Literary Sampler: Essays, Book Reviews, and More...
Monthly Column by Charity Gingerich

I. A Common Family

The English language comes from a large language-source known as Indo-European, which is also the source for the languages of “about one-third of the human race”.¹ Though not much is known about the Indo-Europeans before c. 600, their language and who they were as a people have been reconstructed to some extent by discovering the similarities of Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. This discovery, made by Sir William Jones in the eighteenth century, set researchers on a determined path to find out exactly who these people were and where they lived. Though there are still disputations, we now know that “from the words they used – words for winter and horse – it seems likely that the Indo-Europeans lived a half-settled, half-nomadic existence” (48). In examining what these folks did or did not have words for, “the most widely accepted theory locates the environment of the Indo-Europeans in a cold, northern climate in which common words for snow, beech, bee and wolf, played an important role” (48). Also, because none of these early languages had a word for the sea, “it is clear that [they] must have lived inland somewhere just north of the Black Sea” (48). Sometime between the years 3500 and 2500 BC (50), the Indo-Europeans began to branch out into eastern and western Europe; from this one source we now know there was a huge explosion of languages, of which English is but a particle; (albeit a large particle).

II. The Evolution of English

In a nutshell, “the making of English is the story of three invasions and a cultural revolution,” (46) though it is probably necessary to elaborate a bit more on exactly who participated in these invasions and what all this cultural revolution entailed. The first invasion of the British Isles was made in AD 449 by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who “sailed across the sea from Denmark and the coastal part of Germany, still known as Lower Saxony” (55). We realize that historians of the English language are not funning us when they say that English is the language of conquest; according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the arrival of these tribes was anything but peaceful: “Never [...] was there such a slaughter in the Island.” Nevertheless, the Celts not having much say in the matter, the combination of “mutually intelligible dialects” (Oxford Reference) spoken by these three conquering tribes eventually evolved into a sort of “stew” language, more technically known as a creole (Oxford English Dictionary), and became what scholars refer to today as Old English (which lasted from roughly 500-1100 AD).

Between the gap of what is now called Old and Middle English, yet another series of invasions, this time made by the Vikings (or Danes), came to England in the years AD 750-1050. “Unlike the Anglo-Saxon race war against the Celts, which preserved virtually no trace of the Celtic languages in English, the Danish settlers had a profound influence on the development of Old English” (65). Basically, before the arrival of the Danes, “Old English, like most European languages at that time, was a strongly inflected language [...with] words like 'king' rely[ing] on word-endings to convey a meaning for which we now use prepositions” (69).

What occurred in the years following the Viking conquest is that Danes and Anglo-Saxons, living side-by-side, made language compromises in order to communicate and trade with one another. Old English went through a process of simplification, losing gender markings and certain inflections (suffixes and prefixes). Though “the impact of Old Norse on the English language is hard to evaluate with much accuracy, precisely because the two languages were so similar [...] thanks to the Danes, [English] was given another dimension, more light and shade, more variety” (71).

Along with the Viking invasions, another important event occurred which had a powerful impact on the English language, and subsequently, its culture. In AD 597 Christianity arrived to the British Isles in the form of the missionary Augustine and his fellow monks (61). With the arrival of Christianity came also its huge Latin vocabulary – Latin being, of course, the language of the “civilized” and “saved." “The importance of this cultural revolution in the story of the English language in not merely that it strengthened and enriched Old English with new words, more than 400 of which survive to this day, but also that it gave England the capacity to express abstract thought” (62).  So important was this cultural revolution that, as our text points out, “by the end of the eighth century, the impact of Christianity on Anglo-Saxon England had produced a culture unrivaled in Europe” (65). All this to point out the fact that, before the period which we now know as “Middle English” ever began, Old English had been affected in a number of significant ways.

The third and final invasion that marked Old English significantly was the Norman Invasion of 1066. Once more a collision of languages was to occur with William the Conquerors' victory at the battle of Hastings – a collision that would test the mettle of the English language. William, in a display of power and act of victory, was crowned at Westminster Abby “in a ceremony that used both English and Latin; (he himself spoke the French of Normandy). There would not be another English king for nearly three hundred years, and the English-speaking people “experienced the humiliations of a linguistic apartheid: religion, law, science and literature were all conducted in languages other than English” (73). A class barrier came to be raised between the nobility, who spoke Norman-French, and the commoners, who spoke Old English (WordOrigins.com). However, in spite of the seemingly overwhelming odds, the English language survived for three important reasons: 1) the establishment of the written and spoken Old English vernacular was “too vigorous and [...] too hardy to be obliterated,” 2) because of intermarriage between the conquerors and the conquered, and 3) the final defeat in 1204 of the Anglo-Normans (75-76).

By the time that the English had finally kicked the Norman-French off their land, it was time to usher in a new phase of the English language, namely, Middle English. In all seriousness, the years 1150-1500 which are set aside as belonging to this period, were done so rather arbitrarily, more as a term of description to mark the changes that Old English had undergone. Actually, “much of what is called Middle English is no more than a record in writing of what had already happened to spoken Old English. Thus, while spoken Old English had almost certainly lost most of its inflections by the time of the Norman Conquest, it is not until written Middle English that the changes show up in the documents” (79). These include simplifications mentioned earlier, namely the loss of word endings, which were replaced by the usage of prepositions (79).

Having proved itself a hardy language when pitted against worthy foes such as Latin and French, English, gradually moving into the Early Modern (1500-1800) and Modern periods (1800-present), began the serious task of shaping itself into a language that would in turn do battle with other languages someday. The former period was of course marked by “the Renaissance, the Reformation and the emergence of England as a maritime power” and consequently, the addition of between ten and twelve thousand new words to its lexicon (91-93). The latter, meanwhile, was marked more by a preoccupation within the language of what was considered “rude” or “polite” English – and the awareness that it was time for English to “go to school” (132).

 III. In Sum

A quasi-scientific approach might help in summing up the uniqueness of the English language's birth, development, present existence and future: because of a history of natural selection, (very few Celtic words were grafted into English) mutation, (random borrowing from the many cultures English has collided with) and regular, intense gene flow, (numerous invasions, the spreading of English through the British Empire) our language has never reached and remained at a steady equilibrium. In fact, because of its present diversity, there is possibly just as much difference among English speaking peoples now as there is between different language groups. Who knows – perhaps one day English will become so diverse that it will fragment “back” into separate languages once again.

¹McCrum, Robert, Robert MacNeil and William Cran. The Story of English, third revised ed. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Copyright © 2007 by Charity Gingerich. 

About the Author: Charity graduated from Kent State University with a BA in English, as well as minors in writing and history in 2006. This fall (2008) she will be entering the MFA in Creative Writing program at West Virginia University where she will be specializing in poetry. Charity always welcomes any questions/suggestions about this column. Click Here to send her an email.