CHAPTER
1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
Languages
change over time. Slowly, to be sure, but they do change. English is measured in
three "cataclysmic" changes that generally coincide with historical
events that had a profound effect on the language. The first appearance of
English, as such, was when the Saxons invaded Britain. This form of English is
called Old English and dates from approximately 449 to 1066, when the Normans
conquered England, beginning the period of Middle English. It was during this
time period (1066-1500) that many of the Latinate words used in English today
were introduced into the language, as well as Latinate spellings. Around 1500,
there was a great vowel shift which brought the language into Modern English,
which is where it is today. Based on this measure (approximately 500 years per
shift), we may expect major changes in the language today. The Great Vowel
Shift in English changed the seven long (tense) vowels of Middle English and
moved them "up" on the tongue. Fromkin and Rodman posit that the
Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of the spelling
"inconsistencies" today [320-327]. Language change, however, is a
highly regular process.
Any
of the linguistic rules identified in Linguistics Assumptions and Principles
may be changed: phonemes may be changed, added or removed, morphological rules
may be added, changed, or lost, and even syntactical rules might be modified.
Semantic rules and the lexicon change much more rapidly than the other three.
Lexical changes (the addition, modification, or removal of words from the
general lexicon) are perhaps the quickest changes in language. The semantic
change of words may change broaden, narrow, or even shift in meaning.
It
has been demonstrably shown that all languages are derived from some original
tongues, now long dead. There is enough similarity between English and German
that they can be considered distant cousins at this point. It is supposed that
proto-Latin and proto-German language were once "sister" languages,
making all of the descendants "cousins." Often, but not always, this
relationship of languages is based on geographic areas. As Latin speakers moved
north and west, they successfully integrated themselves into what was to become
the Spanish and French cultures, warping the existing languages into a form of
Latin. There was more resistance to Latin across the Channel, so the language
did not develop from Latin, but more from the barbaric languages of the
Bretons, the Angles, and the Saxons [Fromkin and Rodman, 338-347].
Sufficient
research has been done to indicate that the "parent" tongue for all
of these languages was a tongue now called "Indo-European," which in
turn created a host of other languages as demonstrated in Figure 3-1 [from
ORCHIS software package, 1994].
CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION
2.1 Language change
Language change is variation over time in a language's phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features.
Linguists have traditionally studied
variations in a language occurring at the same, time (synchronic study) or how
language develops over time (diachronic or historical study). Both can be
useful aids to understanding.
The study of language change is often
narrowed to consideration of change in one aspect of language: lexis, semantics
or syntax, say. But you should have a sense of the broad historical development
of English. Later, you may wish to study more fully how the language developed
at a particular period. For the 20th century, we are able to study some kinds
of change over a very short time, as there is plenty of evidence. The further
back we go, the longer may be the periods over which change can be observed.
Before the 20th century, most of the evidence that survives is of written
forms. We have some second-hand written evidence of spoken language forms, but
no recorded speech earlier than that allowed by modern recording technology.
Languages change for a variety of
reasons. Large-scale shifts often occur in response to social, economic and
political pressures. History records many examples of language change fueled by
invasions, colonization and migration. Even without these kinds of influences,
a language can change dramatically if enough users alter the way they speak it.
Frequently, the needs of speakers
drive language change. New technologies, industries, products and experiences
simply require new words. Plastic, cell phones and the Internet didn’t exist in
Shakespeare’s time, for example. By using new and emerging terms, we all drive
language change. But the unique way that individuals speak also fuels language
change. That’s because no two individuals use a language in exactly the same
way. The vocabulary and phrases people use depend on where they live, their
age, education level, social status and other factors. Through our
interactions, we pick up new words and sayings and integrate them into our
speech. Teens and young adults for example, often use different words and
phrases from their parents. Some of them spread through the population and
slowly change the language.
