A History of English

1. A History of English Chapter 2 The Pre-history of English

2. The Indo-European Languages and Linguistic Relatedness • The Beginnings • Timeline: from the first indications of nomadic tribes in Lapland around 8000 BCE to the settlement of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes in 449 CE

3. 700 English 500 Armenian 400 Gothic 0 200 Latin 400 Classical Sanskrit 800 Greek 1000 Old Persian 1200 Hittite 1500 Vedic Sanskrit 3000 Proto Indo-European

4. Sources: • Archaeological record • Linguistic reconstruction • Insights from modern dialectology • Anthropology (Agriculture)

5. The Development of Historical Linguistics • Evolutionary Nature: Charles Darwin • Analogy to biological theories: life-cycle, genealogy, family tree, common ancestors • August Schleicher, Family Tree Theory/Stammbaumtheorie

6. Genetic Relatedness • Indo-European language family and its sub-families • Biological metaphor: various languages belong to different families and bear offspring • Family tree metaphor

7. Genetic RelatednessExample

8. Numerals in Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages

9. Sound correspondences in IE

10. Genetic RelatednessExample • Mann, man, man • Hand, hand, hand • Tier, djur, deer • The individual differences depend on the history of each language after it has split off from the larger group and developed independently

11. Genetic RelatednessCognates

12. Sir William JonesThird Anniversary Discourse Calcutta 1786 • The Sanskrit Language, whatever be ist 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 Celtic […] had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the Old Persian might be addded to the same family.

13. Sir William Jones

14. Sound correspondences between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek

15. The Indo-European Language Family: eminent early scholars • Franz Bopp (1816) • Rasmus Rask (1814): the first linguist to describe formally the regularity of sound changes • Jakob Grimm

18. The Indo-European Language Family • Proto-language: unitary language • Ursprache; parent language • Grundsprache: Latin for French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Rumanian • Sister language: Latin and Greek • Daughter language: French of Latin

19. The language family metaphor • A parent language does not live on after a daughter language is born • Birth metaphor is incorrect • Contact is still there between sister languages • Languages diverge as well as converge

20. August Schleicher

23. On comparative reconstruction • Internal reconstruction • Reconstruction of languages that do no longer exist • pater, */pEter/

25. Indo-European 500 AD

26. Indo-European 500 BC

27. The Indo-European World

28. Indo-European Subfamilies in Europe

29. IE World

30. Centum and Satem

31. The Sun in Indo-European • Classical Greek: helios • New Greek illios • Latin sol • Italian sole • French soleil • Spanish sol • Rumanian soare • Old Irish grian

32. New Irish grian • Welsh haul • Breton heol • Gothic sauil, sunno • Old Norse sol, sunna • Danish sol • Swedish sol • Middle English sonne

33. Modern English sun • Dutch zon • Old High German sunna • Middle High German sunne • New High German sonne • Lithuanian saulé • Lettic saule • Serbo Croatian sunce

34. Czech slunce • Russian solnce • Sanskrit suar

35. Celtic • Keltoi (5th century BC), Proto-Celtic; Gauls; • Insular Celtic (British Isles), Continental Celtic, • *kw-  either q- or p- • P-Celtic: Brythonic; pedwar • Welsh, Cornish, Breton. Cumbric • Q-Celtic: Goidelic; ceathair • Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic • Welsh in Patagonia, Argentina • Gaelic in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada • Dramatic decline of Celtic languages: Cornish, Manx have died out; Celtic revival • Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh still spoken by bilingual speakers; about 20% claim knowledge of Welsh

40. Germanic language zones

41. Germanic languages

42. Germanic • Proto-Germanic • East Germanic • Gothic: Ulfilas (4th CE); Crimean Gothic • North Germanic: Old Norse as common language • Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, Icelandic • West Germanic • Low Germanic: Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, English • High Germanic: German (Low, High)

43. From Indo-European to Germanic • Prosody: from free pitch accent to strong fixed stress accent • The Consonant System: Sound Shifts

44. Grimm’s Law or The First Consonant Shift

45. Germanic Consonant Phonemes from IE stops

46. Sound Laws: ‘Grimm’s Law’ • Voiceless stops > voiceless fricatives • Voiced stops > voiceless stops • Voiced aspirated stops > voiced stops • Exceptions dependent on phonetic environment

47. Verner’s Law (1875) • centum, hundred, patér, fæder, wearD, worden, freas, froren, was, were • The new sound correspondences were in force when (1) the stress was not on the vowel immediately preceding, and (2) the sound in question was bounded by elements that had the feature [+ voice] (either vowels or voiced consonants)

48. The Vowel System • I,e, a, o, u, E • ei, ai, oi, eu, au, ou • ablaut, vowel gradation: sing, sang, sung

49. Morphology in IE and Germanic • three numbers: sg, pl, dual • three genders: masc, fem, neutr • eight cases • strong and weak adjectives: after determiner, no determiner: se goda man, god man • verb marked person, number, aspect, mood (aspect reduced to two tenses in Germanic)

50. Morphology continued • three voices: active, passive, middle • Germanic had five moods: indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative, injunctive • seven major morphological verb classes • dental preterite verbs (weak verbs) in Germanic