2. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
We often hear people delivering opinions about different languages:
French is romantic Italian musical. For the students of language, such
impressionistic judgements are not very useful. Rather, to describe a language we
need to explain how it goes about doing the work that all languages must do; and
it is helpful to compare it with other languages especially members of the
language groups it belongs to.
Language may be compared in a number of ways. Every language has its
own repertory of sounds,as known by all students who have had so struggle to
learn to pronounce a foreign language. Every language also has its own rules for
accentuating words and its own patterns of intonation, the rising and falling pitch
of our voices as we speak. Every language has its own vocabulary, of course,
though when we‘re lucky we find a good bit of overlap between the vocabulary
of our native language and that of the language we‘re learning. And every language has its own way of signalling how words function in utterances of
expressing who performed an action, what the action was, when it took place,
whether it is now finished or still going on, what or who was acted upon, for
whose beneft the action was performed and so on.
Based on above description there are three kinds of English language,
2.1 Old English
Old English is prior the beginnings of English, the inhabitants of Great
Britain spoke primarily Celtic languages. During the later part of the 5th century,
three tribes invaded England from Western Germany and Denmark. These tribes
spoke a similar language that, over says, develop into Old English.
There are three about Old English
1) The Indo-Eorupean languages
The Indo-Eorupean languages do certain things in much the same way. For
example, they share some basic vocabulary. Consider these words for ―father‖ :
Old English : foe
Latin : pater
Greek : pater
Sanskrit : pitr
We can easily see the resemblance among the latin, greek and sanskrit
words. We may begin to understand why the Old English word looks different
from the others when we compare these words for ―foot‖:
Old English : fot
Latin : pedem
Greek : poda
Sanskrit : padam
good bit of vocabulary, through the changes that all languages go through often
bring it about that the same word looks quite different in different languages.
2) The Germanic languages
Perhaps the most important development that distinguishes the Germanic
languages from others in the Indo-European family is the one that produced the
difference, illustrated above, between the ―p‖ of Latin and the ―f‖ of Old English faeder.
3) West Germanic and Low German
The West Germanic languages differ from North and East Germanic in
number of features which are not very striking in themselves, but quite numerous.
For example, the consonant [z] became [r] in North and West Germanic.
Low German is defined in part by something that did not happen to it. This
non-event is the ‗high german consonan shift‘, which alterd the sounds of high
german dialects as radically as Grimm‘s Law had altered the sounds of Germanic.
Students of Modern German will recognize the effects of the High German
consonant shift in such pairs as English eat and German essen, and English sleep
and German schlafen. Another important difference between high German and
Low German is that the Low languages did not distinguish person in plural verbs.
In grammar, Old English was much more highly inflected than Modern
English is. That is,there were more case endings for nouns, more person and
number and number endings for verbs, a more complicated pronoun system,
various endings for adjectives, and so on. Old English nouns had four cases-
instrumental case besides. Present day English has only two case for nouns-
common case and possessive case. Adjectives now have no case system at all. On
the other hand, we now use a more rigid word order and more structure words (
prepostions, auxilieries, and the like) to express relationships than Old English
did.
2.2 Middle English
The invaders from the northern regions of France brought a form of
French with them. The new language became the official languabge of the
government, trade and the rulling class. The division of the classes began to
include linguistics, with the upper or noble classes speaking French, while the
lower classes spoke Middle English. This contiuned until the 14th century when
English once more became the common language. Middle English changed
considerably over the centuries to include a number of French words in the
vocabulary.
2.2.1 Early Middle English
Early Middle English (1100–1300) has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (with many Norse borrowings in the northern parts of the country), but a greatly
simplified inflectional system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in
Old English by the dative and locative cases are replaced in Early Middle English
with prepositional constructions. This replacement is, however, incomplete: the
Old English genitive "-es" survives in the modern Saxon genitive—it is now called the "possessive": e.g., the form "dog's" for the longer "of the dog". But
including most of the roughly one dozen forms of the definite article ("the"). The
dual grammatical number (expressing exactly two of a thing) also disappeared
from English during the Early Middle English period (apart from personal
pronouns), further simplifying the language.
