the oxford history of english sep 2006

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH
This page intentionally left blank
THE OXFORD HISTORY OF
ENGLISH
Edited by
Lynda Mugglestone
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Oxford history of the English language/edited by Lynda Mugglestone.
P. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-924931-2 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-19-924931-8 (alk. paper)
1. English language–History. I. Mugglestone, Lynda. II. Title: History of the English language.
PE1075.o97 2006
420. 9–dc22 2006013471
Data available
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk
ISBN 0-19-924931-8 978-0-19-924931-2
13579108642
contents
List of Illustrations vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Key to Phonetic Symbols x
Introduction: A History of English 1

Lynda Mugglestone
1. Preliminaries: Before English 7
Terry Hoad
2. Beginnings and Transitions: Old English 32
Susan Irvine
3. Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French 61
Matthew Townend
4. Middle English—Dialects and Diversity 86
Marilyn Corrie
5. From Middle to Early Modern Eng lish 120
Jeremy J. Smith
6. Restructuring Renaissance English 147
April McMahon
7. Mapping Change in Tudor English 178
Terttu Nevalainen
8. The Babel of Renaissance English 212
Paula Blank
9. English at the Onset of the Normative Tradition 240
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
10. English in the Nineteenth Century 274
Lynda Mugglestone
11. Modern Regional English in the British Isles 305
Clive Upton
12. English Among the Languages 334
Richard W. Bailey
13. English World-wide in the Twentieth Century 360
Tom McArthur
14. Into the Twenty-first Century 394
David Crystal
A Chronology of English 415

Notes on Contributors 429
Acknowledgements 432
References 433
Index 473
vi contents
illustrations
1.1. Migrations of the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples in the
early centuries ad 9
1.2. The Indo- European language group 12
1.3. The first six letters of the early futhark found on a bracteate [thin gold
medallion] from Vadstena in Sweden 22
2.1. Dialect areas in Anglo-Saxon England 36
2.2. Lines 2677–87 of the manuscript of Beowulf 39
2.3. The Anglo-Saxon futhorc 42
2.4. Part of the runic inscription on the Ruthwell Cross, County Dumfries 43
3.1. Scandinavian settlement in Anglo-Saxon England 64
3.2. The inscri bed sundial at Aldbrough, East Riding of Yorkshire 80
4.1. Dialect areas in Middle English 92
4.2. The main distributions of selected forms for the pronoun ‘she’ in later
Middle English 100
5.1. Caxton’s English: a passage from Caxton’s The Myrrour of the World 142
6.1. The opening pages of Richard Hodges, The English Primrose (1644) 153
6.2. The Great Vowel Shift 156
6.3. The Great Vowel Shift 157
6.4. The Great Vowel Shift? 171
7.1. Increasing use of the third-person singular -(e
)s in personal letters
between 1500 and 1660 187
7.2. Regional spread of -(e)s in verbs other than have and do 189
7.3. Periphrastic do in affirmative statements, 1500–1710 201

7.4. Periphrastic do in negative statements, 1500–1710 203
7.5. Periphrastic do in affirmative statements in personal letters, 1580–1630 204
7.6. Periphrastic do in affirmative statements in Older Scots, 1500–1700 205
9.1. Geographical mobility in eighteenth-century Britain 245
10.1. Queen Victoria’s Speech to the Houses on Opening Parliament in 1863,
translated into the Dorset dialect 293
10.2. ‘Th’ Dickshonary’, by Teddy Ashton 295
11.1. SED map for stressed vowel in thunder 310
11.2. Combined SAWD/SED map for final consonant in calf 312
12.1. The crest of John Hawkins (1532–1595) 341
13.1. World English 385
viii illustrations
abbreviations
CEEC Corpus of Early English Correspondence
EDD J. Wright (ed.), The English Dialect Dictionary: being the complete vocabu-
lary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the
last two hundred years. 6 vols (London: Henry Froude, 1898–1905)
EDS English Dialect Society
GVS Great Vowel Shift
HC Helsinki Corpus of English Texts
HCOS Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots
IPA International Phonetic Alphabet
LALME A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English eds. A. McIntosh, M. L.
Samuels, and M. Benskin (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984)
LSS Linguistic Survey of Scotland
MED Middle English Dictionary
OED Oxford English Dictionary
RP Received Pronunciation
SAWD Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects
SED Survey of English Dialects

