A History of English

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A History of English

• Chapter 2
• The Pre-history of English

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The Indo-European Languages and Linguistic
Relatedness

• The Beginnings
• Timeline from the first indications of nomadic
  tribes in Lapland around 8000 BCE to the
  settlement of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes in 449 CE

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700 English 500 Armenian 400 Gothic 0 200
Latin 400 Classical Sanskrit 800 Greek 100
0 Old Persian 1200 Hittite 1500 Vedic
Sanskrit 3000 Proto Indo-European
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Sources

• Archaeological record
• Linguistic reconstruction
• Insights from modern dialectology
• Anthropology (Agriculture)

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The Development of Historical Linguistics

• Evolutionary Nature Charles Darwin
• Analogy to biological theories life-cycle,
  genealogy, family tree, common ancestors
• August Schleicher, Family Tree Theory/Stammbaumthe
  orie

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Genetic Relatedness

• Indo-European language family and its
  sub-families
• Biological metaphor various languages belong to
  different families and bear offspring
• Family tree metaphor

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Genetic RelatednessExample
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Numerals in Indo-European and non-Indo-European
languages
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Sound correspondences in IE
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Genetic RelatednessExample

• Mann, man, man
• Hand, hand, hand
• Tier, djur, deer
• The individual differences depend on the history
  of each language after it has split off from the
  larger group and developed independently

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Genetic RelatednessCognates
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Sir William JonesThird Anniversary Discourse
Calcutta 1786

• The Sanskrit Language, whatever be ist antiquity,
  is of a wonderful structure more perfect than
  the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more
  exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to
  both of them a stronger affinity, both in the
  roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than
  could possibly have been produced by accident so
  strong indeed, that no philologer could examine
  them all three, without believing them to have
  sprung from some common source, which, perhaps,
  no longer exists there is a similar reason,
  though not quite so forcible, for supposing that
  both the Celtic had the same origin with the
  Sanskrit and the Old Persian might be addded to
  the same family.

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Sir William Jones
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Sound correspondences between Sanskrit, Latin and
Greek
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The Indo-European Language Family eminent early
scholars

• Franz Bopp (1816)
• Rasmus Rask (1814) the first linguist to
  describe formally the regularity of sound changes
• Jakob Grimm

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The Indo-European Language Family

• Proto-language unitary language
• Ursprache parent language
• Grundsprache Latin for French, Spanish,
  Portuguese, Italian, Rumanian
• Sister language Latin and Greek
• Daughter language French of Latin

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The language family metaphor

• A parent language does not live on after a
  daughter language is born
• Birth metaphor is incorrect
• Contact is still there between sister languages
• Languages diverge as well as converge

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August Schleicher
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On comparative reconstruction

• Internal reconstruction
• Reconstruction of languages that do no longer
  exist
• pater, /pEter/

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Indo-European 500 AD
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Indo-European 500 BC
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The Indo-European World
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Indo-European Subfamilies in Europe
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IE World
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Centum and Satem
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The Sun in Indo-European

• Classical Greek helios
• New Greek illios
• Latin sol
• Italian sole
• French soleil
• Spanish sol
• Rumanian soare
• Old Irish grian

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• New Irish grian
• Welsh haul
• Breton heol
• Gothic sauil, sunno
• Old Norse sol, sunna
• Danish sol
• Swedish sol
• Middle English sonne

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• Modern English sun
• Dutch zon
• Old High German sunna
• Middle High German sunne
• New High German sonne
• Lithuanian saulé
• Lettic saule
• Serbo Croatian sunce

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• Czech slunce
• Russian solnce
• Sanskrit suar

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Celtic

• Keltoi (5th century BC), Proto-Celtic Gauls
• Insular Celtic (British Isles), Continental
  Celtic,
• kw- ? either q- or p-
• P-Celtic Brythonic pedwar
• Welsh, Cornish, Breton. Cumbric
• Q-Celtic Goidelic ceathair
• Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic
• Welsh in Patagonia, Argentina
• Gaelic in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Dramatic decline of Celtic languages Cornish,
  Manx have died out Celtic revival
• Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh still spoken by
  bilingual speakers about 20 claim knowledge of
  Welsh

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Germanic language zones
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Germanic languages
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Germanic

• Proto-Germanic
• East Germanic
• Gothic Ulfilas (4th CE) Crimean Gothic
• North Germanic Old Norse as common language
• Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, Icelandic
• West Germanic
• Low Germanic Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, English
• High Germanic German (Low, High)

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From Indo-European to Germanic

• Prosody from free pitch accent to strong fixed
  stress accent
• The Consonant System Sound Shifts

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Grimms Law or The First Consonant Shift
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Germanic Consonant Phonemes from IE stops
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Sound Laws Grimms Law

• Voiceless stops gt voiceless fricatives
• Voiced stops gt voiceless stops
• Voiced aspirated stops gt voiced stops
• Exceptions dependent on phonetic environment

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Verners Law (1875)

• centum, hundred, patér, fæder, wearD, worden,
  freas, froren, was, were
• The new sound correspondences were in force when
  (1) the stress was not on the vowel immediately
  preceding, and (2) the sound in question was
  bounded by elements that had the feature
  voice (either vowels or voiced consonants)

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The Vowel System

• I,e, a, o, u, E
• ei, ai, oi, eu, au, ou
• ablaut, vowel gradation sing, sang, sung

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Morphology in IE and Germanic

• three numbers sg, pl, dual
• three genders masc, fem, neutr
• eight cases
• strong and weak adjectives after determiner, no
  determiner se goda man, god man
• verb marked person, number, aspect, mood (aspect
  reduced to two tenses in Germanic)

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Morphology continued

• three voices active, passive, middle
• Germanic had five moods indicative, subjunctive,
  optative, imperative, injunctive
• seven major morphological verb classes
• dental preterite verbs (weak verbs) in Germanic

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Typological classification

• Syntactic universals SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS,
  OSV
• Strawberries taste good Strawberries, I like,
  raspberries make me sick
• Implicational universals
• Morphological Typology isolating, agglutinating,
  fusional/inflectional, (polysynthetic,
  inorporating)
• Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel,
  Wilhelm von Humboldt

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Language Contact and Language Change

• Why do languages change? The actuation problem
• Geography as a major factor
• Language Contact adstratum, superstratum,
  substratum
• The need to dispersal
• Retention of features as a counter tendency to
  language contact spread of English as a case in
  point