British-English, Scottish English, American English…? Which one is actually the best?
In the Netherlands most schools advise you to speak British-English, while you mainly hear American-English on television. But also other types of English like Australian- and Canadian-English are understandable for most of us, even though they sound a bit different. You will have to make more of an effort to understand the Scottish and Irish-English, especially their oi sound sounds odd to us.
English is the first language in over fifty countries, with each their own unique variety. But how did all those variety types of English arise?
1. History of the English language
2. Misunderstandings within the English language
3.
The history of the English language
Six main periods:
1. England before the English (Prehistory –c. 500 AD) (plaatjes)
2. Old English
3. Middle English (1100-1500)
4. Early Modern English
5. Late modern English
6. Present-day English
England before the English:
The English language has changed a lot in the cause of time. The English language traces its original roots back to Neolithic people known as the Indo-Europeans. They lived in eastern Europe and Central Asia from approximately 5000 BC. No-one knows exactly what their language was like, as they could not write or read.
Around 3000 BC the Indo-Europeans began to spread-out across the world, searching for new hunting grounds. 2000 years later their languages developed and split into more language groups, for example; Celtic , Germanic and Hellenic. English descends most from the Germanic group.
The Germanic group also split, as people started to immigrate into other parts of Europe:
North Germanic; evolved into Old Norse
East Germanic; did not evolve, died out over time
West Germanic; evolved into Old German, Old Saxon and later risen to German, Dutch, Frisian and English
The Celts:
The Celts are, from what we know, the earliest inhabitants of Britain. They had become the most widespread group of Indo-Europeans. They moved into England around 800 BC, by 300 BC were they Celts the most widespread group of Indo-Europeans. Inhabiting what we now call; Italy, Germany, The Balkans, France, Eastern Europe, Spain and Britain. Scotland however was not inhabited by the Celts but by the Picts, whose language was totally different from the Celtic language. But the language of the Celts is not the basis for the English as we now know, there are only a few little -used words which descend from the Celts. The Celtic immigration into the area continued until the roman occupation.
The Romans:
The Romans started a permanent occupation in 43 AD, after they had already entered Britain under Julius Caecer. They invaded most of Britain except the mountainous regions of Scotland and Wales. For almost 400 years Britain remained part of the Roman Empire.
Their invasion had a big influence on aspects of culture, architecture and religion, however the influence on the language was surprisingly limited. The words that are still used, which take the form of less than two hundred words, mainly come from the Roman soldiers; mil – mile, weall – wall, candel – candle
Old English
Invasions of Germanic tribes
More important for the English language were the invasions after the Roman withdrawal. Britain was invaded by continental Europe, mainly by Germanic tribes as the Jutes, the Angles, the Frisian people and the Saxons.
Despite the resistance, the Celts were driven into Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland. The roots of their language survived in the Gaelic languages, that are nowadays only spoken by the Scottish, Ireland and the Welsh.
The Saxons eventually became the dominant group; the Anglo-Saxon nation – Anglaland, which is later shortened to England. Anglo-Saxon or Old English, became a separate language instead of just a German dialect
The coming of Christianity and literacy
In 597 AD Saint Augustine and his forty missionaries from Rome, brought Christianity to England and the pagan Anglo-Saxons. Christianity spread quickly through the country, not only carrying the religion but also literacy. Before the arrival of Christianity the early Anglo-Saxons used an alphabet of runes, angular characters which were originally used for scratching onto stone or wood. “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman” this is the first known written English sentence, dated about 450-480 AD. A more rounded Roman alphabet was introduced by the Christian missionaries. It was easier to read and therefor, with some additions of letters, quite rapidly adopted by the Anglo-Saxons. These additions came from the runic alphabet, used for certain sounds that the Roman alphabet was not familiar with. For example; þ (“thorn”), wynn (“wynn”), 3 (“yogh”), and ð (“edh” or “eth”), later þ and ð represented ‘th’, wynn became ‘w’ and 3 was used for ‘g’ ‘j’ or ‘y’ sounds.
Latin had a minor influence on the language at that time, mainly because it was only used by the educated ruling classes, and being restricted to terms used by the church such as priest, bishop and altar. However domestic words such as circle and fork also came from Latin in that time.
The Anglo-Saxon or Old English language
About four hundred texts remained from this era, including poems about heroic journeys and wild battles. The best known is the poem ‘Beowulf’, written any time between the eight and the eleventh century. It consists of 3,182 lines with emphasis on percussive effects and alliteration. Old English was already a quite developed, poetic language. That shows in the depth and variety of the language, as well as in its quantity of synonyms. The poem uses for example thirty-six different words for hero and twelve for battle, also kennings are used such as banhus – bonehous, meaning body
Many common and basic words including; earth, sleep and food have their roots in Old English. Some words appear to be similar in modern and old English but they are not, words whose meanings have been changed are for example; sona – soon which meant immediately, not in a while and wif – wife, which meant any woman, married or not. The Anglo-Saxon consonant cluster ‘sk’ changed for a unclear reason to ‘sh’, during the sixth century, this affected all words in which ‘sk’ was used. Therefor skip became ship and disk became dish. Words with ‘sk’ which are used in modern English came into the language after the sixth century.
Then around the seventh century a vowel shift took place; vowels began to be pronounced more to the front of the mouth. Plurals of several nouns also started taking a vowel shift instead of changing in inflection. These changes were sometimes reflected in revised spellings, resulting in pairings as man/men, blood/bleed, foot/feet, mouse/mice.
