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A Short History of the Development of Modern English [Note: References, in square brackets, are quoted at the end. You can go to the reference by pressing ' ctrl+f ' and input the reference you want e.g. [23] then pressing 'Enter', and return to your place in the text by simply pressing 'Enter' again].
Origins
The deep roots of English are in the Indo-European group of languages, together with Latin, Greek, Celtic, the Germanic tongues, and others. Their origins are believed to be perhaps as early as the seventh millennium BC near the Black Sea, and to have spread westwards as agriculture replaced hunter-gathering as a way of life[1].
We do not know what language the Stone and Bronze Age inhabitants of the British Isles spoke, but by about 400 BC, in the Iron Age, Celtic peoples from Western Europe had reached Britain, and it was them that the Romans encountered and overcame when they invaded in 43 AD.
For 367 years the Latin-speaking Romans mingled with the Celtic-speaking natives but left in the year 410 when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths. At this time the area that was to become Lancashire was occupied by a Celtic tribe known as the Brigantes[2]. Although Latin was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, for some reason it did not take deep root in England and it appears that Celtic survived the Roman departure.
Old English
The Anglo-Saxons
The Visigoths who sacked Rome were a Germanic-speaking tribe, and related tribes began to push into England after the Roman departure. They introduced languages that ultimately became Anglo-Saxon or Old English. Their invasions lasted until about 590 AD, by which time Angles, Saxons and Jutes had established territorial positions. The four main dialect forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Each of these dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island[3]. Based on linguistic analysis, however, it seems that the ancestors of the people who now live in Friesland were also an important group of invaders.
There is some doubt as to whether the new tribes, collectively referred to as Anglo-Saxons, mixed with the Romano-British people they invaded, or slowly pushed them westwards. In any case it has been suggested that Celtic tribes continued to inhabit an area including much of Lancashire into the early 7th century[4]. In time, however, the Celtic speakers became confined to a western fringe comprising Ireland, Scotland, Cumbria, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany. The new occupants called the Celtic people ‘foreigners’, which in their language was wealas, and this is the origin of the name Wales.
A Christianising influence was brought to bear on the A nglo-Saxon tribes from Celtic sources in the north and from Roman Catholic sources in the south, and it was through the Roman Catholic Church that Latin maintained a presence in England. Although the history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is uncertain – facts and fables often being mixed together – high cultural levels were achieved, as has been shown by fantastic finds in burial mounds, such as a golden helmet at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, and of products traded across Europe. Of course trading had also taken place in Roman Britain, and the flow of goods in each direction inevitably meant an accompanying transfer of foreign words and the mixing of languages. Thus we can see that the modern tendency of English to assimilate foreign words is as old as the language itself.
The following is a small extract for the year 851 from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earliest history book written not in Latin, but englisc. Underneath is a word for word translation: Haethne men aerest ofer winter saeton.
Heathen men rested over winter seated
(meaning Heathen men stayed put over winter).
It describes the activities of raiding Viking parties.
The Vikings
From about 793 Viking invaders from present-day Denmark and Norway perpetrated raids on England’s east and west coasts and carried out a series of invasions, some of the most famous of which were in the time of Alfred the Great of Wessex (c. 849-899). Alfred was eventually able to negotiate a peace, which left a substantial part of eastern and northern England, including the area that now comprises Lancashire, as a Viking administration known as the Danelaw, which persisted until the Norman invasion. The Viking invaders spoke North Germanic languages which were quite closely related to the West Germanic languages spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. In general it appears that the mixing of this rich variety of Germanic peoples who spoke similar, but by no means identical, languages led to a simplification of grammar and a slow trend towards a common form of verbal communication to produce Old English.
English Place-Name Origins
The oldest languages known to have been spoken in the British Isles were those of the Celtic group, and large numbers of the place names in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and other Celtic fringe areas reflect this. Examples taken from the Domesday Book[5] are aber (river mouth), cwm (valley), pen (hill), and tre (settlement). Various researchers have found evidence that Celtic place names are rare in eastern England, but progressively more common westwards, towards Wales and Cornwall, and this is what we would expect from our knowledge of history. Interestingly, Coates thinks the small number of Celtic place names surviving in most of England indicates a lack of linguistic integration between the Celts and the later Anglo-Saxons[6]. Lancashire place names which may indicate Celtic connections are Cuerdon, Walton and Pendle. The literal meaning of ‘Pendle Hill’ is thought to be ‘Hill-hill Hill’!
English place names of purer Roman (Latin) origin are very much more common. Perhaps the most obvious ones are those such as caster, cester or chester (fort, camp and later town – as in Manchester or Lancaster), port (harbour, gate – as in Southport), and street (a paved way).
