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History of EnglishFIL ANG 524

2011/2012

Week 1

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Textbooks

Barber, Charles. 1993.

The English Language: A Historical Introduction.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baugh, Albert C. & Thomas Cable. 1993.

A History of the English Language. 4th edition.

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Freeborn, Dennis. 1998.

From Old English to Standard English. London:

Macmillan.

Pyles, Thomas and John Algeo. 1993.

The Origins and Development of the English Language.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Campbell, Lyle. 2004.

Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. 2nd edition.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University press.

Crystal, David (ed.). 1995.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trask, R.L. 1996. Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold

Mallory, J.P. and D.Q. Adams. 2006. The Oxford Introduction to

Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World .

Oxford: Oxford University Press

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SYNCHRONIC vs. DIACHRONIC

Diachronic linguistics

(Greek dia- 'through' + chronos 'time‘)

• the study of the history of language

• the branch of linguistics that deals with

changes in language through time.

• Also historical linguistics

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SYNCHRONIC vs. DIACHRONIC

Synchronic linguistics

• the study of a language at a given point in

time, present or past

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External vs. internal language history

External language history

• social, political, cultural changes and their influenceon language change and maintenance

Internal language history

• structural, semantic, communicational causes of

language change and maintenance

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Historical linguistics is concerned with language

change.

• It is concerned with what kinds of change can occur,i.e. what kind of changes are possible and why.

• It is also concerned with what kind of changes do notoccur and why.

• Thus it contributes to the understanding of grammar

and human cognition.

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• languages change constantly

• changes are phonetic, phonological, morphological,syntactic, semantic, lexical

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Matthew 27:73

Modern English (The New English Bible, 1961):

Shortly afterwards the bystanders came up and said to Peter,

'Surely you are another of them; your accent gives you away!'

Early Modern English (The King James Bible, 1611):

And after a while came vnto him they that stood by, and said to Peter,

Surely thou also art one of them, for thy speech bewrayeth thee.

Middle English (The Wycliff Bible, fourteenth century):

And a litil aftir, thei that stooden camen, and seiden to Petir,

treuli thou art of hem; for thi speche makith thee knowun.

Old English (The West-Saxon Gospels, c. 1050):

þa æfter lytlum fyrste genēalhton þa ðe þær stodon, and cwædon topetre. Soðlice þu eart of hym, and þyn spræc þe gesweotolað.

[Literally:

then after little first approached they that there stood, said to Peter.

Truly thou art of them, thy speech thee makes clear.]

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Some possible reasons of language change:

• physiological factors

• imperfect language learning

• analogy

• borrowing

• the tendency to preserve symmetry in language

• language variation

• sociological factors

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• All living languages change.

language – dialects

languages – dialects

parent language

daughter language A daughter language B

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Genetically related languages

• all started out as regional dialects of a singleancestral language: PROTO-LANGUAGE

• they constitute a language family

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THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES

1786 – Sir William Jones, a judge in the British court in India,read his paper to the royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta:

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of awonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copiousthan the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing

to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and inthe forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced byaccident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine themall three, without believing them to have sprung from some

common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similarreason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both theGothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom,had the same origin with the Sanskrit...”.

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PIE

Sanskrit400BC

Old Irish600-900

Old Church Slavonic9th-13th cc.

Old PrussianWest Baltic 16th-18th cc.

Latin

English

Meaning: ‘mother’

Some cognate words from different IE languages:

Mallory and Adams (2006)

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PIE

Sanskrit400BC

Old Irish600-900

Old Church Slavonic

9th

-13th

cc.


Latin

English

Meaning: ‘brother’ in all cognate sets except for Greek where it has come to

mean ‘kinsman’, but it also exhibits extended secondary (?) meanings of ‘kinsman, cousin’ in Celtic and Slavic (Mallory & Adams 2006:214)

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PIE

Sanskrit400BC

Old Irish600-900



Latin

English

Meaning: ‘sister’

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PIE *widheweha-

vidhávā-Sanskrit400BC

fedbOld Irish

600-900

vdováRussian

widdewuOld PrussianWest Baltic 16th-18th cc.

viduaLatin

widowEnglish

Meaning: ‘widow’

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PIE

Sanskrit400BC

Old Irish600-900


Lithuanian

Latin

English

Meaning: ‘young’

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PIE

Sanskrit400BC

Old Irish

600-900


Lithuanian

Latin

English

Meaning: ‘sheep’

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Mallory and Adams (2006:61)

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Some cognate words from different branches of

the Indo-European language family:

cognate words: descended from the same single ancestralword in the common ancestral language

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What is the latest date that Proto-Indo-Europeancould have existed?

The three earliest Indo-European groups attested:

Anatolian at c. 2000 BC,

Indo-Iranian at c.1400 BC

Greek at c.1300 BC

‘If we presume a Proto-Indo-European that includesAnatolian (rather than the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, which

makes Anatolian a sister of Indo-European rather than adaughter), then Proto-Indo-European must be set before2000 BC when Anatolian is historically attested.’

‘Stefan Zimmer urges linguists and archaeologists not to

use the word Proto-Indo-European for anything ‘linguisticor archaeological’older than c. 2500 BC, but such caution,which in any case may well be misplaced, is not shared bymost linguists who venture into the area of time depth.’


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Proto-Indo-European

• Spoken perhaps 5000 to 6000 years ago

• the Indo-European homeland problem

Trask (1994:357)

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• Maria Gimbutas and the Kurgan culture• 5th and early 4th millennia BC, the region of the Volga River,

north of the Caspian Sea

• They buried their important dead in tombs which were often

covered by an artificial mound called in Russian a kurgan.• Apparently they were warlike pastoralists who rode horses and

used wheeled vehicles; they had a cult of sky gods and sunworship, a strongly patriarchal organisation, and a great lovefor horses and weapons.

• There is evidence that the Kurgan people, some time after4000 BC, spread out eastwards into central Asia, Persia, and

India, westwards into central Europe and the Balkans, andsouthwards across the Caucasus into Anatolia.

Trask (1996: 358-9)

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• Colin Renfrew argues that, at a time when states and even cities didnot yet exist, no group of people could have possessed the economic

and technological resources necessary to launch large-scale invasionsand to overrun already populated lands.

• He advanced a very different scenario: IE speech must have defusedslowly and peacefully across Eurasia in conjunction with some

economic or technological advance.• He can find only one such advance which is sufficiently widespread

and important to be the vehicle of such linguistics spread: thedevelopment and spread of agriculture.

• Agriculture did spread out slowly across much of Europe and Asiafrom a very few small sites principally in the Middle East, but thatspread of agriculture began not 6 000 years ago but over 10 000 years

ago, in the Neolithic, or the Late Stone Age.• This date is quite unacceptable to most linguists: such an early datewould require IE speech to have diffused over a vast area during thethousands of years while hardly changing at all, something which

historical linguists consider impossible. Trask (1996: 360-1)

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The Wörter und Sachen approach

‘words and things’

• using linguistic information to draw conclusions

about the nature of a society in which the languagewas spoken

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Documents