Chapter 3Which English

单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,Which English?,The English language is divided into three periods:,Old English,(Anglo-Saxon, from 400s through 1066),Middle English,(ME, from 1066 to about the 1400s),Modern English,(MnE, from the late 1400s onward),Whats Old English?,Old English,is the name given to the Germanic language spoken in the southern part of the island of Britain before the Norman Conquest in 1066 (and for about 100 years after the Conquest). This language is the ancestor of the Modern English spoken today, although it is quite different in appearance and sound at first glance. Most of our records of the Old English language date from the period between about 875 and about 1100, and there is very little evidence indeed of the precise state of the language before the Christian missionary efforts at the end of the 6th century, or about the stages by which Old English had become Middle English by about 1250.,Migration from the continent by the ancestors of the people who spoke Old English probably occurred over a period of several centuries, though we have few written records from the time, and probably involved Germanic tribes from around the base of the Jutland peninsula and nearby areas such as the German Low Countries and the modern Netherlands. The Germanic migrants displaced, enslaved, or mingled with the previous Celtic inhabitants of the island and their language became the socially dominant tongue except in Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland.,The descendants of the Germanic migrants referred to their ancestors as Angles and Saxons, and you will still find some references in modern reference books to their language as the Anglo-Saxon language, though Old English is now the preferred term. The medieval languages most closely related to Old English are Old Frisian, Flemish, and Old Low German.,Middle English,The Middle English (ME) period lasted from about 1100-1500. Major historical events influenced the language change. In 1066, the Duke of Normandy, the famous William, henceforth called the Conqueror, sailed across the British Channel. He challenged King Harold of England in the struggle for the English throne. After winning the battle of Hastings where he defeated Harold, William was crowned King of England. A Norman Kingdom was now established. The Anglo-Saxon period was over.,The Norman invasion naturally had a profound effect on Englands institutions and its language. The Norman French spoken by the invaders became the language of Englands ruling class. The lower classes, while remaining English-speaking, were influenced nevertheless by the new vocabulary. French became the language of the affairs of government, court, the church, the army, and education where the newly adopted French words often substituted their former English counterparts. The linguistic influence of Norman French continued for as long as the Kings ruled both Normandy and England.,When King John lost Normandy in the years following 1200, the links to the French-speaking community subsided. English then slowly started to gain more weight as a common tongue within England again. A hundred years later, English was again spoken by representatives of all social classes, this new version of the English language being strikingly different, of course, from the,Old English,used prior to the Norman invasion.,The English spoken at this turn of events is called Middle English. It is the blend of Anglo-Saxon, Latin and French.,About ten thousand French words had been taken over by English during the Middle English period, and most of them have remained in the language until the present day. Aside from the already mentioned new vocabulary pertaining to the affairs of government, court, the church, the army, and education, many words relating to food and fashion were introduced as well.,In some fields an original English terminology did not exist. Therefore, many French terms were borrowed. One example is the names of animals and their meat. Whereas the names of the animals remained the same, their meat was renamed according to the Norman custom.,This correlated to the sociological structures: the farmers that raised the animals were predominantly English natives and could afford to keep using their own vocabulary while farming - those serving the meat at the dining-room table to the mainly French upper classes had to conform to the French language.,Animal: sheep, cow, swine,Meat: mutton, beef, pork,The English language also has doublets - these are pairs of words that have the same,etymology, i.e. the same source, but that differ in meaning because they had been introduced into the English language by two separate languages. The Latin and French influence, for instance, made for many of such word pairs. Latin vocabulary adopted by the Celts directly became a part of English. The same vocabulary was sometimes adopted by the Gauls and introduced to English via Norman French .,As far as grammar is concerned, a,reduction of inflections,began. The grammatical gender disappeared and,inflections,merged. As the inflections of the Old English disappeared, the word order of middle English became increasingly fixed. This change made for a great loss of strong verbs. At a time when English was the language mainly of the lower classes and largely removed from educational or literary domains and influence, it was natural that many speakers applied the pattern of inflecting weak verbs to verbs which were historically strong.,This linguistic principle of adopting the pattern of a less common form to a more familiar one is called,analogy,.The exclusive use of the pattern SVO (subject - verb - object; see the chapter on universals) emerged in the twelfth century and has remained part of English ever since.,Why is Old English so different from Modern English?,Well, first of all, Old English was spoken most recently almost a thousand years ago. Languages just do change, gradually and inevitably, over time, a phenomenon that linguistics has a fairly hard time explaining, and certainly predicting. But there are a couple of factors that affected the English language that tended to hasten linguistic change in English. (In contrast, Icelandic, a language quite similar to Old English in many ways, has undergone very little change, so that Icelandic children read the Viking sagas/legend in school without need for much adaptation or special apparatus such as glossing.),The first factor that tended to make English change rapidly is the arrival in England, over a period of a couple of hundred years from the 850s onwards, of a fairly large number of people who spoke Old Norse, and the arrival over a period of another couple of hundred years of a bunch of people who spoke Old French. This wouldnt have made much of a difference if these people had simply assimilated to the English-speaking population, but they didnt, they maintained their own languages and probably even insisted on them.,Moreover, the groups who spoke these languages had prestige, whether locally in the Dane law in the case of the Viking settlers who spoke Old Norse, or nationally in the case of the Norman conquerors-which meant that there was some pressure for English-speaking people to learn and even to prefer the other languages. Under these conditions, various kinds of linguistic mixture occurred: phonological, lexical, syntactic, and so on. In other words, English took on sounds, words, and ways of constructing sentences from these other languages.,The second important factor producing rapid language change was the fact that for approximately two hundred years after the Norman conquest, English was hardly a written language at all, since almost all writing went on either in the language of the ruling Norman invaders (French) or in the international language of the church, of diplomacy, and of learning (Latin). (In fact, for a further hundred years after that, English was still not a prestigious language, although it was beginning to be a written language again.),Writing normally acts as a kind of brake to language change, since literate people are influenced in their linguistic habits not only by what they hear but by what they read, which is liable to be stuff from some time ago. Without writing, and exposed to influence from other languages with which it was mixing, English changed rapidly. By the time of Chaucer (end of the 14th century) when it was reestablishing itself as a prestige language in England, English had adopted hundreds of words from French and quite a few from Old Norse, and had undergone important simplifications in its system of inflections.,Whether as a result of language mixture, or for some other reason (linguists disagree), there was later a lot of sound change in the English vowel system. During a period perhaps from about 1450 to about 1750 c.e. the change called the Great Vowel Shift occurred. It accounts for the quite startling differences in pronunciation between Modern English long vowels and Old English long vowels-most of the consonants stayed pretty much the same, and so did the short vowels.,So to sum up, Modern English is different from Old English because languages just do change over time, because linguistic change was accelerated during a period of contact with other languages and the removal of written language from the equation, and because phonological change, especially the Great Vowel Shift, was added to lexical change (all those loan words) and syntactic/inflectional change.,Standard English,When BBC was found in 1927, its motto, Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation, clearly indicated that the English spoken over the radio should be universally understood. Announcers were chosen whose speech patterns represented the educated southern upper classes, and their particular style of speech came to be recognized as Standard English or,R,eceived,P,ronunciation English.,English, perhaps more than any other language, has had a strong association with class and social,status.,