ClubEnsayos.com - Ensayos de Calidad, Tareas y Monografias
Buscar

Five Events that Shaped the History of English


Enviado por   •  27 de Noviembre de 2012  •  3.872 Palabras (16 Páginas)  •  992 Visitas

Página 1 de 16

The history of english

Rolando Marabel T.

Índice

Introduction…………………………………………………………………2

Proto-English……………………………………………………………….3

Old English – from the mid-5th century to the mid-11th century……...3

Middle English – from the late 11th to the late 15th century…………..5

Early Modern English – from the late 15th to the late 17th century…..6

Five Events that Shaped the History of English…………………………7

Global English………………………………………………………………10

Conclusion………………………………………………………………….11

Bibliography………………………………………………………………...12

Introduction

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders and/or settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germanyand the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually became predominant.

The English language underwent extensive change in the Middle Ages. Written Old English of AD 1000 is similar in vocabulary and grammar to other old Germanic languages such as Old High German and Old Norse, and completely unintelligible to modern speakers, while the modern language is already largely recognisable in written Middle English of AD 1400. The transformation was caused by two further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. A large proportion of the modern English vocabulary comes directly from Anglo-Norman.

Close contact with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English. However, these changes had not reachedSouth West England by the 9th century AD, where Old English was developed into a full-fledged literary language. The Norman invasion occurred in 1066, and when literary English rose anew in the 13th century, it was based on the speech of London, much closer to the centre of Scandinavian settlement. Technical and cultural vocabulary was largely derived from Old Norman, with particularly heavy influence in the church, the courts, and government. With the coming of the Renaissance, as with most other developing European languages such as German and Dutch, Latinand Ancient Greek supplanted Norman and French as the main source of new words. Thus, English developed into very much a "borrowing" language with an enormously disparate vocabulary.

Proto-English

The languages of Germanic peoples gave rise to the English language (the Angles, Saxons, Frisii, Jutes and possibly the Franks, who traded, fought with and lived alongside the Latin-speaking peoples of the Roman Empire in the centuries-long process of the Germanic peoples' expansion into Western Europe during the Migration Period). Latin loan words such as wine, cup, and bishopentered the vocabulary of these Germanic peoples before their arrival in Britain and the subsequent formation of England.[1]

Tacitus' Germania, written around 100 AD., is a primary source of information for the culture of the Germanic peoples in ancient times. Germanics were in contact with Roman civilisation and its economy, including residing within the Roman borders in large numbers in the province of Germania and others and serving in the Roman military, while many more retained political independence outside of Roman territories. Germanic troops served in Britannia under Roman command. Except for the Frisians, Germanic settlement in Britain, according to Bede, occurred largely after the arrival of mercenaries in the 5th century. Most Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived in Britain in the 6th Century as Germanic pagans, independent of Roman control.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates 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, the Anglo-Saxons received lands in the southeast of Britain. In response "came men of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of Iotum" (Saxons, Angles and Jutes). The Chronicle refers to waves of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms, known as the heptarchy. Modern scholars view Hengist and Horsa as Euhemerised deities from Anglo-Saxon paganism, who ultimately stem from the religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.[2]

Old English – from the mid-5th century to the mid-11th century

The first page of the Beowulf manuscript

Main article: Old English language

After the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the Germanic language displaced the indigenous Brythonic languages and Latin in most of the areas of Great Britainthat later became England. The original Celtic languages remained in parts of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall (where Cornish was spoken into the 19th century), although large numbers of compound Celtic-Germanic placenames survive, hinting at early language mixing.[3] Latin also remained in these areas as the language of the Celtic Church and of higher education for the nobility. Latin was later to be reintroduced to England by missionaries from both the Celtic and Roman churches, and it would, in time, have a major impact on English. What is now called Old English emerged over time out of the many dialects and languages of the colonising tribes.[4] Even then, Old English continued to exhibit local variation, the remnants of which continue to be found in dialects of Modern English.[4] The most famous surviving work from the Old English

...

Descargar como (para miembros actualizados)  txt (25.1 Kb)  
Leer 15 páginas más »
Disponible sólo en Clubensayos.com