HISTORIA DE LA LENGUA INGLESA

03.02.2014

INTRODUCTION

In the introductory chapter we are going to deal with things such as: The External and Internal History of English, Synchrony and Diachrony, The Importance and Diversity of the English language, The Discovery of Sanskrit, Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law, English within the Indo-European family, and From Pre-Roman Britain to the Scandinavian Invasions.

Here, we will try to look at the past of Present Day English so as to see how we reached this step. English does not belong to the same family of Latin languages, such as French, Spanish, Romanian or Italian. Once upon a time, we had the INDO-EUROPEAN tree of languages. This big tree had many branches: Romance (Latin, Spanish, etc.), Celtic (English is not), Balto-Slavic (Hungarian, Russian), Germanic (English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic). Do not confuse Germanic with German, which is the offspring of the first.

OE (OLD ENGLISH) PERIOD

It is the very first period in the history of English. It has three sub-periods:

Pre-Old English – anything that goes before Old English. From 450 to 700, until the apparition of the first written manuscripts. Before Englaland, the place was called Britannia by the peoples who used to live there. Here we study about the different civilizations who decided for one reason or another to conquer and settle the island. The date of the middle of the fifth century for the beginning of this period is chosen because it was then when the Romans left and the Germanic tribes begun to attack the island (Angles, Saxons and Jutes).

Early-Old English – 700 to 900 here we have the first written documents and inscriptions. Beowolf is placed here. It is a period of full inflections. Cases also belong to inflections, as well as the personal ending in a verb, or inflections in nouns. In this stage in English, there used to be cases such as Nominative, Accusative, Dative or Imperative.

Late-Old English – 900 to 1100. In this period, we start finding the leveling of inflections, which means that they start to weaken in the pronunciation, with the result that all case endings start to disappear.

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ME (MIDDLE ENGLISH) PERIOD

There are two sub-periods here:

Early-Middle English – 1100 to 1300. The texts composed in this period sound very archaic, as belonging to the OE Period. The Battle of Hastings (1066) is the historical event which opened the new stage in the English language. After the battle, the Norman Conquest begun. William Duke of Normandy won the battle and the English King was killed, so the Duke took the throne of England. From that moment on England was ruled by Normand Dukes, who made French the language of the court. Apart from it, the lower classes spoke English, while the churchmen spoke Latin. Well, the English vocabulary expanded a lot in this period by adopting French words.

Late-Middle English – 1300 to 1500. Sir Gwain and the Green Knight, belongs to this period. It was written in North-West Midlands, a part which in the 14th century was highly populated by the Scandinavians, Norwegians mainly. Chaucer also belongs to this period. Here, we get more leveling of inflections, as well as an expansion of the vocabulary due to the Norman invasion. French was imposed in England during the Norman invasion (1066), after the Battle of Hastings. 60% of the English vocabulary has Latin origin; however, they are pronounced as English words. These words come from Latin but through French.

ModE (MODERN ENGLISH) PERIOD

Early-Modern English – from 1500 to 1650. Renaissance or Elizabethan literature. It is a period of loss inflections and also Shakespeare’s period. However, to compensate for the loss of inflections, they used more prepositions and more verbal tenses. It is also the time when the auxiliary DO/DOES/DID appeared in the 16th century and it was consolidated in the 17th century. The invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in Germany in the 15th and its introduction in England, London by William Caxton in 1476 changed the English language fully. The printing press helped to homogenize the various dialects existing at the time in England and with its help many people learned to read and write. Before the printing press, if you wanted a book, it had to be copied for you by scribes or monks, and you could never find two identical manuscripts. The second advantage was that books became cheaper and more people had access to knowledge with the consequence to learn how to read and write, thus they became educated. This is the period when the Renaissance was opened. Thus, this is the opening door to Renaissance.

Late-Modern English – from 1650 to 1800. It is the time of a more sophisticated syntax, prescription of grammar, books were written. The double negation started to be considered a grammatical incorrect term.

Today we use what is called Present Day English (PDE) or Present English (PE).

We are going to study about all the stages and we are going to compare the External and the Internal history of language. We are also going to study about the linguistic

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consequences each tribe had on the language. The book is recommended due to its very good external history.

TUTORIALS: Monday and Tuesday: 10:00 – 13:00.

EXTRA LECTURES: March and April

04.02.2014

The difference between INTERNAL and EXTERNAL history. We are going to study them both complementarily. INTERNAL history of the English language had to do with the linguistic evolution of the structure of the language. As a language, we can distinguish different fields.

Morphology (very simplified) – Spanish marks both gender (feminine/masculine) and number (singular/plural) in adjectives; in English we have no variation for adjectives, as they are fixed. In the early stages of the language, adjectives were inflected; they had different forms according to gender, number and case.

Phonology is also part of the internal history (evolution of sounds). OE “bān” – “bone” - (macron) – it marks the length of the vowel, so it is pronounced as a long “a”. It has evolved with the passing of time to the diphthong /əʊ/. “Hūs” is “house” /aʊ/. The “s” was not present in “island” before the Renaissance period, just as the “b” in “doubt” or in “subtle, but in that period they had a complex of inferiority with respects to the other Latin languages which had, for example “isla”.

Syntax also changed a lot. For example “I know not thee” would be “I do not know you”. The auxiliary “do” was created in the 16th century and it was consolidated along the 17th century. “Thee” is a personal pronoun for second person singular; as well as “thou” – “you – “thy/thine” – “yours” – they disappeared along the ModE period even though they are still maintained in religious texts. They are collectively known as “th-“forms. In Yorkshire, they still retain these forms, but they are dialectal.

On the other hand, EXTERNAL history has to do with social, economic, political and cultural events which had a direct influence on the language. We cannot say that these external forces have always and in all the periods a huge impact; for example, OE is very influenced by the external events. Moreover, not all the internal parts of the language are affected by these events, vocabulary is the main one.

Two more very important concepts are SYNCHRONY and DIACHRONY. The first one refers to the study of PDE, while the second one treats with the study of language from its beginnings and all the events which influenced, changed and helped it to develop. We usually study synchrony – language used here and now. This subject, however, presents a different content, a diachronic one, more specifically. The diachronic approach will help us acquire the tools to read for ourselves a piece of

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literature composed in English’s early days. Although we choose Standard English, there are many more varieties. Negating twice in English had always been perfect until the 18th century when some grammarian decided that negating twice is illogical as it means you affirm something. It is the same as double comparative formulae, which are very real nowadays and also very popular until the 18th century. Even though they are real nowadays, they are not standard, but varieties. African-American Vernacular English is the variety spoken by the African-American community in the United States; for them, if you do not used double comparative formulae, you do not belong to the group.

“Goose” – “geese”

“Bag” – “bags”

“Rope” – “ropes”

“Child” – “children”

“Ox” – “oxen”

Here, we can see different formulae for the formation of the plurals. “Oxen”, “children” and “geese” are called irregular plurals. However, from a diachronic point of view, the irregular plurals are the regulars from the past because they have always been like this, so we call them irregular from a synchronic approach. We seem to be very much guided by a synchronic view towards language. “Umlaut” Plural or FRONT MUTATED are the irregular; for example, “man” – “men”.

10.02.2014

Why do languages change? All living languages are subject to change. Many linguists distinguish between actuation or innovation, on the one side, and spread or diffusion, on the other side. Innovation refers to the introduction of a variant form in the English language. Very often, what happens is that the variant form is considered a mistake because it has not been fully admitted by the group of speakers. When the variant makes its way in the group, it is called innovation. Diffusion means that one form of the established group travels to another place, for example from big cities to smaller towns. For diffusion to exist we need the variant forms, so as to have something to diffuse. Variants are terms to say one thing or another in different ways. For example, linguistic variation in the phonological field would be in the word “either”, which could be pronounced as /i:/ or /ai/; the first one is AmE, while the second is BrE. Another example, “tomato”, which could be /a:/ or /ei/. The difference between voiced and voiceless is that when a sound is voiceless we do not use our voice chords when pronouncing it. The voiced sound for the representation “th” is / ð /, while the voiceless is /ɵ/. For the first one the point of articulation is interdental. Not only pronunciation is affected by linguistic variation, vocabulary as well. Thus, we have “film” in BrE and

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“movie” in AmE. Another example would be “rest room” AmE or “toilet” BrE. There is also variation affecting syntax; for instance, “Have you not met Mr. Jones?” or “Haven’t you met Mr. Jones?”. Spelling is also affected: “colour” BrE or “color” AmE.

There are three main engines which encourage linguistic change.

On the one side, we get the structural engine, which may affect any part of the language system. For example, we have “more bread”, uncountable noun, and “less bread”; thus, we use the quantifier for uncountable nouns. “More loaves/fewer loaves” is used when the noun is countable. However, statistics say that there is a variant form, “less”, which becomes more popular with countable nouns as well (due to the process of analogy – regarding the first -). This is a kind of change that we call structural.

Social engines also encourage linguistic change. The first use of a language is to give or receive information from somebody. But there is another very important use of language, which is social. When we choose to use some words in the detriment of others, we are identifying ourselves with a group or an ideology. For example, many times the non-standard speakers of English use the past participle of some verb so as to express a past and finished action: “I done it!”. “We goes…” is also used so as to make narration more vivid. The final “-es” is in fact the mark of the plural which was always there since OE period, in the North, I mean. So, someone who says this is classifying her/himself as a non-standard speaker of English.

Moreover, we have functional factors. In this group we mainly find intensifiers, which are used in a language as a means to be more expressive. In this order of ideas, we know that there are some expressions which our forefathers used and we do not want to use nowadays so as not to be characterized as old-fashioned. “Very/so/extremely/terribly/tremendously/really/awfully/incredibly/extraordinarily/dirt/pretty cheap” is subject to quicker change because people want to be creative. The choice of an intensifier can determine our degree of emphatic. There is another sub-factor in this last step, which we call economy of effort. It has an impact on pronunciation; more specifically is the reduction of the consonant cluster in example such as “fasten/often/Christmas/subtle/receipt”, where the “t” and “b” and “p” are not pronounced.

Apart from these factors, there are also some extra-linguistic factors, such as changes in the world which have an influence on the way languages are evolving. For example, new inventions are extra-linguistic factors; for example, “smart-phones/I-Pods/Podcasts”. However, there seems to be more inertia than change, which is the reason why we do not fully and easily understand texts written hundreds of years ago. PDE is not fixed, as it is subject to continuous change. For example, “sushi” was introduced in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for the first time in 1893. Back then, it was a specialized term, while nowadays pretty everybody knows what it means or what it is. Another example in this category could be LED, which is an acronym for Light Emitting Diode; twenty years ago there was no such thing so people did not need any word to name something which did not exist. “Twoc(k)” is another acronym

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meaning taken without the owner’s consent. This word was created in the 1990s in Britain. “-gate” used as a suffix is more and more often employed since the 1970s’ Watergate Scandal starring President Nixon. It is mainly used in journalism.

11.02.2014

Semantics is also changing. “Cweðan”, which in OE meant “to say”, having a very broad field, with the passing of time was limited, nowadays meaning “to quote”; thus, the OE sequence “cw” was replaced in ME period by the French group “qu”. However, the OE grapheme “ð” is still maintained today as a phoneme.

Synchronic grammar also passes through a phase of change. Thus, “may/might” is being gradually replaced by “can/could”. With this, we can also add that in the 20 th

century the contracted form “mayn’t” was used.

In the field of phonology there are also changes related to intonation. It is very important since different things can be transmitted using the same words but different intonations. Here we have an intonation pattern called HRT (High-Rising Tone or Australian Question Intonation). The usage of this intonation pattern is related to the fact that a declarative sentence is used with the intonation as being an interrogative one. It started to be used in Sydney, Australia in the 1960s by young women belonging to the working class. It seems that from Australia it migrated to the United Kingdom by means of a TV series called Neighbors. Some other critics believe that it originated in California in the 1980s and it was used by Valley Girls. One thing is clear, it is gender marked and it may be used so as to put emphasis on what is being said or to be polite or to look for the interlocutor’s approval.

Some facts: in Shakespeare’s days, it is thought that English was spoken by 2-5 million people in all around the world. Now, according to David Crystal, between Elizabeth I and the beginning of Elizabeth II’s Reign, 51 million people speak English around the world. According to D. Graddol, nowadays 375 million people speak it as a mother tongue, while the same number of people uses it as a second language. EFL stands for English as a Foreign Language. An average of 750 million people speaks it as a foreign language. Pidgin English is a kind of hybrid language which has emerged from the combination of English and the local language. It presents a very limited grammar and vocabulary as it is not yet fully developed. It just has the basis. The IMPORTANCE OF ENGLISH has to be related not only with the language per se, but with the people who spoke it first and had influence in the world of politics, economy, culture or arts. This language functions differently depending on the country it is used in; thus, it can be used as a mother tongue, second language or official language or it may help to the creation of Pidgin and Creole languages. However, another important usage is as Lingua Franca because it is a language for intercommunication. It seems that there are countries where people have to speak even more than two languages, they are trilingual. Thus, in India, after achieving the independence (1947), chose as their official/national

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language Hindi, English was retained as a second language because it proved to work pretty good and if they happen to be born is a region with a language different than Hindi, well they learn that language as well. And here we are talking about three languages being learned so as to get along in the society. When the territories gain independence from the British Crown, they either chose one of their local languages as national language, or they maintained English as the national language because just because it proved to function well; for practical reasons, mainly.