Deeper changes occurred in the grammar. Gradually, the wealthy and the
government Anglicised again, although Norman (and subsequently French)
remained the dominant language of literature and law until the 14th century, even
after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the English
monarchy. The new English language did not sound the same as the old; for, as
well as undergoing changes in vocabulary, the complex system of inflected
endings Old English had, was gradually lost or simplified in the dialects of spoken
Middle English. This change was gradually reflected in its increasingly diverse
written forms as well. The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from
inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages,
and therefore cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking
sections of the population: English did, after all, remain the language of the vast
majority. It is also argued[7] that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact
on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that,
although Norse- and English-speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each
other, the Norse-speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English
words influenced Middle English's loss of inflectional endings. Another argument
is that the morphological simplifications were caused by Romano-Britons who
British Latin (which may have lacked noun case, like most modern Romance
languages).
2.3 Modern English
Modern English began in the 15th century, the transition from Middle
Eglish to Modern English began. Much of the transition was authority to the
expansion of the British Empire throughout the world and to the development of
printing. The printing press and increasing in publishing of books drove the
standardization of the languge. spelling grammar was formalized due to the
publication of various literary works and pamphlets.
Barnet (1967 : 64) say that Modern English was also the period of the
English Renaissance when people develoved, on the one hand, a keen interest in
the past and, on the other, a more daring and imaginative view of the picture.
Modern English has made many features of Modern English perfectly familiar to
many people down to present times, even though we do not use these features in
present day speech andwriting. It is not always realized, however, that
considerable sounds changes have taken place between early Modern English and
the english of the present day. Modern English did succeed in establishing certain
attiudes which, though they haven‘t had much effect on the development of the
language itself, have certainly changed the native speakers feeling about the
language.
When we speak English now, we must specify whether we mean
American English, British English, and Australian English, Indian English, or
orthe Englishman to America confident that he will always understand and be
understood.
2.4 How Old and Modern English are related
Old and Modern English are very related. Modern English are very related
to Old English, though in different way, for old and Modern English are really
different stages in the development of a single language. The changes that turned
Old english into Middle English and Middle English into Modern English took
places gradually, over the centuries and there never was a time when people
perceived their language as having broken radically with the language spoken a
generation before. It is worth mentioning in this connection that the terms Old
English, and Modern English are themselves modern, speakers of these languages
all would have said, if asked that the language they spoke was English.
There is no point, on the other hand in playing down the differences
between Old and Modern English, for they are obvious at a glance. The rules for
spelling Old English were different from the rules for spelling Modern English,
and that accounts for some of the difference. But there are more substantial
changes as well. The three vowels that appeared in the inflectional endings of Old
English words were reduced to one in Middle English and then most inflectional
endings dissappeared entirely. Most case distinctions were lost, so weremost of
the endings added to verbs, even while the verb system became more complex,
adding such features as a future tense, a perfect and a pluperfect. While the
sentences became more fixed, so that, it came to sound archaid and awkward to
place and object before the verb, as Old English hadfrequently done.
