The Adventure of English film series

IMPORTANT STUFF IN BRIEF

The Anglo-Saxons who invaded the British Isle after the retreat of the Romans called the
Celts who tried to find retreat in the West wealas (modern Welsh), which originally meant
“foreigner” and “slave”.

Some remnants in English from the languages of the Celts: crag (in the North) “rock”,
combe “deep valley”, and dialect words like brat or brock for “badger”. Traces in
placenames: tor- as in Torpenhow meaning “peak”; car- as in Carlisle meaning “a fortified
place”. Thames, Avon, Dover, London – all Celtic river and place names.

The the Anglo-Saxon ending –ing in place names means “the people of”, as in Ealing,
Dorking, or Reading; -ton, as in Wigton or Bridlington, means “enclosure” or “village”;
-ham, as in Birmingham, means “farm”.

Old English vocabulary is estimated to have comprised ca. 25,000 words.

Since the latter part of the 9

century (Old) English absorbed Old Norse vocabulary, the

language  of  the  Vikings  who  established  the  Danelaw.  Some  remnants:  the  ending  -by  in
place  names  like  Whitby  or  Birkby  was  an  Old  Norse  word  for  “farm”;  -thorpe,  as  in
Westhorpe  or  Nunthorpe,  meant  “village”;  -thwaite,  as  in  Huthwaite  or  Bassenthawite,
meant “a portion of land”; English surnames ending in –son (“the son of”)  are of  Danish
origin, like Harrison, Simpson, Watson, Johnson etc.; the pronouns they, their, them are Old
Norse borrowings.

Through  contact  with  Old  Norse,  Old  English  started  to  restructure  its  morphology  by
dropping  inflectional  endings,  thereby  changing  from  an  inflectional  language  to  one
where  it  was  word  order  which  more  and  more  determined  grammatical  relations;  in  other
words,  the  influence  of  Old  Norse  speeded  up  the  grammatical  development  of  Old
English.  As  a  result,  towards  the  end  of  the  Old  English  period,  inflectional  endings  were
becoming indistinct and began to be dropped so that Middle English used fewer inflectional
endings and more of word order.

The word fight is Anglo-Saxon, while its synonym, battle, comes from the language of the
Normans (Norman French) who invaded the Britain in 1066.

The last entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, written in Old English, was written in
Peterborough Cathedral in 1154.

After  the  Norman  invasion,  the  English-speaking  peasants  lived  in  small  cottages  or  huts,
while  their  French-speaking  masters  lived  privileged  lives  in  their  castles.  Our  modern
vocabulary  still  reflects  the  distinction  between  them.  English  speakers  tended  the  living
cattle,  which  we  still  cal  by  the  Old  English  words  ox  or  cow;  French  speakers  ate  the
prepared meat which came to the table, which we call by the French word beef. In the same
way, the English sheep became the French mutton, calf became veal, deer became venison,
and pig became pork – English animal, French meat in every case.

The French influence on the English language is enormous in terms of vocabulary, not in
terms of grammar.

The  English  didn’t  just  borrow  vocabulary  from  the  Norman  French,  they  also  borrowed
names:  the  Old  English  Ethelbert,  Aelfric,  Wulfstane  or  Athelstane  went  out  of  fashion,
while  in  came  the  French  names  Richard,  Robert,  Simon,  Steven,  John,  Jefferey  and
William.

Because English was an international language of trade, it acted as a conduit for words from
the markets of the East. The words saffron, mattress, hazard, camphor, alchemy, lute,
amber, syrup are Arabic borrowings that came to English through French. The phrase
checkmate comes through French from the Arabic shah mat, meaning “the king is dead”.

Although the Black Death was a human catastrophe, it triggered a series of social upheavals
which would speed the English language along the road to full restoration, from the
Norman-French and Latin dominance, as the real and recognized language of the English
nation.

John  Wycliffe  –  the  first  translator  of  the  Bible  into  English.  His  translation  was
unauthorized  by  the  Church.  The  work  on  translation  started  in  Oxford  in  1380.  Hence,
Wycliffe’s  is  the  first  English  Bible.  Wycliffe  and  his  associates  were  condemned  as
heretics by the Church.

Henry V broke with 350 years of royal tradition and wrote his dispatches home in English,
which  was  revolutionary.  Starting  in  August  1417,  he  promoted  the  use  of  the  English
language  in  government, and  his  reign  marks  the  appearance  of Chancery
Standard English  as  well  as  the  adoption  of  English  as  the  language  of  record  within
Government. He was the first king to use English in his personal correspondence since
the Norman conquest, which occurred 350 years earlier.

The Chancery Standard was a written form of English used by government bureaucracy
and for other official purposes during the 15

century. The Chancery Standard was

developed during the reign of King Henry V (1413 to 1422) in response to his order for his
chancery  (government  officials)  to  use,  like  himself,  English  rather  than Anglo-
Norman or Latin. It had become broadly standardised by about the 1430s, and it served as a
widely intelligible form of English for the first English printers, from the 1470s onwards. As
a  result,  it  has  contributed  significantly  to  the  form  of Standard  English as  it  developed
during  the Elizabethan  Era,  and  by  extension  to  the  Standard  English  of  today.  Chancery

standardised the variable spelling of Middle English vocabulary (e.g. church, cherche,
cherch, chyrch, cherge, chyrche, schyrche for “church”).

Around the time English was being standardised by Chancery, there was much debate about
the  best  way  to  spell  things.  Broadly,  there  were  “reformers”,  who  wanted  to  spell  words
according to the way they were pronounced, and “traditionalists”, who wanted to spell them
in one of the ways they had always been spelled. The traditionalists won, but they could not
help tampering with the English spelling. In a desire to make the roots of the language more
evident, words that had entered English from French, for instance, were given a Latin look.
The  letter  “b”  was  inserted  into  debt  and  doubt,  and  “c”  into  victuals.  Words  that  were
thought  to  be  of  Greek  origin  sometimes  had  their  spelling  adjusted,  so  that,  for  example,
throne  and  theatre  acquired  their  “h”.  “Rhyme”,  on  the  other  hand,  was  given  an  “h”
just  because  “rhythm”  had  one,  even  though  it  is  etymologically  absurd.  On  a  similar
principle,  an  “l”  was  inserted  in  “could”  because  it  had  become  silent,  but  it  was  still
present in “should” and “would”. The same with “h” in words like “whole” or “where”.

William Caxton – the first printer in England.

William Tyndale – a 16

century scholar and translator who did the first English

translation of the Bible that was based directly on Hebrew and Greek texts; he was also
the first to print his Bible translation, which allowed for its wide distribution.

Coverdale’s Bible – the first legal English translation of the Bible, authorised by Henry
VIII in 1535. It was translated from German.

By the end of the 16

century, there were so many competing versions (translations) of the

Bible that King James I ordered a standardised version, which is now known as the King
James Bible of 1611.