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF ENGLISH

Adjectives are pretty easy as they only have one form, they are invariable (good boy(s)/girl(s)). However, in OE they could be weak or strong. Nouns are also simple, they only present singular and plural (boy/s). Verbs are also easy because for example we only have “go” for almost all the persons, but the third person singular. Vocabulary is also pretty simple as words mainly come either from Latin or German; thus, we may use the German term “hearty” or the Latin one “cordial”, with different nuances. It seems that approximately 350 languages enriched English. From Latin, via French, it is estimated that more than 60% of the English vocabulary came. However, the language is not a Romance, but a Germanic one. In the process of development, English has acquired natural gender, in the detriment of grammatical one. It was born in the 14 th

century as until that point, in the OE period and part of the ME period, people had grammatical gender. Thus, the morphology of English has been very simplified with the passing of time.

17.02.2014

Learning English presents a series of advantages because the language itself is pretty easy to learn, but it was not so in the past. Some easy aspects are those related to vocabulary, as nearly 60% of it comes from Latin through French. Another advantage of the English language is that it nowadays presents natural gender in nouns, which was established all along Britain in the 14 th century, which forms part of what we call Late ME; before that, only grammatical gender existed. Animate living beings were referred by their natural gender as “he” or “she”, while inanimate beings as “it”. In languages which still use grammatical gender, German for example, when learning nouns, we learn them with a particle in front which corresponds to the grammatical gender; thus, “Madchen”, which means “maid” and which has a semantically feminine gender, receives the “das” demonstrative, which corresponds to a neuter grammatical gender.

Disadvantages of learning English are mainly the ones found in pronunciation, as unlike Spanish, the English language is not pronounced the way it is written. There are some reasons why spelling and pronunciation are so different. Let’s take some examples. On the one hand, /i:/, which is a phoneme, thus we pronounce it, can represent various graphemes in spelling: “ee”, “ea”, “e”, “ei”, as in “bee”, “sea”, “be” or “receive”. On the other hand, we have the /ᶴ/ phoneme which in writing can be “sh”,

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“ch”, “t”, “c”, and “s”, in words like “shoe”, “Chevrolet”, “nation”, “ocean” and “sugar”. It seems that there have been attempts to simplify pronunciation in English; Theodore Roosevelt, at the beginning of the 20th century, tried to simplify it by coming up with the idea of stopping writing the final “e” in a word when it is not pronounced.

Now we are going to study about the work which has been done in the field so as to discover the origins of the European languages. So we go back in time in the 19 th

century. Linguists were very keen in establishing phonological correspondences between two languages and by doing so they could find the origin of both of them. For instance, they compared OE and German. In OE we have “bān”, while in standard German we have “Bein” (read /bain/); OE “stān” – G. “Stein”. This happens in many words and after a comparison of long lists of words; they came to the conclusion that German and English had a common ancestor language. Moreover, they also compared English with Latin; L. “pater” – E. “father”; thus L. /p/ is E. /f/. L. “nepos” – E. “nephew”; thus L. /p/ is E. /ph/. In the case of Germanic languages, we have to carry out a process of linguistic reconstruction so as to find out the origin of languages which come from the branch of the Germanic languages (with the off-spring English, German, Dutch, Icelandic…). The problem with Germanic is that there are no written records of Proto-Germanic, so we have to reconstruct them. In the case of Romance languages there is no such a difficulty because there are lots of documents written in both Latin and Vulgar Latin.

Now the teacher made the famous drawing with the Indo-European Tree/Family of Languages, with its many branches. One of them is the Germanic/Proto-Germanic Family with its off-springs English, German and Icelandic and many more. It seems that at the beginning, the off-springs were just dialects, very similar between themselves as they belonged to the same family of languages. So, English was spoken by people/Anglo-Saxons living in Englaland, while Old-High German was spoken from the 8th to the 11th century by the Germanic tribes of what we call today central and southern Germany and also Switzerland and Austria, but these tribes from the last two countries developed distinct varieties. But, with the passing of time, the tribes migrated from one place to another and due to natural/physical barriers such as difficult to be crossed mountains, as well as migratory waves contributed to the different development of the dialects coming from the same language until they in themselves formed a language.

Now we are going to talk about THE DISCOVERY OF SANSKRIT, which is the language of ancient India. Until the later part of the 18 th century, the family relationship of European on the one side and West Asiatic languages had not been worked out or grasped and people did not know that they were connected. Until that moment, they only knew that English, Dutch and German were connected, as well as Spanish, French and Italian. The scholar Sir William Jones lived in India and he learned Sanskrit and when he learned this ancient language he was surprised to discover similarities/the connection/relationship between Sanskrit and European languages, such as Latin and Greek. Thus, he put forth a theory that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek must have a common ancestor language. And he went even further and said that even Germanic and Celtic

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languages, also had a common ancestor language. So, for the first time in history, a connection was established between European and Asiatic languages.

24.02.2014

GRIMM’S LAW. Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm in the 19th century discovered different sets of phonological correspondences which are ever since known as Grimm’s law. There are three different sets. What they saw was that there was a system of parallel sound changes which differentiated the Germanic languages, all of them, from the other Indo-European languages. This was only related to consonants, which Germanic speakers pronounced differently from the Indo-European speakers. We are talking about simple words. Thus, IE was compared with Germanic.

- IE voiceless plosives /p/, /t/ and /k/ became in Germanic voiceless fricatives /f/, /ɵ/, /h/ if it is initially in the word, or [x] if it is medially.

So, when we talk about phonological correspondences, like here, we are talking about sounds, thus we put them in between slashes (/…/); moreover, if we are talking about the letter, we put it in between <…>.

Examples of the law:

L. pes – E. foot; L. piscis – E. fish.

L. tres – E. three.

L. centum – E. hundred; L. cornu – E. horn.

“Honor”, “honest(y)”, “heir(ess)”, these words are not English in origin and they are not in the vocabulary from the very beginning; by the contrary, all the words starting with “h” and the letter is aspirated, it means that they were there from the beginning. Spelling-pronunciation change goes like following. In words like “herb” or “humor”, which came from French and they always aspirated the “h”, with the massing of time, due to the fact that the “h” was there people started to pronounce it.

- IE voiced plosives /b/, /d/ and /g/ became in Germanic voiceless plosives /p/, /t/ and /k/.

L. labium – E. lip.

L. dens – E tooth; L. duo – E. two.

L. genos – E. kin. L. genu – E. knee. OE cneo (with macron in eo).

- IE voiced fricatives /B/, /ð/ and /¥/ became voiced plosives /b/, /d/ and /g/.

S. bhratar – E. brother.

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S. madhu – E. mead.

L. hostis – E. guest.

L. hortus – E. garden.

We do not know why these changes took place but we know that they operated by the fifth century B.C. this law kind of distinguishes Germanic languages from Indo-European ones. There were problems with the first set, even though the second and he third went all right. Thus, we go back to the first set so as to see why it did not worked properly. The person who revised it was VERNER. In 1875 he tried to explain in what way the previous law did not work. Thus, he noticed that the Proto-Germanic (earliest forms of Germanic) voiceless fricatives became voiced unless they were prevented by any of the following three conditions:

1) Being the first sound in the word.2) Being next to another voiceless sound.3) Having the IE stress on the immediately preceding syllable. - IE voiceless plosives /p/, /t/ and /k/ became /B/, /ð/ and /¥/ respectively.

As English is a West Germanic Language, in that group of languages Grimm’s law did not function as hoped. Thus, L. pater – OE fæder.

We call IE an ancient language. From it, there were various branches emerging. Indo-European languages are called like this because they were spoken from Europe in the West to India in the East. Ten or eleven branches have been distinguished. Regarding the Indian branch, The VEDAS or The Sacred Texts of India are the oldest written texts in ancient Sanskrit. The most ancient go back to 1500 B.C. and the language they are written in is Vedic Sanskrit. Iranian is located in North-West of India and covers the Great Plateau of India. Migratory movements have taken Iranian to China and Russia. Armenian, other branch, is found in a very small area to the south of the Caucasus Mountains and the eastern end of the Black Sea. Another branch is called Albanian, located north-west of Greece on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. The Hellenic branch gave birth to Greek, while the Italic branch gave birth to Latin, which in its popular form is the ancestor of Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romance languages in general. There is one more branch called Balto-Slavic, which covers the area in Eastern Europe. Here we have Baltic and Slavic languages, they form two sub-branches. Tomorrow we are going to talk about CELTIC. English is not a Celtic language, even though Celtic is still spoken in French Brittanie, Wheals and Ireland.

25.02.2014

Today the teacher put that famous song in Irish Gaelic and gave us some more names of singers and bands who try to recover the ancient Irish songs. Now we go on with the Celts. They occupied places like Spain, part of France (Gaul), part of Italy and

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Germany, as well as Great Britain. Celtic was the first language spoken in Britain, as far as scientists know. In the British Isles there were two groups of Celts: Goidelic or Gaelic Celts were the first group. They occupied for a time Britain and then they were pushed west and established in Ireland, where they developed their own variety of Irish Gaelic. From Ireland, some of them moved to Scotland were they developed other variety of Celtic, known as Scottish Gaelic or Erse, which is still alive. Other small groups moved to the Isle of Man (placed in between Ireland and Britain), were they developed the Manx variety, which is now dead.

The second group of Celts was called Cymric or Britannic Celts. When the English arrived in the 5th century with the Germanic invasions, pushed them to the west, as well. Thus, they went to Wales and developed the variety Welsh Gaelic, which is still there nowadays. Another group went to Cornwall and developed the variety called Cornish, which extinguished in the 18th century. They also went escaping from the Tetons in Britanie, developing the Breton variety, which is still spoken in France.

Now we are going to move to the most important branch of the Indo-European tree, Germanic. The problem here is that there are no written evidences of this language. So we have to reconstruct the language so as to see what possible kind of language it was, as it antedates Old English. The Germanic languages are classified into three main groups answering to geographic distribution

1. North Germanic Languages : in Scandinavia and Denmark. The earliest traces of North Germanic are found in runic inscriptions which date from the 3rd

century after Christ. In its earliest form, it was called Old Norse. In the course of the 11th century, some dialectal varieties became more important, so we find a division between the east and the west. Thus, we have East North Germanic (Old Swedish – Modern Swedish; Old Danish – Modern Danish – and Modern Norwegian in its most formal form called Riksmaal) and West North Germanic languages (Old Icelandic – Modern Icelandic; Old Norwegian – Modern Norwegian - Landsmaal).

2. East Germanic Languages : the main language which belonged to this division is Gothic, which is nowadays dead. The main document which is preserved of Gothic is a fragmentary translation of the Bible. The translation was made by Bishop Wulfilas in the 4th century. He translated the Bible from Greek. Uppsala is where the Silver Bible is kept in the Library Carolina Rediviva. There were two more languages belonging to this division like Burgundian or Vandalic, which are also dead but we do not have any evidences of them.

3. West Germanic Languages : English is a Low West Germanic language. West Germanic is sub-divided into two more branches: The High and The Low. The difference is that the High have underwent the High German Sound Shift. High German, Middle Franconian, Rhenish Franconian or Bavarian are just more dialects. In the Low sub-branch we have Old English, which evolved into PDE, and Old Frisian, spoken in Friesland in Holland. Some believe that in the category of Low West Germanic languages, there was once upon a time an

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Anglo-Frisian branch, which later on separated into OE and Old Franconian. Old Saxon (Low German) and Old Low Franconian (Dutch and Flemish).

There are two more branches of the IE tree: Hittite and Tokharian, but little is known about them.

Now we are going to explain what the main topic that characterizes Germanic languages is. The language that we now call English is the result of the fusion of three varieties spoken by three different tribes, such as the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. These are collectively known as THE ENGLISH. Each of the tribes spoke their own variety and each contributed in its own way to the formation of the English language. It is hard to say to which extend each of the tribe contributed as there are no written record of that period. English shares features with the other West Germanic languages. These characteristics are the following:

- The shift of the consonants as explained by Grimm’s Law. - Like other West Germanic languages, English presented weak and strong

declensions in adjectives. - English presented weak and strong conjugations in verbs. Today we call them

regular and irregular. - The adoption of a strong stress on the root syllable of most words. This

characteristic is to be “blamed” for the gradual disappearance of inflections in English. E. “gate” – G. “Gasse”; E. “water” – G. “Wasser” this is the difference of the Second Sound Shift.

OE has started in the middle of the 5th century because it is then when the Germanic invasions took place. The first written manuscripts appeared in the 8th century. By the time, OE was a synthetic language, which means that it was fully inflected. Early ME was still sounding like OE, while Late ME was full of prepositions because case endings disappeared. In ModE period, inflections had already disappeared but the use of studying it lays in the fact that the vocabulary expanded in period with Latin and Greek terms, more likely Latin ones.

04.03.2014

Today we are going to concentrate on Historical matters. History goes hand in hand with the history of the language of the tribes which have been to that territory. So there are external, thus historical, forces that influenced the language.

PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN

Celtic is the first language spoken in Great Britain. The Romans seem to have been very interested in the agriculture, mineral resources and the kettle in Britain. Thus, Latin is the second language spoke in the territory and for a period of time it co-existed with Celtic. In the 5th century A.D., the English (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes) were also

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interested in Britain. It is not until they came that we start talking about the birth of the English language, nor the territory was called Englaland before their coming, it was called Britannia. So, before the English came, so other people lived there. The Romans had abandoned the Roman Province, so the Celts were left alone to face the invasions of the English. So, Celtic was the first language spoken there and then Latin, for more than 300 years in the same place. Both these languages left an influence in the English language. Thus, regarding Celtic words, we find just a few, some dozen words or so:

- Bannuc = a bit. – bratt = a cloak. – cumb = Cumbria, Holcombe, Duncombe (valley – a Romance word borrowed from French). – torr = peak. – bre = hill. – river names like Thames, Wye, Esk, Avon.

