"There is a clear line of descent from Old English to the English of the present day, in sounds, spelling, grammar and vocabulary." How far can this view of the history of the English language be justified?

University Degree Linguistics, Classics and related subjects

“There is a clear line of descent from Old English to the English of the present day, in sounds, spelling, grammar and vocabulary.” How far can this view of the history of the English language be justified?

Old, Middle and Modern English donate time periods that start and end with momentous social, cultural or political events which signal change that in turn helps shape the English Language: Subsequently each time period develops its own phonologic, morphological and syntactic style. I shall try to highlight a broad range of language characteristics when investigating the time line, comparing and contrasting each era’s language make up, showing how why and to what extent English changed.

The Anglo Saxons’ gradual invasion of Britain in the seventh century led to “kingdoms” being established, from which several dialects emerged adapted to suit the Germanic tongue. The West Saxon dialect became the dominant “Old English” including only a few native Celtic words. In writing, some Runic characters were used like þ (thorn), that preceded the modern th cluster, and characters to show sound elongation for example [ː] after seoː and the over-score in þā. Crystal’s example (“The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language” 2004 P20), arranged below shows some differences between Old and modern English:

The woman saw the man; seoː cwēn geseah þone guman.

The man saw the woman; se guma geseah þā cwēn.

The woman saw the man; Pone guman geseah seoː cwēn

As in Latin, the Old English inflectional system gave “greater freedom of word-order than modern English”, Barber (“The English Language; a historical introduction” 2003 P118). In the first clause, the nominative feminine case seoː becomes accusative þā in the second clause and the nominative masculine se in the second clause becomes accusative þone in the first with the inflected noun ending changing from guma to guman. “Pone guman geseah seoː cwēn” would also have the same meaning as the first clause as the noun markers pone and seoː show which is the subject and direct object. With the accusative case, pone guman, the direct object can be placed directly before the transitive verb, unlike modern English where there is no separate accusative or dative cases, just an “object” case which usually comes after the verb giving us the familiar “subject, verb, object” pattern. The Old English inflectional case structure gives the reader no confusion as to the subject of the sentence and therefore who is doing what to whom. This contrasts with sixteenth century English and the “relative fluidity of its grammar” (Graddol, Leith & Swann P144). Shakespeare’s “play” on words creates comic effect, an example being Sonnet 105 (P144): “Let not my loue… as an Idoll show”; idoll being the noun and show the verb, but the reader or listener may be tricked into thinking idoll was in fact the adjective of the show. The poets of this time exploited ambiguity that was growing in the English Language to convey a message which style modern English finds difficult to match. “One of the central functions of grammer is to indicate how the words in a sentence are related to each other in meaning.” Graddol, Cheshire & Swann P72). In modern and middle English changing word order, effects the syntactic relationships between words, which is key to convey meaning in a sentence: In Old English morphology is more important when conveying a change in meaning as using a case system of inflecting nouns means that words could be moved within sentences without altering meaning. However, the effect of altering word structure to convey different meaning in English throughout the whole time line should not be overlooked.

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The Viking invasions of the eighth century enlarged vocabulary but regionalized English as “Danelaw” ruled the North Eastern half of England. Typical Norse introductions were sk as in “sky”, are as in the verb “to be”, pronouns they, them and their and the 3rd person present tense singular “s” verb endings, for example, adding an /s/ to the verb love (as in he or she loves). We can see compound words develop in Old, middle and modern English, for example the suffix /nesse/ from Old English suggests a meaning of “arrangement”, whereas French affixes /pre/ and /tion/ originated from Middle English, as do /–lich/ and /–liche/ a predecessor to /-ly/, making the adjective and adverbial endings we see today. Inflection of words may have simplified and adjusted from Roman times but did not die out, yet modern English is not considered an inflectional language. Crystal’s writes (The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language P32), that some scholars suggest Norse and Old English formed a pidgin to facilitate understanding between the two peoples resulting in “a loss of word endings and a greater reliance on word order”. Whatever the correct theory of inflectional re-modelling in England, the Viking landings probably affected lexis, morphology, sounds and syntax of Old English.

King Alfred had promoted Old English rather than Latin as a national language instructing much Latin work to be translated into the favoured West Saxon dialect. Many manuscripts perished in the Viking invasions, but some survived like Caedmon’s story translated from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, being one of the few traceable works of medieval times. Dick Leith draws from the extract (Graddol, Leith & Swann P111) to observe Old English spelling and vowel sounds, for example using huse [ʊ] instead of the diphthongized house [a ʊ ], (U210 Audio Cassette 1 Band 3 “The sounds of Old English”) which would later be found in use in the South of England: Leith shows on the tape that some Old English sounds are still heard in northern parts today by highlighting a woman speaker from the East Riding of Yorkshire, pronouncing /flour/ [ʊ] , rather than a diphthongized [a ʊ ] sound as in the Wallingford speaker on the cassette. “The most significant differences in pronunciation between Old and modern English concern vowels”, (Graddol, Leith & Swann P114).This adoption of “rounded” vowel sounds became known as the “Great Vowel Shift” and helped characterize much of England’s speech as it spread out from London. It is not entirely clear why diphthongs occurred at this time, but the French must take some responsibility, for example changing Old English /þ/ to /th/, leading to a diphthong “thou” [a ʊ] created from the Old English word “þu”meaning “you”. Both “thou” and “thee” were probably derived from “vous” & “tu”, while writing long vowel sounds were marked by doubling the vowels character, for example, see (rather than sē), that we see in modern English. Leith also tells us on the tape that consonant and consonant clusters in the modern language have been weakened. Old English hrofe translated as “roof” in modern English has lost the initial “h” in spelling as in pronouncing “gh” final in “knight and “plough”. The word /often/ sometimes pronounced as /ˈɒfen/ dropping the consonant /t/. The French influenced the spelling of English consonant sounds: To précis some of Crystal’s examples, (“The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language” 2004 PP42/43), “Old English / tʃ / sc is replaced by sh making scip into ship; / tʃ / c is replaced by ch as in church; dʒ cc or gg becomes dg as in bridge”. Furthermore, “Qu” to replace cwene with quene easily recognised as “queen” in modern English: and /v/ was introduced sometimes replacing phonemically the same letter /f/, for example Old English heofon becoming heaven was probably introduced by the Normans. Norman influence on spelling and pronunciation is clear to see, yet there are still areas in England even today where an Old English “sound” can be heard in speech.

