History of English
~ History of English ~
Summer term 2010/11
Wednesdays 11.00-12.30
Fridays 11.00-12.30
~ Introduction ~
- Who speaks English? - 1) inner circle (320-380 million speakers; English as L1) - 2) outer circle (150-300 million speakers; English as L2) - 3) expanding circle (100-1000 million speakers; English as lingua franca = ELF) - possible language shifts: from ELF to L2 - from L2 to L1
- Why is English a world language? - historical reasons → colonization since the 16th and 17th centuries, imperialism - internal political reasons → English spoken in former colonies where it is considered to be the most neutral language which is not connected with any particular ethnic group - external economic reasons → the USA’s dominant position on the market (80% of the world trade in dollars) - practical reasons → international traffic control; historically, England as a maritime power - intellectual reasons → knowledge stored in English - entertainment reasons → movie industry, popular music - some wrong reasons → allegedly has no grammar (poor morphology and inflection, but complex syntax), more logical and beautiful than other languages
~ Language change ~ - a constant non-ending phenomenon
• 1) SOUND CHANGE - e.g. mandatory – ‘mandatory’ and ‘mandatry’ - a change under way in pronunciation: words ending in –ory, -ery, -ary and –ury as if they ended in –urry - dictionaries provide both pronunciations - other examples: factory, scenery, elementary, century - Australia – reduced, almost inaudible first vowel as well as the last one → ‘ostralia’ becomes ‘straya’ - slavery, cursory - etymological spelling (vs. phonological) of place names - e.g. Gloucester, Leicester, Bicester - from Roman castra (pl.) - in OE, “ce” pronounced as “tʃe” - e.g. Barnoldswick, Chiswick, Warwick - from OE wic, possibly meaning “village” - in compounds, the first sound of the second word is dropped → Warwick, /warik/ - e.g. Salisbury /sɔːlzbri/, Shrewsbury /ʃruːzbri/, Daventry /deɪntri/ - e.g. Magdalen College (Oxford), Theobald’s Road - diffusion – word-by-word progress of a sound change through vocabulary - burglary won’t change because of the consonant cluster ‘grl’
- yod dropping - the tenth smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet – refers to ‘y’ as in ‘yes’ - the first words to lose their yods: - after ‘r’ – rule and true → ‘rool’ not ‘ryule’ – vulgar and indolent pronunciation - after ‘l’ – blue → no one pronounces ‘blyue’ any more - e.g. beautiful, cute, fume, mute → ‘bootiful’ – East Anglian dialects (beauty – ‘booty’) - variation: dew, new, tune, suit, enthusiasm - Americans – greatest yod-droppers - British – reluctant yod-droppers - tune - ‘tyune/chune’ (BrE) vs. ‘toon’ (AmE)
- sound change umbrella term for a variety of changes - may affect single sound segments (vowels or consonants), combination of sounds (consonant clusters or diphthongs) - prosodic features (rhythm, stress, intonation) - conditioned = only in specific phonetic environments - unconditioned = all occurrences of a particular sound
- assimilation - a regularly occurring type of conditioned change - one sound becomes like another in its environment - Latin septem → Italian sette - partial assimilation: handbag [hambæg] - anticipatory or regressive assimilation: the affected sound precedes the conditioning one - perseverative or progressive: the order is reversed - Germanic *wulno → OE wull ‘wool’ (* - the word not attested, only reconstructed) - irregular English plural: foot – feet, goose – geese - i-mutation: *fōt /*fōti, *gōs /*gōsi → the i affected the ō vowel quality
- other types of sound change: - dissimilation – opposite of assimilation – sporadically in individual words - Latin peregrīnus (wanderer) to Old French pelerin – the source of English pilgrim - Old French purpre to English purpel - epenthesis – segments inserted into a phonetic sequence to break up consonant clusters (e.g. film, arm in Irish English → /fɪləm/, /arəm/) - aphaeresis – deletion/loss of initial segment: word initial [k] or [g] as in knife and gnome - apocope – deletion/loss of final segmet: name → OE /name/, ModE /neɪm/ - syncope – medial vowels disappear – monks from OE munecas - haplology – a whole syllable is deleted – OE Englalond > England - metathesis – adjacent segments are re-ordered – OE brid > bird; OE ācsian >ask
- sound changes on a much larger scale: - shifts in the pronunciation of sets of vowels or consonants: - First Germanic Consonant Shift – affected sets of plosives in the Germanic ancestor of English - The Great Vowel Shift – occurred with the long vowels in Middle English → main distinction between the Middle and Modern English - [a:] → [æ:] → [ɛ:] → [eɪ] (diphthongization), e.g. name - [e:] → [i:], e.g. feet - [ɛ:] → [e:] → [i:], e.g. beak - [i:] → [Ii] → [əɪ] → [aɪ], e.g. time - [ᴐ:] → [o:] → [oʊ] → [əʊ], e.g. stone - [o:] → [u:], e.g. boot - [u:] → [ʊu] → [əʊ] → [aʊ], e.g. mouse
• 2) SYNTACTIC CHANGE - e.g. I don’t understand nothing. - double and multiple negation - regarded as bad grammar since the late 1700s - 1000 years ago – negation formed with ne and two or more negators in one sentence was the norm - Þere nys noþinge þat so sone smyteþ with grevaunce the hed as wyne. - ‘there not-is nothing that so quickly smites with grievance the head as wine’ - ne-a-wiht (‘not-every-anything’) → noght (‘nothing’), pronounced with strong /h/ - predecessor of Modern English not - embracing negation: Hit ne swelleth not. ‘It not swells not’ - Sleep not grouellynge upon the stomacke. - I know not. Fear not. - not reduced to –n’t - won’t from will not - grammaticalization → negation from ne-a-wiht to n’t = ne-a-wiht → noght → not → n’t - “Language is a gigantic expression compacting machine.” Ron Langacker
- other candidates for negation: - a bit – derived from bite - used to strengthen negative sentences involving eating - I didn’t eat a crumb. I didn’t drink a drop. - It didn’t hurt a bit. - development of bit into a negator far-fetched? - French pas derives from Latin passus ‘step’ - pas originally strengthened verbs of walking - no way: No way I did it! - never: I never did it (‘I didn’t do it’)
• 3) LEXICAL CHANGE - phat – OED – excellent: a London crew with a really phat funk sound - origin 1970s – originally used to describe a woman, in the sense ‘sexy, attractive’ - constant awareness of lexical change: - new words in journalistic reporting - the inclusion of new words in dictionaries - we can each probably remember when certain words started to gain currency - English has gained – and lost – countless nouns, verbs and adjectives - prepositions and conjunctions have remained largely unchanged - core vocabulary - words that are too well entrenched to be threatened by replacement or loss - adjectival terms of approbation (such as cool, fab, wicked, phat and so on) continue to undergo inter-generational change - word loss – relatively frequent - deodand ‘something devoted to God’ - blowen ‘prostitute’ - smicker ‘to look amorously or wantonly at someone’ - loitersacke ‘a lazy person’ - many words we now use will follow the same route of obsolescence in the future - some words fall out of use, others become resurrected and popularized by speakers who apply them to new domains, e.g. after the First World War: - hand grenade (1661) - dugout (1886) - machine gun (1867) - periscope (1822-34) - no man’s land (1350) - broadcast (1813) – originally an agricultural term for the sowing of seed - radiator (1836) – once used as a generic label for anything that radiated heat, light or sound waves
- major sources of lexical augmentation → productive processes such as: derivation, clipping, blending and borrowing - e.g. the loan curry (from Tamil kari) - new to English in the late 16th century - now treated like other English nouns: - pluralized curries - adjectival pre-modification: Andy eats madly hot curries but I like a mild curry. - compounded: Are you going to the new curry house? - functional shift: Are you going to curry the potatoes?
- a) conversion – words come to function in more than one lexical category - drink – noun and verb - pretty – adverb, adjective and noun - that’s pretty bad / a pretty picture / come here, my pretty - in the case of ‘new’ words – a good indication of their integration into the ‘native’ wordstock
- b) compounding – the combination of two or more independent words to create a new one: - bathroom = noun + noun - bittersweet = adjective + adjective - pickpocket = verb + noun - blackboard = adjective + noun - overdose = preposition + noun - ingrown = preposition + adjective - overdo = preposition + verb - in Old English – primarily with words that were native to the language: - tungol-witega (‘star’ + ‘sage’) = astrologer - werewulf (‘man’ + ‘wolf’) - wærloga (‘oath’ + ‘breaker’) – now warlock - later – with ‘foreign elements’, completely ‘non-native’ and sometimes hybrid: - dinosaur (Greek dino ‘terrible’ + saur ‘lizard’) - submarine (Latin sub ‘under’ + marin- ‘sea’) - telephone (Greek tele ‘far’ + phone ‘voice’) - television (Greek tele ‘far’ + Latin (OF) vision) - gentlewoman & gentleman French gentil (1220) - compounding in the 20th and 21st centuries: - air raid, blackout, warbride - software, hardware, network, playstation - smartcard, bluetooth, firewall - affixation – using both native and ‘foreign’ elements from loanwords: - suffix -y: fitty, hotty more productive than –th (warmth, depth) - -wise – cycles of popularity - clockwise, otherwise (practically archaic) until about 1940 - moneywise, healthwise, personalitywise - c) clipping - a word is extracted from a longer one with the same meaning - phone from telephone - ad from advertisement - bra from brassiere - fridge from refrigerator - pram from perambulator - flu from influenza - autonomous words and not abbreviations – functional nouns which take plural markers, modification and participate in compounding: - loud phones, photo-frames, a very lacy bra, - fridge magnets, noisy prams, bird-flu - compound clippings: - sitcom (situation + comedy) - romcom (romantic + comedy) - satnav (satellite + navigation)
- d) blending: combination of clipping and compounding: - brunch (breakfast + lunch) - smog (smoke + fog) - motel (motor + hotel) - electrocute (electricity + execute) - Bollywood (Bombay + Hollywood) - blends (portmanteau words): - scuzzy ‘dirty and grimy’ (scummy + fuzzy) - boost (boom + hoist) - flunk (fail + funk) - Frenglish / franglais; Spanglish, Denglisch - guesstimate (guess + estimate) - spam (spiced ham) - nonce-formations (type of blend) – in advertising and journalistic writing: - Bennifer used extensively in 2003 for the relationship between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez - stalkarazzi (stalker + paparazzi) - spafe (spontaneous + safe) - modtro (modern + retro)
- e) acronyms – letter sequences that can be pronounced as words - AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome) - SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) - yuppie (young urban professional + affix) - snafu (situation normal all fucked up) - radar (radio detecting and ranging) - laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation)
- f) initialisms – sequences have to be pronounced individually: - FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) - FCUK (French Connection United Kingdom) - CD (Compact disc), DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) - initialisms in functional shift: - The police ID’d the suspect. - I lost my ID card. - He OD’d on heroin. - UFOlogy and UFOlogical - Boy George Files With Legal Papers As He DJed - new words from trademark names: - Kleenex, scotch tape - hoover, xerox - aspirin - tipp-ex - google - some of them also in functional shift
- g) backformation - re-analysis of a word’s structure - speakers remove what they think is an affix from a word to create a supposed ‘base’: - -er: teach, write, sing, watch → backformation from teacher, writer, singer, watcher - other examples: editor -> edit - sculptor → sculpt - burglar → burgle - televisor → televise - babysitter → babysit - orientation → orientate - bikini (analogy: bilateral, bilingual, bifocal) → monokini, tankini
- h) coinages - the art of minting new words - googol – number 1 followed by 100 zeros (10 to the 100th power) - coined in 1940 by Milton Sirotta (9) – nephew of the U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner - Shakespeare – laughable (1596), moonbeam (1600) - blurb (1907) by Gellet Burgess - chortle (1872) by Lewis Carroll - quidditch from Harry Potter – has an entry in the Collins Dictionary and an avenue in Cambridge
- i) borrowing - inaccuracy of the label → speakers do not consent to ‘loaning’ elements nor do those of the borrowing language give them back - ‘stealing’ and ‘adoption’ also inappropriate - borrowing continues to be the label of choice in denoting - ‘the attempted reproduction in one language of patterns previously found in another’ (Haugen 1950:212) - happens in cases of language contact - bilingualism - Old English borrowed from Latin in the areas of trade and religion - Early Modern English borrowed significantly larger – e.g. medicine and anatomy
- English today – social prestige in communities around the world – science and technology - borrowings often come from a prestigious language: - Middle English from French (religion, law, government, administration, warfare, arts, fashion, domestic life) - Early Modern English – from Latin and Greek - common direction of borrowing in unequal relationships of social prestige - languages borrow from a less prestigious partner in a contact situation - Germanic tribes in England – topographical features - repeated later in colonization – local places, flora and fauna - incorporation of loans from languages of migrant minority groups to those of established majorities - Britain settled by Indians and Pakistanis who established themselves in the restaurant trade - Indian food became a staple of British life - every Brit knows a balti from a korma from a jalfrezi, or a samosa from a bhaji - in the US – the Spanish of migrant Mexican settlers: - enchillada, nachos, tortilla, tostada, quesadilla, fajita, jalapeño, taco, guacamole, tamale - not necessarily involving a marked imbalance of social power - a reflection of the fact that concepts/objects from one culture are absorbed in another: - French: déjà vu, limousine, garage, voyeur… - Sanskrit: yoga, mantra, tantra, chakra… - Italian: lasagne, pizza, paparazzi, sonnet, opera… - German: angst, nickel, gestalt, zeitgeist, poodle… - Japanese: bonsai, kamikaze, karaoke, sushi, tycoon… - Chinese: feng shui, dim sum, ketchup, typhoon… - can occur because of close and continued cultural and linguistic proximity - English speakers in late 10th and early 11th century borrowed from Norse spoken by Scandinavian settlers in the north and east of England → since OE and ON were mutually intelligible, borrowings from ON not felt as foreign as those from French - close contact + high mutual intelligibility - sky - skin - husband - egg - ugly - window - scorch - they - them - their - are
- adaptation in borrowing - phonological: Theydon Bois on a London Underground map [θeɪdən ˈbɔɪz] - grammatical: French treats English loans as masculine: le weekend, le hamburger - German looks for the gender of the closest equivalent: die Story (die Geschichte), der Computer (der Rechner) - grammatical re-analysis: Arabic singular-plural pair hashhāsh / hashhāshīn - īn - the plural suffix - the plural has become English singular assassin – which is now of course pluralized by the addition of –s - j) calque - calquing = loan translation - skyscraper – gratte-ciel, rascacielos, Wolkenkratzer, neboder - beergarden from German Biergarten - marriage of convenience from French marriage de convenance - that goes without saying from French ça va sans dire - flea market - antibody - superman - standpoint - German Fernsehen from "television" - English honeymoon → French lune de miel, Catalan lluna de mel, Spanish luna de miel, Portuguese lua-de-mel, Italian luna di miele and Romanian luna de miere - German Kindergarten (‘children's garden’)→ French jardin d'enfants, Spanish jardín de infancia and Portuguese Jardim de infância calque Garden of Infants/children
• 4) SEMANTIC CHANGE - speakers are aware of change not only at the lexical level but also at the level of meaning - gay ‘bright’, ‘cheerful’ - aggravate ‘to make worse’ eroded and now it means to ‘irritate’, ‘to annoy’ - based on an assumption that each word has only one ‘true’ inherent meaning which is embodied in the word’s etymology → change is ‘deviation’/’corruption’ - the relationship between a word and the concept it stands for is ultimately arbitrary & based on convention - words do not possess inherent ‘true’ meanings - a signifier can be linked to more than one signified → we assume a one-to-one relationship between a word and a meaning for explanatory convenience - reality is more complex → words tend to be polysemic, “a whole range of shades of meaning” - meaning is a dynamic and fluid property, words gain and lose meaning with relative ease - If you scratch that rash, you’ll aggravate it - with gay abandon – the ‘cheerful’ meaning 'in a completely uncontrolled way’ - arbitrariness and polysemy – pre-conditions for change in meaning - re-interpretation of data in the inter-generational transmission of a native language - Old English (ge)bēd ‘prayer’ > modern bead - an adult using a rosary tells a child she is counting her beads – ambiguous context - she is saying prayers but the child sees the accompanying concrete action – the movement of the little spheres that make up the rosary - technological innovation: car (Latin carrus) – ‘four wheeled vehicle, chariot’ - mouse, virus, infection, cookie, avatar, windows, firewall - trauma – medical term for muscular damage → emotional /mental trauma… traumatized - wombe, stool, worm – OE wambe, stōl, wyrm → stomach, throne, dragon - taboo topics – euphemistic expression: He’s sleeping with Ella.
