History of some English words. (brief)

English is a Germanic language of the Indo_European family. It is the second most spoken laguage in the world.
The history of the laguage can be traced back to the arrival of the three Germanic tribes to the British Isles during the 5th century AD: Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
At this time the vocabulary of Old English consisted of an Anglo-Saxon base with borrowed words from the Scandinavian languages and Latin.
Latin gave English words like Street, Kitchen, Kettle, Cup, Cheese, Wine, Angel, Bishop, Candle.
The Vikings added many Norse words: Sky, Egg, Cake, Skin, Leg, Window, Husband, Fellow, Skill, Anger, Flat, Odd, Ugly, Get, Give, Take, Raise, Call, Die, they, Their, Them.
Many pairs of English and Norse words coexisted giving us 2 words with the same or slightly differing meanings. Examples below:
Norse English
anger wrath
nay no
fro from
raise rear
ill sick
bask bath
skill craft
skin hide
dike ***ch
skirt shirt
scatter shatter
skip shift
In 1066 the Normans conquered Britain. French became the laguage of the Norman aristocracy and added more vocabulary to English. More pairs of similar words arose.
French English
close shut
reply answer
odour smell
annual yearly
demand ask
chamber room
desire wish
power might (sức mạnh)
ire wrath/ anger
Because the English underclass cooked for the Norman upper class the words for most domestic animals are English : Ox, cow, calf, sheep, deer, swine.while the words for the meats derived from them are French: beef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, venison.
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The information above was taken from my friend's essay on the History of English. She's also an EC member.
So if you are interested, I will ask her to continue. This is a very interesting subject and the parts left are even more interesting. I hope you may like it.

Mai

Được thuytienxanh sửa chữa / chuyển vào 12/12/2002 ngày 09:19

Được thuytienxanh sửa chữa / chuyển vào 12/12/2002 ngày 09:23

what an excellent essay ! i think it's a very useful topic. the majority of vietnam population nowadays r studying English so that we need to know more about that language . i hope u will send more information n there will be more ppl join this

if you want to more detailed, let see i the appendices of some good dictionayries

I will go with thee, my fellow

I was so surprised, Thuytienxanh, to see that you still kept my essay. Anyway, if you like, I will continue.
The changes in meaning of some English words.

Lowering of meaning.​

Lowering in meaning means a word comes to mean something worse than what it originally meant in the past. That may be due to a general tendency to stress unpleasant rather than pleasant associations. On the other hand, it may be obvious that an unpleasant feeling will stick to a person's mind longer than a neutral or pleasant feeling.
We can observe this process clearly in verbs. At first, the word stink ( bốc mùi hôi thối) had a very nice meaning. It meant any kind of odour, good or bad and sometimes it even meant to smell sweetly. However, today, the verb stink is associated with bad smell and it was replaced by the word smell. But it seems that smell is now moving in the same direction. When you say :"You smelly cow", it means:" Mày là đồ con bò khó ngửi". People begin to replace it by odour. But I'm sure someday odour will also take on an unpleasant meaning and will be replaced by another word.
Adjectives show the same change. The North American use the word homely ( comfortable, simple) in the sense of "plain, ugly". Silly also shows a very interesting history. The first meanings of the word were "blessed, happy". It then took on the meaning as simple and later, for some unknown reasons, it came to mean foolish, stupid. The word shows an obvious process of lowering in meaning. At first, it had a positive meaning, then, it developed a worse meaning with time. The word Wanton ( phóng đãng) originally meant "unrestrained, sportive". Many other words also underwent this process.
When a word develops a bad meaning, people replace it with another word. This phenomenon is called euphemism (nói giảm, nói tránh), it means, the use of a milder word instead of one that sounds too crude or harsh. For example people avoid using "die, dead or death" but prefering to pass away, to journey or to depart. Even the idea of old age seems to be improper, elderly people are referred to as senior citizens, an old age pension is a retirement allowance. Nowadays we hear old ladies who refer to a leg as a limb, retire instead of going to bed (the word bed is considered not suitable) and call the abdomen (bụng) the lower chest.
The same motive changes dirty clothes into soiled linen.
In the Victorian age the word trousers was considered impolite and was sometimes replaced by humorous terms like unmentionables ( cái không thể đề cập đến được), inexpressibles (cái không thể diễn đạt được), nether garments (đồ mặc bên dưới). In rural areas, male animals are sometimes indicated by euphemistic substitutes. Instead of bull one can hear the Animal, the Big fellow, the He,and even the Gentleman....

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I just post one part of my essay here. If you still find it interesting, I will continue later. I don't think you can find the information in the appendix of dictionaries, Tinyfoxmas.
Money is not the most important thing on earth.
Love is.
Fortunately,I LOVE MONEY!

thanks , those are useful .

