History of English Language - Essay Example

How Germanic is modern English? Discuss the features of contemporary English which mark it as a Germanic language. Then discuss some of the Germanic features which have been lost from the language between Old English and Modern English. Name Institution Date  English language originated in Europe and is now extensively spoken all continents. It is the principal language of the U.S, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Ireland. Additionally, it is spoken in numerous island countries in the Caribbean Sea, as well as the Pacific Ocean. English and German are both Germanic languages since they are considered to have developed from a common ancestor, West Germanic. And indeed, their earliest recorded forms, Old English and Old High German are still remarkably similar, as would be expected. It is widely noted that English looks somewhat more progressive than German. In this sense, progressive does not mean anything near Jespersonian evaluative sense; the term merely suggests that Old English had progressed somewhat further than Old High German along a route that all Germanic languages were following to a greater or lesser extent, namely, simplification of the inflectional system with a concomitant reorientation of syntax. This essay seeks to highlight the influence of Germanic language on contemporary English, as well as, variations inherent from the historical perspective (Dresher & Elan 2000, p. 46) The English language is full of words and lingoes from all over the world due to commerce. In essence, Old German Language alongside Dutch and Norse has had a massive influence on the English language. In recent times, scholars noted that there is a high influence of Germanic language than it was thought. From a lexical point, there has been a significant impact of German words in English vocabulary. Actually, there appears to be a Germanic influence in the dialect of many expanses of contemporary British social life. This can be seen in gastronomy where there are words such as Hamburger and Frankfurter. In music and literature especially in Britain and America, there is Glockenspiel and Leitmotiv. With regards to historical orientations, there is Realpolitik and Blitzkrieg just to mention a few. Some prevalent expressions of words of German language are more tangible like Zeitgeist, Angst and Doppelgänger have been introduced into English language and more words are still being used even though they have not been incorporated in the mainstream language (Hawkins 1986, p. 44). Germanic words are also on the upsurge in the media industry, a fact that linguistic professionals are ascribing to how German compound nouns are utilized by Britons. Moulton states, “Of note, the usage of the term Schadenfreude defined as the pleasure at the hardship of other people has seen a 30% growth in its usage in print, as well as broadcast last year. Supplementary words, like über as a person who likes to exaggerate, have become a popular term in the blogging industry” (Moulton 1962, p. 238). Germanic has a large number of words that have no known cognates in other Indo-European languages including English. These could have existed, of course, in Indo-European languages but been lost from all other languages of the family. It is more likely, however, that they were developed during the Proto-Germanic period or taken from non-Indo-European languages originally spoken in the area occupied by the Germanic peoples. A few words that are apparently distinctively Germanic are, in the Modern English forms include, broad, drink, drive, fowl, hold, meat, rain and wife (Dresher & Elan 2000, p. 77). Germanic languages have only two tenses: the present and the preterit (or past). This simplification of a much more complex Indo-European verbal system is reflected in English bind-bound, as well as in German binden-band and Old Norse binda-band. No Germanic language has anything comparable to such forms which are expressed in the Germanic languages by the verb phrases. This can also be seen in English language where there are expressions such as I shall praise, I have praised, I had praised and I shall have praised. Modern English contains Germanic tense. Germanic developed a preterit tense form with a dental suffix that is one containing d or t (as in spell-spelled) alongside an older pattern of changing the vowels inside a verb (as in rise-rose). All Germanic languages have these two types of verbs. Modern English obtained this concept and applied it in past tense (Moulton 1962, p. 246). From a morphological point of view, the word usage in sentences in Modern English language is almost similar to Germanic language. For instance, the frequent use of in Germanic and English spoken discourse. The frequent use of ‘and’ ‘and then’ as connectivity elements brings out the extent Modern English is Germanic. Their German equivalents ‘und’ and ‘und dann’ are frequently used in German spoken discourse when telling a story or reporting a sequential event in which events are followed by one after another. Both connectors are used to make the speaker’s planning activity explicit showing that the new sentence is linked to the