A Brief History of English

A recent exchange one Usenet about some vagaries of English prompted me to gather my understanding of its history into a short essay. It's highly simplified, but the outlines of the history are accurate enough.

The history of English has two main themes: the words (lexicon) come from many sources, while the grammar is fundamentally a simplified Germanic one, marked by an almost complete absence of grammatical gender.

First, there were the prehistoric peoples, who as far as we know left no traces in the English language. Then there were the Britons, a motley crew of miscellaneous Celtic tribes. These were conquered by the Romans, whose language had some influence on the Celtic dialects, mostly in place names. They built forts and roads, and romanised the indigenous people. Many place names date back to the Roman occupation, for example London (from londinium), and names ending in -chester, -cester, or -caster (from L. castellum).

From about 450 AD, several northwest European peoples invaded the Island. The first ones were the Angles and Saxons, followed by the Danes and the Norwegians. The Anglo-Saxons brought their languages with them, and adopted or adapted some names and words from the Celts they displaced or enslaved. For example “car” (originally from Latin), the Avon, Salisbury (Salis- from Celtic Sorvio, a personal name), and many other placenames in southwestern England. The Danish and Norwegian invasions affected the northen and eastern Anglo-Saxon dialects, which are still distinct from the southern and midland dialects that became the language of the court. Anglo-Saxon was written is a jumble of dialects that are mutually intelligible enough that they form a language.

In 1066, William the Bastard of Normandy conquered England and brought Norman French with him as the language of government and trade. Over the next couple of centuries, the existing Anglo-Saxon dialects and Norman French blended into what we now think of as Middle English. By 1400, it was not only a practical language but a literary one: Geoffroy Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales in his Middle English, London-centric dialect. It became the source of modern English, which in vocabulary is basically Anglo-Saxon with a thick overlay of French, and a grammar regularised and simplified as Anglo-Saxon and Norman French speakers mashed up their languages into a mutually intelligible creole. Hence cow, bull, cattle for the animals, beef for their meat. Anglo-Saxon houses and fields made up French real property. French and English shared a common plural ending -s, which became the near-universal way of making plural nouns.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Latin and Greek words were adopted into the vernacular all over Europe. In English, that produced “church”, “bishop” and “bible”, for example. During the Renaissance, English, like other European languages, absorbed many more Latin and Greek words. By the later Middle Ages, scholars had fallen into the habit of using Latin and Greek terms when writing in their local languages, and still do so today.

In 1473, Caxton brought printing to England. During the 1400s and early 1500s, Middle English was evolving into Early Modern English. Printers wanted standard spelling (and to some extent also standard vocabulary) to widen the market for their books. Thus, English spelling became standardised at a time when its pronunciation changed rapidly. The result is the most inconsistent spelling system in the world: each of the main streams of language that make up the Modern English lexicon has its own spelling system.