Assignment History Of

English Language

Group 3:
Evan Tambunan
Renaldy Tangka
Dewi Christin Lalomo
Prischilla Gratia Dien
Ria Dewi Anggraeni Togo
Angelica Pantouw
Felycia Takarendehang
Ellyz Palandung
Gloria Baru
Betseba Karapeo
Mangraj Jonas

Lecturer : Dra. Hetty Pelealu, SH, M.Hum

 HISTORY OF ENGLISH
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian dialects
brought to Britain in the mid 5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon settlers from what is now
northwest Germany, west Denmark and the Netherlands, displacing the Celtic languages that
previously predominated.
The Old English of the Anglo-Saxon era developed into Middle English, which was
spoken from the Norman Conquest era to the late 15th century. A significant influence on the
shaping of Middle English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by
the Scandinavians who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th
centuries; this contact led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical simplification. Another
important influence came from the conquering Normans, who spoke a Romance langue
d'oïl called Old Norman, which in Britain developed into Anglo-Norman. Many Norman and
French loanwords entered the language in this period, especially in vocabulary related to the
church, the court system and the government. The system of orthography that became
established during the Middle English period is by and large still in use today – later changes in
pronunciation, however, combined with the adoption of various foreign spellings, mean that
the spelling of modern English words appears highly irregular.

PROTO-ENGLISH
English has its roots in the languages of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe.
During the Roman Empire, most of the Germanic-inhabited area (Germania) remained
independent from Rome, although some southwestern parts were within the empire. Some
Germanics served in the Roman military, and troops from Germanic tribes such as
the Tungri, Batavi, Menapii and Frisii served in Britain (Britannia) under Roman command.
Germanic settlement and power expanded during the Migration Period, which saw the fall of
the Western Roman Empire. The Germanic settlement of Britain took place from the 5th to the
7th century, following the end of Roman rule on the island. The Anglo-Saxon Chroniclerelates
that around the year 449 Vortigern, king of the Britons, invited the "Angle kin" (Angles allegedly
led by the Germanic brothers Hengist and Horsa) to help repel invading Picts, in return for lands
in the southeast of Britain. This led to waves of settlers who eventually established seven
kingdoms, known as the heptarchy. (The Chronicle was not a contemporaneous work, however,
and cannot be regarded as an accurate record of such early events.) Bede, who wrote
his Ecclesiastical History in AD 731, writes of invasion by Angles, Saxons and Jutes, although the
precise nature of the invasion and settlement and the contributions made by these particular
groups are the subject of much dispute among historians.
 The languages spoken by the Germanic peoples who initially settled in Britain were part
of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic language family. They consisted of dialects from
the Ingvaeonic grouping, spoken mainly around the North Sea coast, in regions that lie within
modern Denmark, north-west Germany and the Netherlands. Due to specific similarities
between early English and Old Frisian, an Anglo-Frisian grouping is also identified.
These dialects had most of the typical West Germanic features, including a significant
amount of grammatical inflection. Vocabulary came largely from the core Germanic stock,
although due to the Germanic peoples' extensive contacts with the Roman world, the settlers'
languages already included a number of loanwords from Latin.[3] For instance, the predecessor
of Modern English wine had been borrowed into early Germanic from the Latin vinum.
.

OLD ENGLISH
The dialects spoken by the Germanic settlers developed into a language that would
come to be called Anglo-Saxon, or now more commonly Old English. It displaced the so-called
indigenous Brittonic Celtic (and the Latin of the former Roman rulers) in most of the areas
of Britainthat later formed the Kingdom of England, while Celtic languages remained in most
of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, and many compound Celtic-Germanic placenames survive,
hinting at early language mixing. Old English continued to exhibit local variation, the remnants
of which continue to be found in dialects of Modern English. The four main dialects
were Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West Saxon; the last of these formed the basis for
the literary standard of the later Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle
and Modern English would develop mainly from Mercian.
Old English was first written using a runic script called the futhorc, but this was replaced
by a version of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish missionaries in the 9th century. Most
literary output was in either the Early West Saxon of Alfred the Great's time, or the Late West
Saxon (regarded as the "classical" form of Old English) of the Winchester school inspired by
Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester and followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of
Eynsham ("the Grammarian"). The most famous surviving work from the Old English period is
the epic poem Beowulf, composed by an unknown poet.
The introduction of Christianity from around the year 600 encouraged the addition of
over 400 Latin loan words into Old English, such as the predecessors of the
modern priest, paper, and school, and a smaller number of Greek loan words. The speech of
eastern and northern parts of England was also subject to strong Old Norse influence due
to Scandinavian rule and settlement beginning in the 9th century (see below).
Most native English speakers today find Old English unintelligible, even though about
half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. The grammar
of Old English was much more inflected than modern English, combined with freer word order,
and was grammatically quite similar in some respects to modern German. The language had
demonstrative pronouns (equivalent to this and that) but did not have definite article the. The
Old English period is considered to have evolved into the Middle English period some time after
the Norman conquest of 1066, when the language came to be influenced significantly by the
new ruling class's language, Old Norman.

