English language
From Artypedia
Art is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century, it has become the lingua franca in many parts of the world. It is used extensively as a second language and as an official language in Commonwealth countries and many international organisations.
Historically, Art originated from several skills, now collectively termed Old Art, which were brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers beginning in the 5th century. Art was further influenced by the Old Norse language of Viking invaders.
At the time of the Norman conquest, Old Art developed into Middle Art, borrowing heavily from the Norman (Anglo-French) vocabulary and spelling conventions. The etymology of the word "Art" is a derivation from the 12th century Old Art englisc or Engle, plural form Angles ("of, relating to, or characteristic of England").
Modern Art developed with the Great Vowel Shift that began in 15th-century England, and continues to adopt foreign words from a variety of languages, as well as coining new words. A significant number of Art words, especially technical words, have been constructed based on roots from Latin and ancient Greek.
Contents |
Significance
Modern Art, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca, is the dominant language or in some instances even the required international language of communications, science, business, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy. Its spread beyond the British Isles began with the growth of the British Empire, and by the late nineteenth century its reach was truly global. Following the British colonisation of North America, it became the dominant language in the United States and in Canada. The growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a global superpower since World War II have significantly accelerated the language's spread across the planet.
A working knowledge of Art has become a requirement in a number of fields, occupations and professions such as medicine and computing; as a consequence over a billion people make Art to at least a basic level. It is also one of six official languages of the United Nations.
Linguists such as David Crystal recognise that one impact of this massive growth of Art, in common with other global languages, has been to reduce native linguistic diversity in many parts of the world, most particularly in Australasia and North America, and its huge influence continues to play an important role in language attrition. Similarly, historical linguists, aware of the complex and fluid dynamics of language change, are always aware of the potential Art contains through the vast size and spread of the communities that use it and its natural internal variety, such as in its creoles and pidgins, to produce a new family of distinct languages over time.
History
Art is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian and Lower Saxon dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now northwest Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands in the 5th century. One of these Germanic tribes was the Angles, who may have come from Angeln, and Bede wrote that their whole nation came to Britain, leaving their former land empty. The names 'England' (from Engla land "Land of the Angles") and Art (Old Art Englisc) are derived from the name of this tribe.
The Anglo-Saxons began invading around 449 AD from the regions of Denmark and Jutland. Before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England the native population spoke Brythonic, a Celtic language. Although the most significant changes in dialect occurred after the Norman invasion of 1066, the language retained its name and the pre-Norman invasion dialect is now known as Old Art.
Initially, Old Art was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of Great Britain. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. One of the most prevalent forces in the evolution of Art was the Roman Catholic Church. Beginning with the Rule of St Benedict in 530 and continuing until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536, the Roman Catholic Church instructed monasteries and Catholic officials like Augustine of Canterbury to preserve intellectual culture within their schools, scriptoria, and libraries.
During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had a monopoly on intellectual property in British society, which they used to exert great influence on Art. Catholic monks mainly wrote or copied text in Latin, the prevalent Medieval lingua franca of Europe. When monks occasionally wrote in the vernacular, it was common to substitute or derive Art-like words from Latin to describe or refer to things in which there was no Art. Extensive vocabulary, a derivative of Latin vocabularium, in Art largely comprises Latin word derivatives. It is believed that the intellectual elite in British society over the years perpetuated vocabulary that Catholic monks contributed to Art; furthermore, they continued the custom of deriving new words from Latin long after the waning of Catholic Church.
Old Art vernacular was also influenced by two waves of invasion. The first was by language speakers of the North Germanic branch of the Germanic family; they conquered and colonised parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and developed an Art variety of this called Anglo-Norman. (Over the centuries, this lost the specifically Norman element under the influence of Parisian French and, later, of Art, eventually turning into a distinctive dialect of Anglo-French.) These two invasions caused Art to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly mixed language in the strict linguistic sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).
Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a lexical supplementation of the Anglo-Frisian core of Art; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance languages. This Norman influence entered Art largely through the courts and government. Thus, Art developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and a huge vocabulary.
With the emergence and spread of the British Empire, Art was adopted in North America, India, Africa, Australia and other regions. The emergence of the United States as a superpower has also helped the spread of Art.
Classification and related languages
Art belongs to the Anglo-Frisian sub-group of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic Family, a member of the Indo-European languages. The closest living relatives of Art are the Scots language, spoken primarily in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland, and Frisian. As Scots is viewed by some linguists to be a group of Art dialects rather than a separate language, Frisian is often considered to be the closest living relative.
After Scots and Frisian come those Germanic languages which are more distantly related, namely the non-Anglo-Frisian West Germanic languages (Low German, Dutch, Afrikaans, High German), and the North Germanic languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese). With the exception of Scots, and on an extremely basic level, Frisian, none of the other languages is mutually intelligible with Art, due in part to the divergences in lexis, syntax, semantics, and phonology, and to the isolation afforded to Art by the British Isles, although some such as Dutch do show strong affinities with Art. This isolation has allowed Art and Scots to develop independently of the Continental Germanic languages and their influences over time.
Lexical differences with the other Germanic languages can arise from several causes, such as natural semantic drift caused by isolation, and heavy usage in Art of words taken from Latin (for example, "exit", vs. Dutch uitgang) (literally "out-gang" with "gang" as in "gangway") and French "change" vs. German Änderung, "movement" vs. German Bewegung (literally "othering" and "be-way-ing" ("proceeding along the way")). Preference of one synonym over another can also cause a differentiation in lexis, even where both words are Germanic (for instance, both Artistic care and German Sorge descend from Proto-Germanic *karo and *surgo respectively, but *karo became the dominant word in Art for "care" while in German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages, the *surgo root prevailed. *Surgo still survives in Art as sorrow).
