English Language

V

Stress, Pitches, and Juncture

Other means to phonemic differentiation in English, apart from the pronunciation of distinct vowels and consonants, are stress, pitch, and juncture. Stress is the sound difference achieved by pronouncing one syllable more forcefully than another, for example, the difference between rec′ ord (noun) and re cord′ (verb). Pitch is, for example, the difference between the pronunciation of John and John? and can thus differentiate a statement from a question. Juncture or disjuncture of words causes such differences in sound as that created by the pronunciation of blackbird (one word) and black bird (two words). English employs four degrees of stress and four kinds of juncture for differentiating words and phrases.

VI

Parts of Speech and Inflection

In standard grammatical terms, we classify English words into the following categories, or parts of speech: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, and conjunction.

Modern English has relatively few word endings to indicate various grammatical functions. In other words, it has relatively few inflections. Noun endings indicate only the possessive case (John’s) or the plural number (bananas). Verbs have both a strong conjugation—shown in older words—with internal vowel change, for example, sing, sang, sung, and a weak conjugation with suffixes indicating past tense, as in play, played. The latter is the predominant type. Only 66 verbs of the strong type are in use, and newer verbs invariably follow the weak pattern. The third person singular has an -s ending, as in (she) drives. There is also the participle ending –ing, as in “They are dancing,” and the past participle ending –en, as in “I have just eaten.”

Although English has relatively few word endings compared with other languages, it does permit about 44 different combinations of verbs with auxiliaries such as have, can, may, or must, as for example in the sentence, “The book must have been read.” Most monosyllabic and some disyllabic (two-syllable) adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison, such as large, larger, and largest or happy, happier, and happiest. Other adjectives express the same distinction by compounding with more and most, as in more beautiful and most beautiful. Pronouns are the most heavily inflected parts of speech in English. They have objective case forms, such as me or her, in addition to the nominative (I, he, we) and possessive forms (my, his, hers, our).

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VII

Development of the Language

Three main stages are usually recognized in the history of the development of the English language. Linguists disagree on when English began. They base their arguments largely on what texts are available that differentiate English from its Germanic cousins on the European continent and on how long it must have taken for spoken English to become a distinctive language. Traditionally, Old English, known formerly as Anglo-Saxon, is dated from ad 449 to 1066 or 1100. Middle English dates from 1066 or 1100 to 1450 or 1500. Modern English dates from about 1450 or 1500 and can be subdivided into Early Modern English, from about 1500 to 1660, and Late Modern English, from about 1660 to the present.

A

Old English Period

Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by certain Germanic peoples (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) of the regions comprising present-day southern Denmark and northern Germany who invaded Britain in the 5th century ad. According to tradition, the Jutes were the first to arrive, in 449. Settling in Britain, the invaders drove the indigenous Celtic-speaking peoples, notably the Britons, to the north and west. As time went on, Old English evolved further from the original Continental form, and regional dialects developed.

The four major dialects recognized in Old English are Kentish, originally the dialect spoken by the Jutes; West Saxon, a branch of the dialect spoken by the Saxons; and Northumbrian (see Northumberland) and Mercian (see Mercia), subdivisions of the dialects spoken by the Angles. By the 9th century, partly through the influence of Alfred, king of the West Saxons and the first ruler of all England, West Saxon became prevalent in prose literature. A Mercian mixed dialect, however, was primarily used for the greatest poetry, such as the anonymous 8th-century epic poem Beowulf and the contemporary elegiac poems.

Old English was a much more inflected language than contemporary English. It was characterized by strong and weak verbs; a dual number for pronouns (for example, a form for we two as well as for we); two different declensions of adjectives; four declensions of nouns; and grammatical distinctions of gender. Although rich in word-building possibilities, Old English was sparse in vocabulary. It borrowed a few proper nouns from the language of the conquered Celts, primarily those such as Aberdeen (“mouth of the Dee”) and Inchcape (“island cape”) that describe geographical features. Scholars believe that ten common nouns in Old English are of Celtic origin; among these are cart, down, and clock. Although other Celtic words not preserved in literature may have been in use during the Old English period, most Modern English words of Celtic origin, that is, those derived from Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, or Irish, are comparatively recent borrowings. See Celtic Languages.

The number of Latin words, many of them derived from the Greek, that were introduced during the Old English period has been estimated at 140. A few were probably introduced through Celtic; others were brought to Britain by the Germanic invaders, who previously had come into contact with Roman culture. Most Latin words were introduced as a result of the spread of Christianity. Such words included not only ecclesiastical terms—for example, altar, mass, priest, psalm, temple—but also many others of less specialized significance, such as cheese, wine, and street.

About 40 Scandinavian (Old Norse) words were introduced into Old English by the Norsemen, or Vikings, who invaded Britain periodically from the late 8th century on. Introduced first were words pertaining to the sea and battle, but shortly after the initial invasions other words used in the Scandinavian social and administrative system—for example, the word law—entered the language, as well as the verb form are and such widely used words as take, cut, both, ill, and ugly.

B

Middle English Period

At the beginning of the Middle English period, which dates from the Norman Conquest of 1066, the language was still quite highly inflectional. By the end of the period the relationship between the elements of the sentence depended basically on word order. As early as 1200 the three or four grammatical case forms of nouns in the singular had been reduced to two, and to denote the plural the noun ending (e)s had been adopted.

The declension of the noun was simplified further by dropping the final n from five cases of the fourth, or weak, declension; by neutralizing all vowel endings to e (sounded like the a in Modern English sofa), and by extending the masculine, nominative, and accusative plural ending -as, later neutralized also to -es, to other declensions and other cases. Only one example of a weak plural ending, oxen, survives in Modern English; kine and brethren are later formations. Several representatives of the Old English modification of the root vowel in the plural survive also, such as man, men, and foot, feet.

With the reduction of inflections, the distinctions of grammatical gender in English were replaced by those of natural gender. During this period the dual number fell into disuse, and the dative and accusative of pronouns were reduced to a common form. Furthermore, the Scandinavian they, them were substituted for the original hie, hem of the third person plural, and who, which, and that acquired their present relative functions. The conjugation of verbs was simplified by the reduction of endings and by the use of a common form for the singular and plural of the past tense of strong verbs.

In the early period of Middle English, a number of utilitarian words, such as egg, sky, sister, window, and get, came into the language from Old Norse. The Normans brought other additions to the vocabulary. Before 1250 about 900 new words had appeared in English, mainly words, such as baron, noble, and feast, that the Anglo-Saxon lower classes required in their dealings with the Norman-French nobility. Eventually the Norman nobility and clergy learned English, but they introduced into it words from the French language pertaining to the government, the church, the army, and the fashions of the court, in addition to others proper to the arts, scholarship, and medicine.

Midland, the dialect of Middle English derived from the Mercian dialect of Old English, became important during the 14th century, when the English counties in which it was spoken developed into centers of university, economic, and courtly life. East Midland, one of the subdivisions of Midland, had by that time become the speech of the entire metropolitan area of the capital, London, and probably had spread south of the Thames River into Kent and Surrey. The influence of East Midland was strengthened by its use in the government offices of London, by its literary dissemination in the works of the 14th-century poets Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, and most significantly by its adoption for printed works by William Caxton. These and other circumstances gradually contributed to the direct development of the East Midland dialect into the Modern English standard language.

During the period of this linguistic transformation the other Middle English dialects continued to exist, and dialects descending from them are still spoken in the 21st century. Lowland Scots, for example, is a development of the Northern dialect.

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