Observação importante: Ao visitarem esta página de novo, não se esqueçam de acionar o dispositivo de “reload, recarregar” [no Netscape Navigator] ou “refresh, atualizar” [no Microsoft Internet Explorer] dos seus browsers para que a informação no cache dos mesmos seja atualizada e vocês possam visualizar os novos dados colocados na página. Caso contrário, verão apenas informação antiga e desatualizada.
História da Língua Inglesa
History and Structure of the English Language
General Considerations
English – Language that originated in England and is now widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa. English is a member of the western group of the Germanic languages (itself part of the Indo-European language family) and is closely related to Frisian, German, and Netherlandic (Dutch and Flemish).
In the 16th century, English was the mother tongue of only a few million people living in England, but owing to that nation's colonization of other parts of the globe and other historical factors, English was the native language of more than 350 million people by the late 20th century. It is thus the mother tongue of more people than any other language except Mandarin Chinese. English is the most widely taught foreign language and is also the most widely used second language--i.e., one that two people communicate in when they cannot understand each other's native speech. It became the international language of scientific and technical discourse in the 20th century and was also widely adopted for use in business and diplomacy. In the entire world, one person in seven speaks English as either a primary or secondary language.
English is an analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected) language, whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most European, Iranian, and North Indian languages, is synthetic, or inflected. (Inflections are changes in the form of words to indicate such distinctions as tense, person, number, and gender.) Over thousands of years, English has lost most of its inflections, while other European languages have retained more of theirs. Indeed, English is the only European language in which adjectives have no distinctive endings, aside from determiners and endings denoting degrees of comparison.
Another characteristic is flexibility of function. This means that one word can function as various parts of speech in different contexts. For example, the word "book" can be an adjective in "book review," a noun in "read a book," or a verb in "book a room." Because other European languages retain more inflectional endings than does English, they almost never have this characteristic. A third feature, openness of vocabulary, allows English to admit words freely from other languages and to create compounds and derivatives.
In England, British Received Pronunciation (RP) is the usual speech of educated people. In the United States, Inland Northern (popularly known as General American) is commonly used. In both countries, however, other pronunciations are acceptable.
British Received Pronunciation and American Inland Northern show several divergences: (1) After some vowels American has a semiconsonantal glide. (2) The vowel in "cod," "box," and "dock" is pronounced like "aw" in British and a sound similar to "ah" in American. (3) The vowel in "but," "cut," and "rung," is central in American but is fronted in British. (4) The vowels in the American "bath" and "bad" and in the British "bad" are all pronounced the same, but the vowel in the British "bath" is pronounced like "ah," since it is before one of the fricatives s, f, or th (as in "thin"). (5) When a high back vowel is preceded by t, d, or n in British, a glide (consonantal y) is inserted between them (e.g., "tulip," "news"); in American the glide is omitted.
The 24 consonantal sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the fricatives f, v, th (as in "thin"), th (as in "then"), s, z, sh (as in "ship"), zh (as in "azure"), and h; two affricatives, ch (as in "church") and j (as in "jam"); the nasals m, n, and ng (as in "young"); the lateral l; the vibrant or retroflex r; and the semivowels y and w. American and British consonants have the same pronunciation with two exceptions: (1) When r occurs after a vowel, it is dropped in British but pronounced in American. (2) A t between two vowels is pronounced like t in "top" in British, but in American the sound is close to that of a d.
English is a strongly stressed language, with four degrees of stress: primary, secondary, tertiary, and weak. A change in stress can change the meaning of a sentence or a phrase. Although in comparison with other languages English stress is less predictable, there is a tendency toward antepenultimate (third syllable from the last) primary stress. This is apparent in such five-syllable words as equanímity, longitúdinal, and notoríety. French stress is often sustained in borrowed words, e.g., bizárre, critíque, and hotél.
Pitch, or musical tone, may be falling, rising, or falling-rising. Word tone, which is also called pitch, can influence the meaning of a word. Sentence tone is called intonation and is especially important at the end of a sentence. There are three important end-of-sentence intonations: falling, rising, and falling-rising. The falling intonation is used in completed statements, commands, and some questions calling for "yes" or "no" answers. Rising intonation is used in statements made with some reservation, in polite requests, and in certain questions answerable by "yes" or "no." The third type of intonation, first falling and then rising pitch, is used in sentences that imply concessions or contrasts. American intonation is less singsong and stays in a narrower range than does British.
The words of the English language can be divided according to their function or form into roughly eight categories, or parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Modern English nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected, but adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are not. Most English nouns have the plural inflection (-e)s, though some remain unchanged (e.g., deer). Five of the seven personal pronouns have separate forms for subject and object. English verbs are not complex. Regular or weak verbs have only four forms, strong verbs have five, and "to be" has eight. Some verbs ending in t or d have only three forms.
