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História da Língua Inglesa
History of the English Language
by Tatyana Kostadinova Statement of Purpose
The objective of this essay is to present an overview of the development of the English language from its origin as an Indo-European language up to the Middle Ages. My primary focus here will be to show how various changes that occurred during each of these stages have resulted in permanent changes to Present Day English. Sound files (.wav) have been supplied in the Old English and Middle English sections to provide readers with an opportunity to hear the sounds of English from these periods.
While reviewing the sample texts, spellings, and transcriptions provided in the present essay, it is important to understand that during each period of English development, multiple dialects existed. PDE is a direct descendant of the London dialect that developed during the Middle Ages and the Middle English examples in this essay are based on this dialect. Unfortunately, relatively little information remains concerning the Middle English London dialect's predecessor from the Old English period. As a result, the Old English examples in this essay are from a late variety of West Saxon English. This is a late variety of Old English and may have been a somewhat artificial literary dialect. Likewise, some examples of English development during the Germanic period are drawn from Gothic. Technically, Gothic is an East Germanic dialect and PDE descended from West Germanic. Nevertheless, these examples provide a valid insight into the development of the English Language.
Phonemic Description
Unlike the Web, traditional texts must rely exclusively on the description of sound. Those who are unfamiliar with the subject of phonetics but wish to study historical phonemics using texts should be aware of the following challenges.
Multiple pronunciation standards exist among English speakers. For instance, it is not sufficient to read that the first vowel in Hælende is pronounced like the "a" in "bath" as speakers may legitimately pronounce the same word differently. Certainly, the Englishman who speaks with RP pronounces "bath" differently than the American who uses GA pronunciation. It is therefore necessary to map consonant and vowel sounds to a set of grapheme symbols and describe the word using these symbols. This process is known as phonetic transcription.
The Latin alphabet provides the basis for phonetic symbols. It is, however, inadequate for representing all consonant and vowel phonemes. As a result, it is necessary to use symbols outside of the Latin alphabet and to use familiar symbols in unfamiliar ways. For instance, /e/ represents the sound of the vowel "a" in the GA pronunciation of the word "face".
Multiple phoneme symbol standards exist. Thus, using RP symbols, the Englishman says /ba:ø/ and the American says /bæø/. Using GA symbols, they would say /baø/ and /bæø/, respectively. This reflects the fact that in British English vowel length is a phonemic characteristic while in American English, it is not. Therefore, GA symbols do not incorporate a symbol for vowel length.
Many phonemes used in by-gone eras are no longer used in English today. Therefore the sound of such a phoneme must be described using another language. For example, the Old English sounds represented by the symbols /y/ and /y:/ can be described as the vowel sounds in the French words cru and sûr, respectively. Unless the student of Old English is also a student of French, such a description is hardly meaningful.
The motivation to produce this web page was to overcome these difficulties and to facilitate the learning of historical English sound systems by augmenting traditional transcription with audio clips.
Grapheme-Phoneme correspondence
These web pages utilize the grapheme symbols presented in C.M. Millward's college text, A Biography of the English Language. Tables listing these symbols and their corresponding sounds are given below. Technically, the consonants should be described in terms of their place and manner of articulation. For instance, the grapheme b should be described as a bilabial voiced stop. Likewise, vowels should be described in terms of the tongue position within the mouth. Specifically, the height of the tongue, the relative forward or backward location of its highest point, and the degree of tension in the tongue during articulation. Furthermore, to describe the phonemes of historical English, the rounding or unrounding of the lips and the length of the vowel should also be indicated. Since such descriptions would be meaningful only to students of phonetics, the sounds are instead described in terms of familiar words. However, as previously mentioned, several standards of English pronunciation exist. Again, C.M. Millward's text is followed and GA pronunciation is assumed.
