This document summarizes the evolution of the English language from its Anglo-Saxon origins to modern times. It discusses the influences of invasions by Vikings, Normans, and others in contributing words and changing grammar and syntax. It also outlines ongoing additions to the vocabulary through borrowings from other languages, compounding, prefixing, suffixing, blending, and invented words. The English language has developed a large, diverse vocabulary through continual adoption and adaptation over many centuries.
2. BREXIT
A few weeks ago this was an unknown collection of
letters, now itโs a word on everyoneโs lips and will
probably be in the next edition of the OED.
Itโs also a pretty good example of what I want to talk
about. How the English language has acquired both
its variety of dialects and ever increasing vocabulary
11. The French Invasion
CO-EXSISTING WORDS
OLD ENGLISH FRENCH
Mansion House
Judgement Doom
Cordial Hearty
SUPPLANTED WORDS
OLD ENGLISH FRENCH
Leod People
Wlitig Beautiful
Stow Place
12. English
In 1362, with national fervour and antagonism towards France, the Kingโs
speech at the opening of Parliament was in English for the first time. In the
same year, the law courts also began to use English.
13. โThere can be no doubt that pure dialect
speech is rapidly disappearing even in
country districts, owing to the spread of
education and to modern facilities of
intercommunicationโ
Joseph Wright circa 1900
14. MULTIETHNOLECTS
โข SECOND GENERATION IMMIGRANTS
โข Speak English but are very familiar with
their parentsโ mother tongue and
expressions
โข OLDER VERSION OF THIS โ WENGLISH
โข English spoken in the Welsh valleys in
18/19th
century, but through the medium of
Welsh speech patterns and grammar.
19. Vulgar Latin
Plante - plant
Win - wine
Weall โ wall
Ceaster โ city
Cetel โ kettle
Catte โ cat
Cyse - cheese
Old English words given
new Christian meanings
Heaven
Hell
God
Gospel
Easter
Celtic
Crag, cumb โ deep valley
Dunn โ grey
Brock - badger
Old English borrowings
20. Middle English
Borrowings from other languages
โข Latin
โข Arbitrator
โข Conspiracy
โข Homicide
โข Prosecute
โข Contradiction
โข Discuss
โข History
โข Mechanical
โข Immortal
โข Magnificat
โข Collision
โข Expedition
โข Solitary
โข substitute
โข Other sources
Netherlands
- bouse โ drink deeply
- poll โ head
Portuguese
- marmalade
Russian
- sable
Arabic
- saffron
- mattress
- algebra
Persian via French
- chess
- rook
- check
French
Mainly nouns to
do with law,
administration,
medicine, art,
fashion
Prefixes
- con
- trans
- pre
Suffixes
- ance
- tion
23. Compound Words
Joining two separate words
โข Flower + pot = flowerpot
โข Earth + quake = earthquake
โข Scare + crow = scarecrow
Old English Compound words
โข Bagpipe Birthday
โข Blackberry Grandfather
โข Craftsmen Highway
24. Compound word
โข Joining a โnon-wordโ to an existing word
โข Micro + chip = microchip
โข Agri + culture = agriculture
โข Work + aholic = workaholic
โข Swim + athon = swimathon
25. Word class
Nouns to verbs
beautyโฆโฆ..to beautify
farmโฆโฆโฆ..farming
Adjective to verb
emptyโฆโฆโฆto empty
Adjective to noun
natural foodโฆ.a natural
final scoreโฆโฆa final
Long noun to shorter new verb
televisionโฆ..to televise
editorโฆโฆโฆ.to edit
babysitterโฆ..to babysit
26. Blended words
โข Squishingโ two words together to form a
new word
โข Breath + analyser breathalyser
โข Motor + hotel motel
โข Oxford + Cambridge Oxbridge
28. Y O S
Y O S
Added to make mainly Informal words
Telly
Aunty
Aggro
Preggers
29. Reduplicates
โข Two identical, or very, very similar word,
repeated to make a concept
โข Ding-dong
โข Ping-pong
โข Dilly-dally
โข Wishy-washy
30. FIXES
And just because there was a whole chapter in a Linguistics book
