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Introdution
English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century, are collectively called Old English. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England; this was a period in which the language was influenced by French Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London, the printing of the King James Bible and the start of the Great Vowel Shift
English language
English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca. It is named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to the area of Great Britain that later took their name, as England. Both names derive from Anglia, a peninsula in the Baltic Sea. The language is closely related to Frisian and Low Saxon, and its vocabulary has been significantly influenced by other Germanic languages, particularly Norse (a North Germanic language), and to a greater extent by Latin and French.
Modern English grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo- European dependent marking pattern, with a rich inflectionalmorphology and relatively free word order, to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, a fairly fixed SVO word order and a complex syntax. Modern English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspect and mood, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives and some negation. The variation among the accents and dialects of English used in different countries and regions—in terms of phonetics and phonology, and sometimes also vocabulary, grammar, and spelling— can often be understood by speakers of different dialects, but in extreme cases can lead to confusion or even mutual unintelligibility between English speakers.
The west Germanic languages
English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and linguistic continuum along the FrisianNorth Sea coast, whose languages gradually evolved into the Anglic languages in the British Isles, and into the Frisian languages and Low German/Low Saxon on the continent. The Frisian languages, which together with the Anglic languages form the Anglo-Frisian languages, are the closest living relatives of English. Low German/Low Saxon is also closely related, and sometimes English, the Frisian languages, and Low German are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic) languages, though this grouping remains debated. Old English evolved into Middle English, which in turn evolved into Modern
Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the 9th century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex, the West Saxon dialect became the standard written variety.[32]^ The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Cædmon's Hymn , is written in Northumbrian. Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the early period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the 6th century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms. It
included the runic letters wynn ⟨ ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨ þ ⟩, and the modified Latin letters eth ⟨ ð ⟩,
and ash ⟨ æ ⟩.
Old English is very different from Modern English, and is difficult for 21st- century English speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German, and its closest relative is Old Frisian. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms, and word order was much freer than in Modern English. Modern English has case forms in pronouns ( he , him , his ) and has a few verb inflections ( speak , speaks , speaking , spoke , spoken ), but Old English had case endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings.
The translation of Matthew 8:20 from 1000 CE shows examples of case endings (nominative plural, accusative plural, genitive singular) and a verb ending (present plural):
William Shakespeare: His Influence in the English Language
There is no doubt that William Shakespeare had a great influence not only in theater and films and other poets and novelists, but also in the English language, with words that we use every day. Many may not even know that it was him who invented or coined these words. Literally there are thousands of words that Shakespeare invented that we still use today. Who do you think invented the words manager, fashionable, eyeball, laughable, gloomy or lonely, among others? William Shakespeare has knowledge of seven languages and usually made direct quotes in other languages directly in the plays that he wrote. It is incredible that he had a vocabulary of 24,000 words, the most for any writer, then and now.
Standardization of the English language
The writings of Shakespeare actually influenced the English language, as his works contributed to standardize English language rules and grammar in the 17th and 18th centuries. The words and phrases that he wrote were embedded in the language especially in "A Dictionary of the English Language" by Samuel Johnson. The introduction of new words as well as phrases had greatly enriched the English language, which made it more expressive and colorful. Some believe that Shakespeare was the first to use about 1,700 words – words that be created by borrowing from other languages, changing verbs into adjectives or nouns and vice versa, adding suffixes and prefixes and connecting other words as well as creating new ones. He had several phrases that are still very much a part of today's language and conversation such as full circle, a sorry sight, strange bedfellow and seen better days.
Invented words Let us explore some more of the common words the world's pre-eminent playwright created.
Gloomy was formerly a verb that Shakespeare turned into an adjective. He used this in Titus Andronicus. In Merchant of Venice, he introduced the word laughable. Majestic was from the word "majesty" that first used in the 1300s, while "majestical" was used initially around the 1570s. Shakespeare used the word majestic in The Tempest.
In the 1400s, the word "alone" was shortened to lone. From this word, he created the word lonely which he used in the early 17th century tragedy, Coriolanus. He introduced the term "radiance" in King Lear, which originated from "radiantem," the Latin word for beaming. Hurry was a word that is found in Henry VI Part I while generous, which came from the Latin word generosus or "of noble birth" was first used in Hamlet.