SSBE Standard Southern British English
SSE Standard Scottish English
key to phonetic symbols
The following gives a guide to the symbols which are most commonly used throughout
the volume. Symbols not included here are chapter-specific, and are explained (with
keywords) in the chapters in which they appear.
Consonants
/p/ as in pick, leap
/b/ as in break, bark
/t/ as in tea, taste
/d/ as in dog, wide
/k/ as in king, cupboard
/f/ as in find, laugh
/s/ as in sleep, pass
/z/ as in zest, laze
/u/asinthink, teeth
/
D
/asinthere, breathe
/$/asinship, fish
/Z/asinleisure, pleasure
/h/ as in history, hope
/m/ as in make, ham
/n/ as in noise, pin
/N/asinring, think
/r/ as in rattle, wrigg le
/l/ as in listen, fall
/t$/asinchirp, fetch
/dZ/asinjudge, jam
/w/ as in water, wait

/j/ as in yellow, young
/÷/asinloch
Vowels
/i:/asinbead, feet
/I/asinfit, intend
/e/asinset, bend
/
æ
/asincat, pattern
/u:/asintrue, food
/U/asinbook, could
/ö/asinsun, enough
/`/asinnot, pond
/O:/asinlaw, board
/`:/asinfather, cart
/@:/ as in heard, bird
/@/asinwanted, father
Diphthongs
/aI/asinfile, time
/eI/asintake, tail
/oU/asinnote, bowl
/au/ as in loud, found
/OI/asintoil, toy
key to phonetic symbols xi
Close
Front
VOWELS
Central
Back
Close-mid

Open-mid
Open
Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right
represents a rounded vowel.
i
O
f
C
a
I
Y
a
e
ε
U
m
È

Ê
v
A
A
E
W
e
uu
{
ɵ
y
@

IPA Mouth Diagram
introduction
A HISTORY OF
ENGLISH
Lynda Mugglestone
How can there be a true History, when we see no Man living is able to
write truly the Histor y of the last Week?
T. Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia (1688)
S
IR William Belford’s words, spoken in Act II of Thomas Shadwell’s late
seventeenth-century play, The Squire of Alsatia, articulate the problems of
histor y with conspicuous ease. As Belford comments to his brother, no history
can be complete. Instead, all historical description is based on acts of interpret-
ation, leading to accounts which may, or may not, conXict with those oVered by
other tellers and other tales. In this sense, gaps and absences necessarily beset the
historian; not all can be known, and a change of perspective inevitably brings
new, and diVerent, considerations to the fore. A single true—and all-encompass-
ing—history is an illusion.
These problems are equally pertinent for historians of language for whom
the subject is the many-voiced past. Gaps and absences here may be particu-
larly tantalizing; for the remote past of language—the pre-history of English
(discussed in the opening chapter of this volume)—not a single record remains
and history must be reconstructed, deduced from the patterns of languages
which share the same ancestry. Even later, the historical record may be frag-
mentary; if the primary form of language is speech, only with the advent of
sound recording (and the invention of the phonograph in 1877) do we begin to
have a record of the actual voices of the past—and even this evidence is
necessarily partial and selective. The majority of speakers through the history
of English have left not a single trace to document the words they spoke, or the
conversations in which they participated. Even for those who had access to the