When the English came, the first part they occupied was the south-eastern corner of the island, because they came from the continent. The name of that region is Kent, which is also a Celtic name. The capital city of the region is Canterbury, which in OE would be Kent-wara-byrig (Kent-citizen-city; citizens of the city of Kent). So, when the English came, the Celts took refuge in the west and the northern part. London and York are other Celtic place names which were respected by the English when they invaded. Other Celtic words are: loch [x], the Celtic equivalent for lake; whiskey; Whig/Tory (the main political parties). So, we can conclude that the Celtic presence is more important in place names than any other things.

We are now going to talk about the Roman presence in Britain. The lands, the minerals and the potential for kettle were seen with envy from the continent. The first Roman invasion was made by Julius Caesar in the year 55 B.C. The expedition was a complete disaster because while the Roman Legions were crossing the Channel from the continent to Britannia, they faced a storm and due to it the Emperor lost a large part of his cavalry. This led to the disaster. However, they eventually got to Britain and once they were there, exhausted and with few people, they had to face the unexpected resistance of the natives (the Britons). The result is that Caesar had to go back to Gaul with no material gains and with a considerable loss of his military prestige. The following year, 54 B.C., he attempted again and he succeeded in establishing himself in the south-east. And as the Romans always did, he started a recollection of tributes or taxes from the natives. That was the first Roman colony. The first settlement, thus, dates from 54 B.C. In the year 43 A.D. (Annus Domini), Emperor Claudius had an army/Roman Legion of 40.000 men, or at least this is what historians say, so they conquered the southern, eastern and central part of the isle. This is how the Roman Conquest begun. The Celts were not happy with their coming and there were several uprisings, the most important one being in the year 61 by the widow of a Celtic king, Queen Boudicca. 70.000 men are said to have died from both parties, but she did not manage to expel the Romans, so they stayed. At the beginning of the 80s, Governor Agricola advanced the northern border up to southern Scotland. In 123, Hadrian had a stone wall built there so as to protect the Roman Empire form the coming/invasions of the barbarians who lived to the north of that frontier (Picts and Caledonians). Hadrian’s Wall crosses the island from West to East. Vindolanda is one of the most interesting

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places along the wall and it is where we can find a reconstructed Roman Fort. Other one is Housesteads. In 143, another Emperor, this time Antoninus, had a second wall built and he gave it his name, thus we have Antonine’s Wall/the Scottish-Roman Wall. So what happened is that the Roman Legions went further and occupied more land to the north. This new frontier is different; even though people expect to find stones on top of other stones, what we can actually see is a rampant covered by turf and on the other side a ditch. History has proved that this has not been enough so as to protect the territory because when the Legions temporarily left in 193, the barbarians from the north crossed the Antonine’s Wall, but they were never allowed to cross Hadrian’s Wall. The end of the Roman occupation in Britain was in 410, so by the end of the 5th

century when Emperor Honorius took his Legions and left. So, due to the fact that the Romans were there to care for their protection, the Britons never cared about it before and now with the Romans left, they had to protect themselves and could not. So the barbarians from the north begun to attack the Britons and the Celtic king shouted for help from the English.

However, the teacher is now going to give us some reference points about the things the Romans left behind when they left the place.

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Bath is one of the most famous cities in England due to the reconstruction of the Roman baths there; they were discovered by the Victorians. The name was given precisely due to the baths. The remnants the Romans left in Britannia are similar to those left in all other Roman provinces.

Regarding the languages, while the Romans were in Britannia they spoke Latin; more precisely, the language was spoken more widespread in cities and towns, while in smaller places and villages, Celtic was spoken. However, the Britons who, for example, need to sell something to the Romans, they had to learn Latin. We tend to believe that the south and the eastern part of the island were populated by the Romans, while the north and the western part were more populated by the Celts.

There have been four stages on which Latin has had an influence on the English language.

1. Period Zero/Continental Period : the product of the linguistic contact or exchange between speakers of Germanic and speakers of Latin on the continent. The words borrowed are very short and basic; they make reference to tools that the Romans used and that the Germanic people borrowed from them. For example: “cup” (< L. “cupa”); so, the Germanic tribes did not have nor use cups and when they borrowed the thing, they also borrowed its name with it. Before this, they were drinking from animal horns. “Dish” (< L. “discus”) as the Germanic tribes did not have dishes before; they used to put their hands into the

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melting pot. “Wine” (< L. “vinum”), “plum” (< L. “pruna”), “cheese” (< L. “caseus”), “mill” (< L. “molina”), “kitchen” (< L. “coquina”), “pound” (< L. “pondo”) and “inch” (< L. “uncial”). They also imported terms related to infrastructure: OE “stræt” (< L. “strata via”), “wall” (< L. “ualum”) and “mile” (< L. “millia”). There are about 50 words that originated in this period from Latin; they are not many but are highly important, specific and concrete. So this is before the coming of the English.

2. Latin through Celtic Transmission : after the Roman occupation of Britannia and the extend of Roman occupation of the country, one can expect to find many words belonging to this period, yet this is not the case. However, once the Romans have left (beginning of the fifth century), their language also left with them and the Britons kept speaking their mother tongue, Celtic, even though they still have some Latin words they used. So, when the English came, the peoples they encountered were the Britons, who spoke (Celtic) little English, with the result that there was no direct contact between the English and the Latin language. So, the few terms the English borrowed from Latin, were taught to them by the Celts. This period is the poorest regarding Latin borrowed words. However, there are some place names which maintained their Latin origin: OE “ceaster” (< L. “castra”) = “camp” Leicester /lestə/, Gloucester /glustə/, Worcester /u:stə/; Manchester, Chester, Lancaster, Doncaster. EXAM QUESTION: provide the origin and the meaning of place names; whether they were Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Scandinavian or French settlements. The combination /k/ + /a/, like in Doncaster, was maintained in the Northern part of the island; while the Southern used the affricate /tᶴ/ because a front vowel produced a change in the point of articulation of the consonant /k/ + /ᵋa/ > /tᶴ/ + /ᵋa/. OE “wic” (see front vowel) < L. “vicus” which means “village”, like in Norwich, Ipswich, Sandwich (in the south). In the north we find Warwick (disguised element, at the end we find a plosive), Garrick. “Port” (< L. “portus”) like in Newport, Portsmouth /portsmʊɵ/ or Bournemouth. “Munt” (< L. “mons”). We also find some words of Latin origin which have nothing to do with place names: OE “candel” (< L. “candela”) PDE “candle”; process of metathesis (change in the order of letters). OE “mægester” (< L. “magister”) or OE “sealm” (< L. “psalmus”, Greek in origin).

3. Period of Christianization.

THE GERMANIC INVASIONS The Romans left at the beginning of the 5th century; Emperor Honorius took his legions and left in 410. At the middle of the 5th century, 449, the Germanic peoples begun to invade Britannia and their invasion lasted more than one hundred years. The English came from the continent as normal people, conquerors, settlers, who came from Denmark and the Lower Countries. They first occupied the east and the south of the island and then they gradually extended the territory. We know all these due to some written evidence. The oldest prose text written in a Germanic language, Anglo-Saxon, is The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In the 8th century, the year

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731, Venerable Bede wrote Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in Latin. According to it, the tribes that conquered Britannia were the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. Thus, three different tribes are mentioned. It seems that the Jutes had their land in the northern half of Denmark; the Angles came from the southern half, while the Saxons came from an area limited on one side by the river Elbe and on the other by the river Ems. The Frisians occupied the costal part of the Lower Countries, but they are not mentioned in neither book so we do not know if they had an active part in the conquest.

Regarding the reasons of the invasion, we have to mention that before the fifth century the English also tried to invade the island with the difference that in the 4 th century, for example, the Roman legions were still there and they fought back the English. The Romans established a General to save the Saxon Shore in the east coast. So, when the Romans left, the Celts had to see for their own defense. The Picts and the Scots in the North begun to attack them more frequently thus they first asked the Romans for help; while the Romans said no, the Celtic King Vortigern asked the Jutes for help in change of a piece of land. The payment was the Isle of Thanet, which was the very first occupation of the Jutes. However, this tribe which seemed to be an ally of the Celts was in no time their biggest enemy and the first one to begin the invasion. The Jutes’ invasion had no similar with the Roman settlement, as the Romans only came to rule the Celts, not to dispossess them, while the Jutes killed and robbed and murdered.

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We place ourselves in the 5th century. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first Saxons came in the year 477 and they established in the south, in Sussex (Saxons of the South). In 495 another group of Saxons came in Wessex (Saxons of the West). In 547 some more came and established in the eastern part in East Anglia. These were future kingdoms. The process of driving the native Britons to the west took a large time for the English and there were various resistances from the part of the Celts. King Artorius was a Celtic King who fought back the English and reached a kind of peace during one generation, as the life expectancy was very short. However, the Celts were pushed to the west finally. In the course of 150 years, the English established seven kingdoms (Heptarchy), which lasted longer than the rest. From north to south we have: Northumbria (Humber is the river giving the place its name, thus to the north of the river Humber), Mercia (in the Midlands), Sussex, Wessex, Essex, East Anglia and Kent. The English called the invaded people as a group Wealas (Welsh), which means foreigners. The invaders, at the beginning, were called Saxons, with no difference between Saxon, Angles and Jutes. With the passing of time, other terms came up such as Anglii (people from East Anglia, territory occupied by the Angles). At the beginning of the 7th century, the king of Kent, AEthelbert, was named by Pope Gregory Rex Anglorum. Angelcynn was a new term generally referring to the people of the territory, while the language they spoke was Englisc /ᶴ/. Around the year 1000 we get the name of the territory as Englaland (the land of the Angles). For a period of time, there was a

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certain political stability; this is why we are talking about the Heptarchy. In the 7 th

century, Northumbria was the political and cultural leader of the rest. In the 8 th century, that leadership passed to Mercia. In the course of the 9th century, the leadership passed over to Wessex. The 9th century was a very important one because Wessex under the rule of Egbert, the first man to be acknowledge as the common overlord of the English and the Welsh. From the 9th century on, all the Wessex kings were also kings of everything. Under Egbert Wessex extended its influence. During this century, the English had to fight hard against the Vikings, the Scandinavians, and it is then when we find one of the greatest kings of England, King Alfred the Great. In between the beginning of the 5th century and the middle of the same one, after the Romans left and before the English came, we only find the Latinized Celts and the Celtic language. The English were very different from the Romans; they were not urban people, but liked living on the open air and their economy was based on hunting and agriculture. So they destroyed pretty everything. This is why the words that go back to this period, OE, are concerned about their habits. Thus, we have words such as “work”, “field”, “wood”, “plough”, “dog”, “ox/oxen”, only 15% of the words used in that period (OE) are still alive. In OE we do not usually find polysemantic terms or abstract ones, as they are all related to facts.

In origin, the English were pagans until they were Christianized. We are studying this because due to this process there came many Latin words. The process of Christianization begun in the 6th century (in 597, more precisely). Venerable Bede tells us about the process. There was a pope, Pope Gregory “the Great”, who had the idea of converting the pagan English to Christianism. He had the original idea and he sent Augustine along with 50 monks. The issue was harsh but they were lucky that they set foot in Kent which had a small Christian community. The fact is that the King of Kent, AEthelbert married a European Princess, Bertha (from the nation of the Francs). She was given to him on the promise that he should respect her Christian faith. And so he did; and he built a small chapel very near his palace in Kentwarabyric (Canterbury). The King welcomed Augustine and his monks and he was baptized in three months. In the past, when a king converted to a religion, many of his subjects did the same. Augustine died seven years later and by that time all the region of Kent was baptized. The process of Christianization of the English was not violent. In the year 635, preacher Aidam, from the Celtic church of Ireland, begun to convert the English from north to south. In one hundred years from the coming of Augustine and his monks, England was fully Christianized. With this begun the building of monasteries and abbeys and this is very important in the Middle Ages. In the past, monasteries were the schools; thus, it was there that the children of the few privileged went and learned something. They provided education in Arithmetic, Mathematics, Astronomy, Music and Arts and even Poetry and Prose (related to religion, of course). Jarrow was one of the better monasteries in England in the Middle Ages and Bede studied there. The Christians from Europe were green with envy as the monasteries from England were so fruitful that they passed through a stage of hand-written illuminated manuscripts (in silver and gold ink).

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This is the THIRD Period of finding Latin words in English; they came after the Christianization of England. We have about 400 words belonging to this period.

- The Christianization of England provided English with a very large religious vocabulary.

- It introduced words and ideas from very far away countries were missionaries had already been (India and China).

- It stimulated the Anglo-Saxons to apply new Christian concepts to already existing terms.

Thus, we have words such as “disciple”, “shrine” (burial place of someone famous), “priest” (OE “preost”), “monk” (OE “munuc”), “nun”; also from Greek origin, “apostle”, “pope”, “psalm”, “psalter”, etc. so words were attributed new meaning; words like God, Heaven and Hell were already there in pagan Englaland. For example, the concept of God, even existing, was given new meaning. L. “spiritus sanctus” > OE Halig /dᶾ/ Gust (Ghost, due to the Dutch printers, who also had a small influence). L. “Evangelium” (good news) > OE “go(o, macron)d spell” > PDE “gospel” (compound).

More than 400 words are still there from a Latin origin since that third period. However, the fourth period is by far the most important one.

