Файл: lekcii_po_istorii_yazika.doc

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Summary

Thus we may summarize the above discussion stating that the principal features common to all the languages of the Germanic area were:

• Fixation of the main stress on the initial syllable of the word;

• The first, or Germanic sound shift affecting the Indo-European voiceless and voiced stops and the spirant [s];

• Certain vowel changes;

• Reduction in the number of cases as compared to Common Indo-European;

• Full development of the weak declension of the adjective with particular categorical meaning;

• Development of a dental preterite and appearance of the strong/weak verb distinction;

• A peculiar alphabet.

LECTURE 2.

OLD ENGLISH. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

List of principal questions:

1. Outer history

1.1. Pre-Germanic history of Britain. The Celts

1.2. Anglo-Saxon civilization

1.3. Introduction of Christianity

1.4. Principal written records

2.1. Dialectical classification

2.2. The dialects in Old English

2.3 Old English written records

3. Inner history

3.1. Phonetics

3.2. Spelling

3.3. Grammar

3.4. Vocabulary

Literature

1. R.V. Reznik, T.C. Sorokina, I.V. Reznik A History of the English language. M., 2003.

2. T.A. Rastorguyeva History of English. M., 1983.

3. А.И. Смирницкий Лекции по истории английского языка. М., 2000.

4. К. Бруннер История английского языка. Т.1 М., 2001.

5. И. Чахоян, Л. Иванова, Т. Беляева. История английского языка. СПб., 1998.

1. Outer history

1.1. Pre-Germanic history of Britain

The Celts

Before Germanic invasion, Celtic tribes inhabited British Isles. The first Celtic comers were the Gaels, but the Brythons arrived some two centuries later and pushed the Gaels to Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall taking possession of the south and east. Then, after a considerable lapse of time somewhere about the 1 st century B.C. the most powerful tribe, the Belgae, claimed possession of south-east while part of the Brythons was pushed on to Wales though the rest stayed in what is England today, and probably gave there name to the whole country. Thus the whole of Britain was occupied by the Celts who merged with the Picts and Scots, as well as with the Alpine part of the population; the latter predominantly in the West while the rest of the British Isles became distinctly Celtic in language and the structure of the society. The Gaelic form of the Celtic dialects was spoken in Caledonia (modern Scotland) and Ireland, the Bretonic form in England and Wales. The social unit of the Celts, the clans were united into large kinship groups, and those into tribes. The clan was the main economic unit, the main organizational unit for the basic activities.

The Celts came to Britain in three waves. Economically and socially the Celts were a tribal society made up of kins, kinship groups, clans and tribes. They practiced a primitive agriculture and carried on trade with Celtic Gaul. The Celts created the great Iron cultures. The Romans invaded the Celts partially, so in Ireland and Scotland, Iron Age culture continued throughout the Roman and Anglo-Saxon conquest.

The Celtic tribes started to populate Britain in about 500 B.C. The Main wave of Celtic immigration began in about 300 B.C., from France and Brittany; they brought the so-called sophisticated La Tene culture to Britain. These people settled as miners and traders in southern part of Britain and as horse-breeders and cattle ranchers in the Highlands. In there farming they used a light plough that merely scratched the surface of their fields so they had to plough for the second time to deepen the furrow. The introduction of the iron axe opened up new possibilities; woods could be cleared and more areas put under cultivation.

A third wave of Celtic people came into southeast of Britain after 100 B.C. and they were Belgае who moved to Britain before the advancing Romans of Gaul. With arrival of the Belgic tribes to Britain the heavy plough was introduced, drawn by oxen, consequently the slopes of downs were used only as pastures, and fertile valleys were cleared from forests and the south east produced enough grain and food. It was a primitive patriarchal society based on common ownership of land. Afterwards the primitive tillage started to improve and the social differentiation began to develop. All these conditions provided the development of the class distinctions, it helped the tribal chiefs to use the labour of the semi-dependent native population. Alongside with the accumulation of wealth the heads of clans and tribes started to use military forces to rob other tribes.

Fortresses were built on the tops of the hills, in fact they were tribal centers, and the first urban settlements began to appear in the wealthier south east. Actually they were the settlements with large groups of wattle-and-clay houses encircled by a sort of fortified fence. Among the first mentioned Celtic urban settlements are such as Verulamium, Camulodunum, Londinium.

At that time some continental Celts of Gaul who traded with British Celts came over to Britain and settled in Kent contributing to the civilization of that part of the island, teaching the local population some useful arts.

