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ENG 4820 History of the English Language

ENG 4820 History of the English Language. Dr. Michael Getty | Spring 2009 WEEK 6: OLD ENGLISH. HOUSEKEEPING. Assignment #1 Due by E-mail by Midnight Saturday March 7 th Very convenient options at eng4820.wordpress.com: Get new content delivered to your e-mail inbox

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ENG 4820 History of the English Language

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  1. ENG 4820History of the English Language Dr. Michael Getty | Spring 2009 WEEK 6: OLD ENGLISH

  2. HOUSEKEEPING Assignment #1 Due by E-mail by Midnight Saturday March 7th Very convenient options at eng4820.wordpress.com: • Get new content delivered to your e-mail inbox • Get all content of a particular category in one click No class meeting on Monday, March 9th • Full lecture available via streaming & downloadable video on our site • Q&A and discussion on-site ENG4820 | Week 5

  3. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE What happened between the 8th and 11th centuries? • Phonological changes: Reduction of unstressed syllables, already underway since the early Germanic period Primary Stress ENG4820 | Week 5

  4. THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE What happened between the 8th and 11th centuries? Phonological changes: Reduction of unstressed syllables, already underway since the early Germanic period Loss of final consonants Loss of range of possible vowels Since overt case marking in Old English is realized in unstressed syllables, the system collapses, leaving us with the essentially fixed word order system we have today. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK ENG4820 | Week 5 4

  5. The past 55,000 years have seen dramatic climate changes including two distinct ice ages, when much of the northern hemisphere was covered by glaciers. The last ice age ended definitively only about 10,000 years ago, eventually leading to: Better climate Booming populations Invention of agriculture Development of centrally managed settlement areas 1000 years is enough time for a language to change to the extent that it becomes mostly unrecognizable to original speakers. Multiply that by a factor of 50 or so, add in dramatic population movements, and you get scenario that can easily lead to thousands of wildly different languages, many of which show no transparent relationship to each other. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK ENG4820 | Week 5 5

  6. About 7000 years ago (source), a culture emerges in what we now call the Caucasus or possibly northeastern Turkey. An educated guess at the geographic origin of Indo-European comes from side-by-side comparison of the vocabularies of the daughter languages. Common, similar-sounding words for ’snow,’ ‘cow,’ and ’salmon,’ along with a lack of common words for things like ‘lion,’ ‘olive,’ and ‘palm tree’ point towards farming cultures in temperate, wooded areas. The best educated guesses point towards what is now called the Caucasus region, an area encompassing southeastern  Ukraine, southern Russia, and Georgia. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK Source: Google Maps ENG4820 | Week 6 6

  7. Over the next centuries, the descendants of the Indo-Europeans spread across what we now call Europe and Central and Southern Asia. We now call this culture Proto-Indo-European, and we know that the languages that descended from it encompass such far-flung tongues as … Europe The Celtic languages: Gaelic, Welsh, Breton The Germanic languages: English, German, Danish/Swedish/Norwegian The Romance languages All the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, etc.), Greek, Albanian NOT Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, Turkish Western, Central, and South Asia Farsi/Dari (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan) Pashto (Afghanistan) Armenian, Abkhaz (Caucasus) Dozens of languages of South Asia: Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujerati, Sinhalese, Sindhi, but NOT Arabic, Aramaic, Georgian, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, or Malayalam  WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK ENG4820 | Week 5 7

  8. After 7000 years, the daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European had become so dissimilar that it took the work of scholars to figure out that they were all related.  WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK Source: AvuncularFeldspar ENG4820 | Week 5 8

  9. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 6 • These forms are spelled, not transcribed • Accent and vowel length marks • Sanskrit bh – an aspirated voiced stop. Say ‘rib hut’ and gradually take of the sounds leading up to b. ENG4820 | Week 5 9

  10. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK • bh > Latin f Greek ph > f Germanic b • dh > Latin f Greek θ Germanic d • gh > Latin h Greek x Germanic g • No one knows why Proto-Germanic didn't go in a direction like Latin and Greek. Whatever the reason, the change created a big problem for the speakers of the time. ENG4820 | Week 5 10

  11. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK k ENG4820 | Week 5 11

  12. WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK k • This explains why English, once it acquired its taste for Latin and Greek loan words, in many cases acquired two copies of the same word.  footpodiatrist, pedestrian, pedal, etc.fatherpaternity, paternalthreetriad, trimester, triple, etc.toothdental, dentistheartcardio, cardiologist, etc. • kingene, geneology (originally pronounced as /g/)knee genuflect (originally pronounced as /g/)queen gynecology, misogyny (from Greek gyné, ‘woman) • night ([nIxt]) nocturnal ENG4820 | Week 5 12