A kiss is still a kiss in Casablanca
But a kiss is not a kiss without your sight
Please come back to me in Casablanca
I love you more and more each day as time goes by

Raising of meaning​

In contrast to the many words whose meaning have been lowered, we find a few with an improved sense. The best-known examples are fond, nice and naughty, all of which can be found in Shakespeare with meanings different from those they carry today. Thus fond meant foolish as can be seen in Romeo and Juliet
" Thou fond mad man, hear me a little speak"
Nice, which originally meant ignorant is used in Elizabethan English in the sense foolish, trifling, in our modern phrase " a nice point" we are still close to the sense trifling. Naughty, which is a mild term of reproach today was much stronger in Shakespeare's age and is equivalent to wicked ( bị quỷ ám):
" So shines a good deed in a naughty world"
Another quotation from the same play illustrates this and also the word fond= foolish. In the quotation, Shylock is scolding the gaoler for having allowed Antonio to come out of his prison:
" I do wonder
Thou naughty gaoler, that you are so fond (that thou art so fond)
To come abroad with him at his request"
If we are to read Shakespeare or any other earlier writer it is clear that we have to be on our guard for the changes in word meanings. We must be careful not to read into his words meanings which belong not to his day but to our own and which he did not intend to convey. When we consider how much misunderstanding arises at the present time on account of inexact use of terms in writing and discussion we can easily realize how much greater this danger is when we are dealing with utterances belonging to the past.
Money is not the most important thing on earth.
Love is.
Fortunately,I LOVE MONEY!
Được lilly_of_the_valley sửa chữa / chuyển vào 14:13 ngày 14/12/2002
Được lilly_of_the_valley sửa chữa / chuyển vào 14:17 ngày 14/12/2002

A Brief History of the English Language
When the Romans came to Britain in 55 B.C. they found a race of Celtic people called the Britons, and during the four hundred years that followed the Roman invasion (sự xâm lược), Britain became a Roman colony.
In spite of the fact that the Romans built cities with walls around them and magnificent (nguy nga, lộng lẫy) roads all over the country, they did not influence all of Britain because outside their walls and camps the old Celtic language was spoken and their language, Latin, never became a spoken language throughout the whole of the country.
The real story of English in England begins in the first half of the fifth century: when the Goths attacked Rome in A.D. 410, the Roman soldiers had to leave Britain in order to help their countrymen; and the undefended Britain was attacked and seized (bị thống trị) by the Angles from Schleswig, the Saxons from Holstein and the Jutes from Jutland. Once more the Britons were driven to the mountains of Wales and Scotland. The language spoken by those people developed into Welsh and Gaelic and nowadays an Englishman wouldn't understand a single word of those languages because the language he speaks does not come from the Britons who fought the Romans, and fled from other invaders (kẻ xâm lược), but from the Angles who made England into 'Angle-land'.
The language the new invaders spoke belonged to the Germanic speech family, which we can separate into three main families: East Germanic, which disappeared with Gothic in the eighth century, North Germanic, which developed into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic, and low and high West Germanic, the low developed into Dutch, Flemish and English and the high into German.
The language that the above mentioned invaders spoke was a west Germanic member of the Indo-European languages. Although it is generally called Anglo-Saxon there were, in fact, four dialects (tiếng địa phương, thổ ngữ), the dialect of the Saxons was called West Saxon, that of the Jutes was called Kentish, the other two were called Northumbrian (north of the Humber) and Mercian. The 'English' they spoke was an inflicted language and there were five cases of nouns (Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative), 'strong' and 'weak' forms of adjectives (each with five cases); there was a full conjugation (sự kết hợp) of verbs - complete with Subjunctive - and there was a system of grammatical gender.
Fortunately, in modern English most of that has changed, grammatical gender of nouns has completely disappeared, adjectives no longer agree with their nouns in number, case or gender, nouns have only two cases (singular and plural), verbs have very few forms and the subjunctive has almost disappeared. Most of these changes were caused by two other invasions of England.
(to be continued)
As we go on, we remember all the times we had together
As our lives change, come whatever
We will still be FRIENDS FOREVER

