Importance of studying the history

OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

 

Language is a fundamental human faculty used for creative expression, face-to-face communication, scientific inquiry, and many other purposes. Most humans are born with the ability to acquire language automatically and effortlessly if provided the right input by their environment. It is estimated that there are 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world. The number of languages is decreasing rapidly as some languages disappear and a few others – English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi – become more widespread as a result of globalization.

English has achieved a genuinely global status. Its role is most evident in countries where large numbers of the people speak the language as a mother tongue – the UK, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, several Caribbean countries and other territories. Moreover, English is made a priority in many other countries’ foreign language-teaching, even though it has no official status. It has become the language which children are most likely to be taught at school and the one most available to adults.

For all learners of English the History of the Language is of great importance, it shows the ties of English with the languages of the Germanic group, as well as its ties with the languages of other groups, such as French and Latin. The History of English also shows that linguistic alterations may be dependent or caused by the events in the history of the people, for example, the influence of one language on another, the appearance of new words to name new objects. A study of the phonetic, grammatical, and lexical evolution of the language enables us to see the general trends in the development of English and their interdependence. One of the primary aims of the course of the history of English is to provide with the knowledge of history sufficient to account for the essential features and some specific peculiarities of Modern English.

During the 15 hundred years or so of its recorded history English has changed so greatly, that its earliest form is unintelligible to Modern English speakers. Present day English reflects these centuries of development in a great number of specific features and peculiarities, which can be accounted for only with the help of the knowledge of the History of English.

The object of the History of the English Language is the English Language itself, its phonetic, grammatical and lexical aspects.

The subject of the History of English is a systematic study of the development of English from the time of its origin to the present day. It analyses main changes in the phonetic structure and spelling of the language at different stages of the development of the language; the evolution of the grammatical system; the growth and development of the vocabulary. All these changes are considered against the background of the main historical events that took place in the country.

The aim of the History of the English Language is to study the changes mentioned above.

The History of the English Language has been reconstructed on the basis of written records of different periods. The earliest written texts in English are dated in the 7th century. The earliest records in other Germanic languages go back to the 3-4th centuries A.D.

The English language is constantly changing, at different speed and at different linguistic levels (phonetics, grammar, lexicon). The linguistic history explains many features of present-day English both synchronically and diachronically. These two types of studying a language are closely interconnected and create a full picture of the development of a language.

The History of the English Language is interconnected with other linguistic and non-linguistic disciplines:

1. General Linguistics – provides us with general linguistic laws and rules valid for and language.

2. History – historical events that take place in a country influence to a great extent the language of this country.

3. Theoretical Phonetics – provides us with main phonetic notions and helps to explain phonetic phenomena.

4. Theoretical Grammar – provides us with main grammatical notions and helps to explain grammatical phenomena.

5. Lexicology – provides us with main lexicological notions and helps to explain lexical phenomena.

6. Cultural Studies – helps to understand better the connection between the culture and the language of the country and their mutual influence.

7. Literature – gives us examples of the languages of this or that historical period and these works of literature serve as the material for the language research.

MODERN GERMANIC LANGUAGES

 

 

To understand the place of the English language among the other languages of the world it is important to discuss its genealogical relations. According to the genealogical approach languages can be divided into “families”, each family containing only languages that are supposed to have originated from one proto-language.

Indo-European is just one of the language families, or proto-languages, from which the world’s modern languages are descended, and there are many other families including Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Niger-Congo, Dravidian, Uralic, Amerindian, etc. However, it is by far the largest family, accounting for the languages of almost half of the modern world’s population, including those of most of Europe, North and South America, Australasia, the Iranian plateau and much of South Asia. Within Europe, only Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and a few of the smaller Russian languages are not descended from the Indo-European family.

It is supposed that the homeland of the Indo-European proto-language more than 6,000 years ago was in the Transcaucasus, in eastern Anatolia.The landscape described by the protolanguage as now resolved must lie around the southern shores of the Black Sea, south from the Balkan peninsula, east across ancient Anatolia (today the non-European territories of Turkey) and north to the Caucasus Mountains. Here the agricultural revolution created the food surplus that impelled the Indo-Europeans to found villages and city-states from which, about 6,000 years ago, they began their migrations over the Eurasian continent and into history.

Some daughter languages must have differentiated in the course of migrations that took them first to the East and later to the West. Some spread west to Anatolia and Greece, others southwest to Iran and India (Sanskrit). Most Western languages stem from an Eastern branch that rounded the Caspian Sea. Contact with Semitic languages in Mesopotamia and with Kartvelian languages in the Caucasus led to the adoption of many foreign words.

