English Is a Germanic Language: What This Means and How Far It Is True - Research Paper Example

English is a Germanic Language: What this means and how far it is true. At the start of the twenty first century English is a global language which can claim to be one of the most influential languages that there has ever been. It is widely spoken in many countries both as a first language and as a second language, and it has even achieved dominance in the virtual worlds of cyberspace and the internet. This has not always been the case, however, and many people are not aware that only two thousand years ago, the English language did not even exist. Around the year 1 AD Europe was dominated by the Mediterranean based Greek and Latin languages and cultures, while the north western portion of Europe was a mass of small tribes fighting against each other and against the colossal force of the expanding Roman Empire. A good way to understand the true nature of things is to look at their origins, and this paper will therefore examine first the historical origins of English. After that, the main features of the language will be analysed with particular reference to German, along with factors which have influenced the development of English through the ages. Finally a conclusion will be reached on what it means when we say English is a Germanic language and just how true this statement is in the present day. Linguists tend to divide the study of English into four main periods called Old English (500-1100 AD); Middle English (1100-1500 AD) Early Modern English (500-1800) and Modern English (1800 AD until the present day). 1 These are not exact categories, and they mark significant historical periods rather than any clearly identifiable sudden changes in the language. The significance of the year 500 AD is that it marks the start of a period in the history of the British Isles when Germanic tribes began to colonise the islands. As part of a long process of migrations and invasions they gradually moved West and North to take over more and more of the British Isles, pushing the local British tribes, which were of Celtic origin far out to the fringes of the land. Fennel sees the dialects of these Germanic tribes as “the raw material for the development of English”2. It is important to remember that in this period most communication took place orally and very few people could read or write. This meant that there was a lot of local variation from place to place, with no fixed form, especially in low technology cultures like that of the Germanic settlers. Dialect variations were common, and as communities spread out over greater and greater distances, these variations became more pronounced. This diversification of language dialects is a normal and natural process that occurs all the time and in all living languages. Baugh and Cable note that a study of individual vocabulary items reveals both similarities and differences and they cite the examples milch/milk; brot/bread; fleisch/flesh and wasser/water to show that English and German share a close kinship because words like these “have diverged from a common form”.3 This is not the same as saying that English is just a form of German, because that would presume a direct relationship with only this language. It would be truer to say that both German and English are varieties of another, older language, which over time diverged further and further apart until they came to be regarded as two separate languages. If this theory is correct, then one would expect older versions of English and German to be more similar to each other than modern versions are, and when one looks at the evidence, this does indeed seem to be the case. There is a whole group of languages including English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian which appear to have very obvious connections: “(English) shares with these languages similar grammatical structure and many common words”.4 The origins of these similar languages are lost in prehistoric times and the scholars have to imagine a “Proto Germanic” language from which they all have descended. A breakthrough in the understanding of language origins was made in 1713 when a member of another invading tribe, this time the English in India, called Sir William Jones spotted similarities between Sanskrit, the holy language of the people of India, and geographically distant languages like Greek, Latin, and even Celtic and Germanic languages.5 This resulted in the now familiar tradition of describing languages as “families”, grouped together in a series of branches like a family tree. The top of this tree was an ancient supposed language named “Indo-European” and this split into various Indian languages, and some European ones, including Proto Germanic. A century after William Jones started off this line of thinking, the German scholar, Jacob Grimm, one of the famous fairytale writing brothers, filled in some of the linking details by spotting that there were patterns in the ways that the Indo European languages changed. He homed in on the way certain sounds in Greek and Latin consistently shift when they appear in similar words in Germanic languages, for example the pairs Latin/English piscis/fish, tres/three and centum/hundred.6 The initial consonants follow a standard pattern of change. This important discovery came to be known as “Grimm’s Law” and it has been used as tool to mark where the boundary is between Germanic languages and other Indo European languages. The Romance languages, which are related to Latin, do not follow this pattern, as for example in the Latin/French pairs pater/père and tres/trois and they do not belong in the Germanic family of languages. In the light of all this well documented scholarly evidence it is clear that English and German both belong to the linguistic category of “Germanic languages”, at least as far as their origins are concerned. When we look at more modern versions of English, however, the picture is a little more confusing. Two major differences between modern English and modern