written word, not all has been preserved (and only in the more recent
historical past has access to the written word been extended to all, irrespective
of class and gender). The passage of historical time has enacted its own
selectivities, to which historians have often added others. In many histories
of the language, regional voices rarely feature once a standard variety begins to
emerge in the Wfteenth century. Likewise, the history of the language is often
mapped through a progression of canonical landmarks—Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Samuel Johnson—that marginalize the range of other voices which co-existed
(and which, in a variety of ways, might themselves be seen as more rather than
less representative of what ‘ordinary’ English speakers were doing at a given
point in time).
For these and other reasons, the emphasis throughout the following volume is
placed on the construction of ‘a history’ rather than ‘the history’, recognizing that
many other pathways could be navigated through the past—and present—of
the English language. The wider emphasis throughout is, however, placed on the
twin images of pluralism and diversity, and on the complex patterns of usage
which have served to make up English. While the language of Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Johnson does therefore appear (if perhaps more brieXy than
in other histories of English), then so too does the language of footmen, mining
butties, and missionaries, of telegrams and emails, of trade, exploration, and
colonization. The language of thieves and the underworld appears in Chapter 8
on Renaissance English; that of, say, eighteenth-century Jamaican English in
Chapter 12. The English of ordinar y letters, of diaries, and of private testi-
mony—as in Chapters 7, 9, and 10—frequently takes its place in the attempt to
engage with what it was like to use English, in a variet y of circumstances, in
previous centuries. Examples of usage from Scotland, Norfolk, or from Dorset,
Spain, Singapore, and America (amongst others) emphasize the diversity of the
speakers who make up ‘the English language’.
Rather than a seamless synecdoche of the history of English with the history
of the standard variety, the image of the past that is explored over the course of

this volume is therefore one characterized by its heterogeneity, and by the ebb
and X ow of a language (and language-varieties) continually on the move. As
David Crystal has recently pointed out, ‘For every one person who speaks
Standard English, there must be a hundred who do not, and another
hundred who speak other varieties as well as the standard. Where is their
2 lynda mugglestone
stor y told?’.
1
The history of the English language in the following pages engages
with both domains—documenting the rise of a standard variety, but also
continuing to examine the import of regional speech, not only in Middle
English (‘par excellence, the dialectal phase of English’, as Barbara Strang has
famously stressed),
2
but also through the Renaissance and into the present day.
As Chapter 11 aYrms, nineteenth-century fears that the demise of dialect—the
end of the regional voice—was nigh have resolutely proved unfounded. In-
stead, as conWrmed by the one million plus hits received by the BBC’s Voices
2005 website (as at March 2005), diversity is dominant, and interest in lan-
guage and variation perhaps more compelling than it has ever been.
3
Any history of the language is, in this respect, enacted through innumerable
voices, many of which illustrate that even the history of the standard variety is far
more variable than has often been assumed. While Chapters 4 and 5 engage in part
with some reassessment of the origins of standard English, a number of other
chapters in this volume examine the continuing variability of these non-localized
forms of English, especially in contexts unaVected by print. If the eighteenth
century is, for example, often characterized by a set of prescriptive stereotypes of
correctness which inform popular images of a norm, ‘real’ English—even within
the standard variety—could reveal signiWcant diVerences within the patterns of

usage actually deployed. As a result, just as Johnson’s private spellings varied from
those publicly commended in his dictionary (as in his usage of pamXet for
pamphlet,ordutchess for duchess), so too could the grammatical dictates proVered
by Robert Lowth in his celebrated grammar fail to coincide with the forms he
used in his own letters and correspondence. There is in fact compelling
evidence for a set of dual standards of language, with private patterns of usage
co-existing alongside those more formally proclaimed (and often adopted in
print).
4
Both, however, are part of language history and it is important to
recognize that, in this respect, the public image of English does not tell the
whole story. As Chapters 9 and 10 examine, printers’ readers and correctors
habitually normalized the manuscripts which they prepared for public view,
concealing the underlying variabilities of ordinary usage. It was a practice which
can still lead to a number of prevailing misconceptions about the periods in
1
D. Crystal, The Stories of English (London: Penguin, 2004), 5.
2
B. M. H. Strang, A History of English (London: Methuen, 1970), 224.
3
See <http:// www.bbc.co.uk/voices/>. Over one million hits had been registered by the end of
March 2005.
4
See especially N. E. Osselton, ‘Informal Spelling Systems in Early Modern English: 1500–1800’, i n
N. F. Blake and C. Jones (eds), English Historical Linguistics: Studies in Development (SheYeld:
CECTAL, 1984), 123–37.
a history of the english language 3
question—and not least in modern editorial (mis)judgements on the spellings or
grammatical forms of earlier texts, which, while commonly adjudged awry (and in
need of emendation), may instead be entirely typical. Outside the printed text, the