- a) restriction / narrowing / specialization - OE dēor - animal vs. deer - OE mēte – food vs. meat - OE hūnd – dog vs. hound - OE cwēn – woman vs. queen - OE steorvan – die vs. starve - b) extension / generalization / broadening - school ‘group of artists’, ‘school of thought’ - moon ‘any planet’s satellite’ - to arrive ‘to reach the river bank’ – any destination - to carry ‘to transport in a vehicle’ - crisis ‘turning point of a disease’ - c) metaphorization – speakers want to establish a link between two concepts - the foot of a mountain - the eye of a needle - the mouth of a river - the head of a company - the final leg of a race - animal labels: - catty – conniving and malicious - mousy – timid - social butterfly – someone who whizzes from occasion to occasion - wolf – sexually predatory male - vixen / minx – his female counterpart - someone is a honey - someone is bananas - a few sandwiches short of a picnic - d) metonymization – real rather than imagined link between concepts - crown and throne for sovereign - James Bond is in the service of the Crown - Who is in the power behind the throne? - White House, Downing Street, Buckingham Palace - Romania and China are finalists in the gymnastics competition - in Shakespeare: - King Lear to Regan’s husband – Kent, on thy life, no more! (town for a person) - to Cordelia’s husband – Thou hast her, France; let her be thine. (country for a person) - e) amelioration – acquisition of a more favourable meaning - knight OE cniht ‘boy’ - nice from Latin nescius ‘ignorant, silly, simple’ - terribly / awfully → intensifiers - He’s terribly good; She’s awfully pretty. - steward ‘overseer of the pig sty’ OE stig + weard - jolly ‘arrogant, wanton, lustful’ - f) pejoration – acquisition of a less favourable meaning - sælig ‘blessed’ → silly - vulgar ‘common’ - villain ‘low-born or common person’ - pejoration often in conjunction with taboo and euphemism - unpleasant, embarrassing, dangerous or powerful subjects – avoid naming them directly - pass away, gone to sleep - I’m going to the toilet – loo/restroom - I’m going to have a wee/pee. - little boys’/girls’ room - spending a penny - toilet – originally a euphemism (F toile ‘cloth’), introduced to replace privy, latrine & lavatory - technostrategic language: clean bombs, counter value attacks, collateral damage and surgically clean strikes → to obscure the actual scale of death and destruction
• 5) MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE - changes in word structure - morphology is integrated with phonology and syntax - i-mutation for plural formation (foot – feet) – words such as feet and geese became morphologically ‘irregular’ - endings –ás and – án in Spanish verb forms – tu comprarás ‘you will buy’, ellos comprarán ‘they will buy’ – developed from Latin habēre ‘to have’ (grammaticalization) - re-analysis of bikini - apron – from napron (consider related napkin, napery) - speakers analysed the initial nasal as part of a preceding indefinite article a(n) - nickname – from (an) ekename - newt – from (an) ewt (a kind of brilliantly coloured salamander
- analogy – a concept initially devised in diachronic studies of sound change by the Neogrammarians - sound changes occur regardless of the consequences on the grammatical system - i-mutated plurals - analogy comes into play after a sound change had operated - book (OE bōc → respelled with double ‘o’ → book, the Great Vowel Shift → [ᴐ:] – [u:]) – should have followed the i-mutation pattern of feet and geese, but instead conformed to the more widespread –s: books not beek - Sturtevant’s Paradox: “Sound change is regular but creates irregularity, whereas analogy is irregular but creates regularity.” - analogical extension with nouns (the formation of the plural) - OE nouns belonged to different inflectional paradigms - OE stān, ‘stone’ (masculine) – n. pl. stānas - OE scip, ‘ship’ (masculine) – n. pl. scipu - inflectional endings substantially reduced by the end of the ME period - the -as ending was retained, becoming –es/-s - generalized to other noun classes – regular plural marker for nouns in English - mouse – mice – mouses; house – houses - mongoose – mongooses or mongeese? - cactus : cacti, succubus : succubi, radius : radii - octopus – Greek loanword but looks Latin → pl. in Greek octopoedes, but through analogy with the Latin forms – octopi – a generally unproductive pattern - analogical extension with verbs - classes of strong verbs sing : sang : sung - classes of weak verbs walk : walked : walked → the ending –ed allegedly developed from a lexical verb ‘do’ → walked = walk + did - some became weak (help) - She texted me yesterday. I’ve e-mailed my CV. - originally weak dive : dived became strong dive : dove through analogy with drive - verbs and nouns which have no intention of changing: teeth, oxen, sheep, broadcast, swam, bought… - analogical levelling – affects paradigms of inflected words - verb paradigms for ‘to choose’ in OE and ModE - infinitive to choose cēo[z]an choo[z]e - past singular I chose cēa[s] cho[z]e - past plural we chose cu[r]on cho[z]e - past ptcp. you have chosen (ge-)co[r]en cho[z]en - irregularity has been levelled out to make the relationship between forms in the paradigm more transparent - analogy can be applied sporadically: - back-formation: verb laze from adj. lazy (scare – scary) - contamination: the form of a word is influenced by others: four – initial [k], quattro (lat.) – but influenced by neighbouring five (Croatian 9-10 → nonem, decem (lat.)) - folk etymology: word/phrase opaque to native speaker – reinterpreted: French asparagus – English sparrow grass, Italian girasole ‘sunflower’ – Jerusalem artichoke
~ Languages types ~
- Schlegel and Von Humboldt proposed a classification of languages based on the intrinsic characteristics of their morphological systems: - three main morphological types of language: isolating, agglutinating and inflecting
- 1) isolating or analytical - Ni men ti hua wo pu tu tung - you pl. poss. language I not all understand - “I do not entirely understand your language.” (Chinese) - each lexical or grammatical unit of information is carried by an individual morph, without affixation or modification - Chinese, Vietnamese
- 2) agglutimative - Baba –m kardeş –im –e bir mektup yaz -dir -di - father my brother my dat. a letter write/cause to/past tense - “My father had my brother write a letter.” (Turkish) - morphs are ‘stuck’ together to form words - each morph has a particular function - Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, Swahili
- 3) inflecting or synthetic - Arm –a vir –um –que can -o - weapon neut. man masc. and sing 1st p.sg. acc.pl. acc.sg. present indicative - “I sing about weapons and a man.” - Latin, Greek, Old English, Croatian - morphs may carry more than one unit of lexical/grammatical information - OE scipu – final –u – neuter gender, plural, acc or nom.
- 4) incorporating - Qasu -iir -sar -vig -ssar -si –ngit –luinar –nar –puq - Tired not [causing to be] [place for] suitable find not completely someone 3p.sg. - “Someone did not at all find a suitable resting place.” (Eskimo)
- What type is English? - More similar to an isolating language like Chinese than Latin: - There are few inflectional endings and word order changes are the basis of the grammar - Three-in-one: - Isolating: The boy will ask the girl. The girl will ask the boy. - Inflecting: The biggest boys have been asking. - Agglutinating: anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism
• MORPOLOGICAL CHANGE - not all languages actually fit easily into one of these three categories (analytic, synthetic, agglutinative) - languages display a tendency towards one morphological type - Schleicher (1821 – 1868, studied Indo-European, especially Slavic languages, formed the theory that a language is an organism, with periods of development, maturity, and decline) assumed that languages naturally ‘progressed’ in a cyclic process - synthetic state was the ultimate, ideal achievement - for some, the only movement possible from that high point is downward - synthetic → analytic – a process viewed as ‘decline’ or ‘decay’ (also called drift) - e.g. in English, dying out of cases - in Croatian, in plural dative, locative and instrumental the noun form the same - *idem s autom → “s” signifying the means - faster and greater decay indicates an active, civilized people - “If a language did not consistently undergo inflectional decline, it belonged to a people ‘unfitted for historical life’ who could only undergo ‘retrogression, even extinction.” (Schleicher, 1864) - Jespersen – “that language ranks highest which goes furthest in the art of accomplishing much with little means, or, in other words, which is able to express the greatest amount of meaning with the simplest mechanism.”
