THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE(конспект лекцій) What is Old English? It is the vernacular Germanic language, the language of daily life, in Anglo-Saxon England before about 1100. Why bother with it? Old English is where the English language - ‘the tongue that Shakespeare spake’, the tongue that many millions throughout the world now speak - began: the sentence His hand is strong and his word grim is spelt the same in both Old English and Modern English and carries the same message. Old English is where English prose and poetry began. To read English literature without some knowledge of, and feeling for, Old English is to cut oneself off from one of the main traditions which have nourished that literature. Where did the English language come from? How did it get to what was later called Engla lond ‘land of the Angles, England’. Here we lack written records, unlike those interested in French, Italian, and the other Romance languages, who can go back to Latin. We therefore have to rely on the methods of comparative philology, which involve deducing (as far as possible) vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar, of languages now lost from the evidence of languages which we know. Using these methods, scholars have been able to reconstruct in broad outline the story of the people who spoke the languages through which Old English can trace its descent. The narrative may go something like this. Several thousands years BC, perhaps on the steppes of Southern Russia or on the forested plains of Central Europe, there existed a language of which we have no written records but which we now call Indo-European. It may have been spoken by a powerful group of travelling merchants who made it the lingua franca of great councils and of army of common defence. An alternative hypothesis is that the original speakers of Indo-European were peasant farmers in central Anatolia (now part of Turkey) and that their language gradually spread both west and east along with their farming economy. Fig.1 “Migration of Germanic tribes in the 2nd-5th centuries”
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