Lecture I theme I: Subject and aims of the History of English

Key words:

mutation - аблаут-немисча товуш(унли) алмашиниши демакдир;

IE(Indo-European)-Ҳинд-Европа тиллар оиласи;

PG(Proto-Germanic)-енг қадимги Герман қабилалари сўзлашган умумий Герман тили;

periodisation-инглиз тили тарихини ўрганишда уни даврларга бўлиш.

Lecture III

Theme 3: Old English period

Plans:

1. 
   Germanic settlement of Britain.
   
2. 
   Old English dialects.
   
3. 
   Old English alphabet and pronunciation.
   

1. The History of the English language begins with the invasion of the British Isles by Germanic tribes in the 5^th c. of our era.

Prior to the Germanic invasion, the Isles must have been inhabited for at least 50000 years. Archeological research has uncovered many layers of prehistoric population. The earliest inhabitants are the Celts. They came to Britain in three waves and immediately preceded the Tuetons. Economically and socially the Celts were a tribal society made up of kinds, kinship groups, clans and tribes; they practiced a primitive agriculture and carried on trade with Celtic Gaul.

The first millennium B.C was the period of Celtic migrations and expansion. Traces of their Civilisation are still found over extensive parts of Europe before our era; later they were absorbed by other IE languages and left very few vestiges behind.

In the first century B. C. Gaul was conquered by the Romans. Having occupied Gaul, Julius Caesar made two raids on Britain in 55 and 54 B.C. The British isles had long been known to the Romans as a source of valuable tin ore; Caesar attacked Britain for economic reasons – to obtain tin, pearls and corn,- and also for strategic reasons, since rebels and refugees from Gaul found support among their British kinsmen. Although Caesar failed to subjugate Britain, Roman economic penetration to Britain grew; traders and colonists from Rome came in large numbers to settle in the south – eastern towns. In A.D.43 Britain was again invaded by Roman legions under Emperor Claudius and towards the end of the century was made a province of the Roman Empire.

The province was carefully guarded and heavily garrisoned : about 40,000 men were stationed there. Two fortified walls ran across the country, a network of paved Roman roads connected the towns and military camps. Scores of towns with mixed population grew along the Roman roads – inhabited by Roman legionaries and civilians and by the native Celts; among the most important trading centres of Roman Britain was London.

Evidently, the upper classes and the townspeople in the southern districts were to a considerable extent Romanised, while the Romanisation of rural districts was far less thorough. The population further north was but little affected by the Roman occupation and remained Celtic both in language and in custom. On the whole the Romanisation of distant Britain was more superficial than that of continental provinces ( e.g.: Gaul and Iberia , where the complete linguistic conquest resulted in the growth of new Romance language, French and Spanish ).

The Roman occupation of Britain lasted nearly 400 years; it ended in the early 5^th c. In A.D. 410, Constantine officially withdrew the Roman troops to Rome. This temporary withdrawn turned out to be final, for the Empire was breaking up due to internal and external causes, - particularly the attacks of barbarian tribes (including Teutons) and the grows of independent kingdoms on former Roman territories. The expansion of Franks to Gaul in the 5^th c. cut off Britain from Roman world.

After the departure of the Roman legions the richest and most civilized part of the island, the south – east, was laid waste. Many towns were destroyed. Constant feuds among local landlords as well as the increased assaults of the Celts from the North and also the first Germanic raids from beyond the North Sea proved ruinous to the civilization of Roman Britain.

Since the Romans had left the British Isles some time before the invasion of the West Germanic tribes, there could never be any direct contacts between the new arrivals and the Romans on British soil. It follows that the elements of Roman culture and language, which the new invaders learnt in Britain, were mainly passed on to them at second hand by the Romanised Celts. It must be recalled, however , that the West Germanic tribes had already come into contact with the Romans and the Romanised population of continental provinces, prior to their migration to Britain: they had met Romans in combat had gone to Rome as war prisoners and slavers, had enlisted in the Roman or Romanised Celtic merchants. Thus in a number of various ways they had got acquainted with Roman civilization and the Latin language.

Undoubtedly, the Teutons had made piratical raids on the British shores long before the withdrawal of the Romans in A.D. 410, but the crisis came with the departure of the last Roman legions. The Britons fought among themselves and were harried by the Picts and Scots from Scotland. Left to their own resources, they were unable to offer a prolonged resistance to the enemies attacking them on every side. The 5^th c. was the age of increased Germanic expansion. About the middle of the century, several West Germanic tribes overran Britain and for the most part had colonized the island by the end of the century, though the invasions lasted well into the 6^th c.

Reliable evidence of the period is extremely scarce. The story of the invasion is told by Bede (673-735) a monastic scholar who wrote the first history of England, HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM.

