THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE - PART 5

MIDDLE ENGLISH (1100 - 1500)

The most important element of Middle English was undoubtedly a strong presence and influence of French into English. This real transfusion of the Franco-Norman culture on Anglo-Saxon nation, which lasted for three centuries, resulted mainly in a considerable contribution of vocabulary. This demonstrates that, however strong the influence of one language over another may be, this influence does not usually go beyond vocabulary enrichment, hardly affecting the pronunciation or the grammatical structure.

The centuries passed and the disputes that occurred between the Normans of the British Isles and the continent, causing the emergence of a nationalist sentiment and by the end of the 15th century, it becomes evident that the English had prevailed. Even as a written language, English had replaced French and Latin as official language for documents. It also began to emerge a national literature.

Very new vocabulary was embedded with the introduction of new management concepts, political and social, for which there was no equivalent in English. In some cases, however, there were words of Germanic origin, which, or have just disappeared or came to coexist with the equivalent of French origin, in principle as synonymous, but over time, acquiring different connotations. Examples:

Anglo-Saxon	French		Anglo-Saxon	French		Anglo-Saxon	French		Anglo-Saxon	French
answer begin bill chicken clothe come end	respond commence beak poultry dress arrive finish		fair feed folk freedom ghost happiness help	beautiful nourish people liberty phantom felicity aid		hide house hunt kin kingly look mistake	conceal mansion chase relations royal search error		pig sheep shut sight wish work yearly	pork mutton close vision desire labor annual

Small dialectal differences resulting from this symbiosis between different social groups and their languages ​​can still be seen today. In intellectual circles of the more privileged classes of the English-speaking countries still exists a tendency to greater use of words of Latin origin. According to U.S. Pat Brown,

The split between the French-speaking Normans and peasant English-speaking Saxons still exists today in a curious fashion. The Normans, as the conquerors and rulers, became the upper-class of England and their speech metamorphosed into today's well-educated English - composed primarily of Latin-based vocabulary. The common everyday speech of most modern English speakers however is still directly based on the Anglo-Saxon.

Besides the influence of French on your vocabulary, the Middle English is also characterized by the gradual loss of inflections, the neutralization and loss of unstressed vowels at the end of the word and the beginning of the Great Vowel Shift.

THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT

A sharp change in the pronunciation of English vowels occurred mainly during the 15th and 16th centuries. Practically all vowel sounds, including diphthongs, consonants changed and some ceased be pronounced. In general, the changes of vowels corresponded to a movement toward the end of the spectrum of vowels, as shown in the chart below.

The system of vowel sounds of English in the 15th century was very similar to other western European languages, including Portuguese of today. Therefore, the current lack of correlation between spelling and pronunciation of modern English, which is observed mainly in the vowels, is largely a result of this change occurred in the 15th century.

MODERN ENGLISH (starting 1500)

While the Middle English is characterized by a marked diversity of dialects, Modern English was a period of standardization and unification of the language. The advent of printing in 1475 and the creation of a postal system in 1516 enabled the spread of the dialect of London - already the political, social and economic center of England. The availability of printed materials also gave impetus to education, bringing literacy to reach the middle class.

Reproduction and dissemination of a standardized orthography, however, coincided with the period that has happened to Great Vowel Shift. The changes in pronunciation since then, were not accompanied by spelling reforms, which reveals a conservative character of English culture. We have here the origin of the current lack of correlation between pronunciation and spelling in modern English.

Just as the first dictionaries were used to standardize the spelling, the first paper describing the grammatical structure of English influenced the use of language, incorporating grammatical concepts of Romance languages ​​and bringing uniformity grammar. During the 16th and 17th centuries was the emergence and the final incorporation of the auxiliary verb to the negative and interrogative sentences. From the 18th century it was considered bad use of the double negative in the same sentence, for example: She did not go Neither.

SHAKESPEARE

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), represented a strong influence on the development of a literary language. His great work is characterized by creative use of vocabulary then existing, and the creation of new words. Nouns turned into verbs, verbs into adjectives, and the free addition of prefixes and suffixes and the use of figurative language are frequent in the works of Shakespeare.

While that literature developed, British colonialism in the 19th century, took the English language to remote areas of the world, providing contact with different cultures and bringing new enriching the vocabulary of English.

Since the beginning of the Christian era until the 19th century, came to be six languages ​​spoken in Britain: Celtic, Latin, Old English, Norman French, Middle English and Modern English. This diversity of influences explains the fact that the English language a less systematic and less regular compared to Romance and even German. It could also lead us to conclude that English today can be likened to a quilt made ​​of scraps of fabric from different source.

This text was extracted and translated from: http://www.sk.com.br/sk-enhis.html, by Ricardo Schütz.