previous one. Thus, it is noticed that German spoken discourse not only influenced Modern English language production but also other languages (Hans, & Brian 2009, p. 376). The Continental home of the English was north of the area in which the High German shift occurred. But even if this had not been so, the English language would have been unaffected by changes that had not begun to occur at the time of the Anglo-Saxon migrations to Britain, beginning in the fifth century. Consequently English has the earlier consonantal characteristics of Germanic origin, which it shares with Low German, Dutch, Flemish and Frisian. It can also be seen that the Germanic language and even modern ones have striking similarities in the third person singular and plural forms. English has not been spared either as it has borrowed this concept from the German and French. The third person singular and plural forms of the verb ‘to be’ including a remarkable paradigmatic alternation between Vs- in the singular and s- in the plural. Compare as shown below: English German French Good Gut Bon Better Besser meilleur Best Best- le Meilleur Highly idiosyncratic paradigmatic alternations such as those shown above do not normally get borrowed or even the suppletive patterns. “The morphological idiosyncrasies exhibited by these patterns, therefore, combined with the fact that they involve systematic phonological correspondences, would be difficult to explain except as reflecting common heritage as the one that existed between Germanic and English languages. Additionally, Modern English word order is similar to Germanic languages. Hawkins adds This can be seen from the word order; simple subject +verb + other elements sentences: "Ich sehe dich." ("I see you.") or "Er arbeitet zu Hause"-‘He works at home,’” (Hans, & Brian 2009, p. 376).This seemingly similar word order puts the subject of the sentence first, and then followed by the predicate while other elements follow. Phonologically, the phonological sounds of English and Germanic are analogous just like stress and pitch aspects. Moulton explicates, “Nonetheless, the /th/ sound as in words like the, and thing does not exist in German, and many speakers have problems producing such words correctly. German words beginning with a /w/ are pronounced with a /v/. This explains the mispronunciation of English words we or wine as ve and vine.” (Moulton 1962, p. 238). At this point, it is important to note that there are striking similarities between Germanic and Modern English. At the same time, there are numerous striking features that are in modern English with Germanic origin. When these languages were forming, there were relatively small differences which have increased to such extent that they may be said to have become typologically significant, that is, to have affected the level of language type. In other words, Modern English differs much more radically than German from the language still represented by Old English, Old High German, or Gothic, let alone reconstructed West of Common Germanic. The most obvious difference is the more strongly analytic character of English account of the radical reduction of its inflectional endings. One direct consequence of this development (or perhaps also partly its cause) was the grammaticalization of SVO word order in both main and subordinate clauses and its investment with syntactic function: the NP occurring before the verb in declarative sentences is the subject, the one following it is the object. This makes English a truly configurationally language, a characterization that German does not deserve to the same extent since the main-clause word order is less rigid than in English. This syntactic-typological difference, resulting from the interaction of morphology and syntax, has generally been recognized, as has the different complexity of the respective inflectional systems. German still exhibits the typical features of an inflectional language, whereas English inflection has been reduced to a minimum, so that it sometimes is compared to isolating languages like Chinese, which is certainly an exaggeration. But there is no doubt that English has lot more of its original inflection than German, and has also undergone substantial reorganization of its syntax, altogether with other developments. The verb-second and verb-first structures of German main clauses have close parallels in all the modern Germanic languages. Even in English, which has gone furthest in direction of fixing SVO, employs verb –first rule in an almost identical set of environments to German, and it has numerous subject –verb inversion rules creating verb-second structures in a significant number of the environments that is seen in (Matti 1992, p.76) The position of sentence-level constituents in German apart from the verb is relatively free. Within the other major phrasal categories, however (the noun phrase, the adjective phrase, the prepositional phrase), the ordering of daughter constituents is just as fixed as in English. With its rich inflectional morphology, verb-final structures and word order freedom, Modern German and Old English preserve syntactic features that were common to all the older West