Lost in Pronunciation: Where Do English Words Come From?
A brief journey on the history of English: its transition from being the language of Germanic tribes to what it is today.
English as we know it today is the result of its evolution as a Germanic language as well as of the romantic influence given by the Roman Empire first and later on through, mainly, French. That is to say, it would have had much more in common with languages such as German or Dutch, hadn’t it been for certain historical events that made this language sound a lot more like other Romance languages, which resulted in English being a delightful blend between two language families that are not at all related.
I think it is also interesting to note that on the same geographical regions where English developed, there coexisted another group of languages, very much differentiated from it: the Celtic languages (Gaelic, Welsh, Irish, Bretton, Manx and Cornish) which, even though exerted some influence over English, they were hardly assimilated and prevail to this day. Some Celtic remnants, for instance, are -ing inflection in progressive tenses or the Do-periphrasis in questions like “Do you want this?”
I hope that exploring the changes undergone by this fascinating language (and especially the reasons why these processes took place) could stimulate the reader’s interest and maybe, hopefully, raise awareness on the fact that change is nothing but inevitable.
Old English
The history of English begins with the settlement of the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons from Germany and Denmark in Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. Old English or Anglo-Saxon is a form of ancient English that was spoken in England and eastern Scotland around 1500 years ago.
Standard Old English had a very complex grammar: adjectives, nouns, pronouns, and verbs were fully inflected; nouns were inflected for four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) in singular and plural. Verbs had two tenses only (present-future and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative), two numbers (singular and plural), and three persons (1st, 2nd, and 3rd).
With the Roman Empire’s influence, Latin was introduced, but it wasn’t until the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity that English fully adopted Latin terms, a process that started in 597 AD when Irish monks settled in Britain as Christian missionaries.
Some words we still use to this day and that derive from Old English terms are be, water and strong. Not everything’s lost, after all.
Middle English
After the Norman invasions, French was adopted as the main language in the court and higher classes. This event had a major effect on the English language, for it made an evolution of English further from its Germanic roots and closer to Romance languages, by incorporating a large number of French words that constitute today’s English vocabulary.
However, in the course of the centuries following the Norman Conquest the connection of England with the continent broke. This led to English gradually taking over again from the previous French dominance. However, many of the most vivid and forceful current English words are French!
This was a period of great many changes in the language. Many verbs became obsolete and later extinct. Other verbs changed inflection, from strong to weak forms (this often involved the coexistence of both inflections until finally one became the dominant one overruling the other. Such is the case of ache: though oke was still being written, the weak form ached had been in use for the last hundred of years. Also, stope beside stepped, rewe beside rowed, clew beside clawed). While weak forms usually won the dispute, this was not always the case and many did not survive. The inflectional endings mentioned before, i.e.: grammatical gender of nouns, were also lost.
At this point, language differed from county to county and there were many dialects in the same country. Soon, and powered by the introduction of the printing press, a Standard English became necessary.
Early Modern English
This period began in the late 15th century and the beginning is often marked by the death of Geoffrey Chaucher, an outstanding English poet, author of The Canterbury Tales.
Renaissance introduced Latin and Greek terms as a result of the rise of technological advances that created the need for new words to describe new things.
It was William Caxton’s innovation of an early printing press that allowed Early Modern English to become mainstream. Furthermore, the translation and distribution of the Bible into English allowed for the standardization of English.
Modern English
Modern English is the language of Williams Shakespeare, who introduced more than 1,700 terms, thanks to his resourceful use of the language. To him we owe words like agile, allurement, antipathy, catastrophe, consonancy, critical, demonstrate, dire, discountenance, emphasis, emulate, expostulation, extract, hereditary, horrid, impertinency, meditate, modest.
Books were then cheaper and more works got published, and so the need for setting rules arose and dictionaries appeared (the first English-language dictionary was published in 1604 and comprised around 2,500 words).
All of these processes resulted in English as we know it today. We can easily appreciate the coexistence of words with different origins in the following sets of three words, where the first one is English, the second one is French and the third one is Latin (although synonyms, there is a change of tone and register among them).
rise — mount — ascend,
ask — question — interrogate,
goodness — virtue — probity,
fast — firm — secure,
fire — flame — conflagration,
fear — terror — trepidation,
holy — sacred — consecrated,
time — age — epoch.
All in all, the history of English teaches us that a language is a living being, just as much as its people, for in the end a language is nothing but a result of its people’s history: migrations, settlements, invasions, conquests, evolution, the so-called neologisms that arise from the need to name new things, they all shape and give life to a language.
It is also noticeable the importance written language and literature have in providing structure, formalization and standardization; they are the means through which people find their common ground, even though they may speak different variations of the language.
It is not surprising, therefore, that a language continues to change. In fact, these changes occur so rapidly that a certain generation can’t say they speak in the same way as their parents or grandparents do.
Here are a couple of things we can learn about change: there is not much we can do to prevent it and it always aims at simplification, so why is it so hard to give in to change? Well, this is certainly a discussion that could continue for pages on-end. But for now, let’s put a stop to this story here. Tomorrow will be another day; probably, also, another language.
Bibliography:
Baugh and Cable (2005) A History of the English Language, Fifth Edition.
MacMillan Online Dictionary https://macmillandictionaries.com/MED-Magazine/May2006/38-UK-US-Culture.htm
Oxford International English https://www.oxfordinternationalenglish.com/a-brief-history-of-the-english-language/
Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/English-language
