РЕФЕРАТ НА ТЕМУ:
The history of the english language
PLAN
IntroductionHistory of the English Language Germanic to Old English and Influence: Romans, Celts, Danes, NormansDevelopment of Middle English Great Vowel Shift Present and Future of English
INTRODUCTION
is one of the greatest cultural accomplishments the humanity has made. It evolves and develops together with the nation that speaks it. Such historical events as wars, exploration, colonization, migration make the language change, borrow new elements or sometimes even disappear. So, we may say that the history of the nation is reflected in its language.English language is no exception. Throughout the centuries it experienced the influence of many other dialects and languages ??and evolved from Germanic to Old, Middle, and Modern English. On the way it had revolutionary language upheavals such as the ones brought about by the Norman Conquest and the Great Vowel Shift [2] .makes us human. It is the use of language that differs us from animals, since the possession of abstract language is a uniquely human characteristic. The greatest cultural achievements are either made with the help of language or rely upon it for their accomplishment and dissemination. is the main medium of human communication. There exist over six thousand languages ??in the world today, though we are losing some of them. They die, because there remain no persons speaking those languages. Some languages ??are more difficult than the others. For example, Finnish has more than ten noun cases; the verb system of Spanish is exceedingly complex and so on. has a lot of rules and numerous exceptions to all of them, it rapidly adopts new vocabulary, and its rules of reading are so vague that one has a hard time learning how to read in English. However these rules don t seem so strange for those who know the history of the English language. As any living creature, a language changes constantly and many of its unexplainable features have logical historical explanations.
THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
origin of English, as any other human language lies in the very deep past. Scientists state that humans have had language from the dawn of their existence and that the development of language was a great evolutionary leap that separated us from animals. Unfortunately, we will never know for sure when the English language was born, because it existed long before people learned to write down the sounds. That s why a lot of information conveyed orally and got lost on the way. Of course, oral tradition can preserve some information about old languages, but it not too much as the language changes constantly.proved that hundreds of languages ??in the world derived from one ancestor. They called it Indo-European language as its language family included European and Indian languages. Scholars figured out how most European languages ??related to each other and what their ancestors must have been. The Indo-European family can be divided into two branches: Satem and Centum .Satem group includes the Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, and Balto-Slavic families. The Centum group includes the Tocharian, Anatolian, Hellenic (Greek), Italic (Latin), Celtic, and Germanic languages ??families. We are particularly interested in the Germanic branch, because it is the branch to which the English language belongs [3] .Germanic branch in its turn is divided into three other branches: East Germanic, West Germanic and North Germanic. The English language belongs to the West Germanic group, which is in its turn divided into two parts, High and Low. High German was the language of uplands of Germany. The Low German languages ??include Old Saxon, Old Low, Old Frisian, and Old English.
GERMANIC TO OLD ENGLISH
earliest use of Old English date from approximately 700 AD Before that time, we must rely on Latin chronicles and the techniques of the comparative method, because writing reached the Germans only in the IV century. Even after, the West and North Germanic couldn t boast any significant texts for several hundred years.studying the history of the English language it is important to remember that the British Isles were originally settled by Celts, who spoke Celtic languages ??(Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Gaelic, Manx). When Julius Caesar invaded Britain Latin became the dominant language in Britain for almost four hundred years. However after the withdrawal of the Roman legions the remaining Romano-British were sorely oppressed by the Celtic-speaking peoples whom they had dominated before. More over somewhere around ...