Besides employing inflection, English exhibits two other main morphological (structural) processes - affixation and composition - and two subsidiary ones - back-formation and blend. Affixes, word elements attached to a word, may either precede as prefixes (pre-, dis-) or follow as suffixes (-able, -er). They can be native (over-, -ness), Greek (hyper-), or Latin (-ment). English makes varied use of affixes; often, many different ones have the same meaning, or the same one has many meanings. Suffixes are attached more closely to the stem than are prefixes and often remain permanent.
Composition, or compounding, describes putting two free forms together to form a new word. The new word can differ from the previous forms in phonology, stress, and juncture. Five types of compounds are defined by describing the relationship of the free forms to each other: (1) a compound in which the first component noun is attributive and modifies the second noun (e.g., cloverleaf, beehive, vineyard); (2) one made up of a noun plus an agent noun, itself consisting of a verb-plus-agent suffix (e.g., icebreaker, landowner, timekeeper); (3) a verb plus an object (e.g., pastime, scarecrow, daredevil); (4) an attributive adjective plus a noun (e.g., bluebell, grandson, shorthand); and (5) a noun and a present participle (e.g., fact-finding, heartrending, life-giving).
Back-formation, the reverse of affixation, is the analogical formation of a new word falsely assumed to be its derivation. The verbs "to edit" and "to act" have been formed from the nouns "editor" and "actor," respectively. Blends fall into two groups: (1) coalescences, such as "bash" from "bang" and "smash," and (2) telescoped forms, called portmanteau words, such as "motorcade" from "motor cavalcade."
In English syntax, the main device for indicating the relationship between words is word order. In the sentence "The girl loves the boy," the subject is in initial position, and the object follows the verb; transposing the order of "boy" and "girl" would change the meaning. In contrast to this system, most other languages use inflections to indicate grammatical relationships. In puerum puella amat, which is the Latin equivalent of "The girl loves the boy," the words can be given in any order (for example, amat puella puerum) because the -um ending on the form for "boy" (puerum) indicates the object of the verb regardless of its position in the sentence.
English sentences generally start with the subject first, followed by the verb and then by the object. Adjectives or other single words that modify nouns are placed before the noun, while whole phrases acting as modifiers are usually placed after the noun. Adverbs are normally more mobile than adjectives, and they can occur either before or after the verb they modify. As their etymology implies, prepositions usually precede nouns, but there are a few exceptions, e.g., "the whole world over." Because of the laxity of syntactic principles, English is a very easy language to speak poorly.
English has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world, chiefly because of its propensity for borrowing and because the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century introduced vast numbers of French words into the language. The vocabulary of Modern English is thus approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Romance or Italic (French and Latin), with copious importations from Greek in science and borrowings from many other languages. Almost all basic concepts and things come from Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, as do most personal pronouns, all auxiliary verbs, most simple prepositions, all conjunctions, and almost all numbers. Many common nouns, adjectives, and verbs are of Scandinavian origin, a fact due to the Scandinavian invasions of Britain. The English language owes a great debt to French, which gave it many terms relating to dress and fashion, cuisine, politics, law, society, literature, and art. Comparison between French and English synonyms reveals the former to be more intellectual and abstract, and the latter more human and concrete. Many of the Greek compounds and derivatives in English have Latin equivalents with either similar or considerably different meanings.
The English adopted the 23-letter Latin alphabet, to which they added the letters W, J, and V. For the most part, English spelling is based on that of the 15th century. Pronunciation, however, has changed greatly since then. During the 17th and 18th centuries, fixed spellings were adopted, although there have been a few changes since that time. Numerous attempts have been made to reform English spelling, most of them unsuccessful.
The history of the English language begins with the migration of the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons from Germany and Denmark to Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. Their Anglo-Saxon language is known as Old English. The formation of separate kingdoms in Britain to some extent coincided with the development of the Old English dialects of Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. Northumbrian was in a position of cultural superiority until the destructive Viking raids of the 9th century caused cultural leadership to pass to the West Saxon kingdom of Wessex.
The Norman Conquest of 1066 set in motion the transition to Middle English. For the first century after the Conquest, a vast number of loanwords entered the English language from the dialects of northern France. The Conquest also served to place all four Old English dialects on the same cultural level and to allow them to develop independently. So West Saxon lost its supremacy, and the centre of culture gradually shifted to London. During this Middle English period the Northumbrian dialect split into Scottish and Northern, and Mercian became East and West Midland. Another outcome of the Norman Conquest was the adoption of the Carolingian script, then in use on the European continent, and changes in spelling.
The transition from Middle to Modern English started at the beginning of the 15th century. This century witnessed three important developments: the rise of London English, the invention of printing, and the spread of new learning. The Renaissance in England produced many more scholars who were knowledgeable in foreign languages, especially Greek and Classical Latin. Their liberal attitude toward language made possible the introduction of a great number of words into English. Scholars generally date the beginning of the Modern English period at 1500. The language was subsequently standardized through the work of grammarians and the publication of dictionaries, and its vocabulary underwent another vast expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries to accommodate developments in the sciences and technology.
