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Gyeongsang national universityHistory of English Language and Word FormsCourse Reading and WorkbookGNU Dept. English Language and LiteratureSpring 2017Adapted from by Luke Mastin (2011) and History of English: A Resource Book for Students by Dan McIntyre (2009). Information from sources presented and compiled for undergraduate survey lecture by Prof. Alexis Cuperus Manning, Gyeongsang National University, Dept. English Language & Literature (2017).Content Guide (40 pages total):Section A: BEFORE ENGLISH (Prehistory – c. 500 AD) p. 3 – p. 5A1. Indo EuropeanA2. Spread of Indo European LanguagesA3. Germanic/Celts/ RomansSection B: OLD ENGLISH (c. 500 – c. 1100) p. 5 – p. 9B1. Germanic Tribe Invasion B2.Christianity & LiteracyB3. Anglo-Saxon (Old English)B4.The VikingsSection C: MIDDLE ENGLISH (c. 1100 – c. 1500) p. 9 – p. 14C1. Norman Conquest and Its Influence C2. Middle EnglishC3.English ResurgenceC4. Birth of English Literature Section D: EARLY MODERN ENGLISH (c. 1500 – c. 1800) p. 15 – p. 23C1. Great Vowel ShiftC2. English RenaissanceC3. Printing Press / Standardization / Dictionaries / BibleC4. Golden Age of C5. LiteratureC6. William ShakespeareC7.International TradeSection E: LATE MODERN ENGLISH / Today (c. 1800 – c. Today) p. 23 – p. 28E1. Industrial and Science E2. RevolutionE3. British ImperialismE4. American DialectE5. Britain’s Other ColoniesE6. Language ReformE7. 20th CenturyE8. Present DaySECTION F: Supplemental (p. 29 – p. 37)F1. Differences Between British & American English F2. History Quiz Activity F3. Globalization and Korean History in English EducationF4. English History DebateSECTION G: Extra Area (p. 38 – p. 40)G1. (Extra area – blank pages – for note taking or text corrections)BEFORE ENGLISH (Prehistory – c. 500 AD)Indo EuropeanSpread of Indo European LanguagesGermanic/Celts/ RomansINDO EUROPEANThe English language, and indeed most European languages, traces its original roots back to a Neolithic (late Stone Age) people known as the Indo-Europeans or Proto-Indo-Europeans, who lived in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from some time after 5000?BC.We do not know exactly what the original Indo-European language was like; as no writings exist from that time (the very earliest examples of writing can be traced to Sumeria in around 3000?BC). Using the “comparative method”, though, modern linguists have been able to partially reconstruct the original language from common elements in its daughter languages. It is thought by many scholars that modern Lithuanian may be the closest to (i.e. the least changed from) the ancient Indo-European language.Indo-European is just one of the language families, or proto-languages. However, it is by far the largest family, accounting for the languages of almost half of the modern world’s population, including those of most of Europe, North and South America, Australasia, the Iranian plateau and much of South Asia. Within Europe, only Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and a few of the smaller Russian languages are not descended from the Indo-European family.SPREAD OF INDO EUROPEAN LANGUAGESSometime between 3500?BC?and 2500?BC, the Indo-Europeans began to fan out across Europe and Asia, in search of new pastures and hunting grounds, and their languages developed - and diverged - in isolation. By around 1000?BC, the original Indo-European language had split into a dozen or more major language groups or families, the main groups being:HellenicItalicIndo-IranianCelticGermanicArmenianBalto-SlavicAlbanianThese broad language groups in turn divided over time into scores of new languages, from Swedish to Portuguese to Hindi to Latin to Frisian. So, it is astounding but true that languages as diverse as Gaelic, Greek, Farsi and Sinhalese all ultimately derive from the same origin. The common ancestry of these diverse languages can sometimes be seen quite clearly in the existence of cognates (similar words in different languages), and the recognition of this common ancestry of Indo-European languages is usually attributed to the amateur linguist Sir William Jones in 1786. Examples are:father?in English,?Vater?in German,?pater?in Latin and Greek,fadir?in Old Norse and?pitr?in ancient Vedic Sanskrit.brother?in English,?broeer?in Dutch,?Brüder?in German,?braithairin Gaelic,?bró?r?in Old Norse and?bhratar?in Sanskrit.three?in English,?tres?in Latin,?tris?in Greek,?drei?in German,?driein Dutch,?trí?in Sanskrit.is?in English,?is?in Dutch,?est?in Latin,?esti?in Greek,?ist?in Gothic,?asti?in Sanskrit.me?in English,?mich?or?mir?in German,?mij?in Dutch,?mik?or?mis?in Gothic,?me?in Latin,?eme?in Greek,?mam?in Sanskrit.mouse?in English,?Maus?in German,?muis?in Dutch,?mus?in Latin,?mus?in Sanskrit.GERMANS/CELTS/ROMANSGERMANSThe branch of Indo-European we are most interested in is Germanic. The Germanic, or Proto-Germanic, language group can be traced back to the region between the Elbe river in modern Germany and southern Sweden some 3,000 years ago.Jacob Grimm (of fairy tales fame, but also a well-respected early philologist) pointed out that, over time, certain consonants in the Germanic family of languages have shifted somewhat from the Indo-European base. Thus, Germanic words like the English?foot, West Frisian?foet, Danish?fod, Swedish?fot, etc, are in fact related to the Latin?ped, Lithuanian?peda, Sanskrit?pada, etc, due to the shifting of the “p” to “f” and the “d” to “t”. The early Germanic languages themselves borrowed some words from the aboriginal (non-Indo-European) tribes which preceded them, particularly words for the natural environment (e.g.?sea,?land,?strand,?seal,?herring); for technologies connected with sea travel (e.g.?ship,?keel,?sail,?oar); for new social practices (e.g.?wife,?bride,?groom); and for farming or animal husbandry practices (e.g.?oats,?mare,?ram,?lamb,?sheep,?kid,bitch,?hound,?dung).The Germanic group itself also split over time as the people migrated into other parts of continental Europe:North Germanic, which evolved into Old Norse and then into the various Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic (but not Finnish or Estonian, which are Uralic and not Indo-European languages);East Germanic, spoken by peoples who migrated back to eastern and southeastern Europe, and whose three component language branches, Burgundian, Vandalic and Gothic (a language spoken throughout much of eastern, central and western Europe early in the first millennium AD), all died out over time; andWest Germanic, the ancestor of Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old Low Franconian and others which in turn gave rise to modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Low German, Frisian, Yiddish and, ultimately, English.Thus, we can say that English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages.THE CELTSLittle or nothing is known about the original hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the British Isles before they were cut off from the rest of Europe by the English Channel (around 5000-6000?BC). The earliest inhabitants of Britain about which anything is known are the Celts (the name from the Greek?keltoi?meaning "barbarian"), also known as Britons, who probably started to move into the area sometime after 800?BC. By around 300?BC, the Celts had become the most widespread branch of Indo-Europeans in Iron Age Europe, inhabiting much of modern-day Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and also Britain.Further waves of Celtic immigration into Britain, particularly between 500?BC?and 400?BC?but continuing at least until the Roman occupation, greatly increased the Celtic population in Britain, and established a vibrant Celtic culture throughout the land.But the Celts themselves were later marginalized and displaced, and Celtic was not the basis for what is now the English language. Despite their dominance in Britain at an early formative stage of its development, the Celts have actually had very little impact on the English language, leaving only a few little-used words such as?brock?(an old word for a badger), and a handful of geographical terms like?coombe?(a word for a valley) and?crag?and?tor?(both words for a rocky peak). Having said that, many British place names have Celtic origins, including?Kent,?York,?London,?Dover,?Thames,?Avon,?Trent,?Severn,?Cornwall?and many more. ROMANSThe Romans first entered Britain in 55?BC?under Julius Caesar, although they did not begin a permanent occupation until 43?AD, when Emperor Claudius sent a much better prepared force to subjugate the fierce British Celts. Despite a series of uprisings by the natives (including that of Queen Boudicca, or Boadicea in 61AD), Britain remained part of the Roman Empire for almost 400 years, and there was a substantial amount of interbreeding between the two peoples, although the Romans never succeeded in penetrating into the mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland.Although this first invasion had a profound effect on the culture, religion, geography, architecture and social behaviour of Britain, the linguistic legacy of the Romans’ time in Britain was, like that of the Celts, surprisingly limited. This legacy takes the form of less than 200 “loanwords” coined by Roman merchants and soldiers, such as?win?(wine),?butere?(butter),?caese?(cheese),piper?(pepper),?candel?(candle),?cetel?(kettle),?disc?(dish),?cycene(kitchen),?ancor?(anchor),?belt?(belt),?sacc?(sack),?catte?(cat),plante?(plant),?rosa?(rose),?cest?(chest),?pund?(pound),?munt(mountain),?straet?(street),?wic?(village),?mil?(mile),?port?(harbour),weall?(wall), etc. Latin did not replace the Celtic language in Britain as it had done in Gaul, and the use of Latin by native Britons during the period of Roman rule was probably confined to members of the upper classes and the inhabitants of the cities and towns. The Romans, under attack at home from Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals, abandoned Britain to the Celts in 410AD, completing their withdrawal by 436?AD. OLD ENGLISH (c. 500 – c. 1100)Germanic Tribe Invasion Christianity & LiteracyAnglo-Saxon (Old English)The VikingsGERMANIC TRIBE INVASIONMore important than the Celts and the Romans for the development of the English language, though, was the succession of invasions from continental Europe after the Roman withdrawal. No longer protected by the Roman military against the constant threat from the Picts and Scots of the North, the Celts felt themselves increasingly vulnerable to attack. Around 430AD, the ambitious Celtic warlord Vortigern invited the Jutish brothers Hengest and Horsa (from Jutland in modern-day Denmark), to settle on the east coast of Britain to form a bulwark against sea raids by the Picts, in return for which they were "allowed" to settle in the southern areas of Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.But the Jutes were not the only newcomers to Britain during this period. Other Germanic tribes soon began to make the short journey across the North Sea. The Angles (from a region called Angeln, the spur of land which connects modern Denmark with Germany) gradually began to settle in increasing numbers on the east coast of Britain, particularly in the north and East Anglia. The Frisian people, from the marshes and islands of northern Holland and western Germany, also began to encroach on the British mainland from about 450?AD?onwards. Still later, from the 470s, the war-like Saxons (from the Lower Saxony area of north-western Germany) made an increasing number of incursions into the southern part of the British mainland. Over time, these Germanic tribes began to establish permanent bases and to gradually displace the native Celts.All these peoples all spoke variations of a West Germanic tongue, similar to modern Frisian, variations that were different but probably close enough to be mutually intelligible. The local dialect in Angeln is, at times, even today recognizably similar to English, and it has even more in common with the English of 1,000 years ago. Modern Frisian, especially spoken, bears an eerie resemblance to English, as can be seen by some of the Frisian words which were incorporated into English, like?miel?(meal),?laam(lamb),?goes?(goose),?b?ter?(butter),?tsiis?(cheese),?see?(sea),?boat?(boat),?stoarm(storm),?rein?(rain),?snie?(snow),?frieze?(freeze),?froast?(frost),?mist?(mist),?sliepe?(sleep),blau?(blue),?trije?(three),?fjour?(four), etc.The influx of Germanic people was more of a gradual encroachment over several generations than an invasion proper, but these tribes between them gradually colonized most of the island, with the exception of the more remote areas, which remained strongholds of the original Celtic people of Britain. Originally sea-farers, they began to settle down as farmers, exploiting the rich English farmland. The rather primitive newcomers were if anything less cultured and civilized than the local Celts, who had held onto at least some parts of Roman culture. There was little integration between them: the Celts referred to the European invaders as “barbarians” (as they had previously been labelled themselves); the invaders referred to the Celts as?weales?(slaves or foreigners), the origin of the name Wales.Despite continued resistance (the legends and folklore of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table date from this time), the Celts were pushed further and further back by the invaders into the wilds of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland, although some chose to flee to the Brittany region of northern France (where they maintained a thriving culture for several centuries) and even further into mainland Europe. The Celtic language survives today only in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland, the Welsh of Wales, and the Breton language of Brittany.The Germanic tribes settled in seven smaller kingdoms, known as the Heptarchy: the Saxons in Essex, Wessex and Sussex; the Angles in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria; and the Jutes in Kent. Evidence of the extent of their settlement can be found in the number of place names throughout England ending with the Anglo-Saxon “-ing” meaning people of (e.g.?Worthing,?Reading,?Hastings), “-ton” meaning enclosure or village (e.g.?Taunton,?Burton,?Luton), “-ford” meaning a river crossing (e.g.?Ashford,?Bradford,?Watford) “-ham” meaning farm (e.g.?Nottingham,?Birmingham,?Grantham) and “-stead” meaning a site (e.g.Hampstead).Although the various different kingdoms waxed and waned in their power and influence over time, it was the war-like and pagan Saxons that gradually became the dominant group. The new Anglo-Saxon nation, once known in antiquity as Albion and then Britannia under the Romans, nevertheless became known as Anglaland?or?Englaland?