unit_1_课文

Unit one A Brief History of English

Paul McHenry Roberts (1917- 1967) was an American author and journalist. He taught college

English for over twenty years，first at San Jose State College and later at Cornell University. He

published numerous books on linguistics, including Understanding Grammar (1954)，Patterns of

English (1956)，and Understanding English (1958). In this selection excerpted from the book

Understanding English (1958)，Roberts recounts the major events in the English history and

discusses their implications for the development of the English language.

No understanding of the English language can be very satisfactory without a notion of the

history of the language. But we shall have to make do with just a notion. The history of English is

long and complicated, and we can only hit the high spots.

The history of our language begins a little after A.D. 600. Everything before that is pre-history,

which means that we can guess at it but cannot prove much. For a thousand years or so before the

birth of Christ our linguistic ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons, were wandering through the forests of

northern Europe. Their language was a part of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European Family.

Not much is surely known about the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England. We do know,

however, that they were a long time securing themselves in England. Fighting went on for as long as

a hundred years before the Celts in England were all killed, driven into Wales, or reduced to slavery.

This is the period of King Arthur, who was not entirely mythological. He was a Romanized Celt, a

general, though probably not a king. He had some success against the Anglo-Saxons, but it was only

temporary. By 550 or so the Anglo-Saxons were firmly established. English was in England.

It is customary to divide the history of the English language into three periods: Old English,

Middle English, and Modern English. Old English runs from the earliest records— i.e., seventh

century— to about 1100 ; Middle English from 1100 to 1450 or 1500; Modern English from 1500 to

the present day. Sometimes Modern English is further divided into Early Modern,1500-1700, and

Late Modern.1700 to the present.

When England came into history, it was divided into several more or less autonomous kingdoms,

some of which at times exercised a certain amount of control over the others. In the sixth century the

most advanced kingdom. Northumbria, developed a respectable civilization, the finest in Europe. It

was in this period that best of the Old English literature was written, including the epic poem

Beowulf. In the eighth century. Northumbrian power declined, and the center of influence moved

southward to Mercia, the kingdom of the Midlands. A century later the center shifted again, and

Wessex the country of the West Saxons, became the leading power. The most famous king of the

West Saxons was Alfred the great, whose military accomplishment was his successful opposition to

the Viking invasions. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the Norsemen emerged in their ships from their

homelands in Denmark and the Scandinavian Peninsula. The linguistic result of all this was a

considerable injection of Norse into the English language. Norse was at this time not so different

from English as Norwegian or Danish is now. Probably speakers of English could understand, more

or less, the language of the newcomers who had moved into eastern England. At any rate, there was

considerable interchange and word borrowing. Examples of Norse words in the English language are

sky, give, law. egg, outlaw, leg. ugly, scant, sly, crawl, scowl, take, thrust. There are hundreds more.

We have even borrowed some pronouns from Norse-they, their and them. These words were

borrowed first by the eastern and northern dialects and then in the course of hundreds of years made

their way into English generally.

In grammar, Old English was much more highly inflected than modern English is. That is, there

were more case endings for nouns, more person and number endings for verbs, a more complicated

pronoun system, various endings for adjectives, and so on. Present-day English has only two cases

for nouns- common case and possessive case. Adjectives now have no case system at all. On the

other hand, we now use a more rigid word order and more structure words (prepositions, auxiliaries,

and the like) to express relationships than Old English did. In vocabulary, most of the Old English

words are what we may call native English: that is, words which have not been borrowed from other

languages but which have been a part of English ever since English was a part of Indo-European. Old

English did certainly contain borrowed words. We have seen that many borrowings were coming in

from Norse. Rather large numbers had been borrowed from Latin, too. Some of these were taken

while the Anglo-Saxons were still on the Continent (cheese, butter, bishop, kettle, etc.). But the great

majority of Old English words were native English. Now, on the contrary, the majority of words in

English are borrowed，and only about 14 percent are native.

Sometime between the years 1000 and 1200 various important changes took place in the structure of

English, and Old English became Middle English. The political event which facilitated these changes

was the Norman Conquest. The Normans, as the name shows, came originally from Scandinavia. In

the early tenth century they established themselves in northern France, adopted the French language,

and developed a vigorous kingdom and a very passable civilization. In the year 1066, led by Duke

William, they crossed the Channel and made themselves masters of England. For the next several

hundred years, England was ruled by kings whose first language was French.

One might wonder why, after the Norman Conquest, French did not become the national language,

replacing English entirely. The reason is that the Conquest was not a national migration, as the earlier

Anglo -Saxon invasion had been. Great numbers of Normans came to England, but they came as

rulers and landlords. French became the language of the court, the language of the nobility, the

language of polite society, the language of literature . But it did not replace English as the language

of the people. There must always have been hundreds of towns and villages in which French was

never heard except when visitors of high station passed through.

But English, though it survived as the national language, was profoundly changed after the Norman

Conquest. It is in vocabulary that the effects of the Conquest are most obvious. French ceased, after a

hundred years or so, to be the native language of very many people in England, but it continued - and

continues still ---to be a zealously cultivated second language, the mirror of elegance and

civilization . When one spoke English, one introduced not only French ideas and French things but

also their French names. This was not only easy but socially useful. To pepper one’s conversation

with French expressions was to show that one was well- bred, elegant, au courant. The last sentence

shows that the process is not yet dead. By using au courant instead of, say , abreast of thing the

writer indicates that he is no dull clod who knows only English but an elegant person aware of how

things are done in le haunt monde.

