An International Language in the Making
IT HAS been calculated that some 326 million people speak English, making it one of the most widely used languages in the earth today. Yet when Julius Caesar first set foot on the islands of Britain in 55 B.C.E. nobody spoke English there at all. There were no English people; the British Isles were inhabited by the Celts or Ancient Britons.
In 43 C.E. the Roman legions subdued the Celts, and they were driven out into Wales, Scotland and Ireland. A little of their vocabulary has survived into modern English, mostly incorporated into names of places such as London and the county of Kent, which owes its name to the Celtic word canti.
The Romans occupied the islands for about 400 years, but when the Empire finally declined, the Roman legions were recalled to defend the last bastions of the Empire against invaders. With the Roman legions gone, Germanic tribes called Angles, Saxons and Jutes conquered Britain, taking up residence there. These Angles and Saxons spoke almost identical languages, a form of German, one of the members of the Teutonic branch of the Indo-European family of languages.
English as First Spoken
Since the Angles had conquered the most land, the country (England) and the language (English) were named for the Angles. This Anglo-Saxon language was called Anglisc or Englisc by the writers of the time. Although it was to become the basis of modern-day English, it is totally incomprehensible to people today without special study. Here, for example, are the first lines of a famous poem called “Beowulf,” written about the year 900 C.E.:
“Hwaet, we gardena in geardagum theodcyninga thrym gefrunon.” (Lo, we have heard tell how mighty the kings of the spear-bearing Danes were in days past.)
Now that is classed as Old English by the philologists, although not one in a thousand English-speaking people can understand it. This is because nearly 85 percent of the words of the Old English vocabulary are no longer in use. Those that have survived, however, were basic elements, expressing fundamental concepts such as mann (man), wif (wife), hus (house) and mete (meat or food).
The grammar of Old English was also very different from modern English. It was an inflectional language, that is to say, one indicated the function of a word in a sentence by means of endings added to the noun or adjective, and so on. Today nearly all of these inflectional endings have been lost, and we use a fixed order of words to indicate their various functions and relations.
During the 800’s the Vikings from Denmark made raids on the shores of Britain. Because the Viking raiders seemed to delight in battle and in destroying their victim’s property, giving the appearance of madness, the Viking name for a warrior, berserker, came into the English language in the word berserk. The activities of the Danes ended in conquest of Britain. As they settled down in England, they too introduced many words to the English vocabulary, such as egg and most words that begin with sk-, such as sky, skin, skirt and skill.
More significantly, pronouns, which generally remain permanent in a language, were affected. The result was that some Scandinavian pronouns replaced English ones. For example, the pronouns they, their and them are of Scandinavian origin.
Then something happened that was to have a profound effect upon the English language. In 1066 C.E. William the Conqueror, a Frenchman from Normandy, invaded England. As illustrated on the famous Bayeux tapestry, he defeated the Saxon king Harold at the Battle of Hastings. He then distributed the English lands to the French noblemen who had come with him. At first these French lords spoke their own Norman-French, while the people whom they had enslaved spoke Anglo-Saxon or English. However, as the Normans settled down and intermarried with the local people, the two languages fused. This mixture of Old English and Norman-French produced a new form of English, now called Middle English.
A Time of Great Changes
Middle English was marked by momentous changes in the language, changes more fundamental and extensive than any others before or since. For a start the pronunciation slowly altered under the influence of the Normans, and the inflectional endings gradually disappeared. But the outstanding change was in vocabulary.
Thousands and thousands of new words were added as the Normans began to speak Old English, well sprinkled with their own French vocabulary. Among the many English words resulting from the Norman Conquest are air, chair, dinner, government, judge, paper, prison and towel.
Sometimes both the English and the French words were retained. For example, the Saxon peasant lived in an English hus, whereas the French lord lived in a French maison. Both words remained, house being the modern word for a simple dwelling and mansion, the home of the nobleman or man of wealth.
Sometimes both words were kept but took on slightly different meanings. The English raised sheep, cows, calves and pigs. The French equivalents were mouton, boeuf, veau and porc. It is easy to see that the French words were kept to designate the meat of the animal. Thus one raises calves but eats veal, one raises pigs and eats pork.
Of course, many English words were lost entirely. For example, English inwit became French conscience. However, despite this time of great change the Englishman continued to eat and sleep, walk and sing in his original English.
By the time of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400), sometimes called the father of English literature, this mongrel tongue had become quite a fluent and flexible language. Furthermore, it began to have the look of modern English, the Modern English period beginning about 1450 and lasting into modern times. Chaucer wrote much that is fairly understandable today. And when he says, for example, that a man was “a verray parfit gentil knyght” it needs no honors degree in English for one to see that he was saying that he was “a very perfect gentle knight.” Of course, the spelling looks verray odd to us!
