Introduction

This project began under the sponsorship of IDLE in the Department of English at Virginia Tech in 1998, and has been used since primarily as a supplemental text in ENGL4054, History of the English Language, and as an IDLE module. The author is Daniel W. Mosser and all materials are subject to the copyright of the author. This text is made freely available for pedagogical use, but please do notify me by email of you adopt it for your course: .

Short Version

Index

This section is intended to serve as both an introduction to the accompanying web pages--their content, structures, and relationships--and to sketch briefly an overview of the Evolution of Present-day English. Throughout, the following abbreviations will be used to refer to the various periods of the language's history: OE (Old English); ME (Middle English); EME (Early Modern English); and PDE (Present-Day English). The abbreviations B.C.E (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) are used as more neutral alternatives to "B.C." and "A.D." respectively.

External History

Pre-History Old English (External History) Middle English (External History) Norman Conquest Early Modern English (External History) American English

The origin of English is customarily linked to the date 449 C.E. This is the year in which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Laud MS version) records the issuing of an invitation by Vortigern (king of the British, or Celts) to the "Angle kin" (Angles, led by Hengest and Horsa) to help them in their defense against the Picts. In return for their military assistance, the Chronicle says the Angles were granted lands in the southeast. Further aid was sought, and in response "came men of three peoples of Germanie": "of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of Iotum" (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes). These "immigrants" were, as the Chronicle tells us, Germanic, and the roots of English are in the Germanic family of languages. Germanic, in turn, is a branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Subsequent to the establishment of English in "Englalond" (i.e., the land of the Angles), the most profound outside influences on the development of PDE are the Viking conquests and settlements--resulting in the establishment of the Danelaw--and the Norman Conquest. These events resulted in the assimiliation of Old Norse and French vocabulary and other linguistic features.

Syntax/Grammar

OE Syntax ME Syntax EME Syntax 18th-Century Syntax

Anglo-Saxon, as the language spoken by these Germanic immigrants came to be known, or "Old English," was a much more richly inflected language than the English spoken today. Linguists use the term inflection to refer to the endings added to words to signify their grammatical function and relationships in a phrase or sentence. Present-day English (PDE) has very few grammatical inflections, eight to be precise:

PDE Inflections

Inflection	Meaning/Function
-s	third person singular, present tense (verbs)
-s	plural (nouns)
-s ('s)	possessive (nouns)
-ed	past tense (verbs)
-ing	progressive aspect/ present participle (verbs)
-en	perfect aspect/past participle (verbs: in weak verbs, this is realized as -ed)
-er	comparative (adjectives)
-est	superlative (adjectives)

(Noah Webster, who successfully urged a number of simplifications in American English, at times argued against the preservation of any inflections and for merging the past tense and past participal forms of strong verbs in English. )

OE Nouns ME Nouns EME Nouns

A PDE noun, then, has only two inflections: one to signal plurality, and another to signal possession:

While the sentence is now somewhat nonsensical, we still recognize it as a possible sentence of English, but all of the noun phrases now perform different functions in the sentence because they occupy different positions in the sentence. In the second version of the sentence, Gilligan occupies the subject position; the Skipper occupies the direct object position, and a coconut--the object of the preposition at--occupies an indirect object position.

In OE, however, inflectional endings on nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners can signal those relationships regardless of word order. For example:

Both sentences mean "The fisher(man) caught the fish." In this case, it is the form of the demonstrative pronoun (functioning here much like "the" in PDE) that signals the function of the noun phrase: signals "nominative, singular, masculine" (subject), and signals "accusative, singular, masculine" (direct object).

Gothic Pronouns OE Pronouns ME Pronouns EME Pronouns

The inflections used with nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are signals of case: the function, or grammatical role that the word performs in a phrase or sentence. Strictly speaking, PDE nouns have only two cases signaled by inflections: subject/object, and possessive. The PDE pronoun system preserves the richest array of changes in form to signal case, since for these words a change in form also occurs for the object function.

Works of Shakespeare King James Bible

While this paradigm is relatively conservative (i.e., it preserves many older features of the language), readers of Shakespeare and the King James Bible are reminded that as recently as Early Modern English, the language differentiated between singular and plural in the second person: thou, thee, thine for the singular and ye, you, yours for the plural. By Chaucer's time, however, the singular forms were being used by speakers to signal that they regarded the person being spoken to as an inferior, and the plural was used when addressing a single person to indicate deference to their [perceived, or known] superior social status. The plural form thus became in most circumstances the "safest" choice regardless of the number of people being addressed.