• SYNTACTIC CHANGE - re-analysis – contributory to lexical, semantic and morphological change – also influential in syntactic change - the development of English modals - may, might, can, could, will, would, should, must - from a set of Old English full verbs (pre-modals) - properties that set them apart from other verbs: - could not be followed by an inflected infinitive (*I must to go) - lost the ability to take a nominal object (*she could piano) - they do not carry present tense inflections - speakers re-analysed them as members of a new modal category. Evidence: - modals have no infinitive (*to will) - no non-finite forms (*they musted gone) - only modals (apart from auxiliaries) can invert with subjects (can she breathe? - *breathe she?) - they can take a following negative marker (he could not say that, *he speed not)
- change in word order - languages can be classified according to word-order types - based on fundamental order of three constituents (typically and most frequently occurring) → S(ubject), V(erb), O(bject) - Jeannie (S) saw (V) a ghost (O). SVO - Jeannie (S) a ghost (O) saw(V). SOV - the three categories can serve as labels for bigger constituents: - that so-called sweet old lady tripped up the girl who was walking past her house S V O - O can include constituents such as subject complement & adverbial (O = X) - she is in the garden she dances every night - six permutations (SVO, OVS, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV) can be reduced to two general ones – VO and OV - properties cited in word-order typologies: - the position of adjectives relative to nouns - the position of genitives relative to nouns → VO languages – NA and NG orders → OV languages – AN and GN structures - languages show a high degree of conformity to one of these patterns = exhibit typological harmony - English (and Croatian) is VO but does not have expected NA order → proof that these categories are merely idealisations - e.g. Jane likes ice-cream. (SVO) → but, chocolate ice-cream (AN) - Marica voli sladoled. (SVO) → but, čokoladni sladoled (AN)
- through time, languages can move – or drift from one basic type to another - English has drifted from OV to VO - textual evidence from North West Germanic – runic inscriptions of the third-seventh centuries → OV language - ek Hlewagastiz Holtijaz horna tawido ‘I, H.H. [this] horn made’ S O V S O V - [me]z Woduride staina þrijoz dohtriz dalidum. O S V ‘for me, W., [this stone] three daughters made’ - nouns preceded adjectives and genitives could occur both before or after nouns - the available evidence provides a snapshot of a language undergoing typological change from OV to VO - this direction of change continued throughout Old English - 8th century OV pattern (inscription on a gold ring, Lancashire): - Æðred me ah Eanred mec agrof → ‘Æthred me owns; Eanred me carved’ - later VO becomes norm, with OV restricted to certain structures: - main verb + obj pronoun: hē hine geseah ‘he him saw’ > ‘he saw him’ - subordinate clauses: God geseah ða þæt hit gōd wæs ‘God saw that it God was’ - today English is a VO language, except for the adjective placement
- grammaticalization - first defined by Meillet (1912:131): ‘the shift of an independent word to the status of a grammatical element’ - full nouns/verbs/adjectives → auxiliaries/prepositions/adverbs → affixes - accompanied by other developments: change in phonological form & ‘semantic bleaching’ - cross-componential change that involves syntax, morphology, phonology and semantics - the English system of affixes developed out of originally independent words → undergone both phonological reduction and semantic change - the prefix a- - derived from the preposition on - opaquely fossilized in aside (> OE, on side), alive (> OE, on life), abroad - transparently in a-hunting and a-shooting > I am on hunting. → I am a hunting. → I am hunting. - locative phrase preceded the present continuous - the suffix –ed - the most common Germanic prefix ge- for past participle derived from the Latin preposition cum, ‘together’ - cum → ge- → i-/y- → ø - bleaching of meaning – from ‘together’ to denoting past participle - the suffix –ly - adjectives: womanly, homely; adverbs: quickly, quietly - OE noun līc ‘body’ /lɪtʃ/ - began to be used in the formation of adjectives - underwent the process of semantic bleaching → ‘having the body or appearance of’ - OE cræftlic ‘having the appearance of skill’ (> ‘skilful’) - in ME –lich and liche underwent further phonological reduction – sound changes to unstressed syllables - fell together as the –li/-ly inherited by Modern English - the suffix –ly still productive in the derivation of adjectives and adverbs → example of both grammaticalization and lexicalization - extensively phonologically reduced and fully semantically bleached - its meaning is only in its grammatical function - a parallel development of līc to modern like - modern English speakers affix to nouns to form adjectives: human-like, god-like → not the same as humanly and godly - like as a discourse marker: - there were like people blocking, you know? - like as a quotative complementizer: - Maya’s like, ‘Kim come over here for a second’ - AmE discourse marker: like – placed before the part of the narrative intended to receive the most focus: She started to like really go for him - to introduce reported speech: I’m like, ‘just how crazy are you?’, She goes, ‘Mum wants to talk to you.’ - like – to frame constructions of thought: And Scott came up to the back door. He scared me half to death. He comes up and you know he looked pretty big. I was lying down on the couch, watching TV, and you know I could just see the outline of the body, and was like ‘Waaaaaaaaa.’ - the speaker didn’t actually make the noise → and I went … = he did scream
- English as a changing language - change is inevitable - causes of change → two extreme views: - 1) change is unmotivated, random, fortuitous [CHANCE] - 2) change is always functionally motivated, serving the expressing needs of speakers [NECESSITY] - two groups of factors: internal and external → they often interact - brought about by language contact → social, economic, geographical, political and historical reasons such as migrations and trade contacts - unpredictable – impossible to foresee who will migrate where / what fashion will catch on - easiest to trace in examining when loanwords first appear in a language - internal cause of change → those inherent to the system of a language - e.g. speakers stop using endings and start to rely on words such as of, for, the and have - children analyze the language they hear in a slightly different way from the generation before them - changing a vowel or a consonant: hām – home; skip – ship - case marking on who and stranding the preposition: Who did you talk to? - factors that inhibit internal change – prescriptive rules - e.g. ‘don’t split the infinitives’, ‘don’t end a sentence with a preposition’ - based on prestigious language or on logic or on attempts to conserve an older stage of the language
~ Pre-history of English ~
- origins of language → where did language start and how did it spread? - geneticists – relationships in the genetic material of people from different continents - archaeologists – early habitation sites - anthropologists – physical characteristics (e.g. teeth) - assumed that language originated in one place – Africa between 150,000 and 50,000 BC
- Sir William Jones – 18th century philologer and lawyer - late 1700s – Chief Justice of India - began to study and read ancient documents (4-6 c. AD) - Sanskrit ‘the language of the cultured’, used from around 3000 to 2000 BC - classical and modern variety - the Vedas (scriptures) – Hindu philosophy and religion - today it is a dead ‘living’ language restricted to religious ritual and academic study - Jones compared Sanskrit with Latin and Greek → noticed similarities in word forms and grammatical structures - correspondences among Indo-European languages - comparison work – THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
|• Numerals 1-10 in ancient languages |
|Latin |Greek |Sanskrit |Gothic |Old English |
|ūnus |heis |eka |ains |ān |
|duo |duo |dvau |twai |twēgen (twā) |
|trēs |treis |trayas |-- |þrīe |
|quattuor |tettares |catvāras |fidwor |fēower |
|quīnque |pente |panca |fimf |fīf |
|sex |hex |sat |saihs |siex |
|septem |hepta |sapta |sibun |seofon |
|octō |oktō |astau |ahtau |eahta |
|novem |ennea |nava |niun |nigon |
|decem |deka |dasa |taihun |tīen |
|• Grammatical correspondences: the verb ‘to be’ |
|Old English |Gothic |Latin |Greek |Sanskrit |
|eom (am) |im |sum |eimi |asmi |
|eart (art) |is |es |ei |asi |
|is (is) |ist |est |esti |asti |
|sindon (are) |sijum |sumus |esmen |smas |
|sindon (are) |sijuþ |estis |este |stha |
|sindon (are) |sind |sunt |eisi(n) |santi |
|• Verb conjugation |
|Sanskrit |Greek |Latin |Gothic |
|bhara - mi |pher - o |fer - o |bair - a |
|bhara - si |pher - eis |fer - s |bair - is |
|bhara - ti |pher - ei |fer - t |bair - iþ |
|bhara - mas |pher - omes |fer - imus |bair - am |
|bhara - tha |pher - ete |fer - tis |bair - iþ |
|bhara - nti |pher - onti |fer - unt |bair - and |
|• Cognate words: Family relationships |
|Sanskrit |Greek |Latin |Old Slavic |English |
|pitar |pater |pater | |father |
|matar |meter |mater |mati |mother |
|bhratar | |frater |bratu |brother |
|svasar | |soror |sestra |sister |
|duhitar |thygater | |dušti |daughter |
|• Social organization |
|Sanskrit |Greek |Latin |Old Slavic |English |
|vidhava | |viduva |udova |widow |
|• Parts of the body |
|Sanskrit |Greek |Latin |Old Slavic |English |
| |kardia |cor, cordis |sr(d)ce |heart |
| | |→ levis |→ lak |lungs |
|kaput | |caput | |head |
|pat |pous, podos |pes, pedis |→ pod |foot |
|• Climate and geography |• Economy |
|Latin |Croatian |English |Latin |Croatian |English |
|nox |noć |night snow wind beech |iugum |igo |yoke |
|nevis |snijeg |corn |axis |os |axle |
|ventus |vjetar |wolf |IE medhu |med |mead |
|fagus |bukva | |serere |sijati |sow |
|granum |zrno | |gleba |hljeb |loaf |
|lupus |vuk | | | | |
- Jones’ work – enabled scholars such as Rask and Grimm to formulate sound laws and to postulate what the predecessor of Latin and Greek might have been - grouping of certain languages into an Indo-European family - oldest IE – may have been spoken 6,000 years ago - unclear if it was at one point one language – called Proto-Indo European - spoken in one region, “a homeland” (the Urheimat) → Anatolia? North of the Caspian Sea? - Mallory “One does not ask ‘where is the Indo-European homeland?’ but rather ‘where do they put it now?’”
- the Proto-Indo-Europeans appear to have kept *uksen ‘oxen’, cows (*gwou-) and other livestock, such as sheep (*awi- > ewe), swine (*su-) and goats (*ghaido). A PIE *gen ‘family’ (eventually in genetics and kin) may have lived in a *domo ‘house’, furnished with *keromo- ‘pottery’ (> ‘ceramic’) and would have drunk *melg- ‘milk’ from the livestock and eaten dishes made with the *mel ‘meal’ of their *grno-. They may sometimes have had *pisk- ‘fish’, wild *ghans- ‘goose’ and when available, wild *abel- ‘apples’. They wore clothes made of woven (>*webh) *wel- ‘wool’ and possibly *lin- ‘flax’ (>linen), and footwear made of *letrom ‘leather’. Much work would have been done with tools fashioned from *stoino- ‘stone’, as well as wood and bone.
