A look back on the nature of English language -The Asian Age

English as a language belongs to the category of inflectional languages. An inflectional language is one in which there is the use of inflection to indicate the relationships shared by the words occurring in a sentence. If we look back in time, we can quite easily notice three manifest stages or phases that the language has been through over the centuries since it first came into England through the Germans. It is the Germans who can be looked upon as the originator of the English language. Since then the language has come a long way in terms of evolution to become the modern English as we know it today. The inception of the journey of English as a language dates back to 450 A.D. Starting from there, we can identify three phases of evolution the language has gone through to become modern. The first phase begins from 450 A.D and lasts up to 1150 A.D. The second begins from 1150 A.D and extends up to 1500 A.D. The third begins from 1150 onwards and is still on. Hence, we can categorize the three phases as:

A)   450-1150= Old English Period / Period of full inflection (700 years )
B)   1150-1500= Middle English Period / Period of leveled inflection ( 350 years )
C)   1500 onwards = Modern English Period / Period of lost inflection ( 515 years to date )
Back in the first phase known as Old English, there used to be sentences in English like the following:
                    The doga bit the boyo.
                    The boyo bit the doga.

On the surface level, it may appear to us that the two sentences are opposite in meaning, while, surprisingly enough, they are quite identical. Now the explanation we have at disposal is very much one of sentences involving the use of inflection.  In the first sentence above, the subject or performer of the action expressed is the noun '' dog'' with the inflection ''a'' and the object or receiver of the action is the noun '' boy'' with the inflection ''o''. Whatever much of a grammatical sense we possess tells us that the entity before the verb is the subject and that after the verb is the object no matter what or where it is. That accounts for the probable misinterpretation of the two sentences as being contrary in meaning while in reality, it is not quite the case. Even when the subject '' doga'' and the object ''boyo'' interchange their positions, they still serve the same function in the sentences because in either case, they have retained their initial inflection (e.g '' a'' and ''o''). During the Old English Period, it was not the positions of the words that would determine the relationship a particular word would have with the other words in a linguistic context. It would be solely determined by the function of the inflection used with a particular word. In the examples above, we can see the inflection '' a '' indicating the doer or the subject and the inflection '' o '' indicating the doee or object. Hence,

the two sentences would have the same message for a speaker of the language during the Old English Period. De facto, there used to be inflections for almost anything and everything. The first phase is also known as the period of full inflection because during this period, the use of inflection was at its peak.  By the time the language got into the second stage, the use of inflections was halved. This is one reason why the second stage is often referred to as the period of leveled inflection. Finally, as the inflections kept on falling out of use and has now come down to just eight in number, as we see in modern English. Eight being a very insignificant number as compared to the past, modern English is often referred to as the period of lost inflection.

Now, we also have to take note of the fact that languages can be categorized as living or dead. Now we cannot think of languages as something having life as we can think of plants, animals, or human beings. But there is something like the process of change in a language that characterizes the life of living things. Depending on whether or not a language changes over time, a language can be either living or dead. To pick one example, we can think of classical Latin or Sanskrit which has not changed at all over the past 2000 years. Unlike Sanskrit, English has, as a language, evolved over centuries and become an analytic language from a synthetic one. Any inflectional language is either synthetic or analytic. A language is synthetic when in that language the relationship between the words in a sentence is indicated largely by means of inflections as was the case with English during the Old English Period. If we think of modern English, it is analytic in that it follows a particular word order, uses prepositions and auxiliary verbs to show the relationship. Any language can have two different forms, a spoken form and a written form. A language needs a grammar or a set of rules to explain the changes occurring in a language. From that perspective, grammar can be defined as a book that shows how a language evolves. There are many tribal languages in the world that require no grammar because they do not have a written form. In any grammar normally five items are arranged in an upward order which is called '' Rank Scale''. Let us see what items are there and how they are arranged.

Sentence -------------- The phone rang when I was out.
Clause ------------------------------ Many birds are flying.
Phrase ----------------------------- A cup of tea
Word ------------------------------- Book+ish= Bookish
Morpheme ------------------------ Book

There are two layers of this rank scale, a higher rank and a lower rank. Sentence is considered to be the higher rank and morpheme is considered to be the lower rank. Learning a language can be looked upon as a journey, a journey to the center of the sentence. It all starts with morpheme and goes upward till we reach sentence. Every higher unit on the rank scale is bigger than the unit below but every higher unit consists of the lower units.  We will, in this book, take the reader through to sentence starting the journey with morpheme. These five items are in themselves very wide in that they carry a lot of items that a learner needs to cover to have a grasp of English Grammar as a whole.                                                    

The writer is a Vice Principal and O Levels English Language Teacher
London Grace International School, Bangladesh.