When did English begin?

On the subject on the Norman Conquest, Angelika Lutz has written an interesting article on the transition from Old to Middle English. She argues that while Old French certainly made an impact on English lexically in the long run and the language as a whole is often strictly divided into Old and Middle English, its grammatical development had nothing to do with the invasion. Lutz emphasises that historical periods and linguistic periods rarely coincide – all aspects of English were not effectively “Normanised” right after the coronation of William I; a more Germanic English was in common use for centuries afterwards. 

   The English lexicon drastically changed after 1066 as a consequence of power shifting to foreigners. Examples from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and Advanced Learner’s Dictionary show that the number Germanic, French and Latin words is relatively even in Modern English, with other Romance languages, Celtic languages and Greek in the minority. Lutz believes that “ordinary borrowing” would not have affected a language so extensively; there is no doubt that the new rule and authorities eventually led to a push of Norman vocabulary into the “conquered” English. Many Old English terms pertaining to law and justice were successfully replaced, and those who survived (like áþ – oath, and þeóf – thief) may have done so because they existed as cognates in Old French. The Norman language acted as a superstratum for English and imposed many new words related to politics and warfare.

   Lutz goes on to compare vocabulary in William Tyndale’s and Martin Luther’s Bible translations, into English and German respectively. English and German in the 16^th century turn out to be very different – Luther used Germanic terms while Tyndale’s language has many loanwords and is quite obviously affected by a Romance lexicon. However, most terms seem to have French origin rather than Latin and entered English in the 13^th and 14^th century. Following the Conquest, England was a functional trilingual country for over two hundred years, until the 14^th century when the ruling classes switched to English but brought with them significant French vocabulary.

   However, the Old English grammar remained seemingly unaffected by lexical shift – Lutz suggests that the delay in Romance influence on English writing shows that for a long time England was governed by non-Englishmen. Anglo-Saxon is remembered in writing style and some vocabulary – an 1137 extract from the Peterborough Chronicle shows use of e.g. Germanic verbs that would have appeared as awkward to Tyndale and Chaucer as they do to a speaker of Modern English. The text can be considered Middle English based on lack of Old English inflection, but still Anglo-Saxon in that it preserves much Germanic vocabulary. The use of Germanic terms relating to law, rule and the military can also be found even later, in 1258 – a text relating to Henry III displays many “indigenous” English lexical items. Lutz considers these and other texts evidence that a more Germanic than Romance English was used for a long time after the Conquest.

   It seems therefore apparent that Henry Sweet’s division of the history of English into Old, Middle and Modern English does not relate to the development of its vocabulary. A lexicon timeline would rather separate the “Germanic” period from the “Romance” reign, with a ubiquitous transition around the 13^th-14^th century, and Lutz says that Modern English is rather a product of the High Middle Ages.