I used โ I thought I would more formally mention the many
additions to the English language using FIXES
32. prefixes
โข Negate non, dis, un
โข Reverse de
โข Disparage mal, mis
โข Size mega, super, vice
โข Orientation auto, contra
โข Location extra, fore
โข Time post, pre
โข Number bi, semi
34. Defunct fixes
SUFFIX
SHIP quite often replaced with
NESS (but not always)
Boldship โ boldness
Kindship โ kindness
Cleanship - cleanliness
WITH disappeared
Withspeak (contradict)
Withset (resist)
Withsay (renounce)
35. HALIDOM noun
ESCULENT noun
PUDENT noun
NOSOCOMIAL adjective
BEEK verb
NULLIBIETY noun
FILIBEG noun
ENCHIRIDION noun
DEGLUTE verb
DASYPYGAL adjecive
A holy or sacred place
Edible substance
Experience or show shame
Relating or belonging to a hospital
To make warm or comfortable
The state of being nowhere, absence
A kilt
A handbook or manual
To swallow
Having hairy buttocks
WORDS LONG GONE
36. INVENTED WORDS
โข DEBUNK
โข DOORMAT
โข CHINZY
โข FACTOIDS
โข FEMINIST
โข GREMLIN
โข MICROCOMPUTER
โข NERD
โข PEDESTRIAN
โข WORKAHOLIC
โข CHORTLE
โข SCIENTIST
โข WILLIAM E WOODWARD 1923
โข CHARLES DICKENS
โข GEORGE ELIOT 1851
โข NORMAN MAILER 1973
โข ALEXANDRE DUMAS 1873
โข ROALD DAHL 1943
โข ISAAC ASIMOV 1956
โข DR. SEUSS 1950
โข WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
โข DR WAYNE E OATES 1971
โข LEWIS CARROLL
โข WILLIAM WEREWELL 1840
37. Thank you!
โข Thanks!
โข Cheers!
โข Ta!
โข Much obliged
โข Thanks a lot
โข Thanks a bunch
โข Much appreciated
โข Diolch yn fawr!!
Editor's Notes
Doing this presenation has evoked long suppressed school memories.
Knowing you have a piece of work to complete but doing everthing else you can think of to avoid it. I have managed to complete quite a few jobs instead.
Then, when I actually got round to doing the work, finding I have loads of material, but not being able to put into any co=herent order.
Not sure I have actually succeeded in this latter point, so please feel free to fill in my gaps, and make things clearer as we go through.
YES folks, sorry about this. A few weeks ago this was an unknown collection of letters, now itโs a word on everyoneโs lips and will probably be in the next edition of the OED.
Itโs also a pretty good example of what I want to talk about. How the English language has acquired both its variety of dialects and ever increasing vocabulary
English has existed for 1500 years. It has evolved and grown and has now been spread throughout the world.
Over its lifetime it has come into contact with invaders and colonists of our islands and through its speakersโ colonial and commercial exploits has travelled to almost every corner of the world, forever accumulating new material along the way.
English was brought to Britain by Germanic invaders called Anglo-Saxons. The language spoken is referred to as Old English. A member of the west Germanic family of languages โ spoken with many local variations over wide areas of North West Europe at the close of the Roman Period.
AS raids began aound AD410, before the Romans left GB , but when the Romans eventually left,, raids and settlements inevitably increased and became increasingly assertive from around AD450. The native Britons were called โwealasโ by the AS, their word for foreigners. We foreigners, we either absorbed into the communities or driven west to Wales, or to Cornwall or Southern Scotland..
This encroachment of the Germanic invaders was neither rapid nor in large scale. Small war bands, invited or not (some had been invited as mercenaries to fight the Picts and Scots) came to fight, settled and sent word back home that the land was good. Bit like the later settlement of USA.
