ENG424: History of the English Language

Dr. Mubarak Alkhatnai

Week 1

All presentations are made based on the course main reference: Algeo (2010) unless stated otherwise.

Introduction to the course

• Where is this course located. • Why study the history of English?• Geographical context of English • Facts about English Language • English Vs Englishes • Comparative studies of languages • Sound change

Map of the English-speaking world

Picture adopted with thanks from: http://eslcollege.blogspot.co.uk/

British Isles

Picture adopted with thanks from: http://eslcollege.blogspot.co.uk/

Interesting facts about English• More English words begin with the letter “S” than any other letter of

the alphabet.• “I” is the oldest word in the English language.• Approximately one new word is added to the English language every

two hours.• The dictionary grows by about 4,000 words a year.• The most common letter in English is "e".• The most common vowel in English is "e", followed by "a".• The most common consonant in English is "r", followed by "t".• Every syllable in English must have a vowel (sound). Not all syllables

have consonants. • The following sentence contains all 26 letters of the alphabet: "The

quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

Backgrounds of English

• Causal comparison of English with other languages

• 200 years ago• Proto-Indo-European = Indo-European • Genetic classification Language families

• Language classification (Isolating Chinese , agglutinative Turkish, incorporative Eskimo , inflective Latin).

Father

German Vater

Spanish Padre

Swedish Fader

Dutch Vader

Ch. 4 P. 61

Non-Indo-European Languages • Sons of Noah• Semitic

– Eastern • Akkadian, called Assyrian and later Babylonian

– Western• Hebrew (recently revived as the official language of Jews)• Aramaic (native speech of Jesus)• Phoenicians• Moabitic

– Southern• Arabic• Ethiopic (Geez, Amharic)

• Hamitic– Egyptian (Coptic)– Berber dialects– Cushitic dialects (upper Nile)– Chadic (Chad and Nigeria)

Languages of main religions

• Remember: – Up to page 66 for more on non-indo-European

languages in Africa and Asia – According to A Guide to the World Languages by

Merritt Ruhlen (1987): • 17 phyla of languages• 300 major groups and subgroups • 5000 languages • 140 indo-European = fewer than 3% of the world’s

languages but spoken by almost half of the world’s population.

Indo-European Languages

P 68-69

• Study the tree diagram on pages 68-69 carefully and scan through the following 6 pages to answer the following questions:

1- On what basis IE languages were divided into Satem and Centum?

2- What is special about these languages: • Yiddish• Afrikans• Pali • Tocharian

3- In what ways Celtic and Italic are close?

4- What are the Romance languages?

The Celtic languages • Celtic correspondences with Italic in the verbal system and in inflectional endings • Celtic spread over Europe before the Christian era and before the emergence in

history of the Germanic people – reached parts of Asia Turkey• Celts declined and their languages replaced by Latin and then French • British Celts used their own languages and borrowed from Latin

– Angles, Saxons Jutes arrived and British Celtic languages struggled but survived – Welsh has been promoted lately– Britons

• Their language is Breton• Crossed the Channel before Anglo-Saxon• Named their country Brittany

– Cornish people • Their language is Cornish – has been revived lately – Cornwall

– Pictish• North-eastern parts of Britain • Extinct • North and central Scotland in early Middle Ages

– Settlers from Ireland “Scotti” (Scots) named their country “Scotia” (Scotland)• Celtic language they brought is Gaelic

– Ireland was little affected by Roman or Anglo-Saxons• Gaelic was replaced by English and recently revived

Germanic Languages • English belongs to this group • North Germanic – Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faeroese

(Faeroe Islands)

• West Germanic – High German, Low German, Dutch, Flemish,

Frisian, English, Yiddish

• East Germanic – Gothic