History of English

FIL ANG 524 2011/2012

Week 1

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.

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

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

SYNCHRONIC vs. DIACHRONIC Synchronic linguistics the study of a language at a given point in time, present or past

External vs. internal language history

External language history social, political, cultural changes and their influence on language change and maintenance

Internal language history structural, semantic, communicational causes of language change and maintenance

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 not occur and why. Thus it contributes to the understanding of grammar and human cognition.

 languages change constantly changes are phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, lexical

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): a fter lytlum fyrste genal hton a e r stodon, and cwdon to petre. Solice u eart of hym, and yn sprc e gesweotola. [Literally: then after little first approached they that there stood, said to Peter. Truly thou art of them, thy speech thee makes clear.]

Some possible reasons of language change:

physiological factors imperfect language learning analogy borrowing the tendency to preserve symmetry in language language variation sociological factors

 All living languages change.

language dialects languages dialects

parent language

daughter language A

daughter language B

Genetically related languages all started out as regional dialects of a single ancestral language: PROTO-LANGUAGE they constitute a language family

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 a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit....

Some cognate words from different IE languages:

PIE
English Latin Old Prussian
West Baltic 16th-18th cc.

Old Church Slavonic

9th-13th cc.

Old Irish
600-900

Sanskrit
400BC

Meaning: mother

Mallory and Adams (2006)

PIE
English Latin Old Prussian
West Baltic 16th-18th cc.

Old Church Slavonic

9th-13th cc.

Old Irish
600-900

Sanskrit
400BC

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)

PIE
English Latin Old Prussian
West Baltic 16th-18th cc.

Old Church Slavonic

9th-13th cc.

Old Irish
600-900

Sanskrit
400BC

Meaning: sister

PIE *widhewehaEnglish widow Latin vidua Old Prussian widdewu

West Baltic 16th-18th cc.

Russian vdov Old Irish fedb

600-900

Sanskrit vidhv400BC

Meaning: widow

PIE
English Latin Lithuanian Old Church Slavonic
9th-13th cc.

Old Irish
600-900

Sanskrit
400BC

Meaning: young

PIE
English Latin Lithuanian Old Church Slavonic
9th-13th cc.

Meaning: sheep

Old Irish
600-900

Sanskrit
400BC

Mallory and Adams (2006:61)

Mallory and Adams (2006:61)

Some cognate words from different branches of the Indo-European language family:

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

Mallory and Adams (2006)

Mallory and Adams (2006)

Mallory and Adams (2006)

What is the latest date that Proto-Indo-European could 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 includes Anatolian (rather than the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, which makes Anatolian a sister of Indo-European rather than a daughter), then Proto-Indo-European must be set before 2000 BC when Anatolian is historically attested. Stefan Zimmer urges linguists and archaeologists not to use the word Proto-Indo-European for anything linguistic or archaeologicalolder than c. 2500 BC, but such caution, which in any case may well be misplaced, is not shared by most linguists who venture into the area of time depth.
Mallory and Adams (2006:87)

Proto-Indo-European Spoken perhaps 5000 to 6000 years ago the Indo-European homeland problem

Trask (1994:357)

 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 sun worship, a strongly patriarchal organisation, and a great love for horses and weapons. There is evidence that the Kurgan people, some time after 4000 BC, spread out eastwards into central Asia, Persia, and India, westwards into central Europe and the Balkans, and southwards across the Caucasus into Anatolia. Trask (1996: 358-9)

 Colin Renfrew argues that, at a time when states and even cities did not yet exist, no group of people could have possessed the economic and technological resources necessary to launch large-scale invasions and to overrun already populated lands. He advanced a very different scenario: IE speech must have defused slowly 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: the development and spread of agriculture. Agriculture did spread out slowly across much of Europe and Asia from a very few small sites principally in the Middle East, but that spread 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 date would require IE speech to have diffused over a vast area during the thousands of years while hardly changing at all, something which historical linguists consider impossible. Trask (1996: 360-1)

The Wrter und Sachen approach words and things using linguistic information to draw conclusions about the nature of a society in which the language was spoken