- there are no cognates for words meaning: - tiger, camel, monkey - olive, palm, coconut, vine, desert, rice - gold, silver, iron - ocean, ship, sea - this suggests that the original Indo-Europeans did not live in a warm climate, did not live near the sea, and did not work metals: - snow *sneigw- - freezing cold *gel-> (congeal) - animals: *bher- ‘bear’, *wlkwo- ‘wolf’, *bhibru ‘beaver’ - *as- ‘ash’, - trees: *elmo- ‘elm’, *bherag ‘birch’, *bhago ‘beech’
- Indo-European branches of the language tree: Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Greek, Anatolian, Baltic, Slavic (AmE, BrE = Slavonic), Iranian, Indian, Armenian - Indo-European subfamilies in Europe: Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Baltic, Greek, Albanian + Non-Indo-European (Hungarian, Finish, and Turkish)
~ The Germanic Language Family ~
[pic]
- the earliest surviving Germanic text from the 4th century (the translation of the Bible), the earliest Slavic text from the 9th century - Proto-Germanic spoken in the region of present-day Denmark, north Germany and south Sweden - reconstructed language → no concrete proof - North Germanic: ancestor Old Norse - Danish, Swedish and Norwegian mutually intelligible - Icelandic evolved at a slower pace because of its geographical, and subsequently linguistic, isolation
- West Germanic: Frisian closest to English of all West Germanic languages - English and German → monolingual speakers cannot understand each other - points of similarity: Mann mann grün green Maus mouse haben have singen sing Vater father Gast guest - words that correspond less obviously: Pfeffer pepper Hund ‘dog’ hound Herz heart Knecht ‘servant’ knight liegen lie Weib ‘woman’ wife lachen laugh Zeit ‘time’ tide - grammatical correspondences: dick thick dicker thicker (am) dicksten thickest
(irregularities:)
gut good besser better
(am) besten best - the verb system: - lachen – lachte laugh – laughed hassen – hasste hate – hated lieben – liebte love – loved
denken – dachte think – thought bringen – brachte bring – brought
singen – sang – gesungen sing – sang – sung geben – gab – gegeben give – gave - given fallen – fiel – gefallen fall – fell – fallen
|• Germanic cognate words |
|English |German |Swedish |English |German |Swedish |
|year |Jahr |år |queen | |kvinna |
|earth |Erde |jord |Sc bairn | |barn |
|flood |Flut, Fluß |flod |king < cyning |König |kung < konung |
|world |Welt |värld |horse |Ross |ON hross |
|stone |Stein |sten |hound |Hund |hund |
|home |Heim |hem |worm |Wurm |orm |
|mouth |Mund |mun |sword |Schwert |sverd |
|tooth |Zahn |tand |reek |Rauch |rök |
|head |Haupt |huvud |naked |Nackt |naken |
|hand |Hand |hand |young |jung |ung |
|arm |Arm |arm |green |grün |grön |
|finger |Finger |finger |red |rot |röd |
|here |hier |her |sing |singen |sjunga |
|where | |var |sang |sang |sjöng |
|what |was |vad |sung |gesungen |sjungit |
|shall |soll |skal |give |geben |ge |
|go |gehen |gå |gave |gab |gav |
|live |leben |leva |given |gegeben |givit |
| | | |fall |fallen |falla |
| | | |fell |fiel |föll |
| | | |fallen |gafallen |fallit |
- correspondences are fundamental, encompassing not only vocabulary but also all features of language - language change – an inevitable, ongoing process – the ancestors of English and German were dialects of the same language - German and English can be traced back to a common ancestor language → proto-language, parent language and daughter language - proto-language can be attested (surviving texts) - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Rumanian – common ancestor a variant of Latin - German and English – no texts for the common ancestor - reconstruction of a parent language → set up lists of cognate words
|Old English |OHG |Old Norse |Gothic |Modern English |
|fæder |fater |faðir |fadar |father |
|fōt |fuoz |fótr |fôtus |foot |
|þrīe |drî |þrīr |þreis |three |
|þū |dû |þū |þu |thou |
|cūðe |konda |kunna |kunþa |could |
|ōðer |andar |annarr |anþar |other |
|↓ |↓ |↓ |↓ |Proto-Germanic |
|f- |f- |f- |f- |*f- |
|þ- |d- |þ- |þ- |*þ- |
|-Vð |-Vnd |-Vnn |-Vnþ |*-Vnþ |
- correspondence between consonants:
| |Sanskrit |Latin |Gothic |Old English |Old Norse |
|full |purna- |plenus |fulls |full |fullr |
|thunder |tan- |tonare |….. |þunor |þórr |
|hound |cvan |canis |hunds |hund |hundr |
|hemp |…… |cannabis |….. |hænep |hampr |
|tooth |dant- |dens |tunþus |tōþ |tönn |
|corn |…… |grānum |kaurn |corn |korn |
|brother |bhrātar |frāter |broþar |brōþor |bróðir |
|door |dhwar |fores |daur |duru |dyrr |
|guest |ghost- |hosti-s |gast-s |giest |gest-r |
• GRIMM’S LAW: The first Germanic consonant shift
|p |t |k |→ |f |θ |χ |+ stop |→ |+ fricative |
| | | | | | | |voice | | |
|b |d |g |→ |p |t |k |+ stop |→ |voice |
| | | | | | | |+ voice | | |
|bh |dh |gh |→ |b/β |d/ð |g/γ |+ stop |→ |+ fricative |
| | | | | | | |+ aspiration | |aspiration |
| | | | | | | | | |+/- fricative |
- examples:
|PIE |PG | |Old English |Modern English |
|p |f |L piscis |fisc |fish |
| | |S pjena |fam |foam |
|t |θ |L tres |Þreo |three |
| | |L tu S ti |Þu |thou |
|k |χ |L cor(dis) |heort |heart |
| | |L canis |hund |hound |
|b |p |L labium |lippa |lip |
| | |S jabuka |æppel |apple |
|d |t |L decem / |teon |ten |
| | |S deset | | |
| | |L videre / |witan |wit |
| | |S vidjeti | | |
|g |k |L genu |kneo |knee |
| | |L ager |æcer |acre |
|bh |b/β |Sk bhrata |broÞor |brother |
|dh |d/ð |Sk rudhira / |read |red |
| | |S rudjeti | | |
|gh |g/γ |L hostis / |giest |guest |
| | |S gost | | |
- the First Germanic consonant shift (a.k.a. Grimm’s Law) postulated in 1822 - this ‘law’ had many exceptions: Latin pater English father - when [θ] is expected Latin mater English mother - when [θ] is expected - in 1875 the Danish linguist Karl Verner found the explanation – Verner’s Law
- Verner’s law: the shift predicted by Grimm’s Law had initially occurred when: 1) it did not occur in word-initial position 2) it occurred between voiced sounds 3) the preceding syllable had been unstressed
- another change that set (High) German apart from the other Germanic languages → the Second Consonant Shift - took place 1500 years ago Germanic p t k German pf / f /p ts / s/ t χ / k - the Second Consonant Shift:
| |Dutch |-- |English |→ |German |
|p |pijp | |pipe | |Pfeife |
| |slapen | |Sleep | |Schlafen |
| |appel | |apple | |Appfel |
| |dorp | | | |Dorf |
|t |twee | |two | |zwei |
| |eten | |eat | |essen |
| |dat | | | |das |
|k |boek | |book | |Buch |
| |ik | | | |Ich |
| |maken | |make | |machen |
~ The History of English ~
- events crucial for the development of the English language: - the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons around 450 AD - the invasion of the Vikings around 800 AD - the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD - the invention of print and the Great Vowel Shift in the mid 15th century - the development of modern technology
- comparing different stages of English:
|Foxas habbað holu, and heofenan fuglas nest | |10th century |
|sōþlice mannes sunu næfð hwær he hys hēafod āhylde. | | |
|Foxis han dennes, and briddis of heune han nestis, but mannus sone hath not where he schal reste his heed. | |14th century |
|The Foxes haue holes, and the birds of the ayre haue nests: but the sonne of man hath not where to lay his | |17th century |
|head. | | |
|Foxes have their holes, the birds their roosts; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. | |20th century |
- the terminology issues: - Old English - language and literature NOT historical period or ‘people’ - Medieval - language, literature, and historical period NOT ‘people’ - Anglo-Saxon – everything - ‘Old English is a term used to refer to the language and literature spoken and written in ‘England’ during the rule of the Anglo-Saxons (i.e. c. 450 AD up until the mid-eleventh century)’ - the majority of the Old English text preserved until today date from the later Old English period (10th and 11th centuries) - one of most known Old English texts: Bæda Venerabilis [The Venerable Bede] (Jarrow, 673 – Wearmouth, 731), Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum [Ecclesiastical History of the English People]
• History of Britain - circa 449 AD – the date of the first significant landings of the Anglo-Saxons - brothers Hengest and Horsa - invited by the Celtic king Vortigern to fight the Picts - spoke closely related Germanic dialects that would become the roots of English within a few generations - the year 500 AD more sensible birth-date for English - England’s (i.e. Britain’s history) did not begin with English → human populations some 50,000 years earlier - archaeological and paleontological traces remain, but no linguistic - first settlers to leave a linguistic legacy were the Celts, who arrived around 600 BC - invaded by Julius Caesar in 55 BC, ‘land on the edge of the civilized world’ → possible that Caesar carried out his invasion by invitation - in-fighting between various tribes → Celtic kings wanted to demonstrate that they had a strong Roman alliance - Romans never penetrated far into Wales or Scotland → Hadrian’s Wall - Emperor Claudius (43 AD) – a more successful attempt at invasion and colonization → subjugated Celts – numerous revolts - Boudicca, queen of the Welsh tribe Iceni, who led an uprising in 60 AD against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire - destroyed Colchester – the first Roman city in England - 70,000 Roman soldiers and Romanized citizens dead - Wealas – ‘foreigners’ (cf. Wales) - Saxons – the name supposedly derived from the word ‘axe’
- Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy - the tribes and kingdoms:
|the Jutes - |Kent |
|the Saxons - |Sussex |
| |Wessex |
| |Essex |
| |Middlesex |
|the Angles - |East Anglia |
| |Northumbria |
- political supremacy at different times: 7th century → Northumbria 8th century → Mercia 9th century → Wessex Ecgbert (802-839) Alfred (871-889) - fringes of Britain remain Celtic (Wales, Scotland) - kingdoms correspond to dialects → Anglo divided into Northumbrian and Mercian
- Englisc and Englalond - in 597 Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries to Kent → the establishment of Canterbury - the Jutish ruler Æthelbert was baptised by St Augustine → married Bertha, a Frankish princess - upon Æthelbert’s conversion, the Pope styled him Rex Anglorum ‘King of the Angles’→ first time Angles was used as a general term for the Germanic tribes - the Celts & Romans called the tribes simply Saxones, Saxonia - Angli, Anglia and Angelcynn (‘Angle-kin’) - the Germanic dialects spoken by the tribes – always referred to collectively as Englisc - from 1000 onwards – the language of Englalond ‘land of the Angles’
- Viking raids → begun in the late 8th century - destroyed centres of Christianity - threat and actuality of violence - demands for pay-offs - Anglo-Saxon kingdoms submitted to a single ruler → Alfred, the only English king ever formally titled ‘the Great’ - became ruler of Wessex in 871 - in 878 – victory at Edington over Guthrum, one of the Viking chieftains - victory was military and spiritual → Guthrum was impressed by the skills of Alfred’s Christian soldiers that he also decided to convert; Alfred was godfather at his baptism - Alfred and Guthrum signed the Treaty of Wedmore → Guthrum agreed to stay in East Anglia (seized before the battle at Edington) and to refrain from attacking Wessex, Mercia, Essex and Kent - the Treaty allowed for Viking settlement in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria, east of a line of demarcation → the line ran roughly from London to Chester - the area – subject to Viking rule – became known as the Danelaw - Danish vs. Norse vs. Scandinavian (Saxon for Celts) - Battle of Brunanburh in 937 – Alfred’s grandson victorious - late 10th century – Scandinavians renewed attacks on the English - the Battle of Maldon in 991, a famous defeat (and poem) - after the death of Ethelred the Unready (ill-advised), the Dane Cnut (Canute) married his widow and assumed the throne (i.e. Scandinavians ruled for 26 years) - English rule restored with the ascension of Ethelred’s son, Edward the Confessor in 1042 - Scandinavian colonization – important linguistic consequences → sound changes predominately started from the north - culturally – shared similar perspectives, legends and histories - the Danelaw and later settlements brought together peoples which quickly facilitated inter-marriages and neighbourly living
• Runes - Runic inscription from Caistor-by-Norwich, c. AD 400 - possibly the oldest known text in English → raïhan (roe-deer) - the first English were illiterate - an oral culture - first writing that appears are ‘Runes’ - runic alphabet is called ‘Fu(th)orc’ - first six letters - OE run = ‘secret’, so runstafa = rune-stave - stones, coins, jewellery, weapons, poems (70 inscriptions) - magic (?) as in casting the runes
- the archaeological dig at Sutton Hoo - the Franks Casket, Anglo-Saxon, first half of the 8th century AD, Northumbria, England, Whalebone - the Ruthwell Cross inscribed in runes with a religious poem, The Dream of the Rood, c. AD 700 - runes are not sufficient → with the resurgence of Christianity (597 AD) the monks and priests needed to communicate with the rest of Europe and a means to do so
- the Alphabet (Old English Style): A a, Æ æ, B b, C c, D d, E e, F f, G g, H h, I i, K k, L l, M m, N n, O o, P p, R r, S s, T t, Þ þ, Ð ð, U u, W w, X x, Y y
* Q V Z appear in Latin, Roman numerals, and proper names
- problem characters: - æ called asc, pronounced ‘a’ as in ‘cat’ - þ called thorn, pronounced ‘th’ (was originally a rune) → adopted and incorporated into the alphabet by Christian monks - ð Ð called eth pronounced ‘th’ - ‘w’ was written Ƿ by the Anglo-Saxons but in modern editions appears as ‘w’ (because it’s too confusing)
• Place names - BRITISH & ROMAN - London (Londinium) - pre-Celtic: Dover (Dubris – water, the stream), river Dour (Dobra?) Wendover (white waters), Andover (Ann) - Eccles (church) - Lincoln (lindon + Colonia = pool + settlement of military veterans) - Leeds (loidis – district on the river) - Penzance, Tremain, Llanfair, Glamorgan - Gallway, Connaught, Belfast, Derry - Pictish: Perth - British: Kirkaldy, Glasgow - Gaelic: Oban, Argyll, Dun Edin, Lothian - -chester: Manchester (Mamucio – breast shaped hill) - Winchester (Venta Belgarum), Chester - Doncaster (Danum – fast flowing river) - Lancaster (lune – health giving) - Gloucester (Gevum – bright place) - Leicester (ligoraceaster – tribal name) - Exeter (water) - Salisbury (Sorbiodunum – fort) < Salesbiri < Searobyrig - Lichfield < feld + Letocetum (grey wood) - Cornwall < Cornovii (tribal name) + wealas
- ANGLO-SAXON - Essex, Sussex, England, East Anglia - Nort-humber-land - Cumberland < Cumbria (Lat. Cambria) - Hasting, Reading, Barking - Devon (Deofenas), Cornwall (
Summer term 2010/11
Wednesdays 11.00-12.30
Fridays 11.00-12.30
~ Introduction ~
- Who speaks English? - 1) inner circle (320-380 million speakers; English as L1) - 2) outer circle (150-300 million speakers; English as L2) - 3) expanding circle (100-1000 million speakers; English as lingua franca = ELF) - possible language shifts: from ELF to L2 - from L2 to L1
- Why is English a world language? - historical reasons → colonization since the 16th and 17th centuries, imperialism - internal political reasons → English spoken in former colonies where it is considered to be the most neutral language which is not connected with any particular ethnic group - external economic reasons → the USA’s dominant position on the market (80% of the world trade in dollars) - practical reasons → international traffic control; historically, England as a maritime power - intellectual reasons → knowledge stored in English - entertainment reasons → movie industry, popular music - some wrong reasons → allegedly has no grammar (poor morphology and inflection, but complex syntax), more logical and beautiful than other languages
~ Language change ~ - a constant non-ending phenomenon
