History Of English

The English language is spoken by 750 million people in the world as either the official language of a nation, a second language, or in a mixture with other languages (such as pidgins and creoles.) English is the (or an) official language in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; however, the United States has no official language.

Indo-European language and people

English is classified genetically as a Low West Germanic language of the Indo-European family of languages. The early history of the Germanic languages is based on reconstruction of a Proto-Germanic language that evolved into German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and the Scandinavian languages.

In 1786, Sir William Jones discovered that Sanskrit contained many cognates to Greek and Latin. He conjectured a Proto-Indo-European language had existed many years before. Although there is no concrete proof to support this one language had existed, it is believed that many languages spoken in Europe and Western Asia are all derived from a common language. A few languages that are not included in the Indo-European branch of languages include Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian; of which the last three belong to the Finno-Ugric language family.

Speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) lived in Southwest Russia around 4,000 to 5,000 BCE. They had words for animals such as bear or wolf (as evidenced in the similarity of the words for these animals in the modern I-E languages.) They also had domesticated animals, and used horse-drawn wheeled carts. They drank alcohol made from grain, and not wine, indicating they did not live in a warm climate. They belonged to a patriarchal society where the lineage was determined through males only (because of a lack of words referring to the female's side of the family.) They also made use of a decimal counting system by 10's, and formed words by compounding. This PIE language was also highly inflectional as words had many endings corresponding to cases.

The spread of the language can be attributed to two theories. The I-E people either wanted to conquer their neighbors or look for better farming land. Either way, the language spread to many areas with the advancement of the people. This rapid and vast spread of the I-E people is attributed to their use of horses for transportation.

Germanic Languages

The subgroup of Germanic languages contains many differences that set them apart from the other I-E languages.

1. Grimm's Law (or the First Sound Shift) helps to explain the consonant changes from P-I-E to Germanic.

• a. Aspirated voiced stops became Unaspirated voiced stops (Bʰ, dʰ, gʰ became b, d, g)
• b. Voiced stops became Voiceless stops (B, d, g became p, t, k)
• c. Voiceless stops became Voiceless fricatives (P, t, k became f, θ, x (h))

Verner's Law explains other exceptions that Grimm's law does not include.

2. Two Tense Verbal System: There is a past tense marker (-ed) and a present tense marker (-s) on the verb (without using auxiliary verbs.)

3. Weak Past Tense: Used a dental or alveolar suffix to express the past (such as -ed in English, -te in German, or -de in Swedish.)

4. Weak and Strong Adjectives: Each adjective had a different form whether it was preceded by a determiner or no determiner.

5. Fixed Stress: The stress of words was fixed on the first syllable.

6. Vowel Changes (Proto Germanic)

• Short o to short a (Latin: hortus, English: garden)


• Long a to long o (Latin: mater, OE: modor)

7. Common Vocabulary: Words developed that hadn't been used before, such as nautical terms (sea). Others include rain, earth, loaf, wife, meat and fowl.