England and the English, state and folk, [2] are not old as historians reckon time. Tacitus set down the English name, it is true, as early as a.d. 98, but the Anglii of the Germania. [3] were only a Germanic tribe of the Jutland peninsula, politically independent but culturally part of a nationality, not yet a nationality in their own right. They won cultural independence and national status by migration. In the fifth and sixth centuries of our era the Angles, like many another Germanic tribe of that day, gave up their old seats and sought land and loot within the bounds of the Roman Empire. If Bede is right, the whole tribe left home in this migration, and parts of at least two neighboring tribes, the Saxons and the Jutes, took ship in the same move [4] All three tribes settled anew in the Roman province of Britannia, the eastern half of which they overran, from the Channel to the Firth of Forth. The western half held out longer against them, though without help from Rome, who had withdrawn her legions from Britannia one after another until, early in the fifth century, the land was left stripped of troops. Not until the ninth century did Cornwall yield to English arms, and further north the Welsh kept their freedom, more or less, until 1282, over 200 years after the English lost theirs at Hastings. But by the end of the sixth century most of the geographical area now known as England had fallen into the hands of the Germanic tribesmen, and these, whatever their tribe, had begun to think of themselves as members of a larger unit, a new nationality which went by the English name. The old tribal name Angl(i)i in its extended or generic sense, denoting the Germanic inhabitants of Britain irrespective of tribe, first appears in the writings of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604). [5] The rise of this national name marks the beginnings of English national (as distinct from tribal) feeling.
By this time, indeed, the tribes no longer existed as such. When the Roman mission which Gregory had sent out reached England in the year 597, the missionaries did not find any tribal organizations of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; they found a number of kingdoms, each autonomous but those south of the Humber drawn together, loosely enough, through their recognition of the imperium or overlordship of the reigning king of Kent. Earlier holders of such a personal imperium had been a king of Sussex and a king of Wessex, and later holders would be kings of various realms north and south of the Humber, until in the ninth century King Egbert would vwn it permanently for the royal house of Wessex. [6] We know nothing of the political connections of the various Germanic settlements in Britain before the rise of the first imperium, but we have little reason to think that any tribal organization, as such, outlived the migration from Germany. It seems altogether likely that the settlements started their respective careers as mutually independent political units, and that the tribal affiliations of given migrants or groups of migrants had little practical importance even at the time of migration, and soon became a matter of antiquarian and sentimental interest only. [7] No tribal loyalties, therefore, stood in the way of the English nationalism which, by virtue of geographical and cultural community, early came into being.
On the religious side, moreover, this nationalism was fostered, not hindered, by the conversion to Christianity in the seventh century: the Roman missionaries organized a Church of England, not separate churches of Kent, Wessex, and the like, and in the year 664, at the synod of Whitby, the Romanizers, led by Wilfrid of York, won the field over their Irish rivals, ensuring thereby the religious unification of all England in a single Church. [8]
On the political side, it is true, English nationalism could hardly win much ground so long as the various kingdoms kept their autonomy, subject only to the shifting imperium of one or another of the many royal houses. But this particularistic system of government broke down for good and all in the ninth and tenth centuries. In the ninth Egbert set up and Alfred the overlordship of the kings of Wessex, while in the tenth these kings took for title Rex Anglorum “King of the English.” The other royal houses died out or lost their kingly rank and function; Alfred’s followers on the throne won back the Danelaw; the former English and Danish kingdoms in Britain became mere provinces of a kingdom of England; in sum, an English nation replaced the old imperium. The political nationalism which grew up hand in hand with the new nation found focus, naturally enough, in the person of the king, and to this day English patriotism has not lost its association with the crown. But this is not the place to tell the tale of English nationalism in the tenth and eleventh centuries. [9] It will be enough to mention one of its many fruits, the “King’s English” or standard written speech which had grown current all over England by the end of the tenth century. In this form of Old English nearly all the vernacular writings of the period were set down, and the scribes, in copying older writings, usually made them conform to the new standard of speech, though they might let an old spelling, here and there, go unchanged.
