English Language

Ural Scientific Centre (LYCEUM).

Ural Gorky University

Scientific work

Performed by:

Pupil of 11e form of LYCEUM

Pokrovsky Pavel

Director:

Stolyarova Nelli Aleksandrovna

Teacher of English language of LYCEUM.

Yekaterinburg.

1998.

Table of contents.

1.English

Language..................................................................

..................................3

2.Vocabulary..............................................................

.................................................3

3.Spelling................................................................

....................................................4

4.Role of

Phonemes..................................................................

.................................4

5.Stress, Pitches and

Juncture..................................................................

................5

6.Inflection..............................................................

....................................................5

7.Parts of

speech....................................................................

...................................5

8.Development of the

language..................................................................

...............6

8.1.Old English

Period....................................................................

...........................6

8.2.Middle English

Period....................................................................

......................7

8.3.The Great Vowel

Shift.....................................................................

.................... 8

8.4.Modern English

Period....................................................................

....................9

8.5.20-th century

English...................................................................

.......................10

8.6.American

English...................................................................

.............................10

8.7.Basic

English...................................................................

....................................11

8.8.Pidgin

English...................................................................

...................................11

8.9.Future Of English

Language..................................................................

..............12

1.English Language.

English Language, chief medium of communication of people in the United

Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,

and numerous other countries. It is the official language of many nations

in the Commonwealth of Nations and is widely understood and used in all of

them. It is spoken in more parts of the world than any other language and

by more people than any other tongue except Chinese.

English belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group within the western branch of the

Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages. It is

related most closely to the Frisian language, to a lesser extent to

Netherlandic (Dutch-Flemish) and the Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects,

and more distantly to Modern High German. Its parent, Proto-Indo-European,

was spoken around 5,000 years ago by nomads who are thought to have roamed

the south-east European plains.

2.Vocabulary

The English vocabulary has increased greatly in more than 1,500 years of

development. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the

Oxford English Dictionary (13 vols., 1933), a revised edition of A New

English Dictionary on Historical Principles (10 vols., 1884-1933;

supplements), contains 500,000 words. It has been estimated, however, that

the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words,

including slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms,

many of which only came into use after the middle of the 20th century. The

English vocabulary is more extensive than that of any other language in the

world, although some other languages—Chinese, for example—have a word-

building capacity equal to that of English. It is, approximately half

Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French

and Latin) and extensive, constant borrowing from every major language,

especially from Latin, Greek, French, and the Scandinavian languages, and

from numerous minor languages, accounts for the great number of words in

the English vocabulary. From Old English have come cardinal and ordinal

numbers, personal pronouns, and numerous nouns and adjectives: from French

have come intellectual and abstract terms, as well as terms of rank and

status, such as duke, marquis, and baron. In addition, certain processes

have led to the creation of many new words as well as to the establishment

of patterns for further expansion. Among these processes are onomatopoeia,

or the imitation of natural sounds, which has created such words as burp

and clink; affixation, or the addition of prefixes and suffixes, either

native, such as mis- and -ness, or borrowed, such as ex- and -ist; the

combination of parts of words, such as in brunch, composed of parts of

breakfast and lunch; the free formation of compounds, such as bonehead and

downpour; back formation, or the formation of words from previously

existing words, the forms of which suggest that the later words were

derived from the earlier ones—for example, to jell, formed from jelly; and

functional change, or the use of one part of speech as if it were another,

for example, the noun shower used as a verb, to shower. The processes that

have probably added the largest number of words are affixation and

especially functional change, which is facilitated by the peculiarities of

English syntactical structure.

3.Spelling

English is said to have one of the most difficult spelling systems in the

world. The written representation of English is not phonetically exact for

two main reasons. First, the spelling of words has changed to a lesser

extent than their sounds; for example, the k in knife and the gh in right

were formerly pronounced (see Middle English Period below). Second, certain

spelling conventions acquired from foreign sources have been perpetuated;

for example, during the 16th century the b was inserted in doubt (formerly

spelled doute) on the authority of dubitare, the Latin source of the word.

Outstanding examples of discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation

are the six different pronunciations of ough, as in bough, cough, thorough,

thought, through, and rough; the spellings are kept from a time when the gh

represented a back fricative consonant that was pronounced in these words.

Other obvious discrepancies are the 14 different spellings of the sh sound,

for example, as in anxious, fission, fuchsia, and ocean.

4.Role of Phonemes

Theoretically, the spelling of phonemes, the simplest sound elements used

to distinguish one word from another, should indicate precisely the sound

characteristics of the language. For example, in English, at contains two

phonemes, mat three, and mast four. Very frequently, however, the spelling

of English words does not conform to the number of phonemes. Enough, for

example, which has four phonemes (enuf), is spelled with six letters, as is

breath, which also has four phonemes (breu) and six letters. See Phonetics.

The main vowel phonemes in English include those represented by the

italicized letters in the following words: bit, beat, bet, bate, bat, but,

botany, bought, boat, boot, book, and burr. These phonemes are

distinguished from one another by the position of articulation in the

mouth. Four vowel sounds, or complex nuclei, of English are diphthongs

formed by gliding from a low position of articulation to a higher one.

