Version 5.0
Eala ðu lareow, tæce me sum ðing. [Aelfric, Grammar]
Prof. Dr. Russell Block University of Applied Sciences München Department 13 – General Studies Winter Semester 2008 © 2008 by Russell Block
Um eine gute Note in der Klausur zu erzielen genügt es nicht, dieses Skript zu lesen. Sie müssen auch die “Show” sehen!
Dieses Skript ist der Entwurf eines Buches: The English Language – A Guide for Inquisitive Students. Nur der Stoff, der in der Vorlesung behandelt wird, ist prüfungsrelevant. Unit 1: Language as a system ...... 8
1 Introduction ...... 8
2 A simple example of structure ...... 8
Unit 2: The English sound system ...... 10
3 Introduction...... 10
4 Standard dialects ...... 10
5 The major differences between German and English ...... 10 5.1 The consonants ...... 10 5.2 Overview of the English consonants ...... 10 5.3 Tense vs. lax ...... 11 5.4 The final devoicing rule ...... 12 5.5 The “th” sounds ...... 12 5.6 The “sh” sound ...... 12 5.7 The voiced sounds / Z/ and / dZ / ...... 12 5.8 The liquid /l/...... 12 5.9 The liquid /r/ ...... 13 5.10 The glide /w/ ...... 13 5.11 The glottal stop / // ...... 13
6 Vowels ...... 13
7 The English vowels...... 15 7.1 Diphthongization of tense vowels ...... 16 7.2 Vowel length...... 16 7.3 The schwas ...... 16 7.4 The vowel / Q/ ...... 16 7.5 The diphthongs / aI / and / aU / ...... 16 7.6 The diphthong / çI / ...... 16
8 Intonation...... 17 8.1 Stress timing...... 17 8.2 Rhythm...... 17 8.3 Prefixed verbs ...... 18
9 Sound change...... 18 9.1 Evidence for sound change ...... 18 9.1.1 Misspellings as evidence of sound change ...... 19 9.1.2 Rhymes as evidence of sound change ...... 19 9.1.3 Expert opinions ...... 19 9.1.4 Loan words...... 19
3 9.1.5 Dialects ...... 20 9.2 Kinds of sound change...... 21 9.3 Loss of sound ...... 21 9.4 Addition of sound ...... 21 9.5 Assimilation...... 21 9.6 Dissimilation ...... 21 9.7 Lengthening ...... 21 9.8 Shortening ...... 22 9.9 Rounding ...... 22 9.10 Unrounding ...... 22 9.10.1 Short o in BE and AE ...... 22 9.11 Metathesis ...... 23 9.12 Breaking...... 23 9.13 Smoothing ...... 23 9.14 Umlaut ...... 23 9.15 The vowel “joy stick” ...... 24 9.16 Ablaut...... 24 9.17 Vowel Harmony...... 25 9.18 Laxing ...... 25 9.19 Tensing...... 26 9.20 Palatalization ...... 26 9.21 Nasalization ...... 26 9.22 How does sound change take place? ...... 26 9.23 Is sound change regular? ...... 27 9.24 Standard languages ...... 28 9.25 Limited time for application ...... 28 9.26 Analogy ...... 29 9.27 Ousting...... 29
Unit 3: English and German—affectionate sisters ...... 31
1 English and German...... 31
2 Obvious similarities ...... 31
3 Patterned correspondences ...... 31
4 Words related in meaning ...... 32
5 Historical records ...... 33
6 Similarities in inflection...... 33
7 Parallels in syntax (‘Satzbau’) ...... 34
8 Semantic change ...... 36 8.1 Types of semantic change ...... 36
4 8.1.1 Narrowing ...... 37 8.1.2 Broadening...... 37 8.1.3 Elevation ...... 37 8.1.4 Denigration ...... 37 8.1.5 Transfer ...... 37 8.1.6 Hyperbole...... 38 8.1.7 Litotes ...... 38 8.1.8 Metaphor ...... 38 8.2 The etymologist’s method ...... 38 8.3 How close is close enough? ...... 39
Unit 4: Researching the past—the comparative method ...... 40
1 Early attempts ...... 40
2 The breakthrough ...... 41
3 Mother – Proto Indo European (‘Urindogermanisch’) ...... 44 3.1 The method ...... 44
Unit 5: The external history of English – an outline ...... 46
1 Origins of the English language ...... 46 1.1 The Celts ...... 46 1.2 The Roman colonization ...... 46 1.3 The Germanic invasion ...... 46 1.4 Anglo Saxon England ...... 46 1.5 The first literary language ...... 47 1.6 The submergence of English ...... 48 1.7 The re emergence of English ...... 49 1.8 The London standard ...... 51 1.9 The Renaissance ...... 52 1.10 Dissociation in the vocabulary ...... 53 1.11 Codification of the Received Standard English ...... 54 1.12 The modern period ...... 56 1.13 Other varieties of English ...... 56
2 The problem of “style”...... 56 2.1 National style ...... 57 2.2 Origins of the Anglo American style ...... 57 2.3 Influence of the English essayists ...... 58
Unit 6: The chaos of English spelling ...... 59
1 The origins of writing ...... 59
2 Sounds and Sumerians ...... 59
5 3 Syllabaries and alphabets ...... 59
4 The alphabet...... 60
5 Writing among the Germanic tribes ...... 62
6 Norman spellings ...... 63
7 The phonemic principle ...... 63
8 The conservatism of writing systems ...... 64 8.1 Reading and writing as a privilege ...... 65 8.2 Resistance to change on the part of the literate ...... 65 8.3 The difficulties arising from the structure of the language ...... 66 8.4 Middle English vowel system ...... 67 8.4.1 The Great Vowel Shift ...... 68 8.4.2 The Third Syllable Shortening Rule ...... 69 8.4.3 Lengthening in words of two syllables ...... 69 8.4.4 Silent e ...... 70 8.4.5 Shortening and lengthening before two consonants...... 70 8.4.6 The vocalization of /g/ ...... 71 8.4.7 Insertion of glide before /x/ ...... 71 8.4.8 Smoothing ...... 71 8.4.9 The vowel /ju/ ...... 72 8.4.10 Loss of initial /g/, /k/, /h/ ...... 72 8.4.11 The vowel / Œ’ /...... 72 8.4.12 Fun with unrounding ...... 72 8.5 British dialects ...... 73
Unit 7: The simplification of the English inflectional system ...... 74
1 The English inflectional system ...... 74
2 The strong (ablauting) verb ...... 74
3 Weak verbs...... 76 3.1 Regular and irregular weak verbs in Modern English ...... 76
4 Other categories ...... 77
5 Adjectives ...... 77
6 Definite Article ...... 77
7 Demonstratives ...... 77
6 8 Personal pronouns ...... 77
9 Interrogative pronouns ...... 78
10 Relative pronouns ...... 78
11 Reflexive and reciprocal pronouns ...... 79
12 Nouns...... 79
Appendix :...... 80
Old English and Modern German Noun Declension ...... 82
Old English and German Verb Conjugation ...... 82
Indo European Cultural Words ...... 83
From Aelfric's "Homily on St. Gregory the Great" ...... 85
Robert of Gloucester (1298) ...... 86
Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales ...... 88
Three Kings from the Orient ...... 89
From the Gospel According to Luke ...... 90
Northern English ...... 92
Merry Old England ...... 94
The Chaos ...... 95
Review Questions: ...... 99
Someday Reading: ...... 104
7 Unit 1: Language as a system
1 Introduction The purpose of this course is to demonstrate to you that the English language is more than a collection of words and phrases useful for reading technical literature or finding your hotel when traveling outside of Germany. Rather, it is an intricate system of largely unconscious rules we use to create an infinite number of novel sentences with an infinite number of meanings. Because of the nature of our educational system, we graduate from school knowing more about the surface of the moon or the workings of our digestive tract than about what takes place in our mouths when we speak! English instruction is regarded as purely practical, rather like learning how to drive an automobile. Here we will be concerned with how automobiles are made. This course has important practical goals as well. Learning about digestive enzymes probably didn’t improve your digestion much. Learning about the structure of English certainly will improve your English as well as increasing your understanding of English and of languages in general. In addition, we will look at English as a cultural phenomenon intimately tied to history and sociology and see how the growth of English reflects the social history of the English speaking peoples. We will answer questions like Why do English and French have so much vocabulary in common? Moreover, our approach will be comparative. Throughout we will compare English to its sister language German. As a result, you should end up with a far better understanding and appreciation of your native language as well. The material in this course is not difficult. I will give just enough detail to make the underlying principles understandable. There are numerous books that can give you a more thorough view of English and German so that you can continue on your own if you have the time and the interest to do so (see Someday Reading at the end of this script). I should caution you, however, that the material, if not difficult, is thoroughly unfamiliar (not what you had in school) and requires some explanation. Regular attendance at the lectures is a must! Finally, this course will provide numerous examples of how to solve scientific problems and discover hidden relationships (e.g., why does English have silent gh (or gh pronounced f) where German has ch as in pairs like night Nacht, light Licht, laugh lachen )? This sort of training in scientific thinking will be valuable to you in whatever you do in life.
2 A simple example of structure Let us consider the sounds of language in an objective way. That is, as the peculiar noises humans make in order to communicate with one another. For example:
[m], [b], [v], [l], [k], [i]
There are about 40 such distinctive noises in English. By combining and recombining them we can express anything that can be said in the English language from a grocery list to the complete works of Shakespeare.
By combining [k], [i], [l] in that order we get [kil], in normal spelling keel , part of the frame of a boat. By changing the order to [l], [i], [k] = [lik], leak , we get a term for a small
8 accidental hole that can send the boat to the bottom.
It is this ability to combine and recombine a relatively small inventory of sounds that mean nothing by themselves into a potentially infinite number of words and complete messages that distinguishes human speech from animal communication systems. While an ape in the wild can utter a distinctive warning cry meaning “predator approaching on the ground,” no ape can say to another: “Don't look now, but there is a lion hiding behind that eucalyptus tree about thirty meters to your right.” This unique capacity for articulate speech has endowed humans with a tremendous survival advantage as well as a potential for destruction well beyond the reach of any other species. We were able to combine these sounds to produce two actual words of English: keel [kil] and leak [lik]. It is evident, however, that other combinations of these sounds produce possible, but nonexistent words of English like [kib] or [miv]. As far as I know, neither of these sound combinations is currently a word of English, but they are possible words in a way that other combinations like [mbili] or [vlk] are not. That is, one can conceive of a copy writer at an advertising agency choosing Keeb or Meave as a brand name for a new kind of soap, but hardly Mbili or Vlk . The individual sounds in these last two words occur in English, but these sequences do not although they are perfectly all right in some other languages ([mbili] is the Swahili word for 'two' and [vlk] is Czech for 'wolf'). The above is an example of a "phonotactic" rule, simply put: a rule that governs permissible sequences of sounds in a given language. Unit 2: The English sound system
3 Introduction The following is a short description of the sound systems of standard American English and standard German. The information presented here is based on the author's Outline of American Phonetics and Phonology.
