History of English (A Brief Introduction).ppt

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1、Lecture 1 History of English A Brief Introduction,By Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yan Chen ,Contents,1.1 The Indo-European Family of languages (印欧语系) 1.2 A historical overview of the English language 1.2.1 The Period of Old English (A.D. 450-1100) 1.2.2 The Period of Middle English (1100-1500) 1.2.3 The Period

2、of Modern English (after 1500) 1.3 English as a world language,1.1 The Indo-European Family of languages (印欧语系),Languages that are genetically related are grouped into one language family, according to phonological, morphological, and lexical correspondences that stem from the proto-language. Indo-E

3、uropean must have been generated in the Near East and spoken as far north as north-central Europe as long as 5,000 years ago.,A historical overview of the English language,1.2.1 The Period of Old English (A.D. 450-1100) (古英语时期) 1.2.2 The Period of Middle English (1100-1500)(中古英语时期) 1.2.3 The Period

4、of Modern English (after 1500) (现代英语时期),1.2.1 The Period of Old English (古英语时期),A.D. 450-1100 A. D. 450, three Germanic tribesthe Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxonsbegan to press across the Channel. 1066, Norman Conquest with the dialect of Wessex as the “standard language”,The Celts,The Celts: the f

5、irst Britons,Some people have designated the Celts the Indians of Europe, and the comparison is perhaps not so far fetched. Through the centuries they have been exposed to reckless subjugations, persecutions and regular political homicides, for instance by the ill-famed eradications of natives in th

6、e Scottish Highlands. It all started off with Julius Cesars massacres of the Gauls on the Mainland in the mid 50s BC. Their language was, until quite recently, forbidden by law, and during the Victorian age their mother tongue literally was beaten out of their children. By various efforts of assimil

7、ation, politicians have done their very best to eradicate their cultural identity.,Roman subjugation of most of the Celts,In 55 B. C. Julius Caesar led the first Roman invasion of the island. Rome occupied Britain militarily for roughly 400 years, until A. D. 409-410, when Rome called her legions ho

8、me to fight.,Julius Caesar (100 BC-44 BC),What did the Romans leave behind?,five superb highways Roman baths complete with heating equipment and piped water supplies houses built in the Roman style little of their Latin language, e.g. castra (“camp”) as in Winchester, Chester, Lancaster,The Angle, S

9、axon, and Jute tribes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries are known as the Anglo-Saxons. They left their homelands in northern Germany, Denmark and northern Holland and rowed across the North Sea in wooden boats.,Anglo-Saxon Invasion,By around AD 600 the five main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms w

10、ere Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, Kent and Anglia.,Origins of England and English,The Angles occupied the north and east of the country, the Saxons the south and the west. The country came to be called England (“land of the Angles”) and the language English (“tongue of the Angles”). The Anglo-Saxon i

11、nvaders were the founders of the English nation and speakers of the language which we call native English.,Old English, or Anglo-Saxon,difficult for us to read today recognizable if you make allowances for spelling and pronunciation differences e.g. faeder (father), eorl (earl), sittan (to sit), hri

12、ng (ring), hund (hound),In 597 a mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great and led by St. Augustine of Canterbury landed in Kent to begin the work of converting the peoples of what is now Britain.,St. Augustine of Canterbury (died ca. 606), the Apostle of England,The introduction of Christianity: impac

13、t on English,Many religious terms entered English, e.g. abbot (修道院, 修道士的总称), angel, nun, shrine (神殿), fever, candle, altar (圣坛), amen(阿门), apostle (传道者, 最初的传道者),Viking Invasion,In the year 793 Viking pirate raiders sailed across the North Sea to a Christian monastery in north-east England. They stol

14、e its treasures, murdered the monks and terrified everyone. This was followed by other violent “Viking raids” all over Britain. In 865 a “Great Army” of Danish Vikings invaded England. There were fierce battles for several years. In the end the Vikings conquered all of the northern, central and east

15、ern England, and seized much of the land for their own farms. This area was called the Danelaw.,Viking Invasion (continued),During the same period, Norwegian Vikings sailed to northern and western Scotland, and seized land for their farms around the coast and islands. They also settled in the Isle o

16、f Man and parts of Wales.,A map showing where the Vikings came from and where they settled in Britain,Viking expansion,Opening lines of the Beowulf manuscript,Traces of Scandinavian culture in English,During the two centuries between the advent of the Viking sea rovers and the landing of William the

