CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Language changes as time passes, it has a history. The essence of history is change taking place in time. Anything which endures in time has a history, because in this world of flux anything which endures in time suffers change. But if history is to be meaningful, there must also be continuity. A language may change over a long period so greatly as to become something vastly different from what it was at the begining. But this great change is the cumulation of many small changes. We are able to observe directly only the language of our own time, but written records give us clues to the nature of the language of earlier days. The history of a language is of this latter sort. At any given moment, the identity of a language is the sum total of the speaking habits of all the people who use it. These habits change from year to year, even from day to day, and therefor the language also changes. But the people still know they are speaking “the same language”. Its identity persists in spite of change through the generations. After a while the accumulated changes may become so great that it almost seems like a wholly new language. But the 1
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Language changes as time passes, it has a history. The essence of
history is change taking place in time. Anything which endures in time has a
history, because in this world of flux anything which endures in time suffers
change. But if history is to be meaningful, there must also be continuity. A
language may change over a long period so greatly as to become something vastly
different from what it was at the begining. But this great change is the cumulation
of many small changes. We are able to observe directly only the language of our
own time, but written records give us clues to the nature of the language of earlier
days.
The history of a language is of this latter sort. At any given moment,
the identity of a language is the sum total of the speaking habits of all the people
who use it. These habits change from year to year, even from day to day, and
therefor the language also changes. But the people still know they are speaking
“the same language”. Its identity persists in spite of change through the
generations. After a while the accumulated changes may become so great that it
almost seems like a wholly new language. But the continuity is such that very few
people are aware of the changes that accur even in their own speech from year to
year. During the fifteen hundred or so years of this recorded history, English has
changed so greatly that its earliest form is unintelligible to modern speakers of
English. But at no time the language of the father unintelligible to the son. There
has been unbroken continuity from generation to generation.
A language can be said to have two kinds of history, an outer history
and an inner history. The outer history deals with what happens to the language,
primarily what happens to the people that speak it. The stablishment of English-
speaking colonies in the New World was an important event in the outer history of
English, because it separated one group of English speakers from the rest,
introduced them into a new kind of environment, and brought them into contact
with speakers of previous unknown language.
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The inner history of a language, on the other hand, deals with what
happens in the language. It is an important fact about english, for instance, that the
second person singular pronouns thou, thee,ihy, and thine were once widely used
but were gradualli given up in all contexts except prayer. Sometimes connection
can be clearly seen between the outer and the inner history, espesially in the field
of vocabulary.
To the linguist, the most important aspect of the history of English is
its “inner history”. The inner history of English is devided into: Indo-European to
Old English, Old English to Middle English, Middle English to Modern English.
This paper is written to discuss the difference between Old English and Modern
English as parts of English history.
1.1 The Formulation of The study
a. How’s the short history of English?
b. What are the differences between Old English and Modern English?
1.2 The Objective of The Study
a. To describe the short history of English.
b. To describe the differences between Old English and Modern English.
1.3 The Limitation of The Study
a. This paper describes only the short/headlines history of English.
b. This paper describes the differences between Old English and Modern
English as parts of inner history of English, it’s about the changes of
English that affect all the major aspects of language.
1.4 The Significance of The Study
a. For writing this paper, the writers have a lot of opportunities to read so
many references that increase our knowledge, especially about the
differences between Old English and Modern English.
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b. This paper will give information for English students about the differences
between Old English and Modern English and the short history of English,
so that we can view English as something that changes.
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CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 The History of English
English is a West Germanic language that originated from the
Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from various
parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old
English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon,
eventually came to dominate.
The original Old English language was then influenced by two
further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of
the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain
in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century,
who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this
called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become
"mixed" to some degree.
Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant
grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core
of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that
Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance
languages (Latin-based languages). This Norman influence entered English
largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a
"borrowing" language of great flexibility, resulting in an enormous and varied
vocabulary.
The languages of Germanic peoples gave rise to the English
language (the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes and possibly the Franks, who
traded and fought with the Latin-speaking Roman Empire in the centuries-
long process of the Germanic peoples' expansion into Western Europe during
the Migration Period). Some Latin words for common objects entered the
insular script, a cursive and pointed version of the half-uncial script. This was
used until the end of the 12th century when continental Carolingian
minuscule (also known as Caroline) replaced the insular.
The letter ðæt ‹ð› (called eth or edh in modern English) was an
alteration of Latin ‹d›, and the runic letters thorn ‹þ› and wynn ‹ƿ› are
borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction and, a
character similar to the number seven (‹ ›⁊ , called a Tironian note), and a
symbol for the relative pronoun þæt, a thorn with a crossbar through the
ascender (‹ꝥ›). Macrons ‹¯› over vowels were rarely used to indicate long
vowels. Also used occasionally were abbreviations for following m’s or n’s.
All of the sound descriptions below are given using IPA symbols.
e. Literature
Old English literature, though more abundant than literature of the
continent before AD 1000, is nonetheless scant. In his supplementary article
to the 1935 posthumous edition of Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader, Dr. James
Hulbert writes:
In such historical conditions, an incalculable amount of the writings of the Anglo-Saxon period perished. What they contained, how important they were for an understanding of literature before the Conquest, we have no means of knowing: the scant catalogs of monastic libraries do not help us, and there are no references in extant works to other compositions....How incomplete our materials are can be illustrated by the well-known fact that, with few and relatively unimportant exceptions, all extant Anglo-Saxon poetry is preserved in four manuscripts.
Some of the most important surviving works of Old English
literature are Beowulf, an epic poem; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record of
early English history; the Franks Casket, an early whalebone artifact; and
Caedmon's Hymn, a Christian religious poem. There are also a number of
extant prose works, such as sermons and saints' lives, biblical translations, and
translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers, legal documents, such as
laws and wills, and practical works on grammar, medicine, and geography.
Still, poetry is considered the heart of Old English literature. Nearly all
Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous, with a few exceptions, such as Bede