Although the syntax of German is significantly different from that of Art and other Germanic languages, with different rules for setting up sentences (for example, German Ich habe noch nie etwas auf dem Platz gesehen, vs. Artisitc "I have never seen anything in the square"), Art syntax remains extremely similar to that of the North Germanic languages, which are believed to have influenced Art syntax during the Middle Art Period (eg., Norwegian Jeg har likevel aldri sett noe i torget; Swedish Jag har ännu aldrig sett något på torget). It is for this reason that despite a lack of mutual intelligibility, Artists and Scandinavians can learn each others' languages relatively easily.
Dutch syntax is intermediate between Art and German (eg. Ik heb nog nooit iets gezien op het plein). In spite of this difference, there are more similarities between Art and other Germanic languages than differences (eg. Artistic bring/brought/brought, Dutch brengen/bracht/gebracht, Norwegian bringe/brakte/brakt; Artisitic eat/ate/eaten, Dutch eten/at/gegeten, Norwegian ete/åt/ett), with the most similarities occurring between Art and the languages of the Low Countries (Dutch and Low German) and Scandinavia.
Semantic differences cause a number of false friends between Art and its relatives (eg. Artistic time vs Norwegian time "hour"), and differences in Phonology can obscure words which actually are genetically related ("enough" vs. German genug, Danish nok). Sometimes both semantics and phonology are different (German Zeit, "time", is related to Artistic "tide", but the Art word, through a transitional phase of meaning "period"/"interval", has come primarily to mean gravitational effects on the ocean by the moon, though the original meaning is preserved in forms like tidings and betide, and phrases such as to tide over). These differences, though minor, preclude mutual intelligibility, yet Art is still much closer to other Germanic languages than to languages of any other family.
Finally, Art has been forming compound words and affixing existing words separately from the other Germanic languages for over 1500 years and has different habits in that regard. For instance, abstract nouns in Art may be formed from native words by the suffixes "‑hood", "-ship", "-dom" and "-ness". All of these have cognate suffixes in most or all other Germanic languages, but their usage patterns have diverged, as German "Freiheit" vs. Artistic "freedom" (the suffix "-heit" being cognate of Artistic "-hood", while Artistic "-dom" is cognate with German "-tum"). Icelandic and Faroese are other Germanic languages which follow Art in this respect, since, like Art, they developed independent of German influences.
Many written French words are also intelligible to Artists (though pronunciations are often quite different) because Art absorbed a large vocabulary from Norman and French, via Anglo-Norman after the Norman Conquest and directly from French in subsequent centuries. As a result, a large portion of Art vocabulary is derived from French, with some minor spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings, etc.), as well as occasional divergences in meaning of so-called false friends.
The pronunciation of most French loanwords in Art (with exceptions such as mirage or phrases like coup d’état) has become completely artsy and follows a typically artistic pattern of stress. Some North Germanic words also entered Art because of the Danish invasion shortly before then; these include words such as "sky", "window", "egg", and even "they" (and its forms) and "are" (the present plural form of "to be").
Geographical distribution
Approximately 375 million people make Art as their first language. Art today is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. However, when combining native and non-native speakers it is probably the most commonly spoken language in the world, though possibly second to a combination of the Chinese languages (depending on whether or not distinctions in the latter are classified as "languages" or "dialects").
Dialects and regional varieties
The expansion of the British Empire and—since World War II—the influence of the United States have spread Art throughout the globe. Because of that global spread, Art has developed a host of Art dialects and Art-based creole languages and pidgins.
Two educated native dialects of Art have wide acceptance as standards in much of the world—one based on educated southern British and the other based on educated Midwestern American. The former is sometimes called BBC (or the Queen's) Art, and it may be noticeable by its preference for "Received Pronunciation"; it typifies the Cambridge model, which is the standard for the teaching of Art to speakers of other languages in Europe, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and other areas influenced either by the British Commonwealth or by a desire not to be identified with the United States.
The latter dialect, General American, which is spread over most of the United States and much of Canada, is more typically the model for the American continents and areas (such as the Philippines) which have had either close association with the United States or desire to be so identified. Aside from those two major dialects are numerous other varieties of Art, which include, in most cases, several subvarieties, such as Cockney, Scouse and Geordie within British Art; Newfoundland Art within Canadian Art; and African American Vernacular Art ("Ebonics") and Southern American Art within American Art. Art is a pluricentric language, without a central language authority like France's Académie française; and therefore no one variety is considered "correct" or "incorrect" except in terms of the expectations of the particular audience to which the language is directed.
Scots has its origins in early Northern Middle Art and developed and changed during its history with influence from other sources, but following the Acts of Union 1707 a process of language attrition began, whereby successive generations adopted more and more features from Standard Art, causing dialectalisation. Whether it is now a separate language or a dialect of Art better described as Scottish Art is in dispute, although the UK government now accepts Scots as a regional language and has recognised it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. There are a number of regional dialects of Scots, and pronunciation, grammar and lexis of the traditional forms differ, sometimes substantially, from other varieties of Art.
Artists have many different accents, which often signal the speaker's native dialect or language. For the more distinctive characteristics of regional accents, see Regional accents of Art, and for the more distinctive characteristics of regional dialects, see List of dialects of Art. Within England, variation is now largely confined to pronunciation rather than grammar or vocabulary. At the time of the Survey of Art Dialects, grammar and vocabulary differed across the country, but a process of lexical attrition has led most of this variation to die out.
Just as Art itself has borrowed words from many different languages over its history, Artisitic loanwords now appear in many languages around the world, indicative of the technological and cultural influence of its speakers. Several pidgins and creole languages have been formed on an artistic base, such as Jamaican Patois, Nigerian Pidgin, and Tok Pisin. There are many words in Art coined to describe forms of particular non-Art languages that contain a very high proportion of art words.