17、 Conqueror, the English and Scandinavian languages intertwined as their users turned from enemies into neighbors, intermarried, and dwelt side by side in peace. The heritage of the Scandinavian conquest survives today in many words of the English language and most especially in place names (over 140

18、0) plus many family (personal) names. Today all the multitudes of familiar English and American patronymic ending in son; such as Jackson, Robertson, Thompson, Stevenson, Johnson, etc. clearly manifest their Scandinavian origin.,What exactly did the Scandinavian invasions and subsequent settlements

19、bring into English?,Nouns: axle, band, bank, birth, boon, booth, brink, bull, calf (of leg), crook, dirt, down (feathers), dregs, egg, fellow, freckle, gait, gap, gate, girth, guess, hap, haven, keel, kid, knife, leg, link, loan, mire, race, rift, reindeer, reef (of sail), root, scab, scales, score,

20、 scrap, seat, sister, skill, skin, skirt, skull, sky, slaughter, snare, stack, steak, swain, thrift, tidings, trust, want, window, wing. Adjectives: aloft, athwart, awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, low, meek, muggy, odd, rotten, rugged, scant, seemly, sly, tattered, tight, ugly, weak, wrong.,What e

21、xactly did the Scandinavian invasions and subsequent settlements bring into English? (continued),Verbs: bait, bask, batten, call, cast, clasp, clip, cow, crave, crawl, dangle, dazzle, die, droop, drown, egg (on), flit, gape, gasp, get, give, glitter, guess, happen, hit, kindle, lift, lug, nag, rake,

22、 ransack, raise, rake, rid, rive, scare, scout (an idea), scowl, scream, screech, skulk, snub, sprint, take, thrive, thrust. “Form words“: at, both, less, lesser, rather, same, though, till, until, together, worse, hence, thence, whence; and the verb “are“; such as, “They are“ is said to be pure Sca

23、ndinavian.,What was language of England like?,The language of England was a blend of West Germanic and Scandinavian; plus, a respectable amount of Latin-Greek borrowings, about half of them of a religious nature. Educated men communicated in both English and Latin.,Characteristics of Old English,Wit

24、h a vocabulary of about 50,000 to 60,000 words, Old English was a highly inflected language. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs had complex endings or vowel changes, or both. Old English was a language of full endings (词形变化完整), e.g. grammatical gender for substantives masculine, feminin

25、e, neuter, four cases, and strong and weak adjectival declension.),1.2.2 The Period of Middle English (1100-1500)(中古英语时期),The next impact upon English: the conquest of England by the Norman French,William the Conqueror (ca. 1028-1087),William I （威廉一世）,He was also known as Duke of Normandy. In 1066,h

26、e led the Normans to cross the English Channel and conquered England. He became William I. His reign marked the beginning of the complete feudal system in England.,William first moved his invasion fleet from the River Dives in Normandy to St. Valery. The fleet landed at Pevensey without opposition a

27、nd William defeated Harold at Hastings. Dover was the next target as William needed the important Channel crossing point. Canterbury fell and William marched to London. He was forced back and marched around London via Newbury and Wallingford to Berkhamsted. Here the Archbishop of York and the Earls

28、met William and accepted him as their new king.,Consequences of the Norman Invasion,Normans ruled England as Kings. There was an army of occupation in much of the country. The Feudal System was introduced. New laws were passed to give the Normans more power. French became the official language at co

29、urt. Castles were built around England. The style of buildings changed. It linked England more closely with continental Europe.,Impact of Norman Conquest on English,the introduction of Anglo-Norman, a northern dialect of Old French, as the language of the ruling classes in England, displacing Old En

30、glish. Written English went underground for almost 200 years. Most literature in England during this time was written in French or Latin. Fortunately, the lower classes were not pressured out of England, nor were they forced to learn French. While French was the official language of England, English

31、 remained the actual language of most of its people.,English had come back!,The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 25 October 1400), written about 1400 in the London dialect, showed that the English language had come back into its own.,French borrowings into English,Between 1250 and 1500

32、about 9,000 words of French origin poured into English. 75% of them are still in use today. e.g. word borrowed from warfare: army, captain, lieutenant, sergeant, soldier, spy, vanquish, siege, banner, danger; from foods and cookery: dinner, super, cuisine, sausage, toast, jelly, soup, roast, pastry,

33、An interesting borrowing pattern,Live animals: ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, deer. (English) Food: beef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, and venison. (French),Characteristics of Middle English,Inflections (internal change in the forms of words and endings tacked onto words) were disappearing and part of t