Honest, worthy, proper and useful are the terms associated with "frugi" the Latin word that became frugal, which was used in a passage in Much Ado About Nothing. Critical was first used in Othello. In the 1570s, the phrase "to court" means to woo. From this word Shakespeare created the word courtship which he used in The Merchant of Venice. In Love's Labour's Lost, he introduced the word zany, derived from the Latin
includes Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales , and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. In the Middle English period, the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer.
The Great Vowel Shift affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English. It was a chain shift, meaning that each shift triggered a subsequent shift in the vowel system.
Spread of Modern English
By the late 18th century, the British Empire had spread English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. English also facilitated worldwide international communication. In the 20th century the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a superpower following the Second World War has, along with worldwide broadcasting in English by the BBC and other broadcasters, caused the language to spread across the planet much faster. In the 21st century, English is more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been.
As Modern English developed, explicit norms for standard usage were published, and spread through official media such as public education and state- sponsored publications. In 1755 Samuel Johnson published his A Dictionary of the English Language which introduced standard spellings of words and usage norms. In 1828, Noah Webster published the American Dictionary of the English language to try to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent of the British standard. Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes.
Grammar
As is typical of an Indo-European language, English follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment. Unlike other Indo-European languages though, English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system in favor of analytic constructions. Only the personal pronouns retain morphological case more
strongly than any other word class. English distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, determiners (including articles), prepositions, and conjunctions. Some analyses add pronouns as a class separate from nouns, and subdivide conjunctions into subordinators and coordinators, and add the class of interjections. English also has a rich set of auxiliary verbs, such as have and do , expressing the categories of mood and aspect. Questions are marked by do-support, wh- movement (fronting of question words beginning with wh -) and word order inversion with some verbs.
Adjectives
Adjectives modify a noun by providing additional information about their referents. In English, adjectives come before the nouns they modify and after determiners. In Modern English, adjectives are not inflected, and they do not agree in form with the noun they modify, as adjectives in most other Indo-European languages do. Some adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison, with the positive degree unmarked, the suffix -er marking the comparative, and -est marking the superlative: a small boy , the boy is smaller than the girl , that boy is the smallest. Some adjectives have irregular comparative and superlative forms, such as good , better , and best. Other adjectives have comparatives formed by periphrastic constructions, with the adverb more marking the comparative, and most marking the superlative: happier or more happy , the happiest or most happy. There is some variation among speakers regarding which adjectives use inflected or periphrastic comparison, and some studies have shown a tendency for the periphrastic forms to become more common at the expense of the inflected form.
Pronouns, case, and person
English pronouns conserve many traits of case and gender inflection. The personal pronouns retain a difference between subjective and objective case in most persons ( I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them ) as well as a gender and animateness distinction in the third person singular (distinguishing he/she/it ). The subjective case corresponds to the Old English nominative case, and the objective case is used both
Verbs and verb phrases
English verbs are inflected for tense and aspect and marked for agreement with present-tense third-person singular subject. Only the copula verb to be is still inflected for agreement with the plural and first and second person subjects. Auxiliary verbs such as have and be are paired with verbs in the infinitive, past, or progressive forms. They form complex tenses, aspects, and moods. Auxiliary verbs differ from other verbs in that they can be followed by the negation, and in that they can occur as the first constituent in a question sentence.
Most verbs have six inflectional forms. The primary forms are a plain present, a third-person singular present, and a preterite (past) form. The secondary forms are a plain form used for the infinitive, a gerund-participle and a past participle. The copula verb to be is the only verb to retain some of its original conjugation, and takes different inflectional forms depending on the subject. The first-person present-tense form is am , the third person singular form is is , and the form are is used in the second-person singular and all three plurals. The only verb past participle is been and its gerund- participle is being.
Conclusion
England continued to form new colonies, and these later developed their own norms for speech and writing. English was adopted in parts of North America, parts of Africa, Australasia, and many other regions. When they obtained political independence, some of the newly independent nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the official language to avoid the political and other difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others.