England, with its national king (descendant of Alfred, the national hero), its national Church (founded by a papal mission and in communion with Rome), its national speech (the King’s English), and its old and rich national literature, stood unique in the Europe of the year looo. No other modern European state reached full nationhood so early. And yet this English nationhood did not come too soon. Indeed, if it had not been reached early it might not have been reached at all, for the eleventh was a century of political disaster. The state succumbed to foreign foes, and for more than 200 years of French rule the only weapon left to the English was the strong nationalism handed down to them from the golden days of the past. But for this nationalism, the English language in particular would hardly have survived as such, though it might have lingered on for centuries in the form of mutually unintelligible peasant dialects, and with the triumph of French speech England would have become a cultural if not poUtical province of France, doomed to a fate not unlike that which in later times actually befell Ireland at English hands. The nationalism which saved England from such a fate owed much of its strength, of course, to the rich literary culture of the centuries before Hastings, a culture marked from the beginning by free use of the mother tongue (alongside Latin) as a medium of expression. To this mother tongue, and to the literature of which it was the vehicle, let us now turn. [10]
English history (as distinguished from prehistory) begins in the year 597. The Roman and Irish missionaries taught the English to make those written records from which the historians glean their knowledge of early England, and the particular records written in the vernacular give us our earliest documentation of the mother tongue. Then as now this tongue went by the English name. [11] Its nearest kinsman was the speech of the Frisians. Closely kindred tongues, too, were Saxon and Franconian (or Frankish), the two main dialects of Low German. [12] The dialects of High German, and those of Scandinavian, had features which made their kinship to English less close. English was akin to all these neighboring tongues, and to Gothic, in virtue of common descent from Germanic, a language which we know chiefly through its offspring, as it had split up into dialects at a date so early that the records of it in its original or primitive state are few. Germanic in turn was an offshoot of Indo-European, a hypothetical tongue which we know only through the many languages which are descended from it. To the Indo-European family of languages belonged, not only English and the other children of Germanic, but also Latin (with its offspring, the Romance languages), Greek, the various Celtic and Slavic languages, Persian, Sanskrit (with other languages of India), Armenian, Albanian, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc. [13] Here, however, the kinship is so remote that it is overshadowed by a connection of another kind: a fellowship, so to speak. Latin, for instance, is only re-motely linked to English by common descent from Indo-European, but it is closely linked to English by common participation in European life. The fellowship between English and Latin, it must be added, has always been one-sided; Latin has done the giving, English the taking, and this because Latin, the language of the Church and the vehicle of classical culture, had much to give and found little if anything that it needed to take. [14]
That English has many words taken from Latin is a fact familiar to everyone. Such words began coming in even before the migration to Britain (e.g., street and cook^), and they have kept coming in ever since. Less familiar, perhaps, are the so-called semantic borrowings: native words with meanings taken from Latin. Two examples will have to serve: god-spell (modern gospel), literally “good news,” is a translation of Latin evangelium (itself taken from Greek), and its meaning is restricted accordingly; ping (modern thing originally had in common with Latin res the meaning “(legal) dispute, lawsuit,” whereupon, in virtue of the equation thus set up, other meanings of res came to be given to the Old English word, including the meaning most common today. [15] But the fellowship with Latin affected English idiom and style as well as vocabulary; thus, the Latin mundo uti “live” reappears in the worolde brucan of Beowulf.
The fellowship of English with French began much later (toward the end of the Old English period), but has proved just as lasting, and French comes next to Latin in the list of foreign tongues that have set their mark on English speech. The only other important medieval fellowship was that with Danish (as it was then called) or Scandinavian (as we call it now). Here matters were complicated by the kinship of the two tongues. Both Danish and English went back to Germanic, and often one could not tell whether a given word was native English or of Viking importation, so much alike were the two languages. The Scandinavian origin of many of our most familiar words, however, can be proved by earmarks of one kind or another (e.g., sky and take). The fellowship with Danish, beginning in the ninth century, was at its height in the tenth and eleventh; after that it lessened, and though it never died out it has, played only a small part in modern times.