Anybody who reads Chaucer, however, will notice that his grammar and vocabulary are still very simple. In fact, most people of the time felt that English was crude and unwieldy and incapable of expressing the finer sentiments. They felt that if a person had anything important to say he should write in Latin or Greek, which the educated people of the day understood. They called English “the vulgar tunge,” and one English writer lamented: “Poets that lasting marble seek, must carve in Latin or in Greek; we write in sand.”
At first this attitude was sharpened by the coming of the Renaissance, the discovery of the treasure houses of Latin and Greek learning. Gradually, though, with the arrival of the printing press and the possibility for the ordinary people to acquire books cheaply, the demand rose for books in the vernacular.
There were now two schools of thought: those who wanted to preserve the classic tradition of Latin and Greek, and those who wanted to improve the “vulgar tunge” with words borrowed from the classics. We know now which school won out. English, “the vulgar tunge,” triumphed, but with a wealth of added vocabulary.
Men anxious to spread the Word of God contributed largely to the acceptance of the vernacular, for they wanted to have the Bible in a language that all could understand. Tyndale, one of the foremost Bible translators, said that he had rendered it into English because he wanted even the common plowboy to be able to read the Bible. The translators were also anxious that their language be a worthy vehicle for the Word of God, so they took pains to make it fit for that purpose.
Continuous Borrowing from Other Languages
Much of the new vocabulary that was added came from the Latin, with words such as capsule and disrespect. Others, such as chaos and climax, came from the Greek. Some opposed these foreign borrowings, saying that they were “strange and inkhorn” terms. On the other hand, one who was in favor of enriching the vocabulary said a little bitterly that “some people, if they spy but a hard word are as much amazed as if they had met with a hobgoblin”! But still the words flowed in.
The scholars were not the only ones to enrich the vocabulary. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were times of voyage and discovery, and travelers opened new fields for commerce. Some started to trade with the countries they visited and in some places to colonize them. English travelers in Italy, for example, came back speaking a language full of Italian expressions, a language that the folks back home found very funny and affected. However, do we consider words such as algebra, violin or volcano at all funny today? They are Italian, as are piano and pizza.
British ships sailed to South America, colonized chiefly by the Spanish and Portuguese, fought the Spaniards on the Spanish Main and brought back words such as alligator and apricot, cannibal and canoe, hammock and hurricane, all Spanish and Portuguese words.
Merchantmen in small sailing ships, battered by wind and waves as they weathered the tremendous storms at the Cape of Good Hope, struggled to India and China. They came home with their holds filled with silks and spices and speaking of junks and coolies, china and tea.
Pioneers in covered wagons rolled across the American Plains and wrote home to England letters containing words such as hominy, chipmunk and raccoon, all taken from the language of the American Indian. Sequoia was actually a Cherokee chieftain, and from thence came the word.
Thus the spirit of exploration and adventure opened new and exciting horizons. New experiences and new products became reflected in the language. A few minutes spent in the examination of an etymological dictionary will show that English has borrowed from Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hungarian and Hindustani, Bengali, Malay, Chinese and the languages of Java, Australia and Tahiti as well as many others.
If you use one of those dictionaries, you can find out where the words jaguar, ricksha and mongoose came from. Even what you might imagine to be a good English word such as measles proves to be of Dutch origin, along with golf. And did you know that the word candy comes from an Arabic word qandah?
The increase in vocabulary has continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some words, such as zipper, have come from trademark names. In the fields of medicine, electricity, physics and chemistry a whole new range of words has sprung into being. Shakespeare had never heard of penicillin or the endocrine glands; he knew nothing of dynamos, the quantum theory or radium. And as for things such as carburetors, hubcaps and spark plugs . . . !
Sometimes new words were formed by combining two old ones, as in steamroller. Some are taken from proper names; limousine, for example, is taken from a province in France. English has assimilated all these words and to English-speaking people they do not seem at all foreign. But their foreign roots are reflected in the way they are spelled. Unlike Spanish and Italian, for instance, many similar sounds in English are spelled differently, such as shoe, blue, crew, too and through. The borrowing from foreign languages has led to the fairly chaotic state of English spelling, and although numerous efforts have been made to reform it, it seems unlikely that they will ever succeed.
So, from the funny little hodgepodge language of the fifteenth century, much despised as the “vulgar tunge,” we have a great international language with one of the richest vocabularies in the world, a vocabulary of about 600,000 words.
English combines the strength of the German tongue with the beauty of the French and is capable of expressing fine shades of meaning. It is certainly a language worth learning, enabling one thus to communicate with the millions of people who already speak it. In commerce, science, religion and social life a knowledge of English is undoubtedly useful, and much great literature has been written in it. So, many who do not already know English might beneficially learn it, and those who do might learn to speak it better.