Lecture 1

INTRODUCTION

Today English is the second most populous spoken language in the world (after Chinese). It is estimated that
there are 300 million native speakers and 300 million who use English as a second language and a further 100 million use
it as a foreign language. It is the language of science, aviation, computing, diplomacy, and tourism. It is listed as the
official or co-official language of over 45 countries and is spoken extensively in other countries where it has no official
status. Speakers of French, Spanish or Arabic may disagree, but English is on its way to becoming the world’s unofficial
international language. Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more people, but English is now the most widespread of the
world’s languages.
The role of English for Armenians has also increased substantially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
independence of the Republic of Armenia. With the establishment of tighter relations with foreign countries and, of
course, the Armenian Diaspora more and more people today are willing to master this language with the hope to find
better jobs or to move abroad. English has quite obviously penetrated into our daily life leaving little option for those who
do not have sufficient knowledge of it. But how easily can it be learnt by foreigners? Does it possess characteristics of
vocabulary and grammar that make it easy or difficult for acquirement? What are the causes of these difficulties, if there
are any?
To answer there and many other questions the language should be considered from different angles namely
synchronically and diachronically.
In studying MnE we regard the language as fixed in time and describe each linguistic level – phonetics grammar or
lexis – synchronically, taking no account of its origin or tendencies to change. When considered diachronically, every
linguistic fact is interpreted as a stage or step in the never-ending evolution of language. In practice, however, the two
approaches are closely linked for we often resort to history to explain current phenomena in MnE. To be more exact, all
aspects of language should be examined especially from a historical perspective.
The history of the English language is of considerable interest to all students of English, since the English language of
today reflects many centuries of development. Thus, for example, the highly irregular plurals of nouns (mouse-mice, ox-
oxen, etc), or the spelling of MnE, which may seem chaotic to anyone who has to struggle with it, can all be explained
historically. The orthographic joke attributed to Bernard Shaw, that in English fish might be spelled ghoti (gh as in
enough, o as in women, ti as in nation), has been repeated often, but the only way to understand the anomalies of Modern
English spelling is to study the history of English.
Therefore, one of the aims of this course is to provide the student with knowledge of linguistic history sufficient to
account for the main feature of present-day English.
Another aim of this course is to provide the student with wider philological outlook. The history of the English
language shows the place of English in the linguistic world; it reveals its ties and contacts with other related and unrelated
tongues.

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 Lecture 2

THE MAIN PERIODS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

English is a Germanic language of the Indo-European family of languages. This broad family includes most of the
European languages spoken today. The Indo-European family includes several major branches: Latin and the modern
Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.); the Germanic languages (English, German, Swedish etc.); the Indo-
Iranian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit etc.); the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Czech etc.); the Baltic languages
of Latvian and Lithuanian; the Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish Gaelic etc.); and Greek.

The influence of the original Indo-European language can be seen today, even though no written record of it
exists. The word for father, for example, is vater in German, pater in Latin, and pitr in Sanskrit. These words are all
cognates, similar words in different languages that share the same root.

Of these branches of the Indo-European family, two are, as far as the study of the development of English is
concerned, of paramount importance, the Germanic and the Romance (called that because the Romance languages derive
from Latin, the language of ancient Rome). English is a member of the Germanic group of languages. It is believed that
this group began as a common language in the Elbe river region about 3,000 years ago. By the second century BC, this
Common Germanic language had split into three distinct sub-groups:

 East Germanic was spoken by peoples who migrated back to southeastern Europe. No East Germanic language is
spoken today, and the only written East Germanic language that survives is Gothic.
 North Germanic evolved into the modern Scandinavian languages of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic
(but not Finnish, which is related to Hungarian and Estonian and is not an Indo-European language).

 West Germanic is the ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English.

