Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONTHE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND THE DICTIONARYAlthough not everyone may realize it, the origin of the English language can be dated with relative precision. The term "English" goes back to the name of one of the Germanic tribesthe Angleswho, 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 Dictionaryas are the name "Bede" and, of course, the word "English" itself, where the etymology just outlined is given.The Angles, and also 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 German. 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 Indie. Some 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 languagesnow spoken by half the people in the worldto the many other known language families, such as Semitic, which includes the current languages Hebrew and Arabic, or Ural-Altaic, which includes Finnish and Hungarian.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 some, but far from total 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. Some of them have changed simply in pronunciation, and thus in spelling, but still have essentially the same form, e.g.,yaeiter/"father" and /W'thou." Other words have also 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 also 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 casesnominative (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 also "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'."