(the Land of the Angles), later shortened to England, and its emerging language as Englisc?(now referred to as Old English or Anglo-Saxon, or sometimes Anglo-Frisian). It is impossible to say just when English became a separate language, rather than just a German dialect, although it seems that the language began to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental Germanic languages, by around 600AD. Over time, four major dialects of Old English gradually emerged: Northumbrian in the north of England, Mercian in the midlands, West Saxon in the south and west, and Kentish in the southeast.CHRISTIANITY AND LITERACYAlthough many of the Romano-Celts in the north of England had already been Christianized, St. Augustine and his 40 missionaries from Rome brought Christianity to the pagan Anglo-Saxons of the rest of England in 597?AD. After the conversion of the influential King Ethelbert of Kent, it spread rapidly through the land, carrying literacy and European culture in its wake. Augustine was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 601?AD?and several great monasteries and centres of learning were established particularly in Northumbria (e.g. Jarrow, Lindisfarne).The Celts and the early Anglo-Saxons used an alphabet of runes, angular characters originally developed for scratching onto wood or stone. The first known written English sentence, which reads?"This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman", is an Anglo-Saxon runic inscription on a gold medallion found in Suffolk, and has been dated to about 450-480?AD. The early Christian missionaries introduced the more rounded Roman alphabet (much as we use today), which was easier to read and more suited for writing on vellum or parchment. The Anglo-Saxons quite rapidly adopted the new Roman alphabet, but with the addition of letters such as??("wynn"), ? (“thorn”), ? (“edh” or “eth”) and?3?(“yogh”) from the old runic alphabet for certain sounds not used in Latin.?later became "uu" and, still later, "w"; ? and ? were used more or less interchangeably to represent the sounds now spelled with “th”; and?3?was used for "y", "j" or "g" sounds. In addition, the diphthong ? (“ash”) was also used; "v" was usually written with an "f"; and the letters "q", "x" and "z" were rarely used at all.The Latin language the missionaries brought was still only used by the educated ruling classes and Church functionaries, and Latin was only a minor influence on the English language at this time, being largely restricted to the naming of Church dignitaries and ceremonies (priest,?vicar,?altar,?mass,?church,?bishop,?pope,?nun,?angel,?verse,?baptism,?monk,?eucharist,candle,?temple?and?presbyter?came into the language this way). However, other more domestic words (such as?fork,?spade,?chest,?spider,?school,tower,?plant,?rose,?lily,?circle,?paper,?sock,?mat,?cook, etc) also came into English from Latin during this time, albeit substantially altered and adapted for the Anglo-Saxon ear and tongue. More ecclesiastical Latin loanwords continued to be introduced, even as late as the 11th Century, includingchorus,?cleric,?creed,?cross,?demon,?disciple,?hymn,?paradise,?prior,?sabbath, etc.England with its first great poet (Caedmon in the 7th Century), its first great historian (the Venerable Bede in the 7th-8th Century) and its first great scholar (Alcuin of York in the 8th Century), although the latter two wrote mainly in Latin. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is usually considered to be?"C?dmon's Hymn", composed between 658 and 680. By the 10th Century, the West Saxon dialect had become the dominant, and effectively the official, language of Britain (sometimes referred to as the?koiné, or common dialect). The different dialects often had their own preferred spellings as well as distinctive vocabulary (e.g. the word?evil?was spelled?efel?in the south-east, and?yfel?elsewhere;?land?would be?land?in West Saxon and Kentish, but?lond?further north; etc).ANGLO-SAXON (OLD ENGLISH)About 400 Anglo-Saxon texts survive from this era, including many beautiful poems, telling tales of wild battles and heroic journeys. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is?“C?dmon's Hymn”, which was composed between 658 and 680, and the longest was the ongoing?“Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”. But by far the best known is the long epic poem?“Beowulf”.“Beowulf”?may have been written any time between the 8th and the early 11th Century by an unknown author or authors, or, most likely, it was written in the 8th Century and then revised in the 10th or 11th Century. It was probably originally written in Northumbria, although the single manuscript that has come down to us (which dates from around 1000) contains a bewildering mix of Northumbrian, West Saxon and Anglian dialects. The 3,182 lines of the work shows that Old English was already a fully developed poetic language by this time, with a particular emphasis on alliteration and percussive effects. Even at this early stage (before the subsequent waves of lexical enrichment), the variety and depth of English vocabulary, as well as its predilection for synonyms and subtleties of meanings, is evident. For example, the poem uses 36 different words for hero, 20 for man, 12 for battle and 11 for ship. There are also many interesting "kennings" or allusive compound words, such as?hronrad?(literally, whale-road, meaning the sea),?banhus?(bone-house, meaning body) and?beadoleoma?(battle-light, meaning sword). Of the 903 compound nouns in?“Beowulf”, 578 are used once only, and 518 of them are known only from this one poem.Old English was a very complex language, at least in comparison with modern English. Nouns had three genders (male, female and neuter) and could be inflected for up to five cases. There were seven classes of “strong” verbs and three of “weak” verbs, and their endings changed for number, tense, mood and person. Adjectives could have up to eleven forms. Even definite articles had three genders and five case forms as a singular and four as a plural. Word order was much freer than today, the sense being carried by the inflections (and only later by the use of propositions). Although it looked quite different from modern English on paper, once the pronunciation and spelling rules are understood, many of its words become quite familiar to modern ears.Many of the most basic and common words in use in English today have their roots in Old English, including words like?water,?earth,?house,?food,?drink,?sleep,?sing,?night,?strong,?the,?a,?be,?of,?he,?she,you,?no,?not, etc. Interestingly, many of our common swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin (including?tits,?fart,?shit,?turd,?arse?and, probably,?piss), and most of the others were of early medieval provenance. Care should be taken, though, with what are sometimes called "false friends", words that appear to be similar in Old English and modern English, but whose meanings have changed, words such as?wif?(wife, which originally meant any woman, married or not),?fugol?(fowl, which meant any bird, not just a farmyard one),?sona?(soon, which meant immediately, not just in a while),?won?(wan, which meant dark, not pale) and?f?st?(fast, which meant fixed or firm, not rapidly).During the 6th Century, for reasons which are still unclear, the Anglo-Saxon consonant cluster "sk" changed to "sh", so that?skield?became?shield. This change affected all "sk" words in the language at that time, whether recent borrowings from Latin (e.g.?disk?became?dish) or ancient aboriginal borrowings (e.g.?skip?became?ship). Any modern English words which make use of the "sk" cluster came into the language after the 6th Century (i.e. after the sound change had ceased to operate), mainly, as we will see below, from Scandinavia.Then, around the 7th Century, a vowel shift took place in Old English pronunciation (diffrent to the Great Vowel Shift during the?Early Modern period) in which vowels began to be pronouced more to the front of the mouth. The main sound affected was "i", hence its common description as "i-mutation" or "i-umlaut" (umlaut?is a German term meaning sound alteration). As part of this process, the plurals of several nouns also started to be represented by changed vowel pronunciations rather than changes in inflection. These changes were sometimes, but not always, reflected in revised spellings, resulting in inconsistent modern words pairings such as?foot/feet,?goose/geese,?man/men,?mouse/mice, as well as?blood/bleed,?foul/filth,broad/breadth,?long/length,?old/elder,?whole/hale/heal/health, etc.It is estimated that about 85% of the 30,000 or so Anglo-Saxon words gradually died out under the cultural onslaught of the Vikings and the Normans who would come after them, leaving a total of only around 4,500. This represents less than 1% of modern English vocabulary, but it includes some of the most fundamental and important words (e.g.?man,?wife,?child,?son,?daughter,?brother,?friend,?live,?fight,?make,?use,?love,?like,look,?drink,?food,?eat,?sleep,?sing,?sun,?moon,?earth,?ground,?wood,?field,?house,?home,people,?family,?horse,?fish,?farm,?water,?time,?eyes,?ears,?mouth,?nose,?strong,?work,come,?go,?be,?find,?see,?look,?laughter,?night,?day,?sun,?first,?many,?one,?two,?other,?some,?what,?when,?which,?where,?word, etc), as well as the most important “function” words (e.g.?to,?for,?but,?and,?at,?in,?on,?from, etc). Because of this, up to a half of everyday modern English will typically be made up of Old English words, and, by some estimates, ALL of the hundred most commonly-used words in modern English are of Anglo-Saxon origin (although pronunciations and spellings may have changed significantly over time).THE VIKINGSBy the late 8th Century, the Vikings (or Norsemen) began to make sporadic raids on the east cost of Britain. They came from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although it was the Danes who came with the greatest force. Notorious for their ferocity, ruthlessness and callousness, the Vikings pillaged and plundered the towns and monasteries of northern England - in 793, they sacked and looted the wealthy monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria - before turning their attentions further south. By about 850, the raiders had started to over-winter in southern England and, in 865, there followed a full-scale invasion and on-going battles for the possession of the country.Viking expansion was finally checked by Alfred the Great and, in 878, a treaty between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings established the Danelaw, splitting the country along a line roughly from London to Chester, giving the Norsemen control over the north and east and the Anglo-Saxons the south and west. Although the Danelaw lasted less than a century, its influence can be seen today in the number of place names of Norse origin in northern England (over 1,500), including many place names ending in “-by”, “-gate”, “-stoke”, “-kirk”, “-thorpe”, “-thwaite”, “-toft” and other suffixes (e.g.?Whitby,?Grimsby,?Ormskirk,?Scunthorpe,?Stoke Newington,?Huthwaite,?Lowestoft, etc), as well as the “-son” ending on family names (e.g.Johnson,?Harrison,?Gibson,?Stevenson, etc) as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon equivalent “-ing” (e.g.?Manning,?Harding, etc).The Vikings spoke Old Norse, an early North Germanic language not that dissimilar to Anglo-Saxon and roughly similar to modern Icelandic (the word?viking?actually means “a pirate raid” in Old Norse). Accents and pronunciations in northern England even today are heavily influenced by Old Norse, to the extent that they are largely intelligible in Iceland.Old Norse often provided direct alternatives or synonyms for Anglo-Saxon words, both of which have been carried on (e.g.Anglo-Saxon?craft?and Norseskill,?wish?and?want,?dike?and?ditch,?sick?and?ill,?whole?and?hale,?raise?and?rear,?wrath?and?anger,?hide?and?skin, etc). Unusually for language development, English also adopted some Norse grammatical forms, such as the pronouns?they,?them?and?their, although these words did not enter the dialects of London and southern England until as late as the 15th Century. Under the influence of the Danes, Anglo-Saxon word endings and inflections started to fall away during the time of the Danelaw, and prepositions like?to,?with,?by, etc became more important to make meanings clear, although many inflections continued into Middle English, particularly in the south and west (the areas furthest from Viking influence).By the time Alfred the Great came to the throne in 871, most of the great monasteries of Northumbria and Mercia lay in ruins and only Wessex remained as an independent kingdom. But Alfred, from his capital town of Winchester, set about rebuilding and fostering the revival of learning, law and religion. Crucially, he believed in educating the people in the vernacular English language, not Latin, and he himself made several translations of important works into English, include Bede’s?“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”. He also began the?“Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which recounted the history of England from the time of Caesar's invasion, and which continued until 1154.He is revered by many as having single-handedly saved English from the destruction of the Vikings, and by the time of his death in 899 he had raised the prestige and scope of English to a level higher than that of any other vernacular language in Europe. The West Saxon dialect of Wessex became the standard English of the day (although the other dialects continued nontheless), and for this reason the great bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex.MIDDLE ENGLISH (c. 1100 – c. 1500)Norman Conquest and Its Influence Middle EnglishEnglish ResurgenceBirth of English Literature NORMAN CONQUEST AND ITS INFLUENCEThe event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England) invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and court. William crushed the opposition with a brutal hand and deprived the Anglo-Saxon earls of their property, distributing it to Normans (and some English) who supported him.The conquering Normans were themselves descended from Vikings who had settled in northern France about 200 years before (the very word?Norman?comes originally from Norseman). However, they had completely abandoned their Old Norse language and wholeheartedly adopted French.However, the Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences, usually called Anglo-Norman or Norman French, which was quite different from the standard French of Paris of the period, which is known as Francien. The differences between these dialects became even more marked after the Norman invasion of Britain, particularly after King John and England lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France in 1204 and England became even more isolated from continental Europe.Anglo-Norman French became the language of the kings and nobility of England for more than 300 years (Henry IV, who came to the English throne in 1399, was the first monarch since before the Conquest to have English as his mother tongue). While Anglo-Norman was the verbal language of the court, administration and culture, though, Latin was mostly used for written language, especially by the Church and in official records. For example, the?