THE SCANDINAVIAN INVASION took place near the end of the OE period. The mass advance is placed between 750 and 1050 and it was one of the greater migratory movements taking place in Europe. Some of the Scandinavians went from Sweden to European Russia. The Norwegians set foot in Scotland; they were land seekers. Some other Norwegians went to Faroes Islands, Iceland and Greenland and even to the Coast of Labrador. The Norwegians also settled on the east coast of Ireland.

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The Danes settled in the east part of the island. When we are talking about the Scandinavian Invasions we are mainly talking about the Danes and the Norwegians. In 793 is when the Viking Invasions really started. Jarrow and Lindisfane were the first attacks. Thus, we are talking about the end of the 8 th century ; but by the middle of the 9 th

century, the Vikings had already conquered the eastern half of the country and then they focused on Wessex. Egbert, the King of Wessex, had a son, Ethelwulf, who had four sons, the youngest being Alfred. Alfred never thought that he could become a king so he dedicated himself to religious and cultural matters. Just before he had to become a monk, the Court summoned him because Ethelred, the then-present King of Wessex and his elder brother, had an accident. So Alfred became King just when the Vikings came to attack Wessex. He took refuge in Summerset in the hills and he raised a huge army of peasants and fought the Vikings in the Battle of Ethandune, nowadays Edington. The Vikings were surprised and they decided to sign a very famous treaty, the Treaty of Wedmore (879). The leader of the English was Alfred, while Guthrum was the leader

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of the Danes. It said that from that day onwards the Danes could stay in England but to the east and the north of the line (an ancient Roman road, one of the four major roads built by the Romans while there, named Watling Street). From that time onwards, the territory occupied by the Danes was called the Danelaw District. Guthrum was a pagan, like all the Danes, and he was baptized after the treaty; along with him, many Danes also baptized. After the treaty, Alfred used for the first time in England, the English language, his mother tongue, so as to create national identity. This was a kind of way to make the difference between the Danes (Norse language) and the English. Alfred also started to rebuild the monasteries destroyed in the battles, as they were of huge importance being the places of learning. He learned Latin and he took part personally in the translation of some key texts which have been composed in Latin. He took part in the translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum into History of the English Church and People; his idea was to facilitate the access of culture and books to as many citizens as possible. Alfred maintained a certain level of peace with the Danes but there were more Scandinavian invasions and he had a lot of trouble due to the fact that Guthrum broke faith. For a certain time, the English were able to resist to the Scandinavian throats (Scandinavian word). Alfred was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward the Elder, who was succeeded by his eldest son Athelstan. The Battle of Brunambourg (937) was won by the English and it was the last English victory. However, everything changed with the Battle of Maldon (991); the English lost their leader, Athelstan, and from those days onwards the English were ruled by the Danes. The last Anglo-Saxon King of Wessex, Ethelred, was exiled to France, Normandy. He received the surname of Ethelred the Unready. Now we have a line of Danish rulers. Svain was the first Danish King, then his son Cnut, then Harold I and the last Danish King of England was Hardicanute.

LINGUISTICS

The high number of place names which have a Scandinavian name can tell us about the huge number of migrants. More than 1400 names have a Scandinavian origin. Most of them are in the east and north of England, because it was there that the Danish District was. So the greater density of Scandinavian place names is there. There are about 600 place names that contain the suffix “by”. This was a Scandinavian word and it means “a farm”. Whitby is one of the most important as it is related to the Jarrow monastery. Another example is Derby. There are about 300 place names that contain the Scandinavian element “thorp(e)” which means “farmstead”. Examples: Linthorpe. “Thwaite” is another one: Applethwaite. There are 100 places which contain “toft” which is a piece of ground: Easttoft, Lowestoft. The Danes also left the patronymic suffix in England (Fernando – Fernandez, “those who come from Fernando”); so the Danes had “son”, like in Richardson, Johnson. The English form was “-ing” and it has an Anglo-Saxon origin; AEthelwulfing. So now the English have two.

VOCABULARY of Scandinavian origin

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The words are very ordinary and they form part of everyday English. Nouns, adjectives and verbs are the first categories to be transferred from one language to another when we have the co-existence of Scandinavians and English. “Bull”, “leg”, “window”, “raise”, “skull”, “skirt”, “skill”. As well as adjectives: “weak”, “tight”, “odd”, “meek”, and “scant”. And verbs such as “call”, “die”, “clip”, “thrive”, “thrust”, “give”, “get”, and “take”. Thus, we very often find an English word and a Scandinavian word and this is why many words disappeared because one was favored in the detriment of the other. This happened the same with the Norman Invasion. However, what made this linguistic context more special that the rest is that not only adjectives, nouns and verbs made their way in the English language, but also prepositions, pronouns and adverbs. One example, “they”, “them”, “their” are Scandinavian. Before the Scandinavians came, the English used their own words: “hie”, “him” and “hiera”. The fact was that in the Danelaw people used the Scandinavian forms, while in the south, the English ones were used. By the 14th century, they were used even by the people in the south. Authors like Chaucer used the Scandinavian “they” form as the subject one, but when he had to use the object, he used the English one. In the 15th century, people used the Scandinavian forms in the whole country, thus the three words within the personal pronoun system disappeared in the 15th century. Spelling <sc>, pronunciation /ᶴ/; “Englisc”.

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SCANDINAVIAN had an unusual influence in English, as it brought prepositions, adverbs and non-lexical words. For example:

-At (In ME, “at do”, as in the contracted form in Shakespeare’s play “Much Ado About Nothing”).

-Till (Originally, it had a broader meaning, not exclusively related to time).

-From (Remember the expression “To and Fro”).

-Hence

-Whence

-Seemly (Unusual, but it still today exists)

-Both/Same (they meant the same in Scandinavian).

-And, of course, They/Them/Their, which was admitted by Southerners by the 15th

Century.

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UNIT 1 – OLD ENGLISH

Anglo-Saxon English has 4 main differences with PDE: Pronunciation, Spelling, Vocabulary and Morphology.

One of the basic differences of pronunciation is about long vowels, for they had not yet undergone the GVS (Great Vowel Shift). Here, long vowels will be written as double vowels. Words such as Baan, Raap, Haalig, and Huus become Bone, Rope, Holy and House.

As for spelling, differences are fewer but also noticeable.

There are three graphemes that do not exist nowadays.

-The aesc <æ>, which represents the phoneme /æ/.

-The thorn <Þ> (the symbol does not exactly look like this, but pretty much like). It often stands for the sound /θ/, though not always, and it was substituted in the 14 th

Century by the digraph <th>.

-The eth <ð>, sometimes stands for the same as the thorn.

-The digraph <sc> is like nowadays digraph <sh>.

-The grapheme <c> has two possible sound values, either as plosive /k/ (as in “cynn”) or, if followed by a front vowel, we get the affricate /tch/ (I can’t find the symbol, but it’s like in “cheese”), as in “cild”.

In OE, vocabulary is almost purely Germanic. However, only 15% of OE has made it to our days. I don’t know what percentage that makes for today’s lexicon.

Regarding morphology, OE was a synthetic language, as it used inflections to mark sentence functions of the words rather than using word order. See, for example:

Singular PluralNominative fōt fētAccusative fōt fētGenitive fōti fōtaDative fēt fōtum

Nowadays, English is an analytic language, so word order is important, as word endings do not specify grammatical and syntactic relations.

OE used two different writing modes. One of them was the Insular Hand (which used Latin symbols, plus the symbols we mentioned before), and the Runic System.

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Germanic tribes were mainly illiterate till Christianization, but they did have the Runic Alphabet. There exist runic inscriptions of Frisian, Gothic, Norwegian, OE, etc. The earliest known runic inscriptions are from the 2nd Century A.D.

The word “rūn” would later become “writan”, which in OE means to inscribe or to incise in stone or wood mainly, though also on bone and iron.

The name of the alphabet was called the Futharc, as each sound stood for each of the six first letters of the alphabet (the “th” counts as only one).

In England the alphabet was modified into the Futhork, with 31 rather than 24 symbols.

The Germanic Tribes had an oral culture, so they did not require written texts. However, scholars believe that Runes held not a linguistic function, but a magical, religious and mystic purpose.

“Run”, in Germanic, can also mean “Mystery”.

Rune Masters, the few capable of reading and interpreting the Runes, were the shamans, soothsayers and oracles of their tribe.

However, outside Scandinavia, this mode of writing disappeared soon enough. In England, that happened around the 10th Century, substituted by the Insular Hand.

Each rune had attached to it a sound, a name and a mystical meaning (the rune for “m” also stood for “man”, for instance), and were used for riddles. This happens, for instance, in the poem “Saloman and Saturn”, in which the former is called Salo(M-rune).

Another case is the rune for “d”, which also stands for “day”.

There is an important Rune Stone at Ruthwell (Dumfries, Scotland), the oldest there is in the UK. It has a cross carved on it, and it contains fragments of the poem “The Dream of the Rood”, though written in Northumbrian dialect, rather than in West-Saxon Old English, which is the one we are studying.

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Today we are seeing the sounds of OE. We’ll deal with vowels, diphthongs and consonants, in that order.

Vowels and diphthongs can be long or short. You can have e or ē.

GRAPHEMES SOUNDSæ æ:A /a/ (long or short)E /e/(long or short)

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I /i/(long or short)O /o/(long or short)U /u/(long or short)Y /ǖ/ü/, like /i/, but rounded

Vowels, even in unstressed positions, were pronounced clearly. Like “eorles” and “eorlas”. It makes sense that vowels would be easy to distinguish since case endings are vital.

Eventually, both “eorlas” and “eorles” would end up being pronounced with a “schwa” /ə/, so case endings were starting to fade away. It was the Blending Process, or Leveling Process. It happened around the 10th Century, around the period of Early Middle English.

DIPHTHONG GRAPHEMES DIPHTHONG SOUND

All consonants were pronounced, as in “night” and “subtle”.

“Knight” was “cniht”. Today’s silent vowels are pronounced; including RP “silent” “r”s (it had a rhotic pronunciation).

Double consonants are pronounced double.

GRAPHEME SOUND(S)H -[h] (aspirated “h”, appears in initial

position in a word, as in “hal” or “hnutu”. Words nowadays also have an aspirated, initial “h”, but not those that come from French. The first in Hall, the second is Nut, though it doesn’t have an “h”).

-[ç], fricative palatal voiceless, as in “riht”, which nowadays is “right”. It’s quite like in German.

-[x], next to (after) a back vowel, a diphthong or a consonant, as in Brohte (from the verb Bringan, to Bring), or as in Neah, or in Wealh.

F Sound determined by position.

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-Initial/Final: /f/, normal, voiceless “f”, as in Full or Hlaf (Loaf).

-Medial:Between Vowel (always Voiced) and Voiceless Consonant, the consonant becomes Voiceless. Aefter.

-But between two Voiced, as between two Vowels, it becomes Voiced /v/, as in Heofon (Heaven).

-Double-consonants are voiceless even in voiced environments, as in Offa.

S Sound determined by position.

-Initial/Final: /s/, voiceless, as in Sunu and Gos (Goose).

-Medial:Between Vowel (always Voiced) and Voiceless Consonant, the consonant becomes Voiceless. Last.

-But between two Voiced, as between two Vowels, it becomes Voiced /z/, as in Risan (Rice).

-Double-consonants are voiceless even in voiced environments, as in Blissian.

Þ (thorn) Sound determined by position.

-Initial/Final: /θ/, voiceless, interdental, fricative, as in Þeaw and wiÞ. It would eventually be substituted by “t”.

-Medial:Between Vowel (always Voiced) and Voiceless Consonant, the consonant becomes Voiceless. brecÞa.

-But between two Voiced, as between two Vowels, it becomes Voiced /ð/, as in CweÞan (to say, to quote).

-Double-consonants are voiceless even in voiced environments, as in Cwiðdon.

ð (eth) Sound determined by position.C [k]: Plosive, next to a, o, u, y, as in Cynn.

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[ts]: The rest, as in Cild, or as in BrecÞa.SC [sh], as in Fersc (Fresh. It has had a

Metathesis, by which the position of two letters is exchanged during the evolution of the word). Or as in Sceotan (to shoot).

CG [dξ], as in Hecg, (Hedge, pronounced exactly the same).

Hilt: [h]

-Hraefn: [hravn]

-Ruh: [rux]

-Folc [folk]

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Stress Patterns in OE.

If there is just one element in the word (non-compounded, simple word), put the stress in the beginning. In case it is prefixed, do not stress the prefix syllable, but the first syllable after the prefix.

‘feohtan, vs wið’feohtan, attack and counterattack.

Replace the primary stress from the first syllable of the primary element, and the secondary stress on the first syllable of the secondary element. As in ‘scir,gerefa (shire authority, the shire reeve or sheriff), or ‘man,cynn (man’s kin, mankind), or ‘leorning,cniht (learning knight, an Apostle), ‘mynster,mann (minister man, monk).

OE words, though only 15% have survived, are core words nonetheless.

Words were created by means of compounding and affixing, apart from importing from Latin, Greek (via Latin), and Scandinavian.

Compounding is joining two previously separate words. The first element is never inflected; only the second can be, and not always.

NOUN (N), ADJECTIVE (A) VERB (V), ADVERB (ADV)

N+N:

A+N

ADV+N: ‘aer,daeg (early day, the dawn).