Fellowship with foreign tongues is no peculiarity of English; all languages have connections of this kind, though some are more friendly than others. Such fellowships markedly affect the stock of words (including formative prefixes and sufiixes), but as a rule leave almost or altogether unchanged the sounds and inflexions. Their effect on syntax, idiom, and style is hard to assess with precision. In the Old World of medieval times, four great linguistic cultural empires flourished side by side: Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese. [16] The languages of western Europe (whether Celtic, Germanic or Romanic) gave their allegiance to Latin, and English yielded with the rest, [17] but the Latinizing forces did not reach the height of their power in English until the Middle Ages were dead and gone. The medieval Englishman, meekly though he bowed before imperial speech, clung stubbornly to his linguistic heritage.
So much for externals. What of the mother tongue in its own right? Texts written partly or wholly in English (including glosses) have come down to us from the seventh century onward, and by the eleventh their number has greatly grown. From them we learn that the language was not uniform throughout the country but fell into dialects. Our records show four main dialects: one northern, commonly called Northumbrian; one midland, known as Mercian; and two southern, Kentish and West Saxon. The last of these is abundantly represented in the texts; it served as a basis for standard Old English speech. The other dialects are recorded rather meagerly, but the texts we have are enough to give us some idea of the dialectal distinctions. Other dialects than these presumably existed, but for want of texts we know little or nothing about them. The Old English dialects, unlike their descendants, the dialects of modern times, had undergone no great differentiation, and their respective speakers understood each other with ease. The Old English standardization of speech came about, not from any linguistic need but as a by-product and symbol of national unity; the King’s English won for itself a prestige that proved overwhelming.
We shall not undertake to give in this history a detailed or even a systematic description of Old English speech. We shall, do no more than mark, as best we can, where Old English stands on the road from Germanic times to the twentieth century. Here the classical or standard speech of a.d. 1000 will serve as our basis of comparison, and we shall compare this stage of Old English with primitive Germanic on the one hand and current English on the other. With our terms so defined, the temporal place of Old English is midway between Germanic and the speech of today. But mere lapse of time means little, since the tempo of change varies markedly down the years. Let us look at a few particulars each for itself. And first the matter of differentiation.
In the year 100, Germanic was already split up into dialects, but these dialects had not yet grown far apart, and the unity of the language was still unbroken. More precisely, the Anglo-Frisian or proto-English dialect had no independent existence, but was merely a regional form of Germanic. By the year 1000 a revolutionary change had taken place. English had become a language in its own right, fully developed and self-sufficient; in the process it had grown so unlike its Continental kinsmen that their respective speakers could not understand each other. No comparable change took place after the year looo; since that date the language has simply kept the independence which it earlier won. In other words, the differentiation of English from the other Germanic tongues, a process which has beep going on without a break for some 1500 years, was of the utmost importance in its early stages, but became relatively unimportant after English won its independence and established itself as a going concern. In the matter of differentiation, then, the fundamental changes took place in the first, not in the second of our two periods—before, not after a.d. 1000.
Next we take up the simplification of the inflexional system. Germanic Forms was a highly inflected speech; Germanic and Latin were at about the same stage or level of inflexional complexity. Modern English, on the other hand, has a rather simple inflexional system and relies largely on word order and particles, devices, not unknown to Germanic but less important than they are today in expressing syntactical relationships. How far had simplification gone by the year 1000? Among the nouns it had gone pretty far, though grammatical gender did not break down until Middle English times? [18] Among the adjectives, simplification went more slowly: the elaborate double system of adjectival inflexion characteristic of Germanic and kept to this day in German was kept in Old English too, and was not wholly given up until the fifteenth century. Much the same may be said of the demonstratives; that in Old English still had twelve forms as against the three current today (the, that, those), [19] and this still had ten forms as against the two of today (this, these). In the inflexion of the personal pronouns, however, the beginnings of the modern three-case system appear as early as the text of Beowulf, where we find the datives me, þe, him used now and then as accusatives; thus, him thrice occurs in accusative constructions (lines 963, 2377, 2828). This use led later to the loss of the personal (and interrogative) accusative forms, the old dative forms doing duty for both cases. [20] The Germanic system of verb inflexion also underwent marked simplification in Old English. [21]