The name ‘English language’ in its widest sense comprehends the language of the English people from their
first settlement in Britain to the present time. Within the development of the language it is possible to recognize
three different periods. Like all divisions in history, periods of the English language are matters of convenience
and the diving lines between them merely arbitrary. The three main stages in the history of the language are Old
English (OE), Middle English (ME) and Modern English (MnE).
The English scholar Henry Sweet proposed the following division in the history of English, proceeding from
the state of unstressed endings. This division is based on a feature both phonetic (weakening and loss of
unstressed vowels) and a morphological (weakening and loss of grammatical morphemes – inflections).
The first period, which lasted from 400 to 1100 and is known as Old English, is the period of full endings.
During this period the inflections of the noun, the adjective, and the verb are preserved more or less unimpaired.
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This means that, in principle, any vowel may be found in the ending which is usually unstressed: [a, i, o, u, e].
For example, the word sinzan ‘sing’ has the vowel [a] in its unstressed ending, while the word sunu ‘son’ has
the vowel [u] in a similar position.
The second period, which lasted from 1100 to 1450 or 1500 and is known as Middle English, is the period
of leveled endings. During this period the inflections which had begun to break down towards the end of the
OE period, became greatly reduced. In particular, the vowels of unstressed endings – [a, o, e, i, u] – were
leveled under a neutral vowel (something like [….] ) represented by the letter e. Thus, OE sinzan yields ME
singen, OE sunu yields ME sune (also spelt sone).
In ME period many of the sounds were changed, most of the old inflections were lost, their place being
supplied by form-words – preposition, auxiliary verbs, etc. – and many words became obsolete. As a matter of
fat, it is the OE word-stock that shows major and substantial changes in ME. Obviously, these changes are due
to the influence of French words that appeared in ME vocabulary in the form of loan-words and replaced many
English words of Germanic origin. This, the OE word-stock, which was unilingual, became bilingual in ME.
The third period, the language since 1500 which is known as Modern English, is the period of lost
endings. At this stage of development the ending is lost altogether. Thus, ME sinzen became MnE sing; ME
sone became MnE son.
Modern English evolved in dangerous and troubled time: under the growing capitalist system the country
became economically and politically unified; the changes in the political and social structure, the progress of
culture, education and literature favoured linguistic unity. The growth of the English nation was accompanied
by the formation of the National English Language.
In the early Modern period, the Renaissance – the revival of the study of the classical authors of Greece and
Rome – led to the adoption of an immense number of Greek a well as Latin words. As the relations of England
with other countries became more extended, many words were imported into English from almost every
European language, especially Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, and from many other languages, such as Arabic,
Persian, Turkish and the native languages of America.
Thus, language changes cannot be accounted for by linguistic factors only. They are also accompanied by
certain historical factors that motivate language variation. So, in principle, the approximate dates fixing the
boundaries between the periods are very close to important events in the social and political life of the country.

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 Lecture 3

HISTORICAL BACKGROUNDS OF THE MAIN PERIODS

About 3000 years BC many parts of Europe, including the British Isles, were inhabited by a people who came to be
known as the Iberians because some of their descendants are still found in the north of Spain (the Iberian Peninsula). We
do not know much about these early people because they lived in Britain long before a word of their history was written,
but we can learn something from their skeletons, their weapons and the remains of their dwellings which have been found.
After 2000 BC a new race of Alpine stock entered the country and, since Iberians and Alpines were closely related in
culture, they fused soon.
During the period from the 6th to the 3rd c. BC a people called the Celts spread across Europe from the east to the west.
More than one Celtic tribe invaded Britain. The first to come were Gaelic Celts; Celtic tribe called the Picts penetrated
into the mountains on the North (soon after 700 BC); some Picts as well as tribes of Scots crossed over to Ireland and
settled there. Later the Scots returned to the larger island and settled in the North beside the Picts. They came in such large
numbers that in time the name of Scotland was given to the country. Cymric or Britannic Celts (the Brythons), held most
of the country, and the southern half of the island was named Britain after them. Today the words ‘Briton’ and ‘British’
refer to the people of the British Isles. The third Celtic invaders from northern Gaul were called Belgae. Economically and
socially the Celts were a tribal society made up of kinship groups, clans and tribes; they practiced a primitive agriculture,
and carried on trade with Gaelic Gaul.

The Roman Conquest

In the 1st century BC Gaul was conquered by the Romans. Having occupied Julius Caesar made two raids on Britain
in 55 and 54 BC. Although Julius Caesar came to Britain twice in the course of two years, he was not able to conquer it.
The real conquest of Britain by the Romans began nearly a hundred years after Caesar’s visit to the island. It was in
43 AD that the Emperor Claudius decided to undertake the actual conquest of the island. The Romans subdued the Celts
and colonized the country. Britain was a province of the Roman Empire for four centuries. As a result of the conquest
signs of Roman civilization spread over Britain. There had been no towns in Britain before the Romans conquered it; they
began to build towns, splendid villas, public baths. Every town had a drainage system and a good supply of pure water.
York, Gloucester, Lincoln and London became the chief Roman towns; there were also about fifty other smaller towns.
The Romans were great road-makers and now a network of roads connected all parts of the country. Among the other
evidences of Romanization must be included the use of the Latin language. A great number of inscriptions have been
found, all of them in Latin. But Latin did not replace the Celtic language in Britain as it did in Gaul. To this day the
descendants of the ancient Celts live on the territory of the British Isles.
The use of Latin probably began to decline after 410, the approximate at date which the Roman troops were officially
withdrawn from the island.

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