• 1) SOUND CHANGE - e.g. mandatory – ‘mandatory’ and ‘mandatry’ - a change under way in pronunciation: words ending in –ory, -ery, -ary and –ury as if they ended in –urry - dictionaries provide both pronunciations - other examples: factory, scenery, elementary, century - Australia – reduced, almost inaudible first vowel as well as the last one → ‘ostralia’ becomes ‘straya’ - slavery, cursory - etymological spelling (vs. phonological) of place names - e.g. Gloucester, Leicester, Bicester - from Roman castra (pl.) - in OE, “ce” pronounced as “tʃe” - e.g. Barnoldswick, Chiswick, Warwick - from OE wic, possibly meaning “village” - in compounds, the first sound of the second word is dropped → Warwick, /warik/ - e.g. Salisbury /sɔːlzbri/, Shrewsbury /ʃruːzbri/, Daventry /deɪntri/ - e.g. Magdalen College (Oxford), Theobald’s Road - diffusion – word-by-word progress of a sound change through vocabulary - burglary won’t change because of the consonant cluster ‘grl’
- yod dropping - the tenth smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet – refers to ‘y’ as in ‘yes’ - the first words to lose their yods: - after ‘r’ – rule and true → ‘rool’ not ‘ryule’ – vulgar and indolent pronunciation - after ‘l’ – blue → no one pronounces ‘blyue’ any more - e.g. beautiful, cute, fume, mute → ‘bootiful’ – East Anglian dialects (beauty – ‘booty’) - variation: dew, new, tune, suit, enthusiasm - Americans – greatest yod-droppers - British – reluctant yod-droppers - tune - ‘tyune/chune’ (BrE) vs. ‘toon’ (AmE)
- sound change umbrella term for a variety of changes - may affect single sound segments (vowels or consonants), combination of sounds (consonant clusters or diphthongs) - prosodic features (rhythm, stress, intonation) - conditioned = only in specific phonetic environments - unconditioned = all occurrences of a particular sound
- assimilation - a regularly occurring type of conditioned change - one sound becomes like another in its environment - Latin septem → Italian sette - partial assimilation: handbag [hambæg] - anticipatory or regressive assimilation: the affected sound precedes the conditioning one - perseverative or progressive: the order is reversed - Germanic *wulno → OE wull ‘wool’ (* - the word not attested, only reconstructed) - irregular English plural: foot – feet, goose – geese - i-mutation: *fōt /*fōti, *gōs /*gōsi → the i affected the ō vowel quality
- other types of sound change: - dissimilation – opposite of assimilation – sporadically in individual words - Latin peregrīnus (wanderer) to Old French pelerin – the source of English pilgrim - Old French purpre to English purpel - epenthesis – segments inserted into a phonetic sequence to break up consonant clusters (e.g. film, arm in Irish English → /fɪləm/, /arəm/) - aphaeresis – deletion/loss of initial segment: word initial [k] or [g] as in knife and gnome - apocope – deletion/loss of final segmet: name → OE /name/, ModE /neɪm/ - syncope – medial vowels disappear – monks from OE munecas - haplology – a whole syllable is deleted – OE Englalond > England - metathesis – adjacent segments are re-ordered – OE brid > bird; OE ācsian >ask
- sound changes on a much larger scale: - shifts in the pronunciation of sets of vowels or consonants: - First Germanic Consonant Shift – affected sets of plosives in the Germanic ancestor of English - The Great Vowel Shift – occurred with the long vowels in Middle English → main distinction between the Middle and Modern English - [a:] → [æ:] → [ɛ:] → [eɪ] (diphthongization), e.g. name - [e:] → [i:], e.g. feet - [ɛ:] → [e:] → [i:], e.g. beak - [i:] → [Ii] → [əɪ] → [aɪ], e.g. time - [ᴐ:] → [o:] → [oʊ] → [əʊ], e.g. stone - [o:] → [u:], e.g. boot - [u:] → [ʊu] → [əʊ] → [aʊ], e.g. mouse
• 2) SYNTACTIC CHANGE - e.g. I don’t understand nothing. - double and multiple negation - regarded as bad grammar since the late 1700s - 1000 years ago – negation formed with ne and two or more negators in one sentence was the norm - Þere nys noþinge þat so sone smyteþ with grevaunce the hed as wyne. - ‘there not-is nothing that so quickly smites with grievance the head as wine’ - ne-a-wiht (‘not-every-anything’) → noght (‘nothing’), pronounced with strong /h/ - predecessor of Modern English not - embracing negation: Hit ne swelleth not. ‘It not swells not’ - Sleep not grouellynge upon the stomacke. - I know not. Fear not. - not reduced to –n’t - won’t from will not - grammaticalization → negation from ne-a-wiht to n’t = ne-a-wiht → noght → not → n’t - “Language is a gigantic expression compacting machine.” Ron Langacker
- other candidates for negation: - a bit – derived from bite - used to strengthen negative sentences involving eating - I didn’t eat a crumb. I didn’t drink a drop. - It didn’t hurt a bit. - development of bit into a negator far-fetched? - French pas derives from Latin passus ‘step’ - pas originally strengthened verbs of walking - no way: No way I did it! - never: I never did it (‘I didn’t do it’)
• 3) LEXICAL CHANGE - phat – OED – excellent: a London crew with a really phat funk sound - origin 1970s – originally used to describe a woman, in the sense ‘sexy, attractive’ - constant awareness of lexical change: - new words in journalistic reporting - the inclusion of new words in dictionaries - we can each probably remember when certain words started to gain currency - English has gained – and lost – countless nouns, verbs and adjectives - prepositions and conjunctions have remained largely unchanged - core vocabulary - words that are too well entrenched to be threatened by replacement or loss - adjectival terms of approbation (such as cool, fab, wicked, phat and so on) continue to undergo inter-generational change - word loss – relatively frequent - deodand ‘something devoted to God’ - blowen ‘prostitute’ - smicker ‘to look amorously or wantonly at someone’ - loitersacke ‘a lazy person’ - many words we now use will follow the same route of obsolescence in the future - some words fall out of use, others become resurrected and popularized by speakers who apply them to new domains, e.g. after the First World War: - hand grenade (1661) - dugout (1886) - machine gun (1867) - periscope (1822-34) - no man’s land (1350) - broadcast (1813) – originally an agricultural term for the sowing of seed - radiator (1836) – once used as a generic label for anything that radiated heat, light or sound waves
- major sources of lexical augmentation → productive processes such as: derivation, clipping, blending and borrowing - e.g. the loan curry (from Tamil kari) - new to English in the late 16th century - now treated like other English nouns: - pluralized curries - adjectival pre-modification: Andy eats madly hot curries but I like a mild curry. - compounded: Are you going to the new curry house? - functional shift: Are you going to curry the potatoes?
- a) conversion – words come to function in more than one lexical category - drink – noun and verb - pretty – adverb, adjective and noun - that’s pretty bad / a pretty picture / come here, my pretty - in the case of ‘new’ words – a good indication of their integration into the ‘native’ wordstock
- b) compounding – the combination of two or more independent words to create a new one: - bathroom = noun + noun - bittersweet = adjective + adjective - pickpocket = verb + noun - blackboard = adjective + noun - overdose = preposition + noun - ingrown = preposition + adjective - overdo = preposition + verb - in Old English – primarily with words that were native to the language: - tungol-witega (‘star’ + ‘sage’) = astrologer - werewulf (‘man’ + ‘wolf’) - wærloga (‘oath’ + ‘breaker’) – now warlock - later – with ‘foreign elements’, completely ‘non-native’ and sometimes hybrid: - dinosaur (Greek dino ‘terrible’ + saur ‘lizard’) - submarine (Latin sub ‘under’ + marin- ‘sea’) - telephone (Greek tele ‘far’ + phone ‘voice’) - television (Greek tele ‘far’ + Latin (OF) vision) - gentlewoman & gentleman French gentil (1220) - compounding in the 20th and 21st centuries: - air raid, blackout, warbride - software, hardware, network, playstation - smartcard, bluetooth, firewall - affixation – using both native and ‘foreign’ elements from loanwords: - suffix -y: fitty, hotty more productive than –th (warmth, depth) - -wise – cycles of popularity - clockwise, otherwise (practically archaic) until about 1940 - moneywise, healthwise, personalitywise - c) clipping - a word is extracted from a longer one with the same meaning - phone from telephone - ad from advertisement - bra from brassiere - fridge from refrigerator - pram from perambulator - flu from influenza - autonomous words and not abbreviations – functional nouns which take plural markers, modification and participate in compounding: - loud phones, photo-frames, a very lacy bra, - fridge magnets, noisy prams, bird-flu - compound clippings: - sitcom (situation + comedy) - romcom (romantic + comedy) - satnav (satellite + navigation)
- d) blending: combination of clipping and compounding: - brunch (breakfast + lunch) - smog (smoke + fog) - motel (motor + hotel) - electrocute (electricity + execute) - Bollywood (Bombay + Hollywood) - blends (portmanteau words): - scuzzy ‘dirty and grimy’ (scummy + fuzzy) - boost (boom + hoist) - flunk (fail + funk) - Frenglish / franglais; Spanglish, Denglisch - guesstimate (guess + estimate) - spam (spiced ham) - nonce-formations (type of blend) – in advertising and journalistic writing: - Bennifer used extensively in 2003 for the relationship between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez - stalkarazzi (stalker + paparazzi) - spafe (spontaneous + safe) - modtro (modern + retro)
- e) acronyms – letter sequences that can be pronounced as words - AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome) - SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) - yuppie (young urban professional + affix) - snafu (situation normal all fucked up) - radar (radio detecting and ranging) - laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation)
- f) initialisms – sequences have to be pronounced individually: - FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) - FCUK (French Connection United Kingdom) - CD (Compact disc), DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) - initialisms in functional shift: - The police ID’d the suspect. - I lost my ID card. - He OD’d on heroin. - UFOlogy and UFOlogical - Boy George Files With Legal Papers As He DJed - new words from trademark names: - Kleenex, scotch tape - hoover, xerox - aspirin - tipp-ex - google - some of them also in functional shift
- g) backformation - re-analysis of a word’s structure - speakers remove what they think is an affix from a word to create a supposed ‘base’: - -er: teach, write, sing, watch → backformation from teacher, writer, singer, watcher - other examples: editor -> edit - sculptor → sculpt - burglar → burgle - televisor → televise - babysitter → babysit - orientation → orientate - bikini (analogy: bilateral, bilingual, bifocal) → monokini, tankini
- h) coinages - the art of minting new words - googol – number 1 followed by 100 zeros (10 to the 100th power) - coined in 1940 by Milton Sirotta (9) – nephew of the U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner - Shakespeare – laughable (1596), moonbeam (1600) - blurb (1907) by Gellet Burgess - chortle (1872) by Lewis Carroll - quidditch from Harry Potter – has an entry in the Collins Dictionary and an avenue in Cambridge
- i) borrowing - inaccuracy of the label → speakers do not consent to ‘loaning’ elements nor do those of the borrowing language give them back - ‘stealing’ and ‘adoption’ also inappropriate - borrowing continues to be the label of choice in denoting - ‘the attempted reproduction in one language of patterns previously found in another’ (Haugen 1950:212) - happens in cases of language contact - bilingualism - Old English borrowed from Latin in the areas of trade and religion - Early Modern English borrowed significantly larger – e.g. medicine and anatomy
- English today – social prestige in communities around the world – science and technology - borrowings often come from a prestigious language: - Middle English from French (religion, law, government, administration, warfare, arts, fashion, domestic life) - Early Modern English – from Latin and Greek - common direction of borrowing in unequal relationships of social prestige - languages borrow from a less prestigious partner in a contact situation - Germanic tribes in England – topographical features - repeated later in colonization – local places, flora and fauna - incorporation of loans from languages of migrant minority groups to those of established majorities - Britain settled by Indians and Pakistanis who established themselves in the restaurant trade - Indian food became a staple of British life - every Brit knows a balti from a korma from a jalfrezi, or a samosa from a bhaji - in the US – the Spanish of migrant Mexican settlers: - enchillada, nachos, tortilla, tostada, quesadilla, fajita, jalapeño, taco, guacamole, tamale - not necessarily involving a marked imbalance of social power - a reflection of the fact that concepts/objects from one culture are absorbed in another: - French: déjà vu, limousine, garage, voyeur… - Sanskrit: yoga, mantra, tantra, chakra… - Italian: lasagne, pizza, paparazzi, sonnet, opera… - German: angst, nickel, gestalt, zeitgeist, poodle… - Japanese: bonsai, kamikaze, karaoke, sushi, tycoon… - Chinese: feng shui, dim sum, ketchup, typhoon… - can occur because of close and continued cultural and linguistic proximity - English speakers in late 10th and early 11th century borrowed from Norse spoken by Scandinavian settlers in the north and east of England → since OE and ON were mutually intelligible, borrowings from ON not felt as foreign as those from French - close contact + high mutual intelligibility - sky - skin - husband - egg - ugly - window - scorch - they - them - their - are
- adaptation in borrowing - phonological: Theydon Bois on a London Underground map [θeɪdən ˈbɔɪz] - grammatical: French treats English loans as masculine: le weekend, le hamburger - German looks for the gender of the closest equivalent: die Story (die Geschichte), der Computer (der Rechner) - grammatical re-analysis: Arabic singular-plural pair hashhāsh / hashhāshīn - īn - the plural suffix - the plural has become English singular assassin – which is now of course pluralized by the addition of –s - j) calque - calquing = loan translation - skyscraper – gratte-ciel, rascacielos, Wolkenkratzer, neboder - beergarden from German Biergarten - marriage of convenience from French marriage de convenance - that goes without saying from French ça va sans dire - flea market - antibody - superman - standpoint - German Fernsehen from "television" - English honeymoon → French lune de miel, Catalan lluna de mel, Spanish luna de miel, Portuguese lua-de-mel, Italian luna di miele and Romanian luna de miere - German Kindergarten (‘children's garden’)→ French jardin d'enfants, Spanish jardín de infancia and Portuguese Jardim de infância calque Garden of Infants/children
• 4) SEMANTIC CHANGE - speakers are aware of change not only at the lexical level but also at the level of meaning - gay ‘bright’, ‘cheerful’ - aggravate ‘to make worse’ eroded and now it means to ‘irritate’, ‘to annoy’ - based on an assumption that each word has only one ‘true’ inherent meaning which is embodied in the word’s etymology → change is ‘deviation’/’corruption’ - the relationship between a word and the concept it stands for is ultimately arbitrary & based on convention - words do not possess inherent ‘true’ meanings - a signifier can be linked to more than one signified → we assume a one-to-one relationship between a word and a meaning for explanatory convenience - reality is more complex → words tend to be polysemic, “a whole range of shades of meaning” - meaning is a dynamic and fluid property, words gain and lose meaning with relative ease - If you scratch that rash, you’ll aggravate it - with gay abandon – the ‘cheerful’ meaning 'in a completely uncontrolled way’ - arbitrariness and polysemy – pre-conditions for change in meaning - re-interpretation of data in the inter-generational transmission of a native language - Old English (ge)bēd ‘prayer’ > modern bead - an adult using a rosary tells a child she is counting her beads – ambiguous context - she is saying prayers but the child sees the accompanying concrete action – the movement of the little spheres that make up the rosary - technological innovation: car (Latin carrus) – ‘four wheeled vehicle, chariot’ - mouse, virus, infection, cookie, avatar, windows, firewall - trauma – medical term for muscular damage → emotional /mental trauma… traumatized - wombe, stool, worm – OE wambe, stōl, wyrm → stomach, throne, dragon - taboo topics – euphemistic expression: He’s sleeping with Ella.