Origins and Basic Characteristics
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to Frisian, German, and Netherlandic languages. English originated in England and is now widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa.
English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faeroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish), and West (German, Netherlandic [Dutch and Flemish], Frisian, English). Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.
Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The German and Chinese words for "man" are exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern. Chinese has one form: jen. English stands in between, with four forms: man, man's, men, men's. In English only nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected. Adjectives have no inflections aside from the determiners "this, these" and "that, those." (The endings -er, -est, denoting degrees of comparison, are better regarded as noninflectional suffixes.) English is the only European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., "the tall man," "the tall woman," compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and Modern German, it will be found that English now has only five forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern German reiten has 16 forms. In addition to this simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics: flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.
Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the loss of inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in their forms are now often used as both nouns and verbs. One can speak, for example, of "planning a table" or "tabling a plan," "booking a place" or "placing a book," "lifting a thumb" or "thumbing a lift." In the other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian, nouns and verbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun and verb endings. In English, forms for traditional pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns; adjectives and adverbs as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs as adjectives. One speaks in English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix -er to the place-name and put attributive and noun together as a compound, Frankfurter Buchmesse. In French one has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire du Livre de Francfort. In English it is now possible to employ a plural noun as adjunct (modifier), as in "wages board" and "sports editor"; or even a conjunctional group, as in "prices and incomes policy" and "parks and gardens committee."
Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages and the ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change) or adapts (with slight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to denote some new process. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical Greek word elements. English possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately reflect the pronunciation of words; this is discussed below in the section Orthography .
Characteristics of Modern EnglishPhonology
British Received Pronunciation (RP), by definition, the usual speech of educated people living in London and southeastern England, is one of the many forms of standard speech. Other pronunciations, although not standard, are entirely acceptable in their own right on conversational levels.
The chief differences between British Received Pronunciation, as defined above, and a variety of American English, such as Inland Northern (the speech form of western New England and its derivatives, often popularly referred to as General American), are in the pronunciation of certain individual vowels and diphthongs. Inland Northern American vowels sometimes have semiconsonantal final glides (i.e., sounds resembling initial w, for example, or initial y). Aside from the final glides, this American dialect shows four divergences from British English: (1) the words cod, box, dock, hot, and not are pronounced with a short (or half-long) low front sound as in British "bard" shortened (the terms front, back, low, and high refer to the position of the tongue); (2) words such as bud, but, cut, and rung are pronounced with a central vowel as in the unstressed final syllable of "sofa"; (3) before the fricative sounds s, f, and
(the last of these is the th sound in "thin") the long low back vowel a, as in British "bath," is pronounced as a short front vowel a, as in British "bad"; (4) high back vowels following the alveolar sounds t and d and the nasal sound n in words such as tulips, dew, and news are pronounced without a glide as in British English; indeed, the words sound like the British "two lips," "do," and "nooze" in "snooze." (In several American dialects, however, these glides do occur).
The 24 consonant sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the fricatives f, v,
(as in "ship"),
(as in "pleasure"), and h; two affricatives: t
(the sound that occurs at the end of words such as "young"); the lateral l; the vibrant or retroflex r; and the semivowels j (often spelled y) and w. These remain fairly stable, but Inland Northern American differs from British English in two respects: (1) r following vowels is preserved in words such as "door," "flower," and "harmony," whereas it is lost in British; (2) t between vowels is voiced, so that "metal" and "matter" sound very much like British "medal" and "madder," although the pronunciation of this t is softer and less aspirated, or breathy, than the d of British English. Like Russian, English is a strongly stressed language. Four degrees of stress may be differentiated: primary, secondary, tertiary, and weak, which may be indicated, respectively, by acute (
), circumflex (
), and grave (
) accent marks and by the breve ( x ). Thus, "Têll mè the trúth" (the whole truth, and nothing but the truth) may be contrasted with "Têll mé the trûth" (whatever you may tell other people); "bláck bîrd" (any bird black in colour) may be contrasted with "bláckbìrd" (that particular bird Turdus merula). The verbs "permít" and "recórd" (henceforth only primary stresses are marked) may be contrasted with their corresponding nouns "pérmit" and "récord." A feeling for antepenultimate (third syllable from the end) primary stress, revealed in such five-syllable words as equanímity, longitúdinal, notoríety, opportúnity, parsimónious, pertinácity, and vegetárian, causes stress to shift when extra syllables are added, as in "histórical," a derivative of "hístory" and "theatricálity," a derivative of "theátrical." Vowel qualities are also changed here and in such word groups as périod, periódical, periodícity; phótograph, photógraphy, photográphical. French stress may be sustained in many borrowed words; e.g., bizárre, critíque, duréss, hotél, prestíge, and techníque.