This loss or reduction of many inflexional endings did not occur as a strictly inflexional change, but made part of a change much wider in scope, and phonetic rather than inflexional in kind. English shared with the other Germanic tongues a system of pronunciation by which the first syllable of a word was stressed at the expense of the other syllables; [22] these, by progressive weakening, underwent reduction or were lost. Most of the many monosyllabic words in Old English go back to Germanic words of two or more syllables, and most of the dissyllabic words go back to Germanic polysyllables. The tendency to reduce or get rid of the unstressed syllables set in more than once in Old English times; thus, the so-called Middle English leveling of the inflexional endings actually took place in the tenth century, though traditional spelling kept the old distinctions in the texts (more or less) for 200 years thereafter. Nor did the year 1000 mark the end of such changes; the tendency has kept up to this day. It goes with our emphatic or dynamic style of utterance, a style which strengthens the strong and weakens the weak to gain its characteristic effects. The rhythm of English speech has always been apt for emphasis, but has lent itself less readily to indifference. In the quietest of conversations the points still come too strong for a really smooth flow; the dynamic style natural to the language makes itself felt in spite of everything. Perhaps the likewise hoary English taste for litotes has had the function of neutralizing the emphasis with which even an understatement must be uttered. And the quiet low voice which the English take such pains to cultivate may have a like function. In Old English verse the dynamic quality of ordinary speech rhythm was sharpened by alliteration and reinforced by an ictus which (unlike that of Latin verse) never did violence to the natural stress pattern. In effect the verse rhythm was a heightened prose rhythm; by virtue of this heightening, the words of the poet gained in strength and worth.
Finally we come to the development of the English vocabulary. Germanic was a speech well suited to those who spoke it, but its stock of words fell woefully short of meeting the needs of a civilized people. Many new scientific, technical, and learned terms had to be coined by the English after their conversion to Christianity and their adoption of that civilization which the missionaries brought up from the south. Indeed, the change from barbarism to civilization had marked effects on every aspect of English life, and names had to be found for all the new things that kept pouring in. The English rose magnificently to the occasion. They gave new meanings to old words, and made new words by the thousand. A good many Latin words were taken over bodily, but most of the new words were coinages, minted from the native wordstock whether inspired by Latin models or of native inspiration. [23] This creative linguistic activity made English an instrument pf culture equal to the needs of the time. By the year 1000, this newcomer could measure swords with Latin in every department of expression, and Was incomparably superior to the French speech that came in with William of Normandy. [24] But the shift from English to French in cloister and hall brought about a great cultural decline among the hapless English, and when their speech at last rose again in the world it had been stripped of much of its cultural freight and now turned to Latin or French for words that it would never have needed if only it could have kept its own. By turning to foreign stores the language built up anew its lessened word stock, but at heavy cost. Fromthat day to this it has gone the easy way, iborrowing from others insteadof doing its own creative work, until its muscles have become flabby forwant of exercise, while the enormous and 'ever increasing mass of foreignmatter taken into its system has given it a chronic case of linguistic indigestion.
In sum, the English language became a vehicle of civilization in Old English times, but during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the great medieval centuries, it lost rather than gained cultural ground, and its remarkable recovery in the fourteenth and succeeding centuries took place in such a way that permanent damage was done. Thanks to this recovery, English has kept its function as a vehicle of civilization, but in so doing it was merely holding fast to an Old English inheritance. Today we carry on, but we owe our cultural tradition to the pathfinding work of the men of oldest England.
Notes
1. Bibliography: A. H. Heusinkveld and E. J. Bashe, A Bibliographical Guide to Old English, Univ, of Iowa Humanistic Studies, iv, 5 (Iowa City, 1931); see also the Old English section (i. 51-110) of the CBEL, and W. L. Renwick and H. Orton, The Beginnings of English Literature to Shelton (1940), pp.133-252. Literary history: recent works are E. E. Wardale’s Chapters on Old English Literature (1935) and C. W. Kennedy’s The Earliest English Poetry (1943); an older work, S. A. Brooke’s English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest (1898). The best treatment remains A. Brandl's Englische Literatur, in H. Paul’s Grundriss der germ. Philologie, 2ed., ii. Band, i. Abteilung, vi. Abschnitt (Strassburg, 1908), a work which, in spite of its title, deals almost wholly with Old English; also issued separately under the title Geschichte der altenglischen Literatur. Poetic texts: the corpus of Old English poetry was first edited by C. W. M. Grein, under the title Bibliotheh der ags. Poesie; R. p.Wiilcker’s rev. ed. of this (1883-1898) is still standard; it is cited sometimes as Grein-Wiilcker, sometimes as Wulcker or Wulker; a new collection in six volumes. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, edited by G. p.Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie, begun in 1932, was completed in 1953; we cite it as Krapp-Dobbie. Prose texts: the corpus of Old English prose still wants collecting, though a number of texts have been published in the Bihl. der ags. Prosa, the Early English Text Society series, and elsewhere.