4 Standard dialects In America and Great Britain (not to mention other English speaking regions) a large number of varieties of “English” are spoken. The situation in Britain is very similar to that in Germany with strong regional differences in pronunciation. The major difference is that speaking with a regional accent in Great Britain is not “socially acceptable” as it is in Germany. In general, the higher an individual rises on the socio economic ladder the more his/her speech conforms to the prestige standard (Received Pronunciation RP). In America, dialects play a much smaller role than in Germany or Great Britain. About two thirds of the country speaks the Northern or General American Dialect. In the north east (Maine to Massachusetts), the Eastern Dialect is spoken. The Southern Dialect Region covers a broad belt from Delaware to Texas. In general, the differences in pronunciation in American English are not as large as those encountered in Great Britain or Germany. The standard speech form in the United States is Network English so called because it is the dialect adopted by radio and TV network news readers. It's major distinguishing feature is that it is geographically neutral. As with RP, speakers of this dialect cannot be located geographically because they have no local peculiarities in their speech. Unlike RP, Network English is not considered a “snob” dialect. Network German is the variety used by news readers (and in film dubbing) on German radio and television. It is superimposed upon the local dialects in most parts of the country. It’s social role falls somewhere between that of RP and Network English.
5 The major differences between German and English We will start our survey by contrasting the sounds of Network German with those of Network American English. The reason for this choice is that American English is generally more conservative in pronunciation and grammar and thus a better standard of comparison. The differences between American and British English are considered in my American Language course.
5.1 The consonants
5.2 Overview of the English consonants The following chart gives an overview of the English consonants using the IPA transcription found in most modern dictionaries.
10 English Consonants voiceless p t k f T s S tS h
voiced b d g v D z Z dZ l r m n N j w
stops fricatives affricates liquids nasals glides obstruents sonorants
Unfamiliar symbols:
T thin S sh ip tS ch ur ch
D th en Z vi si on dZ judge N so ng
Note that the true consonants or obstruents (consonants that involve obstruction of the air stream) occur in voiced and voiceless pairs. This is mother nature’s way of giving us two for the price of one. That is, pairs like /s/ and /z/ are pronounced the same way (air is forced through a narrow slit formed by the tip of the tongue and the gum ridge), but /z/ involves, in addition, vibration of the vocal cords. Stops are sounds that completely close off the air stream in the mouth. Fricatives , on the other hand, result (as indicated above) from forcing air through a narrow slit produced with tongue, lips and teeth. Affricates are a combination of a stop and a fricative produced at the same place in the mouth. Instead of a sudden release (as with the stops), the affricates are released slowly, producing a fricative. Sonorants are consonant sounds that do not involve obstruction of the air stream. In English (and most other languages) they only occur as voiced sounds. Liquids are so called because the air flows by the tongue like a liquid without friction. The quality of the liquid is determined by the shape of the tongue or, in the case of German, by the vibration of the uvula or the tongue tip (uvular r or trilled r). Nasals are stops, that is, the air stream is closed off in the mouth, but released through the nose. Glides are produced by the movement of the tongue and lips onto or off a neighboring vowel. Finally, /h/ is not produced in the mouth at all, but in the larynx. It is a voiceless fricative produced by creating a narrow slit between the vocal cords and forcing air through. This glottal fricative is nothing more than a voiceless copy of the following vowel or sonorant consonant. Problems with English consonants can be divided into to general and specific problem areas. In the following section, we will first consider the general and then the specific considerations.
5.3 Tense vs. lax In northwest German and British and American English there is an important distinction made between tense and lax consonants. The tense consonants (which are also voiceless) are pronounced with considerably more muscle tension in the vocal organs and more air pressure from the lungs. In south Germany, this distinction tends to be neutralized and the major difference between sounds pairs like /s/ and /z/ is one of voicing and not tenseness.
11 For Anglo American ears, however, tenseness and not voicing is essential. A lax /s/ sounds like a /z/.
5.4 The final devoicing rule German has a final devoicing rule which makes all obstruents (consonants pronounced with obstruction of the air stream, i.e., stops, fricatives and affricates) voiceless at end of a word or before a suffix beginning in a consonant. Cf.
Liebe /li˘b´ /
lieb /li˘p /
lieblich /li˘plIC /
Carrying this habit over into English can have disastrous consequences. A word like said /sed/ comes out sounding like set /set/.
Be careful to maintain full voicing of English obstruents in final position.
5.5 The “th”-sounds English has two sounds spelled
5.6 The “sh”-sound Both German and English have the sound /S/. Although the dictionaries use the same symbol to transcribe this sound in both languages, there is in fact quite a difference between the two. German /S/ is pronounced with rounded lips and a grooved tongue. Its English counterpart is pronounced with spread lips and a flat tongue. On the whole the English sound is rather closer to German / C/.
5.7 The voiced sounds / ZZZ/ and / dZdZdZ / The voiced sounds / Z/ and /dZ / are foreign to German and only occur in a few loan words like Journalist or Dschungel. There is a tendency for German speakers to substitute their voiceless counterparts / S/ and / tS / in both German and English!
5.8 The liquid /l/ English has two l sounds neither of which is identical to German /l/. The so called light l [l] is pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar (gum) ridge (rather than the back of the teeth as in German). In addition, the tongue is slightly grooved and the lips lightly rounded in English, whereas German has a flat tongue and spread lips.
Light l occurs at the beginning of a word (after an optional consonant) (cf. flight, light, plate,
12 late, etc.).
Dark l [ł] occurs after a vowel (cf. bill, tell, pull ). In American English this is true even if another vowel follows as in follow, Philip, pulling.
Dark l is pronounced with the with the tip of the tongue turned up and the root of the tongue retracted. It is close in sound to the /r/.
5.9 The liquid /r/ The famous r sound is made by rolling up the sides of the tongue, rasing the tip toward the roof of the mouth, retracting the root of the tongue and rounding the lips. As mentioned above, it is similar to dark l, the major differences being stronger lip rounding and a much higher position of the tip of the tongue.
In American English, /r/ is pronounced wherever it is written either as the consonant sound /r/ or the vowel sound / Œ’ / or / ‘/ (see below).
5.10 The glide /w/ In German, historical /w/ has become /v/, still written
Historical note: The letter
5.11 The glottal stop / //// The glottal stop is not actually a speech sound in either English or German (in the same way that /b/ or /s/ is), but it nevertheless plays a significant role in German pronunciation because it is inserted at the beginning of a word starting with a vowel or after prefixes as in Is auch was / /Is /aux vas / or Erreignis /E{/aIgnIs /. This gives German its particularly "crisp " sound, which is extremely annoying when carried over to English.
6 Vowels Vowel sounds are much more difficult to describe than consonants because they are not produced with stoppage or friction and are consequently difficult to “feel.” In addition, vowels are not discrete sounds but points in a continuum. You can try this yourself by pronouncing the vowel sound in Eng. beat or Germ, biet(e). Notice that your lips are spread and your tongue is about as high and forward as it can go without causing friction in the air stream. Now, keeping your tongue forward, slowly open your mouth
13 as wide as it will go. You will hear a unbroken continuum of sound from the vowel of Eng. beat to bat. Now return to your starting point and pull your tongue back without opening your mouth. Your lips will automatically round and you will produce a vowel like Eng. do or Germ. du. Keeping your tongue back, you can once again open your mouth as wide as it will go, producing a spectrum of vowels between the starting point and the vowel of Eng. father or Germ. Vater. Given the up ~ down, front ~ back mobility of the tongue, vowels can be placed at any point on the two dimensional surface bounded by the four corner points we have experimentally determined. This is the basis of the Cardinal Vowel system devised by Daniel Jones at the beginning of the last century. Since the distance between the corner vowels is rather large, Jones added for arbitrary mid points front and back to make a set of eight “cardinal vowels.” These vowels act as universal points of orientation to facilitate the description of the real vowels of any given language. The chart shows the cardinal vowels with the real vowels of modern English superimposed.
One additional parameter is necessary to indicate the quality of a given vowel – lip rounding. As indicated above, front vowels and the back vowel [A] are normally pronounced with spread lips in most of the world’s languages, while the back vowels [ ç, o, u] have increasing lip rounding as you move the tongue up. Some languages also have vowels with reverse lip rounding – front rounded, or back unrounded vowels. Jones provided a set of “secondary” cardinal vowels for this eventuality. For German, we only need the four front rounded vowels [y, Y, O, ø]. These are like the “normal” vowels with the same tongue position, but are pronounced with rounded lips. (See table below.)
liegen ‘lie’ lügen ‘lie’ li˘g´n ly˘g´n
Minze ‘mint’ Münze ‘coin’ mInz´ mYnz´
lesen ‘read’ lösen ‘dissolve’ le˘s´n lO˘z´n
Mächte ‘might’ möchte ‘might’ mEXt´ møXt´
14 7 The English vowels The following chart gives the English vowels with key words:
Key Words for Vowels i /bit /
I /bIt /
eI /beIt /
e /bet /
Q /bQt /
u /but /
U /U/
oU /bout /
ç /bçt /
A /bat´m / BE Å
√ /b√t /
´ /´baUt /
Œ’ /bŒ’d /
‘ /mŒ’d‘ /
aI /baIt /
aU /baUt /
çI /bçI /
e´ /be´ r/
As with the consonants, we can distinguish between general and specific problems of pronunciation. Once again we will begin with the general problems.
15 7.1 Diphthongization of tense vowels The tense vowels /i ,eI,u,oU / are not pure vowels like their German counterparts /i:,e:,u:,o:/, but rather combinations of a vowel plus a glide. This is one of the most important distinctions between English and German pronunciation.
7.2 Vowel length In German tense vowels /i,e,o,u,A,y,O / are long when accented, their lax counterparts /I,E,ç,U,a,Y,ø / are short. In English vowel length depends on the following segment. If a vowel is in final position or followed by a voiced consonant it is long. If it is followed by a voiceless consonant, it is short. Compare the length of the vowels in beat bead be. The same is true for the vowel in diphthongs. Compare the length of /a/ in write, ride . After sonorants /l,r,m,n,N / the vowel is naturally long (since these are voiced consonants). However, the vowel is shortened if a voiceless consonant follows the sonorant. Compare pence (short), pens (long), core (long), course (short).
7.3 The schwas A major pronunciation problem is presented by the central vowels (schwas). These sounds occur in German, but only in unaccented position and without r coloring as in the final sounds of eine /aIn´ / and einer /aIn√ /. American English has four schwas (two accented and two unaccented) as illustrated by the following words:
bud /b√d / about /´baUt /
bird /bŒ’d / maker /meIk‘ /
Germans tend to substitute the low back vowel / A/ for the accented schwa.
7.4 The vowel / QQQ/ Only people with a strong German accent substitute /e/ for /æ/. The proper pronunciation of /æ/ can be achieved by saying /e/ and then lowering the jaw slightly. Before /f, T,s / and nasal + consonant, BE generally has /A/ rather then /Q/ as in AE. Compare the pronunciation of laugh, bath, dance, can't, example. Unfortunately, there are a number of exceptions in BE and no rule can be given. Compare can’t with /A/, but cant ‘insincere talk’ with /Q/. Similarly, we have pass, glass with /A/, but ass, mass, gas, passage with /Q/. Some others with /Q/: ant, rant, hand, finance, romance, expand. In general, the nasal + consonant must be in the same syllable for the retraction to take place (hence, random, tandem, rancid, with / Q/).