2.2
History of English Language Change
The history of English is conventionally, if
perhaps too neatly, divided into three periods usually called Old English (or
Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, and Modern English. The earliest period begins
with the migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in
the fifth century A.D., though no records of their language survive from before
the seventh century, and it continues until the end of the eleventh century or
a bit later. By that time Latin, Old Norse (the language of the Viking
invaders), and especially the Anglo-Norman French of the dominant class after
the Norman Conquest in 1066 had begun to have a substantial impact on the
lexicon, and the well-developed inflectional system that typifies the grammar
of Old English had begun to break down.
2.2.1
Old English
The following brief sample of Old English
prose illustrates several of the significant ways in which change has so
transformed English that we must look carefully to find points of resemblance
between the language of the tenth century and our own. It is taken from
Aelfric's "Homily on St. Gregory the Great" and concerns the famous
story of how that pope came to send missionaries to convert the Anglo-Saxons to
Christianity after seeing Anglo-Saxon boys for sale as slaves in Rome:
Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon. Him wæs geandwyrd,
þæt hi Angle genemnode wæron. Þa cwæð he, "Rihtlice hi sind Angle
gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on
heofonum engla geferan beon."
A few of these words will be recognized as
identical in spelling with their modern equivalents—he, of, him, for, and,
on—and the resemblance of a few others to familiar words may be guessed—nama to name, comon to come, wære to
were, wæs to was—but only those who
have made a special study of Old English will be able to read the passage with
understanding. The sense of it is as follows:
Again he [St. Gregory] asked what might be
the name of the people from which they came. It was answered to him that they
were named Angles. Then he said, "Rightly are they called Angles because
they have the beauty of angels, and it is fitting that such as they should be
angels' companions in heaven."
Some of the words in the original have
survived in altered form, including axode
(asked), hu (how), rihtlice (rightly), engla (angels), habbað
(have), swilcum (such), heofonum (heaven), and beon (be). Others, however, have
vanished from our lexicon, mostly without a trace, including several that were
quite common words in Old English: eft
"again," ðeode
"people, nation," cwæð
"said, spoke," gehatene
"called, named," wlite
"appearance, beauty," and geferan
"companions." Recognition of some words is naturally hindered by the
presence of two special characters, þ, called "thorn," and ð, called
"edh," which served in Old
English to represent the sounds now spelled with th.
Other
points worth noting include the fact that the pronoun system did not yet, in
the late tenth century, include the third person plural forms beginning with th-: hi appears where we would use they.
Several aspects of word order will also strike the reader as oddly unlike ours.
Subject and verb are inverted after an adverb—þa cwæð he "Then said he"—a phenomenon not unknown in
Modern English but now restricted to a few adverbs such as never and requiring
the presence of an auxiliary verb like do or have. In subordinate clauses the
main verb must be last, and so an object or a preposition may precede it in a
way no longer natural: þe hi of comon "which they from came,"
for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað "because they angels' beauty have."
2.2.2
Middle English
Perhaps the most distinctive difference
between Old and Modern English reflected in Aelfric's sentences is the
elaborate system of inflections, of which we now have only remnants. Nouns,
adjectives, and even the definite article are inflected for gender, case, and
number: ðære ðeode "(of) the
people" is feminine, genitive, and singular, Angle "Angles" is
masculine, accusative, and plural, and swilcum
"such" is masculine, dative, and plural. The system of inflections
for verbs was also more elaborate than ours: for example, habbað "have" ends with the -að suffix characteristic of plural present indicative verbs. In
addition, there were two imperative forms, four subjunctive forms (two for the
present tense and two for the preterit, or past, tense), and several others
which we no longer have. Even where Modern English retains a particular
category of inflection, the form has often changed. Old English present
participles ended in -ende not -ing, and past participles bore a prefix
ge- (as geandwyrd "answered" above).
