THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH

Ø      Our understanding of the history of English began at the end of the eighteenth century When Sir William Jones a British judge who lived in India, began to study Sanskrit.

He realized that there were many similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and other European language.

He claimed that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin all come from a “common source”

       Later It was known that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English come from the enormous family of language called Indo-European family.

It is thought that a group of people called the Kurgans spoke Indo-European, and lived in what is now southern Russia from some time after 5000BC. In about 3500BC the Kurgans probably began to spread west across Europe and east across Asia.

     They began to develop stronger differences in their dialects. With the passing of time, these dialects became different languages. When some of them (Greek Anatolian, and indo-Iranian languages) appeared in written form in about 2000 to 1000 BC they were clearly separate languages.

     More than 2 billion people speak an Indo-European language as their first language.

     The Celts were the first group of Indo-European speakers to move across Europe. Towards the end of the fifth century BC they began to leave their homeland north of the Alps in central Europe. They went to the Black sea, Turkey south-west Spain and central Italy, the whole of Britain and Ireland. As the travelled, different dialects of their language developed. For example, the Celts who settled in Turkey spoke Galatians, those in Spain spoke Celtiberian. And the Celts who went to Ireland and Later Scotland Spoke Goidelic (Gaelic) and those who went to southern England and Wales spoke Brythonic (or British)

       In AD 43 the Romans invaded Britain. They remained there for almost four hundred years. They introduced a new way of life and a new language-Latin. British Celts in the upper classes and the towns became used to life with laws and police, roads, baths, and theatres. Some learnt to speak and write Latin.

       From the middle of the third century AD, the Romans grew weaker and weaker as the Germanic peoples of northern Europe invaded more and more Romans lands.

       In AD 449, people from Jutland and the Angles from Denmark came and settled in eastern Britain. In 477 the Saxons, from what is now Germany, came and settled in southern and south-eastern Britain.

The Jutes, angles, and Saxons came in larger numbers and they settled on the lands belonging to the British Celts.

Some of the British Celts left and went north, some went west into Wales and Cornwall, and others went over the sea to Brittany, in what is now northern France.

       The Jutes stayed in Kent, in the south-east of Britain, but the Angles moved north and the Saxons went south-west.

They slowly organized themselves into seven kingdoms in what is now England and south-east Scotland. In the seventh century the kingdom of Northumbria, in the north, was very strong and a great centre of learning. In the eighth century Mercia, in the centre, became the most important kingdom and in the ninth century Wessex, in the south and south-west became the strongest kingdom.

       The invaders called the British Celts wealas meaning foreigners. Later this meant both Celts and servants. From wealas comes the Modern English word Welsh. The British Celts called all the invaders “Saxons” at first, but in the sixth century the word Anlgi was used to mean the whole group of invaders. Later Angli became Engle. Today we call them Anglo-Saxons. From the various Germanic dialects used by these people, English developed.