THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE - PART 3

INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY

In 432 AD St. Patrick began his mission to bring Christianity to the Celtic population of Ireland. In 597 AD the Church sends missionaries led by St. Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. The process of Christianization occurs gradually and peacefully, marking the beginning of the influence of Latin on the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxon origins of modern English. This influence occurs in two forms: introduction of new vocabulary related to religion and adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to cover new areas of meaning. The need for reproduction of biblical texts is also the beginning of English literature.

The introduction of Christianity also represented a rejection of elements of Celtic culture and the association of them to witchcraft. The observation today on Halloween night of October 31 is an example reminiscent of Celtic culture in view of the Christianity.

At that time, England was divided into seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon and the Old English, then spoken, actually was not a single language but a variety of different dialects.

The dialects of Old English before Christianity were functional language to describe facts and meet daily communication needs. The vocabulary of Greco-Latin origin introduced by the Christianization expanded the Anglo-Saxon language toward abstract concepts.

At the end of the 8th century, the Vikings begin attacks against England. Originating in Scandinavia, these people used violence and his attacks have caused destruction in many parts of Europe. The Vikings who settled in England were mostly from the region now belonging to Denmark and spoke Old Norse, the ancestor of Danish. These more than 200 years of presence in England of course Scandinavian influence on Old English. However, due to the similarity between the two languages, it is difficult to accurately determine this influence.

OLD ENGLISH (500 - 1100 A.D.)

Old English, sometimes also called Anglo-Saxon, compared to modern English, a language is almost unrecognizable, both in pronunciation and vocabulary and grammar. For a native speaker of English today, the 54 words of the Lord's Prayer in Old English, less than 15% are recognizable in writing, and probably nothing would be recognized if it was pronounced. The correlation between pronunciation and spelling, however, was much closer than in modern English. On the grammatical differences are also substantial. In Old English, nouns decline and have gender (masculine, feminine and neuter), and the verbs are conjugated.