German stand out even to a non-expert observer: English has a huge number of words which appear much closer to the Latin-related Romance group of languages, and English lacks the complicated noun and adjective endings that modern German has. Does this mean that English has ceased to be a Germanic language? In order to answer this question we have to look again at the historical background. The arrival of a large amount of Latin based vocabulary into the English language coincided with a number of significant political and cultural events. First, the role of Latin in the Christian Church was an influence on all languages which came under its sway, and this was the case in the British Isles from the time of the emergence of Old English onwards. Secondly, the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought a new French speaking ruling class to the British Isles, and heralded a new appreciation for French language, literature and culture. Baugh and Cable see this as an event “that had a greater effect on the English language than any other in the course of its history”.7 French did not replace English as the language of choice for the common people, however, and instead it existed alongside the Germanic popular language. Later, in the period of the Enlightenment when Latin again became popular as a language for formal learning, still more non-Germanic vocabulary was added, particularly in areas like science and scholarship. Baugh and Cable note that English has evolved a richness in synonyms, some with a homely touch, and others more literary, and that this is due to “the happy mingling of Latin, French and native elements”.8 The absence of noun and adjective endings in English is a feature that distinguishes it greatly from Germanic languages. In fact it also distinguishes it from most other Indo European languages and so it requires some further explanation. It has been suggested that one reason for this loss is the crowded situation on the British Isles in the Old English period whereby various Saxon and Anglo Saxon dialects were co-existing alongside Scandinavian dialects brought by Vikings and other Scandinavian settlers.9 All of these had such endings, technically called inflections, but they were all slightly different, due to the process of natural variation over time which was mentioned above. Barber suggests that people grew unsure which version was correct and so they just decided not to use any. Added to this was the fact that stress in English mostly fell on the first syllable of a word, and this led to a falling away of the last syllable, which was usually the inflected ending. There are still traces of these old adjective and noun inflections in archaic English expressions like “the olden days” where an adjective ending is present, or “oxen” where a Germanic plural form is retained, but these are rare in modern English. A further consequence of the loss of inflections was that gender became less noticeable. After a while it disappeared altogether as a grammatical feature, and was present only as a property of living objects in the natural world. These are all features which distinguish English from other Germanic languages, but they can be explained in terms of the natural evolution of a language as it comes into contact with the historical and cultural forces in which it has to exist. The few inflections which do remain, such as the genitive “s” and the comparative ending “er” and the superlative ending “est” are all clearly present in modern German. 10 In modern times the English language has not ceased in its evolution and change. It has shown a remarkable flexibility in being able to adapt to different cultural situations both at home in the British Isles, and in far flung parts of the world. The period of Modern English coincides with the rise of American culture, and there is now quite a distinct difference in the varieties of English spoken on each side of the Atlantic Ocean. This is a historical development which has the potential, like other events mentioned above, to drive English into further diversification away from its Germanic roots. On the other hand new inventions in the field of communications like the telephone, radio, television and now the internet have allowed communities located as far away as India, North America, South Africa and Australia to maintain strong cultural links with each other and with Britain and this has a unifying effect on their common language. Linguistic trends now flow freely across the globe, and there is plenty of room for both unity and diversity in English usage to develop. No one nation or culture defines the context for English any more, and this should guarantee that it will survive long into the future. The factors outlined above demonstrate that English is, was and always will be a Germanic language in terms of its historical origins and classification by professional linguists. It retains many grammatical features and vocabulary items which are obviously very closely related to modern Germanic languages. Culturally, there is some affinity with German, Dutch, and Scandinavian cultures, and also with more modern Germanic languages like Afrikaans and Yiddish. What this Germanic connection means today, however, is very hard to define, especially since most people who speak the language are not aware of this definition, and would be indifferent about it even if they knew it existed. It could be argued that English has just as much cultural affinity with French, Spanish non Indo-European based languages like Finnish. In short, the term is both true and useful in understanding the past, and in appreciating the fine points of linguistic theory, but it is increasingly irrelevant in the exciting study of how English will adapt in the future to new, global influences. Charles Barber, The English Language: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 5th edition, London: Routledge, 2002 . Barbara Fennell, A History of English: A Sociolinguistic Approach, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.  Read More