Germanic languages. Modern English, by contrast, has essentially lost its case morphology on nouns (as well as other inflectional morphology), has fixed SVO word order, and permits less sentence-level word order freedom. Modern English syntax also differs from Modern German in other significant ways. Most of these are the result of English having effected changes which were either not carried out, or were carried out to much lesser extent, in German (Matti 1992, p.76). Another Germanic feature that has been lost in the Modern English is the changes that can be seen at the lexicon and morphology. The difference between Old English and Modern English is clear at the level of lexicon and morphology, where Old English tends to have words and inflections that no longer appear in Modern English. It is where Old English lacks the familiar cues of Modern English that the differences are hard to estimate. The sentence type in Old English prose is as open to interpretation as unpunctuated Modern English, as can be seen from vernacular translations of Latin texts that have lexical indications that they are questions. Old English verse, as can sometimes be confirmed through tests, takes more redundant approach (Hans & Brian 2009, p.95). The unexpressed subject in Modern English appears with finite and nonfinite verbs. With nonfinite verbs, the unexpressed subject is ‘people in general’ for verbs like ‘to answer’ in sentences like ‘This question is difficult to answer.’ Other infinitives take their unexpressed subjects from the subjects of other verbs as in “They want to answer the question,” where ‘to answer’ inherits the subject of ‘wan,’ ‘they.’ This is a complete variation of Old English which did not have such detailed rubrics. Moreover, in Modern English, when the verb is marked as subjunctive, as in “were he to know the answer,” the verb –initial clause with a subsequent subject can only be the subjunctive conditional. Old English sentences with the subjunctive are like Modern English sentences in being unlikely to support an interrogative intonation. While it might seem, from the perspective of Modern English, that any verb-initial clause is likely to be a question, the high frequency of statement clauses with this form in Old English makes this tactic anachronistic. Since the majority of verb-initial clauses are non-interrogative, weighing the statement possibility should also occur even when an interrogatory interpretation is possible (Bernshausen 2011). The Great Vowel Shift marks is yet one of the most remarkable changes in the history of Modern English that makes it look fundamentally different with Old English or even Germanic language. The Great Vowel Shift is the term that denotes progressions of variations of the English language long vowels between the 14th and the 17th centuries. Throughout this epoch, all the long vowels moved closer to one another or in better scholastic terms, they were diphthongized. The variations were not as a result of any particular phonetic circumstances in the syllable. All the long vowels the long vowels were changed. It is important to note that this process happened English language only. In no other language a similar complex shift of vowels can be found. The cause of this systematic vowel movement is still not completely clarified. Some theories say that the mass immigration to South England after the pandemic Black Death and the resulting social mobility could be a reason. Afterwards, the numerous dialects with their different vowel sounds and the emerging middle class London altered the speech into a new standard pronunciation, which finally disseminated to other regions. Bernshausen, explains, “The major changes were roughly the following though exemptions occur; the transitions were not always complete. /a:/ - /e:/ (in e.g. cake) /e:/ -> /i:/ (in e.g. greet), /i:/ -> /ai/ (in e.g. rice), /o:/ -> /u:/ (in e.g. foot), /u:/ -> /au/ (in e.g. house). The last main influence in the development of Modern English was the beginning of the reproduction press in 1476” (Bernshausen 2011). Volumes of books and magazines became low-priced and as a consequence, literateness became even more common. Printing for the multitudes became a moneymaking initiative, and literature printed in English became more common. To conclude, the reproduction industry brought normalization to English. References Bernshausen Timm, 2011. The Great Vowel Shift. GRIN Verlag, Norderstedt. Dresher, E & Aditi, L 1991.The Germanic foot: metrical coherence in Old English. Linguistic Inquiry 22: 251.-86. Dresher, B. Elan, A 2000. Analogical levelling of vowel length in West Germanic. Principles of Change in Phonology and Morphology. Mouton Press, Berlin. Hans, H & Brian, J 2009. Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics 2ed. Walter de Gruyter Press, Berlin. Hawkins, J.A 1986. A Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts. University of Texas Press, Austin; Croom Helm, London. Matti Rissanen, 1992. History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics. Walter de Gruyter Press, Berlin. Moulton, W.G 1962. The Sounds of English and German. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Read More