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From: <>
Subject: History of English - Part Three
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 19:19:36 EDT

A Brief Look at the History of English (Part Three--Modern English +
prehistory)

The period of Modern English extends from the sixteenth century to our own
day. The early part of this period saw the completion of a revolution in the
phonology of English that had begun in late Middle English and that
effectively redistributed the occurrence of the vowel phonemes to something
approximating their present pattern. (Mandeville's English would have sounded
even less familiar to us than it looks.)

Other important early developments include the stabilizing effect on spelling
of the printing press and the beginning of the direct influence of Latin and,
to a lesser extent, Greek on the lexicon. Later, as English came into contact
with other cultures around the world and distinctive dialects of English
developed in the many areas which Britain had colonized, numerous other
languages made small but interesting contributions to our word-stock.

The historical aspect of English really encompasses more than the three
stages of development just under consideration. English has what might be
called a prehistory as well. As we have seen, our language did not simply
spring into existence; it was brought from the Continent by Germanic tribes
who had no form of writing and hence left no records.

Philologists know that they must have spoken a dialect of a language that can
be called West Germanic and that other dialects of this unknown language must
have included the ancestors of such languages as German, Dutch, Low German,
and Frisian. They know this because of certain systematic similarities which
these languages share with each other but do not share with, say, Danish.

However, they have had somehow to reconstruct what that language was like in
its lexicon, phonology, grammar, and semantics as best they can through
sophisticated techniques of comparison developed chiefly during the last
century. Similarly, because ancient and modern languages like Old Norse and
Gothic or Icelandic and Norwegian have points in common with Old English and
Old High German or Dutch and English that they do not share with French or
Russian, it is clear that there was an earlier unrecorded language that can
be called simply Germanic and that must be reconstructed in the same way.

Still earlier, Germanic was just a dialect (the ancestors of Greek, Latin,
and Sanskrit were three other such dialects) of a language conventionally
designated Indo-European, and thus English is just one relatively young
member of an ancient family of languages whose descendants cover a fair
portion of the globe.

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