Pitch, or musical tone, determined by the rate of vibration of the vocal cords, may be level, falling, rising, or falling-rising. In counting "one," "two," "three," "four," one naturally gives level pitch to each of these cardinal numerals. But if a person says "I want two, not one," he naturally gives "two" falling pitch and "one" falling-rising. In the question "One?" rising pitch is used. Word tone is called pitch, and sentence tone is referred to as intonation. The end-of-sentence cadence is important for meaning, and it therefore varies least. Three main end-of-sentence intonations can be distinguished: falling, rising, and falling-rising. Falling intonation is used in completed statements, direct commands, and sometimes in general questions unanswerable by "yes" or "no"; e.g., "I have nothing to add." "Keep to the right." "Who told you that?" Rising intonation is frequently used in open-ended statements made with some reservation, in polite requests, and in particular questions answerable by "yes" or "no": "I have nothing more to say at the moment." "Let me know how you get on." "Are you sure?" The third type of end-of-sentence intonation, first falling and then rising pitch, is used in sentences that imply concessions or contrasts: "Some people do like them" (but others do not). "Don't say I didn't warn you" (because that is just what I'm now doing). Intonation is on the whole less singsong in American than in British English, and there is a narrower range of pitch. American speech may seem more monotonous but at the same time may sometimes be clearer and more readily intelligible. Everywhere English is spoken, regional dialects display distinctive patterns of intonation.
Historical Background
Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most clearly: the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries; the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of England to Latin Christianity; the Viking invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest of 1066; the Statute of Pleading in 1362 (this required that court proceedings be conducted in English); the setting up of Caxton's printing press at Westminster in 1476; the full flowering of the Renaissance in the 16th century; the publishing of the King James Bible in 1611; the completion of Johnson's Dictionary of 1755; and the expansion to North America and South Africa in the 17th century and to India, Australia, and New Zealand in the 18th.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Modern English is approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French and Latin), with copious and increasing importations from Greek in science and technology and with considerable borrowings from Dutch, Low German, Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, and many other languages. Names of basic concepts and things come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon: heaven and earth, love and hate, life and death, beginning and end, day and night, month and year, heat and cold, way and path, meadow and stream. Cardinal numerals come from Old English, as do all the ordinal numerals except "second" (Old English other, which still retains its older meaning in "every other day"). "Second" comes from Latin secundus "following," through French second, related to Latin sequi "to follow," as in English "sequence." From Old English come all the personal pronouns (except "they," "their," and "them," which are from Scandinavian), the auxiliary verbs (except the marginal "used," which is from French), most simple prepositions, and all conjunctions.
Numerous nouns would be identical whether they came from Old English or Scandinavian: father, mother, brother (but not sister); man, wife; ground, land, tree, grass; summer, winter; cliff, dale. Many verbs would also be identical, especially monosyllabic verbs--bring, come, get, hear, meet, see, set, sit, spin, stand, think. The same is true of the adjectives full and wise; the colour names gray, green, and white; the disjunctive possessives mine and thine (but not ours and yours); the terms north and west (but not south and east); and the prepositions over and under. Just a few English and Scandinavian doublets coexist in current speech: no and nay, yea and ay, from and fro, rear (i.e., to bring up) and raise, shirt and skirt (both related to the adjective short), less and loose. From Scandinavian, "law" was borrowed early, whence "bylaw," meaning "village law," and "outlaw," meaning "man outside the law." "Husband" (hus-bondi) meant "householder," whether single or married, whereas "fellow" (fe-lagi) meant one who "lays fee" or shares property with another, and so "partner, shareholder." From Scandinavian come the common nouns axle (tree), band, birth, bloom, crook, dirt, egg, gait, gap, girth, knife, loan, race, rift, root, score, seat, skill, sky, snare, thrift, and window; the adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, rotten, rugged, sly, tight, ugly, weak, and wrong; and many verbs, including call, cast, clasp, clip, crave, die, droop, drown, flit, gape, gasp, glitter, life, rake, rid, scare, scowl, skulk, snub, sprint, thrive, thrust, and want.