“Domesday Book”, in which William the Conqueror took stock of his new kingdom, was written in Latin to emphasize its legal authority.However, the peasantry and lower classes (the vast majority of the population, an estimated 95%) continued to speak English - considered by the Normans a low-class, vulgar tongue - and the two languages developed in parallel, only gradually merging as Normans and Anglo-Saxons began to intermarry. It is this mixture of Old English and Anglo-Norman that is usually referred to as Middle English.The Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English (about three-quarters of which are still in use today), including a huge number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-age”, “-ance/-ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and “-tion”, or starting with the prefixes “con-”, “de-”, “ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”. Perhaps predictably, many of them related to matters of crown and nobility (e.g.?crown,?castle,?prince,?count,duke,?viscount,?baron,?noble,?sovereign,?heraldry); of government and administration (e.g.?parliament,government,?governor,?city); of court and law (e.g.?court,?judge,?justice,?accuse,?arrest,?sentence,?appeal,condemn,?plaintiff,?bailiff,?jury,?felony,?verdict,?traitor,?contract,?damage,?prison); of war and combat (e.g.army,?armour,?archer,?battle,?soldier,?guard,?courage,?peace,?enemy,?destroy); of authority and control (e.g.?authority,?obedience,?servant,?peasant,?vassal,?serf,?labourer,?charity); of fashion and high living (e.g.mansion,?money,?gown,?boot,?beauty,?mirror,?jewel,?appetite,?banquet,?herb,?spice,?sauce,?roast,?biscuit); and of art and literature (e.g.?art,?colour,?language,?literature,?poet,?chapter,?question). Curiously, though, the Anglo-Saxon words?cyning?(king),?cwene?(queen),?erl?(earl),?cniht?(knight),?ladi?(lady) and?lord persisted.While humble trades retained their Anglo-Saxon names (e.g.?baker,?miller,?shoemaker, etc), the more skilled trades adopted French names (e.g.?mason,?painter,?tailor,?merchant, etc). While the animals in the field generally kept their English names (e.g.?sheep,?cow,?ox,?calf,?swine,?deer), once cooked and served their names often became French (e.g.?beef,?mutton,?pork,?bacon,?veal,?venison, etc). Sometimes a French word completely replaced an Old English word (e.g.?crime?replaced?firen,?place?replaced?stow,people?replaced?leod,?beautiful?replaced?wlitig,?uncle?replaced?eam, etc). Sometimes French and Old English components combined to form a new word, such as the French?gentle?and the Germanic?mancombined to formed?gentleman. Sometimes, both English and French words survived, but with significantly different senses (e.g. the Old English?doom?and French?judgement,?hearty?and?cordial,?houseand?mansion, etc).But, often, different words with roughly the same meaning survived, and a whole host of new, French-based synonyms entered the English language (e.g. the French?maternity?in addition to the Old Englishmotherhood,?infant?to?child,?amity?to?friendship,?battle?to?fight,?liberty?to?freedom,?labour?to?work,?desire?towish,?commence?to?start,?conceal?to?hide,?divide?to?cleave,?close?to?shut,?demand?to?ask,?chamber?to?room,?forest?to?wood,?power?to?might,?annual?toyearly,?odour?to?smell,?pardon?to?forgive,?aid?to?help, etc). Over time, many near synonyms acquired subtle differences in meaning (with the French alternative often suggesting a higher level of refinement than the Old English), adding to the precision and flexibility of the English language. Even today, phrases combining Anglo-Saxon and Norman French doublets are still in common use (e.g.?law?and?order,?lord?and?master,?love?and?cherish,ways?and?means, etc). Bilingual word lists were being compiled as early as the 13th Century.The pronunciation differences between the harsher, more guttural Anglo-Norman and the softer Francien dialect of Paris were also carried over into English pronunciations. For instance, words like?quit,?question,?quarter, etc, were pronounced with the familiar “kw” sound in Anglo-Norman (and, subsequently, English) rather than the “k” sound of Parisian French. The Normans tended to use a hard “c” sound instead of the softer Francien “ch”, so that?charrier?became?carry,?chaudron?became?cauldron, etc. The Normans tended to use the suffixes “-arie” and “-orie” instead of the French “-aire” and “-oire”, so that English has words like?victory?(as compared to?victoire) and?salary?(as compared to?salaire), etc. The Normans, and therefore the English, retained the “s” in words like?estate,?hostel,?forest?and?beast, while the French gradually lost it (état,?h?tel,?forêt,?bête).French scribes changed the common Old English letter pattern "hw" to "wh", largely out of a desire for consistency with "ch" and "th", and despite the actual aspirated pronunciation, so that?hwaer?became?where,?hwaenne?became?when?and?hwil?became?while. A "w" was even added, for no apparent reason, to some words that only began with "h" (e.g.?hal?became?whole). Another oddity occurred when?hwo?became?who, but the pronunciation changed so that the "w" sound was omitted completely. There are just some of the kinds of inconsistencies that became ingrained in the English language during this period.MIDDLE ENGLISHDuring these Norman-ruled centuries in which English as a language had no official status and no regulation, English had become the third language in its own country. It was largely a spoken rather than written language, and effectively sank to the level of a patois or creole. The main dialect regions during this time are usually referred to as Northern, Midlands, Southern and Kentish, although they were really just natural developments from the Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish dialects of Old English. Within these, though, a myriad distinct regional usages and dialects grew up, and indeed the proliferation of regional dialects during this time was so extreme that people in one part of England could not even understand people from another part just 50 miles away.The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1167 and 1209 respectively, and general literacy continued to increase over the succeeding centuries, although books were still copied by hand and therefore very expensive. Over time, the commercial and political influence of the East Midlands and London ensured that these dialects prevailed (London had been the largest city for some time, and became the Norman capital at the beginning of the 12th Century), and the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education. The 14th Century London dialect of Chaucer, although admittedly difficult, is at least recognizable to us moderns as a form of English, whereas text in the Kentish dialect from the same period looks like a completely foreign language.It was also during this period when English was the language mainly of the uneducated peasantry that many of the grammatical complexities and inflections of Old English gradually disappeared. By the 14th Century, noun genders had almost completely died out, and adjectives, which once had up to 11 different inflections, were reduced to just two (for singular and plural) and often in practice just one, as in modern English. The pronounced stress, which in Old English was usually on the lexical root of a word, generally shifted towards the beginning of words, which further encouraged the gradual loss of suffixes that had begun after the Viking invasions, and many vowels developed into the common English unstressed “schwa” (like the “e” in?taken, or the “i” inpencil). As inflectons disappeared, word order became more important and, by the time of Chaucer, the modern English subject-verb-object word order had gradually become the norm, and as had the use of prepositions instead of verb inflections.The?“Ormulum”, a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century, is an important resource in this regard. Concerned at the way people were starting to mispronounce English, Orm spelled his words exactly as they were pronounced. For instance, he used double consonants to indicate a short preceding vowel (much as modern English does in words like diner and dinner, later and latter, etc); he used three separate symbols to differentiate the different sounds of the Old English letter yogh; and he used the more modern “wh” for the old-style “hw” and “sh” for “sc”. This unusual phonetic spelling system has given philologists an invaluable snap-shot of theyway Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the 12th Century.Many of Orm’s spellings were perhaps atypical for the time, but many changes to the English writing system were nevertheless under way during this period:the Old English letters ? (“edh” or “eth”) and ? (“thorn”), which did not exist in the Norman alphabet, were gradually phased out and replaced with “th”, and the letter?3?(“yogh”) was generally replaced with “g” (or often with “gh”, as in?ghost?or?night);the simple word?the?(written ?e?using the thorn character) generally replaced the bewildering range of Old English definite articles, and most nouns had lost their inflected case endings by the middle of the Middle English period;the Norman “qu” largely substituted for the Anglo-Saxon “cw” (so that?cwene?became?queen,?cwic?became?quick, etc);the “sh” sound, which was previously rendered in a number of different ways in Old English, including “sc”, was regularized as “sh” or “sch” (e.g.scip?became?ship);the initial letters “hw” generally became “wh” (as in?when,?where, etc);a “c” was often, but not always, replaced by “k” (e.g.?cyning/cyng?became?king) or “ck” (e.g.?boc?became?bock?and, later,?book) or “ch” (e.g.cild?became?child, cese became?cheese, etc);the common Old English "h" at the start of words like?hring?(ring) and?hnecca?(neck) was deleted;conversely, an “h” was added to the start of many Romance loanword (e.g.?honour,?heir,?honest,?habit,?herb, etc), but was sometimes pronounced and sometimes not;"f" and "v" began to be differentiated (e.g.?feel?and?veal), as did "s" and "z" (e.g.?seal?and?zeal) and "ng" and "n" (e.g.?thing?and?thin);"v" and "u" remained largely interchangeable, although "v" was often used at the start of a word (e.g. (vnder), and "u" in the middle (e.g.?haue), quite the opposite of today;because the written "u" was similar to "v", "n" and "m", it was replaced in many words with an "o" (e.g.?son,?come,?love,?one);the “ou” spelling of words like?house?and?mouse?was introduced;many long vowel sounds were marked by a double letter (e.g.?boc?became?booc,?se?became?see, etc), or, in some cases, a trailing "e" became no longer pronounced but retained in spelling to indicate a long vowel (e.g.?nose,?name);the long "a" vowel of Old English became more like "o" in Middle English, so that?ham?became?home,?stan?became?stone,?ban?became?bone, etc;short vowels were identified by consonant doubling (e.g?siting?became?sitting, etc).The “-en” plural noun ending of Old English (e.g.?house/housen,?shoe/shoen, etc) had largely disappeared by the end of the Middle English period, replaced by the French plural ending “-s” (the “-en” ending only remains today in one or two important examples, such as?children,?brethren?and?oxen). Changes to some word forms stuck while others did not, so that we are left with inconsistencies like?half?and?halves,?grief?and?grieves,speech?and?speak, etc. In another odd example of gradual modernization, the indefinite article “a” subsumed over time the initial “n” of some following nouns, so that?a napronbecame?an apron,?a nauger?became?an auger, etc, as well as the reverse case of?an ekename?becoming?a nickname..ENGLISH RESURGENCEIt is estimated that up to 85% of Anglo-Saxon words were lost as a result of the Viking and particularly the Norman invasions, and at one point the very existence of the English language looked to be in dire peril. In 1154, even the venerable?“Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which for centuries had recorded the history of the English people, recorded its last entry. But, despite the shake-up the Normans had given English, it showed its resilience once again, and, two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, it was English not French that emerged as the language of England.There were a number of contributing factors. The English, of necessity, had become “Normanized”, but, over time, the Normans also became “Anglicized”, particularly after 1204 when King John’s ineptness lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France and the Norman nobles were forced to look more to their English properties. Increasingly out of touch with their properties in France and with the French court and culture in general, they soon began to look on themselves as English. Norman French began gradually to degenerate and atrophy. While some in England spoke French and some spoke Latin (and a few spoke both), everyone, from the highest to the lowest, spoke English, and it gradually became the lingua franca of the nation once again.The Hundred Year War against France (1337 - 1453) had the effect of branding French as the language of the enemy and the status of English rose as a consequence. The Black Death of 1349 - 1350 killed about a third of the English population (which was around 4 million at that time), including a disproportionate number of the Latin-speaking clergy. After the plague, the English-speaking labouring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance and, within the short period of a decade, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was largely over. The Statute of Pleading, which made English the official language of the courts and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written in French), was adopted in 1362, and in that same year Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in English, a crucial psychological turning point. By 1385, English had become the language of instruction in schools.The following passage is taken from a late 14th Century work called?