Proposed by Mary Frentzou
e-mail: marifrent@yahoo.com

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Information retrieved from  “LINGUARMONY, an introduction to European Languages for young people”. (Published by European Cultural Organization Social Education).

The English language belongs to the Anglo-Friesian* group, the western branch of Germanic languages.

Today it is an alloy of German, Latin and French origin words.

The history of English language is divided into three periods: Old English, known formerly as Anglo-Saxon (5^th century-1100), Middle English (1100-1500), and Modern English (Renaissance-today), which is subdivided into Early Modern English (1500-1660) and Late Modern English (1660- present time).

The first written documents date back to the mid-5^th century. Until the 7^th century, the written production is limited to inscriptions, isolated words and poems.

During the Middle English period, the language of administration was French and  Latin was widely used by writers and educated people.

Present day English appears as an entirely different language from this earlier form as the evolution and differentiation that took place over 1000 years are very great.

The Norman conquest of England had tremendous linguistic consequences. Normans  spoke French and the strong influence of the ancient  French on syntax and mainly on vocabulary, with thousands

of words and derivatives in practically all fields of English, was decisive for the future forms of the language. Had the Normans failed to conquer England, present day English would have maintained its Germanic Anglo-Saxon nature and would look like an intermediary between Dutch and German with a few Latin, Greek and French words.

Today, after the Norman conquest and the second French linguistic influence (17^th-16^th century) English appears as a Latinized form of Germanic dialect, with only 1/5 of its vocabulary being Anglo-Saxon.

The English language is both easy and difficult. It is easy as to its morphology but difficult as to its pronunciation, with a complex phonetic system. It is  a unique phenomenon of a language in which some eight thousand words have an undefined pronunciation or uncertain stress, e.g. the adjective Byzantine can be pronounced in three different ways.

English is a language of consonants, with vowels having a frequency of 37,4%. It is estimated that around 60% of syllables end with a consonant.

The rendering of the vowels is quite different from the rendering of the same phonemes in the other languages; this combined to the fact that English has vowels unknown by most European languages, is one of the reasons very few foreigners manage to imitate exactly the English accent

The distinction between short and long vowels is essential, as it  is often the only way of differentiating the meaning of two words sounding exactly the same, e.g. leave and live.

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*Friesian or Frisian the Germanic language most closely related to English spoken in Friesland, a province in the N. Netherlands, and nearby islands in the North Sea.