The Adventure of English film series

IMPORTANT STUFF IN BRIEF

The Anglo-Saxons who invaded the British Isle after the retreat of the Romans called the
Celts who tried to find retreat in the West wealas (modern Welsh), which originally meant
“foreigner” and “slave”.

Some remnants in English from the languages of the Celts: crag (in the North) “rock”,
combe “deep valley”, and dialect words like brat or brock for “badger”. Traces in
placenames: tor- as in Torpenhow meaning “peak”; car- as in Carlisle meaning “a fortified
place”. Thames, Avon, Dover, London – all Celtic river and place names.

The the Anglo-Saxon ending –ing in place names means “the people of”, as in Ealing,
Dorking, or Reading; -ton, as in Wigton or Bridlington, means “enclosure” or “village”;
-ham, as in Birmingham, means “farm”.

Old English vocabulary is estimated to have comprised ca. 25,000 words.

Since the latter part of the 9

th

century (Old) English absorbed Old Norse vocabulary, the

language of the Vikings who established the Danelaw. Some remnants: the ending -by in
place names like Whitby or Birkby was an Old Norse word for “farm”; -thorpe, as in
Westhorpe or Nunthorpe, meant “village”; -thwaite, as in Huthwaite or Bassenthawite,
meant “a portion of land”; English surnames ending in –son (“the son of”) are of Danish
origin, like Harrison, Simpson, Watson, Johnson etc.; the pronouns they, their, them are Old
Norse borrowings.

Through contact with Old Norse, Old English started to restructure its morphology by
dropping inflectional endings, thereby changing from an inflectional language to one
where it was word order which more and more determined grammatical relations; in other
words, the influence of Old Norse speeded up the grammatical development of Old
English. As a result, towards the end of the Old English period, inflectional endings were
becoming indistinct and began to be dropped so that Middle English used fewer inflectional
endings and more of word order.

The word fight is Anglo-Saxon, while its synonym, battle, comes from the language of the
Normans (Norman French) who invaded the Britain in 1066.

The last entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, written in Old English, was written in
Peterborough Cathedral in 1154.

After the Norman invasion, the English-speaking peasants lived in small cottages or huts,
while their French-speaking masters lived privileged lives in their castles. Our modern
vocabulary still reflects the distinction between them. English speakers tended the living
cattle, which we still cal by the Old English words ox or cow; French speakers ate the
prepared meat which came to the table, which we call by the French word beef. In the same
way, the English sheep became the French mutton, calf became veal, deer became venison,
and pig became pork – English animal, French meat in every case.

The French influence on the English language is enormous in terms of vocabulary, not in
terms of grammar.

The English didn’t just borrow vocabulary from the Norman French, they also borrowed
names: the Old English Ethelbert, Aelfric, Wulfstane or Athelstane went out of fashion,
while in came the French names Richard, Robert, Simon, Steven, John, Jefferey and
William.

Because English was an international language of trade, it acted as a conduit for words from
the markets of the East. The words saffron, mattress, hazard, camphor, alchemy, lute,
amber, syrup are Arabic borrowings that came to English through French. The phrase
checkmate comes through French from the Arabic shah mat, meaning “the king is dead”.

Although the Black Death was a human catastrophe, it triggered a series of social upheavals
which would speed the English language along the road to full restoration, from the
Norman-French and Latin dominance, as the real and recognized language of the English
nation.

John Wycliffe – the first translator of the Bible into English. His translation was
unauthorized by the Church. The work on translation started in Oxford in 1380. Hence,
Wycliffe’s is the first English Bible. Wycliffe and his associates were condemned as
heretics by the Church.

Henry V broke with 350 years of royal tradition and wrote his dispatches home in English,
which was revolutionary. Starting in August 1417, he promoted the use of the English
language in government, and his reign marks the appearance of Chancery
Standard English as well as the adoption of English as the language of record within
Government. He was the first king to use English in his personal correspondence since
the Norman conquest, which occurred 350 years earlier.

The Chancery Standard was a written form of English used by government bureaucracy
and for other official purposes during the 15

th

century. The Chancery Standard was

developed during the reign of King Henry V (1413 to 1422) in response to his order for his
chancery (government officials) to use, like himself, English rather than Anglo-
Norman or Latin. It had become broadly standardised by about the 1430s, and it served as a
widely intelligible form of English for the first English printers, from the 1470s onwards. As
a result, it has contributed significantly to the form of Standard English as it developed
during the Elizabethan Era, and by extension to the Standard English of today. Chancery

standardised the variable spelling of Middle English vocabulary (e.g. church, cherche,
cherch, chyrch, cherge, chyrche, schyrche for “church”).

Around the time English was being standardised by Chancery, there was much debate about
the best way to spell things. Broadly, there were “reformers”, who wanted to spell words
according to the way they were pronounced, and “traditionalists”, who wanted to spell them
in one of the ways they had always been spelled. The traditionalists won, but they could not
help tampering with the English spelling. In a desire to make the roots of the language more
evident, words that had entered English from French, for instance, were given a Latin look.
The letter “b” was inserted into debt and doubt, and “c” into victuals. Words that were
thought to be of Greek origin sometimes had their spelling adjusted, so that, for example,
throne and theatre acquired their “h”. “Rhyme”, on the other hand, was given an “h”
just because “rhythm” had one, even though it is etymologically absurd. On a similar
principle, an “l” was inserted in “could” because it had become silent, but it was still
present in “should” and “would”. The same with “h” in words like “whole” or “where”.

William Caxton – the first printer in England.

William Tyndale – a 16

th

century scholar and translator who did the first English

translation of the Bible that was based directly on Hebrew and Greek texts; he was also
the first to print his Bible translation, which allowed for its wide distribution.

Coverdale’s Bible – the first legal English translation of the Bible, authorised by Henry
VIII in 1535. It was translated from German.

By the end of the 16

th

century, there were so many competing versions (translations) of the

Bible that King James I ordered a standardised version, which is now known as the King
James Bible of 1611.