The Development of Prescriptive Grammar Early Modern English negation Early American views on English Grammar

Another feature of the grammar of English that has been lost (in Standard English) is the use of multiple negatives for emphasis. Chaucer could say of the Knight: He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde In all hys lyf unto no maner wight. (General Prologue, 70-71)

And Shakespeare, in Twelfth Night, Act 4, Scene 1, has the Feste the Clown say:

Well held out, i' faith! No, I do not know you; nor I am not sent to you by my lady, to bid you come speak with her; nor your name is not Master Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither. Nothing that is so, is so.

In the Eighteenth Century--a period of heightened anxiety about language change and the perceived corruption of English--Bishop Robert Lowth (Short Introduction to English Grammar, 1762) pronounced "Two Negatives in English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an Affirmative," and the (standard) language was forever changed. Multiple negation still occurs regularly in nonstandard forms of English, such as Eddie Murphy's declaration in the movie "48 Hours" that "Neither one of us ain't got nuthin' ta lose." The American Noah Webster chafed against the constraints imposed by Lowth: "In polite and classical language, two negatives destroy the negation and express an affirmative....In popular language, two negatives are used for a negation according to the practice of ancient Greeks and the modern French" (Philosophical and Practical Grammar, 1807; quoted in Finegan 42).

"Ain't" is, itself, a proscribed form in standard English usage, and while one might see the argument about double negatives as an attempt to make the language more "logical" (by invoking mathematical analogy), it is difficult to see the logic that applies here. Note the gap in the following paradigm of standard, informal English contractions of pronoun+be=negative:

Not only does standard English lack the capacity for contraction here in the first person, singular, but speakers of English must commit another illogical act by using the plural verb form for the second person singular (another consequence of Lowth's Grammar). James Sledd once summed up the status of ain't in American English very succinctly (and somewhat hyperbolically) when he observed: "any red-blooded American would prefer incest to ain't"(1964, p. 473). In 1919, H. L. Mencken (The American Language 202) had much to say about ain't:

A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. No American of any pretensions, I assume, would defend ain't as a substitute for isn't, say in "He ain't the man," and yet ain't is already tolera bly respectable in the first person, where English countenances the even more clumsy aren't. Aren't has never got a foothold in the American first person singular; when it is used at all, which is rarely, it is as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative of employing the unwieldy "Am I not in this?" the American turns boldly to "Ain't I in this?" It still grates a bit, perhaps, but aren't grates even more.

If Mencken thought he was spotting a trend, however, he was misled. In the first Supplement (1945, p. 406) to The American Language, Mencken give Will Rogers "the last word, perhaps" on ain't: "'Maybe ain't ain't so correct, but I notice that lots of folks who ain't usin' ain't ain't eatin'.'"

Phonology (and the representation of sounds in writing)

If you compared the PDE spelling of the word "stone" in the paradigm above to the spelling of the same word in OE, you probably noticed that the vowel o was spelled in OE as a (with a macron above it to indicate length). This is one of many differences in the appearance of OE and PDE. Between ca. 1500 and 1700, English long vowels underwent a systematic change that resulted in the vowel system found in most varieties of English today (Scots English is one clear exception). This process is generally referred to as the Great Vowel Shift. This process will be dealt with in a more sophisticated fashion elsewhere, but as a preview, the following drastically simplified description might be useful. In the table below, the focus is on the vowel sounds that these PDE spellings signifiy. The sounds in the lefthand column represent the pre-GVS state and the sounds in the righthand column the post-GVS state:

Pre-GVS		Post-GVS
beet		bite
bait		beet
bother		bait
boot		about
boat		boot
bought		boat

Vowels are notoriously unstable, and one can hear vowel shifts underway in many regional varieties of PDE. Listen, for example, to variations in the pronunciation of "oil," "bye," "wire," and "pen" in the speech of your friends, co-workers, or speakers on radio and television. It is unlikely that the spellings of these sounds will change to reflect changes in standard pronunciation. In fact, that is one of the problems created by the Great Vowel Shift: English spellings had become relatively fixed before the GVS occurred; as a result, our representations of those sounds using the spellings of pre-GVS sounds means that English spelling is somewhat "out of synch" with phonetic alphabet representations.

Because the Latin alphabet did not require characters to represent some of the sounds used in OE, scribes supplemented it with characters from the runic alphabet, futhorc, as well as with innovations of their own. Four OE characters that may cause PDE readers problems are:

 

By the Middle English period, while thorn and eth were still common, ash and wen had fallen out of use.

Most of the differences between American and British spelling were introduced by Noah Webster, most notably in his An American Dictionary of the English Language.

Lexicon/Vocabulary