ADJECTIVES

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N+A: ‘aelmes,georn (alms eager, a generous person)

A+A

ADV+A

A+N

Kennings: They existed because it was an oral culture. It has to do with alliteration. It is a metaphor, a type of compound word, like ‘yÞ,engest (wave-horse, a metaphor for “scip”, a ship), or ‘baeð,weg (bathway, the sea), ‘hwael,weg (whale-way, also the sea), ‘segl,rad (sail-road, guess what, it’s the sea).

AFFIXING involves adding prefixes or suffixes to previously-existing words, as in wiÞ’ceosan (to with-choose, to reject), wiÞ’sprecan (to with-speak, to counter-speak, to contradict), wiÞ’stand (to withstand, the only word of this construction that has survived, along with withhold and withdraw).

Aeg-: it generalizes the meaning of the pronoun or of the adverb to which it is attached. As in aeg’hwa, “anywho”, or aeg’hwaer, “anywhere”.

Ge-: It can either mean “together” (as in “ge’fera”), or a perfective sense of action (“ge’ascian”, to find out), and the one that is always present in OE Past Participles (“ge’endod” [it has the beginning and the ending of a past participle, and that of a weak verb, by the way-this system disappeared by ME period])

On-: With a negative (not in a pejorative) sense, as in “on’bindan” (to unbind).

As for suffixes:

-Had: Recurrent Noun suffix, equivalent to PDE “-hood” as in nationhood, manhood, womanhood, childhood (‘cildhad). Remember that the suffix cannot be stressed.

-Ig: As in “Halig” (Holy).

-Lic: For adjectives, as in ‘heovonlic, “heavenly”.

-Lice: For adverbs, like “ly”, as in ‘hraedlice, “quickly”.

31.03.2014

Today we had a look at the paper with the days of the week and the months of the year. The teacher stresses that PDE months of the year have a Latin origin either coming from the names of the Roman gods and goddesses or from the Roman Emperors. “h” at the beginning is aspirated, while when it comes after a back vowel, a diphthong or a consonant it is velar. “Scip” is “ship”. The grapheme <ae> disappeared in the ME period. “c” before a front vowel is voiced.

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Now we begin to see OE GRAMMATICAL GENDER. It means that any noun must be masculine, feminine or neuter without necessarily any reference to the nature of the thing the noun may refer to. For example, “wif”, with macron, means both wife and woman; well, one may think that semantically this noun may point to a female, but grammatically this noun was neuter in OE. German still retains grammatical gender, unlike English, thus “Madchen” refers to a woman, even though grammatically it is classified as a neuter noun nowadays. “Seeo moona”, both with macron, means “the moon”; “moona” was a feminine noun, thus the demonstrative had to be in concordance with it. In the course of the ME period, the grammatical gender changed to the NATURAL GENDER, and this is what we use today. So, during the 14th century, Late ME period, grammatical gender started to fall into disuse and the natural one begun to be used. It means that the beings that are biologically/naturally male or female are also grammatically masculine or feminine. There are exceptions, nevertheless. The demonstrative, the adjective and the noun agreed in gender and in number. So in order to find out the gender of a noun, we look in an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. In the exam we may come across a sentence made by a demonstrative, an adjective and a noun and we will be asked to say the gender of the noun by looking at the demonstrative and the adjective. Adult male humans and adult male animals have the demonstrative “see”, with macron, like in “see faeder”, which means “the/that father”. “see mearh” means “the/that horse”. Feminine nouns are preceded by “seeoo”, with macron above both, like in “seeoo moder” or “seeoo cuu” (adult female human beings and animals). For young beings we use the demonstrative “Þaet”, like in “Þaet cild” and “Þaet cycen”.

Regarding NUMBER, in OE we do not only have singular and plural, but also dual. The last came from the Indo-European languages. It actually proceeds the OE period. In this stage of OE, the one we are seeing here, the dual category of number was only present in the personal pronoun system.

DEMONSTRATIVES had two systems: “see/seeoo/Þaet” pattern (always in Nominative) and “Þes/Þeos/Þis” pattern.

As they had cases everywhere and they are indicating the function of the nouns, they did not have to be in a very strict order in the phrase, unlike today.

At the end of the OE period, a process of analogy took place and since there were two forms in the system of the demonstratives which were different from the rest, “see/seeoo”, they changed to “Þe/Þeo” and in the 14 th century, ME period, apart from a change in orthography, “the”, there also came a change in function and the demonstrative begun to be used with any gender.

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01.04.2014

In OE, the demonstratives could function as definite articles, proper demonstratives and as a relative pronoun when it was missing; and in that case, it had to go hand in hand with the number and gender of the noun. At the beginning of the OE period, “see” and “seeo” were different, but at the end of the first stage, due to the process of analogy we find “Þe” and “Þeeo”. The thorn ended up disappearing along the 14 th century and it transformed to the group “th”, thus “the”, which is nowadays the definite article, which originated in the masculine nominative singular of “see”. So we are using a 14th century spelling for the definite article. In OE it was only a masculine demonstrative form, while in ME both forms coexist (Early ME “Þe”, Late ME “the”) until “the” started to be used for all forms. The ash “ae” died along the 13th century. In ME the distinction of gender started to disappear, so “that” served any gender in ME.

“Þes/Þeos/Þis” is the second pattern of the demonstratives. In OE, “Þis” was only a neuter, while in ME “this” started to accompany all genders as well. “Þas” was the plural for all genders. “Þoos” appeared in ME because people started confusing “Þaa” with “Þaas”. Then the thorn disappeared in the 14th century and so we get “those”, the final “e” indicating that the previous vowel was long. “Þese” in ME is “these” and it is the form from the “Þes” with the “e” indicating the plural.

We are now going to study the NOUN. In OE, nouns had only four cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative. The most important declension is the Masculine and Neuter a-stem; 50% of the nouns were declined according to this type. The historical reason why it is called “a-stem” is that it is believed that in a Pre-Old English Period (Germanic one) there has been an “a” as in “wulfaz” in Nom. and Acc. “wulfan”. Thus, in OE we find “wulf” both for Nom. and Acc. The regular mark of plurality in PDE comes from OE masculine a-stem plural of Nom. and Acc. In the OE period, case endings were pronounced entirely because they made the difference between cases. In ME, they started to relax the final vowels in declensions into a schwa, which in spelling was an “-es”, this is the leveling process and this is how case endings disappeared. The Saxon Genitive has its origin in the Gen. singular of masculine nouns belonging to the a-stem. Endingless plural in OE is “deeor”, while in PDE “deer” is the corresponding form of endingless plural, or irregular one, even though from a historical point of view it is not irregular, it has always been like that. All neuter nouns that presented a long vowel or a diphthong in the root were endingless.

Regarding the “z-stem”, due to the process of rhotacism in Pre-Old English period, the “z” changed to “r”. OE Nom. and Acc. plural “cildru” > ME, French scribes went to England and maintained the sound /tᶴ/ but introduced their own spelling “childre (because instead of “u” we get schwa due to the leveling process) n (in ME it was added due to plurals in “n-“declensions). So there are two indications of plurality in just one word. The “-n” was added because people did not had the impression that the plural was clear enough. Metathesis is the change in the order of the letters of a word, thus in the north, the non-standard form was “childer”.

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The “n-stem” was also of huge importance. Here we can find nouns belonging to all of the three genders.

07.04.2014

Masculine nouns of Nominative and Accusative plural of a-stem give birth to the plurality mark. OE “cildru” > ME “childre” due to the process of leveling and the French spelling. The final “n” was added in the ME period as a second mark of plurality because people believed that the word did not show plurality properly. The “r” is the original mark of plurality and comes from the OE period. The plurals in “-n”, which are in minority today, originated from the “n-stem”. The number of plurals in “-s” became bigger and bigger in ME period and in the early ModE period, the number of plurals in “-n” decreased even further. In PDE we find plurals in “-s” as the regular ones, while the ones in “-n” are labeled as irregular, which is non-sense from a diachronic point of view.

Regarding the declension of root consonant stem, here we find the process of front mutation or umlaut, thus the first time we find the plural of “foot” as “feet” is in the Dative singular form “fēt”. Even more precise is the fact that the Nominative and Accusative of “fōt” as “fēt”. The reason we call them front mutated plurals or umlaut plurals is because we think that in a period previous the OE one, the Dative singular was “fōti”, thus there was a front vowel “i” which with the passing of time made “ō” change to the front and turn into “ē”, thus “fēti” > OE “fēt”. Another example of this time a feminine noun is “bōc”, meaning “book”, and which from the ME period acquired a new plural in “-s”. Thus we have “bōkes” in ME. From “hund/hundas”, due to the leveling process what we get is “-es”.

The ō-stem is as follows: OE “lufu” > ME “love”. In the ME period, the French scribes changed the “u” before a consonant which contained curves (m, n, v, r); the “v” was just the way “f” in between vowels was pronounced, while due to the leveling process, the final “u” weakened into a schwa. OE “sunu” > ME “sone” > PDE “sun”. OE “tunge” > “tongue” these are all changes we attribute to the French scribes. All the nouns in here were feminine nouns and they were not so important.

ADJECTIVES

Nowadays, when we use adjectives we only have to remember to place them in front of the nouns, as well as the fact that they are invariable in form. Well, in OE the picture is not so simple. There were a weak and a strong declension in adjectives. The weak one was used after the demonstrative and the possessive. The strong declension was preferred when the adjective was not preceded by anything. The system of the adjectives was definitely more complex than it is today. The possessive adjectives we know today are “my, your, his, her book”. The Genitive forms of the table if personal pronouns are the one giving birth to the possessive adjectives. OE “mīn” > PDE “my”.

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OE “Þin” > ME “thine” /ɵi:n/, the final “e” was added as a length mark to indicate that the vowel it preceded was long. 3rd person masculine OE “his” is the same form we use today, while the feminine form is “hire”, the neuter and the masculine are the same “his”. PDE form for a possessive neuter is “its”, while in OE it did not exist. However, a form was created in the early ModE period, and that form is “its”. “It” was the form of the personal pronoun neuter and it was taken and people added an “s” due to the fact that it was the mark of the Genitive. Regarding plurals, 1st person plural OE “ūre” > ME “our(e)” due to the French scribes who wrote “ou” for a long “u”, the pronunciation was maintained. With the passing of time, the final schwa was dropped. For the 2nd person plural, OE “ēower” > “your”. 3rd person plural comes from the Scandinavian forms of “they/them/their”, which first appeared in the north of England, where there was the Danelaw. Then the forms were beginning to be used by the midlanders and the southerners. Thus, the origin of “their”, possessive, is Scandinavian, unlike the English one “hira/heora”, which died by the 15th century, the one that closes the ME period.

Regarding the comparative form, in OE they had the “-RA” suffix, which due to the fact that it was a suffix, leveled to “-RE”, and which due to a process of metathesis changed to the present form “-ER”. The periphrastic construction “more + Adj.” was put into practice in the ModE period. The double-comparative formulae (more beautifuller than) are still produced nowadays. “The bestest” was considered good English before the 18 th

century, and it was used so as to put emphasis on things. The superlative in OE was “-ost/ast/est/st”, which in PDE is “-(e)st”, after the leveling process affecting all final vowels in suffixes in this case. The suffix “-(e)st” comes from early ME period after the leveling process. OE “eald”, meaning “old”, has the comparative form as “ieldra”, while the superlative is “ieldest”. “lāng”/”lengra”/”lengest”. “gōd”/”betera”/”best”. “yfel”/”wiersa”/”wierest” (“worse”/”worst”). “micel” (much)/”māra” (more)/”mæst” (most).

PERSONAL PRONOUNS

Their system is much more complex than any other system. Here we find variations depending on gender, number and case. The 1st person singular in the Nominative is “ic”.

08.04.2014

In OE we had “ic” > ME “ich”, French spelling, but there were also forms such as “I” or “ik”. Thus, the I we use nowadays was born in ME period, regarding spelling, but the pronunciation was different. Due to the Great Vowel Shift, which ended in the 18 th

century, the word was first pronounced /i:/, then /ei/ > /əi/ > /ai/. Thus, the spelling is ME, while the pronunciation is late ModE. The GVS applied to late ME long vowels.

Regarding the second person, “Þū” /ɵu:/ > 14th century (ME) “thou” /ɵu:/, different spelling, same pronunciation > GVS /u:/ > /eʊ/ > /əʊ/ > /aʊ/ in the 18 th century. “Þē” >

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“thee”; “Þīn” > “thine”. OE “gē” > early ME “yoghe”ƺ > late ME “ye”. The form “you” comes from OE “ēow”. When the “th-“ forms and the “ƺe” form disappeared in the 14 th

century, they were replaced by “you”.

Concerning the third person, “its” was a form created in the ModE period. The basic form was OE “hit” > ME “it” > PDE “its”, the final “s” being the mark of the Saxon Genitive. Regarding the plural, “they/them/their” were borrowed in the course of ME period from the Scandinavians; they started being used in the Danelaw District. From the end of the 8th century onwards, Scandinavian settlers came to England and the English who co-existed with them had to borrow words from them. “They” was fully accepted by all the population by the 14th century. “Them/their” were also accepted by the 15th century. When these forms were accepted, the others were lost, the OE ones.

Another shocking difference is to be found in the dual number, which is not exclusive of English, as it was also present in other Indo-European languages. The dual number disappeared by the end of the OE period, but its presence in the personal pronoun system is important.

