How human language originated and the earliest stages of English

1. STORIES OF ENGLISH
WEEK 2
THE BEGINNINGS OF
LANGUAGE

2. Last Week – English Today
What is the English language?
Difference between a national and international language?
What do we mean by ‘English speaker’?
What is the distinction between native, second language
and foreign speaker?
Do we use English in the same way?
Dialects and accents – English or Englishes?
Standard English – why important/necessary?
Global language – lingua franca

3. What Changes Language?
Historical Factors – wars, invasions,
Geographical Movement and Location
Social Considerations – class, age, gender,
ethnicity
Cultural Identity
Professional Purposes – Register, Genre
Globalisation – dissipation, fragmentation

4. Approaches to the study of language
Synchronic
Diachronic
What do these terms mean?
Clues – chronological, chronicle,
synchronise watches, synthesis, diagonal,
dialogue,

5. Last week, a brief synchronic look at
English today
This week, we begin our diachronic journey

6. Neanderthal Man and Homo Sapiens – 2
separate species – the dropped larynx
Greater range of sounds – more advanced
language

7. Evidence points at language developing at
similar time in far apart places –
evolutionary alarm clock?
Chomsky, Pinker – studies of children –
innate capacity for learning language

8. Sir William Jones in India, 1783, taught
himself Sanskrit.
Ancient, holy language, oldest writings in
any Indo-European language
He noticed many similarities between this
and European languages

9. A common source? Proto-Indo-European
PIE
But no actual evidence of this language.
As PIE is not directly attested, all PIE
sounds and words are reconstructed using
the comparative method

10. ACTIVITY 1
List of words in different languages, one,
two, three, ten, father, mother, brother, king
Example:
• Brother, bruder, bhrathair, bhrata, biridar

11. Did English start on the plains of India over
4000 years ago and gradually move west?
Split into branches as people spread,
language families
Can you guess what some of these
language families might be?

12. • English is a member of the Indo-European family of
languages. This broad family includes most of the
European languages spoken today. The Indo-European
family includes several major branches:
• Latin and the modern Romance languages;
• The Germanic languages;
• The Indo-Iranian languages, including Hindi and
Sanskrit;
• The Slavic languages;
• The Baltic languages of Latvian and Lithuanian (but
not Estonian);
• The Celtic languages;
• Greek.

13. Introductory Quiz
Put in chronological order the following groups
who invaded what we now call England:
Romans
Vikings
Normans
Celts
Angles and Saxons
Can you provide any approximate dates?

14. Decide which of the following statements
about the history of English are true.
English can be traced back to the language spoken by
Germanic tribes nearly 2000 years ago, and who numbered
only 20-30,000 thousand at the time .
In the 9th
century the North East of England was one of the
most important centres of scholarship in Europe.
For over 300 years, from 1066 to about 1400, no kings of
England spoke English as their 1st
language, if at all.
For many years in the 15th
and 16th
centuries, ownership of
a Bible in English could be punishable by death.
When Caxton introduced printing into England in the late
15th century, there was no standard English for him to
use.
Works of scholarship in England, for example in science,
were published in Latin until the mid 17th
century.
The first English dictionary wasn’t produced until 1755.
The BBC was established in 1924 and until very recently
(10-15 years) none of its presenters had a regional accent .

15. Stories of English
Look again at the reading on p of the chapter 3
reading.
What is the writer saying about the writing of
history?
Can there ever be one right version of history?
What factors could influence how a historian
views the past?
What is needed to provide us with information
about the past?

16. Evidence – External and Internal
What is the main problem regarding
evidence when it comes to the history of
language?
What do you think could be the difference
between internal and external evidence of
the history of language?

17. The Celts:
Migrated to Britain around 6-700 BC – ‘an
admired civilisation’, Bragg
Inhabited much of Britain for 1000 years, but very
few words in English – Thames,
Avon, Dover The Celts:
Migrated to Britain around 6-700 BC – ‘an
admired civilisation’, Bragg
Inhabited much of Britain for 1000 years, but very
few words in English – Thames, Avon, Dover

18. Otherwise a handful of words relating to
landscape – tor, pen, crag, comb, luh
(lough. Loch)
Survives today in Welsh, Gaelic, Bretagne
Why such a tiny linguistic imprint on
English?

19. The Romans
From 43 BC to AD 410 – mighty imperial power,
the language Latin
Yet again very few Latin words in early English –
place names – caster/chester (camp)
The Germanic tribes did use Latin words when
they came up against them on the European
mainland, - street, wine, table, inch, mile and
brought them with them from Europe.

20. However, the Romans had brought culture and
civilisation – roads, running water, aquaducts,
underfloor heating, sophisticated cuisine, art and
literature
The indigenous Celts mingled freely with the
Romans, intermarrying, lifestyle and speaking
Latin – with other races from all over the Roman
Empire, Britain was a multicultural and
sophisticated place compared to much of Europe.

21. Around 400 AD the empire was under
threat from the east and the Roman army
was withdrawn to help protect Rome – the
Celts in Britain were left to fend for
themselves.