“Mandeville's Travels”?about travels in foreign land:In??at lond ben trees??at beren wolle, as??ogh it were of scheep; whereof men maken clothes, and all??ing??at may ben made of wolle. In??at contree ben many ipotaynes,??at dwellen som tyme in the water, and somtyme on the lond: and??ei ben half man and half hors, as I haue seyd before; and??ei eten men, whan??ei may take hem. And??ere ben ryueres and watres??at ben fulle byttere,??ree sithes more?an is the water of the see. In??at contré ben many griffounes, more plentee??an in ony other contree. Sum men seyn??at??ei han the body vpward as an egle, and benethe as a lyoun: and treuly??ei seyn soth??at??ei ben of??at schapp. But o griffoun hath the body more gret, and is more strong,??anne eight lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this half; and more gret and strongere??an an hundred egles, suche as we han amonges vs. For o griffoun??ere wil bere fleynge to his nest a gret hors,?3if he may fynde him at the poynt, or two oxen3oked togidere, as??ei gon at the plowgh.There are clearly many more recognizable words in this sample than in the Old English passage, especially once the continued use of ? ("thorn") to represent the sound “th” is accepted. Another now obsolete character?3?(“yogh”, more or less equivalent in most cases to the modern consonantal “y” as in?yellow?or sometimes like the “ch” in?loch) is also used in this passage, and the letters “v” and “u” seem to be used more or less interchangeably (e.g.?vpward?for?upward,?ryueres?for?rivers,?treuly?for?truly). The indications of a language in a state of flux are also apparent in the variety of spellings of the same words even within this short passage (e.g.?contré?and?contree,??an?and??anne,water?and?watres). Some holdovers from Old English inflections remain (e.g. present tense verbs still receive a plural inflection, as in?beren,?dwellen,han?and?ben), and many words still have the familiar medieval trailing “e” (e.g.?wolle,?benethe,?suche,?fynde, etc), but the overall appearance is much more modern than that of Old English.Throughout the Middle English period, as in Old English, all the consonants were pronounced, so that the word?knight, for example, would have been pronounced more like “k-neecht” (with the “ch” as in the Scottish?loch) than like the modern English?knight. By the late 14th Century, the final “e” in many, but not all, words had ceased to be pronounced (e.g. it was silent in words like?kowthe?and?thanne, but pronounced in words like?ende,?ferne,straunge, etc).BIRTH OF ENGLISH LITERATURETexts in Middle English (as opposed to French or Latin) begin as a trickle in the 13th Century, with works such as the debate poem?“The Owl and the Nightingale”?(probably composed around 1200) and the long historical poem known as Layamon's?“Brut”?(from around the same period). Most of Middle English literature, at least up until the flurry of literary activity in the latter part of the 14th Century, is of unknown authorship.Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his famous?“Canterbury Tales”?in the early 1380s, and crucially he chose to write it in English. Other important works were written in English around the same time, if not earlier, including William Langland’s?“Piers Plowman”?and the anonymous?“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. But the?“Canterbury Tales”?is usually considered the first great works of English literature, and the first demonstration of the artistic legitimacy of vernacular Middle English, as opposed to French or Latin.In the 858 lines of the Prologue to the?“Canterbury Tales”, almost 500 different French loanwards occur, and by some estimates, some 20-25% of Chaucer’s vocabulary is French in origin. However, the overall sense of his work is very much of a re-formed English, a complete, flexible and confident language, more than adequate to produce great literature. Chaucer introduced many new words into the language, up to 2,000 by some counts - these were almost certainly words in everyday use in 14th Century London, but first attested in Chaucer's written works. Words like?paramour,?difficulty,?significance,?dishonesty,?edifice,?ignorant, etc, are all from French roots, but when he wanted to portray the earthy working man of England (e.g. the Miller), he consciously used much more Old English vocabulary, and he also reintroduced many old words that had fallen out of favour, such as?churlish,?farting,?friendly,?learning,?loving,?restless,?wifely,willingly, etc. The list of words first found in Chaucer's works goes on:?absent,?accident,?add,?agree,?bagpipe,?border,?box,?cinnamon,?desk,?desperate,discomfit,?digestion,?examination,?finally,?flute,?funeral,?galaxy,?horizon,?infect,?ingot,?latitude,?laxative,?miscarry,?nod,?obscure,?observe,?outrageous,perpendicular,?princess,?resolve,?rumour,?scissors,?session,?snort,?superstitious,?theatre,?trench,?universe,?utility,?vacation,?Valentine,?village,?vulgar,wallet,?wildness, etc, etc.Such was the pace of continuous change to the language at this time, that different forms of words were often used interchangeably, even by the same author, and this flexibility (or inconsistency) in spelling is quite noticeable in Chaucer’s work (e.g.?yeerand?yere,?doughtren?and?doughtres, etc). However, it should be noted that, because Chaucer’s work was copied by several different scribes, and we have no original in Chaucer’s own hand, different manuscripts have different spellings, none of which are definitive (e.g. the same word is variously rendered as?site,?sighte,?syth,?sigh?and?cite?in different manuscripts).In 1384, John Wycliffe (Wyclif) produced his translation of?“The Bible”?in vernacular English. This challenge to Latin as the language of God was considered a revolutionary act of daring at the time, and the translation was banned by the Church in no uncertain terms (however, it continued to circulate unofficially). Although perhaps not of the same literary calibre as Chaucer (in general, he awkwardly retained the original Latin word order, for instance), Wycliffe’s?“Bible”?was nevertheless a landmark in the English language. Over 1,000 English words were first recorded in it, most of them Latin-based, often via French, including?barbarian,?birthday,?canopy,?child-bearing,?communication,?cradle,?crime,?dishonour,?emperor,?envy,?godly,graven,?humanity,?glory,?injury,?justice,?lecher,?madness,?mountainous,?multitude,?novelty,?oppressor,?philistine,?pollute,?profession,?puberty,?schism,suddenly,?unfaithful,?visitor,?zeal, etc, as well as well-known phrases like?an eye for an eye,?woe is me, etc. However, not all of Wycliffe’s neologisms became enshrined in the language (e.g.?mandement,?descrive,?cratch).By the late 14th and 15th Century, the language had changed drastically, and Old English would probably have been almost as incomprehensible to Chaucer as it is to us today, even though the language of Chaucer is still quite difficult for us to read naturally. William Caxton, writing and printing less than a century after Chaucer, is noticeably easier for the modern reader to understand.EARLY MODERN ENGLISH (c. 1500 – c. 1800)Great Vowel ShiftEnglish RenaissancePrinting Press / Standardization / Dictionaries / BibleGolden Age of LiteratureWilliam ShakespeareInternational TradeGREAT VOWEL SHIFTIMAGEThe Great Vowel Shift(from?ELLO)A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century, as a result of which long vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the mouth (short vowel sounds were largely unchanged). In fact, the shift probably started very gradually some centuries before 1400, and continued long after 1700 (some subtle changes arguably continue even to this day). Many languages have undergone vowel shifts, but the major changes of the English vowel shift occurred within the relatively short space of a century or two, quite a sudden and dramatic shift in linguistic terms. It was largely during this short period of time that English lost the purer vowel sounds of most European languages, as well as the phonetic pairing between long and short vowel sounds.The causes of the shift are still highly debated, although an important factor may have been the very fact of the large intake of loanwords from the Romance languages of Europe during this time, which required a different kind of pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly English phenomenon, and contemporary and neighbouring languages like French, German and Spanish were entirely unaffected. It affected words of both native ancestry as well as borrowings from French and Latin.In Middle English (for instance in the time of Chaucer), the long vowels were generally pronounced very much like the Latin-derived Romance languages of Europe (e.g.?sheepwould have been pronounced more like “shape”;?me?as “may”;?mine?as “meen”;?shire?as “sheer”;?mate?as “maat”;?out?as “oot”;?house?as “hoose”;?flour?as “floor”;?boot?as “boat”;mode?as “mood”; etc). William the Conqueror’s?“Domesday Book”, for example, would have been pronounced “doomsday”, as indeed it is often erroneously spelled today. After the Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciations of these and similar words would have been much more like they are spoken today. The Shift comprises a series of connected changes, with changes in one vowel pushing another to change in order to "keep its distance", although there is some dispute as to the order of these movements. The changes also proceeded at different times and speeds in different parts of the country.Thus, Chaucer’s word?lyf?(pronounced “leef”) became the modern word life, and the word?five?(originally pronounced “feef”) gradually acquired its modern pronunciation. Some of the changes occurred in stages: although?lyf?was spelled life by the time of Shakespeare in the late 16th Century, it would have been pronounced more like “lafe” at that time, and only later did it acquired its modern pronunciation. It should be noted, though, that the tendency of upper-classes of southern England to pronounce a broad “a” in words like?dance,?bath?and?castle?(to sound like “dahnce”, “bahth” and “cahstle”) was merely an 18th Century fashionable affectation which happened to stick, and nothing to do with a general shifting in vowel pronunciation.The Old English consonant?X?- technically a “voiceless velar fricative”, pronounced as in the “ch” of?loch?or?Bach?- disappeared from English, and the Old English word?burX?(place), for example, was replaced with “-burgh”, “-borough”, “-brough” or “-bury” in many place names. In some cases, voiceless fricatives began to be pronounced like an “f” (e.g.laugh,?cough). Many other consonants ceased to be pronounced at all (e.g. the final “b” in words like?dumb?and?comb; the “l” between some vowels and consonants such as?half,?walk,?talk?and?folk; the initial “k” or “g” in words like?knee,knight,?gnaw?and?gnat; etc). As late as the 18th Century, the “r” after a vowel gradually lost its force, although the “r” before a vowel remained unchanged (e.g.?render,?terror, etc), unlike in American usage where the “r” is fully pronounced.So, while modern English speakers can read Chaucer’s Middle English (with some difficulty admittedly), Chaucer’s pronunciation would have been almost completely unintelligible to the modern ear. The English of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late 16th and early 17th Century, on the other hand, would be accented, but quite understandable, and it has much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer. ENGLISH RENAISSANCEThe next wave of innovation in English vocabulary came with the revival of classical scholarship known as the Renaissance. The English Renaissance roughly covers the 16th and early 17th Century (the European Renaissance had begun in Italy as early as the 14th Century), and is often referred to as the “Elizabethan Era” or the “Age of Shakespeare” after the most important monarch and most famous writer of the period. The additions to English vocabulary during this period were deliberate borrowings, and not the result of any invasion or influx of new nationalities or any top-down decrees.Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) was still very much considered the language of education and scholarship at this time, and the great enthusiasm for the classical languages during the English Renaissance brought thousands of new words into the language, peaking around 1600. A huge number of classical works were being translated into English during the 16th Century, and many new terms were introduced where a satisfactory English equivalent did not exist.Words from Latin or Greek (often via Latin) were imported wholesale during this period, either intact (e.g.?genius,?species,?militia,?radius,?specimen,criterion,?squalor,?apparatus,?focus,?tedium,?lens,?antenna,?paralysis,nausea, etc) or, more commonly,?slightly altered (e.g.?horrid,?pathetic,?iilicit,pungent,?frugal,?anonymous,?dislocate,?explain,?excavate,?meditate,?adapt,enthusiasm,?absurdity,?area,?complex,?concept,?invention,?technique,temperature,?capsule,?premium,?system,?expensive,?notorious,?gradual,habitual,?insane,?ultimate,?agile,?fictitious,?physician,?anatomy,?skeleton,orbit,?atmosphere,?catastrophe,?parasite,?manuscript,?lexicon,?comedy,tragedy,?anthology,?fact,?biography,?mythology,?sarcasm,?paradox,?chaos,?crisis,?climax, etc). A whole category of words ending with the Greek-based suffixes “-ize” and “-ism” were also introduced around this time.Sometimes, Latin-based adjectives were introduced to plug "lexical gaps" where no adjective was available for an existing Germanic noun (e.g.?marinefor?sea,?pedestrian?for?walk), or where an existing adjective had acquired unfortunate connotations (e.g.?equine?or?equestrian?for?horsey,?aquatic?forwatery), or merely as an additional synonym (e.g.?masculine?and?feminine?in addition to?manly?and?womanly,?paternal?in addition to?fatherly, etc). Several rather ostentatious French phrases also became naturalized in English at this juncture, including?soi-disant,?vis-à-vis,?sang-froid, etc, as well as more mundane French borrowings such as?crêpe,?