realities of informal usage, even in the nineteenth century, could display a
variability which is strikingly at odds with many popular images of the language
at this time.
Transition—between diVerent language states, between diVerent speakers, and
diVerent texts—proves a further enduring theme throughout the volume. While
transitions in geographical space inform the diversities analysed in Chapters 2
and 4, for example, with their central focus on Old and Middle English respect-
ively, it is the working-out of change in progress—of transitions in usage—which
preoccupies other chapters. The history of English is, in this sense, not a series of
static states but, at each and every point in time, patterns of variation reveal the
cross-currents of change, whether in the gradual marginalization or loss of older
forms, alongside the rise of newer and incoming ones. Susan Irvine examines the
strategic intersections of internal and external history in Anglo-Saxon England;
Jeremy Smith explores the transitions of the Wfteenth century in Chapter 5,a
boundary between the conventionally designated ‘Middle English’ and that of
‘early modern English’. Terttu Nevalainen in Chapter 7 uses the evidence of letters
and trials to examine a number of signiWcant changes as they took place in the
later years of the Renaissance. Factors of age, gender, class, and regional loca-
tion—just as in the present—inXuence the patterns of usage which the past also
presents. Rather than the familiar (and neat) categorization of discrete periods,
changes instead clearly overlap in time; the ebb and X ow of the subjunctive is
worked out over many centuries while, for instance, shifts of inXexional forms
diVuse slowly through time and space. The -s ending of the third person singular
(he walks, she runs)isWrst found in Old English, as Marilyn Corrie points out in
Chapter 4, but it does not become a central part of the standard variety until the
later years of the Renaissance (and even later, as Chapter 10 conWrms, variability
can still be found).
Other transitions are necessarily located in the multilingual past of English,
and in the various strands of linguistic conXict and contact which make up its
history. Indeed, as Matthew Townend stresses in Chapter 3, ‘To write linguistic

history by looking only at English would give an entirely false impression of
linguistic activity in England; it would be like writing social history by looking at
only one class, or only one gender’. Latin, Scandinavian, French, and Dutch all, in
various ways, played a part in the earlier history of English; the catalogue of
languages which later came to inXuence it is far wider still. The focus in the Wnal
three chapters of the volume is, in various ways, placed on English looking
4 lynda mugglestone
outwards, with reference in particular to the di Vusion of English (and English-
speakers) outside the British Isles—and to the complex intersection of extra-
linguistic forces governing the creation of ‘world English’. As Tom McArthur
explores in Chapter 13, it is English which is now a world-wide language and the
interactions which result from this cannot be forgotten; a whole new set of
linguistic identities—such as Singlish or Spanglish—are forged from the contin-
gencies of dissemination and of dominance. Multilingualism is, as Dick Bailey
rightly stresses in Chapter 12, perhaps the most important aspect of a history of
English—tracing the multilingual history of English from the Renaissance
(and before), he adds too the salutary reminder that, for much of this past, it
was the skill of the English in assuming new languages which was celebrated
(rather than that linguistic incapacity which has come to form a sad part of their
modern stereotyping).
‘No one man’s English is all English’, wrote the lexicographer James Murray in
1883 as he strove to determine the limits of inclusion of what would become the
Oxford English Dictionary ; diversities of register and region, of style and context,
of education and of age, necessarily inXuence indiv idual linguistic behaviour.
A similar awareness of necessary diVerence has informed the making of this
volume. As April McMahon notes in opening Chapter 6, ‘there are many diVerent
ways of doing linguistic history and of Wnding out just what the important
changes were’. A multi-author volume such as this is, in this respect, particularly
appropriate for the diversity of the history of English, enabling a variety of
perspectives on the reconstruction of the past to be adopted and applied. The