The family tree of Indo-European languages can be presented as follows:

1. The Albanian language, the language of ancient Illyria. The oldest monuments belong to the 17th century.

2. The Armenian language, the oldest monuments of which belong to the 5th century A.D.

3. The Baltic group, embracing (a)Old Prussian, which became extinct in the 17th century, (b)Lithuanian, (c)Lettic (the oldest records of Lithuanian and Lettic belong to the 16th century).

4. The Celtic group, consisting of: (a)Gaulish known by Keltic names and words quoted by Latin and Greek authors, and inscriptions on coins; (b) Britannic, including Cymricor Welsh, Cornish, and Bas-Breton or Armorican; the oldest records date back to the 8th or 9th century; (c)Gaelic, including Irish-Gaelic, Scotch-Gaelic, and Manx. The oldest monuments are the old Gaelic inscriptions, which date back to about A.D. 500.

5. The Germanic group, consisting of:

5.1. East Germanic – Gothic. Almost the only source of the Gothic language is the fragments of the biblical translation made in the 4th century by Ulfilas, the Bishop of the West Goths.

5.2. North Germanic or Scandinavian — (a)called Old Norse until about the middle of the 11th century; (b)East Scandinavian, including Swedish, Danish and Faroese; (c)West Scandinavian, including Norwegianand Icelandic.

The oldest records of this branch are the runic inscriptions, some of which date as far back as the 3rd or 4th century.

5.3. West Germanic, which is composed of the following languages: German, English, Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Luxembugian.

6. The Greek language, with its numerous dialects.

7. The Indic group, including the language of the Vedas, classical Sanskrit, and the Prakrit dialects.

8. The Iranian group, including (a) West Iranian (Old Persian dating from about 520-350 B.C.); (b) East Iranian (Avesta and Old Bactrian).

9. The Italic group, consisting of Latin and the Umbrian-Samnitic dialects. From the popular form of Latin are descended the Romance languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian.

10. Slavonic, embracing: (a) the South-Eastern group, including Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, and Illyrian (Servian, Croatian, Slovenian); (b)the Western group, including Czech (Bohemian), Sorabian, Polish and Polabian.

Extinct Groups and Languages:

11. Hittite died out in the 2-1 millennium B.C.; spoken on the territory of modern Turkey and Northern Syria. The Hittite language is very important for Indo-European reconstruction.

12. Tocharian died out after the 8th century A.D.; spoken in oases of Eastern Turkestan Tocharian, now extinct, represented by texts discovered in Chinese Turkestan, which are thought to be anterior to the tenth century A.D.

It should be noted that alongside with large groups of languages, like Germanic, Italic or Slavic, the Indo-European family includes individual groups each of which consists of only one language, such as Albanian, Armenian and Greek.

English belongs to the Germanic group of languages representing the Indo-European family of languages.

Modern Germanic languages currently spoken fall into two major groups: North Germanic (or Scandinavian) and West Germanic. The former group comprises: Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese. The latter: English (in all its varieties), German (in all its varieties, including Yiddish and Pennsylvania German), Dutch (including Afrikaans and Flemish) and Frisian.

The varieties of English are particularly extensive and include not just the dialectal and regional variants of the British Isles, North America, Australasia, India and Africa, but also numerous English-based pidgins and creoles of the Atlantic (e.g. Jamaican Creole and Pidgin Krio) and the Pacific (e.g. Hawaiian Pidgin). When one adds to this list the regions of the globe in which Scandinavian, German and Dutch are spoken, the geographical distribution of the Germanic languages is more extensive than that of any other group of languages.  In every continent there are countries in which a modern Germanic language (primarily English) is extensively used or has some official status (as a national or regional language). Demographically there are at least 450 million speakers of Germanic languages in the world today, divided as follows:

North Germanic, over 18 million (Danish over 5 million, Norwegian over 4 million, Swedish approximately 9 million, Icelandic 260,000 and Faroese 47,000);

West Germanic apart from English, approximately 125 million (90 million for German in European countries in which it has official status, German worldwide perhaps 100 million, Dutch and Afrikaans 25 million, Frisian over 400,000); English worldwide, 320–80 million first language users, plus 300 – 500 million users in countries like India and Singapore in which English has official status.

East Germanic is a third group of languages within the Germanic family that needs to be recognised, ерщгпр all of its members are now extinct. These were the languages of the Goths, the Burgundians, the Vandals, the Gepids and other tribes originating in Scandinavia that migrated south occupying numerous regions in western and eastern Europe (and even North Africa) in the early centuries of the present era.

It is difficult to estimate the number of people speaking Germanic languages, especially on account of English, which in many entries is one of two languages in a bilingual community, e.g. in Canada. The estimates for English range from 250 to 300 million people who have it as their mother tongue. The total number of people speaking Germanic languages approaches 440 million. To this rough estimate we could add an indefinite number of bilingual people in the countries where English is used as an official language (over 50 countries).