They were hindered by the likes of King Arthur, but eventually came to dominate the land we now call England, together with part of southern Scotland.
AD500 โ AS communities in England were small groups of armed farming families, separated from similar settlements by many miles of forest of fenland. Each community would be drawn from parts of NW European seaboard. Linguistic and other social characteristic would be local and there would be no pressure to conform. Even when powerful leaders established themselves as kings, their territories were at first very small. There were at least 7 kingdoms and anything approaching a national identity only emerged in the 9th century.
Bede wrote that the Germanic invaders were drawn from three distinct peoples, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes.
Jutes, were the early settlers in Kent where they also colonized IOW and part of Hampshire
Angles probably came largely from southern Denmark and area know as Angeln and settled in the eastern parts of the country as far north as SE Scotland and through out the English Midlands. These were probably at their core a tribal unit. For a different view on the Angles โ read How Wales Created England and the English language by TD Brown
The Saxons were a more loosely knit group. They took or were given their name from SEAX โ a single bladed long knife that was one of their favourite weapons. These raiders came from anywhere along the costal lands from what is now N Germany to N France. Saxons settled in the largest numbers in the S and SW of Britain. This loose confederation of war bands would have brought with them a multitude of customs, traditions and dialects. They would have banded together only as long as needed against a common enemy and once established, broke away into their local groups.
A final important factor working against any tendency towards uniformity of language, at least for the first 2 centuries of AS settlement was that most people from the king downward โ were illiterate.
The Christian missionary Augustine arrived in Southern England in AD597 with the influence of Columba reaching the north a little later. With Christianity came education, those who could read and write put forward some pressure for conformity to a standard form of language, at least within individual kingdoms.
But then, as now, the experience of most of us is that we write in a much more conformist way than we speak. So this conformity had little effect on the spoken word and its variety of dialects continued.
English was well established in the country in its wealth of spoken forms and most people had little cause or opportunity to write it anyway.
The legacy of these early raiders bequeathed to English was one of variety.
There was little need to the AS to invent or conform to a widespread standard language and no doubt for many people there was every inclination to promote their own tongue.
Then came the Vikings. Beginning about AD800 raids increased in size, intensity and duration. By 860s Viking armies were staying in England for several years at a time.
By the late 9th century, Scandinavian settlements were being established in the N and E and Vikings were transformed from raiders into conquerors controlling about half the land of England.
Most of the northern kingdom of Northumbria was overrun and so too was the eastern part of the Midland kingdom of Mercia. Only in Alfredโs kingdom of Wessex were there sufficient resistance and the survival of English tradition and language.
With Alfredโs victory over Futhrum in AD878, the relationship between the two peoples stabilized. Danelaw was established for the Viking north and east with the rest of the county under Alfredโs control.
The culture and language of Wessex became synonymous with English culture and language - for those for whom learning was significant.
The of Viking settlements in England introduced further variety.
The language spoken by the Vikings, today called Old Norse, and like English a Germanic language. Limited communication may have taken place between the Anglo Saxons and Vikings using their own languages, especially if the AS used an Anglian form of English. At first, pure Norse would have been spoken in the Scandinavian settlements in England, no doubt with Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and more localised variations.
Their language assumed an increasingly English character whilst retaining strong Norse feature, elements which can be clearly identified in the dialects and place names of these areas today.
Many of the borrowings from Viking Old Norse have given English its most common words
The most remarkable invasion of all is the Old Norse verb TO BE.
The replacement of Old English SINDON was almost certainly the result of the Scandinavian influence as is the spread of the 3rd person singular S ending in the present tense of other verbs
He comes she believes it stays
Hardly had the upheaval of the Viking period subsided, than a new invasion occurred. The Norman Conquest of 1066.. The Normans who, despite being just 4or 5 generations removed from their Scandanavian ancestry, spoke
Cultures in Normandy and England were not entirely dissimilar and at court level there was considerable contact. But the language they brought had a profound effect on English. French. โ a Romantic rather than a Germanic language
French was far more foreign to English than Old Norse had been. It there was to be contact between the English and the Normans, then they would have to speak each others language.