  13. Proto-Indo-European to Germanic • When descendants of the Indo-European tribes who we call ‘Germanic’ settled on the coast of the Baltic Sea from about the 18th to about the 8th century BCE, they encountered tribal groups that had been their for millennia. • We don’t know who these people were, as their language died out well before the invention of writing, but the Germanic tribes settled among them, intermarried, and borrowed vast numbers of their words, which now form a big part of the core vocabulary of the Germanic languages. • house, leg, hand, shoulder, bone, sick, all, boat, ship, sail, net, oar, shoe, lamb, sheep, seal, sturgeon, herring • They weren’t the Finns, because our words Finn and Finnish bear no resemblance to what the Finns call their country, Suomi, or their language Suomalainen. • We know these are non-Indo-European words because they have no cognates (i.e. similar-sounding counterparts) in other Indo-European languages. Compare English to Latin: • house – domus hand – manus • ship – navis bone – ossus • lamb – agnus sick - male ENG4820 | Week 5 13

  14. Germanic to Old English • Most of the Latin borrowings into English we talk about are from the Middle Ages, the language of civil society. But there was a wave of Latin loans from way before that, dating to contacts between Romans and Germanic tribal groups on the continent between 500 BCE and 500 CE, a period which overlaps with the Christianization of Roman culture. • Stop anyone on the street, and they’d tell you that these words are about as English as you can get. In fact, they were borrowed from Latin before Latin was cool, you might say: cheap, cheese, pan, dish, kitchen, cook, cherry, pillow, mile, tile, beer, street • By the time the Roman presence in Britain began crumbling in the 5th century CE, most of the population had converted to Christianity. In fact, Rome’s first Christian ruler, Constantine I, was declared Emperor in the Roman settlement of Eboracum, what we now call York in the north of England. • As Christianity became the official religion of the empire, it took on the trappings of the Roman state: centralized authority and Latin as its common language and written culture. This culture persisted even as the empire was overrun by Germanic invaders and disintegrated politically. source ENG4820 | Week 5 14

  15. Germanic to Old English • The Germanic invaders of the 5th century were pagans in the common Indo-European tradition: sacrificial worshippers of multiple, very human-like gods embodying mythical abilities or natural phenomena. • The Big Four (Source) • The chief god Woden, thought to carry off the souls of the dead • Frig, Woden’s wife and goddess of love • The god of thunder, Thunor, better known by his Norse name Thor • Tiw, god of war and battle, whose name is directly descended from Proto-Indo-European *deu-, which gave us deus in Latin. • We still say the names of these gods almost every day: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday • Starting in 597, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, having consolidated their power in Britain, converted to Christianity without as much fuss as elsewhere. • As elsewhere in Europe, Christianity was adapted to incorporate local customs. The word ‘Easter’ comes from the name of a Germanic goddess associated with a traditional springtime festival (source). ENG4820 | Week 5 15

  16. Germanic to Old English • The Germanic tribes had a tradition of epic poetry, celebrating the deeds of legendary heroes and mythical figures. • This poetry had a stress-based rhythm and centered on alliteration instead of rhyme, which was a good fit for the strong root-initial stress that characterizes the Germanic languages. • One of the earliest known poems written in English is Cædmon’s Hymn, written by a lay member of a monastery in what is now Whitby in northeastern England. It is dated to between 657 and 680 CE and was wildly popular at the time. • As told by Bede, who wrote the first history of the English church in about 730 CE, Cædmon was a shepherd who turned out to be a prodigy at composing traditional Germanic oral poetry in response to Christian religious themes. • We’re going to delve into Cædmon’s hymn, syllable by syllable. Source ENG4820 | Week 5 16

  17. Cædmon’s Hymn • What We’re Looking At … • How to pronounce Old English • Variation in Old English: West Saxon vs. Northumbrian • Semantic change • Culture and History: • Traces of Germanic paganism • The Norse Incursions Source ENG4820 | Week 5 17

  18. Cædmon’s Hymn Northumbrian Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes ward Metudes maecti end his modgidanc uerc wuldurfadur swe he wundra gihwaes eci dryctin, or anstelidæ He ærist scop ælda barnum heben til hrofe haleg scepen ϸa middungeard moncynnæs ward eci dryctin æfter tiadæ firum foldu Frea allmectig West Saxon Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard Meotodes meahte ond his modgeϸanc weorc wuldorfæder swa he wundra gehwæs ece drihten or onstealde He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum heofen to hrofe halig scyppend ϸa middangeard moncynnes weard ece drihten æfter teode firum foldan Frea ælmihtig Now we shall praise heaven-kingdom's Guardian, the Creator's might, and his mind-thought, the words of the Glory-father; how he, each of his wonders the eternal Lord, established at the beginning. He first shaped for earth's children, heaven as a roof, the holy Creator. Then a middle-yard, mankind's Guardian, the eternal Lord, established afterwards the earth for the people, the Lord almighty (Lerer pp. 12f.) ENG4820 | Week 5 18

