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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).
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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
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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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