VERB

In OE, verbs we conjugated. Today they are not conjugated any more. In OE, there were only two tenses, present and past, or preterit. Verbs in OE were classified into two groups, strong and weak. Nowadays, we refer to verbs as being regular or irregular. A weak verb has to be in its preterit tense or in its past participle form, otherwise it is impossible to say whether it is weak or not. If the preterit presents a “-d/t” then we are talking about a weak form, like “fremede”. The strong verb has to be in its past tense and its root vowel is modified, the process being called gradation, thus the vowel is other than usual, like in present “sing/sang/sung”. These strong verbs are called nowadays irregular. In English we also talk about moods of the verbs. Indicative (statements of facts), Imperative (orders and commands), Subjunctive (to express hypothetical situations or doubts and wishes) are all moods.

OE “cēpan” /tᶴepe/ > ME (we apply the leveling process to any final vowel) “kepen” /kepən/ > because the French scribes introduced “k” before “e/i”. This is a case of spelling-pronunciation because a new change in spelling takes to a change in pronunciation > ME “kepe(n)”, by the end of the ME period, the “n”, the mark of the infinitive OE verbs, started to be dropped, by the late 14 th century. When the final “n” was dropped, the final vowel was also dropped, and so the schwa was dropped and we find “keep(e) /ke:p/. In the 14th century, in London and its surroundings was becoming to be fashionable to reduplicate a vowel such as “e/o”, so as to indicate that it was a long vowel; then the fashion expanded. Then the GVS, by the end of the ME period, made /ke:p/ sound as /ki:p/. In OE, we study the West Saxon dialect; however, the final “s” in the third person singular present comes from the Northumbrian dialect, which also existed in the OE period, but with the difference that the manuscripts are so few. The Dream of the Rood from the Ruthwell Cross was written in the Northumbrian dialect.

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Present participles in OE are easy to identify as they end in “-end”, while nowadays they end in “-ing”, which was born in the south of England.

Regarding the preterit system,

In strong verbs we distinguish four basic parts:

- The infinitive (“cēp/stem/an/ending” – weak verb); “helpan” – strong verb.- 1st and 3rd person singular preterit- In strong verbs we find here a different stem, “hulp-“. Weak verbs only had a

past form: “cēpt-“. - Just in the case of strong verbs we find a fourth part, and this is that of past

participle “geholpen”. We know it is past participle because we always find “ge-“at the beginning. “Driven/frozen/written” are all strong verbs. In the weak verbs we had “geceped”.

Example of weak verbs: inf. “hīeran”; past (sg. or pl.) “hīerde”; past participle “gehiered”. “Endian”; past “endode”; past participle “geendod”.

Example of strong verbs: inf. “drīfan”; preterit sg. “drāf”; preterit pl. “drifon”; past participle “gedrifen”.

28.04.2014

Verbs in the OE period were classified into weak and strong. If we are asked whether a verb was strong or weak, we have to have the preterit or the past participle form, not the infinitive. However, the majority of verbs in that period were weak and they presented a dental ending (-d/-t) in the preterit form; for example, the verb “hieran”, or all verbs ending in “-ian/-n”, had the preterit “hierde” and the past participle “gehiered”. Another example of a weak verb: “endian”; the preterit was “endode”, while the past participle (always the “ge-“ prefix) was “geendod”.

Strong verbs presented a higher complexity. They formed their preterit (past tense) by a vowel change, thus by mutating the vowel in a process that we call gradation (a very ancient process affecting all Indo-European languages). Examples are “ride/rode/ridden”. In OE there were up to seven classes of strong verbs, depending on the mutation the vowel suffered. They had four main parts, so one of the parts: “rīdan” (infinitive part), singular preterit “rād”, plural preterit “ridon” (all strong verbs in the preterit plural form had this ending); in the ME period, there is only one preterit form for strong verbs and it sometimes comes from either the singular or the plural or neither of them. However, there is still one verb which has both, “to be” as in “was/were”. The past participle form was “geriden” (all strong verbs in the past participle had this ending).

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There was one anomalous verb in OE and its infinitive form was “BEON”. In the present tense there were two forms: “ic eom” and “ic beo”. The second person was “Þū eart” and “Þū bist”. In OE “eōw” was an object plural form and it gave birth to “you”. The third person singular masculine, feminine and neuter was “hē, hēo, hit is/biᶞ”. First, second and third persons plural were “wē, gē, hī sindon/beoᶞ” (the last one, “hī”, being the Anglo-Saxon form; we use a Scandinavian form “they”, which was introduced at the end of the OE period). The preterit forms were “ic wæs”, “Þū wære”, “hē, hēo, hit wæs”, with the plural “wē, gē, hī wæron”.

UNIT 2 - MIDDLE ENGLISH

It was opened by the Norman Conquest of 1066. First we are going to deal with the external history. Edward the Confessor (1042-1066) was the last Anglo-Saxon King of England. His father was English, his mother was French. Ethelred the Unready was the father of Edward and as he could not face the Scandinavians, he went to France, Normandy, more specifically. There he married Emma and had Edward. Edward became King of England when the last of the Danish Kings died. Thus, after the Danish rule, there came the English line again, with the only difference that he was more French than English, being brought up at the French court. He married but had no children; this is why he was called “the Confessor”. He decided to build Westminster Abbey. Before dying, apparently he promised the throne of England to his cousin, William (Guillaume) 7th Duke of Normandy. However, the English court decided to name Harold Godwinson king. Thus, William decided to invade the isle. Harold was named king in January 1066. In September, the Vikings produced trouble in the north, in York. So Harold had to go there. There was a very brilliant battle at Stamford Bridge and the English won the Scandinavians. However, while celebrating, the English received the news that the French were landing, so they had to rush to the south so as to meet the other invaders. They met the Normans at Hastings on the 13th of October, 1066. The battle received the name of the Battle of Hastings. The French came with their cavalry, their spears and their bows and arrows, while the English still fought with their axes. Harold was killed; it seems that an arrow went through his eyes. The real place were the battle took place is some miles near Hastings and it is called Battle. Once William won the battle, he was called William the Conqueror and he had an abbey built where Harold died. However, we cannot speak of a battle in the right sense, as just when the English realized their king was dead, they abandoned. Bayeux Tapestry represents scenes of the different stages that caused the battle and also the battle itself. It is a 70 meters long tapestry. Normandy lies in the North-West of France and it was invaded in the course of the 9th and 10th centuries by the Scandinavians. Rollo was the first Duke of Normandy, while William was the 7th; however, it seems that the Scandinavians became both mentally culturally and linguistically French in between those generations. Norman French was the dialect they spoke. After the conquest, there

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came the settlement. The south surrendered to the French first; Winchester surrendered first, and it was a very important city as the kings had their court there. William set fire to London when entering the city and he was crowned King of England on Christmas Day. They established a system of confiscation of the Saxon estates/properties. The English landlords were deprives of their property and it was given to William’s barons and followers. By the end of 1068, he was acknowledged as the King of southern England. In the Midlands (Mercia) and the North (Northumbria) people were not happy with this new ruler and two Earls, Edwin and Morcar rebelled against the French. William suppressed the rebellion and he forgave the Earls. They were so stubborn that they rebelled for a second time and this time their uprising was brilliant because they were backed by the Scandinavians. But, the French power was stronger and they began a very cruel campaign against the north, its name was Harrying of the North. Between York and Durham, the French destroyed everything (buildings, cattle, human beings, everything). The Doomsday Book gives account of all this. This massacre was very convincing for the French with the result of convincing everybody that they could force the English into a new way of life. It was not a question of numbers, but of quality. The Harrying of the North also put an end to the division of the Danelaw District. Thus, in the 9th century, King Alfred of Wessex and Godrow, signed the Treaty of Wedmore and established the fact that the Scandinavians should settle west and north of Watling Street.

The French introduced the feudal system and the Doomsday Book/Survey (Hacienda). The latter gives account of all the properties the citizens of England had. It is kept at the Public Record Office in London and it is an eleventh century book.

29.04.2014

Linguistically speaking, in the time we call the Middle Ages, French had been very practical for the English people in contact with the French power. From the 13 th century, the use of French became more artificial. After Hastings, William was both the King of England and the Duke of Normandy until 1204, when the Loss of Normandy took place. In 1204, John, the King of England at that time and the brother of Richard the Lion Heart, son of Henry II, fell in love with Isabelle of Angouleme. She had already been promised to another man in France, Hugh of Lusignan. John took the girl and attacked the Lusignan family, which was a very powerful one. Thus, we have a diplomatic problem. Both families took advice at the King of France, Phillip. For him, it was a good opportunity to humiliate the English King and he summoned him at the court. John did not turn up, that was very bad manners. Being the Duke of Normandy, John had to appear before Phillip; however, John felt more of a King than a Duke. Thus, the French King invaded Normandy and it was lost by the English crown. John won the nickname the “lackland”. Some French nobles still had property in the south of France; this lasted a while. The French king asked them to decide and by the middle of the 13 th

century, the English nobility was mainly English. The royal family in England still had

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connection with France by means of marriages. Thus, every time the King of England married a French girl, many people came with her from France. King John’s son, Henry III, also married a French lady from La Provence, Eleanor of Provence. All these new people coming from France were occupying all the best religious and political fields. One of the criticisms these French received was that they were not speaking English. The middle of the 13th century can be considered a turning point because from that time onwards there was a renewed interest in the use of English in England. Thus, the English upper-classes begun to use English more naturally. It is from this time onwards that more French words were borrowed. The English nobility was always in contact with the French people in power, thus they spoke French, and sometimes when they did not find the word when speaking English, they just borrowed the French term. There are three factors why French was in decline and English was increasing: the linguistic, political and social.

The linguistic factor had to do with the provincial character of the French use in England. The kind of French used there was a mixture of different northern dialects, with Norman predominating, and some from the south. The time came when people in England felt that there French was not pure.

The political factor has to do with the 100 Years War (1337-1453). The King of England, Edward III, claimed the throne of France. The fact that many generations had to fight the war was decisive as French was the language of the enemy.

The social factor has to do with the rise of the middle class/bourgeois/strata. They all spoke English and as they improved their social position, their language also improved. The middle layer in the Middle Ages was rural, peasants, merchants, craftsmen or women. When the French introduced feudalism, at the top of the pyramid we have the King and at the bottom the serfs. The feudal system disappeared little by little and the serfs became free tenants and they were paid for their services instead of being subjected to a single royal family. The Black Death of 1348 appeared in the south-west of England and it lasted three years, spreading in the whole country. According to different Chroniclers of the 14th century, only 1/10 of the population survived. One out of every 10 people lived. As very few people were left alive due to the fact that there was no quarantine in the free tenants’ families, the one who were left alive, left their small villages and went to towns because they knew that they will get better jogs and better paid. There was a shortage in workers, obviously. Thus, from a shortage of workers, we have a rise of wages and a better economic and social position for the free tenants. In the 14th century, we see a growth of the merchant class. Now, we can talk about a general use of English, by the end of the ME period, 14th century.

Spoken English came first; during a long time in the 14th century, people at court spoke at last English but they still wrote and read in French. That means that documents were still written in French and it continued to be the language of administrative documents and the law. 1362 also marks a turning point, as the Lord Chancellor opened the Parliament for the first time in English. There was a decree that from then on all process

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should be conducted in English. We still have to wait until the beginning of the 15 th

century so as to see written English documents. This may be the reason why we do not find many documents written in English from the middle ages. Latin functioned as a Lingua Franca in those times.

SPELLING

The reason why we find such a difference between spelling and pronunciation in English is due to the influence of French.

A æ (ash) b c d e f ƺ (yogh) h i k l m n o p r s t Þ (thorn) ᶞ (eth) u p (wynn) x y. These were the letters before the French scribes modified the alphabet.

A b c d e f g ƺ h i k l m n o p q r s t (Þ) u v w x y z. This is the alphabet after the scribes touched it.

- The <æ> as a grapheme disappeared in the second stage of ME. In that period we find “e/a/ea”, depending on the regional influences.

- The <ᶞ>, it is an indication of early ME, stopped being used in the 14 th century and instead of it we find the <Þ> or the <th>.

- The wynn was replaced with <u>, <uu> or <w>. - The yogh is very ME. <ƺ> it could be used initially in a word as in “ƺer” or

“ƺong”, pronounced as /j/ (i). By the late ME period, initial yogh was replaced by <y>. Medially in a word, such as in “riƺt”, and next to a front vowel, it was pronounced as a palatal fricative [c]. OE “riht” > ME “riƺt”. Suppose the yogh goes next to a back vowel or a consonant, as in “Þurƺ” (through), it is pronounced as a velar fricative (the Spanish jota) [x](hhhhh). In the 14th century, we are going to find a “y” in initial position. The yogh appeared in the ME period, not before. It also disappeared in the same period.

- The < Þ> disappeared in the course of the 14th century because it was replaced by “th”. Metathesis is the change in the position of two graphemes. Thus “through”, instead of the yogh we start finding “gh”. However, the sound [x] disappeared in the 16th century (early ModE), even though the pronunciation did earlier. Both the velar and the palatal sound disappeared in the same period. Thus, we continue to spell “gh” but we do not pronounce it.

05.05.2014

- <k> was preferred before <e>, <i>, <n> and <l>. OE “cēpan” /tʃ/ > ME “kepen”; we write “e” instead of “a” because “a” begun being pronounced as a /ə/, due to the fact that it was present in an unstressed position, and because of the leveling process, the change in sound was transferred to spelling as well. Later on in the period, the final “n” disappeared in all strong verbs; thus, we have “kepe”. We also find “keep(e)”, because the double “e” for a long “e” sound (and double “o” for a long “o” sound) started as a fashion, as a spelling habit, in London in the 14 th century. But as soon as they started

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printing any kind of documents and they were widely read, the change spread. Because there was a change in spelling, there was a change in pronunciation (spelling-pronunciation change), because as people saw “k”, they started pronouncing it as it was, and not as in OE. OE “cniht” (palatal) > ME spelling changes “kniƺt” (same pronunciation as in OE) > late ME “knight” (same pronunciation). We are using a late ME spelling for many words, but the pronunciation early ModE. Thus, long vowels at the end of the ME period were affected by the GVS and this is why we have a diphthong instead of a long “i”. Another change is that affecting the group “gh”, which had the palatal fricative sound, but it disappeared in early ModE, along the 16 th century; the group stopped being pronounced.