The British craftsmen perfected their skill mostly in bronze work and they tried to express their culture in circular shapes on weapons, vases, domestic utensils, etc.

The Celts were good warriors. The most popular of the Celtic armaments were war-chariots, which terrified the Celtic enemies and made them run. The war-chariots were reliably to hold one warrior standing up to drive and two more to do the fighting.

The war-chariot itself was a destructive force, the well-trained horses trampling down the enemy and the wheels fixed with sharp knives or swords, rotating with the wheel movement, a grave menace to everything living that chanted to be in the way.

The first millennium B.C. was the period of Celtic migration and expansion. Traces of the Celtic civilization are still found all over Europe. Celtic languages were widespread almost all over Europe, later they were absorbed by other Indo-European languages. The Gaelic branch has survived as Irish (or Erse) in Ireland, has expanded to Scotland as Scotch-Gaelic of the Highlands and is still spoken by a few thousand people on the Isle of Man (the Manx language). The Brittonic branch is represented by Kymric or Welsh in Modern Wales and by Breton or Amorican spoken by over a million people in France (in the area called Bretagne or Brittany, where the Celts came as emigrants from Britain in the 5 th century), another Britonic dialect in Britain, Cornish, was spoken in Cornwall until the end of the 8^th century.

As we have already said, the forefathers of the English nation belonged to the western subdivision of old Germanic tribes, and the dialects they spoke later lay the foundation of English national language.

The history of the English language begins in the fifth century AD, when the ruthless and barbaric Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes and Frisians, who up to that time had lived in Western Europe between the Elbe and the Rhine, started their invasion of the British Isles.

At the time of invasion Britain was inhabited by the so-called “Romanized Celts”, that is, Celts who lived under the Roman rule for over four centuries and who had acquired Roman culture and ways of life and whose language had undergone certain changes mainly in the form of borrowings from the Latin language.

The Celtic tribes, whose languages, the same as Germanic belonged to the Indo-European language family, were at one time among its most numerous representatives. At the beginning of our era the Celts could be found on the territories of the present-day Spain, Great Britain, Western Germany and Northern Italy. Before that they had been known to reach even Greece and Asia Minor. But under the steady attacks of Italic and Germanic tribes the Celts had to retreat, so that in the areas where they were once dominant they have left but the scantiest trace of their presence.

The Celts who first came to Britain gradually spread to Ireland, Scotland and Isle of Man. Their languages are represented in modern times by Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. A later wave of Celtic tribes, having occupied for some centuries the central part of England, was driven westwards by Germanic invaders, and their modern language representatives are Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

The Romans invaded Britannia as it was then called in 55 – 54 BC when the troops of Julius Caesar and others conquered the isles. No centralized government was formed, instead there existed petty principalities under the control of local landlords. In 407 AD, with the departure of the last Roman emissary Constantine hostilities among the native tribes in Britain began anew. To normalize the situation the local chieftains appealed to influential Germanic tribes who lived on the continent inviting them to come to their assistance, and in 449 the Germanic troops led by Hengest and Horsa landed in Britain.

The Roman occupation of Britain left little mark on its future. Most of what the Romans did perished after they left, so it is with the Germanic tribes that the history of England truly begins.

The invaders, or Barbarians, as they were generally called, who came to the British Isles were representatives of a by far inferior civilization than the Romans. A bulk of the invaders came from the most backward and primitive of the Germanic tribes. They were an agricultural rather than a pastoral people. Their tribal organization was rapidly disintegrating.

The invaders came to Britain in hosts consisting not only of warriors but also including laborers, women and children. They plundered the country, took possession of almost all the fertile land there and partly exterminated, and partly drove away the native population to the less inhabited mountainous parts of the country – Cornwall, Wales, Scotland. The rest of the natives became slaves to the conquerors.

In view of the historical facts mentioned above it is quite clear why the language of the invaders underwent so few changes under the influence of the Celtic tongue as almost no normal intercourse between the invaded and invaders was possible, the latter being very few and far below socially.

It should be noted that nowadays the remnants of the Celtic group of languages face the threat of complete disappearance unable to survive in the competition with English. Cornish became extinct already in the 18^th century, Manx – after the Second World War. Scottish Gaelic is spoken only in the Highlands by about 75 thousand people, Irish – by half a million, the figures showing a steady declining tendency, and their absolute majority of those speaking these languages are bilingual, English being no less familiar to them than their former native tongue. Although in recent years a certain revival of nationalist sentiments helped to somewhat arrest the decline, many linguists fear the inevitable disappearance of the whole branch of the Indo-European language family.

