Historia i Odmiany Języka
Discuss the influence of language contact on the development of English (from Old English to early Modern English).
The Romans and Latin: In 55 BC Julius Caesar invaded England. The Romans settled and built many roads temples, theatres, houses and famous baths. Therefore, the influence of Latin was tremendous. Many modern words derive from Latin: battle (camp), pound (pund), coin (mynet).
OLD ENGLISH: During the 5th century AD Germanic tribes invaded Britain: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. They crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany. At that time the inhabitants of Britain spoke a Celtic language. Most of the Celtic speakers were pushed west and north by the invaders - mainly into what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Angles came from "Englaland" [sic] and their language was called "Englisc" - from which the words "England" and "English" are derived. About half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old English.
The Vikings from Scandinavia invaded the British Isles during the late eighth century. The Vikings spoke a language called ‘Old Norse’, which today is an extinct language. Old Norse and Old English were in many ways similar since they belonged to the same language family, Germanic. Therefore, the Old Norse constituents integrated with ease into Old English. These borrowings went undetected for centuries but remain in the language up to the present-day. It is estimated that there are around 400 Old Norse borrowings in Standard English. These borrowings are amongst the most frequently used terms in English and denote objects and actions of the most everyday description.
MIDDLE ENGLISH: In 1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy (part of modern France), invaded and conquered England. The new conquerors (called the Normans) brought with them a kind of French, which became the language of the Royal Court, and the ruling and business classes. For a period there was a kind of linguistic class division, where the lower classes spoke English and the upper classes spoke French. After 1200 English became dominant in Britain again, but with many French words added.
MODERN ENGLISH. Early Modern English (1500-1800): Many new words and phrases entered the language. The invention of printing press by William Caxton also meant that there was now a common language in print. Books became cheaper and more people learned to read. Printing also brought standardization to English. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the dialect of London, where most publishing houses were, became the standard. In 1604 the first English dictionary was published.
Show how historical phonological processes can explain Present-day English irregularities.
By the sixteenth century English spelling was becoming increasingly out of step with pronunciation owing mainly to the fact that printing was fixing it in its late Middle English form just when various sound changes were having a far-reaching effect on pronunciation.
Chief among these was the so-called ‘Great Vowel Shift’, which can be illustrated (with much simplification) from the three vowel sounds in mite, meet, and mate. In Middle English these were three long vowels with values similar to their Latin or continental counterparts [i:], [e:], and [a:] (roughly the vowel sounds of thief, fete, and palm); the spelling was therefore ‘phonetic’.
After the shift:
long ‘i’ became a diphthong (probably in the sixteenth century pronounced [əi] with a first element like the [ə] of the first syllable in ago)
long ‘e’ took its place with the value [i:]
long ‘a’ became a front vowel, more like that of air to begin with, but later [e:].
Another great sound change was called Germanic Consonant Shift or Grimm’s Law (first described by Jacob Grimm). It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages. Grimm's law consists of three parts which form consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift. The phases are usually constructed as follows:
Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.
Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.
Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives (as allophones).
This chain shift can be abstractly represented as:
bʰ > b > p > ɸ
dʰ > d > t > θ
gʰ > g > k > x
gʷʰ > gʷ > kʷ > xʷ
Discuss the position of English within Indo-European and Germanic.
English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. This broad family includes most of the European languages spoken today. Indo-European family is the family of languages that spread throughout Europe and many parts of Southern Asia and which can be found around the world because of colonialism. The parent language for all of them is Proto-Indo-European. The Indo-European family includes several major branches: Latin and the modern Romance languages (French etc.); the Germanic languages (English, German, Swedish etc.); the Indo-Iranian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit etc.); the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Czech etc.); the Baltic languages of Latvian and Lithuanian; the Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish Gaelic etc.); Greek.
English is a Germanic language. The dialects of Germanic languages can be further separated off into North Germanic, West Germanic and East Germanic. English belongs to West Germanic group of languages. Other languages in that group are for example Frisian, Dutch and Flemish.
The fact that English is a Germanic language means that it belongs to an early grouping of Indo-European which distinguishes itself from other languages of this family by having undergone a series of changes to consonants in initial position e.g. stops become fricatives. This is assumed to have taken place many centuries BC.
Show the significance of major political and cultural developments for the history of English.
The Roman Christianisation of Britain in 597 – Latin became a language of church and scholarship. New loanwords appeared: pope (papa), school (scol), heaven (heofon), holy (halga), altar, silk, pine, school.
Scandinavian invasions – raids began in 787 and lasted until 850. The Scandinavians initially came to plunder monasteries on the coasts. However, large number of them stayed and settled in England. They were cosmopolitan people due to generations of contact with foreign communities and their natural capability eased their assimilation. They accepted Christianity and mingled with English people. Therefore, there are many borrowings from Old Norse in English: reindeer, goat, swain, whole, bloom.