- a) restriction / narrowing / specialization - OE dēor - animal vs. deer - OE mēte – food vs. meat - OE hūnd – dog vs. hound - OE cwēn – woman vs. queen - OE steorvan – die vs. starve - b) extension / generalization / broadening - school ‘group of artists’, ‘school of thought’ - moon ‘any planet’s satellite’ - to arrive ‘to reach the river bank’ – any destination - to carry ‘to transport in a vehicle’ - crisis ‘turning point of a disease’ - c) metaphorization – speakers want to establish a link between two concepts - the foot of a mountain - the eye of a needle - the mouth of a river - the head of a company - the final leg of a race - animal labels: - catty – conniving and malicious - mousy – timid - social butterfly – someone who whizzes from occasion to occasion - wolf – sexually predatory male - vixen / minx – his female counterpart - someone is a honey - someone is bananas - a few sandwiches short of a picnic - d) metonymization – real rather than imagined link between concepts - crown and throne for sovereign - James Bond is in the service of the Crown - Who is in the power behind the throne? - White House, Downing Street, Buckingham Palace - Romania and China are finalists in the gymnastics competition - in Shakespeare: - King Lear to Regan’s husband – Kent, on thy life, no more! (town for a person) - to Cordelia’s husband – Thou hast her, France; let her be thine. (country for a person) - e) amelioration – acquisition of a more favourable meaning - knight OE cniht ‘boy’ - nice from Latin nescius ‘ignorant, silly, simple’ - terribly / awfully → intensifiers - He’s terribly good; She’s awfully pretty. - steward ‘overseer of the pig sty’ OE stig + weard - jolly ‘arrogant, wanton, lustful’ - f) pejoration – acquisition of a less favourable meaning - sælig ‘blessed’ → silly - vulgar ‘common’ - villain ‘low-born or common person’ - pejoration often in conjunction with taboo and euphemism - unpleasant, embarrassing, dangerous or powerful subjects – avoid naming them directly - pass away, gone to sleep - I’m going to the toilet – loo/restroom - I’m going to have a wee/pee. - little boys’/girls’ room - spending a penny - toilet – originally a euphemism (F toile ‘cloth’), introduced to replace privy, latrine & lavatory - technostrategic language: clean bombs, counter value attacks, collateral damage and surgically clean strikes → to obscure the actual scale of death and destruction
• 5) MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE - changes in word structure - morphology is integrated with phonology and syntax - i-mutation for plural formation (foot – feet) – words such as feet and geese became morphologically ‘irregular’ - endings –ás and – án in Spanish verb forms – tu comprarás ‘you will buy’, ellos comprarán ‘they will buy’ – developed from Latin habēre ‘to have’ (grammaticalization) - re-analysis of bikini - apron – from napron (consider related napkin, napery) - speakers analysed the initial nasal as part of a preceding indefinite article a(n) - nickname – from (an) ekename - newt – from (an) ewt (a kind of brilliantly coloured salamander
- analogy – a concept initially devised in diachronic studies of sound change by the Neogrammarians - sound changes occur regardless of the consequences on the grammatical system - i-mutated plurals - analogy comes into play after a sound change had operated - book (OE bōc → respelled with double ‘o’ → book, the Great Vowel Shift → [ᴐ:] – [u:]) – should have followed the i-mutation pattern of feet and geese, but instead conformed to the more widespread –s: books not beek - Sturtevant’s Paradox: “Sound change is regular but creates irregularity, whereas analogy is irregular but creates regularity.” - analogical extension with nouns (the formation of the plural) - OE nouns belonged to different inflectional paradigms - OE stān, ‘stone’ (masculine) – n. pl. stānas - OE scip, ‘ship’ (masculine) – n. pl. scipu - inflectional endings substantially reduced by the end of the ME period - the -as ending was retained, becoming –es/-s - generalized to other noun classes – regular plural marker for nouns in English - mouse – mice – mouses; house – houses - mongoose – mongooses or mongeese? - cactus : cacti, succubus : succubi, radius : radii - octopus – Greek loanword but looks Latin → pl. in Greek octopoedes, but through analogy with the Latin forms – octopi – a generally unproductive pattern - analogical extension with verbs - classes of strong verbs sing : sang : sung - classes of weak verbs walk : walked : walked → the ending –ed allegedly developed from a lexical verb ‘do’ → walked = walk + did - some became weak (help) - She texted me yesterday. I’ve e-mailed my CV. - originally weak dive : dived became strong dive : dove through analogy with drive - verbs and nouns which have no intention of changing: teeth, oxen, sheep, broadcast, swam, bought… - analogical levelling – affects paradigms of inflected words - verb paradigms for ‘to choose’ in OE and ModE - infinitive to choose cēo[z]an choo[z]e - past singular I chose cēa[s] cho[z]e - past plural we chose cu[r]on cho[z]e - past ptcp. you have chosen (ge-)co[r]en cho[z]en - irregularity has been levelled out to make the relationship between forms in the paradigm more transparent - analogy can be applied sporadically: - back-formation: verb laze from adj. lazy (scare – scary) - contamination: the form of a word is influenced by others: four – initial [k], quattro (lat.) – but influenced by neighbouring five (Croatian 9-10 → nonem, decem (lat.)) - folk etymology: word/phrase opaque to native speaker – reinterpreted: French asparagus – English sparrow grass, Italian girasole ‘sunflower’ – Jerusalem artichoke
~ Languages types ~
- Schlegel and Von Humboldt proposed a classification of languages based on the intrinsic characteristics of their morphological systems: - three main morphological types of language: isolating, agglutinating and inflecting
- 1) isolating or analytical - Ni men ti hua wo pu tu tung - you pl. poss. language I not all understand - “I do not entirely understand your language.” (Chinese) - each lexical or grammatical unit of information is carried by an individual morph, without affixation or modification - Chinese, Vietnamese
- 2) agglutimative - Baba –m kardeş –im –e bir mektup yaz -dir -di - father my brother my dat. a letter write/cause to/past tense - “My father had my brother write a letter.” (Turkish) - morphs are ‘stuck’ together to form words - each morph has a particular function - Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, Swahili
- 3) inflecting or synthetic - Arm –a vir –um –que can -o - weapon neut. man masc. and sing 1st p.sg. acc.pl. acc.sg. present indicative - “I sing about weapons and a man.” - Latin, Greek, Old English, Croatian - morphs may carry more than one unit of lexical/grammatical information - OE scipu – final –u – neuter gender, plural, acc or nom.
- 4) incorporating - Qasu -iir -sar -vig -ssar -si –ngit –luinar –nar –puq - Tired not [causing to be] [place for] suitable find not completely someone 3p.sg. - “Someone did not at all find a suitable resting place.” (Eskimo)
- What type is English? - More similar to an isolating language like Chinese than Latin: - There are few inflectional endings and word order changes are the basis of the grammar - Three-in-one: - Isolating: The boy will ask the girl. The girl will ask the boy. - Inflecting: The biggest boys have been asking. - Agglutinating: anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism
• MORPOLOGICAL CHANGE - not all languages actually fit easily into one of these three categories (analytic, synthetic, agglutinative) - languages display a tendency towards one morphological type - Schleicher (1821 – 1868, studied Indo-European, especially Slavic languages, formed the theory that a language is an organism, with periods of development, maturity, and decline) assumed that languages naturally ‘progressed’ in a cyclic process - synthetic state was the ultimate, ideal achievement - for some, the only movement possible from that high point is downward - synthetic → analytic – a process viewed as ‘decline’ or ‘decay’ (also called drift) - e.g. in English, dying out of cases - in Croatian, in plural dative, locative and instrumental the noun form the same - *idem s autom → “s” signifying the means - faster and greater decay indicates an active, civilized people - “If a language did not consistently undergo inflectional decline, it belonged to a people ‘unfitted for historical life’ who could only undergo ‘retrogression, even extinction.” (Schleicher, 1864) - Jespersen – “that language ranks highest which goes furthest in the art of accomplishing much with little means, or, in other words, which is able to express the greatest amount of meaning with the simplest mechanism.”