Consonants Vowels /p/ pill /f/ feel /h/ heel /i/ keyed // could /b/ bill /v/ veal /m/ hum /
/ kid /o/ code /t/ till /ø/ thigh /n/ Hun /e/ Kade /
/ cawed /d/ dill /ð/ thy /
/ hung /
/ Ked /k/ kill /s/ seal /l/ lore /æ/ cad /g/ gill /z/ zeal /r/ roar /
/ cud, curd /
/ chill /
/ mesher /w/ wore /a/ cod, card /
/ Jill /
/ measure /j/ yore /u/ cooed
The following example illustrates the use of phonetic symbols to transcribe a Present Day English (PDE) sentence spoken with General American (GA) pronunciation (Millward):
They told me you had been to her and mentioned me to him. ðe 'told md 'b
English Morphology
The history of the English Language is a history of linguistic change. Many sound shifts occurred in both consonants and vowels and many graphemes were introduced or lost. But most significantly, English changed from a synthetic language to an analytic language. Originally, the language expressed syntactic relationships primarily by inflections. Today, English expresses grammatical relationships by means of word order, prepositions, periphrastic constructions, and a very limited set of inflectional morphemes. Although the original synthetic system is conceptually different from Present Day English (PDE), the use of inflections in the old system may be better understood by examining the inflections that remain in PDE.
An inflection is a variation in the form of a word used to indicate a change in meaning or a change in grammatical relationships with other elements in the sentence. The patterns of inflections for nouns and pronouns are referred to as declension; the patterns for adjectives are referred to as comparison; the patterns for verbs are referred to as conjugation. Not including personal pronouns, PDE has only eight inflectional endings. Examples of these eight endings are listed below:
1. possessive nouns - The bike's wheel. 2. plural nouns - His new shirts. 3. third-person singular present indicative - He runs every morning. 4. simple past - He walked one mile. - He swam one mile. 5. past participle - He had walked two miles the previous day. - He had swum two miles the previous day. 6. present participle - He is swimming in the race. 7. comparative -er - This race is longer than the previous. 8. comparative -est - This is the longest race he has done.Two examples are provided for the simple past and past participle verb conjugations. The first example is a regular verb that is conjugated with the -ed suffix. The second example is an irregular verb that is inflected by a change in the root vowel.
Of all the word classes, however, pronouns have retained the most inflections. PDE pronoun inflections are discussed in detail in the Old English section. Between the brief overview of PDE inflections provided here and the OE section, the role of inflections in historical English periods should be at least intuitive.
Indo-European 3000 B.C.
Due to the pervasiveness of Christianity in the psyche of Medieval Europe, Hebrew was thought to be the progenitor of all languages. In the late sixteenth century, this idea was finally refuted by J.J. Scaliger. Two centuries later in 1786, Sir William Jones hypothesized that most European languages derived instead from a single "lost" Indo-European language. He observed that when languages share many features not found in other languages, these languages must be derived from the same language. The set of languages derived from the same source are known as cognate languages and are said to belong to the same language family. The Indo-European language family consists of ten sub-families. English is derived from the Germanic subfamily.
External History
The Indo-Europeans were Late Stone Age people. Although their precise geographic origin is unknown, research suggests that they may have originated from the region north of the Black Sea. Beginning after 3000 B.C., the Indo-Europeans began a fifteen hundred year migration that took them across Europe and into Asia.
Linguistic History
Since no texts written in Common Indo-European (CIE) exist, scholars have worked backwards to reconstruct the CIE language roots by comparing records of cognate languages during various stages of their development. Using this technique, scholars have recreated over two thousand roots of the CIE language. The following examples show the original CIE root and the corresponding words in Present Day English (PDE). The PDE words that have Germanic roots are contrasted to those that are loan words from Latin, which is a cognate language.
CIE PDE (Gmc) Cognate (Latin loan) *TEN- tenuis "to stretch" "thin" "tenuous, attenuate, tent" *PET- pinna "to rush or fly" "feather" "pennant" *DEM/DOM- domus "house,household" "timber" "domicile, domestic" *BHER- ferre "carry" "bear,birth" "refer, prefer, infer"* Words preceded by an asterisk (*) are reconstructed words not found in the original written documents.
Inflection
Scholars have also determined that the CIE language used a free stress pattern. Any syllable could be stressed and the stress was indicated by pitch. The CIE vowels were used in a system of vowel gradation (also known as ablaut) in which changes of vowels within a root carried morphological information such as tense or part of speech. The vowel that was used within the root of the word depended on the placement of the stress within the word.