As a consequence of the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Invasion, many French scribes found a job in the scriptoria of the English monasteries and they introduced many changes in the spelling of English:

- <y> (letter “y”): it was used interchangeably with <i>, thus we have ME “mynyster” or “minister”. We also attribute to the French scribes the using of the <y> in the final position.

- <o> was used from the middle 13th century to indicate /ʊ/ (short “u”). OE “lufu” /v/ > ME “love” /ə/. <o> due to the French scribes, <v> because the spelling started to show the voicing in ME and <e> due to the leveling process, pronounced as a schwa. However, the alteration was in spelling, not in sound, as they used to pronounce it /lʊvə/. If we wipe the schwa out, we get /lʊv/ (thus, we use a ME spelling and a ModE pronunciation; thus, the process from a back vowel /ʊ/ to a central vowel happened in that period). OE “sunu” > ME “sone” >ModE “son”.

- <ou>, or before a vowel or in final position they preferred <ow> for [u]. OE “ hūs” > ME “hous” (with no variation in OE sound!!! This is important!). The final “e” in “house” was a creation (as a diacritic mark, so as to indicate that the previous vowel was long) of the ME period. The pronunciation is due to the Great Vowel Shift, which affected long vowels.

- <ie> (spelling) for long [e] (sound). It was only applied to French borrowings at the beginning and then it was transferred to all English words. OE “feond” > ME “ fiend” /feend/, not a diphthong. It was affected by the GVS, thus we have /fiend/.

- <ch> for /tʃ/; the sound was already there in OE. OE “cild” /tʃ/ > ME “child”. The pronunciation was the same, /tʃild/, and then we have /tʃaild/.

- /ʃ/ (fricative voiceless). OE “scip” > ME “schip”, “sship”, “ship”. One of the three was established and that was “sh”. Examples: “ocean”, “nation”, etc.

- <cw> begun <qu> OE “cweᶞan” > ME “quethen” /cueɵən/. The ash, eth and yogh are indicators of early ME.

PHONOLOGY

How vowels changed from OE to ME.

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- Short vowels (a, e, i, o and u) in stressed syllables remained the same as they have been in OE. OE “sinkan” > ME “sinken”. Short <ae> as in OE “saet” (in a closed syllable); from the beginning of the 12th century, early ME, its pronunciation was retracted (the point of articulation moved backwards), thus we have /a/ sound. However, it seems that first speakers modify their pronunciation and then the spelling. Thus, we find the spelling ash in the 12th

century, and in the 13th century it started disappearing. There was a previous change in pronunciation, and only later on there came the change in spelling.

- Long vowels in stressed syllables (a, e, i, u) remained the same in ME (regarding only pronunciation), there were differences in spelling. OE “wīn” > ME “wine” (same pronunciation /ʊi:n/), the diacritic “e” indicates that the previous vowel was long. OE “cwēn” > ME “quene”; “queen” started as a reduplication of “e” as a long vowel, but the sound was still long OE “e”. Long “a” sound was not modified in the North but in the Midlands and South in the ME, it was retracted to [ᵓ:]. OE “stān” > Southern ME “stone”, being long vowel it was affected by the GVS, thus /stoʊn/; Northern ME “

06.05.2014

The ashes are very particular of early ME. After some decades, the ash was retracted to “a”. Long “a” ( [a:] > [ᵓ:] ) was not pronounced differently in the north; in the south and the midlands, the vowel was retracted, its point of articulation went backwards. There seems to have been a change in pronunciation and then in spelling. OE “stān” > ME “ston(e)” the final “e” is a diacritic mark put there in the ME period so as to show that the previous vowel was long. The long vowel was later on affected by the GVS; thus, nowadays we get a diphthong [əʊ].

OE [æ:] > ME a) closed [e:], spelled <ē>. The hypothesis is that the vowel comes from

West Germanic a. ME “strēt(e)”. b) open “e” [ᵋ:], spelled <ē>; ME “tēche”.

DIPHTHONGS. There were only two diphthongs in OE, “ea” and “eo”. The long diphthong “ea:” was reduced (only one vowel was left) [æ:]. “Eo:” was also reduced to the first element maintained and the second one was rounded; thus, we have [ö:] (pronounced as “e” with lip rounding). In the East Midlands, the vowel was fronted and it lost the lip rounding [e:]. OE “deop” > ME “dēp”. Long closed [e:] raised in its point of articulation, thus [i:].

New diphthongs were created in the ME period.

- Vocalization of palatal “g” after ash <æ> and <e> . OE “dæg” > ME “dai”. We attribute to the French scribes the presence of the final “y” in “day”. OE “wegan” > ME “weien”. Vocalization means that a consonant turns into a vowel.

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- Before a palatal fricative [c] and a velar fricative [x] we get an i-glide and a u- glide, respectively. OE “dohtor” [x] > ME “douƺter”.

- Vocalization of velar “g” after <a> or <o> in the middle of a word. OE “dragan” > ME “drawen” (“w” because it was preferred before a vowel). In the 14th

century the final “n” as a mark of the infinitive disappeared. The final schwa also disappeared and with it also went the final “e”. OE “plogas” > ME “plowes“.

There were also vowels borrowed from French. For instance, vowels next to nasal consonants were nasalized. “Danger” [ẵ] is one example. The English introduced the “u” before the consonant and the vowel. For example, “daunce”, “chaunge”, “chaumbre”. The diphthong <oi> comes from French and it was maintained as in “joy”, “join”. The triphthong <eau> was also adopted but it was reduced to a diphthong [eu] > [iu] >[ju].

Now we are going to talk about what happened to vowels in unstressed syllables, and this is the LEVELING PROCESS. OE “dogga” > ME “dogge”, pronounced schwa /ə/. At the beginning, the final “a” was relaxed to a /ə/ in pronunciation, but the schwa was lost in the 14th century. When the schwa was dropped in pronunciation, the final “e” was also dropped in spelling. OE “sunu” > ME “sone” (the “u” before m, n, w and r was changed to “o” because the French scribes thought it was better!!!). The pronunciation of the “o” was maintained to /ʊ/. > “son” /sun/, when the sound of the schwa disappeared, also did the final “e”. In ModE, we passed from /ʊ/ to /ᶺ/. OE “talu” > ME “tale” [a:] … [ei] due to the GVS.

12.05.2014

Last week we were talking about phonology, changes in vowels, more precisely. Today we are going to talk about the changes in consonants. Even though consonants remained pretty the same, we are going to focus on the changes.

One of them is the voicing of the voiceless fricative. Thus, we have <f>, <s> and <Þ>, which were /f/, /s/ and /ᴼ/. Medially in a word and in between vowels, in a voiced environment, we find the following changes in spelling /v/, /z/ and /ᵟ/. For example, OE “wifes” > ME “wives”.

Another change is the vocalization of consonants (the consonant turns into a vowel). OE past participles contained the prefix “ge-“(it is a palatal “g”); the vowel was raised in its point of articulation and speakers started to pronounce “i”. Then, the “g” consonant turned into a vowel of the same quality of the other vowel, thus we have “gi-” > “ii” > “ῐ” (short “i”) and then it disappeared.

Moreover, from OE times, an i-glide tended to develop in the context of a liquid consonant plus “g” plus vowel. For example, OE “myrge” > ME “mirige” > “mirie”. However, the form we inherited nowadays comes from the south and it is “merry”. OE

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“hālig” > ME “holi”. In the Midlands and South, in the ME period, the “o” was retracted to /Ɔ/, which after the GVS turned into /әʊ/.

The process of Metathesis (the change in two letters’ position) mainly concerned the <r>. OE “Þridda” > ME “thirdde” > “third”. When the schwa disappeared in sound, the final “e” also disappeared. OE “hwæt” /huæt/ > ME “what” /huat/; the ash was beginning to die off in the course of the 13th century and it was replaced by “a”. The “h” continued to be aspirated in ME, but it stopped being pronounced with the passing of time. “When/where/who” were passing through the same process.

Some consonants were dropped (they disappeared). C + <w> + <a/o/u>, the “w” was dropped in spelling. OE “swā” > ME “sō” /so:/ to /sәʊ/; the retraction of the “a” in the Midlands and South. Spelling has been usually slower than changes in pronunciation. “Sword” /sord/, the “w” is dropped in pronunciation. “Answer” is being pronounced as /ansә/. The “w” does not sound but we continued writing it.

More droppings of consonants represent the <l> + voiceless affricate /tʃ/, written as <ch>. OE “hwylc” /huiltʃ/ > ME “which” /huitʃ/, because the “l” disappeared. Droppings of the infinitive mark in verbs; OE “sittan” (-ian, -n) > ME “sitten (“e” as a result of the leveling process) > by the very end of the ME period, the “-n” mark of the infinitives was dropped; thus we have “sit”. First, the “-n” was dropped, then the schwa in sound and then in spelling and then the second “-t”.

OE suffix “-lic” /litʃ/ > ME “-lich”, and then /tʃ/ disappeared as a result of the economy of effort. Thus, we may find “-li” or “-ly”. Only the second one survived.

Another dropping is that of the <h>. In OE, an <h> in initial position was aspirated. The <h> followed by “l”, “n” or “r”, like in OE “hnutu” > ME “nute”, “nut” /ʊ/ to /˄/.

The development of a consonant means that a consonant has appeared. This is the case of the <d> between n … l, l … r, or n … r. OE “ƿunor” > ME “thunder”. At the end of a word, a <t> usually developed after a final “-n” or “-s”, so we still get a final “t” after them. OF “ancien” > ME “ancient” or “auncient”. The French passion of introducing the u-glide before an “n” or “m”.

Regarding MORPHOLOGY, there are not many changes. Throughout ME, there was the tendency to simplify the morphological system, as well as all elements of grammar, such as the noun’s declensions.

Sg. Acc. –(e) Pl. –(e)s

G. –(e)s

D. –e

In the south, people were more conservative and they used a plural in “-n”, which came from the “-n” declension in OE. Thus, they used “-e” for all the cases in singular, and “-n” for the plural, with no distinction between cases. By the 15th century, all plurals were

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in “-s”, with no distinction between the region. The table above comes from the “-a” stem in OE. Nowadays, there are very few plurals in “-n” still alive; and there are even fewer umlaut plurals (“foot/feet”).

Regarding adjectives, we will have a look at the comparatives and superlatives. OE comparative forms used “-RA” > ME “-RE” /-rә/, due to the leveling process > Metathesis and we get “-ER”. OE superlatives were “-OST/-AST/-EST/-ST” > ME leveling process gets them all a schwa; “-(e)st”.

13.05.2014

Regarding the personal pronoun system, it was simplified in that there was no more distinction between genders. The most important change concerns the third person. For the masculine, we have “hē”, pronounced /he:/ in early ME and /hi:/ after the GVS. There was also a distinction between the Accusative and the Dative; thus, we have “hine” and “him”, respectively. In late ME, after the 14 th century, the Accusative form disappeared and so we talk about the subject form (the Nominative forms) and the object forms (with no distinction between Accusative and Dative). The first person was “ich”, pronounced as /itʃ/, and it came from OE “ic”. In the south, people also used “ik”. The form we use nowadays appeared in ME and it was used when the following word begun by a consonant. Being an unstressed form and being limited when it was invented, “I” pronounced /i/, begun to be generally used in any context, no matter the consonant or vowel of the following word. Thus, it underwent the GVS and we get a rising diphthong /ai/. The second person singular forms represent a contrast in relation to what we use today. OE “ƿū” > ME “thou”, pronounced just the same as in OE. OE “ƿē” > ME “thee” (due to French scribes). The plural was “Ʒe” and “ye” for the subject form and “eu/oi/you” for the object. Thus, the forms that we use today are not these precisely. All singular forms disappeared in ME period (“thou/thee”), as well as the subject plural forms (“Ʒe/ye”). The Battle of Hastings marked a turning point for the English people and the history of the English language. The English begun to imitate certain patterns. Thus, any of the plural forms (“Ʒe/ye/you”) were used so as to show respect and distance towards your listeners (French “vous”, plural form).

“Hā” meant “he” in an unstressed position, while “a” could mean both “he/she”. The form for the third person singular neuter gender had the form “hit” as in OE. The news is that the “it” form appeared in an unstressed position in ME period (12th century). It gained ground gradually and by the end of the period only one of the two entered in the standard of English.

The feminine forms for the third person singular are divided into three patterns. First we have “heo” /heo/, with lip-rounding, in the West Midlands. Forms like “schō” were used in the North, while the “shē” /ʃe/ type was used in the East Midlands. The last one was the one to survive.

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Regarding the third person plural, there was no difference between genders and the pronouns used were divided into three parts corresponding to the region. In the North, the Scandinavian type of “they/them/their” was use, while in the South people used the English type of “hi/hem/hie”. Meanwhile, people in the Midlands used a mixed type depending on the region they lived (either more to the north or to the south). They used “they/hem/hire”. Chaucer wrote in the 14th century, in the East Midlands variety with the touch of the south, so he was pretty conservative. Thus, when we use the standard forms nowadays, we have to know that we use the Scandinavian forms, not the English ones.

