Fancy Dress and sunnyside, 2013 April 13th.

Origins and Sources

Origins and sources

1.1 Introduction

When did English begin? The question is often asked, but the answer is

surprisingly dull. The standard view is that English began when the

Anglo-Saxons began to settle in Britain. Who, then, were the Anglo-

Saxons? Where did they come from? And when did they come to Britain?

From the accounts of Roman historians, especially Tacitus, we know

that Germanic tribes had spread over northern Europe by the time of

Christ. Such tribes did not form any unified confederation. Rather, they

seemed to have been organised on a small group basis. Before the fifth

century, the spread of these tribes did not include any part of Britain.

Until  410 most of Britain had been under Roman control, although

the native inhabitants were Celts, speaking various forms of Celtic,

which give us present-day Welsh, Irish, Gaelic and (in Brittany) Breton,

as well as the now-dead languages Cornish and Manx. No doubt many

Celts also spoke Latin, the language of the Roman Empire.

Until the fifth century, therefore, there were few Germanic speakers

in Britain, and most of those were almost certainly either in the Roman

army or camp followers. But with the departure of the Romans, the

continental Germanic tribes saw in Britain a nearby land ripe for the

picking. The eighth-century English historian Bede tells of how, in

 449, Hengist and Horsa were invited by the Celtic king Vortigern to

help him against his enemies, and how they proceeded to establish a

base for themselves in Kent. Bede also says that these first settlers came

from three Germanic tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. Bede’s

account, no matter how careful, cannot be an entirely accurate reflection

of what happened three centuries earlier, a period for which there were

no contemporary records and whose history was recorded orally and

passed down from generation to generation.

The language these settlers spoke was called Englisc (= English) by

them, but it could not have been very different from the languages

1

spoken by those they had left behind on the mainland of Europe. Of

course, if you compare present-day English with German or Dutch or

Frisian you will immediately notice many differences. But these were

absent, or only minimally present during the Anglo-Saxon period. In the

last 1,500 years English has grown less and less Germanic in character. It

is important to stress that there is a continuous, if sometimes shaky, line

of development between Old English and present-day English. There is

more in common between the two than first meets the eye, and I shall try

to demonstrate these common factors as often as possible.

1.2 Indo-European and Germanic

I have introduced the term Germanic but have not given an explanation

of it. So what does it mean? First of all, I should say that it does

not equate to German. German is indeed a Germanic language, but

Germanic is the term used to describe a group of languages which share

a particular set of characteristics unique to them. We shall shortly see

some examples of this, but here we need only list the more important

present-day languages which are of Germanic origin: English, Frisian,

Dutch, German, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish and,

outside Europe, Afrikaans (which is most closely related to Dutch). I

have arranged these languages in an order which, broadly speaking, and

ignoring the special case of Afrikaans, shows their relative linguistic

closeness to English.

But this is not the whole story. For, just as English, German and so on

all owe their origins to Germanic, so Germanic itself belongs to a much

larger language family. This family is known as Indo-European, and

to it belong other groups as well as Germanic, including Indic, Greek,

Romance, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic and other less well attested groups. The

various groupings stretch geographically from the Indian sub-continent

to Ireland. Note that this means that the other native languages of the

British Isles, Welsh, Irish and Gaelic, are ultimately related to English,

although only distantly.

It is probably very difficult to appreciate how similar the wide variety

of Indo-European languages are. This is partly simply because the relations

we are talking about stem from a period almost 10,000 years ago,

and for which we have no direct evidence. The way we overcome this

is by searching for what are called cognate forms. These are words

which share meanings over different languages and which appear to have

similar shapes. Thus, if we search for cognates in Sanskrit (an ancient

language of India), Greek, Latin and English, we find the following

words for ‘father’:

2 AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH

Sanskrit Greek Latin English

pita￣ pate￣r pater father

Notice that in the first three languages the first consonant is always p and

the middle one t, and we can guess that the final -r was somehow lost in

Sanskrit.

English looks different, especially in terms of the first consonant.

But if we compare not only ‘father’ with ‘pater’, but also other English

and Latin words, such as ‘fee’ and ‘pecus’, or ‘first’ and ‘primus’, ‘foot’ and

‘pedem’, you may be able to see that English f often corresponds to Latin

p. This process, which is called comparative reconstruction, is fraught

with dangers, but all I want to do here is to give you an idea of what is

done.

It is also possible to use comparative reconstruction on more closely

related languages, such as the Germanic group. Below I give some

examples of cognate forms from English, Dutch and German, and alongside

them I give the corresponding French words:

English Dutch German French

father vader Vater pere

foot voet Fuss pied

tooth tand Zahn dent

ten tien zehn dix

It will be clear that English and Dutch share much in common, and that

German is not hugely different (although the initial consonant t has

changed to z). Of course the reason for this is that all three are Germanic

languages. French, on the other hand, is a Romance language, deriving

from Latin. Therefore it is much more distantly related. Note that where

English has f French has p, just like the words for ‘father’ above. You

should also be able to work out that there is a further parallel relationship

between d and English t.

Novitiate Experiences of Novices 2012 - 13, Shillong

“Novitiate is a home, where we grow rich in our spiritual life” – Sebastian. B

“Novitiate personally is an assert. Living and experiencing, loving and caring in a family that of all necessary” – Robin

“A home where I nourished to be someone dedicated person for the love of God” – Edmund

“Novitiate life helps me to think about my life, to find the will of God.” – Kyrbasius.

“Sunnyside is a little heaven where in I unite myself with God through prayer, work and meditation.” – Kamborsing

“Novitiate is a place of deeping my spiritual life and to know how deepen my strength in God” – Sachin

“Novitiate life is to experience God and to discern my vocation according to His holy will” – Jacob

“It is a dwelling place for all those who are looking for true happiness in Christ” – George

“Novitiate is a house where a novice strives for a greater understanding of his divine vocation by living it to the full.” – Sebastian. M

“Novitiate life is a grace filled time, where a drastic change takes place in my habits and behavior”. Matthew. S

“Novitiate life is a place where I make a difference in my life” – Synshar

“Novitiate is the first step for a life journey with God” – Khlainbor

“For me novitiate is a spiritual banquet with the Lord” – Shemphang

“Novitiate is a place where I prune, break and mould myself to know God more deeply, to love God more intimately and to follow God more closely” – Narendra Lakra

Picnic to Nehru Part in Shillong, 2013