But the Normans were the rulers, they did not mingle with the native Britons and for many generations had little interest in learning the native English language. Only a few gifted or privileged English men and women acquired Norman French. French was the language of the ruling elite. English continued in all its variety of dialects to be used by the ordinary and largely illiterate people. As it was just the spoken language, used within restricted areas for everyday use, there was little need to change. In fact its local usage and regional diversity may have helped to obscure it and inhibit is mastery by aliens.
But many new words arrived and they often duplicated words which already existed from Anglo Saxon times.
There could be two outcomes โ one would supplant the other or both would co-exist but develop slightly different meanings.
First outcome was very common with mainly French words replacing the Old English words, but hundreds of Old English words were lost that way.
Where Old English and French words both survived, they often ended up with different senses of connotations. Quite often French word being the more educated or cultured, with the Old English word describing the more commonplace.
Slowly, with the weakening of ties with Normandy and France, English came to be rehabilitated as the national language. In 1362, with national fervour and antagonism towards France, the Kingโs speech at the opening of Parliament was in English for the first time. In the same year, law courts began to use English
With the influences of Chaucer, Oxford and Cambridge and London with its court and large population, the East Midland variety of English came to be regarded as the written standard.
Later many influential intellectuals such as Swift, Dryen and Johnson argued for imposing a fixing of a standard language and grammar. However spoken English retained its variety, but from this point onwards, non standard English speech was on a downward trend in fashion.. Restoration squires were ridiculed from their local speech. Progress in education, in the professions and in society became linked with the possession of an acceptable accent and grasp of correct grammar and vocabulary. The link between Speech and social class was established..
Although improved communication spread the influence of a need to a standard form of the language, it also began the slow process of exposing everyone to the variety of spoken English dialects.
Preface to โThe English Dialect Grammarโ, part of his six volume English Dialect Dictionary published between 1898 and 1905
Wright made an important point. Improved communications and increasing social mobility were causing acceleration in the pace of dialect change at the time he was writing. Many ancient speech forms and words were disappearing even from the most conservative and isolated rural areas.
However as we all know, there are still many dialects of English. There are city dialects, ethnic minorities, and occupational dialects and as we have said there is relationship between dialect and social class.
British English has always been and continues to be a language of dialects. Wherever one goes in Britain there are very obvious differences between the ways in which people speak.
This can be differences in words, with grammar, the way in which words are organized and of course with pronunciation or accent.
We are all aware of this variety to some extent and most of us that this for granted.
A new term. With increased migrations of people around the world, there has been an increase in new dialects.. Immigrants to an English speaking country either do not speak English or are learning the language.. The second generation - their children have been grow up with English, but speak or be very familiar with their parentsโ mother tongues. This has given rise to English with different speech patterns and borrowings.
Multiethnolects are not pidgin or creole languages, in which people take vocabulary from a colonial language, and grammar from their native languages, and fashion first a makeshift lingo to get by (a pidgin) and then expand that into a new language entirely (a creole)
. One would need no Rosetta Stone to master a multiethnolect version of oneโs own language. Still, multiethnolects are the most fertile source of linguistic innovation in our times.
Nor, as generations of Black Englishโspeakers can attest, are multiethnolects mere youth slang destined to pass away. Slang is but decoration upon language, ever-changing and leaving the foundationโthe neutral vocabulary and the grammatical structuresโintact.
Plausibly, in 50 years there will be gray-haired Europeans of immigrant ancestry using multiethnolect varieties as their casual speech
But this is not a new phenomena. I come from the South Wales valleys. When the Iron, Steel and Coal industries were at their height in the 18/19th century, English took over as the dominant language.
