as these are the most common words (as: man, woman, child, brother, sister, house, sleep, eat, drink, love, fight, to, at, in, on, with), about 80% of words on any page is Anglo-Saxon and the “big” words tend to be Latinate.
This new blend of AN and AS is called “Middle English”. Until 1200, England was a bilingual country, integration between the strata of society low and slow. An external occurrence changed all.
The Black Death, or Black Plague, was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, widely thought to have been caused by a bacterium named Yersinia pestis (Bubonic plague). The pandemic is thought to have begun in Central Asia or India and spread to Europe during the 1340s. The total number of deaths worldwide is estimated at 75 million people; approximately 25-50 million of which occurred in Europe.The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population. It may have reduced the world's population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400. It was a shock to all European society, taking away one third of the population. Its aftershock lead to the European expansion, increased the importance of the laboring and merchant classes, and by doing so, increased in the Anglo Norman kingdom the importance of the English language. Around the 14th century, the Great Vowel Shift started, it would last until the 17th century and change the pronunciation of many words. The printing press invented by William Caxton in 1475 pushed the spoken and written form of English to a standardized form. Most of the publishing houses were located in London, and as a result, the London dialect became the standard form. All the forms of English we have referred to until now are today unreadable also for well educated born English speakers. The top English author now is Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – c. 1400). He was poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished frame narrative “The Canterbury Tales”. Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars as being the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French or Latin.
Early Modern English came about in the 1500s. During the Renaissance, the revival of classical scholarship brought classical Latin and Greek words into the language. Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) and the Bible also helped to standardize Early Modern English. The King James Version of the Bible (1611) was written, as a result of the King's standardization of Protestant worship, and for three hundred years it would be the standard bible in English. Shakespeare's works introduced a variety of clichés and words into the language. In 1632, Parliament enacted the Statute of Pleading, which closed the linguistic divide between the nobility and the commoners and replaced French with English as the language of the law. The King James Version and Shakespearian forms of English (also called Elizabethan) are today understood by well educated born English speakers, as they are part of the cultural tradition, but a less known works of the time can be challenging.
Late Modern English came about in the 1800s as a result of the Age of Reason, the Victorian Age, the settling of the Americas, and the Industrial and Scientific Revolution. The Age of Reason had a strong emphasis on order and regulations, and a strong central government used English as the national language for all purposes. Although the first English dictionary was published in 1604 and many dictionaries were available in the first part of XVIII century, there was open dissatisfaction with them. In 1741 David Hume claimed: "The Elegance and Propriety of Stile have been very much neglected among us. We have no Dictionary of our Language, and scarce a tolerable Grammar." In 1746, a group of publishers approached Dr. Samuel Johnson about creating a dictionary. He did manage to finish it in nine years. What Johnson's dictionary does offer are insights into the 18th century and "a faithful record of the language people used". Furthermore, Johnson's Dictionary is more than a reference book; it serves as a work of literature unto itself.
With the expansion of the British Empire, new words from abroad also became part of the English language. Nabob pajama, and more than other kangaroo entered the vocabulary. The Victorian Age further standardized grammar its maximum achievement being “The Oxford English Dictionary” (OED), that was one of the biggest editorial tasks in the history of linguistic.
The settling of the Americas added Native American, Spanish, French, and West African words to the English language, and the many discoveries and inventions of the Industrial and Scientific Revolution also added new words to the language. Many of the new words used to describe new inventions and discoveries were created from Latin and Greek roots, however a few were created from English roots. The difficulties a non native, and a native speaker too, can find reading an author fron Johnson to Virginia Woolf are more about style than vocabulary or grammatical construction.
American English (indicated as: AmE, AE, AmEng, USEng, en-US), also known as United States English or U.S. English was developing already before the independence. American English and British English (indicated as: BrE) differ at the levels of phonology, phonetics, vocabulary, and, to a lesser extent, grammar and orthography. The first large American dictionary, “An American Dictionary of the English Language”, was written by Noah Webster in 1828; Webster intended to show that the United States, which was a relatively new country at the time, spoke a different dialect from that of Britain.
In many ways, compared to England’s English, North American English is conservative in its phonology. To day English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic and non-rhotic, depending on when the sound typically represented in spelling with the letter R is pronounced. Rhotic speakers pronounce written /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ only if it is followed by a vowel sound (see "linking and intrusive R"), and not always even then.
Most North American speech is rhotic, as English was in most places in the 17th century. While written AmE is standardized across the country, there are several recognizable variations in the spoken language, both in pronunciation and in vernacular vocabulary. General American is the name given to any American accent that is relatively free of noticeable regional influences.
Australian English (AuE, AusE, en-AU) is the form of the English language used in Australia. In 1827 Peter Cunningham, in his book “Two Years in New South Wales”, reported that native-born white Australians of the time — known as "currency lads and lasses" — spoke with a distinctive accent and vocabulary, with a strong Cockney influence. Australian English is (and in this it differs from AmE) a non-rhotic dialect. Similar to New Zealand English bears some resemblance to dialects from the Southeast of England, particularly those of Cockney and Received Pronunciation. Like most dialects of English it is distinguished primarily by its vowel phonology.
Bibliography
I do not put a bibliography as a lot of the fact written here can be checked with a research engine. Of the comments I assume total responsibility as they are not intended other than personal opinions.