34、heir job was being done by prepositions and by the arrangement of words within the sentence. It was a language of leveled endings (词形变化削减). The loss of final syllables increasingly led to the loss of grammatical gender, the simplification of plural formation, and the widespread loss of inflectional

35、morphemes.),Other borrowings into Middle English,During this period, Britain had trade relations with the low countries, esp. Holland. As a result, as many as 2,500 words of Dutch origin found their way into English, such as deck, freight, stoop.,1.2.3 The Period of Modern English,The process of pri

36、nting from movable type was introduced into England about 1476 by William Caxton(c. 1442-1491). Modern English began in England during the Elizabethan era which is also around the time of the great playwright and poet William Shakespeare.,Caxton words,Other important influences,The Hundred Years War

37、 (1337-1453), the rise of an important middle class, the Renaissance (文艺复兴), the development of England as a maritime power, the expansion of the British Empire, and the growth of commerce and industry, of science and literature, have, each in their way, contributed to the development of the English

38、 language.,A dictionary of English by Robert Cawdrey in 1604,the King James Bible (1611),The Book of Common Prayer (1662),Sample entry from Walkers Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (first edition 1791),The standardization of Modern English,Early Modern English lacked uniformity in spelling, but Samue

39、l Johnsons dictionary, published in 1755 in England, was influential in establishing a standard form of spelling. Noah Webster did the same in America, publishing his dictionary in 1828.,Dr. Johnson (1709-1784),Noah Webster (1758-1843),During the Renaissance Period,A great many of the Latin and Gree

40、k words were borrowed in part, as prefixes, suffixes, and roots, e.g. auto Gr. “self”, ology, -inter, pre-, pro combinations of borrowed parts, e.g. misanthrope (missein, “to hate”, +anrhropos, “a man”) and reiterate (re-, “again”, +iterare, “to say again”). Combination of Latin and Greek elements t

41、o form one word, e.g. spectroscope (L+G:“谱/光谱”+“观察仪器/显示器”：分光镜),Notice!,As a rule, the words borrowed from Greek and Latin are the kind which are used formally rather than in everyday conversation, perhaps because they were pushed into the language mainly through writing, e.g. propagate (L.), anonymo

42、us (Gr.), emancipate (L.), admiration (L.), catastrophe (Gr.), interrogate (L.), reiterate (L.).,Latin, Greek, French vs. English,In our modern times, no one can write in English about religious, intellectual, or philosophical subjects without employing the vast heritage of Latin and Greek words; no

43、r can anyone discuss the arts, the social world, or the domains of high fashion and haute cuisine without using the rich legacy from the French language.,Sample words from French, Spanish, and Italian,From Spanish: cannibal, tobacco, potato, and banana bank (It. & Fr.), balcony (It.), volcano (Fr. &

44、 It.), algebra (It, from Ar.),Borrowings from Chinese,silk, china, litchi, shantung (a kind of silk made in Shandong province, China), pekin (a kind of silk made in Beijing, China) tea (1601), ginseng (1654), bohea (1711), kaolin (1727) oolong, loquat, nankeen, pongee yamen, taotai, kowtow, Taoism,

45、and pailou paper tiger, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Maoist,English: a word-borrowing language,From wherever English soldiers were sent for colonization, from wherever English and American ships docked for trade, from wherever jet airlines have carried English-speaking tourists and busin

46、essmen, words have been added to the English tongue. Borrowing into both British and American English continues from all continents.English has borrowed more words and word parts than has any other language.,How is Modern English different from Middle English?,disuse of the T-V distinction (thou, ye

47、), although it is still used in Ireland commonly The use of auxiliary verbs becomes mandatory in interrogative sentences. Grammatical relations which were formerly marked morphologically are now expressed by firm word order rules.,Assets and liabilities of English,English as a world language,World l

48、anguage: 1. A language used throughout the entire world. 2. A language used in many parts of the world (such as Spanish and Portuguese), in specific large regions, and widely because of a special role. International language: A language, natural or artificial, that is used for communication among th

49、e nations of the world. Lingua franca: any language adopted by speakers of different languages, as a common medium of communication for any purposes and at any level,The following map shows the regions of the world where English is commonly spoken (red circles).,Statistics of English,“According to c

50、onservative estimates, mother-tongue speakers have now reached around 400 million; a further 350 million use English as a second language; and a further 100 million use it fluently as a foreign language. This is an increase of over 40% since the 1950s. More radical estimates, which include speakers with a lower level of language fluency and awareness, have suggested that the overall total is these days well in excess of 1,000 million.” (Crystal, 1997: 360),