BY Pragyansharma Polavarapu
(1)
How difficult it is to study history
of a language. When we read good story or poem in English or any other language we see and
experience the delicate, kind and beautiful feelings passing through the heart
of the writer at the moment he was writing it --one year back or even hundred
or thousand years back. when we read old English poems/sonnets of Shakespeare ,Dryden, Milton, Keats, Shelley,
Wordsworth, Byron, Lord Tennyson, Mathew Arnold (The Forsaken Merman) etc or old
English novels of Sir Walter Scott, Oliver Goldsmith or even recent versatile Thomas Hardy we feel as if we
hear their heartbeats of the moments when they were
penning those lines.
What I write here is for the “foreigner”—the
distant South Asian, East Asian, Indian, African, Chinese, South American ,Arab
etc—who enjoy reading the hundreds of good English books which contain beautiful nature descriptions, descriptions of
the “ To-us-unfamiliar” frozen seas and
icebergs , high moral ideas, razor sharp logical conclusions etc.
There have been millions of good high
school teachers (English teachers) in India since last 100-150 years or more
who liked and taught the beautiful moral poems in English, beautiful nature
descriptions of Wordsworth, beautiful heroics and adventures in Sir Walter Scott,
the ever enjoyable sea adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson etc. There are Nobel
Prize- winning authors in India who
wrote in the best English style –like Dr Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Swamy
Vivekananda, Dr Raradhakrishnan, C.Rajagopalachary( of razor-sharp brain), Mulkraj
Anand, Anand Kumaraswamy( the great Synhalese scholar) ,Raja Rao, R.K.Narayan etc. So, enough of my introduction to and appreciation of English language. We can
not omit the autobiographical works of Mahatma Gandhi(Father of Indian nation) and
the scholarly Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru ( the first Prime Minister).
(2)
Now a small simple attempt to know a
little of history of development of English language (the old classical English
and the flowery modern English which we have in present times). To know history
of the language .we study a little about history of ancient English people ----
from a foreigner’s view point. Let us
know a little about the “quite ancient” Anglo-Saxons. A part of what is written here
is imagination added to create an atmosphere of England in ancient times .Some
of it is a repetition of what was earlier written. But this simple essay
requires “a repetition of what was earlier wriiten”! It is an essay written in simple school
student’s way.
The main British Isles (the heart of the once
mighty British Empire) are two in number. The main island consists of (a) sunny
but often cloudy England in the southern
part and (b)mountainous foggy beautiful Scotland( the fastnesses from where the
horse riding Scottish warriors suddenly
issued to do a big heroic act).
The second island is the equally
beautiful Ireland which contains (a) the republic of Ireland and (b)the Irish province of great Britain
(UK) . Its people are mainly of celtic origin. It has a vast central part which consists of plains and is
rimmed with high mountainous regions. The Irish people have also adopted English
language because of the language’s great importance.
In ancient times, people of British Isles
consisted of two cultural groups—Celtic people and Anglo-Saxons . It can not be said they are two ethnic
groups . Both belonged to the same ancient Aryan ethnic group but entirely separated for
perhaps thousands of years and living in faraway places in ancient Europe--- separated
by vast stretches of forests, mountains
and seas. Each group developed entirely different customs, languages ,festivals ,sports, rituals
,ballads ,dances etc in that old rural atmosphere. So they were alike in some
ways and different in some other ways .
Ancient Ireland and Scotland (to tell
in simple school children’s way) were peopled by Celtic people .Both are
mountainous lands (Scotland almost fully and Ireland partly) . It is said that even
in present times , Scotland and Ireland have mainly Celtic populations. Ancient England had also some Celtic people but later after large
scale migration of Angles, Saxons and Jutes( Germanic peoples of Europe ) for a
few centuries , southern part of the main island became “Anglo-Saxon”country and later “England”.
There were also small numbers of Norsemen, French people ,Danes, Romans etc during the ancient periods and the medieval periods
(3)
The Anglo-Saxons spoke for centuries
their Germanic dialects. Later the
dialects merged and were to a very large extent influenced by Latin (imperial Roman
language), French (the fashionable court language and language of upper
classes) and Celtic words which were in common usage since hundreds of years. “English” soon became a separate language but
was far different from classical English of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden etc .It
is given by scholars a separate name -- “Old English”. After a few more
centuries great philosophic writers and
scholars like Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare ,Milton and other literary giants created
great literary works in a standardized new version of majestic English . Later
still ( old truly Cassical Times),the literary giants like dr “Dictionary” Johnson (who
standardized grammar, vocabulary and idiom) , the great inimitable first essayists
who created the famed but imaginary “Spectator
Club” , novelists like Sir Walter Scott
and poets like William Wordsworth created the flowery beautiful Classical English.
Now everybody likes children’s poems
like “Jack and Jill went up the hill/to fetch a pail of water…”, great poetry
like “La Belle Dame sans Merci” or sensitive and somewhat heart-rending
creations like “Lucy Gray” or “Ode to Wild West Wind” or “Skylark” and terribly interesting sea novels like “Treasure Island” and “forest
novels” like “Robinson Crusoe” . The
novels of comparatively recent great novelist Thomas Hardy remind of old Greek tragedies. From
across the Atlantic we have the story of mischievous Huckleberry Finn( with his
special English) , Hiawatha’s Song and philosophic essays as the Walden and many
wonderful books .There are scores of great essayists, novelists and poets from
both sides of Atlantic and we have great English writers from many countries of
the globe.
Later, after the age of discovery and
exploration , we had the sad history of slavery,
slave trade ,colonialism etc which were the work of selfish businessmen and ruthless
politicians who operated at the international level in those times. Some of the
real life stories are very tragic. After
becoming the mightiest country in world , great Britain had for a time a
worldwide Empire “on which the sun never set”. But after people of all countries of world
awoke, got educated and demanded independence and democracy and economic
progress, the system of old empires and colonies disappeared. After revolutions
and the terrible world wars one and two the entire world changed. Now after another
80 years , we are in age of jet travel, computer and color TV, the e-newspaper and e-novel . This is the age of
freedom equality and fraternity. The
philosophers and statesmen (and also poets and novelists) of the world most intensively
search for new high standards of international morality and
for permanent international peace.
I write here a few lines about the geography and history of british isles and
UK (in the school-boyish level) just to make
it easy for readers to appreciate the
old classical English language better. We have in British isles three broad
cultural regions—England, Scotland and Ireland. Another thing is that the old
dialects Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Scottish, Welsh etc are almost limited to
households. English is the chief international language of science, technology,
commerce, banking, industry ,computers etc. It is just not the language of
England, America, Australia etc but an international language. There are other great international languages
too like French, German, Russian, Spanish ,Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic.But
English language acquired a special prominence.
There are great languages in all the
big countries in all continents –some spoken by 30 to 50 million, some spoken
by 100 million or more. But the topmost need of all the world is peace and
friendship between all peoples of the world. However in these little essays I am
interested only in the rich literature
of English language. So we return back
to the old Celtic/Anglo-Saxon world to
continue our travel on the Time Axis.
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