According to Bede, the invaders came to Britain in A.D. 449 under the leadership of two Germanic kings, Hengist and Horsa; they had been invited by a British king, Vortigern, as assistants and allies in a local war. The newcomers soon dispossessed their hosts and other Germanic hands followed. The invaders came in multitude, in families and clans, to settle in the occupied territories; like the Celts before them, they migrated as a people and in that, the Germanic invasion was different from the Roman military conquest, although it was by no means a peaceful affair.

The invaders of Britain came from the western subdivision of the Germanic tribes. To quote Bede, ‘the newcomers were of the three strongest races of Germany, the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes’. Modern archeological and linguistic research has shown that this information is not quite precise. The origin and the linguistic affiliation is of the Jutes appears uncertain: some historian define them as a Frankish tribe, others doubt the participation and the very existence of the Jutes and name the Frisians as third main party in the invasion. It is also uncertain whether the early settlers really belonged to separate tribes, the Saxons, the Angles or perhaps, constituted two mixed waves of invaders, differing merely in the place and time of arrival. They were called Angles and Saxons by the Romans and by the Celts but preferred to call themselves Angelcyn (English people) and applied this name to the conquered territories : Angelcynnes land (land of the English , hence England).

The first wave of the invaders, the Jutes or the Frisians, occupied the extreme southeast: Kent and the Isle of Wight.

The second wave of immigrants was largely made up of the Saxons, who had been expanding westwards across Frisia to the Rhine and to what is known as Normandy. The final stage of the drift brought them to Britain by way of the Thames and the south coast. They set up their settlements along the south coast and on both banks of the Thames and depending on location , were called South Saxons, West Saxons and East Saxons ( later also Mid Saxons , between the western and eastern groups). The Saxons consolidated into a number of pretty kingdoms, the largest and the most powerful of them being Wessex, the kingdom of West Saxons.

Last came the Angles from the lower valley of the Elbe and southern Denmark; they made their landing on the east coast and moved up the rivers to the central part of the island, to occupy the districts between the Wash and the Humber and to the north of the Humber. They founded large kingdoms which had absorbed their weaker neighbours: East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria.

There was, probably, little intermixture between the newcomers and the Celtic aborigines though there is a wide difference of opinion among modern historians as to their relative proportion in the population. Gildas a Celtic historian of the day, alluded to the settlement as “ruin of Britain” and described the horrible devastation of the country: the invaders pulled down British villages and ruined the Roman British towns. They killed and enslaved the Britons or drove them to the distant parts of the country. The Britons found refuge in the mountainous districts of Cornwall and Wales; some Britons fled to Armorice (later called Small Brittany or Bretagne in Modern France). Celtic tribes remained intact only in Scotland and Ireland.

The bulk of the new population sprang from the Germanic invaders, though, to a certain extent, they intermixed with the Britons. Gradually the Germanic conquerors and the surviving Celts blended into a single people.

The invaders certainly prevailed over the natives as far as language was concerned; the linguistic conquest was complete. After the settlement, West Germanic tongues came to be spoken all over Britain with the exception of a few distant regions where Celts were in the majority: Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.

The migration of the Germanic tribes to the British Isles and the resulting separation from the Germanic tribes on the mainland was a decisive event in their linguistic history. Geographical separation, as well as mixture and unification of people, are major factors in linguistic differentiation and in the formation of languages. Being cut off from related OG tongues the closely related group of West Germanic dialects developed into a separate Germanic language, English. That is why the Germanic settlement of Britain can be regarded as the beginning of the independent history of the English language.

2. The Germanic tribes who settled in Britain in the 5^th and 6^th c. spoke related tribal dialects belonging to the West Germanic subgroup. Their common origin and their separation from other related tongues as well as their joint evolution in Britain transformed them eventually into a single tongue, English. Yet, at the early stages of their development in Britain, the dialects remained disunited. On the one hand, the OE dialects acquired common features, which distinguished them from continental Germanic tongues; on the other hand, they displayed growing regional divergence. The feudal system was setting in and the dialects were entering a new phase; geographical division superseded tribal dialectal division, in other words, tribal dialects were transformed into local or regional dialects.

The following four principal OE dialects are commonly distinguished: Kentish, a dialect spoken in the area known now as Kent and Surrey and in the Isle of Wight. It had developed from the tongue of the Jutes and Frisians.

West Saxon, the main dialect of the Saxon group, spoken in the rest of England south of the Thames and the Bristol Channel, except Wales and Cornwall, where Celtic tongues were preserved. Other Saxon dialects in England have not survived in written form and not known to modern scholars.

Mercian, a dialect derived from the speech of southern Angles and spoken chiefly in the kingdom of Mercia, that is, in the central region, from the Thames to the Humber.

Northumbrian, another Anglian dialect, spoken from the Humber north to the river Forth (hence the name – North-Humbrian).

The distinction between Mercian and Northumbrian as local OE dialects testifies to the new foundations of the dialectal division: regional in place of tribal, since according to the tribal division they represent one dialect, Anglian.