7.5 The diphthongs / aIaIaI / and / aUaUaU / This are quite similar in German and English. In English, however, the front vowel is much longer than the following glide, whereas in German the two components of the diphthong are of about equal length. Compare: mein mine, Haus house.
7.6 The diphthong / çIçIçI / The diphthong /çI / as in boy is similar to the German sound spelled
16 Beule. The difference is that German keeps the lips rounded throughout (actually / çY /).
8 Intonation The intonation of AE is rather "flat and monotonous" as compared to RP. For this reason, British speakers sound rather excited to Americans and Americans sound rather disinterested and "lazy" to British speakers. American intonation is very close to German intonation.
8.1 Stress timing English and German are both “stress timed” languages as opposed to “syllable timed” languages like French or Spanish. In stress timed languages, the time between stressed syllables is equalized. Consider the following:
Now is the t ime for all good m en to c ome to the ai d of their c ountry.
Th ei r h elp is n ee ded th is v ery m inute!
Each of these sentences contains seven stress units. The first sentence, however, contains many more unstressed syllables, which have to be taken rather quickly to preserve even timing of the stresses. Contrast this with Spanish, where all syllables are given equal time despite stress:
Ahora deben venir a la ayuda del pais todos buenos hombres.
Syllable rather than stress timing is also characteristic of certain overseas varieties of English (India, Pakistan).
8.2 Rhythm In long words, the basic rhythm of AE alternates full and reduced syllables.
Tennessee /«tEn´»si /
Arkansas /»Ark´n«sç /
In other words, the syllables preceding and following the accented syllable are reduced, while those two or more syllables removed from the accent are full (a number of other factors play a role here as well). Compare the pronunciation of Birmingham:
/»bŒ mIN«hQm / in Alabama
/»bŒmIN´m / in England
In BE there tends to be one accent and the syllable two to the right of the accent is syncopated (left out) before ry:
temporary AE / »temp´«reri / BE / »temprerI /
cemetery AE / »sem´«teri / BE / »sem´trI /
17 dormitory AE / »dçrm´«tçri / BE /»dçrm´trI /
In this feature, American English is clearly more conservative than British: If the syllable had been added in American it wouldn’t be written in British. Furthermore, the “extra syllable” is found in the Latin original, temporarius, cemeterium, dormitorium.
8.3 Prefixed verbs Following the Germanic pattern (cf. Ger. Urlaub vs. erlauben ), both BE and AE have a number of two syllable words which are accented on the second syllable when used as verbs and on the first when used as nouns or adjectives:
record, n. rec ord, v.
This accent shift goes back to an ancient pattern in the Germanic languages, where verbs were accented on the stem syllable and nouns and adjectives shifted the accent back to the prefix. Although this pattern has been largely obscured by subsequent developments, it can still be seen in pairs like:
foresight, n. foregone, adj. fores ee, v. foreg o, v.
9 Sound change One of the advantages of studying English is that the conservative spelling system of the language provides evidence of sound change. Why should the sound / Π/ be spelled in five different ways: earth, nurse, bird, word, herd ? Why should
9.1 Evidence for sound change As with any scientific investigation, we must first examine the possible sources of evidence for our inquiry. Sound recordings go back about one hundred years. Even trained observers can hardly detect differences in the standard British, American or German varieties in such a short
18 time. It is easy to imagine that in societies with no historical records the idea of language change is completely foreign. After all, I have no difficulty in communicating with my grandmother and she had no difficulty communicating with hers our language cannot have changed much. As pointed out above, a good deal of our knowledge about earlier stages of the language are thanks to the conservative traditions of spelling. Sounds change but spelling, once fixed, remains. We will discuss the reasons for this in the unit on writing. Languages like English or Greek are quite extreme in this respect, preserving spellings that reflect the sounds of a distant past. In English, as mentioned above, the spelling system reflects the language as it was pronounced six hundred years ago. In Greek, the historical lag is nearly two thousand years! The conservatism of spelling has a down side too. If spelling is conventionalized and does not change over time, it is difficult to determine just when a change occurred. Consider a word like weight. The historical spelling indicates that could not have been pronounced as it is today. It is spelled today as it was six hundred years ago. But, when did the pronunciation change?
9.1.1 Misspellings as evidence of sound change Let us suppose that we are reading the minutes of a town meeting in New England in the year 1670. The recording secretary writes: “We weighted 30 minutes, but he did not appear.” This mistake (!) would not have been possible if weight and wait did not have the same sound. Hence, we are assured that the sound indicated by
9.1.2 Rhymes as evidence of sound change The long tradition of rhyming poetry assures us the syllables at the end of a line of poetry must rhyme. Thus, if a poet rhymes weight with mate , we can be sure that the historical
9.1.3 Expert opinions The professional linguist is something of a new arrival on the scene. Fortunately, there have been numerous individuals in the past who took the time to record their observations of the language. Mostly, their goal was to determine “what is right and wrong” rather than what is. Nevertheless, when a sixteenth century observer complains that people in London are no longer pronouncing their
9.1.4 Loan words A fascinating – if rather unreliable source of preliterary words – is provided by loan words in other languages. In Latin, for example, there are numerous loan words from “Germanic” that indicate earlier stages of the language than are recorded in written documents. The interpretation of such sources is extremely difficult since the loan words are seen through the prism of foreign speakers. Latin scribes routinely transcribe Germanic / T/ as
19 can admire the obvious similarities or read the notes for details:
Germanic Loan Words in Finnish Finnish Ger./Eng. Germanic kernas ‘willing’ gern/yearn gernaz sairas sore/sehr sairaz horna Horn/horn horna kaunis ‘schön’ schön skaunis lammas Lamm/lamb lambaz rengas Ring/ring hrengaz kana Hahn hana pelto Feld/field feldo(m) nauta Ge nosse nauta kuningas König, king kuningaz ruhtinas ‘lord’ thruhtinaz
Notes: 1. kernas : Finn. has /k/ because there is no initial / g/. The original Gemanic ending az is preserved. 2. horna : Once again the Germanic ending a < om is preserved. 3. skaunis : Finn. drops the initial /s/ because /sk/ is not permissible in Finn.. The original diphthong is preserved au > o (before dentals (n,t,d ) > ö (because of i of the following syllable see below under umlaut). 4. lammas : The ending as here is part of the stem (Germ. lambaz ). The plural had the stem suffix iz plus an ending. This yielded OHG lembir modern Lämmer. Note too, that mb > mm in both Finn. and Mod. German. Mod. English preserves mb in the spelling. See below under assimilation. 5. hrengas : An old word since the change e > i before ng has not yet taken place. 6. kana : Since Finn. has /h/ this word may reflect a stage of Germanic preceding the first sound shift (p, t, k > f, th, ch(h)) This word is related to the Lat. verb canare ‘to sing’. The rooster is the morning singer! 7. pelto : o < om even older than the endings that reflect the common Germ. change o > a. The p may also antedate the first sound shift. 8. nauta : An obsolete word for ‘a head of cattle’. Mod. German Genosse originally meant ‘cattle sharer’. 9. ruhtinas : cf. OHG druhtin ‘lord’.
9.1.5 Dialects Even if we had no historical records of the Germanic languages, the existence of dialects would be enough to confirm language change. Bavarian and Swabian are quite similar, but there are marked differences between them. The most likely explanation for this is that these two dialects were much more similar at a distant time in the past and have diverged over time. The same principle can be applied to different “languages” like English and German or Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian. Comparison of existing evidence from related languages or dialects can reveal the unrecorded past. (See below under the discussion of the
20 comparative method.)
9.2 Kinds of sound change Another aid in reconstructing the past is our catalog of possible or likely sound changes. These sound changes are ones that have been observed in languages for which we have good historical records. They also make sense given the physical properties of the speech organs. A change from t + vowel to m + vowel is highly unlikely if not impossible since the two sounds /t/ and /m/ have nothing in common and the conditioning element (the following vowel) could hardly have caused the change. On the other hand, the change from mb to mm is well motivated. The two sounds are identical exception for the feature of nasalization. Here, nasalization is simply extended to b. Such changes are frequent, cf. Germ. Lämmer , Eng. lamb, Finn. lammas, all from Germanic *lambaz /lambiz . Armed with a “tool kit” of possible sound changes, we can go about reconstructing the past.
9.3 Loss of sound The simplest kind of sound change is perhaps loss of a sound. Compare the actual pronunciation of the English past tense forms: liked, loved, wanted, loaded. The spelling < ed> indicates that the ending should be pronounced / ´d/. In fact, this is only the case when the stem of the verb ends in t,d. In other cases, the vowel is lost and the stop takes its voicing from the final segment of the stem—a kind of “assimilation” (see below).
9.4 Addition of sound Less common is the addition of a sound. Consider English moon, German Mond. In German the d was added. Compare too, English thunder and German Donner. Here, English has added the d. The same effect is noted in the romance languages. Where n and r come together in the future a d is added “to ease the transition”: Fr. venir ~ viendrai, Sp. venir ~ vendré.
9.5 Assimilation Assimilation is the process by which a sound becomes more like (or identical to) another sound. The word assimilation is a good example of this process. It comes from Latin ad+similare. The voiced stop /d/ “assimilates” to the following voiceless fricative pronounced with the same tongue position. This is an instance of complete assimilation. Sometimes, assimilation is only partial (and may not be reflected in spelling at all). Consider, the pronunciation of input, usually /ImpVt /. Here, the nasal /n/ has remained nasal, but is pronounced /m/ with the stoppage at the lips as in the following /p/.
9.6 Dissimilation This is the opposite process by which two similar sounds become less similar. Consider the Lat. word arbor ‘tree’, which becomes Sp. arbol. Two r’s in succeeding syllables are apparently “objectionable” and the second one retains its liquid quality, but changes to l. Sometimes, dissimilation can result in the total loss of a sound, e.g., American govern ~ governor , where the r is only pronounced in the first word of the pair; dissimilation leads to total loss of r in the second syllable of governor.
