of blackbird (one word) and black bird (two words). English employs four
degrees of stress and four kinds of juncture for differentiating words and
phrases.
6.Inflection
Modern English is a relatively uninflected language. Nouns have separate
endings only in the possessive case and the plural number. Verbs have both
a strong conjugation—shown in older words—with internal vowel change, for
example, sing, sang, sung, and a weak conjugation with dental suffixes
indicating past tense, as in play, played. The latter is the predominant
type. Only 66 verbs of the strong type are in use; newer verbs invariably
follow the weak pattern. The third person singular has an -s ending, as in
does. The structure of English verbs is thus fairly simple, compared with
that of verbs in similar languages, and includes only a few other endings,
such as -ing or -en; but verb structure does involve the use of numerous
auxiliaries such as have, can, may, or must. Monosyllabic and some
disyllabic adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison, such as
larger or happiest; other adjectives express the same distinction by
compounding with more and most. Pronouns, the most heavily inflected parts
of speech in English, have objective case forms, such as me or her, in
addition to the nominative (I, he, we) and possessive forms (my, his, hers,
our).
7.Parts of Speech
Although many grammarians still cling to the Graeco-Latin tradition of
dividing words into eight parts of speech, efforts have recently been made
to reclassify English words on a different basis. The American linguist
Charles Carpenter Fries, in his work The Structure of English (1952),
divided most English words into four great form classes that generally
correspond to the noun, verb, adjective, and adverb in the standard
classification. He classified 154 other words as function words, or words
that connect the main words of a sentence and show their relations to one
another. In the standard classification, many of these function words are
considered pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions; others are considered
adverbs, adjectives, or verbs.
8.Development of the Language
Three main stages are usually recognized in the history of the development
of the English language. Old English, known formerly as Anglo-Saxon, dates
from AD 449 to 1066 or 1100. Middle English dates from 1066 or 1100 to 1450
or 1500. Modern English dates from about 1450 or 1500 and is subdivided
into Early Modern English, from about 1500 to 1660, and Late Modern
English, from about 1660 to the present time.
8.1.Old English Period
Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by certain Germanic
peoples (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) of the regions comprising present-day
southern Denmark and northern Germany who invaded Britain in the 5th
century AD; the Jutes were the first to arrive, in 449, according to
tradition. Settling in Britain (the Jutes in Kent, southern Hampshire, and
the Isle of Wight; the Saxons in the part of England south of the Thames;
and the Angles in the rest of England as far north as the Firth of Forth),
the invaders drove the indigenous Celtic-speaking peoples, notably the
Britons, to the north and west. As time went on, Old English evolved
further from the original Continental form, and regional dialects
developed. The four major dialects recognized in Old English are Kentish,
originally the dialect spoken by the Jutes; West Saxon, a branch of the
dialect spoken by the Saxons; and Northumbrian and Mercian, subdivisions of
the dialects spoken by the Angles. By the 9th century, partly through the
influence of Alfred, king of the West Saxons and the first ruler of all
England, West Saxon became prevalent in prose literature. The Latin works
of St Augustine, St Gregory, and the Venerable Bede were translated, and
the native poetry of Northumbria and Mercia were transcribed in the West
Saxon dialect. A Mercian mixed dialect, however, was preserved for the
greatest poetry, such as the anonymous 8th-century epic poem Beowulf and
the contemporary elegiac poems.
Old English was an inflected language characterized by strong and weak
verbs; a dual number for pronouns (for example, a form for “we two” as well
as “we”), two different declensions of adjectives, four declensions of
nouns, and grammatical distinctions of gender. These inflections meant that
word order was much freer than in the language today. There were two
tenses: present-future and past. Although rich in word-building
possibilities, Old English was sparse in vocabulary. It borrowed few proper
nouns from the language of the conquered Celts, primarily those such as
Aberdeen (“mouth of the Dee”) and Inchcape (“island cape”) that describe
geographical features. Scholars believe that ten common nouns in Old
English are of Celtic origin; among these are bannock, cart, down, and
mattock. Although other Celtic words not preserved in literature may have
been in use during the Old English period, most Modern English words of
Celtic origin, that is, those derived from Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, or
Irish, are comparatively recent borrowings.
