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História da Língua Inglesa   

Language Families and the Linguistic Context for Old English

English Language Program, Kingston University (UK)

Languages: families

Previously, we talked about the Indo-European family of languages, that (originally) single language group from which most of the modern languages of Europe and many of those of south and southwest Asia are descended. The Indo-European language is believed to have been spoken in the region between the Carpathian and Ural mountains, possibly as late as 4000 BC. From there, groups spread in all directions and the language diversified into its sub-groups; one of which was the Germanic group, out of which English eventually emerged.

How is it possible to speak of families of languages?  How can we know that languages are linked to each other? Sometimes these connections are clear within historical time and on the basis of surviving records. Thus we can document the common origin of Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, Romansh and Romanian in the Latin language, of which we have extensive records. Sometimes the affinities are so strong (as between Danish and Swedish) that it is clear that they share a comparatively recent common origin.

But if we look back over longer stretches of time, the documentation will be lacking and affinities less obvious. In 1786 Sir William Jones, a judge in British India who had studied the ancient North Indian language Sanskrit, noticed affinities between Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Latin, and published a paper arguing that there might have been a common origin. With this the theory of the Indo-European family began. It was developed in the 19th century as scholars examined living and dead languages and established a regular pattern of affinities across most of the languages of Europe and southwest Asia.

Other language families exist around the world: the Semitic family includes Arabic, Hebrew, and many languages of northeastern Africa. The Uralic family includes Finnish, Estonian, Lapp, and Magyar (the language of Hungary); and the Altaic includes Turkish. These may, in certain cases, have had links with the Indo-European family at some remote point in the past, but the evidence is now probably too slight to establish this.

Languages: types

It is possible to look at languages in terms of their present organisation and working, rather than their origins. This produces a rather different set of connections. Languages that have no common origin may work in similar ways and so be grouped together. Three principal types of language have been proposed: agglutinative, fusional and analytic.

Indo-European was a language of the fusional or inflected type: like its descendants Latin, Greek, Russian and Lithuanian, it depended heavily on inflections in order to modify meaning. Though English has now largely moved away from inflection and become a language more of the analytic type, Old English and before that Germanic were fusional/inflectional languages in the I-E tradition. So one feature of the history of English is that it has gone a long way toward changing the type of language that it is.

The linguistic context for Old English

(a) Old English (the name given to the language between about 450 and 1100 AD) grew out of a group of related languages or dialects spoke in the northeast of Germany and what is now south Jutland. They belonged to the West Germanic group of languages and were probably mutually intelligible. At the time of the migration to Britain (between 400 and 500 AD) large groups of Germanic peoples were moving across Europe; some went south into (present) France, Italy and Spain and were responsible for the final disintegration of the western Roman Empire.

(b) The linguistic situation in Britain before the arrival of the Germanic tribes was one in which Celtic speech dominated. Though Britain (Latin Britannia) had been a province in the Roman Empire for more than 300 years (49-410 AD), and though Latin had been spoken at least by administrators and the more urbanised or Romanised, the mass of the people continued to speak their Celtic languages. It was these that the Germanic tribes would have encountered on arrival; first as mercenaries in the early 5th century, and then as invaders and settlers.

The Celtic speech was fairly quickly displaced; it survived in "Wales" ("Wealas" – the strangers or foreigners), which included Cornwall and Cumbria as well as Wales proper. There is almost no trace of Celtic influence on English. This can be explained in a number of ways: massacre of existing populations, flight, subordination and imposition of Germanic speech may all have played some part.

The structure of the OE linguistic community

The Germanic settlers came from four main groups: the Saxons from (probably) Schleswig-Hostein, the Jutes from South Jutland, the Angles from Northeast Germany, the Frisians from the North Sea Coast of Germany and the neighbouring islands. They moved into different regions in Britain. The Saxons were dominant below a line from the Thames to the Severn; the Angles were dominant north of that line in the Midlands, East Anglia (hence the name) and the North; and the Jutes occupied Kent, southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

This regional division of populations established the dialect geography of OE and of English generally into at least the late Middle Ages. The various groups were governed by local kings; in the 6th century there were seven kingdoms in what is now England. There was, until the arrival of missionaries from Rome in 597, no written language. So English was really a loose clustering of related dialects with no standard or common form.

The nature of Old English

Nevertheless a sense of linguistic affinity existed and began to grow. The language that we describe as "Old English" is really "Old West Saxon", the speech of Wessex, which is the only version of OE for which we have adequate records (this is the result of Alfred's encouragement of literacy and scholarship at his court in the 9th century).

OE was an inflected language. The noun had four cases – nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. Pronouns and articles were also inflected. Verbs were of two kinds – strong and weak. Strong verbs form the past tense by changing the main vowel (so – dig/dug). Weak verbs form the past by adding a dental suffix (-t or -d) (so – talk/talked). For fuller details see the brief grammar summary circulated in class.

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