9.7 Lengthening Both vowels and consonants are affected by lengthening. In our discussion of vowel length above, we saw that English vowels are lengthened before voiced sounds. Vowels are typically
21 lengthened in open syllables (syllables closed by a single consonant and followed by a vowel), e.g., in Middle English, e, o, a were lengthened in two syllable words: OE sm 4ca –> ME smōke. Since some words had both one and (with inflection) two syllable forms: blac ~ blace ‘black’or two and three syllable forms: heven ~ hevenes ‘heaven’, conflicting forms arose, (cf., black and the family name Blake ). These were leveled in favor of one form or the other. The loss of a consonant often causes the lengthening of a previous vowel. This is called “compensatory lengthening” (more elegantly in German ‘Ersatzdehnung’). Consider German Mund and English mouth (cf. Goth. munþs). In English, the loss of /n/ before the fricative / T/ (written <þ> in the conventional transcription of Gothic and Old English) led to the lengthening of the preceding vowel. The long vowel was then diphthongized (broken) like other instances of /u:/. Thus, we have the same vowel sound in mouth and house ( 9.8 Shortening The opposite effect is shortening. In the history of English the “third syllable shortening rule” played a major role in determining modern pronunciation. As its name indicates, this rule shortened long vowels when they appeared in the third syllable from the end of the word. It accounts for thousands of pairs like: nation national, supreme supremacy, obscene obscenity. In the case, of supreme , for example, the original long / e˘/ was raised to /i˘ / by the Great Vowel Shift (discussed below). The shortened / E/ in supremacy remained. 9.9 Rounding Vowels are often rounded because of the influence of neighboring consonants—particularly /l/. Consider, Bavarian /fu:i/ for standard German viel, or English veal and French veau. The English pronunciation reflects the pronunciation of the word as it was borrowed from Old French. In Modern French, rounding has taken place with subsequent loss of the /l/. 9.10 Unrounding More important for the history of English is the opposite process—unrounding. Once upon a time, English had front rounded vowels like German. The equivalent of German <ü> was German English Old English küssen kiss cyssan ( 9.10.1 Short- o in BE and AE A particularly interesting case is the American unrounding. In words like not, hot, bottom , AE has a characteristically unrounded / A/, the same vowel as in father , while BE has a rounded variety /Å/. Historically, these are both derived (mostly) from Middle English short o /ç/. In the 22 middle of the seventeenth century, this vowel was lengthened before / f,T,s /. The long vowels remained /ç/ in AE (e.g., off, moth, loss ) while the short vowel unrounded to / A/. Two Dutch loan words also show this distribution: dollar from Du. daler and boss from Du. baas. (Notice that the original vowel in baas was rounded before /s/.) Lengthening of short o also took place before the velar fricative /x/ (spelled 9.11 Metathesis Metathesis is the name given to a change in which two neighboring sounds change place. Consider, WestGerm. *hros > Eng. horse. The sounds /h/ and / ç/ have changed place. In German, the initial / h/ was lost, producing: Ross. 9.12 Breaking Breaking (also called diphthongization) involves the division of one vowel into two. Compare the pronunciation of Pete [pi˘t ] and peal [pi´l ]. The following / l/ causes the /i/ to break into two parts: [ i´ ]. Historically, the long high vowels / u/ and /i/ broke into diphthongs /aU / and /aI / independently in both English and German. Hence, we have mein and mine , Haus and house from earlier mīn and hūs inherited from “mother,” West Germanic. 9.13 Smoothing The opposite effect is smoothing or monophthongization. Two vowels, or rather a vowel plus a glide, merge into one long vowel. In Southern American dialects, for example, / aI/ has smoothed to / a˘ /, so we hear / ma˘n / for mine. Historically, Old High German bruoder has become Bruder. Some of the modern dialects (cf.Bavarian bruadà ) have not participated in this change. 9.14 Umlaut Umlaut is the change in the quality of a vowel caused by a vowel in a following syllable. In the history of English and German i/j umlaut has played a major role. Here an / i/ or /j/ or the following syllable attracts a preceding vowel causing raising and fronting. This accounts for 23 alternations between sing. and plur. , like Gast Gäste, Old High German gast gesti. There is no umlaut in Arm Arme because the historical form was arm arma. Compare also Gothic fulljan and German füllen. The back, rounded vowel / u/ is pulled forward by the / j/ of the following syllable, but rounding is retained resulting in a front rounded vowel. In English, the front rounded vowels produced by i/j umlaut were subsequently unrounded, cf. fill. 9.15 The vowel “joy stick” In Unit 2, we saw that the quality of vowels is largely determined by tongue position along two axes – high vs. low, front vs. back rather like a computer joy stick. Thus, it should not be surprising that a shift of tongue position is a rather frequent event in sound change. In our discussion of Umlaut, we saw that an i/j drew the vowel of the preceding syllable toward it (without changing lip rounding). This is a conditioned sound change falling into the category of fronting (u, o) and raising (a). Another kind of conditioned change is vowel harmony discussed below. The joy stick also works spontaneously (without a conditioning element) and systematically as in the Great Vowel Shift where a whole series of vowels is raised. This will be discussed in detail in Unit 6: The Chaos of English Spelling . For now, a single example should suffice: ME feed /fe:d/ > Mod.Eng feed /fi:d/. Lowering plays a less prominent role in the development of English. In the north, i, u were lengthened and lowered in two syllable words. Thus, OE wicu > ME week /we:k/, ironically raised again by the Great Vowel Shift as with feed. Backing (Retraction) is not common in the standard, but there is an interesting example pointed out by Lass. In Old English there was a verb scyttan ‘lock, shut’. This is probably from Germ. *skutjan, which would also regularly give us the sister word schützen ‘protect’ in German. Now, in our discussion of unrounding above, we saw that the front rounded vowel generally unrounds in standard Modern English (e.g., cyssan ~ kiss, fyllan ~ fill ). In the case, of scyttan, however, the front rounded vowel is not unrounded, but retracted (y > u), scyttan > shut. Can you suggest a reason why this might of happened before looking at the fine print? That’s right. The result of unrounding would have been shit ! Lass rejects this “functional” explanation of the irregularity and I think correctly so. For one thing, the offensive form does in fact occur in older texts, for another, the Wrights EHNEG (1924:43) list ten other retraction forms in the literary standard that are totally inoffensive. 9.16 Ablaut Ablaut is a regular alternation of vowels under conditions unknown (i.e., a kind of umlaut for which we have no explanation). Ablaut plays an important role in the Indo European languages, especially in the verb tense system in the Germanic languages. German has preserved the vowel changes quite faithfully. In English, the system has largely crumbled, leaving behind “irregular verbs.” 24 Present Past Sg. Past Pl. Past Prt. I-E pentō ponta pntm en pntm onos OHG findu fand fundun (ge)fundan NHG finde fand gefunden OE finde fand fundon (ge)funden NE find found found Note that the Germanic verb used to have four principal parts instead of three as today. In German, the past singular was generalized in this case, while in English the past plural won out. Regular sound change accounts for the modern English pronunciation (lengthening and breaking of the vowel before nd ). Only a few verbs ( find, bind, grind, wind ) now follow this pattern. As for the original cause of the ablaut, the zero grade (no vowel at all) in the past plural and past participle would seem to result from the shift of the accent to the ending. Unaccented vowels tend to be reduced. The change from e to o has not been adequately explained. 9.17 Vowel Harmony Vowel harmony is a kind of assimilation at a distance that specifies that vowels of successive syllables must be alike in some way. This principle is quite pervasive in Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish. For example, the plural suffix in Turkish is ler/ lar. Somewhat oversimplifying things, we can say that ler occurs after high and middle vowels and lar after low vowels. Hence, the plural of ev ‘house’ is evler and the plural of adam ‘man’ is adamlar. In Germanic, at an early stage (before i/j umlaut), e was raised to i before a high vowel (i, u) of the following syllable and u was lowered to o if an a followed. Similarly, i and u were lowered to e,o before a of the following syllable . Compare Lat. vir ‘man’ with Eng. Wer(wulf) < *weraz . Similarly, Eng. middle ~ Lat. medius. This alternation is also observed in German pairs like Erde ~ irdisch, Gold ~ gülden, Tor ~ Tür, voll ~ Fülle. In the cases with umlaut, the original vowel was first raised then fronted. Thus, from the noun *goldam , the adjective *guldin was formed (vowel harmony), which later became güldin (i/j umlaut) and then, after the weaking of final inflection syllables, modern gülden. 9.18 Laxing Laxing (or lenition) involves substituting a sound which requires less muscle tension than the one it replaces. If we can follow developments long enough (as with Latin and its children), we can sometimes observe a change from a tense consonant to a lax consonant to a fricative to zero: amatus > amado > [AmADo] > amao Lat. amatus, ‘loved’, becomes older Span. amado, modern Span. [AmADo ], Port. amao. A similar development occurs in German, where a stop becomes an affricate or a fricative. Compare heart ~ Herz, water ~ Wasser, where the original stop (as in English) has become an affricate or a fricative in German, depending on position. In fact, all the voiceless stops /p,t,k/ have laxed to affricates or fricatives. cf. pepper ~ Pfeffer, foot ~ Fuß, make ~ machen. 25 9.19 Tensing Tensing, the opposite development is much rarer, but occurs in the history of German. Compare: English German English German live leben seven sieben bathe baden paths Pfade The English forms with fricatives are older than the German forms with stops. Thus, in German, the voiceless stops have laxed (see previous section) and the voiced fricatives have tensed! 9.20 Palatalization Compare the pronunciation of German Kuh and Kind. We regard these as the same sound and write them with the same letter although the stop is formed at the back of the mouth for Kuh and at the front, on the hard palate, for Kind. In English, this palatal k (before e,i ) became / tS/. Compare: German English Kinn chin Käse cheese It is easy to “get the feeling” of this sound change. Just pronounce Kinn and chin while paying attention to the position of the tongue. It is virtually identical except for the slow release in English, which produces the affricate. The front rounded vowel /y/ pushes the tongue back (try Kinn ~ Kühn ). Later, /y/ unrounds to /i/. Hence, i < y does not cause an affricate. The word kitchen < *kykina <*kukina < Lat. coquina shows both developments. The /i/ of the second syllable affricates the /k/ immediately before it, but also fronts the vowel of the first syllable (i/j umlaut). Later this vowel unrounds (/y/ > /i/), but the new /i/ does not cause affrication. 9.21 Nasalization Nasalization of vowels does not play a significant role in the history of English or German, but is worth mentioning here as it does effect other common languages like French and Portuguese. Compare the pronunciation of French bon /bç)/ ‘good’ masc. with bonne /bçn´ / ‘good’ fem. In the masc. form the unprotected n has disappeared, but has lent its nasal value to the preceding vowel. This vowel is pronounced with open mouth and open nasal passage so that the air exits simultaneously through the nose and mouth. Presumably, the long vowels produced by the disappearance of n before fricatives (see above) originally produced nasal vowels which subsequently denasalized. Modern Bavarian has nasalized vowels (e.g., /i kõ/ 'ich kann', but /dees kon i/ 'das kann ich'), where the following enclitic pronoun has preserved the original nasal. 9.22 How does sound change take place? There have been many ingenious attempts to explain sound change as result of internal developments within the sound system. While these cannot be entirely discounted, they have, on the whole, been less than convincing. It seems better to regard sound change as random within the confines of what is likely to 26 happen in the mouth. For example, the change from /t/ to /d/ (laxing) is likely, whereas a spontaneous change from /t/ to /m/ is highly unlikely since the two sounds have little in common. At first, both the original and the shifted form exist side by side. Whether or not such a sound change becomes established probably depends on social factors. If a particular change becomes a popular, “prestige” feature, it will replace the earlier form. If not, it will disappear. For example, so called r dropping as in BE /bI´ / ‘beer’ or German /bi´ / ‘Bier’is also found on the east coast of North America. In England and Germany, r dropping has become a “prestige” feature and has virtually replaced forms with a final r. Here we can speak of a sound change. In North America, however, r dropping is considered “vulgar” and is slowly disappearing. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing what social factors influenced most of the sound changes we observe in history. That is, we have no idea why the High Germans, who shifted /t/ to /ss/ after a vowel (or between vowels) should have preferred was to wat or wasser to water. And pending the invention of a time machine, we never will know. 9.23 Is sound change regular? Despite heated controversy in the last century, it seems beyond doubt that sound change is regular. That is, a change like /t/ > /ss/ occurs not just in individual words, but uniformly across the vocabulary. The reason for this is not hard to see. Sound change reflects the more or less unconscious change in the pronunciation of individual sounds or groups of sounds, not words. The High Germans who said wasser (for water ) also said besser for better because they changed the pronunciation of t between vowels, not the pronunciation of these words. Apparent exceptions can be explained away – given that we know enough about the external history of the language and the people who spoke it. For example, on the basis of English boat , we should expect a High German form ending in ss. In fact, we find Boot with unshifted t. Fortunately, we know that the Low Germans, who lived along the North Sea excelled in seafaring. In Low German, this shift of t to ss did not take place. The word Boot , as it turns out, was a loan word from Low German that first appeared in High German in the sixteenth century. It is not part of the ancient inherited vocabulary like Fuß and did not participate in the High German sound shift. [Here the spelling should have made us suspicious. In High German / o˘/ is usually spelled Another instructive example is the unusual English pair: fox ~ vixen. The parallel to German: Fuchs ~ Füchsin is obvious. The / I/ in vixen is easily explained. It results from the general unrounding of /y/ reflected in küssen ~ kiss. Similarly, the suffix en used to form the feminine derivative (as in German Lehrer ~ Lehrerin ) is understandable through comparison with German although fox ~ vixen is the only surviving pair of this kind in English. The change in the initial consonant /f/ ~ /v/ is mysterious and certainly not part of any general process. There is also a parallel between German Fass and English vat and Fahne ~ (weather)vane, but no general correspondence /f/ ~ /v/ between German and English. Fortunately, we know that in the South of England) voiceless fricatives spontaneously voiced. These three dialect words : vixen, vat, vane have become part of the Anglo American standard for reasons unknown. Suffice it to say, that without extensive knowledge of related languages and British dialects they would remain unexplained “exceptions.” 27 [This is also the likely explanation for the spontaneous voicing of initial th in “function words” (pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions) i.e., thou, they, their, them, this, these, though, etc.] Perhaps the best argument against “exceptions” is that sound change that spread from word to word and skipped a few in the process would be expected to leave behind all sorts of debris, that is, isolated words that contain sounds that have otherwise disappeared from the phonological system of the language in question. Consider, for example, the common Berlin affectation of pronouncing das, was , es as /dAt /, /vAt /, / It / although other words with historical final t are pronounced with /s/ (e.g., Fuß, Gruß, muss ). If these words were really exceptions to regular sound change, we should also expect forms like / TAt /, /wAt / (cf. English that, what ). The reason why we don’t find isolated instances of /T/ and /w/ in German is clear: These sounds have completely disappeared from the language. The final /t/ (from /d/ as in Bett ~ bed ) is, however, alive and well. If sound change simply skipped over words, we should expect to find such historical holdovers as well. A glance at the dialect map (in the Appendix) provides an answer to the mystery. Berlin is positioned at the edge of the border between High and Low German. The exceptional forms dat, wat, it were simply borrowed from the north or the “simple folk” in the city, who held on to the Low German tradition. The “exceptions” dat, wat , it have become a symbol of Berlin identification. If they were really an exception to the sound change of /t/ to /ss/ we would expect to find similar exceptions in other places far from Low German influence. The major source of apparent exceptions to regular sound change is the restructuring caused by analogy (see below). 9.24 Standard languages From the considerations above, it should be clear that the standard languages British Received Pronunciation, American and German Network are "messy." That is, none of these standard literary languages is a "pure" development from a earlier stage of the language, but involves an admixture of features from competing dialects. Both the British and American standards go back to a common eighteenth century upper class standard based in London but this standard incorporates dialect forms like vixen, vat, vane that are quite foreign to the expected London standard. In addition, we have contrasts like good ~ food, which cannot be explained by regular development. Here we have an arbitrary choice in the "prestige dialect" among available dialect forms. "I say / t´meItoU /, she says / t´mAt´U / let's call the whole thing off." The German standard, based on a spelling pronunciation of Middle Saxon (Martin Luther German), is far less messy than the English standards. A German pronouncing dictionary for native words is a waste of money. In the new orthography: (e.g., Fuß ~ Fluss) the pronunciation can be read off the standard spelling. An English dictionary routinely lists two to four different pronunciations for some words because of dialect mixing. Consider common cases like the pronunciation of either, again, been. (A list of such cases is to be found in my script The American Language. ) 9.25 Limited time for application Implicit in what was said about exceptions above, is the principle that sound changes like physical forces only apply for a limited period of time. Then, like the ripples in a pond caused by tossing in a stone, they die out. Thus when the sound change from /t/ to /ss/ was underway in High German, all final and intervocalic t’s were swept away. A related change shifted /t/ to /ts/ when doubled as in sitzen (< sittian ) or when /t/ was initial (as in Zug , cf. Eng. tug ) or when /t/ followed a liquid or nasal ( Herz ~ heart, Lenz ~ lent ). 28 For a time then, High German had no sound /t/! Later, /d/ shifted to /t/ as in (day ~ Tag, dead ~ tot ), filling the hole in the system. After this development had taken place, there was no difficulty in borrowing Low German boot. The same principle applies to the American word boss , which was borrowed toward the end of the seventeenth century from Dutch baas. Before /s/, only / ç˘/ was possible (as in loss ) and the word had to be borrowed with a rounded vowel. Later scientific words have / A/ as in oscillator, ossify or MS DOS. Note that the vowel here is short. When fricatives no longer lengthened preceding vowels, the written symbol 9.26 Analogy Analogy or “Systemzwang” is the principal force that eliminates the effects of sound change and creates apparent exceptions to regular changes. As mentioned above, in the history of German, there was a process that lengthened vowels in open syllables (syllables with a single consonant followed by another vowel). Consider the paradigm of Middle High German wec ‘Weg’: nom. wec wege pronounced / wEk, wEg´ / with short vowel gen. weges wege dat. wege wegen acc. wec wege Six of the eight forms in the paradigm have open syllables (wege, weges, wegen ) which were lengthened according to the rule. The two remaining forms, the nominative and accusative singular ( wec ), should have kept a short stem vowel because no vowel follows to open the syllable. In fact, all eight forms (not just the six regular ones) have long vowels in Modern German. The reason for this is that the six regular long vowel forms exerted pressure on the other two. Note that the adverb weg retains the short vowel because it was not regarded as part of the paradigm and was thus not obliged to conform. Another example of “Systemzwang” is the local name of the popular Munich Oktoberfest: “die Wies’n”. The name comes from the Teresienwiese , where the festival is held, but where does the final n come from? In standard German, we have die Wiese , sg. and die Wiesen , pl. Die Wies’n is clearly a singular form. The answer is that in earlier German so called feminine n stems like zunge, wiese, declined like the masculine der Bote, des Boten . . . die Boten, etc. That is, only the nom. sg. had e, all other forms of the singular and plural had en. In Bavarian, the seven other forms in n forced an n on the nom. sg. as well. In standard German, on the other hand, n was restricted to the plural. 9.27 Ousting There are a number of changes in the standard language that cannot be explained by normal sound change. For example, Shakespeare never rhymed words like sea and see. Even a century later the “best” poets like Alexander Pope (d. 1744) kept them separate. In all likelihood, see was pronounced as it is today and sea with the vowel in great, break, steak. What happened? We might be tempted to posit a sound change that raised / e˘/ to /i˘ / in the 29 mid eighteenth century. But, this cannot be correct. The same poets that kept sea and see separate rhymed the vowel of sea with the vowels in maid and made. Thus, we find rhymes like: sea ~ way, eat ~ state. Evidently, these words have the same vowel. Since sound changes have no memory and cannot distinguish between identical vowels that come from different historical sources (as indicated by the spelling), either all or none would have had to have been shifted. Fortunately, the historical record helps us out on this point. Other poets rhyme sea with be and he, seas with these, etc. In 1621, Alexander Gill notes this pronunciation among certain classes and condemns it. Evidently, there were two competing “styles” in use over a period of centuries. One rhymed sea with we , the other rhymed sea with way. Both arose from regular sound change but the question of social acceptance was left open. Despite the objections of the grammarians and the “best” poets, the style that favored / i˘/ in words with Middle English /E˘ / (spelled mostly 30 Unit 3: English and German—affectionate sisters 1 English and German The similarities between English and German seem to be less apparent to German speakers than to English speakers. Perhaps the reason for this is that, for German speakers, English is a “fact of life,” the de facto medium of international communication. English literacy along with computer literacy and a driver’s license are basic requirements for a well paying job these days. On the other hand, English speakers, who learn German, generally do so because they have to fulfill a language requirement for a college degree or perhaps because they are genuinely curious about the German language. Their main interest is seldom practical. After all, everyone in Germany speaks English, don’t they? In any case, they are more likely to see German as an object of curiosity or at least to seek out similarities between the two languages that make their learning task more easy. 2 Obvious similarities After the English speaking learner of German has gotten over the shock of having to learn three genders for nouns, six words for the and seven common plural forms, similarities begin to become apparent. The most obvious ones are similarities in vocabulary. Consider: Haus house Mann man mein mine sing(en) sing Bier beer Finger finger To be sure, such exact correspondences in sound and meaning between the two languages are relatively rare. And they might just be due to borrowing. Did the English borrow the word beer along with the beverage from Germany? (This was in fact the case with Sauerkraut. ) That houses and fingers were borrowed along with the words that refer to them is, however, rather unlikely if not completely impossible. In addition, we have to consider the possibility of pure coincidence. A comparison of the vocabulary of any two languages will always turn up a handful of words that have approximately the same sound and meaning. The classic example is Lat. deus and Grk. theos. Both mean ‘god’ and given the fact that the languages are members of the same family, they should have the same origin. But the equation d ~ th cannot be confirmed by other related pairs of words. Compare Grk. thura ~ Lat. foris ‘door’. Only patterned correspondences count. See the next section. 3 Patterned correspondences The comparison becomes more interesting if we loosen the requirement of exact correspondence between the two languages. Consider, for example, the following words with similar sounds and corresponding meanings: Salz salt Nacht night Wind wind drei three Vater father Bruder brother If they had been borrowed, it is difficult to see why they changed in sound. After all, German 31 Salz could have been borrowed as English “salts.” English night could have been borrowed as German “Neit.” Even more significant is the fact that the difference between the two languages seem to be systematic. For example, the are quite a few words of similar meaning where English has a t after l or r and German has a z in the corresponding position: salt Salz heart Herz malt Malz wart Warze bolt Bolzen fart Furze To be sure, there are a number of apparent exceptions to the rule: sort - Sorte, tart - Torte. A bit of investigation reveals, however, that these words were borrowed from Latin via French in both English and German at a relatively recent date. The pairs in the tables above seem to be much more fundamentally related. 