These diphthongs are the i of bite (a glide from o of botany to ea of

beat), the ou of bout (from o of botany to oo of boot), the oy of boy (from

ou of bought to ea of beat), and the u of butte (from ea of beat to oo of

boot). The exact starting point and ending point of the glide varies within

the English-speaking world.

5.Stress, Pitches, and Juncture

Other means to phonemic differentiation in English, apart from the

pronunciation of distinct vowels and consonants, are stress, pitch, and

juncture. Stress is the sound difference achieved by pronouncing one

syllable more forcefully than another, for example, the difference between

' record (noun) and re' cord (verb). Pitch is, for example, the difference

between the pronunciation of John and John? Juncture or disjuncture of

words causes such differences in sound as that created by the pronunciation

of blackbird (one word) and black bird (two words). English employs four

degrees of stress and four kinds of juncture for differentiating words and

phrases.

6.Inflection

Modern English is a relatively uninflected language. Nouns have separate

endings only in the possessive case and the plural number. Verbs have both

a strong conjugation—shown in older words—with internal vowel change, for

example, sing, sang, sung, and a weak conjugation with dental suffixes

indicating past tense, as in play, played. The latter is the predominant

type. Only 66 verbs of the strong type are in use; newer verbs invariably

follow the weak pattern. The third person singular has an -s ending, as in

does. The structure of English verbs is thus fairly simple, compared with

that of verbs in similar languages, and includes only a few other endings,

such as -ing or -en; but verb structure does involve the use of numerous

auxiliaries such as have, can, may, or must. Monosyllabic and some

disyllabic adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison, such as

larger or happiest; other adjectives express the same distinction by

compounding with more and most. Pronouns, the most heavily inflected parts

of speech in English, have objective case forms, such as me or her, in

addition to the nominative (I, he, we) and possessive forms (my, his, hers,

our).

7.Parts of Speech

Although many grammarians still cling to the Graeco-Latin tradition of

dividing words into eight parts of speech, efforts have recently been made

to reclassify English words on a different basis. The American linguist

Charles Carpenter Fries, in his work The Structure of English (1952),

divided most English words into four great form classes that generally

correspond to the noun, verb, adjective, and adverb in the standard

classification. He classified 154 other words as function words, or words

that connect the main words of a sentence and show their relations to one

another. In the standard classification, many of these function words are

considered pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions; others are considered

adverbs, adjectives, or verbs.

8.Development of the Language

Three main stages are usually recognized in the history of the development

of the English language. Old English, known formerly as Anglo-Saxon, dates

from AD 449 to 1066 or 1100. Middle English dates from 1066 or 1100 to 1450

or 1500. Modern English dates from about 1450 or 1500 and is subdivided

into Early Modern English, from about 1500 to 1660, and Late Modern

English, from about 1660 to the present time.

8.1.Old English Period

Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by certain Germanic

peoples (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) of the regions comprising present-day

southern Denmark and northern Germany who invaded Britain in the 5th

century AD; the Jutes were the first to arrive, in 449, according to

tradition. Settling in Britain (the Jutes in Kent, southern Hampshire, and

the Isle of Wight; the Saxons in the part of England south of the Thames;

and the Angles in the rest of England as far north as the Firth of Forth),

the invaders drove the indigenous Celtic-speaking peoples, notably the

Britons, to the north and west. As time went on, Old English evolved

further from the original Continental form, and regional dialects

developed. The four major dialects recognized in Old English are Kentish,

originally the dialect spoken by the Jutes; West Saxon, a branch of the

dialect spoken by the Saxons; and Northumbrian and Mercian, subdivisions of

the dialects spoken by the Angles. By the 9th century, partly through the

influence of Alfred, king of the West Saxons and the first ruler of all

England, West Saxon became prevalent in prose literature. The Latin works

of St Augustine, St Gregory, and the Venerable Bede were translated, and

the native poetry of Northumbria and Mercia were transcribed in the West

Saxon dialect. A Mercian mixed dialect, however, was preserved for the

greatest poetry, such as the anonymous 8th-century epic poem Beowulf and

the contemporary elegiac poems.

Old English was an inflected language characterized by strong and weak

verbs; a dual number for pronouns (for example, a form for “we two” as well

as “we”), two different declensions of adjectives, four declensions of

nouns, and grammatical distinctions of gender. These inflections meant that

word order was much freer than in the language today. There were two

tenses: present-future and past. Although rich in word-building

possibilities, Old English was sparse in vocabulary. It borrowed few proper

nouns from the language of the conquered Celts, primarily those such as

Aberdeen (“mouth of the Dee”) and Inchcape (“island cape”) that describe

geographical features. Scholars believe that ten common nouns in Old

English are of Celtic origin; among these are bannock, cart, down, and

mattock. Although other Celtic words not preserved in literature may have

been in use during the Old English period, most Modern English words of

Celtic origin, that is, those derived from Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, or

Irish, are comparatively recent borrowings.

The number of Latin words, many of them derived from the Greek, that were

introduced during the Old English period has been estimated at 140. Typical

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