The Historical Impact of Latin on the English Language Vocabulary

The Historical Impact of Latin on English Vocabulary

Latin Influence via Celtic Transmission

When the English migrated from the Continent to Britain in the mid-fifth century, they found the island already inhabited. Celtic people had been there for many centuries. Despite the long Roman occupation, the British Celts continued to speak their own language.

However, the relations between the Celts and the English were such that the Latin influence of this period remains the slightest of all influences that Old English owed to contact with Roman civilization.

The Christianization of Britain (597 AD)

The greatest influence of Latin upon Old English was occasioned by the reintroduction of Christianity into Britain in 597. The leader of this band was St. Augustine.

In the course of the 7th century, the new faith spread rapidly. The Christian missionaries not only introduced literacy; they also brought a huge Latin vocabulary, some of which was taken over into Old English. The Anglo-Saxons had encountered Latin before, in Europe, when several Latin words entered their language—such as weall (‘wall’), straet (‘street’), ceap (‘bargain’, ‘cheap’), and win (‘wine’). They brought these words with them to Britain, but these were only a few dozen.

Latin Borrowings During the Middle English Period

After the Norman Conquest, during the Middle English period (1150–1500), especially in the 14th and 15th centuries, several thousand words came into the language directly from Latin. The 1384 translation of the Bible initiated by John Wycliffe, for example, contained over 1,000 Latin words not previously known in English. Most of these words were professional or technical terms, belonging to such fields as religion, medicine, law, and literature.

Many Latin words having to do with religion appeared in English, among them:

• Religious Terms: 'collect', 'dirge', 'mediator', and ‘Redeemer’.
• Legal Terms: 'client', 'conviction', 'subpoena'.
• Scholastic Activities: 'dissolve', 'equal', 'essence', 'medicine', 'mercury', 'opaque', 'orbit', 'quadrat', and 'recipe'.

Latin Words Borrowed in Early Modern English

The main factor promoting the flood of new publications in the sixteenth century was the renewed interest in the classical languages and literatures, and in the rapidly developing fields of science, medicine, and the arts. This was also the age of the Reformation, of Copernicus, and the Discovery of America.

The focus of interest was vocabulary. There were no words in the language to talk accurately about the new concepts, techniques, and inventions which were emerging in Europe, and so writers began to borrow them.

Some Renaissance foreign words incorporated into Early Modern English from Latin and Greek are:

• Absurdity, benefit, capsule, disability, emancipate, fact, glottis, habitual, idiosyncrasy, immaturity, impersonal, lunar, monopoly, necessitate, obstruction, pancreas, relaxation, scheme, temperature, utopian, vacuum.

Pedagogical Approach and Curriculum Alignment

Didactic Differentiation of Content

When dealing with the didactic approach of this topic's content, we have to differentiate two clear parts: the historical and the linguistic one.

Teaching the Historical Part

In order to deal with the historical part of the content, it could be taught in the form of a text and questions for higher levels (like ESO 4th Year and Bachillerato). At lower levels (like ESO 1st, 2nd, and 3rd), we can resort to timelines in order to show the historical period where these events took place. For all levels, we can teach vocabulary grouped in different categories:

• Army: Legions, armour, tactics.
• Worship: God, temple, ritual.
• Technology: road, machine, aqueduct, building.
• Entertainment: Gladiator, chariot.

Teaching the Linguistic Part

• Regarding the linguistic part of the content in the topic, it has to be approached because of the great number of loanwords that poured into the language after the Roman conquest.
• Look at the etymology of certain words in order to find out about their origin.
• Students are expected to learn about the influence of Latin, not only from a linguistic approach but also from a social point of view, since the semantic choice between words tends to emphasize the importance of different groups of users. For instance, the exposure to Latin has been sustained throughout much of the recorded history of English, and it is this that helps give the language its European flavor, in that many of our words are quickly recognizable to speakers of French, Italian, and Spanish.
• We can also make use of videos and flashcards in order to teach this content in a more fun and practical way.

Curriculum Alignment (Spanish Legislation)

The content of this topic connects especially with the legislation in force: LOMCE 8/2013 (the organic law on the improvement of education), RD 1105/2014 (the national decree that regulates the curricula in the Spanish territory for Secondary Education), and Decrees 220/2015 and 221/2015 which regulate the curricula for Secondary and Bachillerato stages in the Autonomous Community of Murcia.

It is stated in Content Blocks No. 1, 2, 3, & 4 (Understanding Written and Oral Texts and Producing Oral and Written Texts) that students have to be familiar with sociocultural values of the foreign language.

The content of this topic deals with Competence in Linguistic Communication, which appears in Order ECD 65/2015 of January 21st, where the relationships among contents, assessment criteria, and key competences are established. It also touches on Cultural Awareness and Expression because learning a language is also learning a culture.