As a result of the Viking wars and the subsequent settlement of many speakers of Old Norse, a North Germanic language, the introduction of new words and a simplification of the grammar had already started to take place. This was more marked in those areas in the North, Midlands and East Anglia where the Danes and Norwegians settled in large numbers.
Battle of Hastings marks the beginning of Norman conquest. In that period, French became a language of prestige. English almost disappeared – the new ruling class was French speaking and English was downgraded to the language of poor and uneducated people. There was a considerable number of French literary works published in England and about England (e.g. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “History of the English”).
Hundred Years’ War – (a series of conflicts from 1337 to 1453 between England and France, for control of the latter kingdom). The change in language effected by the Hundred Years' War was radical. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, French was the accepted language of all formal discourse in England. Hundred Years’ War is seen among the causes contributing to the disuse of French and reestablishment of English. It was generally adopted in 14th century, introduced in Law Courts and in literature.
Renaissance (1500-1650) – it was in that period when William Caxton invented printing press. This great achievement was followed by the spread of popular education, increased communication, growth of specialized knowledge and language awareness. English became a language of prestige. Books became more accessible and many of them were translated into English. Also, there were first attempts to draw up rules. Several authors (Thomas Smith, John Hart, Richard Mulcaster) wrote books in which they attempted to present rules that governed English language.
The expansion of British empire – the number of people who speak English has gradually increased all over the world since the mid-16th century. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I the number of English speakers ranged between five and seven million while in 1952, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the number reached 250 million. This huge increase in the number of English speakers in the world is the result of the expansion of the English language from the British Isles to different areas and continents in the world. It is sometimes called "linguistic imperialism". As a result, English became the most dominant and most powerful language in the world that motivated many linguists and language researchers. Now it is considered the international language". The British colonial activity, in addition for spreading the English language all over the globe, has resulted in the creation of new varieties of English which were influenced by the aboriginal languages of the colonised countries.
Present 16th and 17th century attitudes to English and their consequences.
After the Norman conquest English started to gain prestige. In 1485 after the War of The Roses the House of Tudor came into power and ruled England for over a hundred years. Second monarch of this dynasty was Henry VIII, the king who is the founder of the Anglican church. As he broke with Rome he also removed Latin from Church services in favour of English. In 16th century there was also a need to draw up rules, mainly to systematise English language. The Normans introduced confusion when they tried to write in the language that they knew imperfectly and they transferred their habits from French. Therefore in 16th century there was no one generally accepted spelling system that everyone could conform to. First book in which some universal rules were introduced was “A.B.C for Children”. The author focused on vowels and how spelling can indicate pronunciation. Then several more works like that appeared. The most important one was “Elementarie” by Richard Mulcaster, most extensive and most important work on spelling in the 16th century. Mulcaster believed that the same letter must sometimes be used for different sounds. His work was so influential that its publication was followed by Mulcaster’s reform and general adoption of some universal rules he had put forward in his book e,g. reduction of superfluous letters: putt, grubb, led > put, grub, led, principle of proportion (since we write hear, we should write dear, fear and many more.
In the 17th century the tendency towards uniformity of English spelling increased steadily. The most important date is 1658 when Edward Phillips published his book “The New Work of English Words”. This book gave grounds for modern spelling. As well as containing common words, the dictionary featured many unusual words, foreign terms, proper nouns and other specialist terms. In total, the original edition featured 11 000 entries, increasing to 17 000 by the fifth edition in 1696. It was later revised and enlarged by John Kersey in 1706, eventually containing 38 000 entries. Kersey had already compiled his own dictionary, “A New English Dictionary”, in 1702, and used this revised edition of The New World of English Words as the basis for his more concise “Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum” in 1708.
Discuss grammatical change in the history of English.
The English language once had an extensive declension system similar to Latin, modern German and Icelandic. Old English distinguished between the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases, and for strongly declined adjectives and some pronouns also a separate instrumental case (which otherwise and later completely coincided with the dative). In addition, the dual number was distinguished from the singular and plural. Declension was greatly simplified during the Middle English period, when the accusative and dative cases of the pronouns merged into a single oblique case that also replaced the genitive case after prepositions. Nouns in Modern English no longer declined for case, except for the genitive.
Pronouns such as whom and him (contrasted with who and he), consist of the old accusative and dative cases, as well as of the genitive case after prepositions (while her also includes the genitive case). The information formerly conveyed by distinct case forms is now mostly provided by prepositions and word order. In Old English as well as modern German and Icelandic as further examples, these cases had distinct forms.
Although some grammarians continue to use the traditional terms "accusative" and "dative", these are functions rather than morphological cases in Modern English. That is, the form whom may play accusative or dative roles (as well as instrumental or prepositional roles), but it is a single morphological form, contrasting with nominative who and genitive whose. Many grammarians use the labels "subjective", "objective", and "possessive" for nominative, object, and genitive pronouns.
Modern English nouns exhibit only one inflection of the reference form: the possessive case, which some linguists argue is not a case at all, but a clitic - a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase (it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent, always attached to a host).