Ablaut was only one method by which the CIE language indicated inflections. The CIE language was a synthetic language and therefore used inflections to convey all grammatical information. Four major word categories are identified for CIE based on the types of inflections used by these parts of speech. These categories are nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. All were inflected for case, number, and gender. Verbs were also inflected to indicate aspect, voice, and mood. The following list shows these inflectional categories:
Case nominative - for subject of finite verbs or predicate nouns/adjectives genitive - express possession, source, or partition dative - indicate indirect object of a verb ablative - used to indicate direction away from a source locative - indicated place in or at which instrumental - express agency or means accusative - indicate direct object of a verb vocative - indicate person or thing being directly addressed Aspect present - continuing action in present imperfect - continuing action in past aorist - momentary action in the past perfect - completed action pluperfect - completed action in past future - actions to come Mood indicative - statements of fact subjunctive - expressing will optative - expressing wishes imperative - expressing commands injunctive - expressing unreality Numbers - singular, dual, plural Genders - masculine, feminine, neuter Persons - first, second, third (pronouns only) Voice - active, passive, middleAs the English language evolved into an analytical language, inflections ceased to be the primary means of conveying grammatical information. Indeed, some grammatical concepts, such as aorist aspect, dual numbers, and noun genders, are no longer used in PDE morphology. The focus of CIE verb conjugations was on aspect, which focuses on the duration, repetition, or completion of the action being expressed by the verb. In contrast, PDE verb conjugations focus on "tense," which relates the action expressed by the verb to time. Whereas the CIE verbs were inflected for six aspects, PDE retains only one purely aspectual form, the progressive aspect, and conveys twelve different tenses.
In contrast to the large assortment of CIE inflectional categories, PDE uses inflections for only a small number of grammatical functions. These functions, with the exception of PDE pronouns, are discussed in the Overview. The PDE use of inflections in pronouns is discussed in the Old English section.
Germanic 100 B.C.
Linguistic History
Until the beginning of the Christian era, Germanic speakers are believed to have spoken various dialects of a single Common Germanic (CGmc) Language. After this time, the tribes migrated into various parts of Europe and developed distinct languages. These languages are divided into East, North, and West Germanic. The East Germanic languages eventually became extinct. The Scandinavian languages developed from North Germanic and English developed from West Germanic.
Scholars have analyzed characteristics of all IE languages in order to reconstruct IE roots. Likewise, they have identified contrasting characteristics of IE languages in order to divide them into appropriate sub-families. Several important characteristics distinguish the CGmc languages from other Indo-European languages.
Dental preterites
First, Common Germanic added a new category of verbs referred to as "weak verbs" or dental preterite verbs. These verbs are characterized by past tense and past participle endings that contain the sounds [d] or [t]. This characteristic was carried forward and is reflected in the PDE past tense and past participle conjugation of regular verbs. PDE examples are the verbs cleaned (-[d]) and walked (-[t]).
The First Consonant Shift
Second, the language underwent two consonant transformations. In the first sound shift, all the IE voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives, the IE voiced stops became voiceless stops, and the IE voiced aspirated stops became voiced stops. The following chart shows these changes:
IE Gmc IE Gmc IE Gmc /p/ > /f/ /b/ > /p/ /bh/ > /b/ /t/ > /ø/ /d/ > /t/ /dh/ > /d/ /k/ > /x/(h) /g/ > /k/ /gh/ > /g/This shift was first codified by Jakob Grimm in 1822 and is known as Grimm's Law. Since Grimm's Law applies only to the Germanic languages, its effect can be readily observed in the following examples, which contrast Germanic and cognate (Latin and Greek) language words.
Latin Greek Gothic OE PDE pedem poda fotus fot foot tres treis þrír þri(e) three tu tu þú þu you thou (ME) cordem kardia hairto heorte heart* Note that þ is pronounced /ø/.
In these cases it is clear that the Germanic language word was affected but not the cognate. The same words in later periods of the English language are also provided. This is to demonstrate that once the shift occurred, the change often carried through to the present day. The examples in the Indo-European section also illustrate this consonant shift.
