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3
UNIT I. OLD ENGLISH ORIGIN AND PRONUNCIATION
INTRODUCTION
It has been our principal aim in writing this booklet to suggest
analyzing some of the ways, in which the study of History of the English
Language could be of interest for you, future postgraduates.
Aristotle and experience agree that MAN is an inquisitive animal,
and most inquisitive, perhaps, about his own relation to the world he
inhabits, about his own status and how he got that way... We are almost by
natural compulsion, then, interested in how our fathers spoke and wrote
and how differently they spoke and wrote from what and how we
speak and write. This idea is so well expressed by Prof. J.Brook, the
author of "English dialects", 1972. He writes with admirable clarity, that
"he never forgets that language is a part of life" [3].
Almost every native speaker of English as well as our English
speaking student, is quite well aware of the fact that his knowledge of Old
English leaves much to be desired, though an average Englishman has,
very probably, had enough schooling to have read a little of the
"Canterbury Tales" and realizes that Chaucer’s English is more
different from Shakespeare’s than theirs from his own.
Old English means English from the time of the earliest extant
records a little before A.D. 700 till the 11th century, not till the time of
Shakespeare, or even till the time of Chaucer. The period from c.1100
till c.1450 is called Middle English, and that from c.1450 till c.1650 is
called Early Modern English. These days are all very approximate and
more or less arbitrary.
The origin of a Standard English goes back to the 14th century.
The existence of a literary distinct from the dialects, based on the language
of London, can be considered as generally recognized from 1500. The
unification, first of all, affected the written language. The colloquial
language long continued to be dependent on the dialects, as direct evidence
from the 16th and 17th cc. shows.
The English language originated from Anglo-Frisian dialects,
which made part of the West Germanic language group. The Germanic
tribes, which conquered Britain in the 5th c., belonged, as ancient
historians say, to three tribes: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes.