The Danish Element
The first of these invasions was by the Danes. The language spoken by these invaders was very similar to the language of England - words like mother and father, man and wife, summer and winter, house, town, tree, land, grass, come, ride, see, think, and many others were the same in both languages, so Saxon and Danes could just about understand each other. But although the languages were similar, the endings were different; and as the roots of the words were the same, Saxon and Dane found that they could understand each other better if the inflectional endings were dropped.
Adding the language the Danes spoke brought a lot of positive gains in vocabulary and grammar. The word law is Danish, so are leg, skin, knife, sky and Thursday, some of the adjectives the Danes brought to English are flat, happy, low, ugly, weak and wrong; among the verbs are want, cut, call, die, lift and take. An interesting feature of the language is a number of Danish forms existing side by side with, and usually with a different meaning from, the English forms.
shirt --> skirt
no ---> nay (từ cổ, nghĩa cổ: từ chối)
drop --> drip
sit ---> seat
rear ---> raise
from ---> fro
blossom ---> bloom
(to be continued)
As we go on, we remember all the times we had together
As our lives change, come whatever
We will still be FRIENDS FOREVER

The Norman Element
The Norman invasion played a major part of the shaping of modern English. The Normans were renowned for their learning, their military prowess and their organizing ability. After defeating the English king Harold at Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror began to organize England on the Norman pattern. Many Frenchmen came to Britain and brought the rich learning and developed civilization and culture of Normandy.
The Normans ruled with a hard hand and the defeated Saxons were oppressed. For the next three centuries all the Kings of England spoke French: all the power in Court, Church and Castle was in the hands of the Normans. The language they spoke was French and they never dreamed of doing their organizing in any other language than French or Latin. For about three hundred years two languages were spoken side by side in England: the ''official'' language was French, and English was only spoken by the common people.
The language of Saxon times was being changed, but it was in no danger of dying out, and every change did something to improve the English language. It took over three hundred years, but it happened, Norman and Saxon united to form one language. When King Edward III opened Parliament in English in 1362 it became obvious that there was no turning back.
When English finally emerged as the language of England, it had been greatly modified by the changes through which it had gone. The gradual dropping of the inflectional endings and the general grammatical simplification, which had begun in the times of the Danes, had gone on and had been greatly accelerated by the collision with French. Moreover, for three centuries English had been almost entirely a spoken language, no longer restrained and kept from change by literary models.
The changes were revolutionary and English became the only language that had managed to get rid of grammatical gender, case endings of nouns had been reduced to one. Verb forms had been simplified, and in general the whole language had been made much more flexible and expressive. If we take a close look at the vocabulary in modern English, we will discover that approximately 50 per cent. of the words in it are of French or Latin origin and half of these were adopted between 1250 and 1400.
(to be continued)
As we go on, we remember all the times we had together
As our lives change, come whatever
We will still be FRIENDS FOREVER

Despite this incredible French element, English remains fundamentally Anglo-Saxon because although it is quite easy to make a sentence without any French words it is practically impossible to make even a short sentence without using Saxon words. Furthermore, the words which came into English from French throw an interesting light on the social history of the times. It would almost be possible to reconstruct the social history just by examining the vocabulary of today. This examination would reveal that the Normans were the ruling race because almost all the words expressing government (including government itself) are of French origin. Words such as: king, queen, lord and lady are Saxon; but prince, sovereign, throne, crown, chancellor, minister, council, royal, state, country, people, nation, parliament, duke, count and many others are all Norman.
The Normans also introduced words which expressed the new ideas of chivalry and refinement such as: honour, glory, courteous, duty, polite, conscience, noble, pity, fine and cruel. Through words like, arch, pillar, palace, tower, and castle, we can see that they excelled in the art of building. From their interest in war and warfare we got: war, peace, battle, armour, officer, soldier, navy, captain, enemy, danger, march and company.
The Normans were great law-givers, and although the word law is Scandinavian, the words, justice, judge, jury, court, cause, crime, traitor, assize, prison, tax, money, rent, property and injury are all of French origin.
When English monks translated the scriptures into English, it was often far easier to adopt the Latin or French word than to try and invent a new word. Therefore, a large number of French words connected with religion came into the language. These words include: religion, service, saviour, prophet, saint, sacrifice, miracle, preach and pray.
The names of nearly all articles of luxury and pleasure are Norman and the simpler things in life are English. Occasionally, we have two English words, both derived from the same French word, but borrowed at different times, and, as a result, having different pronunciations and usually slightly different meanings. Examples of these are: warden, guardian; warranty, guarantee, catch, chase. French words that came into the language at an early time became fully anglicized both in accent and pronunciation. The later importations, from the sixteenth century onwards, failed to achieve this complete incorporation into the language. A feature of the Germanic group of languages is that in words of more than one syllable the accent is on the first syllable. This rule applies to early borrowings from French: virtue, nature, honour, favour, courage, reason, captain. However, words which came into the language at a later stage like: campaign, connoisseur, garage and ménage have not yet managed to acquire this accentuation.
As we go on, we remember all the times we had together
As our lives change, come whatever
We will still be FRIENDS FOREVER