However, a series of exceptions appeared to contradict Grimm's Law. Specifically, it was observed that sometimes the CIE voiceless stops, [p,t,k], were transformed to voiced stops, [b,d,g]. For example:
heptá (Greek) --> sibun (Gothic) --> seven (PDE) centum (Latin) --> hundred (OE)In 1877, Karl Verner explained these exceptions. The CIE voiceless stops did indeed change to Germanic voiceless fricatives. But when these voiceless fricatives were surrounded by voiced sounds and preceded by an unaccented vowel, they became voiced. This explanation became known as Verner's Law. Together, the effects of Grimm's Law and Verner's Law is often referred to as the First Consonant Shift.
Fixed Stress Placement
Sometime after the First Consonant Shift occurred, Germanic primary stress became fixed on the root of almost all words. This change had far reaching effects.
First, the CIE system of vowel gradation ceased to function in Germanic since the conditioning factor (variable stress placement) was no longer used. This had the effect of freezing certain vowel alterations. echoes of these alterations can be seen today in PDE strong verbs such as in sing, sang, sung.
Second, placing primary stress on the root of a word caused the ending to become de-emphasized. This in turn led to a progressive loss of inflectional endings. As a result, the English language eventually grew into a highly analytical language. However, during the Germanic period, the language was still highly synthetic although Germanic languages did develop prepositions to compensate for certain inflections that it lost.
This pattern of change from a synthetic to an analytic language can also be seen by the reduction in the number of Germanic inflectional categories as compared to CIE. The following list summarizes the CIE categories that lost their distinctness and were combined into a single Germanic category.
CIE Germanic Case dative ablative locative dative Aspect present future present imperfect perfect aorist pluperfect past (=preterite) Mood subjunctive optative injunctive optative (=subjunctive) Voice active passive middle activeAll other CIE inflectional categories were carried forward into the Common Germanic language.
Old English A.D.450 - A.D. 1100
Þa wæs sumes hundred-mannes þeowa untrum, se wæs sweltendlic, se wæs him diere. And þa he gehierde be þæm Hælende, he sende to him Iudea aldras, and bæd þæt he come, and his þeow gehælde.
Then was (a)certain centurion's servant unwell, he was ready to die, Þá wæs sumes hundred-mannes þéowa untrum, sé wæs sweltendlic, ða wæs sumes hundred mannes øExternal History
The Celts were the first Indo-Europeans to settle England several centuries B.C.. By A.D. 50, the Romans had subjugated most of Britian. The official language of the land became Latin, but the natives continued to speak Celtic dialects. Although Celtic is part of the IE family, it is a cognate language to Germanic. It was not until after the Romans withdrew from Britian in 410 A.D. that the first Germanic speakers began to arrive. In 449 A.D., the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians invaded England. Their common language was referred to as English. By 550 A.D. the Celtic population had been decimated and the conquerors ruled the land in the form of seven major kingdoms. These kingdoms formed the basis of the English aristocracy and more or less survived Danish Vikings and Norse invasions until the arrival of William the Conquorer in 1066. During this period, the Roman and Irish Church proselytized throughout England and the English futhroc was replaced by the Latin alphabet.
Linguistic History
The replacement of the Germanic runic alphabet with the Christian Latin alphabet was an important event in Old English phonology. An ideal alphabet maintains a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme. As time progresses, phonological changes alter the association between a sound and alphabetic character, sometimes to the point that spelling and alphabet reform are required. However, when the Christian alphabet was first accepted during the Old English period, the relationship between grapheme and phoneme was very close; words were pronounced as they were spelled. For instance, in the OE words cnight, gnæt, and clamb, each letter in the consonant clusters cn, ght, gn, and mb were distinctly pronounced. Silent letters did not exist in OE as they do in PDE. This close correspondence between grapheme and phoneme can be clearly seen in the transcription of the above OE passage.
In contrast to the Germanic period, OE consonants underwent little change. In fact, after the Germanic period, the English consonant system has remained highly stable even to the present day. All the OE consonant phonemes are still present in PDE, although PDE has incorporated several new ones.
