ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The English language is derived from Germanic which is derived from Indo-European but it is not definitely known how, when, or even where Indo-European began. Ever since the Elizabethan Age the number of people speaking English as the first language, or mother tongue, has grown rapidly. Today, however, several languages are adding speakers at a faster rate. Nevertheless, the situation and prospects enjoyed by English have never seem better. For several years now English has been accepted in virtually every part of the world as the preferred second language- the language that two people will turn to when they cannot understand each others tongue. It is no accident that the leaders of France and Germany speak to each other in English, and the English Language shows no signs of losing its international pre-eminence.

ORIGINS

English carries the story of its origin as an independent language in its name. The Engl-part of the world goes back to the Angles, a Germanic tribe that invaded and colonized match of Britain during the 5th and 6th centuries. The -ispart means belonging to: in this case, the language that belonged to the Angles- the Angle-is language. The Angles lived in Northern Germany alongside a number kindred tribes, including the Saxons and Jutes. Beginning about the year 450, members of these three tribes, joining in the wide spread barbarian migrations that marked the end of the Western Roman Empire, crossed the North Sea to find new homes in Britain. For the next 50 or 60 years the would-be colonizers, aided by reinforcement, fought with the original inhabitants of the island, the Britons, and pushed them back to the North and West into present-day Scotland and Wales. The territory that Angles, Saxons, and Jutes- thus carved out for themselves that can be called the land of the Anglo-Saxons, or, for short, Angle-land England. Similarly, their language can be called Anglo-Saxon or Old English.

OLD ENGLISH

English has, however, changed so much during the course of the past thousand years that today Old English seems like a foreign tongue to us.

Fderure, thu the eart on heofonum, si thin namagehalgod; cume thin rice; si thin willa on eorthanswaswa on heofonum. Urnedghwamlican half sele us todg, and forgif us uregyltasswaswa we forgifaththam the with us agyltath . (The first two sentences of an AngloSaxon version of the Lords prayer)

All letters forms printed here are familiar; even (ash) is found occasionally in words such as archology or medival. Old English scribes also used the letter forms (thorns) or (eth)

instead of th; 3 (yogh) instead of g; and (wen) instead of w. What truly sets the passage off from present-day English, however, is the spelling, vocabulary and syntax; the spelling half instead of loaf ; the word rice (pronounced reach-a) instead of kingdom; the verbs cume and si(be) preceding rather than following their subjects thin rice and thin willa.

MIDDLE ENGLISH

Although 1066 in no way marks a change of languages for the people of England, the date nonetheless serves as a convenient divider between two periods of English: Old English and MIDDLE ENGLISH. Middle English is characterized both by its greater French vocabulary and, more importantly, by the loss of inflections. In the Old English version of the Lords Prayer, the endings e (ure, cume, rice, selo), -um (heofonum), -a (nama, willa), -od (gehalgod), -an (eorthan, dghwamlican), -ne (urne), -as (gyltas) and ath (firgifath, agyhath) all indicated how the words to which they were attached functioned in the sentence. By the close of the Middle English period, however, only two of these inflections remained in use; -es for plural nouns (descended from -as) and the past tense marker ed (from od). The poet Geoffrey Chaucer for example, who died in the year 1400 was no longer able to indicate by means of the inflection ne was no longer able to indicate by means of the inflection ne that the phrase urne. . . hlaf was a direct object even though it preceded its verb sele (give) Chaucers equivalent phrase,

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

The American Language is the name given to the type of English spoken in the United States as a whole can be dialects of its own- the speech of the South, for instance- but all of its dialects share enough characteristics so that the English found in the United States as a whole can be distinguished from that of other countries, such as Great Britain or Australia. Until the middle of the 20th century, many commentators believed that the American language would grow increasingly distinct, until it bore a relation to British English similar to the relationship between Portuguese and Spanish, or Norwegian and Danish. Lately, however, American and British English are clearly beginning to converge. The most apparent reason for the convergence is the immense influence of the electronic media, but each country has also become more willing to bornow linguistic features from the other. The essential difference between current American and British English is probably in intonation- an elusive quality consisting of voice timbre, pitch, sentence rhythm and stress. Almost no syntactical differences are evident between American and British English, and comparatively few differences exist in vocabulary, pronunciations, or spelling. The British, however, do say rubber instead of eraser, andvest instead of undershirt. They also drop their rs before consonants- pronouncing lord as laud, for example- and spell honour, colour, and many other words with our instead of or.

AMERICANISMS

Among the first Americanisms- words or us- ages found in the United States but not in Great Britainwere the names coined to describe the new animals, plants, and landscape features that the British settlers found in North America. Raccoon was borrowed from Algonquian, prairie from French; foothill was a new compound forged from two familiars English words. Later, terms such as presidential, congress, and gubernatorial were applied to the newly established American political institutions. The British has no objection to the use of neologisms to describe new phenomena. From the middle of the 18th century, however, they did object, often vehemently, to other kinds of Americanisms. The writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, for instance denounced to wobble, to budge, and fun, because, in his opinion, English already possessed words adequate to express these ideas. Americans fought back, however. Noah Webster believed that words and usages should be evaluated in their own merits, not on the basis of their place of origin. His American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) included thousands of new words, old words with new meanings, new pronunciations, and new spellings- solely on the grounds that they were all used by educated American speakers.