• SYNTACTIC CHANGE - re-analysis – contributory to lexical, semantic and morphological change – also influential in syntactic change - the development of English modals - may, might, can, could, will, would, should, must - from a set of Old English full verbs (pre-modals) - properties that set them apart from other verbs: - could not be followed by an inflected infinitive (*I must to go) - lost the ability to take a nominal object (*she could piano) - they do not carry present tense inflections - speakers re-analysed them as members of a new modal category. Evidence: - modals have no infinitive (*to will) - no non-finite forms (*they musted gone) - only modals (apart from auxiliaries) can invert with subjects (can she breathe? - *breathe she?) - they can take a following negative marker (he could not say that, *he speed not)
- change in word order - languages can be classified according to word-order types - based on fundamental order of three constituents (typically and most frequently occurring) → S(ubject), V(erb), O(bject) - Jeannie (S) saw (V) a ghost (O). SVO - Jeannie (S) a ghost (O) saw(V). SOV - the three categories can serve as labels for bigger constituents: - that so-called sweet old lady tripped up the girl who was walking past her house S V O - O can include constituents such as subject complement & adverbial (O = X) - she is in the garden she dances every night - six permutations (SVO, OVS, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV) can be reduced to two general ones – VO and OV - properties cited in word-order typologies: - the position of adjectives relative to nouns - the position of genitives relative to nouns → VO languages – NA and NG orders → OV languages – AN and GN structures - languages show a high degree of conformity to one of these patterns = exhibit typological harmony - English (and Croatian) is VO but does not have expected NA order → proof that these categories are merely idealisations - e.g. Jane likes ice-cream. (SVO) → but, chocolate ice-cream (AN) - Marica voli sladoled. (SVO) → but, čokoladni sladoled (AN)
- through time, languages can move – or drift from one basic type to another - English has drifted from OV to VO - textual evidence from North West Germanic – runic inscriptions of the third-seventh centuries → OV language - ek Hlewagastiz Holtijaz horna tawido ‘I, H.H. [this] horn made’ S O V S O V - [me]z Woduride staina þrijoz dohtriz dalidum. O S V ‘for me, W., [this stone] three daughters made’ - nouns preceded adjectives and genitives could occur both before or after nouns - the available evidence provides a snapshot of a language undergoing typological change from OV to VO - this direction of change continued throughout Old English - 8th century OV pattern (inscription on a gold ring, Lancashire): - Æðred me ah Eanred mec agrof → ‘Æthred me owns; Eanred me carved’ - later VO becomes norm, with OV restricted to certain structures: - main verb + obj pronoun: hē hine geseah ‘he him saw’ > ‘he saw him’ - subordinate clauses: God geseah ða þæt hit gōd wæs ‘God saw that it God was’ - today English is a VO language, except for the adjective placement
- grammaticalization - first defined by Meillet (1912:131): ‘the shift of an independent word to the status of a grammatical element’ - full nouns/verbs/adjectives → auxiliaries/prepositions/adverbs → affixes - accompanied by other developments: change in phonological form & ‘semantic bleaching’ - cross-componential change that involves syntax, morphology, phonology and semantics - the English system of affixes developed out of originally independent words → undergone both phonological reduction and semantic change - the prefix a- - derived from the preposition on - opaquely fossilized in aside (> OE, on side), alive (> OE, on life), abroad - transparently in a-hunting and a-shooting > I am on hunting. → I am a hunting. → I am hunting. - locative phrase preceded the present continuous - the suffix –ed - the most common Germanic prefix ge- for past participle derived from the Latin preposition cum, ‘together’ - cum → ge- → i-/y- → ø - bleaching of meaning – from ‘together’ to denoting past participle - the suffix –ly - adjectives: womanly, homely; adverbs: quickly, quietly - OE noun līc ‘body’ /lɪtʃ/ - began to be used in the formation of adjectives - underwent the process of semantic bleaching → ‘having the body or appearance of’ - OE cræftlic ‘having the appearance of skill’ (> ‘skilful’) - in ME –lich and liche underwent further phonological reduction – sound changes to unstressed syllables - fell together as the –li/-ly inherited by Modern English - the suffix –ly still productive in the derivation of adjectives and adverbs → example of both grammaticalization and lexicalization - extensively phonologically reduced and fully semantically bleached - its meaning is only in its grammatical function - a parallel development of līc to modern like - modern English speakers affix to nouns to form adjectives: human-like, god-like → not the same as humanly and godly - like as a discourse marker: - there were like people blocking, you know? - like as a quotative complementizer: - Maya’s like, ‘Kim come over here for a second’ - AmE discourse marker: like – placed before the part of the narrative intended to receive the most focus: She started to like really go for him - to introduce reported speech: I’m like, ‘just how crazy are you?’, She goes, ‘Mum wants to talk to you.’ - like – to frame constructions of thought: And Scott came up to the back door. He scared me half to death. He comes up and you know he looked pretty big. I was lying down on the couch, watching TV, and you know I could just see the outline of the body, and was like ‘Waaaaaaaaa.’ - the speaker didn’t actually make the noise → and I went … = he did scream
- English as a changing language - change is inevitable - causes of change → two extreme views: - 1) change is unmotivated, random, fortuitous [CHANCE] - 2) change is always functionally motivated, serving the expressing needs of speakers [NECESSITY] - two groups of factors: internal and external → they often interact - brought about by language contact → social, economic, geographical, political and historical reasons such as migrations and trade contacts - unpredictable – impossible to foresee who will migrate where / what fashion will catch on - easiest to trace in examining when loanwords first appear in a language - internal cause of change → those inherent to the system of a language - e.g. speakers stop using endings and start to rely on words such as of, for, the and have - children analyze the language they hear in a slightly different way from the generation before them - changing a vowel or a consonant: hām – home; skip – ship - case marking on who and stranding the preposition: Who did you talk to? - factors that inhibit internal change – prescriptive rules - e.g. ‘don’t split the infinitives’, ‘don’t end a sentence with a preposition’ - based on prestigious language or on logic or on attempts to conserve an older stage of the language
~ Pre-history of English ~
- origins of language → where did language start and how did it spread? - geneticists – relationships in the genetic material of people from different continents - archaeologists – early habitation sites - anthropologists – physical characteristics (e.g. teeth) - assumed that language originated in one place – Africa between 150,000 and 50,000 BC
- Sir William Jones – 18th century philologer and lawyer - late 1700s – Chief Justice of India - began to study and read ancient documents (4-6 c. AD) - Sanskrit ‘the language of the cultured’, used from around 3000 to 2000 BC - classical and modern variety - the Vedas (scriptures) – Hindu philosophy and religion - today it is a dead ‘living’ language restricted to religious ritual and academic study - Jones compared Sanskrit with Latin and Greek → noticed similarities in word forms and grammatical structures - correspondences among Indo-European languages - comparison work – THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
|• Numerals 1-10 in ancient languages |
|Latin |Greek |Sanskrit |Gothic |Old English |
|ūnus |heis |eka |ains |ān |
|duo |duo |dvau |twai |twēgen (twā) |
|trēs |treis |trayas |-- |þrīe |
|quattuor |tettares |catvāras |fidwor |fēower |
|quīnque |pente |panca |fimf |fīf |
|sex |hex |sat |saihs |siex |
|septem |hepta |sapta |sibun |seofon |
|octō |oktō |astau |ahtau |eahta |
|novem |ennea |nava |niun |nigon |
|decem |deka |dasa |taihun |tīen |
|• Grammatical correspondences: the verb ‘to be’ |
|Old English |Gothic |Latin |Greek |Sanskrit |
|eom (am) |im |sum |eimi |asmi |
|eart (art) |is |es |ei |asi |
|is (is) |ist |est |esti |asti |
|sindon (are) |sijum |sumus |esmen |smas |
|sindon (are) |sijuþ |estis |este |stha |
|sindon (are) |sind |sunt |eisi(n) |santi |
|• Verb conjugation |
|Sanskrit |Greek |Latin |Gothic |
|bhara - mi |pher - o |fer - o |bair - a |
|bhara - si |pher - eis |fer - s |bair - is |
|bhara - ti |pher - ei |fer - t |bair - iþ |
|bhara - mas |pher - omes |fer - imus |bair - am |
|bhara - tha |pher - ete |fer - tis |bair - iþ |
|bhara - nti |pher - onti |fer - unt |bair - and |
|• Cognate words: Family relationships |
|Sanskrit |Greek |Latin |Old Slavic |English |
|pitar |pater |pater | |father |
|matar |meter |mater |mati |mother |
|bhratar | |frater |bratu |brother |
|svasar | |soror |sestra |sister |
|duhitar |thygater | |dušti |daughter |
|• Social organization |
|Sanskrit |Greek |Latin |Old Slavic |English |
|vidhava | |viduva |udova |widow |
|• Parts of the body |
|Sanskrit |Greek |Latin |Old Slavic |English |
| |kardia |cor, cordis |sr(d)ce |heart |
| | |→ levis |→ lak |lungs |
|kaput | |caput | |head |
|pat |pous, podos |pes, pedis |→ pod |foot |
|• Climate and geography |• Economy |
|Latin |Croatian |English |Latin |Croatian |English |
|nox |noć |night snow wind beech |iugum |igo |yoke |
|nevis |snijeg |corn |axis |os |axle |
|ventus |vjetar |wolf |IE medhu |med |mead |
|fagus |bukva | |serere |sijati |sow |
|granum |zrno | |gleba |hljeb |loaf |
|lupus |vuk | | | | |
- Jones’ work – enabled scholars such as Rask and Grimm to formulate sound laws and to postulate what the predecessor of Latin and Greek might have been - grouping of certain languages into an Indo-European family - oldest IE – may have been spoken 6,000 years ago - unclear if it was at one point one language – called Proto-Indo European - spoken in one region, “a homeland” (the Urheimat) → Anatolia? North of the Caspian Sea? - Mallory “One does not ask ‘where is the Indo-European homeland?’ but rather ‘where do they put it now?’”
- the Proto-Indo-Europeans appear to have kept *uksen ‘oxen’, cows (*gwou-) and other livestock, such as sheep (*awi- > ewe), swine (*su-) and goats (*ghaido). A PIE *gen ‘family’ (eventually in genetics and kin) may have lived in a *domo ‘house’, furnished with *keromo- ‘pottery’ (> ‘ceramic’) and would have drunk *melg- ‘milk’ from the livestock and eaten dishes made with the *mel ‘meal’ of their *grno-. They may sometimes have had *pisk- ‘fish’, wild *ghans- ‘goose’ and when available, wild *abel- ‘apples’. They wore clothes made of woven (>*webh) *wel- ‘wool’ and possibly *lin- ‘flax’ (>linen), and footwear made of *letrom ‘leather’. Much work would have been done with tools fashioned from *stoino- ‘stone’, as well as wood and bone.
- there are no cognates for words meaning: - tiger, camel, monkey - olive, palm, coconut, vine, desert, rice - gold, silver, iron - ocean, ship, sea - this suggests that the original Indo-Europeans did not live in a warm climate, did not live near the sea, and did not work metals: - snow *sneigw- - freezing cold *gel-> (congeal) - animals: *bher- ‘bear’, *wlkwo- ‘wolf’, *bhibru ‘beaver’ - *as- ‘ash’, - trees: *elmo- ‘elm’, *bherag ‘birch’, *bhago ‘beech’
- Indo-European branches of the language tree: Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Greek, Anatolian, Baltic, Slavic (AmE, BrE = Slavonic), Iranian, Indian, Armenian - Indo-European subfamilies in Europe: Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Baltic, Greek, Albanian + Non-Indo-European (Hungarian, Finish, and Turkish)
~ The Germanic Language Family ~
[pic]
- the earliest surviving Germanic text from the 4th century (the translation of the Bible), the earliest Slavic text from the 9th century - Proto-Germanic spoken in the region of present-day Denmark, north Germany and south Sweden - reconstructed language → no concrete proof - North Germanic: ancestor Old Norse - Danish, Swedish and Norwegian mutually intelligible - Icelandic evolved at a slower pace because of its geographical, and subsequently linguistic, isolation
- West Germanic: Frisian closest to English of all West Germanic languages - English and German → monolingual speakers cannot understand each other - points of similarity: Mann mann grün green Maus mouse haben have singen sing Vater father Gast guest - words that correspond less obviously: Pfeffer pepper Hund ‘dog’ hound Herz heart Knecht ‘servant’ knight liegen lie Weib ‘woman’ wife lachen laugh Zeit ‘time’ tide - grammatical correspondences: dick thick dicker thicker (am) dicksten thickest
(irregularities:)
gut good besser better
(am) besten best - the verb system: - lachen – lachte laugh – laughed hassen – hasste hate – hated lieben – liebte love – loved
denken – dachte think – thought bringen – brachte bring – brought
singen – sang – gesungen sing – sang – sung geben – gab – gegeben give – gave - given fallen – fiel – gefallen fall – fell – fallen
|• Germanic cognate words |
|English |German |Swedish |English |German |Swedish |
|year |Jahr |år |queen | |kvinna |
|earth |Erde |jord |Sc bairn | |barn |
|flood |Flut, Fluß |flod |king < cyning |König |kung < konung |
|world |Welt |värld |horse |Ross |ON hross |
|stone |Stein |sten |hound |Hund |hund |
|home |Heim |hem |worm |Wurm |orm |
|mouth |Mund |mun |sword |Schwert |sverd |
|tooth |Zahn |tand |reek |Rauch |rök |
|head |Haupt |huvud |naked |Nackt |naken |
|hand |Hand |hand |young |jung |ung |
|arm |Arm |arm |green |grün |grön |
|finger |Finger |finger |red |rot |röd |
|here |hier |her |sing |singen |sjunga |
|where | |var |sang |sang |sjöng |
|what |was |vad |sung |gesungen |sjungit |
|shall |soll |skal |give |geben |ge |
|go |gehen |gå |gave |gab |gav |
|live |leben |leva |given |gegeben |givit |
| | | |fall |fallen |falla |
| | | |fell |fiel |föll |
| | | |fallen |gafallen |fallit |
- correspondences are fundamental, encompassing not only vocabulary but also all features of language - language change – an inevitable, ongoing process – the ancestors of English and German were dialects of the same language - German and English can be traced back to a common ancestor language → proto-language, parent language and daughter language - proto-language can be attested (surviving texts) - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Rumanian – common ancestor a variant of Latin - German and English – no texts for the common ancestor - reconstruction of a parent language → set up lists of cognate words
