Evolution of the English Language: Key Historical Influences
The Great Vowel Shift
Occurring in the early decades of the 15th century, the Great Vowel Shift significantly altered the pronunciation of long vowels. These vowels were raised in articulation or became diphthongs. Notably, the spelling often remained unchanged despite these pronunciation shifts. For example:
- Middle English /i:/> Modern English /ai/ -> bite /bi:ta/ > /baIt/
- /u:/>/au/ -> house /hu:s/>/haUs/
Morphological Change
Languages can be categorized into three types based on their morphology:
Isolating Languages
These languages feature one morpheme per word. Words do not use affixes, making word order crucial. Example: Chinese.
Agglutinating Languages
A word may contain several morphemes (a root and a number of affixes). These parts are ‘glued’ together, but the morphemes remain clearly separated, with each morpheme expressing a single meaning. Example: Turkish.
Inflectional Languages
The form of a word changes to indicate a change in meaning or grammatical function. A word may contain several morphemes (a root and a number of affixes), but morpheme boundaries are blurred. Each morpheme may express more than one meaning. Example: Latin.
English used to be inflectional but lost its inflections during the Middle English period. During this time, it began acquiring many function words (grammaticalization). The presence of function words indicates that a language is isolated. English still retains a few inflections and can be classified as highly isolated and slightly inflectional.
Analogical Change
The purpose of analogical change is to remove irregularities in a language and make it more homogeneous.
Syntactic Change
Languages can be classified by the order of elements in a sentence, specifically by word order, indicating the position of subject, verb, and object. Examples include:
- VSO (Verb-Subject-Object): Welsh
- SVO (Subject-Verb-Object): English
- VOS (Verb-Object-Subject): Malagasy
- SOV (Subject-Object-Verb): Japanese
Proto-Indo-European was an SOV language, but a branch of it evolved into English, predominantly SVO. Modern German is also SVO, but embedded clauses are SOV. This shift is connected to the breakdown of the inflectional system, Heavy NP Shift, and Verb Fronting Rule.
Grammaticalization
Grammaticalization is a process by which a word with full lexical meaning becomes a lexically empty grammatical marker or may even be reduced phonetically by becoming an inflection. Examples:
- Old English -lic > -ly
- Old English willan > to want
Influences on the English Language
Celtic Inhabitants
Influence seen in place names (rivers like the Thames, towns like Lincoln) and terms like border, valley, hill.
Roman Invasion
Latin served as an important source of loan words, particularly those related to war, trade, and agriculture (e.g., wine, battle). Latin influence through Celtic transmission is mainly evident in place names. The introduction of Christianity brought words connected to religion (altar, temple) and education (school, grammar).
Germanic Settlements
Settlements from Angles, Saxons, and Jutes began when the Romans left Britain. They were “invited” by the Britons (romanized Celts) to fight against the unromanized Celts (Picts and Scots), leading both tribes to move to Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Four dialects existed, with West Saxon being the most predominant. Saxon influence is seen in place names ending in -ton, -wide, -ham, and family names like Baker and Hunter.
Scandinavian (Viking) Invasion
North Germanic dialects spoken by Scandinavians were closely related to West Germanic dialects of Anglo-Saxon. Speakers simplified their language to communicate with one another. When Scandinavians Christianized, communities merged, and Norse was no longer spoken, but English had been modified. Influence is seen in place names (-by, -borough, -thorpe), personal names (-son, e.g., Lawson), and words related to objects and actions (law, take, anger, wrong, ugly). Words with Scandinavian origin do not show palatalization. The third-person plural pronouns (they, their, them) replaced native forms.
Norman Conquest (Middle English)
This marked a transitional period between Old English and Early Modern English. The Norman Conquest in 1066 was the MOST IMPORTANT event regarding the development of English. The Battle of Hastings saw William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy) defeat King Harold of England. Normans (Norsemen settled in France) learned French, were Christianized, and adopted French culture and law. Their dialect, when they invaded, became Anglo-Norman. Early French loans include castle, prison, garden, market, and people. This introduced governmental/administrative words (empire), law (justice), army/navy (peace, siege), religion (cardinal), and fashion (dress, art).