The beginning of English - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... umber of branches including the Germanic branch lived somewhere between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea six thousand years ago (McCrum, Cran and MacNeil 1). This population then expanded and migrated eastward, westward and northward and inhabited most of Europe. A casual comparison between Indo-European and English reveals similarities among them (Hogg 67). By studying cognates, words of common origin in different languages, linguistics were able to make qualified guesses about what words may have looked like in a proto-language. Cognates also reveals systematic sound changes that have occurred as new languages have emerged. English has an alphabetic writing system based on the Roman alphabet that was brought to Anglo-Saxon England by Christian missionaries and church officials in the 600s AD (Hogg 55). An earlier Germanic writing system called runes, also alphabetic and originating eventually from the same source as the Roman alphabet, was used for incantations, curses, and a few poems, when the tribes were still on the continent and also after their migration to Britain, up until Christianization (Hogg 87). Crucial elements of the sound stream of a message are thus captured by a linear sequence of marks that can be sounded out to recapture the message by means of its sounds. The entire sound stream is not captured, but enough of it is to provide a prompt for lexical recognition. Other kinds of writing systems are based on written representation of other linguistic units such as syllables, words, or some mix of these (Hogg 98).
The Standardization of English is divided into periods. The first is the Primitive Old English Period between 450AD and 700AD. In 500 BC, Britain was invaded by Celtic tribes, who ruled the Island (Hogg et al.). In 43 A.D., however, the islands were invaded by Emperor Claudius and Britain became part of the Roman Empire. When the Roman Empire collapsed and the Roman legionaries went home, they left a power vacuum in Britain. The Scots ...Download file to see next pagesRead More