We have very little indirect evidence about the beginning of the Old English period – 5^th – 7^th centuries. The first written records were dated as far back as the beginning of the 8^th century that is why the 5^th – 7^th centuries are generally referred to as “pre-written period”.

The Latin Language in Britain

Among the other evidences of Romanization must be included the rules of the Latin language. A great number of inscriptions have been found, all of them in Latin. The majority of these proceed no doubt from the military and official class and, being in the nature of public records, were therefore in the official language. They do not in themselves indicate a widespread use of Latin by the native population. Latin did not replace the Celtic language in Britain as it did in Gaul. Its use by native Britons was probably confined to members of the upper classes and the inhabitants of the cities and towns. Occasionally “graffiti” scratched on a tile or a piece of pottery, apparently by the workman who made it, suggest that in some localities Latin was familiar to the artisan classes. Outside the cities there were many fine country houses, some of which were probably occupied by well-to-do natives. The occupants of these also probably spoke Latin. Tacitus tells us that in the time of Agricola the Britons, who had hitherto shown only hostility to the language of their conquerors, now became eager to speak it. At the same time a Greek teacher from Asia Minor was teaching in Britain and by A.D. 96 the poet Martial was able to boast that his works were read even in this far-off island. On the whole, there were certainly many people in Roman Britain who habitually spoke Latin or upon occasion could use it. But its use was not sufficiently widespread to cause it to survive, as the Celtic language survived, the upheaval of the Germanic invasions. Its use probably began to decline after 410, the approximate date at which the last of the Roman troops were officially withdrawn from the island.

Britain’s Roman villas

Numerous monuments recall the 400 or so years (from A.D. 43 to the beginning of the fifth century) when Britain was part of the Roman Empire. Ancient city walls, including fragments to the ones that once defended London and Colchester, old roads like the Fosse Way and Watling Street. The frontier defenses of Hadrian’s Wall. The bastions at Portchester. An arched gateway at Lincoln. Bath’s great bath. The theatre at Verulamium, near St. Albans. But it is at the villas that one feels closest to the everyday life of Roman Britain.

Some of the villas were small farms. Others were great houses. They were well built, usually of one storey, and handsomely decorated. Often they had large courtyards and spacious outbuildings – barns for storage, stables, shelter for pigs and cattle, and living space for the laborers who worked on the estate.

The first villa was built here around A.D. 80 – 90. it was a house of flint and mortar with, beneath ground level, a deep room, used as grain store. The type of owner was a native farmer. Around A.D. 180, however, the villa became the home of a Roman of Mediterranean origin, a man of wealth who greatly extended the house, adding kitchens and baths and turning the deep room into a place of worship, decorated with a fresco painting of water goddesses, part of which survived.

The eventual fate of most of the Roman villas of Britain remains uncertain. But it is known that Lullingstone was destroyed by fire early in the fifth century. Afterwards the hill-wash crept in form the downs and covered the ruins, keeping them hidden for hundreds of years until the middle of the 18^th century, when excavations for a deer fence revealed part of a mosaic floor. No further investigation took place at the time, and it was not until 1949 that systematic excavation of the site began.

In a similarly accidental way clues to the presence of the villas at Rudston, Yorkshire, at Bignor, Sussex, and at Chedworth in Gloucestershire were discovered.

The Roman Twilight

The destruction of the Roman Empire was due to a unique combination of internal and external causes.

For long the Empire persisted rather because of the absence of any outside force powerful enough to attack it than from its own strength. In the fourth century A.D. a serious of westward migratory movements across the steppes of Asia and Europe forced the Germanic tribes nearest to the Roman frontiers into motion. At its heart we can trace the westward migration of the Huns, Mongol tribes from Central Asia. At first these Germanic tribes were allowed and even encouraged to enter the Empire, where they were absorbed and partially Romanized. Gradually the hold of the central government on outlying provinces was relinquished and one by one they were overrun by barbarian tribes who set up independent kingdoms of varying character – some largely Roman in culture and language, others almost wholly barbarian.

Britain, as the most remote and among the most exposed of the provinces, was among the earliest to fall away and lost most completely its Roman character.

In 407 two events ended the long period of Roman occupation. One was the departure of Constantine, with the bulk of the troops stationed in Britain, in an attempt to secure the Imperial purple. The other was the crossing of the Rhine into Gaul of a host of Germanic tribesmen who cut Britain off from the Roman world and prevented the return or replacement of the departed legions. The people of South and East Britain were left to improvise their own government and defense against their never conquered kinsmen of the more parts of the islands.