The period of Middle English extends roughly
from the twelfth century through the fifteenth. The influence of French (and
Latin, often by way of French) upon the lexicon continued throughout this
period, the loss of some inflections and the reduction of others (often to a
final unstressed vowel spelled -e) accelerated, and many changes took place
within the phonological and grammatical systems of the language. A typical
prose passage, especially one from the later part of the period, will not have such
a foreign look to us as Aelfric's prose has; but it will not be mistaken for
contemporary writing either. The following brief passage is drawn from a work
of the late fourteenth century called Mandeville's Travels. It is fiction in
the guise of travel literature, and, though it purports to be from the pen of
an English knight, it was originally written in French and later translated
into Latin and English. In this extract Mandeville describes the land of
Bactria, apparently not an altogether inviting place, as it is inhabited by
"full yuele [evil] folk and full
cruell."
The spelling is often peculiar by modern
standards and even inconsistent within these few sentences (contré and contree, o [griffoun] and
a [gret hors], þanne and þan, for
example). Moreover, in the original text, there is in addition to thorn another
old character 3, called "yogh," to make difficulty. It can represent
several sounds but here may be thought of as equivalent to y. Even the older
spellings (including those where u stands for v or vice versa) are
recognizable, however, and there are only a few words like ipotaynes "hippopotamuses" and sithes "times" that have dropped out of the language
altogether.
We may notice a few words and phrases that
have meanings no longer common such as byttere
"salty," o this half "on this side of the world," and at
the poynt "to hand," and
the effect of the centuries-long dominance of French on the vocabulary is
evident in many familiar words which could not have occurred in Aelfric's
writing even if his subject had allowed them, words like contree, ryueres, plentee, egle, and lyoun.
In general word order is now very close to
that of our time, though we notice constructions like hath the body more gret
and three sithes more þan is the water of the see. We also notice that present
tense verbs still receive a plural inflection as in beren, dwellen, han, and
ben and that while nominative þei has replaced Aelfric's hi in the third person
plural, the form for objects is still hem.
2.2.3
Modern English
All the same, the number of inflections for
nouns, adjectives, and verbs has been greatly reduced, and in most respects
Mandeville is closer to Modern than to Old English.
The period of Modern English extends from the
sixteenth century to our own day. The early part of this period saw the
completion of a revolution in the phonology of English that had begun in late
Middle English and that effectively redistributed the occurrence of the vowel
phonemes to something approximating their present pattern. (Mandeville's
English would have sounded even less familiar to us than it looks.)
Other important early developments include
the stabilizing effect on spelling of the printing press and the beginning of
the direct influence of Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek on the lexicon.
Later, as English came into contact with other cultures around the world and
distinctive dialects of English developed in the many areas which Britain had
colonized, numerous other languages made small but interesting contributions to
our word-stock.
The historical aspect of English really
encompasses more than the three stages of development just under consideration.
English has what might be called a prehistory as well. As we have seen, our
language did not simply spring into existence; it was brought from the
Continent by Germanic tribes who had no form of writing and hence left no
records. Philologists know that they must have spoken a dialect of a language
that can be called West Germanic and that other dialects of this unknown
language must have included the ancestors of such languages as German, Dutch,
Low German, and Frisian. They know this because of certain systematic
similarities which these languages share with each other but do not share with,
say, Danish. However, they have had somehow to reconstruct what that language
was like in its lexicon, phonology, grammar, and semantics as best they can
through sophisticated techniques of comparison developed chiefly during the
last century.
Similarly, because ancient and modern
languages like Old Norse and Gothic or Icelandic and Norwegian have points in
common with Old English and Old High German or Dutch and English that they do
not share with French or Russian, it is clear that there was an earlier
unrecorded language that can be called simply Germanic and that must be
reconstructed in the same way. Still earlier, Germanic was just a dialect (the
ancestors of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were three other such dialects) of a
language conventionally designated Indo-European, and thus English is just one
relatively young member of an ancient family of languages whose descendants
cover a fair portion of the globe.