However, this English used English words, but with Welsh speech patterns and grammar. It was also peppered with Welsh and anglizised Welsh words. This way of speaking, was christened Wenglish by John Edwards, who made a good living as an after-dinner speaker talking about this subject. He published a few books on the way of speaking English, through Welsh and I would like to read you his Wenglish version of the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
By way of contrast, would anyone like to read this poem, written in one of the Derbyshire dialects, spoken around the Ilkeston area
Before the Anglo Saxons, the languages of the British Isles belonged to the Celtic family, introduced by a people who had come to the islands around the middle of that Millennium BC
Many were eventually subjugated by Romans by 436BC. There was little Celtic influence probably due to the savage way communities were destroyed or pushed into Cornwall, Wales and Scottish borders. A few Romano Celts remained in the South โ slaves or intermarried. The Roman armies and merchants left some Latin influence on the language, but they spoke a Vulgar Latin and not the more formalised language which brought a later influence.
Christian missionaries from Ireland and Rome brought more vocabulary. Hundreds of new words were introduced about the Church, theology, learning, biological and domestic words which still survive.
Old English words were given new Christian meanings. Latin endings were sometimes added to Old English words.
Into middle English, came many new words. Latin continued to have a major influence. French influence became increasingly evident in English manuscripts of 13th century. It has been estimated that some 10,000 French words came into English at that time., many previously borrowed from fore distanct sources But many other languages also supplied a sprinkling of new words at this time, though not all have survived. Some words came to English via another language, particularly French โ the words used in chess are originally from the Persian language.
The effect of all this borrowing on the balance of words in the English lexicon was dramatic. In early Middle English over 90% of the words were of native English origin. By the end of the Middle English period, this had fallen to around 75%
Now over to youโฆ..With so many words borrowed from other languages, I thought a quiz was in order. Can you guess, or do you know which language English borrowed these words from
Your turn. How many of these borrowings can you recognise. Can you name the original language?
English adds to is lexicon by joining separate words together to make a completely new concept or idea.
This is not a new idea, many Old English words were formed in the same way
New words are formed by linking two separate words, but another form is adding a non word to an existing one. As a sort of prefix or suffix. These sorts of words are more recent additions to the lexicon.
As are blended words
Words can be changed in their class, - Nouns to verbs, adjectives to nouns. In this way the vocabulary is increased.
Another form of changing word class, is to take a longer noun and make a shorter verb from it.
Making these shorter words has been labelled Back Formations in some of the books I read.
Squishing together two words, leaving bits out and making another word. Again a more recent trend
Then, of course we can add nonsense words to the lexicon. Words which have no real meaning and I suppose one of the most famous of these is>>>>
Another more recent word formation, mainly informal words, made by adding Y or O or S. They are quite often an abbreviated form of the original word. Some would say a sign of our every more rushed lives where we do not even have the time to say a complete word.
Another linguistic concept โ two identical, or more commonly almost identical words strung together to make a new lexeme, with a new meaning. Possibly not to be used in more formal anguage.
And just because there was a whole chapter in a Linguistics book I used โ I thought I would more formally mention the many additions to the English language using FIXES. I have already mentioned some of the ones that were borrowed from French (tion, trans etc.). Linguistic study likes FIXES. There are three kinds
Shall I do my impersonation of a teacher and ask you for examples of each of these prefixes?
And the third fix โ An infix. The books state if is quite rare. The only wellknown one I could come up with wasโฆ.โฆ..hereโs a clue
Not all fixes added to the language have survived to the modern age. Two examples of erstwhile common fixes are SHIP and WITH. Ship seems to have been replaced in most instances with NESS. WiTH has disappeared and the concepts given new words
Finally, I thought I would end with a little quiz. There are so many words which have disappeared from modern speech. Here are 10 I liked the sound of. Should we say hands up if you can guess, or know what these words mean and if we should start a campaign to bring them back.
These words wre coined by various authors. Many of the words came into being long before you would think
