The External History of English

Preface

I. Backgrounds to the History of English

CHAPTER 1. English: Its Present and Future
1.1. English Today
1.2. Why is English so Important?
1.3. Strengths and Weaknesses of English
1.4. English Tomorrow

CHAPTER 2. Language Change and History of English
2.1. Language Change and English
2.2. Internal History vs. External History
2.3. Chronological Division of English
2.4. Changes in English
2.5. English is Still Changing
2.6. Reasons for the Study of the History of English

CHAPTER 3. The Pre-Old English Period (before 449)
3.1. Ancestor of English: Proto-Indo-European Language
3.2. Language Families within the Indo-European Group
3.3. Germanic Language Family
3.4. Celtic and Romance Language Families
3.5. Typological Classification of English

II. The History of English: External History

CHAPTER 4. The Old English Period (449-1100)
4.1. Before the English: Celtic and Roman Britain
4.2. The Early Old English Period (c. 450-900)
4.3. The Late Old English Period (900-1100)
4.4. Old English Literature

CHAPTER 5. The Middle English Period (1100-1500)
5.1. The Early Middle English Period (1100-1300)
5.2. The Late Middle English Period (1300-1500)
5.3. Middle English Dialects
5.4. The Rise of Standard English
5.5. Middle English Literature

CHAPTER 6. The Modern English Period (1500-1800)
6.1. The Early Modern English Period (1500-1650)
6.2. The Late Modern English Period (1650-1800)
6.3. Modern English Literature

CHAPTER 7. Expansion of English around the World
7.1. Expansion of English within the British Isles and to Ireland
7.2. Expansion of English to America
7.3. Expansion of English to Canada
7.4. Expansion of English to Australia
7.5. Expansion of English to New Zealand
7.6. Expansion of English to Other Areas

CHAPTER 8. The American English
8.1. Language Variation in America
8.2. Differences between British and American English

Cited Bibliography
Index

[머리말]

Why do we have to study the history of English?

There are already so many books on the history of English, both large and small, that this book seems redundant and unnecessary. What is more, this book does rarely give new academic findings on the topic. Nevertheless, I decided to make this book to be brought into the world, since it was written for pedagogical purposes, not for strictly academic ones. The main readers of this book will be Korean university students. These days, we, Korean professors, are forced to take such ‘practical’ classes like TOEIC, English Composition, English Grammar, etc., as the major courses of the Department of English and, at the same time, are pressed to give up teaching the so-called ‘academic’ subjects, including the history of English. “Most English-language courses, nowadays, are either concerned with developing a practical competence or with understanding the synchronic structure of English” (Rastall 2002: 31).
There is a prediction that artificial intelligence will overcome language barriers as a tool beyond what we can imagine in a near future. The barriers of language will soon disappear, and the day of liberation from the difficulty and boredom of learning foreign languages is not far. Then we may not have to waste time and effort in studying English. The purpose of language education is not to secure ‘communication tools’, however, but to provide an opportunity for the mutual understanding of the culture and the promotion of the individual’s cultivation to alleviate the conflict and to eliminate its cause. From this point of view, the meaning of learning the history of English is revealed. It is an attempt to understand the whole English-American culture.
Nevertheless, the history of English was taught too atomistically without the proper connection with contemporary English. So I believe that what matters is not the course itself but the teaching method and textbooks for the course. For “English in Historical Perspective”, advocated by Rastall (2002), the history of English should be taught at a university-level, at least for the students of English major. In spite of the need to seek for the explanation of contemporary English usage in a historical light, we did not achieve this goal at the courses of the Department of English. This situation is severely observed in the non-native environment, as at Korean universities. It is a greatly worrying situation that the students’ interest in English linguistics (not the study of the so-called ‘practical’ English), English literature, or the humanities in general, has recently been weakening in Korea. However, I am confident that the study of the history of English will be of great help in studying contemporary ‘practical’ English, too.
This book was written to be used as a(n easy) textbook for the course of the history of English at Korean Universities. Therefore, the contents of the book should be a little different from those of the books written for English-native students. We cannot help taking outsiders’ perspectives. So this book is mostly concerned with the external history of English, for Korean students to be more familiar with the history of England (or the United Kingdom), the western Europe, and North America (the United States of America and Canada).
Lastly, I should confess that I feel uneasy in publishing this book, because I am greatly worried about the possibility of infringing copyright. This book contains not a few direct quotations. I have tried to reveal all the primary sources of the quotations, but it was limited and not always possible. I apologize for any infringement of copyright, if any.

All living languages are in a state of change. It is one of the prominent features of human languages. In this sense, languages are like living creatures, which are born, get old, and finally die. The rate of change varies from time to time and from language to language. Changes can be observed in all levels of language; in pronunciation, spelling, word form, syntactic structure and meaning. Language changes may be at a different pace and with different intensity in these various areas of their structure. It is a little difficult to notice language change because change is generally very slow and gradual. However, change is real and always present. Indeed, it would be strange if language did not change while everything else in its surrounding undergoes constant modification.
English is not an exception to this. Since its birth or establishment as an independent language from one of the Germanic dialects roughly in the middle of the 5th century, English has undergone more changes than any other language spoken in Europe. And the changes reflect the external history of the English people. This book is concerned with such changes as English has undergone for over a millenium and with the history of the people who have used the language as their mother tongue.

2.2. Internal History vs. External History

As was already mentioned above, the formation and change of any language is inseparably related to the environment of its speakers and of the society in which it is spoken. Thus, a broad picture of the history of a language must include not only the development of the structure of the language but also an account of the external forces, such as cultural, political, social, scientific and technological, which influence this evolution. Thus, we need the division between the internal history and the external history of a language. The internal history means the changes occurring in the structure of a particular language. It includes the changes of its spellings and lexicon, pronunciations (i.e. phonological change), inflections or word-forms (i.e. morphological change), word order or structures (i.e. syntactic change), and its meaning (i.e. semantic change).
By contrast, “the external history of English deals with all non-structural factors which have exerted influence on the evolution of English and directed its course of change” (Fisiak 1995: 23). There are various external factors. They include the political (e.g. the formation of states, wars, invasions, etc.), social (e.g. changes in social structure, social prestige, etc.), economic (e.g. economically-motivated social movements, uprisings, industrialization, etc.), and scientific and cultural factors (e.g. the introduction of printing and several cultural movements like Renaissance, etc.). The impact of Christianization is especially important for the history of English. It has a profound influence on the English language and literature. “The extent to which these kinds of external factors contribute to the development of a language varies from one period to another and from one place to another” (Fisiak 1995: 23).