Why do we have to study the history of English?

There are already so many books on the history of English, both large and small, that this book seems redundant and unnecessary. What is more, this book does rarely give new academic findings on the topic. Nevertheless, I decided to make this book to be brought into the world, since it was written for pedagogical purposes, not for strictly academic ones. The main readers of this book will be Korean university students. These days, we, Korean professors, are forced to take such ‘practical’ classes like TOEIC, English Composition, English Grammar, etc., as the major courses of the Department of English and, at the same time, are pressed to give up teaching the so-called ‘academic’ subjects, including the history of English. “Most English-language courses, nowadays, are either concerned with developing a practical competence or with understanding the synchronic structure of English” (Rastall 2002: 31).

There is a prediction that artificial intelligence will overcome language barriers as a tool beyond what we can imagine in a near future. The barriers of language will soon disappear, and the day of liberation from the difficulty and boredom of learning foreign languages is not far. Then we may not have to waste time and effort in studying English. The purpose of language education is not to secure ‘communication tools’, however, but to provide an opportunity for the mutual understanding of the culture and the promotion of the individual’s cultivation to alleviate the conflict and to eliminate its cause. From this point of view, the meaning of learning the history of English is revealed. It is an attempt to understand the whole English-American culture.

Nevertheless, the history of English was taught too atomistically without the proper connection with contemporary English. So I believe that what matters is not the course itself but the teaching method and textbooks for the course. For “English in Historical Perspective”, advocated by Rastall (2002), the history of English should be taught at a university-level, at least for the students of English major. In spite of the need to seek for the explanation of contemporary English usage in a historical light, we did not achieve this goal at the courses of the Department of English. This situation is severely observed in the non-native environment, as at Korean universities. It is a greatly worrying situation that the students’ interest in English linguistics (not the study of the so-called ‘practical’ English), English literature, or the humanities in general, has recently been weakening in Korea. However, I am confident that the study of the history of English will be of great help in studying contemporary ‘practical’ English, too.

This book was written to be used as a(n easy) textbook for the graduate course of the history of English at Korean Universities. This book deals with the ‘internal’ history of English in a more detailed way than most other introductory textbooks in this field; phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic changes, since I hope that this book will be used as a starting material for the students of graduate level to find some interesting research topics here. For the ‘external’ history of English, it is recommended to refer to the separate volume, titled The External History of English: Stories of English.

Lastly, I should confess that I feel uneasy in publishing this book, because I am greatly worried about the possibility of infringing copyright. This book contains not a few direct quotations. I have tried to reveal all the primary sources of the quotations, but it was limited and not always possible. I apologize for any infringement of copyright, if any.

Pil-Hwan Lee
Youngam Hall, Keimyung University, January 2019