Gramatyka Historyczna 11

• Yes-no questions - either introduced by the pronoun hwæþer or by inversion itself:

  • hwæðmoton twagenæwe gebroðr twa geswustor in gesinscipe onfon? ‘whether may two full brothers two sisters in marriage take?’

• Sentence patterns:

  • Subjectless structures ­ - the subject NP could be dropped when it could be recovered from the context:

    • he þeæsunde oferflat, hæfde mare mægen ‘he thee at swimming surpassed, (he) had more strength’

    • Especially with reference to natural phenomena:

      • norþsniwde ‘of-north snowed’

  • Basically, no subjectless clauses in PDE

  • In polish, they are present (mówi się)

  • Impersonal constructions did not have nominative subjects either

    • finite clauses – subject in nominative case – he goes

    • Himðæsceamode

    • Them-DAT this-GEN shamed ‘im był wstyd tego / they were ashamed of that’

  • common in OE (in Polish they are quite common today, too: mi się podoba, in Spanish: me gusta)

The seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy)

• Heptarchy:

1. Northumbria,

2. Mercia,

3. Wessex,

4. East Anglia,

5. Kent,

6. Sussex,

7. Essex

• Four main dialects

  1. Northumbrian – Northumbria

  2. Mercian – Mercia, East Anglia, Essex

  3. West Saxon – Wessex, Sussex

     • most of the texts from OE that survived are West Saxon texts

     • Standard English is not a direct continuation of West Saxon – it’s not always easy to see the continuation in words of English, some words are taken from Mercian, but more words in PDE English came from roman LGs: French, Latin

  4. Kentish – Kent

Events / works written

• Cadmon’s Hymn (670?) Bede finishes Ecclesiastic History

• King Alfred the Great – ordered to translate many texts (mainly Latin) into English – this texts are also classified as early OE texts and ordered Anglo Saxon Chronicle to be written

• Gospels written (translations from Latin) –

  • 970 Exeter Book (Riddles, the Wanderer, the Seafarer)

  • 975 Vercelli Book copied

  • Alfric’s Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints

  • Beowulf – manuscript copied

  • Junius manuscript copied (contains Oenesia, Exodus, Christ and Satan) / Some parts of the Bible

• Most written documents were found in OE in comparison to other Germanic LGs

• At least three million words in writings

Christianisation – in 597, Roman emissary, Augustine, arrived in South England, converted the king of Kent, and set up Canterbury cathedral, 1066 Norman Conquest

• by 700 all of Anglo-Saxon England was Christian

• replacing runic alphabet

• Quite a peaceful process

• New monasteries were founded

• Classical culture brought together with Latin and Greek

• Monks studied arts, classical LGs, literature, science, chronology

  • Caused the introduction of new words in English (words connected with religion, studying, e.g. monk, candle, some words were adapted from English or changed meaning)

  • Practically all England Christianised

  • Several linguistic effects of Christianisation

    • New words (Latin: abbot, hymn, candle, oil, master, school, apostle, pope, monk, mass, verse)

    • The change of old words in new meanings ( heahfæder ‘patriarch’, godspell ‘Gospel’, halend ‘saviour, heofon ‘heaven’, gast ‘spirit’, halga ‘holy’, god changed grammatical category)

    • Replacing the runic alphabet by the roman alphabet

• Viking Invasion (Old Norse) – 787-850 – raids for plundering. Shallow penetration of the coastal area, plundering of towns and monasteries and a relatively quick return. In 793 and 794 the monasteries of Lindisfarne and Jarrow, the centres of learning and Christendom, were attacked and plundered

  • 3 periods – plunder, plunder+occupy, conquer

  • Canute – the 1^st “Danish” king

  • 865-879 – the participation of large and well organised forces, whose aim was not only plunder but also the occupation and settlement of the invaded land

  • By 875, the Vikings had conquered all of England except Wessex. …

  • 991-1042 in 991 Olaf Tryggvason invaded England and defeated the English army at the Battle of Maldon

  • Scandinavian invaders came to England without women and married English females

  • Intermarriages and close everyday contacts between the English and the Scandinavian settlers ultimately led to the amalgamation of the two peoples.

    • This amalgamation was facilitated by more cultural similarities than differences between them and by a relatively small difference between the two genetically related (Germanic) languages they spoke

  • Danelaw – the occupied territory of England by Vikings/Danes

  • English absorbed a lot of words and some semantic changes were introduced

• William Caxton – set up the first printing press in London (i śmieszkował o liczbie mnogiej jajek, hehe)

• Old Norse and Old English similar

Germanic:

• /sk/

  • North Germanic (Scandinavian) shirt, scatter, skip

    • /sk/ vs.

  • West Germanic (English) shirt, shatter, shift

    • / ʃ / <sc> (palatalisation)

• /k/, /g/

  • North Germanic (Scandinavian) break, wake, stick, dike, egg

    • /k/, /g/ vs.

  • West Germanic (English) breach, watch, stitch, ditch, ey

    • /k//tʃ/; /g//j/ (palatalisation)

• / ɑɪ /

  • North Germanic bloom – flower, bloom| gift – gift, present |plow –agricultural tool

    • eɪ, e: vs.

  • West Germanic bloom – ingot of iron | gift – price of a wife |plow - a measure of land

    • a:

• open-class words easily borrowed and added from and to the lexicon

• closed-class words pronouns, conjuctions, prepositions; borrowed from Old Norse: till, their, rhey, them, though, are (sindon)

• Loanwords of Scandinavian origin are associated with the sea, law, and a variety of everyday objects, activities, qualities, etc.

