By Jason Pickett
October 14, 1066, the Battle of Hastings occurred, between Harold of England, and William the Conqueror of Normandy. With a title like Billy the Conqueror how can he afford to lose? William being a Norman, and therefore a Frenchman, defeated Harold at Hastings and brought with him the influence of his language French, and even better Latin. When the Normans brought their language hundreds of French words were borrowed into English, indeed it appeared as if Norman French would become the language of England, but its influence finally faded after more than a century of imposition.
The Normans brought with them Latin that currently makes up the majority of English vocabulary. The Norman invasion is said to be the beginning of Middle English. Middle English can be reflected in two very important written sources today the Magna Carta, and the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. The Magna Carta has significance in that it is the first official state document written in both English and Latin. This document basically gave more rights to the English barons, and took power away from the king. In Chaucer’s work Canterbury Tales he is the first to use vernacular English (as opposed to Latin or French) in a published writing. The English Chaucer uses is remarkably close to our own and phonetically even sounds very close to our own language today. It should be noted for future reference, Chaucer used an early form of a London dialect that eventually evolved into the sort of English we use today.
From 1100 to about 1700 AD there was a strange event in English history known as the Great Vowel Shift, which in effect is the reason why some spelling in English today is so confusing. ‘Great’ for instance sounds like ‘late’ or ‘straight’, yet the spelling is nothing alike for all of these, and ‘great’ is spelled very much like ‘breath’ and ‘heath’, and sounds nothing like these. Why this occurred is unknown, but it is repeatedly noted in historical texts. My personal belief is that French phonetics had much to do with it, causing the English to mispronounce many things with the French influence (Carruth, p1216)
The end of Middle English is generally thought to be around the year 1600 AD, and the start of the modern era is thought to have begun around that time. The reason is because the rapid progression of the evolution of English is thought to have been relatively stabilized because of a few things. Among these things are the invention of the printing press that was spoken of above, the printing press allowed for the written and therefore verbal language to stabilize through spreading a standard set of rules quickly. Another reason that it stabilized was due to a strong central government brought about by such English monarchs as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. A final and very important reason it stabilized was because London picked up importance as a commercial trading center that continued until the early nineteenth century (though it is still very important as a cultural and commercial trading center to this day). Before regional dialects of England were very different, and with the rise of London’s importance it unified English into the London dialect and in effect stabilized English as a language (Carruth p1217).