4 Words related in meaning If we relax the requirement that the word pairs mean exactly the same thing, we can find further likely correspondences: smart Schmerz shirt Schürze smelt schmelzen felt Filz lent Lenz mint Minze If you check in the dictionary, you will find that smart really does mean a kind of burning pain caused by a slap in addition to the more common meaning “intelligent.” Both English shirt and German Schürze are pieces of clothing. English smelt means to melt ore to separate out the metal – one of the meanings of German schmelzen . English spelling presents a number of interesting riddles as well. How is it that English words with silent laugh lachen cough keuchen through durch high hoch night Nacht freight Fracht German influence on English could hardly account for this. The only reasonable explanation is that English once had a sound similar to the sound represented by 32 In the case of Finger - finger , the historical form has remained unchanged. With Haus - house , English and German have independently developed a diphthong /aU / from an earlier long vowel /ū/. An additional example of this sort of “convergence” is the vocalization of r after a vowel in Standard German and RP (cf. the pronunciation of for and vor ). 5 Historical records This should remind us that historical linguistics is a historical science and we are thus fundamentally dependent on the facts in our possession for our analyses. Fortunately, we have quite a bit of information about the history of English and German (although not nearly as much as we would like to have) so we can clear up at least some of these questions. The earliest sources for English and German (going back more than a thousand years) record forms like finger and hūs. Thus, it is clear that finger is an original form, whereas Haus and house both developed from an earlier form hūs although the developments took place independently, long after German and English had gone their separate ways. Historical records can also help in another way. There are striking parallels between English and French as well as between English and German. Consider the following table. In the first two columns we have similarities between modern French and English, but thanks to historical records, we know that Old English (before the Norman Conquest) used other words which are strikingly similar to modern German: French English OE German face face anwlita Antlitz sauveur savior hælend Heiland royal royal cynelic königlich unité unity ānnes Einheit (cf. oneness) From these examples it should be clear that German and English were once much more similar than they are today. Because of the influence of French and Latin, a good deal of the similarity has been lost. 6 Similarities in inflection The similarities between German and English go beyond the vocabulary. English like German forms the past tense and the past participle of most verbs with a final / d/ or / t/ mostly spelled < ed>. Consider love loved loved - lieben liebte geliebt. There is no parallel here to French or Latin. More interesting still are the “irregular” verbs that change their internal vowels in the different stem forms: sing sang sung - singen sang gesungen. Although borrowing of words between languages is common, borrowing of complex, systematic alternations of this sort is virtually unknown. Once again, the verb forms point to an “ānnes” between German and English. Other irregular verbs are reinforce the comparison. Consider English think. According to the pattern sink sank sunk, we might expect think thank thunk(!). In fact, we find think thought thought. The very same anomaly occurs in German denken dachte gedacht. Remember 33 and English is revealed by shared irregularities, rather than identical patterns. English has borrowed thousands of verbs from French and Latin, but the English forms of the verb do not agree with their sources. Consider the English verb finish. It is derived from the present plural of the French verb finir (finissons, finissez, finissent) . In English there is no trace of the present singular (finis, finis, finit), or the simple past: finis, finis, finit, finîmes, finîtes, finîrent or of the past particple fini. All the forms in English are derived from present plural in French: finish, finished, finished using the common device of adding the suffix ed , which English shares with German. 7 Parallels in syntax (‘Satzbau’) Syntactic parallels between German and English are not as obvious, but one example may suffice. Typical of German is the so called VII Rule which says that in a declarative main clause the inflected verb always stands in the second position. Consider: Ich verbrachte mein Urlaub letztes Jahr in Spanien. Letztes Jahr verbrachte ich mein Urlaub in Spanien. I spent my vacation last year in Spain. Last year, I spent my vacation in Spain. Moving the adverbial phrase letztes Jahr to the front causes verb subject inversion in the German sentence so that the inflected verb will stay in the second position. In the English sentence, however, the subject verb order is not affected by moving the adverbial phrase last year to the front. Apparently, English does not have the VII Rule. But, note the following: I have never seen such a mess! Never have I seen such a mess! If a negative element like never stands in the first position and the verb is constructed with an auxiliary, the VII Rule applies in English too! A sentence like *Never I have seen such a mess is quite impossible. (The star here means an ungrammatical sentence.) This can hardly be a coincidence. It is more likely that German and English were once very similar in this respect and that English restricted the VII Rule to obligatory inversion with a negative element and “stylistic inversion” in a number of other cases: Down went the curtain. Down the curtain went. Another striking difference between modern English and modern German is the word order in subordinate clauses, where German puts the finite (inflected) verb at the end of the clause. Compare: Sie nahmen ihre Hauptstadt, die sie “Capitolium” hießen. They took their chief place, which they called “Capitolium.” Although not as strict as modern German in its word order, Old English also puts the inflected verb at the end in such clauses in most cases: hie benóman heora heofodstedes þæt hie Capitolium héton. (Orosius 86,30) 34 Note that the German and Old English sentences are not only identical in word order, but in vocabulary as well. Old English has benóman, heofstede, héton parallel to German nahmen, Hauptstadt, heißen, Modern English has took, called (from Skandinavian), chief, place from French (if we insist on being literal) and capital from Latin. . Thus there are a large number of similarities between German and English and the further one goes back in time the more similarities appear. The conclusion we are led to is that German and English would “merge” into a common language if we could follow their history far enough back in time! Put another way, German and English are descendants of a common great grandmother. There is nothing really extraordinary about this. We know, for instance, that the so called Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) are all descended from Latin. The difference is that many Latin documents have come down to us so that, in the case of the Romance languages, we have a first hand acquaintance with the “parent” language. In the case, of German and English, there are no literary remains of the extinct parent. We can, at best, hope to reconstruct it by comparing its offspring. The following table compares German and English consonants and indicates their origin from “mother” in this case, a language we call “Proto West Germanic.” The sounds we find in standard German are the result of what is called “the High German Sound Shift.” High German Sound Shift: Mother, German German German German Examples: English and English initial V_V final after l,r German p pf ff ff pf > ff pepper, ship, sleep, help Pfeffer, Schiff, schlafen, helfen t tz ss ss tz time, water, foot, heart Zeit, Wasser, Fuß, Herz k k (kh) ch ch ch kitchen, make, book, milk Küche, machen, Buch, Milch As the table indicates, English agrees with Mother. High German has innovated. But how do we reach this conclusion? We can cite three reasons: 1. Plausibility - The change from stop to affricate to fricative (e.g., p > pf > ff ) is far more natural than the change from affricate and fricative to stop (e.g., pf, ff > p ). 2. Majority All of the other Germanic languages including Scandinavian and Gothic have stops (Old Norse hjalpa , Dutch helpen, Gothic hilpan ). It is more likely that one variety (High German) innovated than that the rest of the Germanic family underwent the same unlikely change from affricate and fricative to stop. 3. Geography - The High German consonants are most consistently found in the south west 35 (present day Switzerland, where we find Kchind for Kind ). As we move north, the effects of the sound shift gradually die out (like the waves produced from throwing a stone into a pond) until only p,t,k are found north of the Benrath line. If the High German consonants were original, there would be no way to explain why the shift to p,t,k took place along a front stretching from the town of Benrath in the west to a point just north of Berlin and on into East Prussia. 4. Loan words- In this case, we also have “the smoking gun” – namely, the treatment of Latin loan words. Consider NHG Pflanze < Lat. planta, NHG Küche < Lat. coquina. Since the Latin source words clearly have p,t,k the High German development must be an innovation. Here are some additional correspondencies between Mother, English and German: Mother English German English German d d t dead, day tot, Tag v v b live, silver leben, Silber gg dg ck bridge Brücke bb b pp rib Rippe dd d tt bid bitte kk k ck wake wecken pp p pf shape schöpfen tt t tz set setzen 8 Semantic change The comparative enterprise cannot thrive without considering change in meaning as well. With words like father ~ Vater ~ pater, we are on safe ground. There can be little doubt that these are “cognates,” (words born from the same mother). But, not all cases are so clear. Mod. Engl. smart , Germ. Schmerz ‘pain’ are clearly related. After all, there is an English verb to smart, which means to experience a burning pain. Perhaps, smart in the meaning ‘intelligent’ comes from the burning pain one experiences when one is “outsmarted.” There is a transfer of meaning from ‘pain’ to someone who is capable of causing pain through intelligence. In any case, we do have to be reasonably sure that we are comparing apples with apples and not with oranges in order to establish sound correspondencies. An attempt to establish sound shifts on the basis of false comparisons must inevitably lead to disaster. 8.1 Types of semantic change Just as we were able to establish a catalog of types of sound changes, we can attempt to create a similar catalog for semantic change. The differences should be clear: sound change is constrained by what can happen in the mouth plus auditory factors and analogy. Meaning change is much more difficult to pin down. 36 Nevertheless, we can list some of the most common kinds of semantic change with examples. Just as we observed opposites in sound change, we can also point to opposites in meaning change. 8.1.1 Narrowing Very often the meaning of a word is restricted from the general to the specific. Consider Ger. Tier ~ Eng. deer. The original meaning ‘beast’ is reduced to a particular kind of arboreal ruminant (Bambi and friends). Similarly, Ger. sterben ‘to die’ corresponds to Eng. strave ‘to die of hunger’. O.E. sweltan ‘to die’ gives us Eng. swelter ‘to suffer or die from excess heat’. In British English outhouse means a ‘small building which is near to and belongs to a larger main building’ in American, it refers only to an outdoor toilette! Another intriguing example is Eng. stud ‘male breeding horse’ and Germ. Stute ‘mare, female horse’. These seem to be derived from I.E. *stā ‘stand’, originally, the place where animals stand around, cf. stable via Old French. From here we come to breeding place and then further specialization to breeding horse of one gender or the other. The current English meaning of stud ‘male breeding horse’ is surprisingly recent (1803). The transfer (q.v.) to ‘a man who is highly active and proficient sexually’ is first attested in 1895. 8.1.2 Broadening Broadening is the opposite process. A word of restricted meaning becomes more general. Lat. virtūs ‘manly quality’ (< vir ‘man’) ~ Mod. Eng. virtue (via French) ‘any good quality’. Similarly, the word novice (Lat. novus, a, um ) originally applied to beginners seeking acceptance into religious orders (monks or nuns). Today, it refers to any sort of beginner: radio amateur, computer programmer, linguist, etc. 8.1.3 Elevation Elevation means making a term more socially acceptable than it was before. O.E. cniht ‘boy, servant’ > Mod. Eng. knight, (cf. Germ. Knecht ). O.E. cwēn ‘woman’ ~ Mod. Eng. queen. There can be little doubt that the original meaning here was ‘woman’, cf. Grk gynē ‘woman’ as in gynecologist ‘women’s doctor’. Most likely, wīfmann ‘wife man’ replaced the other term in the common meaning ‘woman’ and freed it for social climbing. 