Language in Britain (lecture 3)

1. Lecture 3

Language in Britain

2. English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family

3. The name English is derived from Englisc, the language of the Angles and Saxons

4. Periods in the evolution of English:

Old English – the mid 5th – the mid
12th centuries
Middle English – the mid 12th – the
mid 15th centuries
Modern English – the mid 15th – to
the present

5. Old English period 1. Names of basic concepts and things: heaven and earth, love and hate, life and death, beginning and end,

day and night
etc.
2. Cardinal and ordinal numerals (except
second)
3. Personal pronouns (except “they, their,
them”)
4. The auxiliary verbs, most simple
prepositions,
all
conjunctions

6. Old English had: - 3 genders for nouns and adjectives: masculine, feminine, neuter - 4 cases for nouns, pronouns, adjectives:

nominative, genitive,
dative, accusative
- more irregular verbs than in
Modern English

7. Middle English

- was greatly influenced by French and
Latin (over 10000 words were borrowed
from French !)
- was of secondary importance and
spoken by uneducated people
- had tremendous grammatical changes
(the inflections and case endings of Old
English disappeared, word order became
of prime importance)

8. Modern English

- The vocabulary is half Germanic (Old
English and Scandinavian) and half Romance
(French and Latin) with Greek borrowings in
in science and technology and also from
Dutch, Italian, Spanish and some other
languages
- is analytic (uninflected)
- One standard literary English: Received
Standard English
- Several regional and social dialects (eg.
cockney of East Londoners)

9.

Cornish (= the language of Cornwall)
Manx ( = the language of The Isle of Man)
Gaelic (=the language of Scottishs Celts)
Scots Gaelic
Irish Gaelic
(in Scotland)
(in Ireland)
Welsh (in Wales)