The Subject, aim and objectives of studying the History of the English Language

Every language has a history; and as in the rest of human culture, changes are constantly taking place in the course of the transmission of a language from one generation to another. Languages change in all their aspects, in their pronunciation, word forms, syntax, and word meanings. These changes, mostly gradual in their operation, become noticeable only cumulatively over the course of several generations. In studying a foreign language, English in our case, the student inevitably compares it to his native tongue and is often astonished to find great differences not only in the structure of the target language but also in the way ideas are expressed in it. There is no denying that English spelling is somewhat difficult for a Belarusian learner of English. This is because the written form of the English word is conventional rather than phonetic. Therefore, some phonetic phenomena cannot be explained from the modern point of view without going into the history of the language. When the Latin alphabet was first used in Britain, writing was phonetic. After the introduction of printing in the 15^th century, the written form of the word became fixed, whereas the sounds continued to change. This resulted in a growing discrepancy between letter and sound. Hence, such ‘difficult’ words as light, daughter, speak, great, book and many others where their pronunciation and spelling differ. Moreover, if you ask a little English boy or girl to write the word light (in the meaning of daylight) he or she would rather spell it as lite because they have not learned its spelling yet.On the other hand, modern spellings show how such words were pronounced in the past. For example, the word light sounded as [lix’t] which is easy to prove if you compare it with the Belarusian word лiхтар (something which produces light). As far as English vocabulary is concerned, it contains words which are similar to words found in other languages. For example, English – German (mother – Mutter, father – Vater, winter – Winter, hand – Hand, etc.); English - French (revolution – revolution, autumn – autumne, river – rivière, etc,); English –Russian (float – плот; флот); English –Belarusian (glebe – глеба, must – мусiць, etc.). Without going into the history of English, it is difficult to say whether these words are native or borrowings from the above mentioned languages. English grammar also presents some phenomena which a Belarusian learner of English will find misleading. For example, the irregular plural of nouns (man- men, foot –feet, mouse – mic e, etc), or the same form for both singular and plural of such words as sheep, deer, fish, or the fact that English modal verbs, unlike the other verbs, take no ending –s in the 3d person singular, and many other similar facts. All these things are traced back to a distant past and can be accounted for only by studying the history of the language. Another important aim of this course is of a more theoretical nature. Study of the history of any language is based on applying general principles of linguistics to the language in question. While tracing its evolution through time, students will be confronted with a number of theoretical questions connected with the language development in general and its aspects in particular. To find answers to these questions, students will have to rely on the theory previously studied in the course called Introduction to Linguistics. In this way ties will be established between general principles of linguistics and concrete linguistic facts, in other words, theoretical knowledge will find its application in practice. While studying the history of the English language we will inevitably have to deal with the history of the English nation considering the ‘traces’ it left in the language development. It goes without saying that a systematic study of the language’s development from the earliest times to the present day will enable the student to acquire a more profound understanding of modern English, its role in our world and perspectives of its future development

cumulatively- increasing gradually as more of smth is added or used target languag e the language that you are learning or translating into   conventional- snth that has been used for a long time and is considered the usual type   discrepancy – a difference between two things that should be the same   borrowing – a word or phrase, that has been copied from another language   account for – explain   in question – the things, people etc in question are the ones that are being discussed   inevitable – certain to happen and impossible to avoid

 

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Methods and sources of studying language and its history

 

As is known, the science of scientific study of language as a system is called linguistics. This term was first used in the middle of the 19^th century to emphasize the difference between a new approach to the study of language that was then developing and the more traditional approach of philology. The philologist is concerned primarily with the historical development of languages as it is manifested in written texts and in the context of the associated literature and culture. The linguist, though he may be interested in written texts and in the development of languages through time, tends to give priority to spoken languages and to the problem of analyzing them as they operate at a given point of time. The field of linguistics may be divided in terms of three dichotomies: synchronic versus diachronic, theoretical versus applied, and microlinguistics versus macrolinguistics. A synchronic description of a language describes the language as it is at a given time; a diachronic description is concerned with the historical development of the language and the structural changes that have taken place in it. The goal of theoretical linguistics is the construction of a general theory of the structure of language or of a general theoretical framework for the description of languages; the aim of applied linguistics is the application of the findings and techniques of the scientific study of language to practical tasks, especially to the elaboration of improved methods of language teaching. The terms microlinguistics and macrolinguistics are not yet well established, and are used purely for convenience. The former refers to a narrower and the latter to a much broader view of the scope of linguistics. According to the microlinguistics view, languages should be analyzed for their own sake and without reference to their social function, to the manner in which they are acquired by children, to the psychological mechanism that underlie the production and reception of speech, to the literary and the aesthetic or communicative function of language, and so on. In contrast, macrolinguistics embraces all of these aspects of language. Various areas within macrolinguistics have been given terminological recognition: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, dialectology, mathematical and computational linguistics, and stylistics. The study of language has a long history which began in pre-historic times in different cultures but linguistics as a science was established only in the 19^th century in Europe when accumulation of facts about the early stages of living languages called for theoretical interpretation of linguistic evolution.   The Comparative Method It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement of linguistic scholarship in the 19^th century was the development of comparative method which comprised a set of principles whereby languages could be systematically compared with respect to their sound systems, grammatical structure and vocabulary and shown to be ‘ genealogically’ related. As French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and the other Romance languages had evolved from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as well as the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages and many other languages of Europe and Asia, had evolved from some earlier language, to which the name Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European, or the common parent language or the original language is now customarily applied. It had been known for centuries that all the Romance languages were descended from Latin and thus constituted one family. But the existence of the Indo-European family of languages and the nature of their genealogical relationship was first demonstrated by the 19^th -century comparative philologists. The main impetus for the development of comparative philology came toward the end of the 18^th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit (Note 1), the classical Indian language, bore a number of striking resemblances to Greek and Latin. The English orientalist, Sir William Jones, though he was not the first to observe these resemblances, is generally given the credit for bringing them to the attention of the scholars and putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786, that all three languages must have ‘sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists’. The next important step came in 1822, when the German scholar Jacob Grimm, following the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (whose work (1818), being written in Danish, was less accessible to most European scholars)) pointed out in the second edition of his comparative grammar of Germanic that there were a number of systematic correspondences between the sounds of Germanic and the sounds of Greek, Latin and Sanskrit in related words. Grimm noted, for example, that where Gothic (the oldest surviving Germanic language) had an f, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit frequently had a p. The table below illustrates this correspondence.

dichotomy -[daɪˈkɒtəmi] дихотомия the difference between several things or ideas that are completely opposite     synchronic- синхронический   diachronic- диахронический   applied- прикладной   microlinguistics микролингвистика   macrolinguistics макролингвистика   techniques- methods, means   elaboration- разработка     accumulate- gather and build up   call for- require   scholarship- study   genealogy- the study of the history of families genealogical evolve- develop   Proto-Indo-European – протоиндоевропей-ский, индоевропей- ский праязык descend- to have developed from something that existed in the past   comparative philologists- филологи-компаративисты orientalist- someone who studies the languages and culture of oriental countries   accessible- easy to obtain or use

 

Germanic	Non-Germanic	Germanic
Gothic	Sanskrit	Greek	Latin	Modern English
fotus	padas	podos	pedis	foot