Thus French words came into English, all sorts of them. These words to do with government：

parliament , majesty, treaty , alliance , tax ,government ; church words：parson, sermon, baptism,

incense, crucifix, religion; words for foods : veal , beef

，mutton , bacon , jelly，peach, lemon, cream,

biscuit; colors : blue , scarlet , vermilion ; household words : curtain , chair , lamp , towel , blanket ,

parlor ; play words : dance , chess , music, leisure , conversation ; literary words : story , romance ,

poet, literary ; learned words : study, logic , grammar , noun , surgeon , an atomy , stomach ; just

ordinary words of all sorts : nice, second ,very, age bucket, gentle , final , fault , flower , cry , count,

sure , move , surprise , plain．

All these and thousands more poured into the English vocabulary between 1100 and 1500 until, at

the end of that time, many people must have had more French words than English at their command.

This is not to say that English became French. English remained English in sound structure and in

grammar, though these also felt the ripples of French influence. The very heart of the vocabulary, too,

remained English. Most of the high-frequency words -- the pronouns, the preposition, the

conjunctions , the auxiliaries , as well as a great many ordinary nouns and verbs and

adjectives---were not replaced by borrowings.

Middle English, then, was still a Germanic language, but it differed from Old English in many ways.

The sound system and the grammar changed a good deal. Speakers made less use of case systems

and other inflectional devices and relied more on word order and structure words to express their

meanings. This is often said to be a simplification, but it is not really. Languages don ' t become

simpler; they merely exchange one kind of complexity for another. Modern English is not a simple

language, as any foreign speaker who tries to learn it will hasten to tell you.

The period of Early Modern English --that is , the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries --was also the

period of the English Renaissance，when people developed , on the one hand , a keen Interest in the

past and , on the other , a more daring and imaginative view of the future. New ideas multiplied, and

new ideas meant new language. Englishmen had grown accustomed to borrowing words from French

as a result of the Norman Conquest; now they borrowed from Latin and Greek. As we have seen,

English had been raiding Latin from Old English times and before, but now the floodgates really

opened, and thousands of words from the classical languages poured

rian,bonus,anatomy,controdict,climax,dictionary,benefit,multiply,exist,paragraph,initiate,scene,inspire are random examples. Probably the average educated American today has more words

from French in his vocabulary than from native English sources, and more from Latin than from

French.

The greatest writer of the Early Modern English period is of course Shakespeare, and the

best-known book is the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611. The Bible (if not

Shakespeare) has made many features of Early Modern English perfectly familiar to many people

down to the present time, even though we do not use these features in present-day speech and writing.

For instance, the old pronoun thou and thee have dropped out of use now, but they are still familiar to

us in prayer and in Biblical quotations, such as “Whither thou goest, I will go.”

The history of English since 1700 is filled with many movements and countermovement, of which

we can notice only a couple. One of these is the vigorous attempt made in the eighteenth century, and

the rather half-heated attempts made since, to regulate and control the English language. Many

people of the eighteenth century, not understanding very well the forces which govern language,

proposed to polish and prune and restrict English, which they felt was proliferating too widely. There

was much talk of an academy which would rule on what people could and could not say and write.

The academy never came into being, but the eighteenth century did not succeed in establishing

certain attitudes which, though they haven’t had much effect on the development of the language

itself, have certainly changed the native speaker’s feeling about the language.

In part, a product of the wish to fix and establish the language was the development of the

dictionary. The first English dictionary was published in 1603; it was a list of 2500 words briefly

defined. Many others were published his English Dictionary in 1755. This, steadily revised,

dominated the field in England for nearly a hundred years. Meanwhile in America, Noah Webster

published his dictionary in 1828, and before long dictionary publishing was a big business in this

country. The last century has seen the publication of one great dictionary: the twelve-volume Oxford

English Dictionary, compiled in the course of seventy-five years through the labors of many scholars.

We have also, of course, numerous commercial dictionaries which are as good as the public wants

them to be if not, indeed, rather better.

Another product of the eighteenth century was the invention of “English grammar.” As English

came to replace Latin as the language of scholarship, it was felt that one should also be able to

control and dissect it, parse and analyze it, as one could Latin. What happened in practice was that

the grammatical description that applied to Latin was removed and superimposed on English. This

was silly, because English is an entirely different kind of language, with its own forms and signals

and ways of producing meaning. Nevertheless, English grammars on Latin model were worked out

and taught in the schools. In many schools they are still being children, but it is sometimes an

interesting and instructive exercise in logic. The principal harm in it is that it has tended to keep

people from being interested in English and has obscured the real features of English structure.

But probably the most important force on the development of English in the modern period has

been tremendous expansion of English-speaking peoples. In 1500 English was a minor language,

spoken by a few people on a small island. Now it is perhaps the greatest language of the world,

spoken natively by over a quarter of a billion people and as a second language by many millions

more. When we speak of English now, we must specify whether we mean American English, British

English, Australian English, Indian English, or what, since the differences are considerable. The

American cannot go to England or the Englishman to America confident that he will always

understand and be understood. It is only because communication has become fast and easy that

English in this period of its expansion has not broken into a dozen mutually unintelligible languages.