examination of social networks and chains of linguistic inXuence is explored in
Chapter 9; Chapter 7 focuses on the detailed awareness of change in progress
enabled by an emphasis on corpus linguistics, and the close-up of variation which
this provides; in McMahon’s own chapter, there is conversely a move away from
the nuances of actual usage in order to examine the wide-scale structural changes
which are at work in what is perhaps the most complex of linguistic problems in
the history of English—the English Great Vowel Shift. The social texturing of
language, in a variety of ways, unites other chapters. Moreover, while the volume
maintains a broadly chronological framework, areas of productive intersection
and overlap between chapters are also deliberately maintained; historical periods
are not neatly conWned (even if they may be in the Wctions of history which are
popularly advanced). Old English does not become Middle English merely with
the advent of the Norman Conquest. Indeed, as Susan Irvine explores in Chapter
2, a number of the characteristics which we associate with ‘Middle English’ (such
as the falling together of inXexional endings) are already well established in some
areas of Britain by 900. However, to present a diVerent picture yet again, the
a history of the english language 5
scribal copying and reproduction of Old Eng lish manuscripts continued well into
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Chapters often span chronological div isions,
exploring continuities and the critical debate which this can generate.
As a single-volume history, the Oxford History of English is, of course, inevit-
ably selective. It oVers, however, the invitation to rethink various aspects of the
history for the English language—to engage with the past through private as well
as public discourses, to look at the usage of men and women, of standard and
non-standard speakers, at English at the borders and margins of time and space,
from pre-history to the present-day, and as subject to the changing pressures and
contexts which constantly inXuence usage, as well as to examine some of the
motives and explanations which may underpin change as it took place within the
past. The aim throughout has been to provide an accessible and discursive text in
which primary material is glossed where necessary or (for earlier periods)

translated in full. Technical terminology is explained within the chapters, and a
guide to phonetic symbols (with keywords) appears on pp. x–xi. Each chapter
also incorporates a detailed guide to Further Reading.
As the volume as a whole serves to explore, questions of transmission, of
orality, of scribal culture, of manuscript against print, of private usage and public
norms, can all complicate notions of what English can be said to be at diVerent
points in time. Even within a relatively narrow period of time, speakers will not
necessarily agree in usage, depending on facts as diverse as register, gender, or
geography, or of age and audience. This diversity—of speakers and the forms
they use—is, of course, an essential part of history. Indeed, as the historian John
Arnold has eloquently noted, ‘the past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is
as uncoordinated and complex as life’; history, as a result, is always about ‘Wnding
or creating patterns and meaning from the maelstrom’.
5
Histories of the language
necessarily share this same complex of origins. And, like historians, their writers
too are constantly aware that other patterns also exist, and that many other
stories could also—and always—be told.
5
J. Arnold, History. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13.
6 lynda mugglestone
1
PRELIMINARIES:
BEFORE ENGLISH
Terry Hoad
languages on the move
T
HE Eng lish language is at more than one point in its history a language
which is being carried from one part of the world to another. This is true at
the beginning of its existence as a recognizably distinct language—the phase

which this and later chapters refer to as Old English. Migration of people and
the consequent relocation of the languages they speak will therefore be one of
the major themes of this chapter, which will focus on the pre-history of
English and the various developments which underpin the creation of English
as a language in its own right within the British Isles. We can, however, better
understand some things about that early period, and what was happening to
the language at the time, if we Wrst take a look at certain events in the more
recent past which can be seen to oVer a number of useful parallels for the
much earlier transmission of language varieties through time and space.
Early in the seventeenth century, a period which will be discussed in more
detail in Chapters 8 and 12, speakers of English started to migrate from the British
Isles to North America. This process of migration, once begun, continued on a
signiWcant scale over the best part of three centuries. The forms of English that the
migrants took with them varied considerably according to such factors as the part
of Britain from which they came, their social class, their age, and the date at which
they migrated. Once settled in North America they had contact not only with
users of forms of English which were similar to their own, but also with those
who spoke diVerent varieties of the language. Furthermore, they encountered
and, naturally, had occasion to communicate with speakers of quite di Verent
languages, which included those of the Native American inhabitants of the
continent as well as the non-English languages of immigrants from other Euro-
pean countries and elsewhere around the globe.
As a result of their geographical separation, the language of the English-
speaking migrants began to differ from that of their previous neighbours in
Britain. Given what we know of the natural development of languages, we can say
with conWdence that this would inevitably have happened, even without other
factors playing a part. DiVerently shifting social alignments among English
speakers in Britain on the one hand, and in North America on the other,
would alone have been suYcient to ensure that. But the multilingual environ-
ment which arose in North America helped shape the particular directions of

