UDA COMMUNICATION:
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English is one of the most used languages in the world: nowadays over 1 billion
people speak it regularly for political, economic and cultural purposes.
Let’s know about its origin and development.
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The first form of English was spoken by the Anglo-Saxons from 5th century to
12th century, and it is known as “Old English”.
Its main characteristics were:
• It was inflected, that is, it had declinations (nominative, genitive,
accusative, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative)
The reason for this is that it was influenced by the Romans who conquered the
land in 43 A.D. with Emperor Claudius, who made Britannia a Roman
province. Old English had the following features:
• It had three grammar genders (masculine, feminine and neuter)
• Adjectives could be weak or strong and they agreed in gender, case and
number with the nouns they described.
• The comparative was formed by adding –ra to the adjective, while the
superlative had many endings: -ist, -est, -m and –ost. The last two will
later combine to form the word most which is still used today.
• Adverbs were formed by adding –e or –lic to the adjective
• It had nine conjugations: seven strong ( irregular with vowel changes) and
two weak (regular ending in –de)
• The infinitive form ended in –an
• The first syllable was stressed and the endings were not clearly pronounced
• The alphabet consisted of 24 letters. Of these, 20 were adopted from the
Roman alphabet (Latin), two were modified Latin letters (Æ, Ð) , and two
were developments from the runic alphabet ( , Þ, lett. winn and thron)
• Some words remained the same through centuries, such as anger, bag, hit,
law, sky, take, same and many more.
The first specimen of Old English in literature was Beowulf, an old epic poem
about the story of a mighty Nordic warrior.
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The following step in the development of English language was “Middle
English”, which formed the basis of modern English.
Middle English was dominant from 11th to 15th centuries. It was evolved from
Old English with the contribution of the French-Norman language which was
introduced into England by William the Conqueror in 1066.
The main characteristics of Middle English were:
• Loss of case suffixes because of the stress shift at the beginning of words.
• The infinitive lost –an and gained the form it has today
• The third singular and plural subject added –th
• The adjectives lost agreement with the nouns
• The comparative was formed by adding –er and the superlative –est
• these and those were added
• Adverbs ending in –lic became –ly
• Perfect tenses, shall and will for the future tenses and the passive forms
were added
• Sc became sh
• Hw became wh
• V and u were used for the first time
• Silent H was added to words like honor, honest, hair, habit; words that even
today are used with an, as an indefinite article
• In some words, even in Modern English, the letter o is pronounced
instead of : son, some, come, money, one, of, …
Shakespeare’s In Folio
Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
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Between 16th and 18th centuries Middle English underwent further
simplification, as follows:
•
•
•
•
Adjectives lost all endings except comparatives and superlatives
The personal pronoun it and the relative pronoun were first used
-th in verbs became –s
Negative multiples were still used
It is very important to notice that during this period language was greatly
influenced by the great vowel shift (14th -16th ); the tongue was placed higher in
the mouth and some consonants were no longer pronounced (but still present in
the spelling system) such as:
• -b in the ending –mb in words like comb, lamb, dumb
• -l between a or o and consonants
• k at the beginning of the words
• g in –ing ending of the verbs
(Edgar Allan Poe’s handwriting)
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After the 18th century modern English was established with the following
changes:
• loss of post-vocalic r
• increased use of progressive tenses and new words related to science and
technologic derivation from Latin and Greek.
Modern English was widely spread all over the world because of England’s
imperial policy and the creation of the Commonwealth, a political association of
the first British colonies. That’s why English is intensively used today all over
the world.
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During the 17th century immigrants from the south of England began to arrive
in North America. By the 19th century over 3,5 millions of immigrants left the
British Isles for the United States, followed by migrants coming from Spain,
Italy, China, Japan, Russia. They spoke their native languages, but they all
contributed with them to the development of American English.
Student’s name: Bassi Giacomo
Class: I A
Liceo Scientifico “G. Galilei” – Pescara
English Teacher: Miscia Roberta