Introduction to Linguistics- 24.10.07

HISTORY OF ENGLISH

At the beginning of the lecture we discussed the origin of today’s English referring to our homework and the question where English had been 6000 years ago. English like German and many other languages which are obviously different nowadays origin from Proto-Indo-European. Mr. Gibbon clarified the development of English and other languages with a tree model of the different Proto-Indo-European languages (Fig. 1). Still today you can see that some words in different languages are not different (e.g. “father” (English), “Vater” (German), “padre” (Spanish)). Even languages on other continents show (unexpectedly) some similarities to European languages – this was already found out by missionaries.

In addition to the model tree Mr. Gibbon pointed out that written language is not as old as spoken language. This means that the history of writing is approximately 3000 years old and the history of written English even “only” 1500. Another fact that was shown on the model tree was that English, which is an Germanic language was also influenced by French. The reason therefore lies in the Norman conquest of England in 1066.

Who was in Britain before the English?
It is not known who the original human inhabitants of the British Isles were. The earliest known inhabitants however were the Celts who immigrated East and West from Danube. After about 400 AD was the West Germanic migration by the Angles and Saxons. The North Germanic migration by the Viking was after about 600 AD. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 has already been mentioned.

Sound changes
Referring to the tree model and the similarities of different languages we discussed the development of language, the history of words and how languages are related to each other. Considering the history of words, it becomes quite obvious that languages are dynamic and have always been changing. Sound changes that we discussed in the lecture were Grimm’s Law, the High German Soundshift (which belongs to Grimm’s Law) and the Great Vowel Shift.