Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND THE DICTIONARY Although not everyone may realize it, the origin of the English language can be dated with relatíve precision. The term "English" goes back to the name of one of the Germanic tribes-the Angles-who, according to the Venerable Bede, began to invade Britain in the year 449. "English" derives from "Angle-ish," and both the name of the tribe, the "Angles," and the "-ish" suffix are entered in this Dictionary-as are the name "Bede" and, of course, the word "English" itself, where the etymology just outlined is given. The Angles, and alsó the Saxons and the Jutes, who, according to Bede, joined in the invasion of Britain, all spoke dialects of a language scholars call West Germanic, no contemporary records of which are extant. Other current West Germanic languages, along with English, are Dutch and Germán. West Germanic was closely related to North Germanic, which survives today in the Scandinavian languages such as Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Originally, both West Germanic and North Germanic were the same language, called Germanic, before its speakers split up and in time evolved their own distinctive speech. Germanic, in turn, is related to a number of other ancient languages in both Europe and Asia, such as Greek, Latin, Slavic, Celtic, Hittite, and Indic. Somé of these ancient languages, such as Hittite, have no surviving descendants; others, such as Latin, have many, e.g., French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. As with the branches of Germanic, all these ancient languages stem from the same prehistoric language, which scholars call "Indo-European." Attempts have long been made to relate the Indo-European family of languages-now spoken by half the people in the world-to the many other known language families, such as Semitic, which includes the current languages Hebrew and Arabic, or Ural-Altaic, which includes Finnish and Hungárián. The oldest stage of the English language is called Anglo-Saxon or Old English. Its period lasted until the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror imposed a new government, and tried, with somé, but far from totál success, to impose on Britain the conquerors' French. From then until about 1475, the language is called Middle English, and from then to now. Modern English. The earliest Old English records date from about the year 650. Most surviving Old English manuscripts, however, are from the tenth and eleventh centuries, including the single surviving manuscript of the epic poem Beowulf. The English of these early times is much different from that of today. Here is the Lord's Prayer as written in the southwest of England about the year 1000: Faeder ure, thu the eart on heofenum, si thin nama gehalgod. To-becume thin rice. Geweorthe thin willa on eorthan, swa swa on heofenum. Urne daeghwamlican hlaf syle us to-daeg. And forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgifath urum gyltendum. And ne gelaede thu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfle: Sothlice. Almost all of the eleven words of the opening sentence, for instance, are recognizable, but barely. Somé of them have changed simply in pronunciation, and thus in spelling, but still have essentially the same form, e.g., faederI''father'' and rW'thou." Other words have alsó changed in inflection. An "inflection" is a sound (and hence, in writing, one or more letters) added to a word to show how that word is being used. So, for instance, heofenum in the Old English is the noun heofen ("heaven") plus the -um inflection, which indicated "dative plural." That is, the noun is plural here, and in the dative case, which is the case of the indirect object. Thus the form heofenum by itself means "in (the) heavens." Yet in this first sentence of the Lord's Prayer, the Old English alsó uses a preposition with the dative noun: on heofenum. This is redundant, as both the preposition on (here meaning "in") and the inflection -um show how the noun heofen is being used in, or relates to the rest of, the sentence. Because of such redundancies, many inflections used in Old English have died out. So, whereas in Old English a singular noun can have special inflections for any of four cases-nominative (subject), genitive (possessive), dative, and accusative (direct object)-today only one case, the possessive, has any inflection: we say "heaven" for subject or object, but "heaven's" for possessive. And whereas in Old English a plural noun can likewise have special inflections for the same four cases, today in the plural, nouns are not inflected at all: we say "heavens," plural subject or object, and alsó "heavens'," plural possessive. In writing we use apostrophes to show the singular and plural possessives, but there is no difference in pronunciation between "heavens," "heaven's," and "heavens . Verbs, pronouns, and adjectives alsó have far more inflections in Old English than in later stages of the language. In fact, adjectives in current English do not have any inflections at all, and have not had any for over five hundred years. Verbs and pronouns still inflect, but not so much as previously, and somé pronouns have been lost or are now little used, such as the thu!"thou" and /Wn/"thine" of the Lord's Prayer for second person singular. Today we say "you" or "your" whether the reference is to one other person or more than one. The opening sentence of the Lord's Prayer alsó happens to show how somé Old English verbal inflections have coalesced or been lost. The last word in the sentence, gehalgod, meaning "hallowed," is a past participle, and this is shown by the distinctive inflection -od. (The ge- prefix occurs here, too, but this prefix was not restricted to past participles in Old English.) The past tense forms of this verb in Old English are gehalgode, singular, and gehalgodon, plural. Thus Old English has three distinct inflections--od, -ode (pronounced as two syllables), and -odon-which have all coalesced into "-ed": we use "hallowed" not only as a past participle, but alsó in the past tense singular and past tense plural. The distinctive o vowel in the Old English inflection was reduced in pronunciation to an undifferentiated "e" sound (called "schwa") early in the Middle English period, the final -n was lost from past plural inflections (but not always from past participles: note, e.g., the current past participles "ridden" and driven"), and, around the year 1400, the unstressed final -e was lost. By the time of Chaucer, who wrote during the Middle English period (and died in the year 1400), the English is much more easily recognizable as the language we speak today. There are still more inflections than we use, but not so many more, and, equally important,