The Vikings
The Vikings, or Norsemen, began by the late eight century to invade the east coast of Britain. The Vikings, mainly Danes and some from Norway and Sweden, are known for their cruelty and ruthlessness. Before their interest in the south, they plundered the towns in northern England. In 856 they began to battle for the full possession of the country. The expansion was stopped by Alfred the Great; the Danelaw, a treaty between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons, which meant splitting the country along a line from London to Chester. So the Vikings had control of Northern England and the Anglo-Saxons of Eastern England. The Danelaw however has not lasted more than a century, but it can still be seen in the place names.
The language that was spoken by the Vikings was Old Norse, which was not that dissimilar to the Old English language. Over time many Scandinavian terms were gradually merged into the English language, these are terms including; birth, odd, wrong and gate. Some Norse grammatical forms, as the pronouns they, them and their were also adopted into the English language which is unusual. Also, during the Danelaw, prepositions as; to and with became more important.
Old English after the Vikings
In 871, when Alfred the Great came to the throne, education in the vernacular English language, so not in Latin, became important. He even made several translations, mainly of important works.
This is how what the English language in that time looked like;
Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon. Him wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi Angle genemnode wæron. þa cwæð he, “Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon.”
What stands out is that a few words are identical to the modern language; he, of, him, for, and on. And a few more words may be guessed; nama – name, common – come, wære – were and wæs became was. The other words are harder to recognize, including hu – how and beon – be. And some words have disappeared completely.
Middle English
Norman Conquest
The main event for the transition from Old- to Middle English was the Norman conquest in 1066, when the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror invaded the island of Britain. William took all the rights and property of the Anglo-Saxons and divided it among the Normans who were descends from the brutal Vikings. The Normans had adopted French and completely abandoned their Old Norse language. They had however a dialect with Germanic influences, what we call; Norman French or Anglo-Norman, this became the language of the nobility of England for about 300 years.
Anglo-Norman may be the verbal language of the administration and court, though Latin was still used in official records and by the church. While the peasantry and lower class, the majority of the population, continued speaking English. A mixture of Old English and Anglo-Norman was created when the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans gradually began to intermarry, that is referred as Middle English.
There are still a lot of words from the Normans in the English language, including abstract nouns ending in the suffixes; -ment, -tion, -ity and prefixes as trans-, and pre-. The French Normans also changed the letter pattern ‘hw’ to ‘wh’ so hwanne became when, hwear – where and hwil – while
Middle English after the Normans
In that time there were so many dialects that people in one part of England could not understand people form only fifty miles away. In 1167 and 1209 the universities of Cambridge and Oxford were founded, and general literacy continued to increase over the centuries. During this period many of the complex forms and inflections of Old English disappeared.
The “Ormulum”, a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century, is an important resource in this regard. Concerned at the way people were starting to mispronounce English, Orm spelled his words exactly as they were pronounced. For instance, he used double consonants to indicate a short preceding he used three separate symbols to differentiate the different sounds of the Old English letter yogh; and he used the more modern “wh” for the old-style “hw” and “sh” for “sc”.
Many of Orm’s spellings were perhaps atypical for the time, but many changes to the English writing system were nevertheless under way during this period:
• the Old English letters ð (“edh” or “eth”) and þ (“thorn”), which did not exist in the Norman alphabet, were gradually phased out and replaced with “th”, and the letter 3 (“yogh”) was generally replaced with “g” (or often with “gh”, as in ghost or night);
• the simple word the (written þe using the thorn character) generally replaced the bewildering range of Old English definite articles, and most nouns had lost their inflected case endings by the middle of the Middle English period;
• the Norman “qu” largely substituted for the Anglo-Saxon “cw” (so that cwene became queen, cwic became quick, etc);
• the “sh” sound, which was previously rendered in a number of different ways in Old English, including “sc”, was regularized as “sh” or “sch” (e.g. scip became ship);
• the initial letters “hw” generally became “wh” (as in when, where, etc);
• a “c” was often, but not always, replaced by “k” (e.g. cyning/cyng became king) or “ck” (e.g. boc became bock and, later, book) or “ch” (e.g.cild became child, cese became cheese, etc);
• the common Old English “h” at the start of words like hring (ring) and hnecca (neck) was deleted;
• conversely, an “h” was added to the start of many Romance loanword (e.g. honour, heir, honest, habit, herb, etc), but was sometimes pronounced and sometimes not;
• “f” and “v” began to be differentiated (e.g. feel and veal), as did “s” and “z” (e.g. seal and zeal) and “ng” and “n” (e.g. thing and thin);
• “v” and “u” remained largely interchangeable, although “v” was often used at the start of a word (e.g. (vnder), and “u” in the middle (e.g. haue), quite the opposite of today;
• because the written “u” was similar to “v”, “n” and “m”, it was replaced in many words with an “o” (e.g. son, come, love, one);
• the “ou” spelling of words like house and mouse was introduced;
• many long vowel sounds were marked by a double letter (e.g. boc became booc, se became see, etc), or, in some cases, a trailing “e” became no longer pronounced but retained in spelling to indicate a long vowel (e.g. nose, name);
• the long “a” vowel of Old English became more like “o” in Middle English, so that ham became home, stan became stone, ban became bone, etc;
• short vowels were identified by consonant doubling (e.g siting became sitting, etc).
Chaucer and the Birth of English Literature
The famous ‘Canterbury Tales’ by Geoffrey Chaucer from the early 1380s, is considered as the first great works of English literature. Other important works which were written around that time are ‘Sir Gawain and the green Knight’, ‘Piers Plowman’ and the well-known ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’
In the prologue to the ‘Canterbury Tales’ occur almost 500 French loanwords, but his work is very much of a reformed English language.
The language had changed drastically by the late 14th and 15th century, Old English was even for people in that time not understandable.