Not unexpectedly the Anglo-Saxons made a huge impact on the place-names of England and evidence of them is strong in Lancashire. Burn (stream) as in Burnley, delph (ditch, dyke or stream) as in Delph in Saddleworth[7], den (pig pasture) as in Denton and Haslingden, field (field) as in Dukinfield, ford (ford) as in Salford, ham (village) as in Oldham, hurst and ley (clearing) as in Nuthurst or Burnley, mere (pool) as in Windermere, moor (moor), ton (house, farm) as in Ashton, Bolton, Chorlton or Preston, wood (wood) as in Heywood and worth (enclosed land) as in Failsworth are examples.
There is a notable influence of the Vikings on the place names of northwest England, especially in the Lake District. This resounds with becks, fells, garths (enclosure), gills, kirks, tarns, thorps and thwaites. However a Viking influence on place names further south in Lancashire is much less evident.
Middle English
The Normans
In the period from 1066 to roughly the middle of the 12th century Old English gave way to Middle English.
The invasion of 1066 by William, Duke of Normandy, brought marked changes to England. The Normans were a people related to the Vikings who had settled in northern France in the late 9th century. They became Christians and adopted the Gallo-Roman language but developed their own cultural identity.
After the successful invasion of England, William divided his new kingdom up among his chief campaigners such that an aristocracy, both political and ecclesiastical, that spoke Old French was superimposed on the population that spoke Old English. We can obtain a fascinating glimpse of the superimposition on the native Anglo-Saxon by the Anglo-Norman of the new aristocracy from the different names used for meat. The vassals referred to sheep, but on the table of the lord of the manor this became mutton. Similarly pig became pork, ox or cow became beef and hen became poult (as in poultry).
Norman French became the official language of the law courts and all educated people spoke it. Most writing was in Old French or Latin, so Old English became a second-class language while gradually absorbing more and more words from French. In this way English vocabulary was enormously enriched with many additional ‘more sophisticated’ words being grafted on to the Anglo-Saxon base. A good example follows from the Latin tinere (to hold), which was absorbed into French as tenir and is visible in the modern French verb contenir. Thus in English we have contain, detain, retain, obtain and sustain which we can choose to use instead, perhaps, of the Anglo-Saxon forms hold, stop, hold back’and keep up. It is not difficult to find other examples, usually involving Latin-derived pronouns and stems, such as cipere that led to the French recevoir and gave rise to the English receive, deceive, conceive, and perceive. These perhaps might be used instead of the Anglo-Saxon derived get, lie, get (again, perhaps get pregnant?), and understand. And who would deny that even today a person who wished to sound a little more educated, a little more sophisticated, would say receive instead of get, sustain instead of keep up, or disappear instead of get lost? But words such as receive, sustain or disappear rarely appear in Lancashire dialect!
The changes produced in Old English by interaction with Old French gave rise to what historical linguists call Middle English. From the end of the Hundred Years War (1453), when the English claim to the French throne was finally abandoned, the Anglo-Normans increasingly saw themselves as English.
Perhaps the most famous example of Middle English is The Canterbury Tales, written in the 1380s and 1390s by Geoffrey Chaucer, who has been described as the Father of English Literature. Chaucer was closely connected to the royal family, well-travelled in Europe and competent in French and Italian. Part of his significance as a poet and author is that he chose to write in English, although the vernacular he uses is interlaced with much Latin-derived vocabulary. Some of stories in The Canterbury Tales are related by the learned ranks of society, but others by the more humble, and the literary forms used reflect the differences. Among the vernacular vocabulary are a significant number of archaic words that appear in the Lancashire dialect of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as 'brast' (burst), 'fayn' (glad) or 'schivere' (shive, slice of bread). The Lancashire 'hoo' (she) does not, however, appear - though I have heard tell to the contrary - at least it does not appear in the version of 'The Tales' that I have read [7a].
Soon after the death of Chaucer in 1400, Henry V (1413-1422) decided that his court should use the English that he spoke in preference to Anglo-Norman or Latin. At that time different dialects were used across the country, making communication difficult, so Henry demanded that a form of the language known as Chancery Standard be developed to aid clear and unambiguous communication in official documents. Chancery Standard is believed to have contributed in a significant way to the development of Modern English; it was based mostly on the dialects spoken in London and the East Midlands, which dominated the country politically, commercially and in terms of population.
To give an idea of how far Middle English is from Modern English, a short extract from The Canterbury Tales is included below, followed by a translation[8]: Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from euery shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke
Then people long to go on pilgrimages,
and palmers [pilgrims carrying palm leaves] to seek strange strands [coastlines],
to far [distant] saints [holy places], known in various lands;
and specially, from every shire's end [from every county]
in England, to Canterbury they wend [go; went comes from "wend"],
to seek the holy blissful martyr [Thomas à Becket]
who helped them when they were sick.
