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عدد المساهمات : 9
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تاريخ التسجيل : 18/10/2015
 | | موضوع: History of the English language الخميس نوفمبر 05, 2015 12:43 pm | |
| English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain in the fifth to seventh centuries by Germanic invaders and settlers from what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands.
The Old English of the Anglo-Saxon era developed into Middle English, the language as spoken between the Norman Conquest and 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 colonised 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 form of French 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.
Early Modern English – the language used by Shakespeare – is dated from around 1500. It incorporated many Renaissance-era loans from Latin and Ancient Greek, as well as borrowings from other European languages, including French, German and Dutch. Significant pronunciation changes in this period included the ongoing Great Vowel Shift, which affected the qualities of most long vowels. Modern English proper, similar in most respects to that spoken today, was in place by the late 17th century. The English language came to be exported to other parts of the world through British colonisation, and is now the dominant language in Britain and Ireland, the United States and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many smaller former colonies, as well as being widely spoken in India, parts of Africa, and elsewhere. Largely thanks to United States influence, English has taken on the status of a global lingua franca.
Old English consisted of a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant; however, a greater input to Middle English came from the Anglian dialects. Geographical and social variation between English dialects and accents remains significant today. Scots, a form of English traditionally spoken in parts of Scotland and the north of Ireland, is often regarded as a separate language. Old English After the Anglo-Saxon settlement, the Germanic language displaced the indigenous Brythonic languages and Latin in most of the areas of Britain that later became England[citation needed]. The original Celtic languages remained in parts of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall (where Cornish was spoken into the 18th century), although large numbers of compound Celtic-Germanic placenames survive, hinting at early language mixing.[4] 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 colonizing tribes.[5] Even then, Old English continued to exhibit local variation, the remnants of which continue to be found in dialects of Modern English.[5] The most famous surviving work from the Old English period is the epic poem Beowulf, composed by an unknown poet.
Old English varied widely from modern Standard English, and most native English speakers today find Old English unintelligible. Nevertheless, English remains a Germanic language, and approximately half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old English. Many non-standard dialects such as Scottish English (with its heavy Scots influence) and Northumbrian English have retained features of Old English in vocabulary and pronunciation.[6] Old English was spoken until some time in the 12th or 13th century.[7][8]
In the 10th and 11th centuries, Old English was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Old Norse, spoken by the Norsemen who invaded and settled mainly in the North East of England (see Jórvík and Danelaw). The Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians spoke related languages from different branches of the Germanic family; many of their lexical roots were the same or similar, although their grammar was more divergent.
The Germanic language of the Old English-speaking inhabitants was influenced by extensive contact with Norse colonisers, resulting perhaps in cases of morphological simplification of Old English, including the loss of grammatical gender and explicitly marked case (with the notable exception of the pronouns). The Vikings had a very significant effect on English culture and language by interacting with ordinary people, which was further encouraged by the Christianization of the Danes. Converting the Danes allowed intermarriage, further forcing the two groups to mingle and encouraging language cohabitation.[9] While the heightened level of mingling indicates large amounts of lexical borrowing, it is difficult to define how and when those borrowings occurred. That being said, English borrowed approximately two thousand words from Old Norse, including anger, bag, both, hit, law, leg, same, skill, sky, take, window, and many others, possibly even including the pronoun they.[10]
The introduction of Christianity from around 600 encouraged the addition of over 400 Latin loan words into Old English, such as priest, paper, and school, and fewer Greek loan words.[11] The Old English period formally ended some time after the Norman conquest of 1066, when the language was influenced to an even greater extent by the Normans, who spoke a French dialect called Old Norman  The first page of the Beowulf manuscript | |
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