étiquette, etc.IMAGEEarly Modern English loans from Latin & French (from? HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" Scribd, originally from T. Nevaleinen "An Introduction to Early Modern English")Some scholars adopted Latin terms so excessively and awkwardly at this time that the derogatory term “inkhorn” was coined to describe pedantic writers who borrowed the classics to create obscure and opulent terms, many of which have not survived. Examples of inkhorn terms include?revoluting,ingent,?devulgate,?attemptate,?obtestate,?fatigate,?deruncinate,?subsecive,?nidulate,?abstergify,arreption,?suppeditate,?eximious,?illecebrous,?cohibit,?dispraise?and other such inventions. Sydney Smith was one writer of the period with a particular penchant for such inkhorn terms, including gems like?frugiverous,?mastigophorus,?plumigerous,?suspirous,?anserous?and?fugacious, The so-called Inkhorn Controversy was the first of several such ongoing arguments over language use which began to erupt in the salons of England (and, later, America).There was even a self-conscious reaction to this perceived foreign incursion into the English language, and some writers tried to deliberately resurrect older English words (e.g.?gleeman?for?musician,?sicker?for?certainly,?inwit?for?conscience,?yblent?for?confused, etc), or to create wholly new words from Germanic roots (e.g.?endsay?for?conclusion,?yeartide?for?anniversary,?foresayer?for?prophet,?forewitr?for?prudence,?loreless?for?ignorant,?gainrising?forresurrection,?starlore?for?astronomy,?fleshstrings?for?muscles,?grosswitted?for?stupid,?speechcraft?for?grammar,?birdlore?for?ornithology, etc). Most of these were also short-lived. John Cheke even made a valiant attempt to translate the entire?"New Testament"?using only native English words.PRINT PRESS / STANDARDIZATION / DICTIONARIES / BIBLEThe final major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press, one of the world’s great technological innovations; introduced into England by William Caxton in 1476 (Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in Germany around 1450). The first book printed in the English language was Caxton's own translation,?“The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye”, actually printed in Bruges in 1473 or early 1474. Up to 20,000 books were printed in the following 150 years, ranging from mythic tales and popular stories to poems, phrasebooks, devotional pieces and grammars, and Caxton himself became quite rich from his printing business (among his best sellers were Chaucer’s“Canterbury Tales”?and Thomas Malory’s?“Tales of King Arthur”). As mass-produced books became cheaper and more commonly available, literacy increased a lot, and soon works in English became even more popular than books in Latin.The Chancery of Westminster made some efforts from the 1430s onwards to set standard spellings for official documents, specifying?I?instead of?ich and various other common variants of the first person pronoun,?land?instead of?lond, and modern spellings of?such,?right,?not,?but,?these,?any,?many,can,?cannot,?but,?shall,?should,?could,?ought,?thorough, etc, all of which previously appeared in many variants. Chancery Standard contributed significantly to the development of a Standard English, and the political, commercial and cultural dominance of the "East Midlands triangle" (London-Oxford-Cambridge) was well established long before the 15th Century, but it was the printing press that was really responsible for carrying through the standardization process. With the advent of mass printing, the dialect and spelling of the East Midlands (and, more specifically, that of the national capital, London, where most publishing houses were located) became the de facto standard and, over time, spelling and grammar gradually became more and more fixed.A good part of the reason for many of the vagaries and inconsistencies of English spelling has been attributed to the fact that words were fixed on the printed page before any orthographic consensus had emerged among teachers and writers. Printing also directly gave rise to another strange quirk: the word?the?had been written for centuries as ?e, using the thorn character of?Old English, but, as no runic characters were available on the European printing presses, the letter “y” was used instead (being closest to the handwritten thorn character of the period), resulting in the word?ye, which should therefore technically still be pronounced as “the”. It is only since the archaic spelling was revived for store signs (e.g. Ye Olde Pubbe) that the "modern" pronunciation of?ye?has been used.Also during the 16th Century, the virgule (an oblique stroke /), which had been a very common mark of punctuation in?Middle English, was largely replaced by the comma; the period or full-stop was restricted to the end of sentences; semi-colons began to be used in additon to colons (although the rules for their use were still unclear); quotation marks were used to mark direct speech; and capital letters were used at the start of sentences and for proper names and important nouns. The grammarian John Hart was particularly influential in these punctuation reforms.THE BIBLETwo particularly influential milestones in English literature were published in the 16th and early 17th Century. In 1549, the?“Book of Common Prayer”?(a translation of the Church liturgy in English, substantially revised in 1662) was introduced into English churches, followed in 1611by the Authorized, or King James, Version of “The Bible”, the culmination of more than two centuries of efforts to produce a Bible in the native language of the people of England.As we saw in the?previous section, John Wycliffe had made the first English translation of?“The Bible”?as early as 1384, and illicit handwritten copies had been circulating ever since. But, in 1526, William Tyndale printed his New Testament, which he had translated directly from the original Greek and Hebrew. Tyndale printed his?“Bible”?in secrecy in Germany, and smuggled them into his homeland, for which he was hounded down, found guilty of heresy and executed in 1536. By the time of his death he had only completed part of the Old Testament, but others carried on his labours.Tyndale’s?“Bible”?was much clearer and more poetic than Wycliffe’s early version. In addition to completely new English words like?fisherman,?landlady,?scapegoat,?taskmaster,?viper,?sea-shore,?zealous,?beautiful,?clear-eyed,?broken-hearted?and many others, it includes many of the well-known phrases later used in the King James Version, such as?let there be light,?my brother’s keeper,?the powers that be,?fight the good fight,?the apple of mine eye,?flowing with milk and honey,?the fat of the land,?am I my brother’s keeper?,?sign of the times,?ye of little faith,?eat drink and be merry,?salt of the earth,?a man after his own heart,?sick unto death,?the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,?a stranger in a strange land,?let my people go,?a law unto themselves, etc.The?“King James Bible”?was compiled by a committee of 54 scholars and clerics, and published in 1611, in an attempt to standardize the plethora of new Bibles that had sprung up over the preceding 70 years. It appears to be deliberately conservative, even backward-looking, both in its vocabulary and its grammar, and presents many forms which had already largely fallen out of use, or were at least in the process of dying out (e.g.?digged?for?dug,?gat?and?gotten?for?got,?barefor?bore,?spake?for?spoke,?clave?for?cleft,?holpen?for?helped,?wist?for?knew, etc), and several archaic forms such as?brethren,?kine?and?twain. The "-eth" ending is used throughout for third person singular verbs, even though "-es" was becoming much more common by the early 17th Century, and?ye?is used for the second person plural pronoun, rather than the more common?you.Although the majority of the King James Version was quite clearly based on Tyndale’s (up to 80% of the New Testament and much of the Old Testament), it is often considered a masterpiece of the English language, and many phrases from it have become well-used in every day speech. It is still considered by many to be the definitive English version of?“The Bible”, and its iconic opening lines?“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”?are well known, as are many of its phrases (in addition to those borrowed from Tyndale), including?how are the mighty fallen,?the root of the matter,to every thing there is a season,?bent their swords into ploughshares,?set your house in order,?be horribly afraid,?get thee behind me,?turned the world upside down,?a thorn in the flesh, etc. Much of its real power, though, was in exposing the written language to many more of the common people.DICTIONARIES AND GRAMMAR(S)The first English dictionary,?“A Table Alphabeticall”, was published by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604 (8 years before the first Italian dictionary, and 35 years before the first French dictionary, although admittedly some 800 years after the first Arabic dictionary and nearly 1,000 after the first Sanskrit dictionary). Cawdrey’s little book contained 2,543 of what he called “hard words”, especially those borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, although it was not actually a very reliable resource (even the word?words?was spelled in two different ways on the title page alone, as?wordes?and?words).Several other dictionaries, as well as grammar, pronunciation and spelling guides, followed during the 17th and 18th Century. The first attempt to list ALL the words in the English language was“An Universall Etymological English Dictionary”, compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721 (the 1736 edition contained about 60,000 entries).But the first dictionary considered anything like reliable was Samuel Johnson’s?“Dictionary of the English Language”, published in 1755, over 150 years after Cawdrey’s. An impressive academic achievement in its own right, Johnson’s 43,000 word dictionary remained the pre-eminent English dictionary until the much more comprehensive?“Oxford English Dictionary”?150 more years later, although it was actually riddled with inconsistencies in both spelling and definitions. Johnson’s dictionary included many flagrant examples of inkhorn terms which have not survived, includingdigladation,?cubiculary,?incompossibility,?clancular,?denominable,?opiniatry,?ariolation,?assation,ataraxy,?deuteroscopy,?disubitary,?esurine,?estuation,?indignate?and others. Since the 16th Century, there had been calls for the regulation and reform of what was increasingly seen as an unwieldy English language, including John Cheke's 1569 proposal for the removal of all silent letters, and William Bullokar's 1580 recommendation of a new 37-letter alphabet (including 8 vowels, 4 "half-vowels" and 25 consonants) in order to aid and simplify spelling. There were even attempts (similarly unsuccessful) to ban certain words or phrases that were considered in some way undesirable, words such as?fib,?banter,?bigot,?fop,?flippant,?flimsy,workmanship,?selfsame,?despoil,?nowadays,?furthermore?and?wherewithal, and phrases such assubject matter,?drive a bargain,?handle a subject?and?bolster an argument.But, by the early 18th Century, many more scholars had come to believe that the English language was chaotic and in desperate need of some firm rules. Jonathan Swift, in his?“Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue”?of 1712, decried the “degeneration” of English and sought to “purify” it and fix it forever in unchanging form, calling for the establishment of an Academy of the English Language similar to the Académie Fran?aise. He was supported in this by other important writers like John Dryden and Daniel Defoe, but such an institution was never actually realized. (Interestingly, the only country ever to set up an Academy for the English language was South Africa, in 1961).In addition to dictionaries, many English grammars started to appear in the 18th Century, the best-known and most influential of which were Robert Lowth's?“A Short Introduction to English Grammar”?(1762) and Lindley Murray's?“English Grammar”?(1794). In fact, some 200 works on grammar and rhetoric were published between 1750 and 1800, and no less than 800 during the 19th Century. Most of these works, Lowth’s in particular, were extremely prescriptive, stating in no uncertain terms the “correct” way of using English. Lowth was the main source of such "correct" grammar rules as a double negative always yields a positive, never end a sentence with a preposition and never split an infinitive. A refreshing exception to such prescriptivism was the?“Rudiments of English Grammar”?by the scientist and polymath Joseph Priestley, which was unusual in expressing the view that grammar is defined by common usage and not prescribed by self-styled grammarians.The first English newspaper was the?“Courante”?or?“Weekly News”?(actually published in Amsterdam, due to the strict printing controls in force in England at that time) arrived in 1622, and the first professional newspaper of public record was the?“London Gazette”, which began publishing in 1665. The first daily, “The Daily Courant”, followed in 1702, and?“The Times”?of London published its first edition in 1790, around the same time as the influential periodicals?“The Tatler”?and?“The Spectator”, which between them did much to establish the style of English in this period.GOLDEN AGE OF LITERATUREAll languages tend to go through phases of intense generative activity, during which many new words are added to the language. One such peak for the English language was the Early Modern period of the 16th to 18th Century, a period sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of English Literature (other peaks include the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century, and the computer and digital age of the late 20th Century, which is still continuing today). Between 1500 and 1650, an estimated 10,000-12,000 new words were coined, about half of which are still in use today.Up until the 17th Century, English was rarely used for scholarly or scientific works, as it was not considered to possess the precision or the?gravitas?of Latin or French. Thomas More, Isaac Newton, William Harvey and many other English scholars all wrote their works in Latin and, even in the 18th Century, Edward Gibbon wrote his major works in French, and only then translated them into English. Sir Francis Bacon, however, hedged his bets and wrote many of his works in both Latin and English and, taking his inspiration mainly from Greek, coined several scientific words such as?thermometer,pneumonia,?skeleton?and?encyclopaedia. In 1704, Newton, having written in Latin until that time, chose to write his?