John Wycliffe led a translation of the bible from Latin into English in the period from about 1382-1384, at about the time that The Canterbury Tales were written. Its English is similar, as can be seen from the following short extract from the start of St. John's gospel[9]: 1 In the bigynnyng was the word, and the word was at God, and God was the word.
2 This was in the bigynnyng at God.
3 Alle thingis weren maad bi hym, and withouten hym was maad no thing, that thing that was maad.
4 In hym was lijf, and the lijf was the liyt of men; and the liyt schyneth in derknessis,
5 and derknessis comprehendiden not it.
The Great Vowel Shift
In 1477 William Caxton hugely advanced the development of English by printing the first book in the English language, in Westminster. The advent of a standardised English, distributed through printed material, led to the period known as Modern English, generally considered to have started from 1500 to 1550. The new period was ushered in by an event of major linguistic importance, known as the Great Vowel Shift – the GVS – in which the pronunciation of many vowels changed. The GVS is perhaps the major culprit for the apparently nonsensical way that many English words are written. Perhaps as nice an example as any is the very word English, the ‘e’ of which was pronounced as in ‘end’ until the GVS, but which came to be pronounced as in ‘in’ thereafter!
An example of English that shows some of the effects of the GVS is William Tyndale's translation of the bible, published in 1525[10]. Using the same extract from St. John's Gospel given above from Wycliffe's translation, it is possible to see how the old pronunciations have changed. For example maad becomes made, lijf ('laife') becomes life and derkenssis becomes darcknes. It is also interesting to see how the Anglo-Saxon weren has now become were. 1 In the beginnynge was the worde and the worde was with God: and the worde was God.
2 The same was in the beginnynge with God.
3 All thinges were made by it and with out it was made nothinge that was made.
4 In it was lyfe and the lyfe was ye lyght of men and the lyght shyneth in the darcknes 5 but the darcknes comprehended it not.
There are several theories as to why the GVS took place – it might have resulted from a wish for a prestige accent to imitate the finer pronunciation of the aristocracy, or it could have resulted from the greater physical and social mobility that followed the population losses of the Black Death (1349-50). In any case the shift migrated across the country from London but it remained incomplete in the north. Many remnants of the old vowels can still be found in Scottish pronunciation and in the dialects of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Nothumberland and Cumbria. William Shakespeare (1564-1616), writing during the English Renaissance in the late 16th century, used a form of English that in many respects spans the GVS. For example he was able to use misunderstandings between the pre- and post-GVS pronunciations to make jokes. In The Taming of the Shrew he makes a pun by confusing the words reason (pronounced ‘raisin’) and raising; a lady asks a beggar about his reason, but he interprets her pronunciation as raising – to her acute embarrassment! The Modern English Period
The influences of Chancery Standard for government purposes, the printing press, translations of the bible into English by Wycliffe and Tyndale, Chaucer, the Great Vowel Shift and Shakespeare produced changes in Middle English so important that we now refer to post GVS English as Modern English. One of the great foundations of Modern English was the Authorised Version of the bible, a new translation published by King James I in 1611. It is a fine example of Early Modern English, not unlike that used by Shakespeare. Since it continued widely in use until at least 1970 (when the New English Bible was published) it helped preserve the vocabulary, usage and phraseology of the English of that period and is the version that would have been in the houses of those who lived in Lancashire before and during the industrial revolution. It was the most widely owned and read book at this time and its influence on the English language has been immense. Nevertheless it should be considered as a document of high culture and did not reflect the speech of those who read it, at least in northern England. Only the more educated were able to write, and in the process of learning to write they were naturally directed towards what was considered to be a ‘good’ standard of English, the easier to communicate, and the easier to establish a position of prestige within society. It is quite easy for us to understand even old texts written in Modern English. For example the description of York written in 1697 by Celia Fiennes is intelligible with little difficulty and that of the Yorkshire woollen industry near Halifax, written by Daniel Defoe in about 1728, is very close to current English. Only a little later we can marvel at the modernity of Lancashire writers such as James Butterworth [11] in 1817 or Samuel Bamford in 1843. Bamford (1788-1872), brought up as a handloom weaver and had comparatively little formal education and he provides an example of how those who succeeded in gaining some formal education rapidly acquired the ability to write in standard English. Spoken English, however, continued to lag written English in many parts of the country and this is the topic explored in more detail in the following section An Essay on Lancashire Dialect. This page was last modified on Saturday, June 21, 2008 [7a] 'The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by Dr Lesley A. Coote, 2002, Wordsworth Poetry Library, ISBN 1 84022 536 X |
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