Front Mutation
The OE vowel system, however, underwent major changes. One of these changes, referred to as Front Mutation or I/J Mutation, produced changes that were carried forward to PDE. In front mutation, if a stressed syllable were followed by an unstressed syllable that contained an [i] or [j], the preceding stressed vowel was fronted or raised. The [i] or [j] that caused the fronting either dropped from the word or changed to [e]. One class of OE nouns contained an [i] in its dative singular and nominative-accusative plural inflections. As a result of front mutation, a series of OE irregular singular/plural oppositions developed as in fot/fet, þoð/þeð, mann/menn, and mus/mys. These are the PDE irregular plurals foot/feet, tooth/teeth, man/men, and mouse/mice. Many Germanic weak verbs were formed by adding a formative suffix to another part of speech or a strong verb. When the suffix began with an [i] or [j], front mutation occurred. This gave rise to a large set of oppositions that are reflected in the PDE examples blood/bleed, doom/deem, sale/sell, tale/tell, and whole/heal.
Ablaut
Old English also used an ablaut series to provide morphological information (tense, person, number) for strong verbs. In contrast to the Indo-European ablaut, which was determined by stress placement, the OE ablaut series was fixed and depended only on which of the seven classes the verb belonged. Each class required only four different stem vowels for the ablaut series to represent the infinitive, past singular, past plural, and past participle. For example, class 3 verbs used the ablaut series i-a-u-u for these tenses. Thus, the class 3 verb singan (PDE to sing) was inflected as singþ, sang, sungon, (ge)sungen from which PDE derives sing/sang/sung. (Of course, PDE does not distinguish between the singular and plural past). The OE class 3 strong verbs was the class that survived the best into PDE. Begin/began/begun, drink/drank/drunk, swim/swam/swum, and many other PDE irregular verbs that follow the i-a-u pattern are derived from OE class 3 strong verbs.
Inflections
As discussed in previous sections, English was originally a synthetic language that used inflections to provide morphological information such as case, gender, and number. As an example, the noun stone was historically a masculine noun and was therefore inflected as follows in both CGmc and OE, respectively:
Singular Plural CGmc OE CGmc OE Nominative se stan þa stanas Accusative þone stan þa stanas Genative þæs stanes þara stana Dative þæm stane þæm stanumIn PDE, the only inflection that could be applied to a noun is the plurality indicator -s. For example, in the PDE sentence "Tom threw the stone at the wall", the word stone is a direct object. In the sentence "Tom hit the wall with the stone", stone is used as an indirect object. In both PDE sentences, stone remains uninflected and the case information is carried by word order or a prepositional phrase. In OE, however, the accusative singular stan, and the the dative singular stane, would have been used for the direct and indirect objects forms, respectively. (Note that in contrast to CGmc, OE used a common stem and relied on declensions to indicate grammatical information. Also note that the OE nominative and accusative declensions were no longer distinct. This was part of the pattern that eventually lead to an analytical system.)
To many speakers of PDE, a synthetic language that inflects even nouns may seem wholly unfamiliar. However, PDE has retained one class of words that closely resembles a synthetic system because of its use of inflections to provide most morphological information. This class, PDE pronouns, is inflected for person, number, gender, and case:
Subject Object Possessive Singular Plural Singular Plural Singular Plural 1st Person I we me us mine ours 2nd Person you you you you yours yours 3rd Person she/he/it they her/him/it them hers/his theirs one oneWhen one compares the PDE personal pronoun inflections with the OE personal pronoun inflections, the similarities between the two are obvious. The following table compares the OE and PDE personal pronouns:
First Person Singular Dual Plural Nominative ic (I) wit wé (we) Accusative mé,mec (me) unc ús (us) Genitive mín (mine) uncer úre (ours) Dative mé (me) unc ús (us) Second Person Singular Dual Plural Nominative þú (you) git gé (you) Accusative þé,þec (you) inc éow, éowic (you) Genitive þín (your) incer éower (yours) Dative þé (you) inc éow (you) Third Person Masculine Feminine Neuter Plural Nominative hé (he) héo (she) hit (it) híe (they) Accusative hine (him) híe (her) hit (it) híe (them) Genitive his (his) hiere (hers) his (its) hiera (theirs) Dative him (him) hiere (her) him (it) him (them)As the above table shows, PDE has lost only the distinction between the accusative and dative cases, the distinction between singular and plural in the second person, and the dual category. In some respects, however, the PDE pronoun system is more complex than OE. PDE has distinct possessive adjective and possessive pronoun forms (my/mine, your/yours, our/ours, etc.). OE used the genitive forms for both. Furthermore, PDE has distinct reflexive forms (myself, yourself, ourselves, etc.) whereas OE used the dative or accusative forms to express reflexivity.