“Opticks”?in English, introducing in the process such words as?lens,?refraction, etc. Over time, the rise of nationalism led to the increased use of the native spoken language rather than Latin, even as the medium of intellectual communication.Thomas Wyatt’s experimentation with different poetical forms during the early 16th Century, and particularly his introduction of the sonnet from Europe, ensured that poetry would became the proving ground for several generations of English writers during a golden age of English literature, and Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope and many other rose to the challenge. Important English playwrights of the Elizabethan era include Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster and of course Shakespeare.It was really only in the 17th Century that dialects (or at least divergence from the fashionable Standard English of Middlesex and Surrey) began to be considered uncouth and an indication of inferior class. However, such dialects provided good comic material for the burgeoning theatre industry (a well-known example being the “rude mechanicals” of Shakespeare’s?“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and, paradoxically, many dialect words were introduced into general usage in that way. The word?class?itself only acquired its modern sociological meaning in the early 18th Century, but by the end of the century it had become all-pervasive, to the extent that the mere sound of a Cockney accent was enough to brand the speaker as a vagabond, thief or criminal (although in the 19th Century, Charles Dickens was to produce great literature and sly humour out of just such preconceptions, explicitly using speech, vocabulary and accent for commic effect).WILLIAM SHAKESPEAREWhatever the merits of the other contributions to this golden age, though, it is clear that one man, William Shakespeare, single-handedly changed the English language to a significant extent in the late 16th and early 17th Century. Skakespeare took advantage of the relative freedom and flexibility and the protean nature of English at the time, and played free and easy with the already liberal grammatical rules, for example in his use nouns as verbs, adverbs, adjectives and substantives - an early instance of the “verbification” of nouns which modern language purists often decry - in phrases such as“he pageants us”,?“it out-herods Herod”,?dog them at the heels,?the good Brutus ghosted,?“Lord Angelo dukes it well”,?“uncle me no uncle”, etc.He had a vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some counts) and he personally coined an estimated 2,000 neologisms or new words in his many works, including, but by no means limited to,?bare-faced,?critical,?leapfrog,?monumental,?castigate,?majestic,obscene,?frugal,?aerial,?gnarled,?homicide,?brittle,?radiance,?dwindle,?puking,?countless,submerged,?vast,?lack-lustre,?bump,?cranny,?fitful,?premeditated,?assassination,courtship,?eyeballs,?ill-tuned,?hot-blooded,?laughable,?dislocate,?accommodation,eventful,?pell-mell,?aggravate,?excellent,?fretful,?fragrant,?gust,?hint,?hurry,?lonely,summit,?pedant,?gloomy, and hundreds of other terms still commonly used today. By some counts, almost one in ten of the words used by Shakespeare were his own invention, a truly remarkable achievement (it is the equivalent of a new word?here?and then, after just a few short phrases, another other new word?here). However, not all of these were necessarily personally invented by Shakespeare himself: they merely appear for the first time in his published works, and he was more than happy to make use of other people’s neologisms and local dialect words, and to mine the latest fashions and fads for new ideas.He also introduced countless phrases in common use today, such as?one fell swoop,vanish into thin air,?brave new world,?in my mind’s eye,?laughing stock,?love is blind,star-crossed lovers,?as luck would have it,?fast and loose,?once more into the breach,sea change,?there’s the rub,?to the manner born,?a foregone conclusion,?beggars all description,?it's Greek to me,?a tower of strength,?make a virtue of necessity,?brevity is the soul of wit,?with bated breath,?more in sorrow than in anger,?truth will out,?cold comfort,?cruel only to be kind,?fool’s paradise?and?flesh and blood, among many others.By the time of Shakespeare, word order had become more fixed in a subject-verb-object pattern, and English had developed a complex auxiliary verb system, although?to be?was still commonly used as the auxiliary rather than the more modern?to have?(e.g.?I am come?rather than?I have come).?Do?was sometimes used as an auxiliary verb and sometimes not (e.g.?say you so??or?do you say so?). Past tenses were likewise still in a state of flux, and it was still acceptable to use?clomb?as well as?climbed,?clew?as well as?clawed,?shove?as well as?shaved,?digged?as well as?dug, etc. Plural noun endings had shrunk from the six of Old English to just two, “-s” and “-en”, and again Shakespeare sometimes used one and sometimes the other. The old verb ending “-en” had in general been gradually replaced by “-eth” (e.g.?loveth,?doth,?hath, etc), although this was itself in the process of being replaced by the northern English verb ending “-es”, and Shakespeare used both (e.g.?loves?and?loveth, but not the old?loven).INTERNATIONAL TRADEIMAGEMajor global trade routes, 1400-1800(from?Mail & Guardian Online)While all these important developments were underway, British naval superiority was also growing. In the 16th and 17th Century, international trade expanded immensely, and loanwords were absorbed from the languages of many other countries throughout the world, including those of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. Among these were:French (e.g.?bizarre,?ballet,?sachet,?crew,?progress,chocolate,?salon,?duel,?brigade,?infantry,?comrade,?volunteer,detail,?passport,?explorer,?ticket,?machine,?cuisine,?prestige,garage,?shock,?moustache,?vogue);Italian (e.g.?carnival,?fiasco,?arsenal,?casino,?miniature,design,?bankrupt,?grotto,?studio,?umbrella,?rocket,?ballot,balcony,?macaroni,?piano,?opera,?violin);Spanish (e.g.?armada,?bravado,?cork,?barricade,?cannibal);Portuguese (e.g.?breeze,?tank,?fetish,?marmalade,molasses);German (e.g.?kindergarten,?noodle,?bum,?dumb,?dollar,muffin,?hex,?wanderlust,?gimmick,?waltz,?seminar,?ouch!);Dutch/Flemish ( e.g.?bale,?spool,?stripe,?holster,?skipper,dam,?booze,?fucking,?crap,?bugger,?hunk,?poll,?scrap,?curl,scum,?knapsack,?sketch,?landscape,?easel,?smuggle,?caboose,?yacht,?cruise,?dock,?buoy,?keelhaul,?reef,?bluff,?freight,?leak,?snoop,?spook,sleigh,?brick,?pump,?boss,?lottery);Basque (e.g.?bizarre,?anchovy);Norwegian (e.g.?maelstrom,?iceberg,?ski,?slalom,?troll);Icelandic (e.g.?mumps,?saga,?geyser);Finnish (e.g.?sauna);Persian (e.g.?shawl,?lemon,?caravan,?bazaar,?tambourine);Arabic (e.g.?harem,?jar,?magazine,?algebra,?algorithm,?almanac,?alchemy,?zenith,?admiral,?sherbet,?saffron,?coffee,?alcohol,?mattress,?syrup,hazard,?lute);Turkish (e.g.?coffee,?yoghurt,?caviar,?horde,?chess,?kiosk,?tulip,?turban);Russian (e.g.?sable,?mammoth);Japanese (e.g.?tycoon,?geisha,?karate,?samurai);Malay (e.g.?bamboo,?amok,?caddy,?gong,?ketchup);Chinese (e.g.?tea,?typhoon,?kowtow).Polynesian (e.g.?taboo,?tatoo).LATE MODERN ENGLISH / Today (c. 1800 – c. Today)Industrial and Science RevolutionBritish ImperialismAmerican DialectBritain’s Other ColoniesLanguage Reform20th CenturyPresent DayINDUSTRIAL AND SCIENCE REVOLUTIONThe main distinction between Early Modern and Late Modern English (or just Modern English as it is sometimes referred to) lies in its vocabulary - pronunciation, grammar and spelling remained largely unchanged. Late Modern English accumulated many more words as a result of two main historical factors: the Industrial Revolution, which necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not previously existed; and the rise of the British Empire, during which time English adopted many foreign words and made them its own. No single one of the socio-cultural developments of the 19th Century could have established English as a world language, but together they did just that.Most of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century were of British origin, including the harnessing of steam to drive heavy machinery, the development of new materials, techniques and equipment in a range of manufacturing industries, and the emergence of new means of transportation (e.g. steamships, railways). At least half of the influential scientific and technological output between 1750 and 1900 was written in English. Another English speaking country, the USA, continued the English language dominance of new technology and innovation with inventions like electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the sewing machine, the computer, etc.The industrial and scientific advances of the Industrial Revolution created a need for neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries. To a large extent, this relied on the classical languages, Latin and Greek, in which scholars and scientists of the period were usually well versed. Although words like oxygen,?protein,?nuclear?and?vaccine?did not exist in the classical languages, they could be (and were) created from Latin and Greek roots.?Lens,refraction,?electron,?chromosome,?chloroform,?caffeine,?centigrade,?bacteria,?chronometer?and?claustrophobia?are just a few of the other science-based words that were created during this period of scientific innovation, along with a whole host of “-ologies” and “-onomies”, like?biology,?petrology,morphology,?histology,?palaeontology,?ethnology,?entomology,?taxonomy, etc.Many more new words were coined for the new products, machines and processes that were developed at this time (e.g.?train,?engine,?reservoir,pulley,?combustion,?piston,?hydraulic,?condenser,?electricity,?telephone,?telegraph,?lithograph,?camera, etc). In some cases, old words were given entirely new meanings and connotation (e.g.?vacuum,?cylinder,?apparatus,?pump,?syphon,?locomotive,?factory, etc), and new words created by amalgamating and fusing existing English words into a descriptive combination were particularly popular (e.g.?railway,?horsepower,?typewriter, cityscape,?airplane, etc).BRITISH IMPERIALISMBritish colonialism had begun as early as the 16th Century, but gathered speed and momentum between the 18th and 20th Century. At the end of the 16th Century, mother-tongue English speakers numbered just 5-7 million, almost all of them in the British Isles; over the next 350 years, this increased almost 50-fold, 80% of them living outside of Britain. At the height of the British Empire (in the late 19th and early 20th Century), Britain ruled almost one quarter of the earth’s surface, from Canada to Australia to India to the Caribbean to Egypt to South Africa to Singapore.Although the English language had barely penetrated into Wales, Ireland and the Scottish Highlands by the time of Shakespeare, just two hundred years later, in 1780, John Adams was confident enough to be able to claim (with a certain amount of foresight, but quite reasonably) that English was “destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age”. In 1852, the German linguist, Jacob Grimm, called English "the language of the world", and predicted it was "destined to reign in future with still more extensive sway over all parts of the globe".It was taken very much for granted by the British colonial mentality of the time that extending the English language and culture to the undeveloped and backward countries of Africa and Asia was a desirable thing. But colonialism was a two-way phenomenon, and Britain’s dealings with these exotic countries, as well as the increase in world trade in general during this time, led to the introduction of many foreign loanwords into English. For instance, Australia gave us a set of words (not particularly useful outside the context of Australia itself) like?boomerang,?kangaroo,?budgerigar, etc. But India gave us such everyday words as?pyjamas,?thug,?bungalow,?cot, jungle,?loot,?bangle,?shampoo,?candy,?tank?and many others.The rise of so-called “New Englishes” (modern variants or dialects of the language, such as Australian English, South African English, Caribbean English, South Asian English, etc) raised, for some, the spectre of the possible fragmentation of the English language into mutually unintelligible languages, much as occurred when Latin gave rise to the various Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc) centuries ago. As early as 1789, for example, Noah Webster had predicted “a language in North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German or from one another”. However, in retrospect, this does not seem to have happened and, in the age of instantaneous global communication, it now seems ever less likely to occur in the future.AMERICAN DIALECTIn 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter: "The new circumstances under which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An American dialect will therefore be formed". As the settlers (including a good proportion of Irish and Scots, with their own distinctive accents and usages of English) pushed westward, new terms were indeed introduced, and these pioneers were much less reticent to adopt native words or, indeed, to make up their own. The journals of Lewis and Clark, written as they explored routes to the west coast in 1804-6, contain over 500 native words (mainly animals, plants and food). The wild “outlands” west of the Mississippi River gave us the word outlandish?to describe its idiosyncratic characters.John Adams’ much-vaunted “plain English” took a back seat in the hands of colourful characters like Davy Crockett (who was himself of Scots-Irish decent) and others, who saw western expansion as an excuse to expand the language with new words and quirky Americanisms like?skedaddle,bamboozle,?shebang,?riff-raff,?hunky-dory,?lickety-split,?rambunctious,ripsnorter,?humdinger,?doozy,?shenanigan,?discombobulate,?absquatulate,splendiferous, etc, not to mention evocative phrases like?fly off the handle,a chip on the shoulder,?no axe to grind,?sitting on the fence,?dodge the issue,?knuckle down,?make the fur fly,?go the whole hog,?kick the bucket,face the music,?bite the dust,?barking up the wrong tree,?pass the buck,?stack the deck,?poker face,?in cahoots,?pull up stakes,?horse sense,?two cents’ worth,?stake a claim,?strike it rich,?the real McCoy and even the phrase?stiff upper lip?(in regard to their more hidebound British cousins). From the deliberately misspelled and dialectical works of Artemus Ward and Josh Billings to popular novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe's?