development for the English language as used there. Pronunciation, grammar,
and vocabulary were all subject to this interplay of inevitable ‘internal’ linguistic
change with powerful inXuences from other languages also in use. One of the
most obvious results of those inXuences was the adoption or ‘borrowing’ into
English in North America (and later, in many cases, into English in Britain too)
of words from other languages: skunk from one of the Native American lan-
guages, cockroach from Spanish, prairie from French. It seems right, though, to
think of American English as remaining primarily based on the English of the
British Isles. We now, for example, usually consider the forms of English spoken
in Britain and in North America as diVerent forms—diVerent ‘dialects’—of the
‘same’ language. We can nevertheless simultaneously be very conscious of how
unalike British and North American English are.
The populations of English speakers on each side of the Atlantic were never, of
course, completely cut oV from contact with one another. There continued to be
movement in both directions between Britain and North America; activities such
as trade and warfare have alternately led to direct contact of varying degrees of
friendliness, while letters, newspapers, books, the telephone, radio, television,
and most recently email have successively been some of the main means whereby
indirect communication has been maintained on a vast scale.
It is important to remember, too, that English in America did not remain the
language solely of the migrants and their descendants. It was also adopted by
people whose language, or whose parents’ language, was entirely diVerent. These
people included other migrant groups from Europe and elsewhere, some of
whom retained their ancestral languages (German or Italian, for example) in
full and active use alongside the English which they had also acquired. These new
speakers of English included many of the previous inhabitants of the continent
and their descendants—the Native American peoples—who came to use English
8 terry hoad
alongside or, in many cases, instead of the languages which they and their
forebears had previously spoken.

The situation was in many respects very similar at the beginning of the history
of what we can call ‘English’. In a wave of migrations which extended over a
large part of the Wfth and sixth centuries ad people from northern continental
Europe brought to the British Isles a language of a kind which had previously
JUTES
ANGLES
SAXONS
F
R
I
S
I
A
N
S
FRANKS
Fig. 1.1. Evidence of English presence in the fifth and sixth centuries from archaeo-
logical and historical sources (DIAGONAL SHADING). Germanic areas of cultural
and linguistic influence through migration and contact on the continent and in
Scandinavia (HORIZONTAL SHADING).
preliminaries: before english 9
been unknown there. These migrants came, it appears, from a number of diVerent
places (see Fig. 1.1) no doubt being distinguishable from one another in the same
kinds of ways as the British settlers in North America were to be many centuries
later. They spoke a range of dialects and in their new home they each encountered
and interacted with speakers of other varieties of their own language, as well as
with people speaking quite diVerent languages, namely the Celtic languages of the
native British population, and the form of Latin which many of those people seem
to have used under the recently ended Roman governance of Britain.
As these migrants (whom we call the Anglo-Saxons) started their new and

separate life in the British Isles, their language began to develop in its own
distinctive ways and to become diV erent from the language of their previous
neighbours on the Continent. It was also exposed to inXuences from the indi-
genous Celtic languages and from Latin, as will be discussed in a later chapter.
But, again as in the history of modern English in America, the Anglo-Saxons were
never completely isolated, and trade and other activities continued to keep them
in contact with people across the channel and the North Sea.
looking back: indo-european origins
The kinds of language which the Anglo-Saxons brought with them to the
British Isles had previously been shared with other peoples, who remained
behind in their Continental homelands. At that time, with two exceptions—
runes and Gothic—which will be discussed below, these peoples (including the
Anglo-Saxons) had not yet acquired the skill of writing their language. As a
result, we have virtually no recorded evidence of most forms of it. By the time
when, in the succeeding few centuries, they did start to write their language it
had become divided. The separating oV of the ‘English’ of the Anglo-Saxons has
already been touched on, and by very similar processes there developed what
we can, for example, recognize as the earliest stages of German and Dutch, and
of the Scandinavian languages Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. These lan-
guages are known collectively as the ‘Germanic’ group of languages, and
linguists believe that it is possible to reconstruct a good deal of the history of
these languages before they took written form. That history, they also believe,
leads back to a time, perhaps before c 200 bc, when diVerent forms of Germanic
were as closely similar as were the dialects of English when the later migrations
to North America began. In other words, there seems to have been a time when
we can reasonably think in terms of a single Germanic language to which
10 terry hoad
linguists have given the name ‘Proto-Germanic’ or, sometimes in the past,
‘Primitive Germanic’.
This Proto-Germanic language is itself recognized by linguists as an