  • anger (wræþ), band, bank, bask (bathe, bull, cake, call, egg, die, fellow, gap, keel, law, leg, loan, root, scab, sister, skill (cræft), skin (hide), sky, steak, windows (eagthryl), ill (sick), low, meek, weak, wrong, call , cast, get ,give, take (niman), ugly, want

Main types of sound changes (name the sound changes in the exam):

• Assimilation – making a sound more like an adjacent sound

  • Palatal: L: ag’do’ + tus (pass. Part.) > actus

  • Complete: L: exactus > IT: esatto ‘exact’ L: octo > IT: otto

  • Anticipatory/regressive - change of the prior phoneme

    • L factum (fact) > lt. fatto 0 preservative/progressive (change of the proceeding phoneme): IE* /plnó-/ (cf. Pol. Pełny) > Proto-Germanic */fulla-/ > OE full ‘full’

  • Distant:

    • consonantal change

      • IE */penkwe/> L */quinque/ > PG*/femf(e)/ ‘five’

    • Vocalic change, umlaut (which is often confused with the grammatically conditioned ablaut):

      • PG */musiz/> OE > /mi:siz/

• Dissimilation – unpredictable replacement of a sound that co-occurs with a word):

  • Ger. Tartuffein > Mod. German Kartoffel, PL. arbitralny < L: arbitrarius

• Palatalization – a change of consonants to (alveo-)palatal affricatives or fricatives: PG

  • Examples in the table “Germanic” on the previous page

• Loss (delition) – the dropping of a segment

  • Apocope - the loss of final sound(s)

    • OE: blawan > ME: blow; OE: sunu > ME: son

    • PL: złotych -> złoty in connected speech

  • Syncope - the loss of medial sounds

    • OE: elnboga > elboga ‘elbow’

  • Aphaeresis - the loss of initial sounds / [misdivision (based on analogy)]:

    • OE: a naddre > ME: an adder

      • (n moved from the noun to the indefinite article)

    • Simplification of consonantal clusters: hn-, hr-, hl-,

      • OE: hring > rain

    • An irregular loss:

      • ONF: escalder > ME: scaldnde ‘scalding’

  • Haplology - the loss of a similar phoneme or a group of similar phonemes in an adjacent position

    • OE: Englalond > ME: England

      • la and lo – similar phonemes > la

• Epenthesis - the insertion of an extra medial sound

  • thymel > thimble

    • normally homogenic -

      • sound inserted of the same place of articulation [m is homogenic with b]

• Prothesis - the introduction of an extra initial sound

  • L: schola > SP: Escuela

  • Pl: hameryka

• Metathesis - sporadic reordering of adjacent segments

  • ascian and axian ‘ask’ fiscas and fixas ‘fishes’ frost and forst ‘frost’ three – third (more regular would be third)

• Split – introduction of new phoneme into the phonological system which originally is an allophone of a phoneme that does not correspond to an allophone of any other phoneme:

  • in OE /ð/, /z/ and /v/ were only allophones of /θ/,/s/ and /f/ respectively in ME, after apocope of schwa and consonantal degemination, they gained the status of phonemes in English

Other sound changes

• Compensatory lengthening - the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable

• Final devoicing - voiced obstruents become voiceless before voiceless consonants and in pausa. // simplified – if a particular obstruent is at the final position – it is devoiced [smog – smok]

• Intervocalic voicing (of fricatives) – main fricatives voiced if they appeared between two voiced sounds – otherwise voiceless [f; θ]

• Nasal assimilation - The process whereby nasal stops assimilate to an adjacent obstruent, as in the case of the English prefix /ɪn-/, realised as [ɪm] in impossible, [ɪn]in indirect, and [ɪŋ] in incredible.

• Diphthongisation - A process in which a monophthong becomes a diphthong. For example, the monophthongs /e/ and /o/ have undergone diphthongisation in many varieties of English to become, for example, [eɪ] and [əυ]. Referred to informally as breaking.

• Monopthongisation (coalescence) - A process in which two sounds assimilate to each other. In English, a sequence of alveolar [s] followed by the palatal approximant [j] will often result in coalescence, yielding the palato-alveolar sound [ʃ], as in [mɪʃə] for miss you.

• Vowel raising ­- vowel raising means that the vowel is closer, toward the top of the vowel chart kobietakobita

• Vowel lowering – lowering means that the vowel is more open, toward the bottom of the chart

• Nasalisation - An assimilation process in which a vowel becomes nasalised when it is adjacent to a nasal sound, often a nasal stop. In many accents of American English, the vowel // is nasalised when followed by a nasal stop, as in [p˜n] (pan).

• Gemination - A process whereby a single, non-geminate, consonant undergoes lengthening to become a geminate consonant. //consonants are doubled

• Degemination - A process in which a geminate segment is simplified to become non-geminate. In the English word immaterial, the prefix in- is added to the adjective material. But the word is pronounced with a nongeminate[m]: [ɪmətɪəɹiəl], and not as [ɪmmətɪəɹiəl],with a fake geminate. This is in contrast to words such as unnatural, where degemination does not take place; the prefix un- is added to the root natural, resulting in the pronunciation [nntʃəɹəl], with a fake geminate. //doubled consonants replaced by the single consonant

• Spirantisation (Fricativisation): the process in which stops become fricatives.

• Lengthening – when a given element is lengthened [i -> i:]

• Shortening - when a given element is shortened [u: -> u]

• Weakening (lenition) – when nr of elements is fewer d->t, devoicing, stop->fricative, loss of aspiration // Phonetics. a phonological process that weakens consonant articulation at the ends of syllables or between vowels, causing the consonant to become voiced, spirantized, or deleted. // lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous (vowel-like). The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin lenis = weak) // vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels, which are related to changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for Creek language[1]), and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.

Next time: Middle English “aaand” maybe Modern English

Vowel chart

GVS