“Uncle Tom's Cabin”?(1852) and Mark Twain's?“Huckleberry Finn”?(1884), this American vernacular spread rapidly, and became in the process more publicly acceptable both in everyday speech and in literature.Many Spanish words also made their way into American English during the expansion and settlement of the Spanish-influenced American West, including words like?armadillo,?alligator,?canyon,?cannibal,?guitar,?mosquito,?mustang,?ranch,?rodeo,?stampede,?tobacco,?tornado?and?vigilante?(some of which were also originally derived from native languages). To a lesser extent, French words, from the French presence in the Louisiana area and in Canada, contributed loanwords like?gopher,?prairie,?depot,?cache,?cent?and?dime, as well as French-derived place names like?Detroit,?Illinois,?Des Moines, etc.Today, some 4,000 words are used differently in the USA and Britain (lift/elevator,?tap/faucet,?bath/tub,?curtains/drapes,?biscuit/cookie?and?boot/trunkare just some of the better known ones) and, increasingly, American usage is driving out traditional words and phrases back in Britain (e.g.?truck?forlorry,?airplane?for?aeroplane, etc). American spelling is also becoming more commonplace in Britain (e.g.?jail?for?gaol,?wagon?for?waggon,?reflection?for reflexion, etc), although some Americanized spelling changes actually go back centuries (e.g. words like?horror,?terror,?superior,?emperor?and?governor were originally spelled as?horrour,?terrour,?superiour,?emperour?and?governour?in Britain according to Johnson's 1755?"Dictionary", even if other words like?colour,?humour?and?honour?had resisted such changes).BRITAIN’S OTHER COLONIESBut North America was not the only “New World”. In 1788, less than twenty years after James Cook’s initial landing, Britain established its first penal colony in Sydney, Australia (once labelled merely as Terra Australis Incognita, the Unknown Southern Land). About 130,000 prisoners were transported there over the next 50 years, followed by other “free” settlers. Most of the settlers were from London and Ireland, resulting in a very distinctive and egalitarian accent and a basic English vocabulary supplemented by some Aboriginal words and expressions (e.g.?boomerang,?kangaroo,koala,?wallaby,?budgerigar, etc). The Australian Aborigines were nomadic and reclusive, and their numbers relatively small (perhaps 200,000, speaking over 200 separate languages), so the loanwords they contributed to English were few and mainly limited to local plant and animal names.New Zealand began to be settled by European whalers and missionaries in the 1790s, although an official colony was not established there until 1840. New Zealand was keen to emphasize its national identity (and particularly its differences from neighbouring Australia), and this influenced its own version of English, as did the incorporation of native Maori words into the language.British settlement in South Africa began in earnest in 1820, and nearly half a million English-speaking immigrants moved there during the last quarter of the 19th Century, eager to take advantage of the discoveries of gold and diamonds. The Dutch had been in South Africa since the 1650s, but the wave of British settlers soon began to anglicize the Afrikaans (Dutch) and black population. English was made the official language in 1822 and, as in Australia, a distinctive homogeneous accent developed over time, drawing from the various different groups of settlers. Although English was always - and remains - a minority language, spoken by less than 10% of South Africans, Afrikaans was seen by the 80% black majority as the language of authority and repression (the word?apartheid, in addition to?trek, remains South Africa's best known contribution to the English lexicon).In West Africa, the English trading influence began as early as the end of the 15th Century. In this language-rich and highly multilingual region, several English-based pidgins and creoles arose, many of which (like Krio, the?de facto?national language of Sierra Leone) still exist today. Sierra Leone, Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria and Cameroon were all run as British Crown Colonies in the 19th Century, and the influence of the English language remains of prime importance in the region. Liberia, founded in 1822 as a homeland for former American slaves (similar to the way in which Sierra Leone had been established by the British in the 1780s), is the only African country with an American influence.In East Africa, British trade began around the end of the 16th Century, although systematic interest only started in the 1850s. Six modern East African states with a history of 19th Century British imperial rule (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe), gave English official language status on achieving independence in the 1960s. English is widely used in government, civil service, courts, schools, media, road signs, stores and business correspondence in these countries.The British East India Company established its first trading station in India in 1612, and it expanded rapidly. At first, the British traders had to learn the various languages of India in order to do business (Hindi, Bengali, Gujurati and others). But soon, schools and Christian missions were set up, and British officials began to impose English on the local populace. During the period of British sovereignty in India (the “Raj”), from 1765 until partition and independence in 1947, English became the medium of administration and education throughout the Indian sub-continent, particularly following Thomas Macaulay's famous (or infamous)?"Minutes"?of 1835. This was welcomed by some (particularly in the Dravidian speaking areas of southern India, who preferred English as a lingua franca to the Hindi alternative), but opposed and derided by others. A particularly florid and ornate version of English, incorporating an extreme formality and politeness, sometimes referred to as Babu English, grew up among Indian administrators, clerks and lawyers.Although now just a “subsidiary official language” (one of 15 official languages in a country which boasts 1,652 languages and dialects), and much less important than Hindi, English continues to be used as the lingua franca in the legal system.?LANGUAGE REFORMGeorge Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde or Dylan Thomas or even Winston Churchill, the attribution is unclear) once quipped that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”, and part of the reason for the differences between the two versions of English lies in the American proclivity for reform and simplification of the language. In the 1760s, Benjamin Franklin campaigned vigorously for the reform of spelling (he advocated the discontinuation of the “unnecessary letters “c”, “w”, “y” and “j” and the addition of six new letters), as later did Noah Webster and Mark Twain. To be fair, there were also calls for reform in Britain, including from such literary luminaries as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and even Charles Darwin, although the British efforts generally had little or no effect.Both Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster were totally convinced that American English would evolve into a completely separate language. Towards the end of the 19th Century, the English linguist Henry Sweet predicted that, within a century, “England, America and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages, owing to their independent changes of pronunciation” (as it has turned out, with the development of instantaneous global communications, the different dialects seem likely to converge rather than diverge, and American economic and cultural dominance is increasingly apparent in both British and, particularly. Australian speech and usage).Noah Webster is often credited with single-handedly changing American spelling, particularly through his dictionaries:?“The American Spelling Book”?(first published in 1788, although it ran to at least 300 editions over the period between 1788 and 1829, and became probably the best selling book in American history after?“The Bible”),?“The Compendious Dictionary of the English Language”?(1806), and?“The American Dictionary of the English Language”?(1828). In fact, many of the changes he put forward in his dictionaries were already underway in America (e.g. the spelling of?theater?and?center?instead of?theatre?and?centre) and many others may well have happened anyway. But he was largely responsible for the revised spelling of words like?color?and honor?(instead of the British?colour?and?honour),?traveler?and?jeweler?(for?traveller?and?jeweller),check?and?mask?(for?cheque?and?masque),?defense?and?offense?(for?defence?and?offence),?plowfor?plough, as well as the rather illogical adoption of?aluminum?instead of?aluminium.For many Americans, like Webster, taking ownership of the language and developing what would become known as American Standard English was seen as a matter of honour (honor) for the newly independent nation. But such reforms were fiercely criticized in Britain, and even in America a so-called "Dictionary War" ensued between supporters of Webster's Americanism and the more conservative British-influenced approach of Joseph Worcester and others. When the Merriam brothers bought the rights to Webster’s dictionaries and produced the first Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1847, they actually expunged most of Webster’s more radical spelling and pronunciation ideas, and the work (and its subsequent versions) became an instant success. 20th CENTURYThe 20th Century was, among other things, a century of world wars, technological transformation, and globalization, and each has provided a source of new additions to the lexicon. For example, words like?blockbuster,?nose-dive,?shell-shocked,?camouflage,?radar?,?barrage,?boondocks,?roadblock,snafu,?boffin,?brainwashing,?spearhead, etc, are all military terms which have made their way into standard English during the World Wars. As an interesting aside, in 1941, when Sir Winston Churchill wanted to plumb the depths of the English soul at a particularly crucial and difficult time in the Second World War, almost all of the words in the main part of his famous speech ("we shall fight on the beaches... we shall never surrender") were of Anglo-Saxon origin, with the significant exception of?surrender?(a French loanword). The speech is also a good example of what was considered Received Pronunciation at the time.The push for political correctness and inclusiveness in the last third of the 20th Century, particularly by homosexuals, feminists and visible minority groups, led to a reassessment of the popular usage of many words. Feminists called into question the underlying sexism in language (e.g.?mankind,chairman,?mailman, etc) and some have even gone to the lengths of positing?herstory?as an alternative to?history. For a time, stong objections were voiced at the inherent racism underlying words like?blacklist,?blackguard,?blackmail, even?blackboard, and at the supposedly disparaging and dismissive nature of terms like?mentally handicapped,?disabled,?Third World, etc. But there has also been a certain amount of positive re-branding and reclamation (also known as reappropriation) of many pejorative words, such as?gay,?queer,?queen,?dyke,?bitch,?nigger, etc, by those very same marginalized segments of society.The explosion in electronic and computer terminology in the latter part of the 20th Century (e.g.?byte,?cyberspace,?software,?hacker,?laptop,?hard-drive,database,?online,?hi-tech,?microchip, etc) was just one element driving the dramatic increase in new English terms, particularly due to the dominance of the USA in the development of computer technology, from IBM to Apple to Microsoft. Parallel to this, science fiction literature has contributed it own vocabulary to the common word-stock, including terms such as?robotics,?hyperspace,?warp-speed,?cyberpunk,?droid,?nanotech,?nanobot, etc.Later, the Internet it gave rise to (the word?Internet?itself is derived form Latin, as are?audio,?video,?quantum, etc) generated its own set of neologisms (e.g.?online,?noob,?flamer,?spam,?phishing,?larping,?whitelist,?download,?blog,?vblog,?blogosphere,?emoticon,?podcast,?warez,?trolling,?hashtag,?wifi,bitcoin,?selfie, etc). In addition, a whole body of acronyms, contractions and shorthands for use in email, social networking and cellphone texting has grown up, particularly among the young, including the relatively well-known?lol,?ttfn,?btw,?omg,?wtf,?plz,?thx,?ur,?l8ter, etc. The debate (db8) continues as to whether texting is killing or enriching the English language.PRESENT DAYThe language continues to change and develop and to grow apace, expanding to incorporate new jargons, slangs, technologies, toys, foods and gadgets. In the current digital age, English is going through a new linguistic peak in terms of word acquisition, as it peaked before during Shakespeare’s time, and then again during the Industrial Revolution, and at the height of the British Empire. According to one recent estimate, it is expanding by over 8,500 words a year (other estimates are significantly higher), compared to an estimated annual increase of around 1,000 words at the beginning of the 20th Century, and has almost doubled in size in the last century.Neologisms are being added all the time, including recent inclusions such as fashionista,?metrosexual,?McJob,?McMansion,?wussy,?bling,?nerd,?pear-shaped,unplugged,?fracking,? sexting,?crowdsourcing,regift,?meme,?selfie,?meh,?diss,?suss,?emo,?twerk,?chav,,?punked,?vaping, etc, In recent years, there has been an increasing trend towards using an existing words as a different part of speech, especially the “verbification” of nouns (e.g. the word?verbify?is itself a prime example; others include to?thumb, to?parrot, toemail, to?text, to?google, to?medal, to?critique, to?leverage, to?sequence, tointerface, to?tase, to?speechify, to?incentivize, etc), although some modern-sounding verbs have surprisingly been in the language for centuries (e.g. toauthor, to?impact, to?message, to?parent, to?channel, to?monetize, to?mentor, etc). "Nounification" also occurs, particularly in business contexts (e.g. an?ask, a?build, a?solve, a?fail, etc).Compound or portmanteau words are an increasingly common source of new vocabulary (e.g.?stagflation,?edutainment,?flexitarian,?Disneyfication,frenemy,?confuzzle,?gastropub,?bromance,?hacktivist,?chillax,?infomercial,?shareware,?dramedy,?gaydar,?wellderly, etc).The meanings of words also continue to