Usachev V.A., Lutcenko S. V.

Donetsk national university of economics and trade named after Mikhailo Tugan - Baranovsky

The history of the English language

The English language, and indeed most European languages, traces it original roots back to a Neolithic (late Stone Age) people known as the Indo-Europeans or Proto-Indo-Europeans, who lived in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from sometime after 5000 BC (different hypotheses suggest various different dates anywhere between the 7th and the 3rd millennium BC). We do not know exactly what the original Indo-European language was like, as no writings exist from that time (the very earliest examples of writing can be traced to Sumeria in around 3000 BC), so our knowledge of it is necessarily based on conjecture, hypothesis and reconstruction. Using the ?comparative method¦, though, modern linguists have been able to partially reconstruct the original language from common elements in its daughter languages. It is thought by many scholars that modern Lithuanian may be the closest to (i.e. the least changed from) the ancient Indo-European language, and it is thought to retain many features of Proto-Indo-European now lost in other Indo-European languages. Indo-European is just one of the language families, or proto-languages, from which the world's modern languages are descended, and there are many other families including Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Niger-Congo, Dravidian, Uralic, Amerindian, etc. However, it is by far the largest family, accounting for the languages of almost half of the modern world-s population, including those of most of Europe, North and South America, Australasia, the Iranian plateau and much of South Asia. Within Europe, only Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and a few of the smaller Russian languages are not descended from the Indo-European family.

Sometime between 3500 BC and 2500 BC, the Indo-Europeans began to fan out across Europe and Asia, in search of new pastures and hunting grounds, and their languages developed - and diverged - in isolation. By around 1000 BC, the original Indo-European language had split into a dozen or more major language groups or families, the main groups being: Hellenic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Germanic, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Albanian.

In addition, several more groups (including Anatolian, Tocharian, Phrygian, Thracian, Illyrian, etc) have since died out completely, and yet others may have existed which have not even left a trace. These broad language groups in turn divided over time into scores of new languages, from Swedish to Portuguese to Hindi to Latin to Frisian. So, it is astounding but true that languages as diverse as Gaelic, Greek, Farsi and Sinhalese all ultimately derive from the same origin.

The branch of Indo-European we are most interested in is Germanic (although the Hellenic-Greek branch and Italic-Latin branch, which gave rise to the Romance languages, also became important later). The Germanic, or Proto-Germanic, language group can be traced back to the region between the Elbe river in modern Germany and southern Sweden some 3,000 years ago. The early Germanic languages themselves borrowed some words from the aboriginal (non-Indo-European) tribes which preceded them, particularly words for the natural environment (e.g. sea, land, strand, seal, herring); for technologies connected with sea travel (e.g. ship, keel, sail, oar); for new social practices (e.g. wife, bride, groom); and for farming or animal husbandry practices (e.g. oats, mare, ram, lamb, sheep, kid, bitch, hound, dung). The Germanic group itself also split over time as the people migrated into other parts of continental Europe:

· North Germanic, which evolved into Old Norse and then into the various Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic (but not Finnish or Estonian, which are Uralic and not Indo-European languages);

· East Germanic, spoken by peoples who migrated back to eastern and southeastern Europe, and whose three component language branches, Burgundian, Vandalic and Gothic (a language spoken throughout much of eastern, central and western Europe early in the first millennium AD), all died out over time; and

· West Germanic, the ancestor of Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old Low Franconian and others which in turn gave rise to modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Low German, Frisian, Yiddish and, ultimately, English.

Thus, we can say that English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages.

Little or nothing is known about the original hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the British Isles before they were cut off from the rest of Europe by the English Channel (around 5000-6000 BC). Indeed, little is know of the so-called Beaker People and others who moved into the British Isles from Europe around 2500 BC, and were probably responsible for monuments like Stonehenge around this time. The earliest inhabitants of Britain about which anything is known are the Celts (the name from the Greek keltoi meaning "barbarian"), also known as Britons, who probably started to move into the area sometime after 800 BC. By around 300 BC, the Celts had become the most widespread branch of Indo-Europeans in Iron Age Europe, inhabiting much of modern-day Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and also Britain. Parts of Scotland were also inhabited from an early time by the Picts, whose Pictish language was completely separate from Celtic and probably not an Indo-European language at all. The Pictish language and culture was completely wiped out during the Viking raids of the 9th Century AD, and the remaining Picts merged with the Scots. Further waves of Celtic immigration into Britain, particularly between 500 BC and 400 BC but continuing at least until the Roman occupation, greatly increased the Celtic population in Britain, and established a vibrant Celtic culture throughout the land. Having said that, many British place names have Celtic origins, including Kent, York, London, Dover, Thames, Avon, Trent, Severn, Cornwall and many more. The Celtic language survives today only in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland, the Welsh of Wales, and the Breton language of Brittany.

The Romans first entered Britain in 55 BC under Julius Caesar, although they did not begin a permanent occupation until 43 AD, when Emperor Claudius sent a much better prepared force to subjugate the fierce British Celts. Despite a series of uprisings by the natives (including that of Queen Boudicca, or Boadicea in 61 AD), Britain remained part of the Roman Empire for almost 400 years, and there was a substantial amount of interbreeding between the two peoples, although the Romans never succeeded in penetrating into the mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland.

From the late 15th century, the language changed into Modern English, often dated from the Great Vowel Shift. English is continuously assimilating foreign words, especially Latin and Greek, causing English to have the largest vocabulary of any language in the world. As there are many words from different languages the risk of mispronunciation is high, but remnants of the older forms remain in a few regional dialects, notably in the West Country. In 1755 Samuel Johnson published the first significant English dictionary. From around 1600, the English colonization of North America resulted in the creation of a distinct American variety of English. Some English pronunciations and words "froze" when they reached America. In some ways, American English is more like the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is. Some expressions that the British call "Americanisms" are in fact original British expressions that were preserved in the colonies while lost for a time in Britain (for example trash for rubbish, loan as a verb instead of lend, and fall for autumn; another example, frame-up, was re-imported into Britain through Hollywood gangster movies). Spanish also had an influence on American English (and subsequently British English), with words like canyon, ranch, stampede and vigilante being examples of Spanish words that entered English through the settlement of the American West. French words (through Louisiana) and West African words (through the slave trade) also influenced American English (and so, to an extent, British English).