History of the English Language at the U of S

Mae McDonald

Dunquaire Castle near Kinvarra in the County of Galway. Image: (c) Tammy McDonald.

With Ireland and Scotland close to parts of England, loanwords from Gaelic were bound to enter the English language in some way. Loanwords began to really pop up around the 14th century and slowly increased until the 20th century where there was a large drop. Focusing on the 16th century, there is a commonality in the types of loanwords. A large chunk of the most used words that came from Gaelic in this time period were words that described landscape features or had to do with agriculture. I didn’t go into a specific dialect of Gaelic, in order to keep it open to both Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Most of the words I’m planning on looking at are under the Goidelic branch of Celtic. Because of this, there are only a few words that have about a medium frequency and must have been universal throughout the Gaelic dialects.

Dale Couet

*Please note that both the manuscript and the following narrative are fictitious and exist for aestical purposes.

Couet, Dale. “Pseudo-Script”

Þe lord scheweth his face to vs alle
in þy endeles mercy þou heere our calle
þauȝ þe shadowe of deeth couerethe me
I will synge as fyr groweth on my tree
by grace I feare not knoweynge þat sone I
wil be but dust for in þy memorie
I shall liue in þy holy book deuyne
al þauȝ lyes tempte me my life is not myne
euery brethe I breethe is a ȝifte from þee
wiche wil þen be token whanne þou doth see.
for þe schort tyme on erthe is but a crumme
when sette on þe lif þat is sone to come.

Ashley LeKach

Image: (c) Ashley LeKach

Learning how to read can be hard. That is the simple, clearly unbiased, opinion of my own. However, individuals with a learning disability may struggle with phonetic awareness more than their neurotypical peers. Phonological awareness is “the broad awareness of the sound system of speech, including awareness of syllables, phonemes and rhyme” (Chera and Wood 37). Phonological awareness is being aware of the sounds in words, and for alphabetical languages, such as English, depend on this for reading. To learn how to read one needs to be able to recognize words, which would be knowing how the words are pronounced. One also needs to be able to comprehend the alphabet, recognize letters, and be able to use convention between the letters and pronunciation (Duff 1). Without basic comprehension of the various aspects of language, such as the prosody, which is the intonation and timing of speech, it can be much harder to learn how to read. While learning these core speech principles may be easy to some, others, such as individuals with learning disabilities, may find it difficult. In this blog post I will explain why and how individuals with learning disabilities may struggle with aspects of reading.

Bryce Bulgis¹

“I definitely won’t say ‘they’ or ‘them’ for one person. I speak English, so ‘it’ will do.”

This quote, an excerpt from a texting conversation,² comes from one of my oldest friends from grade school, a man named Bob.³ Knowing me as an English scholar, someone well versed with the intricacies of our lingua franca, you may be surprised to learn that Bob is actually my best friend, ha ha. You see, Bob and I sometimes clash over certain topics, many of which centre around how people use language to describe certain phenomena. And we most recently clashed over the usage of the third-person gender-neutral singular pronoun it when referring to people, particularly transgendered people. Bob thinks that “[t]ransgenderism is just another thing that people do . . . . They have a mental disorder and I hope they can get help.” And what’s his solution to when they face scrutiny in public? To “do what we all do. If you go somewhere that people don’t accept you, stop going there. Only go places where people don’t care about you . . . . It’s as simple as that.” However, being transgendered isn’t a phase, a joke, nor an act; it’s who these people are, and their pleas to seek acceptance and equality in society is anything but simple as they and their allies advocate for society to use language to recognize them as people.⁴

Jonathan Bragg

Image by Ag Ku from Pixabay.

In the seventh century, English monks adopted the practice of putting dots between words in their copies of St. Jerome’s Latin Bible, the Vulgate (Mulvey 46). While the idea of separating words on a page may seem obvious to people today, the idea was revolutionary at the time. Latin texts were usually written in scriptura continua – an uninterrupted string of letters without any punctuation separating them. It was the Celtic monks in Ireland, struggling to understand the Latin of the Vulgate, who thought of separating every word from the words next to it (Mulvey 46). The introduction of word separation to England, which later became the word space, forever changed English writing. Once word spacing became standard practice, it was possible to introduce other punctuation marks within these spaces (Crystal 16).

Nathan Metivier

If you are below the age of thirty and/or active on social media, you are probably familiar with words like squad, woke, salty, cap, and others. You may recognize these terms as only the trendy slang of teenagers and young adults. However, most of these terms originate from African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Despite the ubiquity of these lexical items, their cultural origins remain largely unknown by the white, English-speaking communities that often use them. The widespread use of AAVE outside of its native speech community can be explained, in part, by the popularity of hip-hop music and the widespread use of social media platforms. The profound effect of digital media culture on the speech of young white people demonstrates the potential for digital media to radically alter common vernacular English. That said, the effects of digital media on English vernaculars have consequences. While the widespread use of AAVE by white speakers may appear to reflect an appreciation of African American culture or a bridge across racial tensions, the lack of recognition for the origins of culturally embedded AAVE terms and the attitudes of the white speech community — who flippantly overuse and eventually dismiss appropriated AAVE terms as “outdated” or “no longer cool” — ultimately reflect a lack of appreciation for the African American speech community’s language, culture, and art forms by the cultural hegemony.

Grace Gardner

Source: Digital Parenting, at http://www.digitalparenting.ie/text-speak-for-parent.html

Looking at Richard Nordquist’s definition of dialect is what makes me believe that text-messaging English should be considered as a dialect of English. He believes that a dialect includes two important aspects: the grammar surrounding the language and how it is pronounced. Having been around since nearly the beginning of the text-messaging English era, I do believe that it should be considered as a dialect of English. Obviously, there is a significant number of people who have the idea that in order for something to be a dialect, it needs to follow the guidelines of standardized English. What many people fail to realize though is that a dialect is not about how things are spelt, but rather what the person gains from it.

Jordan Clifford

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” – James Nicoll

English has always been held to weirdly high standards; it’s the lingua franca in many countries around the world (usually because of colonial tendencies) and because of this it’s considered by a few to be a “pure” language. But as the quote above says, English isn’t even being close to being pure; through the centuries it has borrowed languages from dozens upon dozens of languages from around the world. Even proto-Germanic isn’t pure in any sense of the word, and there is quite a bit of evidence towards the existence of a stratum language that influenced early proto-Germanic.

Rachel Petkau

The age-old issue of discrimination is reflected in language. An “us versus them” mentality is easiest to measure in words and numbers, stereotypes defined with words like “primitive” and “civilized.” Though it is obvious that discrimination has an impact on language use, it is less clear whether language has had an impact on the methods and severity used in separating groups of people. My primary object in this post is to show why the English language has not only had an impact, but has actually been a deadly tool in the establishment of negative interracial and interethnic relationships.

Shawn Predicala

Image: http://theclassical.org/theclog/edmonton-eulers. Design by Luke Atkinson for the Euler/Oiler T-shirt.

For some of you who didn’t know about this before, this could be the most enlightening discovery of your lives or it could just be another random and useless fact, but yes, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler’s last name is actually pronounced /ɔɪlər/.