  19. Cædmon’s Hymn • HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH • When a language is first written down in an alphabetic system like the Roman alphabet, it tends to go through a kind of golden period during which the correspondence between written symbols and phonemes is almost one-to-one • This was true for the first few centuries of English writing, until the point at which writing became centralized and conventionalized in the later Middle Ages. At that point, the phoneme-to-written-symbol relationship started becoming much looser. Source ENG4820 | Week 5 19

  20. Cædmon’s Hymn HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH Vowels before the Great Vowel Shift (started in the 14th century CE): æ low front vowel, as in cat a low central vowel, as in father e in stressed syllables, a mid front vowel as in hayminus the final gliding-off sound in unstressed syllables, a very short mid central vowel as in even i a high front unrounded vowel, like in mini. y a high front rounded vowel, found today in only a few dialects. Say the /i/ sound and round your lips u a high back rounded vowel, like in soon. o a mid back rounded vowel, like in lone. Source ENG4820 | Week 5 20

  21. Cædmon’s Hymn HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH Consonants Consonants were pronounced more or less as they still are, except: h At the beginning of a syllable, today’s pronunciation as in hay hElsewhere, as a voiceless fricative, close to the sound some people have in huge or in their emphatic pronunciation of words like how. Another analogue is the ch sound in German/Yiddish Ach! Source ENG4820 | Week 5 21

  22. Cædmon’s Hymn HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH Consonants Consonants were pronounced more or less as they still are, except: ϸ ð Voiceless and voiced interdental fricatives c Before or after a front vowel, a voiceless alveopalatal affricate [č] like chick Everywhere else, a voiceless velar stop, like chick g Before or after a front vowel, a high front glide (semivowel), [j] like yes Between non-front vowels or after [l] or [r], a voiced velar fricative [ɣ] Everywhere else, a voiced velar stop like cigar sc In northern dialects, probably like skill. In southern dialects, probably a voiceless alveopalatal fricative, [ʃ] as in shell cg A voiced alveopalatal affricate, [ǰ] a ʃ ENG4820 | Week 5 22

  23. Cædmon’s Hymn HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH Consonants These are assimilations: Bringing neighboring sounds closer to each other in their articulations a ʃ ENG4820 | Week 5 23

  24. Cædmon’s Hymn HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH Consonants These assimilations dominatedsouthern dialects but were lessprevalent in northern dialects. The prevalence of assimilated and non-assimilated forms varied across space and time along with variations in the vowels that conditioned them. Let’s use three handles: Assimilation #1: skirt/shirt sk -> ʃ Assimilation #2: get/yet gi -> ji Assimilation #3: cool/chill ki -> či a ʃ ON TO IT! ENG4820 | Week 5 24

  25. Additional Facts | More Things to Know PRONOUNS AND VERBS One case in which today’s English is vastly more complex than Old English is in what’s known as our tense/aspect system. Today’s English Old English I sing Ic singe I am singing “ “ I will sing Ic sceal singan I will be singing “ “ “ I sung Ic sang I have sung “ “ I have been singing “ “ I would sing Ic sceolde singan I would be singing “ “ “ I would have been singing “ “ “ a ʃ ENG4820 | Week 5 25

  26. Additional Facts | More Things to Know • PRONOUNS AND VERBS • The pronouns of Old English were, quite frankly, a mess. • Especially with the bleaching out of unstressed syllables, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between masculine and feminine, singular and plural. • (Source: Millward p. 100) a ʃ • But pronouns are among the most frequently used words in any language, and frequently used words tend to be the most resistant to change, so the Old English system limped along well into the Middle English period. • The system we use today is a blend of the original Old English inventory plus Scandinavian imports she, they, and their, which made their way from the North of England and gradually displaced the southern forms. ENG4820 | Week 5 26

  27. Additional Facts | More Things to Know • THE ‘DANISH’ INCURSIONS • Trade and settlement from Scandinavia, concentrated in the Northumbrian areas, had been a constant since the Germanic invasion. • Starting in the late 8th century, the activity becomes larger-scale and more organized. The ‘Danes,’ as the English called them (using one tribal name from among many) colonize most of the northern and eastern halves of the country. • Different English kings use a combination of treaties, bribes, and military power to contain the Scandinavians behind a mostly imaginary line called the ‘Danelaw,’ an area in which the settlers/invaders could live under their own laws and rulers. • The settlers all became English-speaking within a few generations, but they left their mark in distinctive Scandinavian pronouns and place names ending in –thorp, -by, and –wick(Souce: Crystal p. 25) a ʃ ENG4820 | Week 5 27

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