8.1.4 Denigration Denigration means lowering the prestige of a word. Here again we can site Ger. Knecht ‘lowly servant’ vs. Eng. knight. Examples abound: MHG dirne ‘maid servant’ ~ NHG Dirne ‘whore’, Germ. Kerl ‘fellow’ ~ Eng. churl ‘fool’, Ger. seelig ‘blessed’ ~ Eng. silly ‘foolish’. IE *klewos ‘famed’ (cf. Ludwig ‘famous in battle’) gives us Eng. loud, Germ. laut. Famous people were always loud in self praise. On the whole, denigration seems to be more popular than elevation. It would be tempting to draw conclusions about human nature here. 8.1.5 Transfer Often a word is “reassigned” to a closely related concept. Thus, Lat. penna ‘feather’ becomes Eng. pen ‘a writing implement’ because feathers used to be used for writing before there were computers. Perhaps, we can add Ger. zählen ‘count’ and Eng. tell ‘recount’ (with the original meaning in tell one’s beads ‘count one’s prayers with the rosary’). There are some less obvious transfers that are generally excepted. An interesting one is IE *sal(d) ‘salt’, which appears with the familiar meaning in Germanic, Greek, Latin, Armenian and Old Prussian, but is also confirmed (according to well established laws of sound change) in Lith. saldùs and Russ. sladkij , 37 which mean ‘sweet’! Latvian, Lithuanian’s only surviving sister, has both forms of the root, reflected in sāl ‘salt’, salds ‘sweet’. A similar transfer is seen in Gk. typhlos ‘blind’ ~ Ger. taub ‘deaf’. Also Yid. shmeken ‘smell’ ~ Ger. schmecken ‘taste’. 8.1.6 Hyperbole Hyperbole is exaggeration, from that was terrifying real (I was terrified) to that was terribly good (no terror involved). Germ. sehr gut from sehr ‘painful’ (cf. King James Bible, they were sore afraid belongs here too). Consider too: I will crucify you! where nailing someone to the cross is not really meant. 8.1.7 Litotes Litotes is the opposite of hyperbole. Here, a weaker meaning is strengthened. Consider Germ. quälen ‘torture, torment’ and O.E. cwellan ‘to kill’, even now to quell (‘put down’) a rebellion. 8.1.8 Metaphor Metaphor can be virtually anything. It simply indicates the use of a word for something vaguely similar, i.e., the mouth of a river, the point of an argument , boiling with rage. We find very interesting correspondencies between languages here. Consider Ger. die Mundung eines Flusses, der springende Punkt des Arguments, kochend vor Wut. 8.2 The etymologist’s method If you ask a student (or other rational person) what English word is related to Germ. Vogel, the first reaction is invariably bird although these words can’t possibly be related by regular sound change. The problem is that normal people almost invariably try to cross the bridge of meaning in identifying cognates. Given what we have considered above, this is clearly the wrong way to go about it. Sound change is limited mostly to the kind of things that can happen in the mouth when we speak. Meaning change is not unlimited, but considerably more complex and unpredictable. Thus, the surer way is to proceed from form to meaning. Let us first consider the example above. Germ. v/f at the beginning of a word always corresponds to Eng. f (cf. Vater ~ father, Fuß ~ foot ). Germ. l always corresponds to Eng. l. Now we have something like a crossword puzzle or a Scrabble game. You get fifty points for figuring out what comes between f and l. Now, there is a sound shift that says that O.E. g becomes the back glide w after back vowels (cf. Bogen ~ bow ). Hence, we would expect the related word in English (cognate) to be something like fowl, assuming that there is such an English word at all. Check the English dictionary and you will find that there is a word fowl meaning a bird used for food (narrowing). Could this have something to do with Ger. fliegen, Geflügel ? Let us consider a more complex case – English kitchen . What would the German cognate look like (assuming one exists)? Let’s start with the first vowel i. This can have two sources, i or y (high front vowel unrounded or rounded). Since the preceding consonant is k, i must come from y. Otherwise, k would have been palatalized as in Eng. chin ~ Germ. Kinn. The source of y must be i/j umlaut, so we must posit an i in the following syllable. This is supported by the affricate /tS /, which, as we have pointed out comes from the palatalization of a k before i. Since the n is normally stabile, we arrive at the reconstruction * kukin. Taking *kukin as our starting point, we can use regular sound laws to derived the expected German form. In German, we have umlaut and subsequent weakening of the unaccented i just as in English, only the umlauted vowel survives to this day as ü. Between vowels, k becomes a fricative through the High German sound shift (cf. Eng. make ~ Germ. machen ). Our result is 38 thus *küchen . Indeed, there is a German word Küche that means ‘kitchen’ so we only have to explain the missing final n in order to have a perfect match. Here, we need an assist from analogy. Since, Küche is feminine, it has apparently joined the feminine declension, which reserves the n for the plural. Hence, we have die Küche ~ die Küchen in analogy to other feminines like die Lampe ~ die Lampen. In this case, we can confirm our reconstruction since we are dealing with a Latin loan word, cf. classical Lat. coquina ‘kitchen’. The loaned form must have been vulgar Lat. * kukina – perhaps with the u from culina ‘kitchen’, cf. Ital. cusina . 8.3 How close is close enough? In our two examples above, there is no doubt that the words in question are descended from a common ancestor. Kitchen and Küche are an exact match and fowl is a narrowing of the general concept in Vogel. Furthermore, we know that fowl historically had the broader meaning (edibility was not a requirement for participation in Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” (1382)). But, how close is close enough? In a discussion of the loss of Germanic n before the fricative h (cf. denken ~ dachte ), Hirt (Hdb. I:111) discusses pairs of words with and without n, e.g. OHG fahan ~ fieng ‘catch ~ caught’. The alternation here is due to the action of Verner’s law. Where h is voiceless, preceding n is dropped. Where h is voiced, it combines with n to form ng. Although this parti cular sound law has been established beyond a shadow of a doubt, can we use it draw a parallel between Goth. leihs ‘light’ and OHG lunga ‘lung’ or Finn. hanho ‘drinking vessel’ (presumably borrowed before n was lost) and OHG hahala ‘kettle hook’ or Finn. tenho ‘magic’ and Goth. þeihwo ‘thunder’? Perhaps, the best approach is the one that he tacitly follows. Sound laws have to be established on the basis of clear cognates. However, once such laws are established, we are licensed to use them in a fishing expedition to uncover further, less certain cognates by using the method described above. If you find thunder and magic, drinking vessel and kettle hook to be something of a stretch, that is up to you. 39 Unit 4: Researching the past—the comparative method 1 Early attempts By the time of the Renaissance, scholars were well aware of the facts about the origin of the Romance languages mentioned at the end of the last Unit. They could easily have worked out the rules of sound change based on a comparison of Latin with its daughter languages, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc., and then applied the knowledge they had gained about sound change from this analysis to the far more difficult problem of searching for the origins of the mother from which Latin, Greek, German and other European languages are descended. They did not do this, however. In asking why, we can imagine two reasons. First, the origin of the Romance languages was known, hence there was nothing particularly interesting about pursuing this question. Far more interesting, was to discover the source of all languages. Furthermore, the evolution (they certainly wouldn’t have used this word) of, say, Spanish from the classical Latin of Julius Caesar had taken some 1,500 years and yet the close similarity was obvious. Explaining the far greater differences between Greek, Latin and the oldest available German would require more time than there was in the age of the universe. Remember, at that time it was generally assumed, relying on the information in the Bible, that the universe was created around 4000 BC. Early estimates were based on the genealogies in the Bible. The Venerable Bede (d. 735), an English monk and a leading scholar of his day placed the creation in 3963 B.C. The Jewish rabbinical tradition determined October 6, 3761 B.C. as the date of creation. By far the most influential chronologist was James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, who published the date Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C. as the first day of creation in his Annals of the World (1650 in Latin, 1658 in English). Ussher’s chronology later found its way into editions of the King James Bible in the form of marginal notes and was considered authoritative. This approach to chronology did not begin to come apart until the development Egyptology and Assyriology in the middle of the nineteenth century. The scientific study of these civilizations showed that they must have thrived long before the purported date of Noah’s Arc (Ussher 2348 B.C.) and no such destruction as might have been expected from the great Flood was discernable from the historical record (e.g., the Flood would have destroyed the clay tablets on which the Assyrian records were recorded.) Besides which, they already had the answer (many thought). All languages must have descended from Hebrew, the language the Lord spoke to Noah and Moses in the Old Testament. The vast differences between Hebrew, Latin, Greek, German, etc. were to be explained by the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, described in the Book of Genesis. The major differences were caused by the hand of the Lord. This cataclysmic change that created Latin, Greek and German was to be distinguished from the slow evolutionary change that had created Spanish, French and Italian. Given the state of their knowledge about natural history, this was not an implausible theory. The problem was how to prove it and the method was thoroughly false. They did not look for regular patterns (like smart ~ schmerz ), but rather collected chance similarities between words that seemed to prove what they wanted to prove – that Hebrew was the mother of all languages. Here is an example from an attempt by Cruciger (1616): 40 German Latin Greek Hebrew Metall metallum metallon metil Sack saccus sákkos sak Fuß pēs pōs pasah ‘pass by’ Acker ager agros iccar ‘field worker’ The resemblance between German, Latin and Greek with regard to the first two words (Metall, Sack ) is based on the fact that Latin had borrowed them from Greek and German from Latin (then quite recently). The resemblance to Hebrew is pure coincidence. If one compares thousands of words of vocabulary between any two languages, there is a statistically significant chance that some of pairs with similar form and meaning will turn up. The German, Latin and Greek words for Fuß, Acker really are “urverwandt.” The resemblance to Hebrew is coincidental. In Latin and Greek, the root of the word for ‘foot’, for instance, actually ends in d (ped /pod ) so all that remains of the similarity is the initial p. Hirt (1927:170) entertains the possiblility that IE *agro is a loan word in Indo European, derived from Akk. ikkaru ‘field worker’. This, of course, would not prove relationship, but simply borrowing. Oddly enough, this method, driven by conviction rather than systematic observation, persisted well into the nineteenth century. Noah Webster, the famous American lexicographer, produced fanciful etymologies of this sort for his American Dictionary (1828) . They weren’t replaced until the edition of 1864 – after his death. 