History of Linguistic

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. Commonly, it is known as diachronic linguistics. The term diachronic is derived from Greek dia- ‘’through’’ + chronos ‘’time’’ + -ic. Diachronic linguistics concerned to language change or language over time, for example we study linguistics changes from Old English to Modern English.  While synchronic linguistics refers to a language at a one point in time. 

The changing of language appeared in each period. There are four periods of linguistic changes, Old English, Middle English, Early of Modern English and Modern English. If we want to see the linguistic changes in each period, we can see the changes in translation of the Bible below, as a small sample from various stages of English. 

1.      Old English (The West-Saxon Gospels, c. 1050):

þa æfter lytlum fyrste genēalæton þa ðe þær stodon, cwædon to petre. Soðlice þu aert of hym, þyn spræc gesweotolað.

(Literally: then after little first approached they that there stood, said to peter. Truly thou art of them, thy speech thee makes clear.)

2.      Middle English (The Wycliff Bible, fourteen century):

And a litil aftir, thei that stooden camen, and seiden to Petir, treuli thou art of hem; for thi speche makith thee knowun.

3.      Early Modern English (The King James Bible, 1611):

And after a while came vnto him they that stood by, and siade to Peter, Surely thou also art one of them, for thy speech bewrayeth thee.

4.      Modern English (The New English Bible, 1961):

Shortly afterwards the bystanders came up and said to Peter, ‘surely you are another of them; your accent gives you away!’ (Campbell, 1998: 7).

It is common for one language to take words from another language and make them part of its own language (loanwords), and the process of it is called borrowing. In borrowing, of course, there are two or more languages that mixed up with the borrowing; the language which borrows or recipient language and the language which is borrowed from or donor languages.

There are some matters that we have to know in borrowing. The first is about loanword. Loanword is a word which has been ‘borrowed’ from another language. A word that originally was not part of the vocabulary of the recipient language but was adopted from some other and made a part of the borrowing language’s vocabulary, for example, Old English did not have the word pork; this became an English word only after it was adopted from French porc ‘pig, pork’,borrowed in the late Middle English period, so the word pork is a French loanword in English. French has also borrowed words from English, for example bifteck ‘beefsteak’, and see the example of English’s words that was borrowed from another language;

English’s words	Donor words and its country
ketchup	from Malay kechap, taken by Dutch as ketjap
chocolate	from Spanish chocolate
Flour	from French fleur
tomato	from Spanish tomate
Juice	from French jus
Pantry	from Old Frech paneterie
pepper	from Germanic people via Latin piper
and so on	……

In English case, linguistic change was happened because of some colonizer came to England, such as Roman, German, Scandinavian, France, and so on. Of course, when new people and new language had come to a country, the amalgamation between two peoples and also two languages appeared between them and it will influence to the native language.

We can take the history of other countries, when they came to England. Roman as the first colonizer, conquered some districts in England, then brought Christian religion to England, whereas at that time the People of England as paganism. In this case, Roman used Latin as the language in the church and also in the Bible. Of course, people of England learned Latin, and automatically two languages mixed in England.

The second new comer was German. German (Anglo and Saxon) came to England not for conquered, but they came to England because of an appeal for help of Celt (one of the district in England that was conquered by Roman).

The third of new comer in England was Scandinavian (Denmark). When Scandinavian came to England, the amalgamation of two peoples appeared between them. Of course, it had impact to the English, for example: Scandinavian countries it retained its hard sk sound. Consequently, while native words like ship, shall, fish have sh in Modern English, words borrowed from the Scandinavians are generally still pronounced with sk: sky, skin, skill, scrape, scrub, bask, whisk.

The next of colonizer was Norman (the people from French; Normandy). When Norman came to England, English was used for the lower class and middle class, whereas French was used for the upper class and middle class. In this period, two languages also mixed in England’s society. The middle class should learn two languages (English and French) because their position as a bridge, that was to connect between lower class and upper class. The lower class also learned French because they had married with the Norman. The influence of the foreign languages to English was not only in words form but also pronunciation, grammatical gender, adjective, definite article, syntax and so on. All of them gave impact to the linguistic change. 

MK