2. Political history: F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1943); See also R. G. Collingwood and J. N. L. Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements (Oxford, 1936); R. H. Hodgkin, A History of the Anglo-Saxons [to a.d. 900] (av, Oxford, 1935); Charles Oman, England before the Norman Conquest (igio).
3. Cap. 40; cf. K. Malone, Namn och Bygd. xxii (1934). 26-51.
4. Hist. Eccl. I. 15. The j of Jutes (from Bede’s lutae) is in origin a blunder, by confusion of ( and j. A better form would be Iuts or Euts, but these forms are current among the learned only.
5. The Pope presumably had the term, directly or indirectly, from the English themselves. Certainly Saxones was the generic term current among the insular Celts, and on the Continent, in and before Gregory’s day, and in setting this old and familiar term aside in favor of Angli, Gregory must have been trying to conform to English usage (which with good reason might be held authoritative here). The Pope’s example was followed by Gregory of Tours and other writers of the seventh and eighth centuries.
6. Bede, op. cit., n. 5; see also OE Annals under a.d. 827. With the imperium went the title Bretwalda “ruler of Britain.”
7. Cf. J. N. L. Myres, in Roman Britain and the English Settlements, pp.347-348.
8. See S. J. Crawford, Anglo-Saxon Influence on Western Christendom (Oxford, 1933), pp.48-49; cf. J. L. G. Meissner, Celtic Church in England after the Synod of Whitby (1929).
9. The tale is told by R. W. Chambers, EETS, 186 (1932). Ixi-lxxx. See also Chambers, Man's Unconquerable Mind (1939), pp.70-87. Chambers fails to point out that Old English nationalism was summed up and given official expression in the legal formula an Christendom and an cynedom cejre on deode “one Church and one state always in the land.” See F. Liebermann, Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 1 (1903). 385.
10. A standard guide to the language of the period is the Old English Grammar of J. and E. M. Wriffht (sed., Oxford, 1925).
11. Throughout historical times the adj. English (used in the absolute construction) has been the regular name for the language spoken by the Germanic inhabitants of Britain. From the seventeenth century onward, the adj. Anglo-Saxon (a learned coinage of modern times) has had more or less currency as a synonym of English-, among scholars it was commonly used to denote the earliest forms of English, but this meaning has never become familiar to the general public, and most scholars now call the language in all stages by the name which it has always had among those who spoke it: namely, English. See K. Malone, RES, V (1929). 173-185. When qualification by period is thought needful, a suitable qualifying term may be prefixed. See K. Malone, English lomnal, College Edition, xix (1930). 639-651. The usual division by periods gives Old English (beginnings to 1100), Middle English (1100 to 1500), and Modern English (1500 to present day). Linguistically speaking, this division is not accurate, but all divisions in the nature of the case are more or less arbitrary.
12. The chief modern representatives of the Franconian dialect of Low German are Dutch and Flemish.
13. The traditional classification here followed is figurative (for a language is no plant or animal and neither begets nor brings forth offspring). Classification in biological terms, moreover, like any other way of ordering phenomena, stresses some features at the cost of others. If, however, we bear all this in mind, we may accept the linguistic family tree as a legitimate device, serving a useful purpose.
14. Here we must distinguish between classical and medieval Latin. The former took nothing from English; the latter (more precisely, that variety of medieval Latin current in England) became more or less colored, in time, by its English setting.
15. These and other examples may be found in S. Kroesch’s paper, “Semantic Borrowing in Old English,” Studies... in honor of Fredericia Klaeber (Minneapolis, 1929), pp.50-72.
