The English Classical Inheritance

As it happened to Latin in relation to Romance languages, varieties of English have developed autonomously during centuries, shaping into different languages. Some linguists consider this being the cause of the death of English, while others address this issue as a natural consequence of usage. What is sure is that, generally speaking, Natural languages are characterized by an intrinsic fluidity, which implies changes and continuous modifications, even in the deepest of their essence.

As for Latin, it will probably happen that English will survive only to guarantee the understanding among speakers of English varieties as well as of different languages: having Latin been used for more than 500 years as undisputed communication medium, it decayed after AD 400. It was restored during the 18th Century as high institutional language and used to be acquired though formal instruction: early after the Medieval Period, English “grammar schools” adopted Latin grammar and learning methods as everyday tool to convey Classical Education. So doing, the Classical method reached other European countries and likewise affected their educational systems, their literatures and languages.

Remounting to the 4th Century, Latin had already penetrated the English cultural and linguistic system, as it was the language of the Vulgate Bible version. Thanks to the stylistic contribution of Saint Augustine, this kind of Latin was positively received and adopted in England by Aldhelm (7th C.), Bede (7th-8th C.), Alcuin (8th-9th C.) and Aelfric (10th-11th C.9. But only thanks to King Alfred’s translation of the Bible from Latin into Anglo-Saxon (9th C.) we can assert the prose writing tradition been founded and a new language, the nowadays called Old English, affirmed. Nevertheless, writing in Classical Latin was the most common habit and translations were not fully considered until the 16th Century because no dialect had yet developed into dominant language.

Classical Latin survived because of its not being subject to the transformation laws of Natural languages. In the same way, English will probably survive thanks to its being globally used and recognized. But the history of standardization of English began in the early 17th Century, when the first English dictionaries were compiled with the purpose of recording and establishing meanings and uses of words. This process stimulated the creation of new terms, often borrowed from Latin or Greek, together with the modelling of an “acrolectal” English. As a matter of fact, English suffered some kind of hybridization due to code mixing: learned men had been using it for generations, taking words, phrases and sentences from Latin right into English maybe with the intent of ennobling the everyday speaking and writing.

This effort brought to the birth of a dual system, where vernacular and Latin-derived words actually coexist, having similar denotation but distinct connotations and associations. Generally, English vernacular derived words own a strong and physical meaning, while Latin derived ones are more abstract. But if lexical parallelism could have been noticed even in Classical Latin, with its debt towards Ancient Greek (see for example the words coordination/parataxis) can we assert that also English owes to Greek some of its lexicon? Of course, in fact it is not rare to find three English adjectives bound to the same sphere of meaning (see the vernacular “earthy”, the Latin-derived “terrestrial” and the Greek derived “geologic”). An English mother tongue speaker will be supposed to use each of the three levels for a specific intent. The vernacular level is often the level that children and foreigners learn first. It includes basic words, usually short ones; they may have many meanings and concur to the creation of phrasal verbs (i.e. do/look/make/put/get etc.). The Latin derived lexicon is always used in written and formal production. Words are often long and “sophisticated”; although some French derived ones such as “form, operate, derive” have been widely introduced into everyday life language, the majority keeps the original technical quality (collaboration, pejorative, arbitrary). Greek derived words adapted into Latin, French or English are always analytical and specialized, commonly used in medical or scientific fields.

Certainly, most of the International Standard English users do not feel at ease with this “spectrum” of words, this wide usage inherited from Anglo-Scandinavian, French, Latin and Greek. This is partly due to the little care and lack of interest users place on the understanding of the history of Standard English and on how this has affected the nature and use of today’s language.

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Tags: english, Etymology, french, greek, latin

Category: Foreign Language