The debt of the English language to French is large. The terms president, representative, legislature, congress, constitution, and parliament are all French. So, too, are duke, marquis, viscount, and baron; but king, queen, lord, lady, earl, and knight are English. City, village, court, palace, manor, mansion, residence, and domicile are French; but town, borough, hall, house, bower, room, and home are English. Comparison between English and French synonyms shows that the former are more human and concrete, the latter more intellectual and abstract; e.g., the terms freedom and liberty, friendship and amity, hatred and enmity, love and affection, likelihood and probability, truth and veracity, lying and mendacity. The superiority of French cooking is duly recognized by the adoption of such culinary terms as boil, broil, fry, grill, roast, souse, and toast. "Breakfast" is English, but "dinner" and "supper" are French. "Hunt" is English, but "chase," "quarry," "scent," and "track" are French. Craftsmen bear names of English origin: baker, builder, fisher (man), hedger, miller, shepherd, shoemaker, wainwright, and weaver, or webber. Names of skilled artisans, however, are French: carpenter, draper, haberdasher, joiner, mason, painter, plumber, and tailor. Many terms relating to dress and fashion, cuisine and viniculture, politics and diplomacy, drama and literature, art and ballet come from French.
In the spheres of science and technology many terms come from Classical Greek through French or directly from Greek. Pioneers in research and development now regard Greek as a kind of inexhaustible quarry from which they can draw linguistic material at will. By prefixing the Greek adverb tele "far away, distant" to the existing compound photography, "light writing," they create the precise term "telephotography" to denote the photographing of distant objects by means of a special lens. By inserting the prefix micro- "small" into this same compound, they make the new term "photomicrography," denoting the electronic photographing of bacteria and viruses. Such neo-Hellenic derivatives would probably have been unintelligible to Plato and Aristotle. Many Greek compounds and derivatives have Latin equivalents with slight or considerable differentiations in meaning.
At first sight it might appear that some of these equivalents, such as "metamorphosis" and "transformation," are sufficiently synonymous to make one or the other redundant. In fact, however, "metamorphosis" is more technical and therefore more restricted than "transformation." In mythology it signifies a magical shape changing; in nature it denotes a postembryonic development such as that of a tadpole into a frog, a cocoon into a silkworm, or a chrysalis into a butterfly. Transformation, on the other hand, means any kind of change from one state to another.
Ever since the 12th century, when merchants from the Netherlands made homes in East Anglia, Dutch words have infiltrated into Midland speech. For centuries a form of Low German was used by seafaring men in North Sea ports. Old nautical terms still in use include buoy, deck, dock, freebooter, hoist, leak, pump, skipper, and yacht. The Dutch in New Amsterdam (later New York) and adjacent settlements gave the words boss, cookie, dope, snoop, and waffle to American speech. The Dutch in Cape Province gave the terms apartheid, commandeer, commando, spoor, and trek to South African speech.
The contribution of High German has been on a different level. In the 18th and 19th centuries it lay in technicalities of geology and mineralogy and in abstractions relating to literature, philosophy, and psychology. In the 20th century this contribution has sometimes been indirect. "Unclear" and "meaningful" echoed German unklar and bedeutungsvoll, or sinnvoll. "Ring road" (a British term applied to roads encircling cities or parts of cities) translated Ringstrasse; "round trip," Rundfahrt; and "the turn of the century," die Jahrhundertwende. The terms "classless society," "inferiority complex," and "wishful thinking" echoed die klassenlöse Gesellschaft, der Minderwertigkeitskomplex, and das Wunschdenken.
Along with the rest of the Western world, English has accepted Italian as the language of music. The names of voices, parts, performers, instruments, forms of composition, and technical directions are all Italian. Many of the latter--allegro, andante, cantabile, crescendo, diminuendo, legato, maestoso, obbligato, pizzicato, staccato, and vibrato--are also used metaphorically. In architecture, the terms belvedere, corridor, cupola, grotto, pedestal, pergola, piazza, pilaster, and rotunda are accepted; in literature, burlesque, canto, extravaganza, stanza, and many more are used.
From Spanish, English has acquired the words armada, cannibal, cigar, galleon, guerrilla, matador, mosquito, quadroon, tornado, and vanilla, some of these loanwords going back to the 16th century, when sea dogs encountered hidalgos on the high seas. Many names of animals and plants have entered English from indigenous languages through Spanish: "potato" through Spanish patata from Taino batata, and "tomato" through Spanish tomate from Nahuatl tomatl. Other words have entered from Latin America by way of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California; e.g., such words as canyon, cigar, estancia, lasso, mustang, pueblo, and rodeo. Some have gathered new connotations: bonanza, originally denoting "goodness," came through miners' slang to mean "spectacular windfall, prosperity"; mañana, "tomorrow," acquired an undertone of mysterious unpredictability.
From Arabic through European Spanish, through French from Spanish, through Latin, or occasionally through Greek, English has obtained the terms alchemy, alcohol, alembic, algebra, alkali, almanac, arsenal, assassin, attar, azimuth, cipher, elixir, mosque, nadir, naphtha, sugar, syrup, zenith, and zero. From Egyptian Arabic, English has recently borrowed the term loofah (also spelled luffa). From Hebrew, directly or by way of Vulgate Latin, come the terms amen, cherub, hallelujah, manna, messiah, pharisee, rabbi, sabbath, and seraph; jubilee, leviathan, and shibboleth; and, more recently, kosher, and kibbutz.