UNIT 3 – MODERN ENGLISH

The period was opened by the introduction of the printing press in London. It was invented in Germany by Gutenberg. William Caxton introduced it in England in 1476, in District One next to Westminster Abbey. Eduard the Confessor had it charged from Germany. This is the beginning of a new era in the history of the English language. In English historical linguistics we call this period Early Modern English. The introduction of the printing press made books cheaper. They all looked the same and it was cheaper than ordering a scribe to write it for you during many days. Moreover, until this time, there were no identical manuscripts. However, now when books were printed, they showed the same letter. As a consequence, we find a growth in schools. In Shakespeare’s days, somewhere between a third and 50% of the population could read and write. Renaissance is a time when people wanted to learn more and more in any subject. Thus, came the necessity to translate many important books from classical languages (Latin and Greek). When translator begun to work with a text, they more often than not found that there was no exact and accurate term in the English language so as to express so accurately what was firmly stated in Latin. Thus, they borrowed many terms from the classical languages. This is what we call enriching the English language because the vocabulary expanded; they borrowed thousands of words from Latin. 10,000 new words came from Latin and Greek to English. By the middle of the 17th century, the vocabulary had grown in its dimensions to a large extent. THIS IS THE FOURTH PERIOD OF LATIN INFLUENCE ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. This happened in the 16th and 17th century, in 1650 more precisely. This enriching lead to the inkhorn/inkpot controversy; the inkpot terms which were specific terms borrowed from the classical languages were thought to be too bookish, considered that no one used them in everyday life; they were thought to belong to a certain kind of minority people and of a specific type. Many Cambridge and Oxford teachers of Greek and Latin did not approve them.

Now we are going to consider the GVS and the rise of the Standard English, which along with the inkpot controversy were the most important point of the Modern English period. The GVS is very important and it is concerned with differences in

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pronunciation between the end of the ME period and PDE. Only long vowels were affected by it. They were raised in their point of articulation. We will see this the next week.

Regarding the rise of Standard English, we have to say that about the end of the ME period, the dialect of East Midland London became something of a standard. What helped in its choice so as to be representative for all the English was the fact that London was the capital city (very important politically, socially and economically). However, the choice was also due to the fact that Oxford and Cambridge were very near and they were the center of culture and education.

We are going to introduce the problem of spelling in the Modern English period. After the Norman Invasion, the use of English as a written language was limited because it had to compete with French and Latin. French influenced the spelling of English to a large extent because of the French scribes who changed it by introducing their own spelling habits. The presence of French thus is highly important. In the Renaissance, there was no dictionary that all people followed and which could prescribe the correct spelling of English. More or less until the middle of the 17 th century, we find for a great number of words still different spellings. “Tongue” presented up to nine different spellings. “Shaksper/Shaxpere/Shackspear” was the three different ways Shakespeare signed.

The influence of the classical languages was as it follows: late ME “dette” > early ModE “debt”, pronounced /det/. Ever since the Modern English period, people started introducing changes in spelling but which did not changed pronunciation. English “debt” comes from Latin “debit”, so they introduced the “b”. ME “boute” /dutә/ > early ModE “doubt” /daʊt/, from Latin “dubit”.

20.05.2014

Regarding spelling, we also have to mention that the word “island” in OE was “igland”, and then it changed to “iland” and due to the influence of the classical languages (e.g. Latin “insula”), an “s” was added to the word in the early Modern English period (Renaissance). More spelling habits, this time introduced by the Dutch printers, were those regarding the addition of an “h” after a “g”, like in “ghost” or “ghess”. However, regarding the last word, the French influence was bigger and thus we say nowadays “guess”. Another change in spelling which provoked a change in pronunciation was that of an “h” after a “t”; like in “theatre”, “anthem” or “Anthony”. Sir John Cheke was a very important figure because he suggested to extinguish the final “e” in many words, as the final “e” was not pronounced, it just laid there; for example, “girl(e)”, “doubt”, “whole”, “my” or “would”. The spelling reform was an important movement in the period and John Hart, Thomas Wilson and William Bullokar were just some of the reformers who proposed to change the spelling of English so as for it to accommodate to the pronunciation. Many things they proposed were changed and many were not. In

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the Renaissance period, the English language changed a lot. By the mid-17th century, the spelling of English was kind of stabilized. By the mid-18 th century, Samuel Johnson wrote the first dictionary. Still, the distinction between “i” and “j” in pronunciation was not being made, neither the one between “u” and “v”. Nobody made a difference in between them. These are some things to remember about spelling.

Today we are going to see THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT (phonology – the evolution of sounds). Only long vowels were affected by the GVS. We are going to see them one by one how they were affected. Thus, long vowels raised their point of articulation. “ē” (open “e”), “ē.” (close “e”), ō” (open “o”), “ō.” (close “o”), “ā”, “ī” and “ū” (being the very high, they diphthongized, turned into diphthongs). It is in late ME when the GVS started. The Midlands was the cradle of Standard English. There are two possibilities so as to obtain a long “a” in ME: Anglo-Saxon words that in OE had a short “a” in an open syllable (one which ends in a vowel is an open syllable). Thus, OE “name” > ME “nāme”, being long, it suffered the GVS. The other possibility is from loan French words (“fame”).

GO TO WRITTEN NOTES!!!

26.05.2014

We go on practicing on the GVS on paper. In the exam, we are going to be given a word in its form before being affected by the GVS. We have to state the changes of the vowel and the periods when they occurred. Moreover, we can also be given the transcription of a word in PDE and we have to go backwards in time and see the origin.

There were also changes affecting consonants in the Modern English period.

- Voiceless fricative palatal [ç]. OE “niht” (hhh) (after a front vowel “i” was pronounced palatal). Early ME “niƷt” > Late ME “night” /hhhh/. In Early Modern English de sound disappeared in pronunciation, even though showing the Late ME spelling. The cluster became mute depending on the speaker but more generally along the 16th century. In the 16th century, the word was pronounced /neit/, because we have applied the GVS to the long vowel.

- Voiceless fricative velar consonant [x]. OE “broht” (“o” is a back vowel; thus, after a back vowel/diphthong/consonant, the “h” was pronounced velar) > Early ME “brouƷt” > Late ME “brought” > Early Modern English “brought” /broʊt/. Nowadays, there are still a few words in which the group <gh> is being pronounced (laugh, cough, enough).

- When the “b” came after an “m” finally in a word, the “b” was dropped in pronunciation and then in spelling as well. Thus, OE “lim” > ME “lim” > ModE “limb”. The same happened with the group “-nd”. ME “laund” > EModE “laun”/”lawn”. ME “soun” > Early ModE “sound”; at first the “d” was not pronounced.

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- < al > + consonant takes to the vocalization of the “l”. “Talk” was ME [talk] > [al] > [Ɔʊ] > [Ɔ:]. If the was an “f/n/m” we have exceptions as in “half” /a:/ or “have” /æ/. However, in the United States they say “half” as /hæf/.

- < ol > + consonant is another change. ME “folk” /folk/ > in ModE it was vocalized to /foʊk/. The “l” always vocalized to “u”. Sherlock Holmes is /hoʊms/. “L” plus consonant always vocalizes.

- < gn- >, < kn- >. OE “cniht” [ç] /kniçt/ > Early ME “kniƷt” > Late ME “knight”. In the Early modern English period (16th century), the pronunciation of the “k” disappeared. In the 16th century, the word sounded something like /neit/; from “knight”. With PDE “gnat” /næt/ happens the same.

Present participle of any verb is ending in “-ing”; for example, “listening” with the pronunciation /in/. In the 19th century, working-class people who could not read or write, started a new pronunciation of the ending and it is nowadays the standard one; they introduced a velar “n”.

27.05.2014

Today we are going to talk about MORPHOLOGY in the Modern English period. Even though people believe that OE is very difficult, the teacher believes that ME is far more difficult because of the variety we find in respects to language. By the end of the ME period, regarding nouns, we talk about the leveling process, thus we have caseless plurals, with the form ending in –(e)s. In Modern English, the picture is even easier. The apostrophe appeared for the first time in the 17 th century and it is there so as to facilitate the understanding of the language (e.g. mother’s suit). Moreover, the plurals that we nowadays call irregular from a synchronic point of view, they we umlaut or front mutated plurals. There also existed plurals in –n, in words such as “eyen” and “toen”. The “-s” mark of plurality moved from the north to the Midlands and then to the south, so the southerners were the most conservative people. These plurals disappeared with the passing of time, still in the Modern English period. “Brethren” is another old example of the plural in –n and we still use this term; it refers to a religious community. “Children” is another example, as well as one of those words presenting a double mark of plurality. We still have one more group of plurals, the uninflected ones in words such as OE “dēor” > ME “dēr”; “deer”. Regarding spelling, we still use a ME spelling, while pronunciation is Modern English. Other examples are “sheep”, “horse”, which used to be uninflected until the 17th century, “fish”, “fowl”, “antelope”, and “buffalo”. Even though the majority of nouns formed their plural in the easy way, by adding – (e)s, there seemed to also be other nouns which did not follow the analogical process. The HIS Genitive construction is something new. The historical ending of the Genitive – s was beginning to be regarded as a variant form of “his”. This was confusion because of, for example, if we have the sentence “James’s friends” and “James his friends”, the “his” in the unstressed position implies the dropping of the “h” and this makes them

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sound the same. So people begun to write “his/is/ys” instead of the Genitive. Some more things people did was putting “her/their” in the Genitive position, as in “Augustus her daughter”. This construction disappeared by the Late Modern English period. Another construction is the group genitive one; it was an innovation of the Modern English period. So, the Genitive was attached to the last word of the group, the one that came before it. We more often than not find a pronoun plus “s”, like in “somebody else’s”, which still exists today. Moreover, we can also find a group linked by a conjunction, like in “Hatin & Mason’s book”. The Genitive refers to both terms, not just to the one it is attached. Furthermore, we still find the uninflected Genitive in Early Modern English in nouns coming from OE and also in nouns that ended in an “s” or preceding words that started in “s”. For example “for God sake” may imply economy of effort. More examples are “Lady Chapel” or “Lady Day”. We do not produce uninflected Genitives today, even though we can use the fossilized forms. However, there are other non-Standard varieties of English which do not produce the Genitive case. For the African-American Vernacular speakers of English, the rule is not to use the Genitive form. “My brother house” is a good example of this.

Now we are going to talk about ADJECTIVES. In OE we find weak and strong adjectives. Any adjective could follow one or another pattern, depending on the fact that if it was preceded by a demonstrative or a possessive it followed the weak pattern, and if it was not preceded by anything it was strong. In the ME period, due to the fact that the diversity of case endings was reduced, we only find differences in monosyllabic adjectives ending in a consonant. By Late ME period we find singular strong form as “long” and plural as “longe”. Weak singular adjectives as “longe” and plural “longe”. This was paving the way to a fixed form for adjectives; at the end of the ME period, we only find one form for the adjectives, an invariable one. Regarding comparative and superlative forms, we will draw a line of comparison between the periods.

In the comparative form in OE we have “- RA” (the Germanic device) > ME “- RE” /rә/ in pronunciation due to the leveling process. Still in ME, the metathesis process affected the letters and thus we have “- ER”. In ME, we find more often than not the periphrastic construction and that meant the use of MORE + ADJ./ADV. + THAN. Today we use both. However, if the adjective is long/polysyllabic, then we have to use the periphrastic construction, and if it is short, we have to use the Germanic construction. In ME there was not the case, as we can find something like “more fair”. At that time, they even used the double-comparative formula, as in “more beautifuler/fairer than”, up until the 18th century, when someone regulated the norm into the use of one of another form.

Regarding the superlative, in OE we had different endings: “-EST/OST/AST/ST”. In the ME period, due to the leveling process, the picture was very much simplified. Thus, we have the ME form “- (E)ST”. in Modern English period, regarding adjectives, the number of syllables was irrelevant; thus, we could find something like “the most brightest student”. This was also considered bad English in the 18 th century with the emergence of grammars.

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THE PERSONAL PRONOUN SYSTEM goes as follows: 1st person singular subject form “I”. OE “ic” /itʃ/ > ME “ich” /itʃ/, with the unstressed form of “I”. thus, when we talk about the Early Modern English period, we talk about “I” with its pronunciation depending on the century, because it was affected by the Great Vowel Shift. The object form was “me”, since the OE period, while the possessive forms were “my/mine”, for both the Attributive and the Nominative, with no differentiation.

The second person singular subject was “thou” and it came from OE “ƿū” > ME “thou”. The object was “thee” from OE “ƿē” > ME “thē/thee” (the pronunciation was all the same until the vowel was affected by the GVS): the possessive forms were “thy/thine”, without distinction. “My/thy” were preferred when the following word started by a consonant or before a pause. The “Mine/thine” were used when the following word started with a vowel. Thus, we are going to talk about a phonological distinction. In the 18th century, Late Modern English, the first forms “my/thy” started having an Attributive function. The forms with the “- n” was preferred for the Nominal use (e.g. “I forgot mine in the car”). However, important to remember is the fact that all the forms for the second person (the “th-“forms) disappeared from the Standard of English in the 18th century, we no longer use them today.

Something which was established in the ME period, lived along the Modern English one and died until today is the difference between the French uses of “tu/vous”. So as to imitate this trend, the English used the “th-“forms for the informal use and the “y-“forms (“ye - subject/you - object/your - possessive”) when they wanted to be polite and to mark a distance you’re your addressee. With the passing of time, the formal “y-“forms prevailed and nowadays they are used with no distinction.

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