2.3 Types of language change
2.3.1 Lexical changes
The study of lexical changes forms the
diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology. The ongoing influx of new words in
the English
language (for
example) helps make it a rich field for investigation into language change,
despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the vocabulary
available to speakers of English. Throughout its history
English has not only borrowed
words from other
languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words.
Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in
languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the appearance in a language of
new words, or of new usages for existing words. By the same token, they may tag
some words as "archaic" or "obsolete".
2.3.2 Phonetic and phonological changes
The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments. The sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short period in the
American resort of Martha's
Vineyard and showed
how this resulted from social tensions and processes.[4] Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media
have recorded their work, one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and
the 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and
fashionability of regional
accents in media may
also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — compare the
widespread adoption of language policies.
The mapping and recording of
small-scale phonological changes poses difficulties, especially as the
practical technology of sound recording
dates only from the 19th century. Written texts provide the main (indirect)
evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries. But note Ferdinand
de Saussure's work on
postulating the existence and disappearance of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European as an example of other methods of
detecting/reconstructing sound-changes within historical
linguistics.
2.3.3 Spelling changes
Standardization of spelling originated relatively recently. Differences in spelling
often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The
pre-print era had fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed
systems of orthography, and the handwritten manuscripts that survive often show
words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal preference.
2.3.4 Semantic changes
Semantic changes are shifts in meaning
of the existing words. They include:
§ Widening, in which a term acquires a broader
meaning
§ Narrowing, in which a term acquires a
narrower meaning
2.4 The Differences of Vocabulary in Old
English to Modern English
2.4.1 General characteristics
The
surviving vocabulary of Old English (OE) is relatively small. The Thesaurus of
Old English (TOE), with which you will be working, contains almost 34,000
different word forms, whereas a modern desk dictionary might contain 80,000.
Some of these words have more than one meaning, i.e. they are polysemous: TOE
contains just over 50,000 meanings altogether. An example of multiple meaning
or polysemy is OE ecg, pronounced in the same way as its Modern English (Mod.
E.) descendant ‘edge’. In addition to meaning ‘edge’, it also means ‘blade’,
the part of an object that has a sharp edge, and ‘sword’, an object
distinguished by having a sharp edge or blade. This is an example of metonymy,
the identification of an object by one of its attributes, as when the Prime Minister
is referred to as ‘No. 10’. ‘Edge’ in Mod. E. also has a metaphorical sense,
where an abstract idea is conveyed by referring to something concrete, as in
‘her voice had an edge to it’.
Much
of the vocabulary of Mod. E. derives from OE. This applies particularly to our
core vocabulary: common words in everyday use for fundamental concepts.
Examples include the natural world (earth,
sea, wind, fire, water; sun, moon, star); people (man, woman, child, father, mother, brother, daughter); the body (hand, arm, elbow, finger, foot, nose, mouth);
and other basic concepts such as food,
drink; heaven, hell; friend, neighbour; love, good, evil; hot, cold; after,
over, under. However, not all words which look alike necessarily refer to
the same thing – such misleading words are often called false friends. An
example pair is OE bēor / Mod. E. beer. Although both refer to alcoholic
drinks, the nature of the drink is quite different.
The
examples above are all typical of OE words in being one or two syllables in length.
Where there are two syllables, the stress is on the first. Initial stress is a
characteristic feature of the Germanic languages as a group and remains the
most common type of word structure in Mod. E. We have also retained from OE
many of the ways of making new words, but at the same time English has borrowed
numerous words from other languages, notably French and Latin. Thousands of
French words were brought into English after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which
ended the rule of the Anglo-Saxon kings and introduced considerable social
change. New words occur especially in fields where Norman influence was
strongest, such as Law, Literature and Fashion. These loan words from other
languages often exhibit different stress patterns from the basic Germanic
vocabulary, as with anatomy and cagoule from French, armada and potato from
Spanish, kamikaze from Japanese, anathema from Greek and flamingo from
Portuguese.
