A Short History Of The English Language

[Hayley Sweigard]

Quirksand inconsistencies aside, the history surrounding its monumental rise is both a fascinating and rich one, and while we promise to be brief, you just might pick up a thing or two that may stimulate your interest in studying English with us here at Oxford International English Schools. Our English learning course offers a comprehensive curriculum tailored to all proficiency levels. Enroll now to experience an engaging and effective way to improve your language skills.

Albert Baugh, a notable English professor at the University of Pennsylvania notes amongst his published works[1] that around 85% of Old English is no longer in use; however, surviving elements form the basis of the Modern English language today.

It was during the mid-1400s that the Chancery English standard was brought about. The story goes that the clerks working for the Chancery in London were fluent in both French and Latin. It was their job to prepare official court documents and prior to the 1430s, both the aforementioned languages were mainly used by royalty, the church, and wealthy Britons. After this date, the clerks started using a dialect that sounded as follows:

As you can see, the above is starting to sound more like the present-day English language we know.

If one thinks about it, these clerks held enormous influence over the manner of influential communication, which ultimately shaped the foundations of Early Modern English.

The changes in the English language during this period occurred from the 15th to mid-17th Century, and signified not only a change in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar itself but also the start of the English Renaissance.

The English Renaissance has much quieter foundations than its pan-European cousin, the Italian Renaissance, and sprouted during the end of the 15th century. It was associated with the rebirth of societal and cultural movements, and while slow to gather steam during the initial phases, it celebrated the heights of glory during the Elizabethan Age.

It was during the early 17th century that we saw the establishment of the first successful English colony in what was called The New World. Jamestown, Virginia, also saw the dawn of American English with English colonizers adopting indigenous words, and adding them to the English language.

The constant influx of new blood due to voluntary and involuntary (i.e. slaves) migration during the 17th, 18th and 19th century meant a variety of English dialects had sprung to life, this included West African, Native American, Spanish and European influences.

If one endevours to study various English language courses taught today, we would find almost no immediate similarities between Modern English and Old English. English grammar has become exceedingly refined (even though smartphone messaging have made a mockery of the English language itself) where perfect living examples would be that of the current British Royal Family. This has given many an idea that speaking proper English is a touch snooty and high-handed. Before you scoff, think about what you have just read. The basic history and development of a language that literally spawned from the embers of wars fought between ferocious civilisations. Imagine everything that our descendants went through, their trials and tribulations, their willingness to give up everything in order to achieve freedom of speech and expression.

Everything has lead up to this point where English learners decide to study the language at their fancy, something we take for granted as many of us have access to courses to improve English at the touch of a button!

The advances and discoveries in science and technology during the Industrial Revolution saw a need for new words, phrases, and concepts to describe these ideas and inventions. Due to the nature of these works, scientists and scholars created words using Greek and Latin roots e.g. bacteria, histology, nuclear, biology. You may be shocked to read that these words were created but one can learn a multitude of new facts through English language courses as you are doing now!

The idea may have backfired as the English language walked away with a large number of foreign words that have now become part and parcel of the English language e.g. shampoo, candy, cot and many others originated in India!

Many of you will be forgiven for thinking that studying an English Language course consists of English grammar more than anything else. However, preparing for an English test involves a balanced approach, covering listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. While English grammar does play a part when taking courses to improve English overall, it is but a small part of the overall curriculum where one becomes immersed in a history that was partly influenced by myths, battles, and legends on one hand, and the everyday workings of its various social class on the other.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the English language itself really took off with the invasion of Britain during the 5th century. Three Germanic tribes, the Jutes, Saxons and Angles were seeking new lands to conquer, and crossed over from the North Sea. It must be noted that the English language we know and study through various English language courses today had yet to be created as the inhabitants of Britain spoke various dialect of the Celtic language.

[2] Stumpf, John (1970). An Outline of English Literature; Anglo-Saxon and Middle English Literature. London: Forum House Publishing Company. p. 7. We do not know what languages the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons spoke, nor even whether they were sufficiently similar to make them mutually intelligible, but it is reasonable to assume that by the end of the sixth century there must have been a language that could be understood by all and this we call Primitive Old English.

During the Carolingian period, such grid and figure wordplay continued. The 9th century poet Hrabanus Maurus was a Frankish benedictine monk who wrote poetry and encyclopdias, and was trained by Alcuin. He had a love for carmina quadrata et figurata. In his De laudibus sanctae crucis, there are 28 figure poems on a range of ecclesiastical topics.

As per usual, this is a short blog post that leaves out a lot of rich history of figure poems; however, I think these examples go a long way towards inspiring us to think more deeply both about the history of textual presentation and about how objects may have influenced their formation. Poetry was certainly inscribed on objects, but objects also left their impression on poetry. The placement of words helps to shape our understanding and even our enjoyment of reading, as does the background (e.g., paper, papyrus, parchment, cup, statue) behind the words. The beauty of letters and words as linguistic Legos means that they will continue to be broken apart, remade, and reformed to create unique poetic fabrics. Certainly it was the letter sculpture set against the backdrop of a Milwaukee sunset over Lake Michigan that always made this reader speechless.

It takes time to write such a post for a non-native speaker like me, but I appreciate what the OCaml gives me and believe I am doing good for the community, so I decide to write a short history of ReScript and explain the motivations behind this project.

JSOO started growing mature back in 2013, it is the first compiler which gets bootstrapped in the browser, truly impressive. However, even for OCaml experts like me, it is really hard to get started with JSOO. It is a black box to me that I can not read the generated JS code under the hood. If your code works under the bytecode but stops working in the browser. You have to do a random guess to do the debugging. These are the impressions I have back then.

The beauty of this idea is that OCaml will share the same runtime as JS so that interop is really easy and you can use your favorite language in your daily jobs. I also shared my ideas with JSOO devs: discuss: compiling rawlambda output to javascript Issue #338 ocsigen/js_of_ocaml (github.com)

I wish the very few resources could be put into bug fixes instead. We communicated and realized that the top priority for ReasonML syntax is the compatibility for OCaml ecosystem while our top priority is providing the best dev experience for JS users.

Thank you for this excellent summary Bob, and for your efforts on ReScript. I remember very clearly an OCaml Industrial Consortium meeting a few years ago when the essential difference between jsoo and Bucklescript/ReScript was explained to us.

jsoo maintains full OCaml compatibility at the cost of some translation complexity, whereas ReScript does not in favour of more optimal JavaScript output that is human-readable. They are very clearly in different parts of the design space, and both clearly valuable in our ecosystem.

One result of this is that people who invested money and labor into building projects on top of ReasonML because they needed compatibility with an existing OCaml code base now get to throw away their work. The folks who built such things believed that they were joining up with an emerging ecosystem, but that ecosystem is gone.

There is a recommended path forward which I believe the ReScript team has communicated fairly well: convert BuckleScript projects to ReScript syntax. Migrate to ReScript Syntax ReScript Language Manual

I can not speak for ReasonML maintainers. The project is transferred to Jordan since he left Facebook. The ReScript project is still funded by Facebook (and other companies) and we will upgrade existing ReasonML syntax to ReScript syntax internally.

If you look at the discussions of ReScript (or BuckleScript) in various places, lots of negative comments are actually from them. So maybe it is not a terrible choice to not promote OCaml syntax so that we dont have a overlapping use case with JSOO (even though such overlapping is quite small).

The other thing is that our top priority is to make the dev experience better for JS platform users, while the OCaml users are more concerned about using the latest version of compilers from upstream and compatibility. Such mismatch of user expectation and needed communication consumed lots of energy from our side.

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