16. Greek had a medieval empire too, but it was a mere shadow of its Hellenistic self,
17. Of all the western tongues, Icelandic alone held out against Latinization.
18 Nearly all Old English nouns belonged to one of three declensions: fl-stems, d-stems and «-stcms. In the plural all these had a three-case system of inflexion: one form for the nom. and acc., one for the gen. and one for the dat. (Modern English has a two-case system: one form for nom. dat. acc., another form for gen.). In the singular, the ā-stems had a three-case inflexion parallel to that of the plural. (Modern English likewise has a two-case system parallel to that of the plural). The other two declensions, however, had a two-case inflexion of the singular: one form marked the nom., the other the oblique case. (The neuter n-stem nouns had a different two-case system: one form for the nom. acc., the other for gen. dat.). Moreover, by the year 1000 the distinction between nom. and oblique had been lost in the singular of ö-stems, and tended to be lost in the singular of n-stems. The consequent inability of speakers to make case distinctions in these declensions may have had something to do with the Middle English tendency to give a-stem inflexion to the ö-stem and n-stem nouns. At any rate, this tendency existed and was carried through (to the incidental destruction of grammatical gender), and the modern inflexion of nouns is only a somewhat simplified form of the old þ-stem inflexion. Other Germanic declensions, of which only remnants or traces appear in Old English, were i-stems, u-stems, r-stems, þ-stems, nd-stems, and monosyllabic consonant stems.
19. But the indeclinable definite article the occurs in Old English times (notably in annal 963 of the Laud text of the Annals).
20. But the neut. acc. forms hit and hwæt were kept, and did duty for the dat. as well.
21. Thus, the passive was lost, except for the form hatte; the dual was lost; the three persons were no longer distinguished except in the indicative singular, and even here only in the present tense (in the preterit the second person had a distinctive form, but the first and third persons were identical).
22. But the inseparable preverbs did not take the stress (e.g., be in becuman “become”), arid the prefixes be-, jor-, and ge-, whether used as preverbs or not, usually lost whatever accent, ^ey may once have had (e.g., jorbod “prohibition”).
23. On the Old English wordstock, see A. C. Baugh, History of the English Language (1935), pp.75-80 and 101-110. Note also Professor O. Vocadlo’s characterization of Old English; “The language of Wessex as it was developed by Alfred and his followers was certainly the most refined and cultured speech among all early Teutonic dialects. … with its rich vocabulary, which conformed to a Latin pattern in the formation of native abstract words and was a fit tool even for the subtleties of philosophical and theological thought, [it] was no doubt the only fully developed vernacular language in Europe: the only medieval language which at an early period developed a remarkable nomenclature of science, religion and philosophy out of its own resources” (Studies in English by Members of the English Seminar of the Charles University, Prague, 1933, p.62).
24. Sir James Murray, in The Evolution of English Lexicography (1900), p.14, puts the matter thus: “In literary culture the Normans were as far behind the people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made themselves masters of Greece.” Not until the twelfth century did the development of French into a literary language get well under way. In other important aspects of culture, too, the English were ahead of the Normans. As R. W, Chambers points out, in his Continuity of English Prose (1932), “the Norman conquerors wer,e amazed at the wealth of precious things they found in England—land which in that respect, they said, surpassed Gaul many times over. England reminded them of what they had heard of the riches of Byzantium or the East. A Greek or a Saracen would have been astonished, said William of Poitiers, at the artistic treasures of England” (p. lxx). Again, “English jewellery, metal-work, tapestry and carving were famed throughout Western Europe. English illumination was unrivalled, … Even in stone-carving, those who are competent to judge speak of the superiority of the native English carver over his Norman supplanter” (ibid., p.lxxvii). The verdict of one of “those who are competent to judge" reads thus: “in the minor arts the Norman conquest was little short of a catastrophe, blotting out alike a good tradition and an accomplished execution, and setting in its place a semi-barbaric art which attempted little and did that little ill” (A. W. Clapham, English Romanesque Architecture before the Conquest [1930], p, 77). See also M. Schapiro, Gazette des Be aux-Arts, vi Series, xxiu (1943). 146.