The life stories of individual words, often mazy
and conjectural, need a fixed backdrop if they are to make sense.
So first, a little history. English is a member of the
Indo-European family of languages. The precise origins of this are
still a matter of some controversy, but the consensus view is that
it came on the scene around 8,000 years ago in the general area to
the north of the Black Sea. Since then it has
split up into a large number of subgroups, which today provide nearly all the languages of Europe and
have also spread over large areas of the Middle East and
northern India. Among them are the Indo-Iranian languages,
including Hindi and ancient Sanskrit; the Slavic languages –
Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croat, and so on; the Baltic
languages, Latvian and Lithuanian (which of all these modern
languages most
closely resembles
its Indo-European
ancestor); the Celtic
languages, such as Welsh, Gaelic, and Breton; and Greek.But in the
history of English, there are two particular groups that are of
central importance. The
first is the
Romance languages:
classical Latin,
the literary language
of ancient Rome;
and French,
Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Romanian, which evolved from
Vulgar Latin, the language of the common people that spread through
the Western Roman Empire. The role of Latin and French, in
particular, in the growth of English vocabulary has been immense.
We acquired a
sizeable portion of our words from one or other of these
sources.
The second
important group, of course, is the Germanic languages: for that is
the group to which English itself belongs. The existence of the
Germanic peoples as a separate speech community dates back at least
3,000 years. Their first northern European home has been traced to
an area around the river Elbe. At this time they all
spoke the
same language,
which is
generally known
as Common Germanic.
Around the 2nd century BC this began to split up into three
distinct dialects. One was East
Germanic. The
only East
Germanic language
of which any
written evidence survives is Gothic. Now extinct, it was spoken by
Germanic peoples who migrated back eastwards to the area of modern
Bulgaria and the Crimea. It provides us with our closest glimpse of
what prehistoric C common Germanic must have been like. The second
was North Germanic, which has evolved into modern
Swedish,Danish, Norwegian,
and Icelandic.
And lastly
there was
West Germanic, the
ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and
English.
The forerunners of English crossed the Channel in the 5th and 6th
centuries AD.
They were brought by peoples from the northeastern corner of the
European mainland, around Jutland and southern Denmark – the
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.They
spoke a
mutually intelligible
set of
Germanic dialects
(whose closest modern continental relative is
Frisian), which formed the basis of what is now known as Old
English (the alternative term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is no
longer much used). This
was a more
or less
homogeneous language,
but with marked geographical
differences reflecting the areas into which the various Germanic
peoples had moved: the Angles into the Midlands (where Mercian was
spoken)and the North (whose form of Old English is now called
Northumbrian); the Jutes into Kent; and the Saxons into the rest of
southern and western England (their speech is known as West
Saxon).
|
