The Evolution and Grammar of English

English language: evolution, classification, and history

• English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England.

• Old English dialects evolved from a group of North Sea Germanic dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century.

• Middle English began in the late 11th century after the Norman Conquest of England, when considerable Old French and Latin-derived vocabulary was incorporated into English.

• Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the start of the Great Vowel Shift and the Renaissance trend of borrowing further Latin and Greek words and roots into English.

• Modern English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspects, and moods, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives, and some negation.

• Modern English has spread around the world since the 17th century as a consequence of the worldwide influence of the British Empire and the United States of America.

• English is the most spoken language in the world and the third most spoken native language in the world.

• English is either the official language or one of the official languages in 59 sovereign states.

• English is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union, and many other international and regional organisations.

• English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares innovations with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German, and Swedish.

• Old English is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand because its grammar was similar to that of modern German.

• Early Modern English literature includes the works of William Shakespeare and the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I.English is the world’s most widely spoken language, with 400 million people speaking it as their first language and 1.1 billion people speaking it as a second language. English spread through the British Empire, which had colonies all over the world, and through international communication, commerce, science, technology, art, and formal education. Samuel Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, which introduced standard spellings of words and usage norms, and Noah Webster published the American Dictionary of the English language in 1828 to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent of the British standard. In modern English, there has been a loss of grammatical case, and SVO word order is mostly fixed. The loss of case and the introduction of loanwords from French and word replacements have affected sentence structure. Standard English is maintained purely by the consensus of educated English-speakers around the world. English is a pluricentric language, which means that no one national authority sets the standard for use of the language. English is used as a global language, with most people learning it for practical rather than ideological reasons. English is used in mass entertainment, international trade, scientific publishing, international telecommunications, and diplomacy. It is also one of six official languages of the United Nations and is the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations. The increased use of the English language globally has had an effect on other languages, leading to some English words being assimilated into the vocabularies of other languages.Overview of English Phonetics and Phonology

• English phonetics and phonology vary between dialects, affecting the inventory of phonemes and pronunciation of those phonemes.

• Most English dialects share the same 24 consonant phonemes, with fortis and lenis obstruents pronounced differently.

• RP and GA are the standard pronunciations for the UK and US respectively, with slight variations in their phoneme inventories and allophones.

• Vowel pronunciation differs greatly between dialects, with RP distinguishing vowel length, while GA does not.

• English syllables have a specific structure and can start with up to three consonants and end with up to five, with certain restrictions on consonant clusters.

• Stress in English is phonemic and is used to distinguish between words and phrases. English is generally considered a stress-timed language.

• Regional variation in English pronunciation is most noticeable in vowel pronunciation, with differences between BrE, AmE, and other standard varieties.

• English grammar follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment, with personal pronouns retaining morphological case more strongly than other word classes.

• English distinguishes at least seven major word classes and uses auxiliary verbs to express mood and aspect.

• New nouns can be formed through derivation or compounding, and nouns are divided into proper and common nouns, concrete and abstract nouns, and count and mass nouns.English Grammar: A Comprehensive Overview

• Noun phrases (NP) can consist of one or more nouns, adjectives, determiners, and specifiers, and function as a syntactic unit.

• Determiners are used to specify the definiteness or quantity of a noun, and are the first constituents in an NP.

• English adjectives modify nouns, and come before the nouns they modify and after determiners.

• English pronouns conserve many traits of case and gender inflection, with personal pronouns having a subjective and objective case, and an animateness and gender distinction.

• Prepositional phrases (PP) are composed of a preposition and one or more nouns, and have a wide range of uses in English.

• English verbs are inflected for tense and aspect, and marked for agreement with present-tense third-person singular subject. Auxiliary verbs such as have and be are paired with verbs in the infinitive, past, or progressive forms.

• English has two primary tenses, past and non-past, with the future tense expressed periphrastically using auxiliary verbs.

• Adverbs modify the action or event described by the verb by providing additional information about the manner in which it occurs.

• English word order is almost exclusively subject-verb-object, and the grammatical roles of each constituent are marked through word order.

• A sentence may be composed of one or more clauses, with subordinate clauses often functioning as arguments of the verb in the main clause.

• Relative clauses are clauses that function as a modifier or specifier to some constituent in the main clause.

• English makes frequent use of constructions traditionally called phrasal verbs, verb phrases that are made up of a verb root and a preposition or particle that follows the verb.