oVshoot from a still earlier language system which comprises the ‘Indo-
European’ group of languages. Other branchings oV from this group (for
which see Fig. 1.2) gave rise to the majority of the known languages of Europe
and Scandinavia, as well as some in Asia and Asia Minor. In some cases there
is evidence, in the form of written texts, of individual languages having
separated themselves oV and taken distinguishable form at a very early date.
Early forms of Greek, for example, survive in written texts from 1500–1200
years bc; in India, the most ancient form of the Indo-European language
whose classical representative is Sanskrit can be traced back to 1000–500 years
bc; for the Iranian branch of Indo-European, the oldest evidence is for the
language known as Avestan, which is of comparable date; and in southern
Europe, not much later, come the beginnings of Latin. Earliest of all are the
records of Hittite and related languages in Asia Minor, which may start as
early as 1700 bc or before.
As Figure 1.2 illustrates, other major branches of Indo-European include the
Celtic, Baltic, and Slavonic languages, as well as Armenian and Tocharian (a
language of Central Asia). Evidence for these all occurs rather later, in most cases
well into the Christian era. The same is true of Germanic, the last major branch
of the family to be mentioned, which will be the main concern of the later part
of this chapter.
The starting point for the realization that the recorded Indo-European lan-
guages had a common source—a ‘parent’ language, if we use the common image
of the family tree—was the recognition that individual words in one of the
languages bore systematic resemblances to those in others. Such resemblances
are seen, for instance, in many ‘basic’ words:
Sanskrit Greek Latin Old Church Slavonic
‘house’ da
´
mah do
´

mos domus domu
˘
‘new’ na
´
vah ne
´
os novus novu
˘
‘three’ tra
´
yah treı
ˆ
stre
¯
s triye
In these examples, the consonants have remained to a large extent the same in
each language, while the vowels are often diVerent. Having studied not just a few
examples such as have been cited here but many thousands of cases which point
in the same direction, linguists believe that in the Indo-European from which
Sanskrit, Greek, and the other languages later developed, ‘house’ would have had
a form something like *domos/domus, ‘new’ would have been something like
preliminaries: before english 11
Indo-European
Germanic Celtic Italic Venetic Albanian
Albanian
Greek Baltic Slavonic Anatolian
Armenian Iranian Indic Tocharian
Recorded
pre-1000
Western

group
Old
English
Old
Saxon
Old
Frisian
Old High
German
Northern
group
Old
Icelandic
Old
Norwegian
Old
Swedish
Old
Danish
Eastern
group
Gothic
Gaulish
Old
Irish
Old
Welsh
Old
Breton
Latin

Faliscan
Oscan
Umbrian
Venetic Ancient
Greek
Old Church
Slavonic
Hittite Classical
Armenian
Avestan
Old
Persian
Sanskrit Tocharian
Recorded
in
modern
times
English
Low
German
Dutch
German
Icelandic
Norwegian
Swedish
Danish
[None]
Irish
Scots
Gaelic

Welsh
Breton
Portuguese
Spanish
Catalan
French
Provençal
Italian
Romanian
[None] Greek
Old
Prussian
Lithuanian
Latvian
Czech
Croatian
Serbian
Polish
Slovak
Macedonian
Belorussian
Ukrainian
Bulgarian
Russian
[None] Armenian Kurdish
Persian
(Farsi)
Pashto
Gujarati
Punjabi

Hindi
Bengali
[None]
Fig. 1.2. The Indo-European language group (the listing of individual languages is not comprehensive)