English has freely adopted and adapted words from many other languages, acquiring them sometimes directly and sometimes by devious routes. Each word has its own history. The following lists indicate the origins of a number of English words: Welsh--flannel, coracle, cromlech, penguin, eisteddfod; Cornish--gull, brill, dolmen; Gaelic and Irish--shamrock, brogue, leprechaun, ogham, Tory, galore, blarney, hooligan, clan, claymore, bog, plaid, slogan, sporran, cairn, whisky, pibroch; Breton--menhir; Norwegian--ski, ombudsman; Finnish--sauna; Russian--kvass, ruble, tsar, verst, mammoth, ukase, astrakhan, vodka, samovar, tundra (from Sami), troika, pogrom, duma, soviet, bolshevik, intelligentsia (from Latin through Polish), borscht, balalaika, sputnik, soyuz, salyut, lunokhod; Polish--mazurka; Czech--robot; Hungarian--goulash, paprika; Portuguese--marmalade, flamingo, molasses, veranda, port (wine), dodo; Basque--bizarre; Turkish--janissary, turban, coffee, kiosk, caviar, pasha, odalisque, fez, bosh; Hindi--nabob, guru, sahib, maharajah, mahatma, pundit, punch (drink), juggernaut, cushy, jungle, thug, cheetah, shampoo, chit, dungaree, pucka, gymkhana, mantra, loot, pajamas, dinghy, polo; Persian--paradise, divan, purdah, lilac, bazaar, shah, caravan, chess, salamander, taffeta, shawl, khaki; Tamil--pariah, curry, catamaran, mulligatawny; Chinese--tea (Amoy), sampan; Japanese--shogun, kimono, mikado, tycoon, hara-kiri, gobang, judo, jujitsu, bushido, samurai, banzai, tsunami, satsuma, No (the dance drama), karate, Kabuki; Malay--ketchup, sago, bamboo, junk, amuck, orangutan, compound (fenced area), raffia; Polynesian--taboo, tattoo; Hawaiian--ukulele; African languages--chimpanzee, goober, mumbo jumbo, voodoo; Inuit--kayak, igloo, anorak; Yupik--mukluk; Algonquian--totem; Nahuatl--mescal; languages of the Caribbean--hammock, hurricane, tobacco, maize, iguana; Aboriginal Australian--kangaroo, corroboree, wallaby, wombat, boomerang, paramatta, budgerigar.
Old English
The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons lived in Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, respectively, before settling in Britain. According to the Venerable Bede, the first historian of the English people, the first Jutes, Hengist and Horsa, landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle of Thanet in 449; and the Jutes later settled in Kent, southern Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons occupied the rest of England south of the Thames, as well as modern Middlesex and Essex. The Angles eventually took the remainder of England as far north as the Firth of Forth, including the future Edinburgh and the Scottish Lowlands. In both Latin and Common Germanic the Angles' name was Angli, later mutated in Old English to Engle (nominative) and Engla (genitive). "Engla land" designated the home of all three tribes collectively, and both King Alfred (known as Alfred the Great) and Abbot Aelfric, author and grammarian, subsequently referred to their speech as Englisc. Nevertheless, all the evidence indicates that Jutes, Angles, and Saxons retained their distinctive dialects.
The River Humber was an important boundary, and the Anglian-speaking region developed two speech groups: to the north of the river, Northumbrian, and, to the south, Southumbrian, or Mercian. There were thus four dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish (see Figure 13). In the 8th century, Northumbrian led in literature and culture, but that leadership was destroyed by the Viking invaders, who sacked Lindisfarne, an island near the Northumbrian mainland, in 793. They landed in strength in 865. The first raiders were Danes, but they were later joined by Norwegians from Ireland and the Western Isles who settled in modern Cumberland, Westmorland, northwest Yorkshire, Lancashire, north Cheshire, and the Isle of Man. In the 9th century, as a result of the Norwegian invasions, cultural leadership passed from Northumbria to Wessex. During King Alfred's reign, in the last three decades of the 9th century, Winchester became the chief centre of learning. There the Parker Chronicle (a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) was written; there the Latin works of the priest and historian Paulus Orosius, St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and the Venerable Bede were translated; and there the native poetry of Northumbria and Mercia was transcribed into the West Saxon dialect. This resulted in West Saxon's becoming "standard Old English"; and later, when Aelfric (c. 955-c. 1010) wrote his lucid and mature prose at Winchester, Cerne Abbas, and Eynsham, the hegemony of Wessex was strengthened.
