ENG 4820 History of the English Language

1. ENG 4820History of the English Language Dr. Michael Getty | Spring 2009 WEEK 2: THE ABSOLUTE BASICS

2. WHAT STUCK FROM LAST WEEK? • West Germanic structure with a Romance (Latin, French, etc.) vocabulary • England was bilingual (English and French) for quite some time • English has only existed for about 1500 years • The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons invaded ‘England’ when Romans and Celts lived there ca. 5th centurty CE • The Norman invasion of 1066 brought French to England • English of ca 8th century is almost totally unrecognizable to us • Old English (ca. 8th century) was much more complex gramatically than modern English • Change had been constant throughout the history of the English language, except for a few periods of consvulsive, dramatic, rapid, profound change • I’m really excited • 4 written assignments: not papers in the strictest sense – dialogues, letters, essay-ish written responses • Extra credit: Lesson plan, history of a word, Wikipedia article on something that’s poorly documented there, annotated, original links to relevant Web sites • Print handouts if at all possible • Leave enthusiastic about English

3. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK ENGLISH IS A LANGUAGE OF INVASIONS • Germanic tribes invaded Celtic-Roman Britain in the 5th century CE. Their language formed the core of what we now call English.  • Scandinavian settlers invaded Britain from the 8th to the 10th centuries. They blended into the local population and heavily influenced the language. • French-speaking descendants of Scandinavians who had settled in France invaded Britain in the 11th century, almost completely displacing the ruling classes of England

4. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK ENGLISH IS A LANGUAGE OF INVASIONS • Each wave of invasion touched off a wave of changes in English grammar and the importation of vast numbers of words. • These facts help us understand why English has undergone such breathtaking changes in the last 1000 years, making its earlier stages mostly unrecognizable to untrained modern eyes.

5. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK ABOUT THE COURSE • Don't count on handouts. Download class notes starting at 7:00 a.m. on Mondays, and print as you see fit. • Read Millward as a reference work. Understand the concepts. Know what's in each chapter and where to find it.  • Supplemental readings to be made available for download via myGateway • Buy the workbook to go with Millward, but you won't be turning anything in.  • Formal class ends between 7:30 and 7:45, with informal class until 8:00 and office hours in our classroom until 8:30.

6. ABOUT LANGUAGE GROUPS… • We talked about the interplay between two language groups: • Germanic: Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian • Romance: Latin and French • What do we mean by language groups? • Language is a messy, slippery term. At its simplest, it means the collection of mutually comprehensible habits of speech that form part of a group’s identity at any given time.  • Within communities of people who all speak the same 'language,' there can be huge differences in grammar and word-stock. • We often use the word 'dialect' to refer to these divergent segments of a larger speech community.

7. ABOUT LANGUAGE GROUPS… • Where you draw the line between dialect and language is mostly a political and cultural question, not a scientific one.  • You will find no easier example than present-day English: • Northern England: I nearly did a runner when I saw the courgettes I left on the cooker hood had gone mankey.  • Translation: "I almost ran away when I saw the zuchinni I left on top of the stove had spoiled.” • Somewhere in California: And there was this one chick who was, like, jonesing for nachos and was totally stoked when I scored her some.   • Translation: "I saw a woman who wanted to eat fried corn chips and melted cheese and was very enthusiastic when I obtained some for her.”

8. ABOUT LANGUAGE GROUPS… • One language or two?  • One if you focus on our common history and still overwhelming areas of commonality.  • Two if you focus on this and plenty of other moments of mutual incomprehensibility.

9. ABOUT LANGUAGE GROUPS… • We find many more clear-cut cases ... such as the Germanic and Romance languages • English:  All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. • German: Alle menschen sind frei und gleich an würde und rechten geboren.  • Swedish: Alla människor är födda fria och lika i värde och rättigheter.  • French: Tous les êtres humains naissent libres et égaux en dignité et en droits. • Spanish:  Todos los seres humanos nacen libres e iguales en dignidad y derechos  • Italian:     Tutti gli esseri umani nascono liberi ed eguali in dignità e diritti.  Source: UN Declaration of Human Rights (http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/navigate/alpha.htm) The similarities within each group are easy to notice. Historically, we know that this is because the languages within each group are descended from a common ancestor, a single, mutually comprehensible language that over time broke apart into distinct 'daughter' languages.  But notice the similarities between English and the Romance group… MORE NEXT WEEK!

10. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS What Linguists Study … • We study what people say, not what anyone else thinks they should say. • Human language has been around for at least 100,000 years.  • People have been obsessing about other people's language for only about the last 2000 years, and mostly for just the last 200 years. • There is enough complexity in any single human language -- its structure and usage and development over time -- for whole lifetimes of study.

11. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS What Linguists Study … • What people know consciously about their language is generally less interesting than what they know only subconsciously. • Hold a sheet of paper right in front of your lips as you pronounce the words take and steak. • You produce a little puff of air after the first sound in take, but not after the second sound in steak. • If you are a native speaker, you've been doing this, with virtually 100% accuracy, since about age 5.  • If you had to, could you explain to a non-native English speaker why these sentences are not okay?  • *Jane has met her boyfriend in 1976.  • *I look forward to meet you tomorrow.  • *I went to the bathroom when you called. * = ‘Ungrammatical,’ or inconsistent with the system that characterizes a language

12. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS What Linguists DO NOT Study … • How to make aesthetic, artistic, and moral judgments. • English is going downhill. • Certain people are lazy when they talk and/or write. • Middle English is more poetic than Old English • Spelling and punctuation for their own sake • Matters of conscious convention that relate only indirectly to what's really going on, most of which is subconscious

13. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS What Linguists Study … • 'Grammar' is the system of rules and principles that, when plugged into a language's word-stock, can generate an infinite number of utterances that speakers will accept as consistent with that language.

14. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS SOUNDS • The sound system -- phonology -- of a given language is the set of rules and principles that describes: • Which speech sounds occur in that language • Which differences between speech sounds are meaning-bearing • Which differences between speech sounds are predictable and therefore not meaning-bearing

15. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS SOUNDS • We use agreed-upon phonetic symbols to represent speech sounds based only on their physical characteristics. This is always imperfect work, but it frees us from the limitations of any one language's alphabet. • We usually refer to the space inside the mouth by using a vertical slice of head -- a saggital cross-section -- that always faces west Sources: (Right: Millward p. 23) http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy.html

16. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS FEELING THE POINTS OF ARTICULATION • Labial vs. labiodental:     pot     fought • Labial vs. alveolar:      pot     tot • Alveolar vs. interdental:     tot      thought • Alveolar vs. interdental:      sought     thought • Alveolar vs. alveopalatal:   sought     shot • Alveolar vs. velar:      tot     cot • Alveopalatal vs. velar:     shot     caught • Front to back: • pot    thought    fought    tot    shot    caught

17. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS FEELING THE MANNERS OF ARTICULATION Voiced vs. Voiceless Put your fingers on your throat. You should feel vibration from your vocal chords at the beginning of the second word, not at the beginning of the first: pay     bay few     view bath     bathe toe     doe char     jar coal goal Source: Millward p. 28

18. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS FEELING THE MANNERS OF ARTICULATION Stop vs. nasal • Put a finger right under your nose. • You should feel warm air on your finger at the end of the second word, but not at the end of the first. mob    mom mad    man hag    hang Source: Millward p. 28

19. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS FEELING THE MANNERS OF ARTICULATION Nasal vs. lateral pan     pal Nasal vs. retroflex nap     rap Nasal vs. lateral vs. retroflex nap     lap     rap Semivowels: well yell Source: Millward p. 28

20. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS VOWELS • The chart goes according to where the highest point of your tongue is as you pronounce each sound, facing west • High-Mid-Low Front: yeah • Low Central to High Front: eye • High Front to High Back ~ Unrounded to Rounded: you • High Back to Mid Back to Low Central ~ Rounded to Unrounded: wuah! Source: Millward p. 28

21. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS Kal-El, Son of Jor-El, an Alien from the Planet Krypton PHONES AND PHONEMES “Superman” “Clark Kent”

22. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS PHONES AND PHONEMES • Pronounce the following words, paying close attention to what goes on inside your mouth as you hit the sound cued by the letter t: take ~ steak ~ truck ~ twin ~ water ~ witness

23. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS • Native English speakers pronounce these very different sounds in their very particular environments with almost 100% accuracy, but we are almost never aware of it. • Why? Because the differences are not meaning-bearing. You can always predict which sound is going to occur based on the sounds around it. • What you see at work here is assimilation: making neighboring sounds more like each other • Assimilation is all about minimizing the work it takes to get your mouth from one configuration to the next! 

24. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS MORE THINGS YOU HAD NO IDEA YOU WERE DOING • Feel where the tip of your tongue is when you say [n] in tent vs. tenth • Feel the difference in where your tongue touches the top of your mouth with the [k] sound in keep vs. coffee • Feel what your lips are doing when you say the [k] sound in coo vs. clue • Feel your vocal chords as you say potato. Is your voice buzzing during the first syllable? • Do you notice anything different about the vowel in bid vs. the vowel in bit? • Put a finger right under your nose and say the words bad vs. ban. Feel a difference in warmth?

25. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS • Whether you say [t] or [th] in English depends on whether you are pronouncing it at the beginning of a word or after another sound. • Each sound is a manifestation of some common, underlying, more abstract unit. We call this unit a phoneme, and we call its manifestations allophones. • Think of Superman and Clark Kent as allophones of a common phoneme, the alien named Kal-El. You never seem them both in the same environment, and Superman in particular only comes out under very specific conditions. 

26. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS • Speakers of other languages are consciously aware of some differences we know only subconsciously -- precisely because in their languages, the differences are meaning-bearing. • Take Hindi, for example

27. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS • In Hindi, whether you have a [t] or a [th] depends on whether you're talking about a tune or a piece of cloth. • Each sound is a distinct building block, as different to Hindi speakers as [t] and [d] are to us. 

28. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS • On the flip side, English has meaning-bearing differences in sound -- phonemes -- that other languages do not.  • I once had a roommate, Evis (short for Evripides), who was a native speaker of Greek.  • One day, he came to my room and said what sounded like “Michael, come here. I want you to see my new shits.”  • I had already taken linguistics, so I had an idea of what was going on, but it was nonetheless with some apprehension that I went into his room. • There on his bed were some new sheets.  • “Oh,” I said, “You mean new sheets."  • “That’s what I said,” he replied. “Shits.” • For English speakers, sheets and shits are very different things, and the distinction between the two words rests on a single difference in sound: tense vs lax, /i/ vs /І/. 

29. THE ABSOLUTE BASICS LOOKING AHEAD • The inventory of phonemes that characterizes English has shifted constantly over time. • In my lifetime, Americans have begun to lose the distinction between the vowels in don and dawn, a change that is happening nowhere else outside of North America. • Historically, the vowel inventory of English was completely reorganized in a series of overlapping changes that started in the 13th century and went to different degrees of completion in different parts of the world. • The Great Vowel Shift. We will make time for it! • Another great, much earlier sound shift obscured the relationship between the Romance and the Germanic languages … which all descend from a common parent language.