|Old English |OHG |Old Norse |Gothic |Modern English |
|fæder |fater |faðir |fadar |father |
|fōt |fuoz |fótr |fôtus |foot |
|þrīe |drî |þrīr |þreis |three |
|þū |dû |þū |þu |thou |
|cūðe |konda |kunna |kunþa |could |
|ōðer |andar |annarr |anþar |other |
|↓ |↓ |↓ |↓ |Proto-Germanic |
|f- |f- |f- |f- |*f- |
|þ- |d- |þ- |þ- |*þ- |
|-Vð |-Vnd |-Vnn |-Vnþ |*-Vnþ |
- correspondence between consonants:
| |Sanskrit |Latin |Gothic |Old English |Old Norse |
|full |purna- |plenus |fulls |full |fullr |
|thunder |tan- |tonare |….. |þunor |þórr |
|hound |cvan |canis |hunds |hund |hundr |
|hemp |…… |cannabis |….. |hænep |hampr |
|tooth |dant- |dens |tunþus |tōþ |tönn |
|corn |…… |grānum |kaurn |corn |korn |
|brother |bhrātar |frāter |broþar |brōþor |bróðir |
|door |dhwar |fores |daur |duru |dyrr |
|guest |ghost- |hosti-s |gast-s |giest |gest-r |
• GRIMM’S LAW: The first Germanic consonant shift
|p |t |k |→ |f |θ |χ |+ stop |→ |+ fricative |
| | | | | | | |voice | | |
|b |d |g |→ |p |t |k |+ stop |→ |voice |
| | | | | | | |+ voice | | |
|bh |dh |gh |→ |b/β |d/ð |g/γ |+ stop |→ |+ fricative |
| | | | | | | |+ aspiration | |aspiration |
| | | | | | | | | |+/- fricative |
- examples:
|PIE |PG | |Old English |Modern English |
|p |f |L piscis |fisc |fish |
| | |S pjena |fam |foam |
|t |θ |L tres |Þreo |three |
| | |L tu S ti |Þu |thou |
|k |χ |L cor(dis) |heort |heart |
| | |L canis |hund |hound |
|b |p |L labium |lippa |lip |
| | |S jabuka |æppel |apple |
|d |t |L decem / |teon |ten |
| | |S deset | | |
| | |L videre / |witan |wit |
| | |S vidjeti | | |
|g |k |L genu |kneo |knee |
| | |L ager |æcer |acre |
|bh |b/β |Sk bhrata |broÞor |brother |
|dh |d/ð |Sk rudhira / |read |red |
| | |S rudjeti | | |
|gh |g/γ |L hostis / |giest |guest |
| | |S gost | | |
- the First Germanic consonant shift (a.k.a. Grimm’s Law) postulated in 1822 - this ‘law’ had many exceptions: Latin pater English father - when [θ] is expected Latin mater English mother - when [θ] is expected - in 1875 the Danish linguist Karl Verner found the explanation – Verner’s Law
- Verner’s law: the shift predicted by Grimm’s Law had initially occurred when: 1) it did not occur in word-initial position 2) it occurred between voiced sounds 3) the preceding syllable had been unstressed
- another change that set (High) German apart from the other Germanic languages → the Second Consonant Shift - took place 1500 years ago Germanic p t k German pf / f /p ts / s/ t χ / k - the Second Consonant Shift:
| |Dutch |-- |English |→ |German |
|p |pijp | |pipe | |Pfeife |
| |slapen | |Sleep | |Schlafen |
| |appel | |apple | |Appfel |
| |dorp | | | |Dorf |
|t |twee | |two | |zwei |
| |eten | |eat | |essen |
| |dat | | | |das |
|k |boek | |book | |Buch |
| |ik | | | |Ich |
| |maken | |make | |machen |
~ The History of English ~
- events crucial for the development of the English language: - the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons around 450 AD - the invasion of the Vikings around 800 AD - the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD - the invention of print and the Great Vowel Shift in the mid 15th century - the development of modern technology
- comparing different stages of English:
|Foxas habbað holu, and heofenan fuglas nest | |10th century |
|sōþlice mannes sunu næfð hwær he hys hēafod āhylde. | | |
|Foxis han dennes, and briddis of heune han nestis, but mannus sone hath not where he schal reste his heed. | |14th century |
|The Foxes haue holes, and the birds of the ayre haue nests: but the sonne of man hath not where to lay his | |17th century |
|head. | | |
|Foxes have their holes, the birds their roosts; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. | |20th century |
- the terminology issues: - Old English - language and literature NOT historical period or ‘people’ - Medieval - language, literature, and historical period NOT ‘people’ - Anglo-Saxon – everything - ‘Old English is a term used to refer to the language and literature spoken and written in ‘England’ during the rule of the Anglo-Saxons (i.e. c. 450 AD up until the mid-eleventh century)’ - the majority of the Old English text preserved until today date from the later Old English period (10th and 11th centuries) - one of most known Old English texts: Bæda Venerabilis [The Venerable Bede] (Jarrow, 673 – Wearmouth, 731), Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum [Ecclesiastical History of the English People]
• History of Britain - circa 449 AD – the date of the first significant landings of the Anglo-Saxons - brothers Hengest and Horsa - invited by the Celtic king Vortigern to fight the Picts - spoke closely related Germanic dialects that would become the roots of English within a few generations - the year 500 AD more sensible birth-date for English - England’s (i.e. Britain’s history) did not begin with English → human populations some 50,000 years earlier - archaeological and paleontological traces remain, but no linguistic - first settlers to leave a linguistic legacy were the Celts, who arrived around 600 BC - invaded by Julius Caesar in 55 BC, ‘land on the edge of the civilized world’ → possible that Caesar carried out his invasion by invitation - in-fighting between various tribes → Celtic kings wanted to demonstrate that they had a strong Roman alliance - Romans never penetrated far into Wales or Scotland → Hadrian’s Wall - Emperor Claudius (43 AD) – a more successful attempt at invasion and colonization → subjugated Celts – numerous revolts - Boudicca, queen of the Welsh tribe Iceni, who led an uprising in 60 AD against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire - destroyed Colchester – the first Roman city in England - 70,000 Roman soldiers and Romanized citizens dead - Wealas – ‘foreigners’ (cf. Wales) - Saxons – the name supposedly derived from the word ‘axe’
- Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy - the tribes and kingdoms:
|the Jutes - |Kent |
|the Saxons - |Sussex |
| |Wessex |
| |Essex |
| |Middlesex |
|the Angles - |East Anglia |
| |Northumbria |
- political supremacy at different times: 7th century → Northumbria 8th century → Mercia 9th century → Wessex Ecgbert (802-839) Alfred (871-889) - fringes of Britain remain Celtic (Wales, Scotland) - kingdoms correspond to dialects → Anglo divided into Northumbrian and Mercian
- Englisc and Englalond - in 597 Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries to Kent → the establishment of Canterbury - the Jutish ruler Æthelbert was baptised by St Augustine → married Bertha, a Frankish princess - upon Æthelbert’s conversion, the Pope styled him Rex Anglorum ‘King of the Angles’→ first time Angles was used as a general term for the Germanic tribes - the Celts & Romans called the tribes simply Saxones, Saxonia - Angli, Anglia and Angelcynn (‘Angle-kin’) - the Germanic dialects spoken by the tribes – always referred to collectively as Englisc - from 1000 onwards – the language of Englalond ‘land of the Angles’
- Viking raids → begun in the late 8th century - destroyed centres of Christianity - threat and actuality of violence - demands for pay-offs - Anglo-Saxon kingdoms submitted to a single ruler → Alfred, the only English king ever formally titled ‘the Great’ - became ruler of Wessex in 871 - in 878 – victory at Edington over Guthrum, one of the Viking chieftains - victory was military and spiritual → Guthrum was impressed by the skills of Alfred’s Christian soldiers that he also decided to convert; Alfred was godfather at his baptism - Alfred and Guthrum signed the Treaty of Wedmore → Guthrum agreed to stay in East Anglia (seized before the battle at Edington) and to refrain from attacking Wessex, Mercia, Essex and Kent - the Treaty allowed for Viking settlement in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria, east of a line of demarcation → the line ran roughly from London to Chester - the area – subject to Viking rule – became known as the Danelaw - Danish vs. Norse vs. Scandinavian (Saxon for Celts) - Battle of Brunanburh in 937 – Alfred’s grandson victorious - late 10th century – Scandinavians renewed attacks on the English - the Battle of Maldon in 991, a famous defeat (and poem) - after the death of Ethelred the Unready (ill-advised), the Dane Cnut (Canute) married his widow and assumed the throne (i.e. Scandinavians ruled for 26 years) - English rule restored with the ascension of Ethelred’s son, Edward the Confessor in 1042 - Scandinavian colonization – important linguistic consequences → sound changes predominately started from the north - culturally – shared similar perspectives, legends and histories - the Danelaw and later settlements brought together peoples which quickly facilitated inter-marriages and neighbourly living
• Runes - Runic inscription from Caistor-by-Norwich, c. AD 400 - possibly the oldest known text in English → raïhan (roe-deer) - the first English were illiterate - an oral culture - first writing that appears are ‘Runes’ - runic alphabet is called ‘Fu(th)orc’ - first six letters - OE run = ‘secret’, so runstafa = rune-stave - stones, coins, jewellery, weapons, poems (70 inscriptions) - magic (?) as in casting the runes
- the archaeological dig at Sutton Hoo - the Franks Casket, Anglo-Saxon, first half of the 8th century AD, Northumbria, England, Whalebone - the Ruthwell Cross inscribed in runes with a religious poem, The Dream of the Rood, c. AD 700 - runes are not sufficient → with the resurgence of Christianity (597 AD) the monks and priests needed to communicate with the rest of Europe and a means to do so
- the Alphabet (Old English Style): A a, Æ æ, B b, C c, D d, E e, F f, G g, H h, I i, K k, L l, M m, N n, O o, P p, R r, S s, T t, Þ þ, Ð ð, U u, W w, X x, Y y
* Q V Z appear in Latin, Roman numerals, and proper names
- problem characters: - æ called asc, pronounced ‘a’ as in ‘cat’ - þ called thorn, pronounced ‘th’ (was originally a rune) → adopted and incorporated into the alphabet by Christian monks - ð Ð called eth pronounced ‘th’ - ‘w’ was written Ƿ by the Anglo-Saxons but in modern editions appears as ‘w’ (because it’s too confusing)
• Place names - BRITISH & ROMAN - London (Londinium) - pre-Celtic: Dover (Dubris – water, the stream), river Dour (Dobra?) Wendover (white waters), Andover (Ann) - Eccles (church) - Lincoln (lindon + Colonia = pool + settlement of military veterans) - Leeds (loidis – district on the river) - Penzance, Tremain, Llanfair, Glamorgan - Gallway, Connaught, Belfast, Derry - Pictish: Perth - British: Kirkaldy, Glasgow - Gaelic: Oban, Argyll, Dun Edin, Lothian - -chester: Manchester (Mamucio – breast shaped hill) - Winchester (Venta Belgarum), Chester - Doncaster (Danum – fast flowing river) - Lancaster (lune – health giving) - Gloucester (Gevum – bright place) - Leicester (ligoraceaster – tribal name) - Exeter (water) - Salisbury (Sorbiodunum – fort) < Salesbiri < Searobyrig - Lichfield < feld + Letocetum (grey wood) - Cornwall < Cornovii (tribal name) + wealas
- ANGLO-SAXON - Essex, Sussex, England, East Anglia - Nort-humber-land - Cumberland < Cumbria (Lat. Cambria) - Hasting, Reading, Barking - Devon (Deofenas), Cornwall (
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Keeping a combining vowel between two root words, EVEN if the second root word begins with a vowel.…
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I am a 23 year old who is going back to school for my first time in 7 years. English is one of the courses I signed up for, not only because it is a requirement, but I see it as a necessity. For me to be successful in college and whatever career I choose, I believe adequate reading and writing skills is important. My history with reading and writing has definitely had its ups and downs throughout my life.…
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The very fact that people have linguistic diversity in the US makes it necessary to follow the single language system to ease out the gap in communication. This argument is well presented in the article ‘Can English Be Dethroned?’ The essay answers the question favorably as it suggests English can never be dethroned from its unique position among languages. Globalization has caused it to this high support, and there is no doubt that the language cannot be removed from its number one position in a global…
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vowel creates an image of never ending growth as the words themselves sound longer than…
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g. [frut] h. [pritʃər] i. [krak] j. [baks] k. [θæŋks] l. [wɛnzde] m. [krɔld] n. [kantʃiɛntʃəs] o. [parləmɛntæriən] p. [kwəbɛk] q. [pitsə] r. [bərak obamə] s. [dʒɔn məken] t. [tu θaʊzənd ænd et]…
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Further changes following Grimm's Law, as well as sound changes in other Indo-European languages, can sometimes obscure its effects. The most illustrative examples are used here.…
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Occurs when the final consonant sound of a word is connected to the first vowel or…
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When a sound changes because of the influence of a neighboring sound, the change is called a conditioned sound change. We have already considered a good example of a conditioned sound change from the history of English namely, the palatalization【語】顎音化of [k] before the front vowel [ī]. Notice that the only voiceless【語】清音的, 無聲的velar【語】軟顎音的 stops【語】塞音that were palatalized were those occurring before the vowel [ī]; all other velar stops remain剩下, 餘留nonpalatal. Evidence o this is Old English ku [kū], corresponding符合的; 一致的; 相同的, 對應的; 相當的to Modern English cow [ka]. It is important to focus on the phonetics語音的; 語音學的here, rather than the spelling because even though the spelling happens to have changed from k to c, this in itself does not necessarily imply暗指; 暗示; 意味著[+(that)] a change in pronunciation.…
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to the English “s” in 90 percent of nouns (Heminway 8). Another example, - the suffix “-eur”…
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The main aim of the work is to analyze, and to find examples of English vowels and their diversities, which are commonly used in English.…
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Another phenomenon common for Germanic languages is gradation or ablaut- root vowel change in strong verbs etc.…
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