The number of Latin words, many of them derived from the Greek, that were
introduced during the Old English period has been estimated at 140. Typical
of these words are altar, mass, priest, psalm, temple, kitchen, palm, and
pear. A few were probably introduced through the Celtic; others were
brought to Britain by the Germanic invaders, who previously had come into
contact with Roman culture. By far the largest number of Latin words was
introduced as a result of the spread of Christianity. Such words included
not only ecclesiastical terms but many others of less specialized
significance.
About 40 Scandinavian (Old Norse) words were introduced into Old English by
the Norsemen, or Vikings, who invaded Britain periodically from the late
8th century on. Introduced first were words pertaining to the sea and
battle, but shortly after the initial invasions other words used in the
Scandinavian social and administrative system—for example, the word
law—entered the language, as well as the verb form are and such widely used
words as take, cut, both, ill, and ugly.
8.2.Middle English Period
At the beginning of the Middle English period, which dates from the Norman
Conquest of 1066, the language was still inflectional; at the end of the
period the relationship between the elements of the sentence depended
basically on word order. As early as 1200 the three or four grammatical
case forms of nouns in the singular had been reduced to two, and to denote
the plural the noun ending -es had been adopted.
The declension of the noun was simplified further by dropping the final n
from five cases of the fourth, or weak, declension; by neutralizing all
vowel endings to e (sounded like the a in Modern English sofa), and by
extending the masculine, nominative, and accusative plural ending -as,
later neutralized also to -es, to other declensions and other cases. Only
one example of a weak plural ending, oxen, survives in Modern English; kine
and brethren are later formations. Several representatives of the Old
English modification of the root vowel in the plural, such as man, men, and
foot, feet, also survive.
With the levelling of inflections, the distinctions of grammatical gender
in English were replaced by those of natural gender. During this period the
dual number fell into disuse, and the dative and accusative of pronouns
were reduced to a common form. Furthermore, the Scandinavian they, them
were substituted for the original hie, hem of the third person plural, and
who, which, and that acquired their present relative functions. The
conjugation of verbs was simplified by the omission of endings and by the
use of a common form for the singular and plural of the past tense of
strong verbs.
In the early period of Middle English, a number of utilitarian words, such
as egg, sky, sister, window, and get, came into the language from Old
Norse. The Normans brought other additions to the vocabulary. Before 1250
about 900 new words had appeared in English, mainly words, such as baron,
noble, and feast, that the Anglo-Saxon lower classes required in their
dealings with the Norman-French nobility. Eventually the Norman nobility
and clergy, although they had learned English, introduced from the French
words pertaining to the government, the church, the army, and the fashions
of the court, in addition to others proper to the arts, scholarship, and
medicine. Another effect of the Norman Conquest was the use of Carolingian
script and a change in spelling. Norman scribes write Old English y as u
and u as ou. Cw was changed to qu, hw to wh, and ht to ght.
Midland, the dialect of Middle English derived from the Mercian dialect of
Old English, became important during the 14th century, when the counties in
which it was spoken developed into centres of university, economic, and
courtly life. East Midland, one of the subdivisions of Midland, had by that
time become the speech of the entire metropolitan area of the capital,
London, and probably had spread south of the Thames River into Kent and
Surrey. The influence of East Midland was strengthened by its use in the
government offices of London, by its literary dissemination in the works of
the 14th-century poets Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, and
ultimately by its adoption for printed works by William Caxton. These and
other circumstances gradually contributed to the direct development of the
East Midland dialect into the Modern English language.
During the period of this linguistic transformation the other Middle
English dialects continued to exist, and dialects descending from them are
still spoken in the 20th century. Lowland Scottish, for example, is a
