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The English Language.

  As we know, there are great communities of languages, called families. Most European languages and several Asian belong to one of the families, Indo-European (exceptions are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, and Livonian, which are Uralic). English is certainly one of them.
Languages of any group are distinct because of divergence. This is a process when a language splits into several: people who formerly spoke one language stop to understand each other. Ofcourse, it takes long time, hundreds and thousands years. So protolanguage may split several times. As a result, a lot of modern speeches are related to few protolanguages.
When first Europeans came to India, they found that Indian speeches are like old European ones, especially Latin and Greek. So Indo-European family was discovered.
  When Julius Caesar landed in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English didn't exist. Now we can say that there is old English, Middle English and Modern English. There is the Germanic influence, the French influence, the Classical influence and the Colonial influence.
The Germanic influence. The Anglo-Saxons, who invaded England in AD 350, came from Germany, Denmark and Holland. They spoke a Germanic language which became the basis of Old English for ordinary objects are mostly. Anglo-Saxons or Germanic in origin. The proto-Germanic went under changes, which made it different. These changes are known as Grimm's law or Verner's law:
• Unvoiced stops became voiceless fricatives: p->f, t->th, k->h;
• Voiced stops became unvoiced: d->t, b->p, g->k;
• Aspirated stops became non-aspirated.
Words of Germanic origin are usually short (often just one syllable) and tend to be informal in modern English (shoe, clothes, earth, sun, moon, day, man, wife, child, friend, house, food, water, sleep, love, say, live, have, be, work).
The French influence. English also has many similarities with Roman languages, whose origin in Latin. Norman-French has used as the language of government. Words of Latin origin are usually longer than words of Germanic origin and often have more formal meaning in English than in the origin Romance language. Norman-French words didn't enter English immediately. When the Normans invaded in 1066, ordinary people still spoke old English. Imagine a Norman feast. The English would look after the animals by their old English names. The Normans when they saw the cooked meat arrive at the table would use French ones. This explains why the English language now has different words for animals and meats. In the fourteenth century a new form of English has used: Middle English, which was old English enriched by thousands of French words. The fourteenth-century poets, Chauser, wrote in Middle English. (Government, parliament, judge, court, legal, military, army, crown, nation, state, country, power, authority, people.
The Classical influence. Two centuries later came Renaissance: there was a revival of interest an ancient culture, Greek and Latin. By the seventeenth century it became possible to describe something in English with words of Germanic, Latin and Greek origin. This is still true today.
Germanic Latin Greek
Book Renew Water Library Renovate Aquatic Bibliography Neolithic Hydraulic

The Colonial influence. Words from foreign countries have entered English as a result of trade and colonial expansion: alcohol and algebra came from Arabic, divan and khaki from Persian, chocolate and tomato from native American languages, bungalow and cot from Gujerati, tea and tycoon from Chinese. Nowadays the importance of computer software, often invented in America, spreads the English worldwide. When Columbus came back from South America he brought home to Spain new plants - with the plants he brought their names. This is how these words appeared in Spanish and later were borrowed from it by the English language.
The expansion of learning. Another way to add new words to the language is the words of inventions and technics. The period from Renaissance to the present day has seen many ideas and inventions especially in science and technology. As new things are invented new words have to be created. Often these words are created from existing Greek or Latin words put together in new ways. When someone invented an instrument for speaking to another person at a distance, it was called a telephone from the Greek words tele (= far) and phone (= sound). There are now thousands of such words in English. Just think television, microscope, psychology and thermometer.
So you know there is Old English, Middle English, Modern English influenced the English language. The Viking, Anglo-Saxons, the Romance and the Normans invaded England and influenced the English language. The Colonial influence and expansion of learning enriched the English language too.
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Отредактировано Rasty_Nail (2006-01-12 20:36:03)