Clearly, the PDE personal pronoun system is just as synthetic in nature as the OE personal pronoun system. However, the primary difference between PDE as an analytical language and OE as a synthetic language, is that in OE all word categories were highly inflected, not just pronouns. By recognizing the extent to which the PDE pronoun system is a synthetic system, the synthetic language system used in the early periods of English development should be at least intuitively understandable.
Middle English A.D.1066 - A.D. 1509
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open yë
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),- Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne hawles, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem holpen whan that they were seeke.
Geoffrey Chaucer
General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.
Consonants
By the end of the Middle English period, the consonant system was identical to that of PDE with the exception of phonemic /
The loss of inflectional suffixes was not limited to verb conjugations. Every word category in Middle English lost almost all inflections. As a result, a phonemic contrast between voiced and voiceless word-final fricatives developed. The effects of this are seen in PDE verb/noun, verb/adjective, or singular/plural contrasts such as house/house, cleave/cleft, lose/lost, bathe/bath, knife/knives, path/paths, and half/halves.
vowels
The vowel system of English continued to evolve during the ME period and experienced both qualitative and quantitative change. Qualitative change refers to the change in the pronunciation of vowels and quantitative change refers to the change in vowel length during pronunciation.
During the ME period, the pronunciation of the short vowels /a/, /
The quantitative characteristic of vowels (and consonants) are no longer used phonemically in PDE. Historically, English used this characteristic as a phonemic quality. For instance OE gód (PDE good) contrasted with god (PDE God) on the basis of vowel quantity. In PDE, these words contrast on the basis of vowel quality. Likewise, OE man (PDE man) contrasted contrasted with OE mann (PDE mankind) on the basis of consonant length. In PDE consonant quantity is no longer a phonemic characteristic. During the OE period, vowel quantity became less distinct as the short vowels lengthened and the long vowels shortened. These conditioned changes occurred in a large number of situations. One condition was a stressed syllable followed by two or more unstressed syllables. In this situation, the vowel of the stressed syllable always shortened. This accounted for the ME contrasts Chríst/Christemesse and bréke/brekefast, which are the PDE contrasts Christ/Christmas and break/breakfast. Another situation that produced this change was if the short vowels /a/, /
To be or not to be
Middle English was very much a transitional period and many changes that occurred at this time were later lost or obscured by changes in future periods. In a few instances, however, certain changes gained final resolution during this period. The important and highly anomalous verb to be is one such example.
During the OE period, the verb to be had two different stems. One stem was the infinitive wesan and the other was the infinitive béon. The following chart shows the OE conjugation of the verb to be.
Present Tense Preterite Tense Infinitive: wesan béon Indicative Singular First person eom béo wæs Second person eart bist wære Third Person is biþ wæs Plural sind(on) béoth wæron Subjunctive Singular sý béo wære Plural sýn béon wæren Imperative Singular Second Person wes béo Plural Second Person wesaþ béoþ Participle wesende béonde -béonIn ME, these two seperate present tenses merged into one. Although the origin of the PDE infinitive form to be is based on béon, it is the singular present indicative forms of wesan that prevailed. The plural present indicative forms beoþ and be(n) also prevailed but were eventually supplanted by a new verb form, are(n). However, the plural present indicative form they be was not lost from the English language until well into the Early Modern English (EmnE) period.
References & Related Links
The primary texts on which this essay is based are as follows:
Baugh, Albert C. (ed). Chaucer's Major Poetry. Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey. 1963. Barber, Charles. The English Language. A Historical Introduction. Cambridge University Press. 1993. Celece-Murcia, Marianne & Larsen-Freeman, Diane. The Grammer Book. An ESL/EFL Teacher's Course. Heinle & Heinle Publishers, Boston, Massachusetts. 1983. Claiborne, Robert. The Roots of English A Reader's Handbook of Word Origins. Times Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., New York. 1989. Hogg, Richard M. (ed). The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol 1. Cambridge University Press. 1992. Millward, C.M.. A Biography of the English Language. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., USA. 1988.
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