The vocabulary of Old English was of course Germanic, more closely
related to the vocabularyof such languages as Dutch and German than to Frenchor
Latin. The viking age, which culminated in the reign of the Danish king Cnut in
England, introduced a great many Danish words in to English but these were
Germanic words as well.the conquest of England by a French speaking people in
the year 1066 eventually brought about immense changes in the vocabulary of
english. During the Middle English period, English borrowed some ten thousand
words from French, and at the sme time it was friendly to borrowings from latin ,
dutch and flemish. Now relatively few Modern English words come form Old
English; but the words that do survive are some of the most common in the
language, including almost all the grammar words‘ (articles, pronouns,
prepositions) and a great many words for everyday concepts. For example, the
words in this paragraph that come to us from Old English
Some of the Modern English which come Old English : Eald (old), brodor
(brother), hus (house), nett (net), riht (right), widuwe (widow), wiftman (woman),
half (loaf), apostle (apostol), chalk (cealc), wine (win), monk (munuc), gefaran
(act), onettan (active, be), gelyfed (advanced), ongean (again, against), eall (all),
mid (amid), hatheart (angry), deor (animal), ahwear (anywhere), gretan
(approach), fyrd (army), gelendan (arrive), beon (be), leger (bed), geliefan
(believe), deore (beloved), betera (better), begeondan (beyond), lean (blean),
(bone), brieg (bridge), beorht (bright), byrnan (burn), ciese (cheese), breost
(chest), betynan (close), heretoga (commander), bisgu (concern), belucan
(contain), coc (cook), scieppan (create), cyrm (crry), cuckoo (geac), astandan (get
up), acennan (give birth), alecgan (give up), abugan (give away), awedan (go
mad), abugan (yield), wage (war), anbidian (wait ), abaedan (ward off ), ansund
(whole), amyran (wound), awritan (write), ahebban (raise), awestan (ravage),
alysan ( release), aferran (remove), areccean (render), ahreddan (rescue),
anwealda (ruler), asecgan (say), ahreddan (save), asendan (send), andgit (sense),
assettan (set), anfeald (simple), asingan (sing), anlepe (single), ansund (sound),
arian (spare), afylan (stain), astandan (stand up), abrecan (storm), asteccan (
stretch out), atteon (ateon), awendan ( translate), asmeagan (understand).
2.5 Old English different from Modern English
First of all, Old English was spoken most recently almost a thousand
years ago. Languages just do change, gradually and inevitably, over time, a
phenomenon that linguistics has a fairly hard time explaining, and certainly
predicting. But there are a couple of factors that affected the English language that
tended to hasten linguistic change in English. (In contrast, Icelandic, a language
quite similar to Old English in many ways, has undergone very little change, so
that Icelandic children read the Viking sagas in school without need for much
adaptation or special apparatus such as glossing.)
The first factor that tended to make English change rapidly is the arrival in
England, over a period of a couple of hundred years from the 850s onwards, of a
of another couple of hundred years of a bunch of people who spoke Old French.
This wouldn't have made much of a difference if these people had simply
assimilated to the English-speaking population, but they didn't, they maintained
their own languages and probably even insisted on them. Moreover, the groups
who spoke these languages had prestige, whether locally in the "Danelaw" in the
case of the Viking settlers who spoke Old Norse, or nationally in the case of the
Norman conquerors--which meant that there was some pressure for
English-speaking people to learn and even to prefer the other languages. Under these
conditions, various kinds of linguistic mixture occurred: phonological, lexical,
syntactic, and so on. In other words, English took on sounds, words, and ways of
constructing sentences from these other languages.
The second important factor producing rapid language change was the fact
that for approximately two hundred years after the Norman conquest, English was
hardly a written language at all, since almost all writing went on either in the
language of the ruling Norman invaders (French) or in the international language
of the church, of diplomacy, and of learning (Latin). (In fact, for a further hundred
years after that, English was still not a prestigious language, although it was
beginning to be a written language again.) Writing normally acts as a kind of
brake to language change, since literate people are influenced in their linguistic
habits not only by what they hear but by what they read, which is liable to be stuff
from some time ago. Without writing, and exposed to influence from other
languages with which it was mixing, English changed rapidly. By the time of
language in England, English had adopted hundreds of words from French and
quite a few from Old Norse, and had undergone important simplifications in its
system of inflections.
Whether as a result of language mixture, or for some other reasons
(linguists disagree), there was later a lot of sound changes in the English vowel
system. During a period perhaps from about 1450 to about 1750 c.e. the change
called the Great Vowel Shift occurred. It accounts for the quite startling
differences in pronunciation between Modern English "long" vowels and Old
English long vowels--most of the consonants stayed pretty much the same, and so
did the short vowels.
So to sum up, Modern English is different from Old English because
languages just do change over time, because linguistic change was accelerated
during a period of contact with other languages and the removal of written
language from the equation, and because phonological change, especially the
Great Vowel Shift, was added to lexical change (all those loan words) and
