11. English and English speaking countries - P

FLEXIBILITY

English has become a very flexible language. Without inflections, the same word can operate as many different part of speech. Many nouns and verbs have the same form, for example swim, drink, walk, kiss, look, smile.

OPENNES OF VOCABULARY

This involves the free admissions of words from other languages.

3) History

The history of the English language started with the arrival of 3 Germanic tribes - Angles, Saxons and Jutes- in 5th century AD. They crossed the North sea from what today is Denmark and nothern Germany. At that time the Celtic language was spoken, but the most of Celtic speakers were pushed west and north (what is today Scotland, Wales, Ireland) by the invaders. The Angles came from Englaland and their language was called Englisc -> from which the words England and English are derived. Germanic tribes displaced also the Romans occupiers that speak vulgar latin. Before the time of Romans, Gaelic - the language of the Celts - was in use. Gaelic gave name to places such as for example Thames, Avon and Wye. Roman occurs in place names: Londonium became London.

OLD ENGLISH (450 - 1100)

The invanding Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain developed into Old English. Old English did not sound or look like English today. Nevertheless, about the half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots, for example: be, strong, water. Old English was spoken until around 1 100.

Features of Old English

highly inflacted ( = O.E. is synthatic language) case (4) - nominative, genitive, accusative, dative; "possesive genitive" - the house´s back (O.E.) X the back of the house (M.E.) distinguish gender - masculin, feminin, neutral flexible word order - the verb can precede subject or it could stand at the end of the sentance after the object the use of multiple negatives - double/triple In 1597, Christianity arrived in Britain. Abbot Augustin was sent to Britain to spread Christianity there. He founded monasteric centres - monasters (for men), nunneries (for women) and cloister (for both). Here first monks started to create first monuscripts ->latin glossaries were translated into English. At this time the first narrative poem named Beowulf was created. It is epic, so we can find here many informations how the O.E. looked.

Christianity brough with it both Latin and Greek which:

1)allowed English language to express abstract thoughts, something almost impossible with the previous Anglo - Saxon vocabulary

2)gave English a large vocabulary related to the Church: angel, devil, priest, bishop, Sabbath

3) also brought with it foreign words from the East: orange, pepper, India, ginger

4)inspired the Anglo-Saxons to use their own words for different concepts. The Old English words od heaven, hell and God took on a new meaning with the arrival of Christianity

Between 750 and 1050, the Vikings (Danes) conquered a large part of the British Isles. Before their arrival, Old English was strongly inflected. The influence of Danes was to eliminate ending and to simplify the language. Vikings also changed the personal pronoun into "they". This kind of word transformation - changing personal pronoun - is realy rare. Some of Vikings words for places are still in use, for example Debry, Grimsbym Rugby, Selby. It is the most often a village that ends in -by. Other words derived from Vikings are: get, leg, skirt, skin, want, same,...