Middle English
Middle English is the form of English spoken roughly from the time of the Norman
Conquest in 1066 until the end of the 15th century.
For centuries after the Conquest, the Norman kings and high-ranking nobles in England and
to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles spoke Anglo-Norman, a variety of Old Norman,
originating from a northern langue d'oïl dialect. Merchants and lower-ranked nobles were often
bilingual in Anglo-Norman and English, whilst English continued to be the language of the
common people. Middle English was influenced by both Anglo-Norman, and later Anglo-French
(see characteristics of the Anglo-Norman language).

Opening prologue of "The Wife of Bath's Tale" from the Canterbury Tales

Until the 14th century, Anglo-Norman and then French were the language of the courts and
government. Even after the decline of Norman, standard French retained the status of a formal
or prestige language, and about 10,000 French (and Norman) loan words entered Middle
English, particularly terms associated with government, church, law, the military, fashion, and
food[13] (see English language word origins and List of English words of French origin). The strong
influence of Old Norse on English (described in the previous section) also becomes apparent
during this period. The impact of the native British Celtic languages that English continued to
displace is generally held to be much smaller, although some attribute such analytic verb forms
as the continuous aspect ("to be doing" or "to have been doing") to Celtic influence.[14][15] Some
scholars have also put forward hypotheses that Middle English was a kind of creole language
resulting from contact between Old English and either Old Norse or Anglo-Norman.
English literature began to reappear after 1200, when a changing political climate and the
decline in Anglo-Norman made it more respectable. The Provisions of Oxford, released in 1258,
was the first English government document to be published in the English language after the
Norman Conquest. In 1362, Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in English.
The Pleading in English Act 1362made English the only language in which court proceedings
could be held, though the official record remained in Latin. By the end of the century, even the
royal court had switched to English. Anglo-Norman remained in use in limited circles somewhat
longer, but it had ceased to be a living language. Official documents began to be produced
regularly in English during the 15th century. Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived in the late 14th
century, is the most famous writer from the Middle English period, and The Canterbury Tales is
his best-known work.
The English language changed enormously during the Middle English period, both in
vocabulary and pronunciation, and in grammar. While Old English is a heavily inflected language
(synthetic), the use of grammatical endings diminished in Middle English (analytic). Grammar
distinctions were lost as many noun and adjective endings were levelled to -e. The older plural
noun marker -en (retained in a few cases such as children and oxen) largely gave way to -s,
and grammatical gender was discarded. Definite article þe appears around 1200, later spelled
as the, first appearing in East and North England as a substitute for Old English se and seo,
nominative forms of "that.”
English spelling was also influenced by Norman in this period, with the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds being
spelled th rather than with the Old English letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth), which did not exist in
Norman. These letters remain in the modern Icelandic and Faroese alphabets, having been
borrowed from Old English via Old West Norse.

Early Modern English

English underwent extensive sound changes during the 15th century, while its spelling
conventions remained largely constant. Modern English is often dated from the Great Vowel
Shift, which took place mainly during the 15th century. The language was further transformed
by the spread of a standardized London-based dialect in government and administration and by
the standardizing effect of printing, which also tended to regularize capitalization. As a result,
the language acquired self-conscious terms such as "accent" and "dialect". As most early
presses come from continental Europe, a few native English letters such as þ and ð die out; for
some time þe is written as ye. By the time of William Shakespeare (mid 16th - early 17th
century), the language had become clearly recognizable as Modern English. In 1604, the first
English dictionary was published, the Table Alphabeticall.
 Increased literacy and travel facilitated the adoption of many foreign words, especially
borrowings from Latin and Greek from the time of the Renaissance. In the 17th century, Latin
words were often used with their original inflections, but these eventually disappeared. As
there are many words from different languages and English spelling is variable, the risk
of mispronunciation is high, but remnants of the older forms remain in a few regional dialects,
most notably in the West Country. During the period, loan words were borrowed from Italian,
German, and Yiddish. British acceptance of and resistance to Americanisms began during this
period.

Modern English

The first authoritative and full-featured English dictionary, the Dictionary of the English
Language, was published by Samuel Johnson in 1755. To a high degree, the dictionary
standardized both English spelling and word usage. Meanwhile, grammar texts
by Lowth, Murray, Priestly, and others attempted to prescribe standard usage even further.
Early Modern English and Late Modern English, also called Present-Day English (PDE), differ
essentially in vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from the Industrial
Revolution and technologies that created a need for new words, as well as international
development of the language. The British Empire at its height covered one quarter of the
Earth's land surface, and the English language adopted foreign words from many countries.
British English and North American English, the two major varieties of the language, are
together spoken by 400 million people. The total number of English speakers worldwide may
exceed one billion. The English language will almost certainly continue to evolve over time.
With the development of computer and online environments (such as chat rooms, social media
expressions, and apps), and the adoption of English as a worldwide lingua franca across
cultures, customs, and traditions, it should not be surprising to see further shortening of words,
phrases, and/or sentences.

Grammatical Changes
The English language once had an extensive declension system similar to Latin,
modern German and Icelandic. Old English distinguished among
the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases, and for strongly declined adjectives and
some pronouns also a separate instrumental case (which otherwise and later completely
coincided with the dative). In addition, the dual number was distinguished from the singular
and plural. Declension was greatly simplified during the Middle English period, when
the accusative and dativecases of the pronouns merged into a single oblique case that also
replaced the genitive case after prepositions. Nouns in Modern English no longer decline for
case, except for the genitive.