2.4.2 Compounds
New
words are often formed in Mod. E. by combining two existing words to form a
compound, as in aircraft, hatchback, motorway and raincoat. Such words are more
specific in their meanings than the words they combine. This practice is even
more characteristic of OE, where a high proportion of the vocabulary,
particularly the vocabulary of poetry, comprises compounds. For instance, OE sǣ ‘sea’ combines with OE mann ‘man’ to give a compound sǣmann ‘sailor’. The same first element
combines with OE dēor ‘animal’ to
give sǣdēor ‘sea creature’. It also
combines with OE rima ‘rim’ to give sǣrima ‘coast’, and with OE faru ‘journey’ to give sǣfaru ‘voyage’. You can often work out
what a word means by breaking it down into its constituent parts.
2.4.3 Kennings
Sometimes
a little more thought is required to understand a compound, as with sǣmearh, a combination of sǣ with mearh ‘horse’ (the ancestor of Mod. E. mare). Here the second
element refers not to a living animal but to the horse as a mode of transport,
so the compound as a whole translates as ‘ship’. Compounds like sǣmearh which are to be understood
metaphorically rather than literally are common in OE poetry, and are known as
‘kennings’. Other examples are nihthelm
‘darkness’, a combination of niht
‘night’ with helm ‘helmet’; bānhūs
‘body’, from bān ‘bone’ and hūs ‘house’; and swanrād ‘sea’, from swan ‘swan’ and rād ‘road’.
2.4.4 Prefixes and suffixes
As
in Mod. E., new OE words could be formed from existing ones with the addition
of prefixes or suffixes. Prefixes tend to affect meaning, for instance by
reversing or intensifying the application of the original word (e.g. excusable,
inexcusable; sound, unsound). Suffixes are used to change one type of word into
another: for instance, to create a noun from a verb (e.g. sing, singer), or an
adverb from an adjective (e.g. sad, sadly).
Common
OE prefixes include:
·
mis- defective (dǣd ‘deed’, misdǣd
‘misdeed’; faran ‘to go’, misfaran ‘to go astray’)
·
ofer- excess (ǣt ‘eating’, oferǣt
‘gluttony’; fyllan ‘to fill’, oferfyllan ‘to fill to overflowing’)
·
un- negative (cūþ ‘known’, uncūþ ‘unknown’;
riht ‘right’, unriht ‘wrong’)
However,
prefixes sometimes have little if any effect. For instance, giefan and
forgiefan both mean ‘to give’. Many verbs can occur with or without the prefix
ge-; niman and geniman both mean ‘to take’. This is sometimes summarized in
dictionaries and grammars of OE as (ge)niman, and the ge is ignored when the
words are alphabetized.
Common
suffixes, many of which are still used in Mod. E help to identify types of
word.
Common adjective
suffixes include:
-ful (cearu ‘care, sorrow’, cearful
‘sorrowful’)
-ig (blōd ‘blood’, blōdig ‘bloody’)
-isc (cild ‘child’, cildisc ‘childish’)
-lēas (hlāford ‘lord’, hlāfordlēas ‘lordless’)
-lic
(wundor ‘wonder, miracle’, wundorlic ‘wonderful, miraculous’)
Many adverbs end in:
-e
(heard ‘hard, fierce’, hearde ‘fiercely’)
-līce
(hrædlic ‘quick’, hrædlīce ‘quickly’)
Abstract nouns often
end in:
-dōm (wīs ‘wise’, wīsdōm ‘wisdom’)
-hād (cild ‘child’, cildhād ‘childhood’)
-nes (beorht ‘bright’, beorhtnes ‘brightness’)
-scipe (frēond ‘friend’, frēondscipe
‘friendship’)
Other
common Mod. E. suffixes, such as those in words like devotion, fortitude;
generous, generosity; social, sociable, sociability, were adopted later from
French or Latin.