change, part of a process that has been going on almost as long as the language itself. For instance, to the disgust of many,?alternate?is now almost universally accepted in North America as a replacement for?alternative;?momentarily?has come to mean "very soon" and not (or as well as) "for a very short period of time"; and the use of the modifier?literally?to mean its exact opposite has recently found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary (where one of its meanings is shown as "used for emphasis rather than being actually true"). In some walks of life,bad,?sick,?dope?and?wicked?are all now different varieties of good. is an old saying that America and Britain are “two nations divided by a common language.”No one knows exactly who said this, but it reflects the way many Brits feel about American English. My British friend still tells me, “You don’t speak English. You speak American.”But are American and British English really so different?VocabularyThe most noticeable difference between American and British English is vocabulary. There are hundreds of everyday words that are different. For example, Brits call the front of a car the?bonnet, while Americans call it the?hood.Americans go?on vacation, while Brits go?on holidays,?or?hols.New Yorkers live in?apartments; Londoners live in?flats.There are far more examples than we can talk about here. Fortunately, most Americans and Brits can usually guess the meaning through the context of a sentence.Collective NounsThere are a few grammatical differences between the two varieties of English. Let’s start with?collective nouns. We use collective nouns to refer to a group of individuals.In American English, collective nouns are singular. For example,?staff?refers to a group of employees;?band?refers to a group of musicians;?team?refers to a group of athletes. Americans would say, “The band is good.”But in British English, collective nouns can be singular or plural. You might hear someone from Britain say, “The team are playing tonight” or “The team is playing tonight.”Auxiliary verbsAnother grammar difference between American and British English relates to auxiliary verbs.?Auxiliary verbs, also known as helping verbs, are verbs that help form a grammatical function. They “help” the main verb by adding information about time,?modality?and voice.Let’s look at the auxiliary verb?shall. Brits sometimes use?shall?to express the future.For example, “I shall go home now.” Americans know what?shall?means, but rarely use it in conversation. It seems very formal. Americans would probably use?“I will go home now.”In question form, a Brit might say, “Shall we go now?” while an American would probably say, “Should we go now?”When Americans want to express a lack of obligation, they use the helping verbdo?with negative?not?followed by?need. “You do not need to come to work today.” Brits drop the helping verb and contract?not. “You needn’t come to work today.”Past Tense VerbsYou will also find some small differences with past forms of irregular verbs.The past tense of?learn?in American English is?learned. British English has the option of?learned?or?learnt. The same rule applies to?dreamed?and?dreamt, burned?and?burnt, leaned?and?leant.Americans tend to use the?–ed?ending; Brits tend to use the?-t?ending.In the past participle form, Americans tend to use the?–en?ending for some irregular verbs. For example, an American might say, “I have never gotten?caught” whereas a Brit would say, “I have never got caught.” Americans use both?got?andgotten?in the past participle. Brits only use?got.Don’t worry too much about these small differences in the past forms of irregular verbs. People in both countries can easily understand both ways, although Brits tend to think of the American way as incorrect.Tag QuestionsA tag question is a grammatical form that turns a statement into a question. For example, “The whole situation is unfortunate, isn’t it?” or, “You don’t like him, do you?”The tag includes a pronoun and its matching form of the verb?be,?have?or?do. Tag questions encourage people to respond and agree with the speaker. Americans use tag questions, too, but less often than Brits. You can learn more about tag questions on a?previous episode of Everyday Grammar.SpellingThere are hundreds of minor spelling differences between British and American English. You can thank American?lexicographer?Noah Webster for this. You might recognize Webster’s name from the dictionary that carries his name.Noah Webster, an author, politician, and teacher, started an effort to reform English spelling in the late 1700s.He was frustrated by the?inconsistencies?in English spelling. Webster wanted to spell words the way they sounded. Spelling reform was also a way for America to show its independence from England.You can see Webster’s legacy in the American spelling of words like?color (from colour), honor (from honour),?and?labor (from labour). Webster dropped the letter?u?from these words to make the spelling match the pronunciation.Other Webster ideas failed, like a proposal to spell?women?as?wimmen. Since Webster’s death in 1843, attempts to change spelling rules in American English have gone nowhere.Not so different after allBritish and American English have far more similarities than differences. We think the difference between American and British English is often?exaggerated.If you can understand one style, you should be able to understand the other style.With the exception of some regional dialects, most Brits and Americans can understand each other without too much difficulty. They watch each other’s TV shows, sing each other’s songs, and read each other’s books.They even make fun of each other’s accents.I’m Jill Robbins.And I’m John Russell.And I'm Claudia Milne.Now it’s your turn. What style of English are you learning? Why did you choose it? Write to us in the comments section or on our Facebook page.Adam Brock wrote this article for VOA Learning English. Jill Robbins and Kathleen Struck were the editors.________________________________________________________________Word in This Storycollective noun?–?n. a word which refers to a collection of things taken as a whole.auxiliary verb?–?n. a word used in construction with and preceding certain forms of other verbs, as infinitives or participles, to express distinctions of tense, aspect, mood, etcmodality–?n. expressing ability, necessity, possibility, permission or obligation.lexicographer?–?n. someone who writes dictionariesinconsistency?–?n. the quality or fact of not staying the same at different timesexaggerate?–?v.?to think of or describe something as larger or greater than it really isRead the comment by an expert on the topic. Do you agree or disagree with her opinion? Brainstorm your reply in the box below it.Dr. Jill Robbins?(Washington)Moderator11/07/2016 4:11 PMDear Adam, When people who speak a language move to a different place, that language naturally changes due to being in a different environment. There are different plants and animals to talk about, different foods, social structures, and so on. In another way, the language of the colonists may remain the same while the land of the language's roots will change. This is seen in many languages where people speaking it became isolated and removed from the influence of the original place where the language was spoken. Best wishes, Dr. JillAfter brainstorming, you’ll be put into a discussion group. Share your thoughts from the box above with your members.Stay in your assigned group. As a team, work together to come up with your collective opinion on ONE of the following:American English is more relevant and valid for 2017 because…British English is more relevant and valid for 2017 because…We should invest time and money to select another global language because…Supporting details for your perspective: (2 supporting details may be personal experience / opinion – 3 MUST be factual data from video, class reading, other research you locate, etc.)Our group’s opinion is:We support our opinion with the following: (remember – only TWO may be personal experience / opinion)1.2.3.4.5.You will share this as a brief oral report to the class. All group members must speak and participate. Be prepared to be questioned randomly to extend your opinion if necessary.History Quiz ActivityStep 1: Find a partnerStep 2: You have 30-40 minutes to create a quiz and answer key on important key knowledge (up to you!) from reading and slide content. Minimum: 10 questions – maximum: 15 questions.Step 3: Compose quiz on separate paper. Make answer key on separate paper. Step 4: Administer your quiz to another set of partners.Step 5: Offer feedback on the quiz to whomever took it.Our Quiz Answer Key: if needed add where to find the answer in case the people who take it have a question for you.1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.WARM UPGlobalization and Korean History in English EducationExcerpt from: the following bullet points from the article:Even professors of Korean history whom one would expect to be somewhat shielded from the craze, are feeling social pressure to teach in English.When classical Chinese became the language of official documents in the late ninth century, many people of Unified Silla who did not even belong to one of the privileged classes started to go to T’ang China {to learn Chinese}When Japan annexed Korea, Japanese was made the official language of KoreaWhen the U.S. military started to settle in South Korea after the liberation, English became the most important foreign language. Those who could fluently speak English took the most important and powerful positions in Korean societyAnswer the following questions by brainstorming in the space below after considering the above bullet points.1. Why would a history professor in Korea feel pressure to teach in English?2. Is Chinese a better option than English for official documents in Korea, as it was in the 9th century?3. Make an educated guess (just use your background knowledge to attempt a response) – do more people in the world care to learn Korean or Japanese?4. Would South Korea (NOT the Korean peninsula) be better without the US military and its influence on language?*** Share your ideas with a partner***Let’s watch: “South Korea Documentary”Relating to history:After reviewing the last class, answer the following questions while brainstorming for a little while:1. If we consider how many times the island of England was invaded by different populations, what conclusions can you draw about the invasion of England and the invasion of Korea about language change?2. Read the summaries below about 2 great leaders. Fill in the information as necessary.King Sejong the GreatKing Alfred the GreatImportant contributions:Important contributions:Different from Alfred because: Different from Sejong because: Alfred the Great?(Old English:??lfrēd,??lfr?d, "elf counsel" or "wise elf"; 849 – 26 October 899) was King of Wessex?from 871 to 899.Alfred successfully defended his kingdom against the?Viking?attempt at conquest, and by the time of his death had become the dominant ruler in?England.[1]?He is one of only two English monarchs to be given the?epithet "the Great", the other being the Scandinavian?Cnut the Great. He was also the first?King of the West Saxons?to style himself "King of the?Anglo-Saxons". Details of Alfred's life are described in a work by the?10th-centuryWelsh?scholar and bishop?Asser.Alfred had a reputation as a learned and merciful man of a gracious and level-headed nature who encouraged education, proposing that primary education be taught in?English, and improved his kingdom's?legal?system, HYPERLINK "" \o "Military" military?structure and his people's quality of life. In 2002, Alfred was ranked number 14 in the BBC's poll of the100 Greatest Britons.Sejong the Great?(Korean pronunciation:?[s?e(?)d?o?]; 15 May 1397 - 8 April 1450) was the fourth king of? HYPERLINK "" \o "Joseon" Joseon-dynasty Korea. Born with family name?Yi?(pronounced?[i(?)];?Hangul:??;?Hanja:?李), given name Do (?;?祹), family origin? HYPERLINK "" \o "Jeonju" Jeonju?([t??nd?u];???;?全州),?sobriquet?Wonjeong (??;?元正). He ascended to the throne in 1418. During the first four years of his reign,? HYPERLINK "" \o "Taejong of Joseon" Taejonggoverned as regent, after which his father-in-law,? HYPERLINK "" \o "Sim On" Sim On, and his close associates were executed.Sejong reinforced?Confucian?policies and executed major "legal amendments" (??;?貢法). He also created the Korean alphabet?Hangul, encouraged advancements of scientific technology, and instituted many other efforts to stabilize and improve prosperity. He dispatched military campaigns to the north and instituted the Samin Policy (????;?徙民政策) to attract new settlers to the region. To the south, he subjugated Japanese raiders and captured?Tsushima Island.3. Do you think the English language has invaded Korea, like the Vikings and Normans invaded England, or do you think English was ‘invited’ – similarly to how the Germanic tribes gradually entered England after the Romans left and the Celts were on their own?Share your answers with members of a group. In your group, write a 4-5 sentence summary of what you want to share with the class about your overall opinion about the history and current role of the English language in South Korea.My groups’ opinion:Warm-up: ’s debate about some topics in English historical contexts:Shakespeare is the Greatest writer in English language historyPRO/ CONWhy? 1. ___________________________________ 2. ___________________________________ 3. ___________________________________Loanwords are an important factor in the development of English from Old English until todayPRO/ CONWhy? 1. ___________________________________ 2. ___________________________________ 3. ___________________________________Latin has had a greater influence on the development of English language than Norman FrenchPRO/ CONWhy? 1. ___________________________________ 2. ___________________________________ 3. ___________________________________ English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languagesPRO/ CONWhy? 1. ___________________________________ 2. ___________________________________ 3. ___________________________________Extension: After choosing and writing your support, let’s mingle and share our debate answers among the class. You may also be asked to share your support individually to the whole class.Extra area for notes or text correctionsExtra area for notes or text correctionsExtra area for notes or text corrections--- END --- ................
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