USING THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE CLASSROOM

Angélica Sáenz

Publicado en Capital Letter No. 4

Noviembre de 2003

   The history of the English language is a field of study that can be very useful for teachers. It should be regarded as a matter of cultural interest, an important part of the knowledge that every professional in languages must be able to recognize, reflect upon and most importantly, learn to use. In our particular case, teachers can use language history to explain with clarity and precision concepts and language patterns dealing with word formation, suffixation, pronunciation, the tense system, and in general, all of the cases which are regarded as "exceptions" such as the plural of the nouns "child" and "ox". Students are most convinced, and our contributions are best welcome when a supporting reason with a historical background accompanies them.

   The purpose of this article, then, is to present some of the English Language peculiarities which are considered "exceptional" and to provide the historical conditions that support their existence, so that teachers can use them in the classroom to expand their presentations of grammar issues.

   1. Why is the plural of "child", "children" and not "childs"?

   English was a highly inflected language before the renaissance period. Before the XV Century a great loss of inflections took place and this language became much simpler in this respect. One of the few inflectional endings that survived the reduction was the "s" attached to nouns to mark plurals. However, certain nouns used the mutations of vowels to indicate plurals (mice-mouse, foot-feet) and few others used unchanged plurals (sheep). Some nouns used the inflectional ending "-n" (old weak plural) in the XVI Century but later changed it to "-s": kneen (knees), fleen (fleas); Shakespeare used eyen (eyes) and shoon (shoes). Today, the only plurals in use with this inflection are children "children" and "oxen".

   2. Why does English use 's to indicate possession?

   When English was an inflected language, possession, just as with Latin and German was marked with the genitive case. The inflection in Middle English for marking genitive in most nouns was "-es" but since it was unaccented, it was pronounced and written "-is" or "-ys". Its pronunciation was identical to "his", for the "h" was very often not pronounced. Ever since the thirteenth Century the ending marking genitive (-is) was written separately from the noun (ston is) as if the genitive case were a contraction on the noun and the possessive pronoun "his". Thus, (ston is and ston his) gave origin to the structure ston's (his stone) which has survived until our days.

Bibliography: Albert Baugh and Thomas Cable A history of the English Language. Prentice Hall, 1978, U.S.A.