The boundaries between the dialects were uncertain and probably movable. The dialects passed into one another imperceptibly and dialectal forms freely borrowed from one dialect into another.
3. The records of OE writing embrace a variety of matter: they are dated in different centuries, represent various local dialects, belong to diverse genres and are written in different scripts. The earliest written records of English are inscriptions on hard material made in a special alphabet known as the runes. The word rune originally meant ‘secret’, ‘mystery’ and hence came to denote inscriptions believed to be magic. Later the word “rune” was applied to the characters used in writing these inscriptions.

There is no doubt that the art of runic writing was known to the Germanic tribes long before they came to Britain, since runic inscriptions have also been found in Scandinavia. The runes were used as letters, each symbol to indicate a separate sound. Besides, a Rune could also represent; a word beginning with that sound and was called by that word , e.g. the rune ‘h’ denoting the sound (O) and (d) was called “thorn” and could stand for OE porn (NE thorn); the runes W P stood for (w) and (f) and were called wynn ‘joy’ and feoh ‘cattle’ (NE fee) .

In some inscriptions the runes were found arranged in a fixed order making a sort of alphabet. After the first six letters this alphabet is called futhark.

The runic alphabet is a specifically Germanic alphabet, not to be found in languages of other groups. The letters are angular; straight lines are preferred, curved lines avoided; this is due to the fact that runic inscriptions were cut in hard material: stone, bone or wood. The shapes of some letters resemble those of Greek or Latin, others have not been traced to any known alphabet and the order of the runes in the alphabet is certainly original. To this day the origin of the runes is a matter of conjecture.

Neither on the mainland nor in Britain was the runes ever used for everyday writing or for putting down poetry and prose works. Their main function was to make short inscriptions on objects, often to bestow on them some special power or magic.

The two best known runic inscriptions in England are the earliest extant OE written records. One of them is an inscription on a box called the “Franks Casket”, the other is a short text on a stone cross in Dumfriesshire near the village of Ruthwell known as the “Ruth-well Cross”. Both records are in the Northumbrian dialect.

The Franks Casket was discovered in the early years of the 19^th c. in France and was presented to the British Museum by a British archeologist, A.V.Franks. The Casket is a small box made up whale bone; it’s four sides are carved: there are pictures in the centre and runic inscriptions.

The greatest poem of the time was BEOWULF, an epic of the 7^th or 8^th c. It was originally composed in the Mercian or Northumbrian dialect, but has come down to us in a 10^th c. West Saxon copy. It is valued both as a source of linguistic material and as a work of art; it is the oldest poem in Germanic literature. BEOWULF is built up several songs arranged in three chapters (over 3,000 lines in all). It is based on old legends about the tribal life of the ancient Teutons. The author (unknown) depicts vividly the adventures and fight of legendary heroes some of which can be traced to historical events.

OE scribes used two kinds of letters: the runes and the letters of the Latin alphabet. The runic alphabet was described above. The bulk of the OE material – OE manuscripts – is written in the Latin script. The use of Latin letters in English differed in some points from their use in Latin, for the scribes made certain modifications and additions in order to indicate OE sounds.

Depending of the size and shape of the letters modern philologists distinguish between several scripts which superseded one another during the Middle Ages. Throughout the Roman period and in the Early Middle Ages capitals and uncial letters were used reaching almost an inch in height, so that only a few letters could find place on a large page; in the 5^th – 7^th c. the uncial became smaller and the cursive script began to replace it in everyday life, while in book-making a still smaller script, miniscule was employed. The variety used in Britain is known as the Irish or insular, minuscule. Out of the altered shapes of letters used in this script- d, f, g and others – only a peculiar shape of g, y is preserved in modern publications. In the OE variety of the Latin alphabet I and j were not distinguished; nor were u and v; the letters k, q, x and w were not used until many years later. A new letter was devised by putting a stroke through d – d or d, also the capital letter – D to indicate the voiceless and voiced interdentally 10 and 51. The letter a was used either alone or as part of a ligature made up of a and e – a; likewise in the earlier OE texts we find the ligature oe (o plus e), which was later replaced by e.

The most interesting peculiarity of OE writing was the use of some runic characters, in the first place, the rune called “thorn”. P which was employed alongside the crossed d, d to indicate (O) and (D) – it is usually preserved in modern publications as a distinctive feature of the OE script. In the manuscripts one more rune was regularly used – p “wynn” for the sound (w).

Like any alphabet writing, OE writing was based on a phonetic principle: every letter indicated a separate sound. This principle of spelling of some OE letters indicated two or more sounds , even distinct phonemes, e.g. y stood for four different phonemes (see below); some letters, indicating distinct sounds stood for positional variants of phonemes – a and a. A careful study of the OE sound system has revealed that a set of letters, s, f and p (also shown as d) stood for two sounds each: a voiced and voiceless consonant. And yet, on the whole, OE spelling was far more phonetic and consistent than Mod E spelling.

The letters of the OE alphabet below are supplied with transcription symbols, if their sound values in OE differ from the sound values normally attached to them in Latin and other languages.

Old English alphabet