Historical Linguistics (Linguistics Study)

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

1.1.  Background Of Study

            The history of the language can be traced back to the arrival of three Germanic tribes to the British Isles during the 5th Century AD. Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea from what is the present day Denmark and northern Germany. The inhabitants of Britain previously spoke a Celtic language. This was quickly displaced. Most of the Celtic speakers were pushed into Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. One group migrated to the Brittany Coast of France where their descendants still speak the Celtic Language of Breton today. The Angles were named from Engle, their land of origin. Their language was called Englisc from which the word, English derives.

1.2.  The Purpose of Study

            Within this paper, we will learn about the history of language, how language change, why language changes and the Sub-field of historical linguistics study, such as Comparative linguistics, Etymology, Dialectology, Phonology, Morphology and syntax.

CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

2.1.The history of English

Traditionally and in fact most appropriately, the history of English is divided into four distinct periods: Old, Middle and Modern English.

Ø  Old English

The invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survived largely in Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. The dialects spoken by the invaders formed what is now called Old English. Later, it was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the north-east. The new and the earlier settlers spoke languages from different branches of the Germanic family; many of their lexical roots were the same or similar, although their grammars were more distant, including the prefixes, suffixes and inflections of many of their words.

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CHAPTER III

CONCLUSION

Traditionally and in fact most appropriately, the history of English is divided into four distinct periods: Old, Middle, Early Modern and Modern English. Old English covers a period from the second half of the first millennium to roughly around 1100, ending shortly after the Norman Conquest. It is a period in which English still was a dominantly synthetic language and it is certainly different from any English spoken since. The language of this period was influenced by and in contact (language contact) with Latin and what is called Old Norse, i.e. the language of Scandinavian seafarers and settlers. As in later stages, English lexicon at this stage of its development was (amongst other features) characterized by frequent borrowings from contact languages, i.e. by taking over words from them. With the beginning of the

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REFERENCES

Bragg, Melvyn. 2003. The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language.

New York: Arcade Publishing.

Bryson, Bill. 1990. Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way. New

York: Perennial.

McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. 1986. The Story of

English. New York: Viking.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics (April 11, 2012)

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