It is a popular belief that the Norman Conquest of 1066 was a disruptive influence on the stable inflective language of Old English. French introductions to Old English were many as the Normans further regionalized English speech and spelling. English now had a northern Scandinavian and a southern French influence. “Striking dialects differences” (Graddol, Leith & Swann P72) were heard. Observing written work of the twelfth and thirteenth century we start to see French influencing English verse. The poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” written around 1200 in southern England, “is evidence of one abrupt break with the past”, (Graddol, Leith & Swann P123):

Ich was in one sumere dale

In one suþe diʒele hale

Iherde ich hlode grete tale

An hule and one niʒtingale

þat plait was stif and stark an strong

Sumwile softe an lud among

Source: (Graddol, Leith & Swann P124).

The extract shows French influence, which paid great attention to rhyme and layout of verse rather than stress and alliteration of Old English: Yet we still see the Old English ʒ (yogh) and þ (thorn) used, as well as alliteration and stress on consonant sounds, “Stif and stark an strong” using non diphthongized vowel sounds, similar to Old English poems five hundred years earlier. For example Caedmon writes: “heofon to hrofe, halig Scyppend”. Listening to Dick Leith reading the Caedmon extract aloud, (U210 Audio Cassette 1 Band 3 “The sounds of Old English”), we can appreciate the consonant stress and the “truncated” style. Comparing this with the verse above shows us that although the piece is influenced by the Normans literary styles as speech communities do take time to adopt and change.

The Reformation was seen as a time of science and order in Britain and Europe. English benefited from this as it was steered from being a vernacular language to a national one largely through advances in printing. William Caxton was central to introducing a national standard in printing to Britain. After printing his first translation in 1473, the course was set to print newspapers using a standardized East Midlands English. Up to now consistent spelling wasn’t considered important and written English became largely phonetic with no “standard” to observe. This would have helped regulate such irregular spellings like “blau” and “blaw” as in this verse dated 1272 from York:

wel qwa sal thir hornes blau

haly Rod thi day

nou is he dede and lies law

was wont to blaw thaim ay

Source: (Graddol, Leith & Swann P124).

Much was made of standard English brought about by Caxton. Educators became aware of the need for a “prescriptive” grammar as they considered the relationship between written and pronounced English. Puttenham tells us from his extract in 1579, (Graddol, Leith & Swann PP146/7), that while northern speech is “the purer English Saxon”, deference should be shown to “courtly” current “Southern English” that developed around London’s power base. Dr Samuel Johnson’s dictionary completed in 1755 helped fill the void, making rules for language based on “reason” rather than whims of writers. For example, Caedmon’s Old English text contains a line Ne con ic noht singan (I don’t know how to sing). This used double negatives ne and noht, so according to Johnson “illogical therefore incorrect”: Given the French negative construction n’ and pas and the influence that French had on the English Language, Johnson’s comments could be seen as correct yet directed against French influence. However, in modern colloquial English double negatives appear, as in colloquial French today /pas/ occurs alone. American lexicographer Noah Webster sought to get rid of what he saw as the “class bound perspective of Dr Johnson” , (Graddol, Leith & Swann P198) developing a “classless” dictionary, and in 1828 produced “The American Dictionary of the English Language” to correct Johnson’s “faults”. Webster saw Johnson’s dictionary using the “same letters often representing different sounds and the same sounds often expressed by different letters” (Graddol, Leith & Swann P91): Spellings such as tire, tonite and sidewalk replace tyre, tonight, and path getting rid of redundant silent letters and words replacing them with, in Webster’s view, something more phonemically correct or reinventing the word anew as in the sidewalk example.

When considering the development of English from Anglo Saxon to Chaucerian times that scribes were not consistent and English was randomly evolving as there were no strict rules to follow as in Latin or Old English. English transformed from being largely inflectional to language that altered syntax to convey written “meaning”. Borrowings from Scandinavian and French invaders regionalized vocabulary, changed spelling; vowel and consonant sounds, yet some Old English “sounds” still remain. Printing technology and scientific thinking helped English truly progressed to develop into a language that was “manageable” and could be regulated. In recent times the American influence has challenged the “standard” along with various “Englishes” worldwide, but the historic thread running through the English Language is strong, arguably keeping the cohesion of a standard from unravelling and regressing back to the unregulated language of the middle ages.

References:

Graddol et.al : 1996 English history diversity and change. Routledge in association with the OU.

U210 Study Guide.

Graddol et.al : Describing Language 1994. OU Press.

Crystal: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language Second Edition 2003 Cambridge University Press.

Open University Audio Cassette 1

2067 words.