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History of English Language

a common source language were reconstructed named Proto-Indo-European (Crystal, 1997).The Proto-Indo-European language was more complex than English today. It is possible to reconstruct three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and up to eight cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative, instrumental). Adjectives agreed in case, number, and gender with the noun. The verb system was also rich in inflections, used for aspect, mood, tense, voice, person, and number. Different grammatical forms of a word were often related by the feature of ablaut, or vowel graduation: the root vowel would change systematically to express such differences as singular and plural or past and present tense, as is still the case in English foot/feet or take/took (Crystal, 1997).The Proto-Indo-European language is thought to have been spoken before 3,000 BC, and to have split up into different languages during the following millennium (Crystal, 1997). The languages families include Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Armenian, Anatolian, Albanian, Greek, Balto-Slavic, and Slavic languages. Yiddish, German, Afrikaans, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English make up the West Germanic subgroup of the Germanic Branch (Crystal, 1997). Scholars renamed the language group the Indo-European family after 3,000 BC (Crystal, 1997). Theorists suggest that the horse was a major element of the Proto-Indo-European and the Indo-European family of languages. They speculate that warriors who conquered from horse-drawn chariots spread the culture. The Proto-Indo-European, the Indo-European, and specifically the Germanic language, of which English is a derivative, influenced the early history of the English Language. The early history of the English language began in Britain and with several groups of people. At first people migrated to the placed now called England. Several invading groups joined the original settlers of England...

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