In standard Old English, adjectives were inflected as well as nouns, pronouns, and verbs. Nouns were inflected for four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) in singular and plural. Five nouns of first kinship--faeder, modor, brothor, sweostor, and dohtor ("father," "mother," "brother," "sister," and "daughter," respectively)--had their own set of inflections. There were 25 nouns such as mon, men ("man," "men") with mutated, or umlauted, stems. Adjectives had strong and weak declensions, the strong showing a mixture of noun and pronoun endings and the weak following the pattern of weak nouns. Personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite, and relative pronouns had full inflections. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons still had distinctive dual forms:
There were two demonstratives: se, seo, thaet, meaning "that," and thes, theos, this, meaning "this," but no articles, the definite article being expressed by use of the demonstrative for "that" or not expressed at all. Thus, "the good man" was se goda mon or plain god mon. The function of the indefinite article was performed by the numeral an "one" in an mon "a man," by the adjective-pronoun sum in sum mon "a (certain) man," or not expressed, as in thu eart god mon "you are a good man."
Verbs had two tenses only (present-future and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative), two numbers (singular and plural), and three persons (1st, 2nd, and 3rd). There were two classes of verb stems. (A verb stem is that part of a verb to which inflectional changes--changes indicating tense, mood, number, etc.--are added.) One type of verb stem, called vocalic because an internal vowel shows variations, is exemplified by the verb for "sing": singan, singth, sang, sungon, gesungen. The word for "deem" is an example of the other, called consonantal: deman, demth, demde, demdon, gedemed. Such verbs are called strong and weak, respectively.
All new verbs, whether derived from existing verbs or from nouns, belonged to the consonantal type. Some verbs of great frequency (antecedents of the modern words "be," "shall," "will," "do," "go," "can," "may," and so on) had their own peculiar patterns of inflections.
Grammatical gender persisted throughout the Old English period. Just as Germans now say der Fuss, die Hand, and das Auge (masculine, feminine, and neuter terms for "the foot," "the hand," and "the eye"), so, for these same structures, Aelfric said se fot, seo hond, and thaet eage, also masculine, feminine, and neuter. The three words for "woman," wifmon, cwene, and wif, were masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively. Hors "horse," sceap "sheep," and maegden "maiden" were all neuter. Eorthe "earth" was feminine, but lond "land" was neuter. Sunne "sun" was feminine, but mona "moon" was masculine. This simplification of grammatical gender resulted from the fact that the gender of Old English substantives was not always indicated by the ending but rather by the terminations of the adjectives and demonstrative pronouns used with the substantives. When these endings were lost, all outward marks of gender disappeared with them. Thus, the weakening of inflections and loss of gender occurred together. In the North, where inflections weakened earlier, the marks of gender likewise disappeared first. They survived in the South as late as the 14th century.
Because of the greater use of inflections in Old English, word order was freer than today. The sequence of subject, verb, and complement was normal, but when there were outer and inner complements the second was put in the dative case after to: Se biscop halgode Eadred to cyninge "The bishop consecreated Edred king." After an introductory adverb or adverbial phrase the verb generally took second place as in modern German: Nu bydde ic an thing "Now I ask [literally, "ask I"] one thing"; Th ilcan geare gesette Aelfred cyning Lundenburg "In that same year Alfred the king occupied London." Impersonal verbs had no subject expressed. Infinitives constructed with auxiliary verbs were placed at the ends of clauses or sentences: Hie ne dorston forth bi thære ea siglan "They dared not sail beyond that river" (siglan is the infinitive); Ic wolde thas lytlan boc awendan "I wanted to translate this little book" (awendan is the infinitive). The verb usually came last in a dependent clause--e.g., awritan wile in gif hwa thas boc awritan wile (gerihte he hie be thære bysene) "If anyone wants to copy this book (let him correct his copy by the original)." Prepositions (or postpositions) frequently followed their objects. Negation was often repeated for emphasis.
Middle English
One result of the Norman Conquest of 1066 was to place all four Old English dialects more or less on a level. West Saxon lost its supremacy and the centre of culture and learning gradually shifted from Winchester to London. The old Northumbrian dialect became divided into Scottish and Northern, although little is known of either of these divisions before the end of the 13th century (Figure 14). The old Mercian dialect was split into East and West Midland. West Saxon became slightly diminished in area and was more appropriately named the South Western dialect. The Kentish dialect was considerably extended and was called South Eastern accordingly. All five Middle English dialects (Northern, West Midland, East Midland, South Western, and South Eastern) went their own ways and developed their own characteristics. The so-called Katherine Group of writings (1180-1210), associated with Hereford, a town not far from the Welsh border, adhered most closely to native traditions, and there is something to be said for regarding this West Midland dialect, least disturbed by French and Scandinavian intrusions, as a kind of Standard English in the High Middle Ages.