2.4.5 Metathesis
The
transposition of sounds within a word is known as ‘metathesis’, and it affects
a small but distinctive group of Mod. E. words derived from OE. Examples
include beorht ‘bright’, brid ‘young bird’, gærs ‘grass’, þerscold ‘threshold’,
þrītig ‘thirty’, þurh ‘through’ and wæps ‘wasp’.
2.4.6 Survival
Many
of the surviving OE words occur very rarely, or only in specialised contexts.
These are marked in TOE by four superscript flags, g, o, p, q.
-
g indicates words which occur only as translations of foreign words, usually
Latin. Such translations are sometimes written in a manuscript and sometimes
occur in bilingual wordlists or glossaries.
-
o indicates words which occur very rarely, often only once.
-
p indicates words which occur only in poetry.
-
q indicates words about whose very existence we are doubtful, perhaps because
they occur in a manuscript which is difficult to read or has been altered in
some way.
Searches
can be made in TOE on the g, o and p flags. If a large number of words in a
field have g or o flags, then either it is a field with a lot of specialized
vocabulary or one that was not much written about. A lot of p flags, as in
sections such as Warfare or Emotions, indicate that the subject commonly occurs
in poetry. Poetry was an important literary form in Anglo-Saxon culture. Its
structure was based on half lines linked by alliterating sounds, which is one
reason why it was advantageous for poets to have groups of synonyms beginning
with different letters.
Table 1.1 The Vocabularies of OE to
Mod.E
Old
English
|
Modern
English
|
Sǣ
|
Sea
|
Mann
|
Man
|
Sǣmann
|
Sailor
|
Dēor
|
Animal
|
Sǣdēor
|
Sea Creature
|
Faru
|
Journey
|
Sǣrima
|
Coast
|
Cearu
|
Care
|
Cearful
|
Sorrowful
|
Cild
|
Child
|
Wundor
|
Wonder
|
Wundorlic
|
Wonderful
|
Blōd
|
Blood
|
Blōdig
|
Bloody
|
Beorht
|
Bright
|
2.5
Endangered languages
As "globalization"
increases, so does the loss of human languages. People find it easier to
conduct business and communicate with those outside their own culture if they
speak more widely used languages like Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish or
Russian. Children are not being educated in languages spoken by a limited
number of people. As fewer people use local languages, they gradually die out.
Globalization
and other factors speed language loss. Globalization is endangering
languages, as people prefer to conduct business and communicate in widely
used tongues like English, Chinese and Hindi. Public education, the Internet
and print and television media also speed the rate of language loss.
Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation |
At
least 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages (about 50 percent) are about
to be lost. Why should we care? Here are several reasons.
- The enormous variety of these languages represents a vast, largely unmapped terrain on which linguists, cognitive scientists and philosophers can chart the full capabilities—and limits—of the human mind.
- Each endangered language embodies unique local knowledge of the cultures and natural systems in the region in which it is spoken.
- These languages are among our few sources of evidence for understanding human history.
CHAPTER
III
CONCUSION
Based on the explanation above that Language change is variation over time
in a language's phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features. So, it has the correlation with the
history of English that conventional. English is measured in
three "cataclysmic" (old,
middle, and modern English) changes that generally coincide with historical
events that had a profound effect on the language.
Of
all of these, it is important to note that the parent languages were reconstructed
by measuring the differences of the "daughter" languages. There are
linguistic universals as well as differences.
REFERENCES
Baugh, A. C.
rev. Cable. 2002. History of the English Language, 5th edn. London:
Routledge (and
previous editions).
Sheard,
J. A. 1954. The Words We Use. London: Deutsch.
Barney, Stephen A. (1985). Word-Hoard:
An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary.Yale
University Press. ISBN 0-300-03506-3.
Pollington, Stephen (2010).
Wordcraft: New English to Old English Dictionary and Thesaurus. Anglo-Saxon
Books. ISBN 1-898281-02-5.
"Oxford English Dictionary
Online (paid membership)".
Bosworth, Joseph, Northcote
Toller, T. "An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary". Internet Archive (1848
edition).
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BalasHapus