Modern English and its perspectives
Introduction to the study of English language Katarina Radovanović and Jelena Savić
The development of the English language
5th c. AD - it becomes a language (I-E, WG) English got its name from first Germanic tribes who settled in Britain (Englisc, Englaland - Angles) Old English (A – S, Germanic influence) 450 - 1100 Middle English ( Norman – French influence) 1100 - 1500 Modern English 1500 – present day
Modern English - periods of Modern English: 1)Early MdE - 1500 (The Great Vowel Shift, William Caxton) - 1700 (differences in vocabulary and pronunciation, many new words due to the Industrial revolution) 2)Modern English 1700 – present day
Pronunciation - Grimm's law - sound change whereby voiceless fricatives, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives p-f-b, g-h-k, t-th, d-t, v-f - Verner's law - voiced aspirated stops became voiced obstruents, voiced unaspirated stops became unvoiced stops, and unvoiced stops became unvoiced fricative k/ch, th/d, d
Consonant clusters:
C – k deorc/dark C – č cirice/church Sc - š scip/ship Cg – dž brycge/bridge
Consonant clusters
C – k deorc/dark C – č cirice/church Sc - š scip/ship Cg – dž brycge/bridge
The Great Vowel Shift
I – mutation and gradation I - mutation influenced : irregular nouns, irregular verbs, comparison of adjectives: - a/o + I = e ; u + I = y Mus + iz = mys Old + ira = eldira, eldista
Gradation: singan – sang – sung writan – wrat – writen
Spelling - Nowadays, English language is 40% phonemic - Standardization of language led to multiple alterations in spelling (BrE and AmE) - 40-50 different sounds but more than 200 ways of spelling : sound sh – shou, sugar, ocean.. long o – go, show, though, long e – me, seat, people, long a – hey, stay, maid - out of 26 letters, only 5 of them are never silent
Dictionaries
John Hart - The opening of the unreasonable writing of our Inglish toung (1551) Robert Cawdrey – Table Alphabeticall (1604) Samuel Johnson – A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) Noah Webster – An American Dictionary of the English Language (1841)
A page from Robert Cawdrey's “Table Alphabeticall”
Vocabulary
- Due to inflections, there are many new words created every day (suffixes, prefixes, compounding, conversion)
- some poets created their own words - among them, Shakespeare created almost 2000 new words (bare – faced, critical, homicide, hint, excellent..)
Borrowings
- Celtic words – Avon, Severn, Thames, Kent - German words – aspirin, automat, kindergarden, hamster - Latin and Greek words – allusion, utopian, temperature, expensive - French words - vase, bayonet, passport, chocolate - Italian words – stanza, sonnet, balcony,opera - Portuguese and Spanish words – guitar, apricot, corral, potato - Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese, Turkish, Icelandic, Persian and more than 120 different languages
Modern English – Global language - Second most popular mother tongue in the world
(around 400 million native speakers – Britain, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and some Caribbean countries)
- Also spoken as second official language in more than 50 countries (India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore...) - English as a Lingua Franca in the fields of business, aviation, computing, politics, education, science, entertainment, Internet
References 1. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 1995. Cambridge, England 2. Barbara M. H. Strang, A history of English, 1970. London, England 3. Robert Burchfield, The Cambridge history of the English language, volume 5, 1994. Cambridge, England 4. www.thehistoryofenglish.com (10.11.2014.) 5. www.etymonline.com (10.11.2014.) 6. www.wmich.edu (10.11.2014). 7. www.everything2.com (10.11.2014.) 8. www.brittanica.com (10.11.2014.)