Another outcome of the Norman Conquest was to change the writing of English from the clear and easily readable insular hand of Irish origin to the delicate Carolingian script then in use on the Continent. With the change in appearance came a change in spelling. Norman scribes wrote Old English y as u, as ui, u as ou (ow when final). Thus, mycel ("much") appeared as muchel, fr ("fire") as fuir, hus ("house") as hous, and hu ("how") as how. For the sake of clarity (i.e., legibility) u was often written o before and after m, n, u, v, and w; and i was sometimes written y before and after m and n. So sunu ("son") appeared as sone and him ("him") as hym. Old English cw was changed to qu; hw to wh, qu, or quh; c to ch or tch; sc to sh; -cg- to -gg-; and -ht to ght. So Old English cwen appeared as queen; hwaet as what, quat, or quhat; dic as ditch; scip as ship; secge as segge; and miht as might.
For the first century after the Conquest, most loanwords came from Normandy and Picardy, but with the extension south to the Pyrenees of the Angevin empire of Henry II (reigned 1154-89), other dialects, especially Central French, or Francien, contributed to the speech of the aristocracy. As a result, Modern English acquired the forms canal, catch, leal, real, reward, wage, warden, and warrant from Norman French side by side with the corresponding forms channel, chase, loyal, royal, regard, gage, guardian, and guarantee, from Francien. King John lost Normandy in 1204. With the increasing power of the Capetian kings of Paris, Francien gradually predominated. Meanwhile, Latin stood intact as the language of learning. For three centuries, therefore, the literature of England was trilingual. Ancrene Riwle, for instance, a guide or rule (riwle) of rare quality for recluses or anchorites (ancren), was disseminated in all three languages.
The sounds of the native speech changed slowly. Even in late Old English short vowels had been lengthened before ld, rd, mb, and nd, and long vowels had been shortened before all other consonant groups and before double consonants. In early Middle English short vowels of whatever origin were lengthened in the open stressed syllables of disyllabic words. An open syllable is one ending in a vowel. Both syllables in Old English nama "name," mete "meat, food," nosu "nose," wicu "week," and duru "door" were short, and the first syllables, being stressed, were lengthened to name, mete, nose, weke, and dore in the 13th and 14th centuries. A similar change occurred in 4th-century Latin, in 13th-century German, and at different times in other languages. The popular notion has arisen that final mute -e in English makes a preceding vowel long; in fact, it is the lengthening of the vowel that has caused e to be lost in pronunciation. On the other hand, Old English long vowels were shortened in the first syllables of trisyllabic words, even when those syllables were open; e.g., haligdaeg "holy day," ærende "message, errand," cristendom "Christianity," and sutherne "southern," became holiday (Northern haliday), errende, christendom, and sutherne. This principle still operates in current English. Compare, for example, trisyllabic derivatives such as the words chastity, criminal, fabulous, gradual, gravity, linear, national, ominous, sanity, and tabulate with the simple nouns and adjectives chaste, crime, fable, grade, grave, line, nation, omen, sane, and table.
There were significant variations in verb inflections in the Northern, Midland, and Southern dialects. The Northern infinitive was already one syllable (sing rather than the Old English singan), whereas the past participle -en inflection of Old English was strictly kept. These apparently contradictory features can be attributed entirely to Scandinavian, in which the final -n of the infinitive was lost early in singa, and the final -n of the past participle was doubled in sunginn. The Northern unmutated present participle in -and was also of Scandinavian origin. Old English mutated -ende (German -end) in the present participle had already become -inde in late West Saxon, and it was this Southern -inde that blended with the -ing suffix (German -ung) of nouns of action that had already become near-gerunds in such compound nouns as athswering "oath swearing" and writingfether "writing feather, pen." This blending of present participle and gerund was further helped by the fact that Anglo-Norman and French -ant was itself a coalescence of Latin present participles in -antem, -entem, and Latin gerunds in -andum, -endum. The Northern second person singular singis was inherited unchanged from Common Germanic. The final t sound in Midland -est and Southern -st was excrescent, comparable with the final t in modern "amidst" and "amongst" from older amiddes and amonges. The Northern third person singular singis had a quite different origin. Like the singis of the plural, it resulted almost casually from an inadvertent retraction of the tongue in enunciation from an interdental -th sound to postdental -s. Today the form "singeth" survives as a poetic archaism. Shakespeare used both -eth and -s endings ("It [mercy] blesseth him that gives and him that takes," The Merchant of Venice). The Midland present plural inflection -en was taken from the subjunctive. The past participle prefix y- developed from the Old English perfective prefix ge-.
Chaucer, who was born and died in London, spoke a dialect that was basically East Midland. Compared with his contemporaries, he was remarkably modern in his use of language. He was in his early 20s when the Statute of Pleading (1362) was passed, by the terms of which all court proceedings were henceforth to be conducted in English, though "enrolled in Latin." Chaucer himself used four languages; he read Latin (Classical and Medieval) and spoke French and Italian on his travels. For his own literary work he deliberately chose English.
Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
 |
Voltar ao começo da página |
 |
Voltar à página principal |
 |