Optimal English

Optimal English®

Markus Heinrich Rehbach

Copyright 2017 Markus Heinrich Rehbach All Rights Reserved

A brief description of the development of the English language and the implications for T.E.S.O.L

Today English is used as a first or second language by over 1 Billion people, in 112 of the 232 internationally recognised territories. ‘English’ is considered to be around 1500 years old. Of course when we say this, we are referring to that language spoken on the territories known as ‘England’. The languages that contributed to this language of course developed prior to, and parallel to, the ‘English’ language. So let us return to England, in the 5 th Century.

Friesland is in the far north of Germany, bordering on Denmark and the

North Sea. Even before the 5th Century Friesians had begun migrating to Britain across the North Sea, bringing their Germanic Dialects with them. In the 5th Century more Germanic tribes, Jutes, Franks (who in the 6th Century would conquer Gaul, lending their name to the modern state of France), Frisians, Angles, and Saxons, invaded and/or settled a land that the Romans had begun withdrawing from. The ‘locals’ of the time were Celts and Britons. The Angles and Saxons came to dominate around half of

England. The Saxon kingdoms came to be known as West, East, and South Saxony i.e. Wessex, Essex, and Sussex. The Angle kingdom in the East became known as East-Anglia. The Angle-Saxon dialect became the dominant spoken language amongst these Germanic tribes. From this we have the concept of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as an ethnic grouping. The name ‘England’ may derive from the older term ‘Angle-land’. Medieval documents refer to England as ‘Aengla-land’.

The linguistic roots of English are, for this reason, defined as ´Germanic´. The earliest written forms of Angle-Saxon consisted of runes carved in wood and stone, and were very limited in scope. The written word was seen to have power. Runes often had ‘magical’ functions. Runic ‘graffiti’, short messages, were carved in stone and wood. The examples that are still to be found today are those carved on personal possessions such as weapons, on the entrances to dwellings, on tombstones and boundary markers, and on standing stones marking sacred sites. Language was seen to have magical properties, able to invoke the benevolence of the gods. This is the source of our modern notion of ‘magic spells’.

Today we tend to associate runes with the Scandinavian Vikings. In fact the early Angle and Saxon dialects were similar enough to the Scandinavian Old Norse of the 5th Century to encourage a linguistic ‘mixing’ of the languages when the Vikings later invaded. Around 900 terms ‘borrowed’ from Old Norse survive in the modern English language. These include common verbs such as to die, to call, to give, to take, and nouns such as birth and sky. Other Old-Norse loan-words include they, their, them, and are.

We should remember that the local population of England at the time of the Viking invasions and settlements referred to all Vikings as ‘Danes’.

In AD 597 England´s often forced ‘conversion’ to Christianity began, by means of ´fire and the sword`. The local We should note here that the Celts had already had contact with the Latin speaking Romans in England, and the Germanic tribes had also had contact with the Romans on the European mainland. In the 7th Century missionaries introduced the Latin alphabet, and the use of parchments and ink. These were the precursors to books. The church became the dominant power structure. Clergy and religious leaders formed the scholarly and administrative elites. Latin became the language of the educated classes. The written language of Britain came to be Latin. It was the language in which records were kept, legal documents were made, and the church and state were administered.

The ‘Lingua-Franca’, the language of the powerful, of government and administration, of the legal system, and of the civil institutions, was Latin. Hence the official language of England in the 7th Century was in fact Latin.

Bead’s famous History of the English Speaking Peoples was written in Latin. It did, however, incorporate some Angle-Saxon runes, and phonetic representations of Angle-Saxon, in order to incorporate some Angle-Saxon concepts, expressions and vocabulary.

The common spoken language of the masses was Angle-Saxon. This is the ‘English’ language which developed over the centuries, against the background of invasions, conquests, religious upheavals, politics and trade, and which ultimately emerged as the official language of England. During this development it embraced language elements from more than 50 of the languages that it interacted with.

The date of the writing of Beowulf has been placed at somewhere between the 7th and 10th Centuries. It has been described as the first great poem written in ‘English’. The author is unknown. Beowulf narrates the adventures of a heroic warrior-King, Beowulf, who battles with the monster Grendell.

Beowulf is, however, mostly incomprehensible to anyone literate in modern English.

We must be clear that Modern English did NOT develop logically and incrementally, evolving greater sophistication and complexity from basic roots, whilst maintaining an essential integrity as a discrete language.

If we used the analogy of a species, we would say that it had bred with other species so thoroughly that, rather than evolving as a species over time, it actually evolved into a new species, a hybrid. Little of what was defining in the Angle-Saxon Germanic dialects remains discernible in the modern English language. The new species would in fact recognise its French and Latin cousins more readily than its German ones!

Modern English is the outcome of a large number of interactions over time, all able to be traced to particular geographical limits, that is, the territory of modern England. These interactions took the form of various military and cultural invasions and conquests, and international trade. If you can ignore the questions of geography for a moment, and seek out the ‘roots’ of the English language as we know it today, you will find its roots in over 50 nations, including France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Arabia.

From 870 onwards, the Vikings conquered and settled most of the North and the East of England. Ultimately the ‘Danes’ conquered all of England except Wessex, and ruled most of England from 1016 to 1041. They invaded East Anglia, Sussex, and Essex. They brought their Old Norse Danish language with them.

The Danish occupation of most of England lead to the adoption and adaptation of many Danish language elements into the ‘English’ language of the time.

King Alfred the great, the Saxon king of Wessex, eventually did battle with these occupying ‘Danes’, signed a peace treaty with Denmark, and established a Southern and Western Saxon kingdom. Under the terms of the treaty the Danes maintained ‘Danelaw’ in the North and East of England. Trade and cultural exchanges between the North and South would continue the interaction between the Danish Old Norse and the ‘English’ language.

The ‘English’ language of this time would be mostly unintelligible to those who speak 21st Century English. It was in fact a combination of the Friesian and Angle-Saxon of the Germanic invaders and settlers, the Latin of the ‘Christians’, and the Old Norse of the Danes.

King Alfred, late in the 9th Century, wanting to make books and learning more accessible to the general population, had many books, including works of history and philosophy, translated from Latin into the common 9th Century Angle-Saxon (English) language. The written documents from this time give us an idea of the state of the ‘English’ language of the 9th Century.

In the 9th Century the Normans, the North-men, the Vikings from

Scandinavia, had been given territories in the North of France by the French King. These territories became known as Normandy. This was done with the understanding that they would stop raiding and pillaging in the rest of France. The Normans adopted the language and customs of the French. In 1066 a certain ´bastard´, William, Duke of Normandy, conquered Angle Saxon Britain, with the aid of mercenaries given ´absolution ‘from the Roman Catholic Pope for any rape, murder, and pillage committed within the first three days of victory. William replaced the Anglo-Saxon nobility with his own Norman lords. The language of the Norman court was French. French and Latin became the ‘lingua-franca’ of Norman Britain, the official languages of the court, of civil administration, of law, and of religion. That most famous tax audit document, the ‘Domesday book’, was a record of all the inhabitants and their possessions at the time of the Norman Conquest. It was written in Latin.

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