By the middle of the thirteenth century Anglo-Saxon, or
English, as it may now be called, had taken on a somewhat familiar appearance,
as in these opening words of the Lord's Prayer: "Fadir ur, that es in
heven, Halud thi nam to nevene, Thou do as thi rich rike, Thi will on erd be
wrought, eek as it is wrought in heven ay." In the poems of Geoffrey
Chaucer (about 1340-1400 A.D.), especially in his Canterbury Tales,
English wears quite a modern aspect, though the reader is often troubled by the
old spelling and by certain words not now in use. The changes in the grammar of
English have been so extremely small since 1485 A..D.—the beginning of the
reign of Henry VII --that any Englishman of ordinary education can read
without difficulty a book written more than four hundred years ago.
ENGLISH AS A WORLD-LANGUAGE
What in medieval times was the speech of a few millions of
Englishmen on a single small island is now spoken by at least one hundred and
fifty millions of people all over the world. English is well fitted for the role
of a universal language, because of its absence of inflections and its simple
sentence-order. The great number of one-syllabled words in the language also
makes for ease in understanding it. Furthermore, English has been, and still
is, extremely hospitable to new words, so that its vocabulary has grown very
fast by the adoption of terms from Latin, French, and other languages. These
have immensely increased the expressiveness of English, while giving it a
position midway between the very different Romance and Teutonic languages.