2 The breakthrough The breakthrough came in 1786 when Sir William Jones, a British judge in India, noticed the remarkable resemblances between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit (the ancient language of the Hindus). He surmised, correctly, that they along with the German, Celtic and Slavic languages might have developed from a common source, which perhaps no longer existed: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more 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; and that the old Persian might be added to the same family. Thirty years later, the Dane Rask (1787 1832) and Jacob Grimm (1785 1863) (of Grimms Märchen ) demonstrated the systematic relationship between the Germanic languages, on the one hand, and Latin and Greek on the other. For example, where Latin and Greek have an initial p, German and English have f: 41 Latin Greek English German pater patér father Vater ped pod foot Fuß pur pyr fire Feuer poly viel porcus Ferkel The point is that these resemblances cannot be due to coincidence. There are just too many of them. And they cannot be due to borrowing since they would have been borrowed in something like their original form. Consider English paternal, pedestrian, pure, polygon, pork, which were all borrowed much later from Greek or Latin (sometimes via French) and all have initial p. This principle can generalized to the other voiceless stops: Latin Greek English German ped pod foot Fuß trēs treis three drei cord kardia heart Herz (The d in German drei is due to a later development.) If whole sets of sound correspondences between two languages can be found, it is certain that they are more or less distantly related. For the languages mentioned here, this is indeed the case although we will not cite additional examples. Nevertheless, the regularities were not without problems. While the correspondences were clear at the beginning of a word, puzzling exceptions were sometimes found in the middle of a word. Consider the following correspondences between Latin and German: Latin frater corresponds to German Bruder as expected (t ~ d), but Latin pater corresponds to German Vater and Latin mater corresponds to German Mutter ( t ~ t ). Grimm was profoundly frustrated by these apparent exceptions to the First German Sound Shift. In the first volume of his monumental Deutsche Grammatik (1819), he complains: “Die lautverschiebung erfolgt in der masse, tut sich aber im einzelnen nie rein ab. Es bleiben wörter in dem verhältnis der alten einrichtung stehen, der strom der neuerung ist an ihnen vorbei geflossen.” It wasn’t until more than half a century had gone by that the solution to the problem was found by Karl Verner. He noticed (in 1875) that, in Greek and Sanskrit, there was a difference in accentuation between the two words: 42 Greek German phráter Bruder patér Vater matér Mutter Where the accent immediately preceded the voiceless stop as in phráter the development was regular in accordance with “Grimm’s Law.” Where the accent was not on the immediately preceding vowel as in patér , where it follows, a different but equally regular development takes place in accordance with what is now known as “Verner’s Law.” The details are a bit complicated. Verner took the verb forms as his point of departure. Grimm had already noted a peculiarity that he called “grammatischer Wechsel.” Consider Mod Eng. was ~ were, where there is a change between the consonant of the past singular and plural. After considering possible conditions for the alternation, Verner shows that only the placing of the original PIE accent can be responsible. Voiceless fricatives become voiced in voiced surroundings unless the accent immediately precedes, cf. the modern German pronunciation of Hannóver vs. Hannoveráner. In the case of was ~ were, in the past singular the original accent was on the stem and in the past plural on the ending. The alternation is s ~ z, where z > r. The impact of Verner’s paper cannot be overestimated. He presented his evidence in the form of a mathematical proof, which set new standards of exactness in linguistic investigation. The solution to a number of other long standing problems around the same time by a group of young scholars centered around the University of Leipzig ( die Junggrammatiker ) led to the proclamation that there are no irregularities in sound change, only undiscovered laws. Even more convincing is a comparison of the inflectional systems of the Indo European languages. The pioneer in this field was the German scholar Franz Bopp (1791 1867). The following table illustrates the history of the Indo European verb “bear.” If an educated Greek scholar had sat down with a German at the beginning of the Christian era, it is hard to imagine that they would not have noticed the resemblances. Unfortunately, the last thing the Greeks were interested in was finding correspondencies between Greek and “barbarian” languages. Indo European “bear” Indo Eur. Greek Germanic Old High (reconst.) (reconst.) German Singular 1st pers. bherō pherō berō biru 2nd pers. bheresi phereis beris biris 3rd pers. bhereti pherei berith biri Plural 1st pers. bheromes pheromes berames berames 2nd pers. bherete pherete berith beret 3rd pers. bheronti pheronti berand berant 43 Notes: 1. In general the Germanic forms are one segment shorter than Indo European. 2. In the unaccented endings of OHG, e > i , ō > u. The high vowels of the endings caused raising of the stem vowel. 3. The 1 st and 3 rd plural of the Greek are taken from the Doric dialect. 4. The 2nd plural beret might be a contamination between the expected form berit and the other plural forms with /a/. This is, however, rather speculative. 3 Mother – Proto-Indo-European (‘Urindogermanisch’) By a process of comparison as outlined above, it has been possible to trace most of the languages of Europe and northern India back to a common origin (probably in present day Lithuania). Proto Indo European, as we call the mother tongue, is certainly not the mother of all languages. Language as we know it is as old as our species (sixty to one hundred thousand years old) and Proto Indo European dates from approximately 3500 BC. It is not the “original” language. It is just as far back in time as we can go using scientific methods and given the information we have. By comparing the vocabulary we can reliably reconstruct from the various daughter languages, we can try to develop a picture of what their society was like. There are common words for field, plow and domestic animals (sheep, pigs, cows) so we can conclude that they practiced agriculture. Kinship terms like “father in law, brother in law,” etc., lead us to conclude that they had a patriarchal form of society and that women went to live with their husbands’ family. Since there are common words for “mouse,” “horse” and “dog,” we can conclude that they were familiar with these animals. On the other hand, the absence of common words for “cat” and “donkey” – southern animals – help to place them in the north. The tentative dating of the Indo European “Völkerwanderung” as no earlier than 5,500 years ago is based on a common word for ‘wheel’: IE *kwekulos , (a reduplicating, zero grade, thematic stem, derived from the root *kwel/kwol ‘wheel, circle’). This word is found from Tocharian in the east to Old English in the west as well as Sanskrit and Greek in the middle. Since an independent development of this particular form of the root is extremely unlikely, we can conclude that this was the/a common word for ‘wheel’ in Indo European. Since archeologists have discovered no wheels datable before 3,500 B.C., we can conclude that the members of the Indo European family went on their separate ways after this common technological development appeared. This is, of course, very speculative, but nonetheless interesting. The appendix contains a list of Indo European culture words and a map indicating the migration routes of this rather successful tribe. 3.1 The method Of primary importance, is the method we use to reach our conclusions. Consider the following comparative table for the Indo European word for ‘sheep’: 44 Indo-European: owis ‘sheep’ English ewe < awi Latin ovis Greek ois Sanskrit avis Lithuanian avis Given the huge geographic spread of these similar words for ‘sheep’, borrowing would seem to be ruled out – or, if the word was borrowed, it must have been transmitted at a time when the Indo European languages were located in a small geographical area, before the Indo European “Völkerwanderung.” More impressive than the obvious similarities are the patterned differences. That is, in each of the languages, the word for ‘sheep’ developed away from the ancestral word in accordance with the laws of sound change that prevail in the language in question. Thus, Indo European o regularly becomes Germanic a (cf. Latin octo ~ German acht ). The i of the second syllable regularly causes i umlaut. The development to the modern pronunciation of ewe as /ju/ in English parallels the development of new, few. In Greek, w regularly falls out between vowels. In Lithuanian and Sanskrit, o regularly becomes a. Because of the complexity of development, the poverty of historical records and the difficulty of interpreting the records that do exist, comparative linguistics cannot achieve mathematical perfection. What has been demonstrated is a mathematical regularity within the limitations of the available data. 45 Unit 5: The external history of English – an outline 1 Origins of the English language It is quite impossible to understand the a language without at least a thumbnail sketch of its origins and development. More than any other social institution, language carries its history along with it. This social history is reflected in every aspect of the language from its sounds to its social use. In this and the next section we will concentrate on the external history, on the origins of the English language and its spread to the North American continent. 1.1 The Celts The Celts, who in prehistoric times spoke a language closely related to Latin and Ancient Greek, began settling in Britain ca. 600 BC driving the native population to the north. They consolidated their hold on the south and central portions of the island and lived pretty much undisturbed until the arrival of the first Roman legions under Julius Caesar in 55 BC. At first the Celts were able to repel the invaders, but the Romans returned the next summer and defeated the Celts in a number of encounters. Caesar was able to exact a tribute from the Celtic chiefs (which in fact was never paid) and retired to the continent leaving things essentially as they were. 1.2 The Roman colonization The real Roman colonization began under the emperor Claudius in 43 AD. Within three years, the Roman armies were able to establish their hegemony in south and central Britain and ruled this portion of the island for more than three hundred years, building roads, several cities and more than a hundred towns. A good number of place names containing the Latin elements castra ‘camp’ or vicus ‘village' like Lancaster, Cloucester, Worcester, Harwich, and Berwick date from Roman times. By the middle of the fourth century, pressure on the more central areas of the empire forced the Romans to withdraw their legions from Britain. The Roman withdrawal was completed by 410 AD, once again leaving the Celts to their own devices. 1.3 The Germanic invasion As the Romans withdrew, the Celts were subjected to attacks from the Picts and Scots in the north and German sea raiders in the south. According to the earliest historical records, the beleaguered Celts invited in the Jutes, a Germanic tribe, to help fight off the attackers. The Jutes, whose original homeland was probably the north west coast of the Danish peninsula (Jutland), were joined by two neighboring tribes, the Angles, from the south of Jutland, and the Saxons, who probably inhabited the coastal area between the Elbe and the Ems. Starting in 428 (or by another account 449) they conquered most of Britain and drove the Celts into Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. The legend of King Arthur, a Celtic hero who resisted the Germanic invaders, probably dates from this period. 1.4 Anglo-Saxon England These three groups settled in different areas of Britain. The Jutes occupied the extreme south east (Kent), the Saxons the south central area (Wessex, Sussex, Essex) and the Angles the central and northern areas (Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria). In the eighth century they were joined (very much against their will) by Viking raiders who managed to establish themselves on the north east coast. Thus, from the outset English was by no means a unified language, but rather a group of closely related dialects akin to Low German and East and North Frisian on the continent. The 46 marked dialect differences in England today have their roots in the original patterns of settlement. The Scandinavian element made itself felt most strongly in the north where the Vikings settled and is exemplified in dialect poetry like that of Robert Burns. The Skandinavian element turns up first in documents of the Middle English period although it doubtlessly dates back to the the Viking settlement in the ninth century. The reason for the late surfacing of Skandinavian vocabulary is the fact that the Old English literary language was based on West Saxon in the south, outside the Viking sphere of influence. The language of the Scandinavian settlers and their Anglian neighbors was so similar that it is often unclear whether a particular word is "native" or Scandinavian. A sign of Scandinavian origin is the presence of /g/ or /sk / at the beginning of a word where Old English had /j/ and /S/. Thus, give, get, are transmitted in their Scandinavian form although they were present in Old English with initial /j/. Also, skin, skull, scold (Scan. skald 'poet'!). A good number of common words in standard English are of Scandinavian origin. Most prominent are the pronouns they, them, their. There are also a number of interesting word pairs that exist side by side in Scandinavian and English forms with similar, but differentiated meaning like skirt/shirt, dike/ditch, hale/whole, leap/lope. Other important words of Scandinavian origin dating from this period are: take (for OE niman ), sky (for OE hemel ), call, (for OE hétan, cf. heißen ), husband, fellow (for OE ceorl , cf., Kerl ), knife, leg, egg (ME also ey ), window, root (for OE wyrt , cf. Würzel ) sister (OE sweostor ). It is evident that English looked more like German before Scandinavian loan words ousted common West Germanic vocabulary. The intimate character of these borrowings suggests bilingualism without specialization. (Think of a Turkish family that sometimes speaks Turkish at home and sometimes German, rather than reserving each language for its own special purposes.) The transfer of vocabulary was favored by similarity of Anglian and Danish at that time. They were probably mutually comprehensible. A modern parallel might be Dutch and Frisian in the Netherlands. The Celtic element in English is rather small; only two words of ancient heritage are still in common use: ass and bin. Arguably, the most important Celtic word in English whisky < uisge beatha = aqua vitae 'water of life' did not appear until the eighteenth century. To be sure, Celtic place names are well represented and can be recognized by typical elements like: aber ‘mouth of a river’ in Aberdeen; car ‘fortress’ in Cardigan, Carlisle; dun ‘fortified town’ in Dunbar, Dundee; kil ‘church’ in Kilpatrik, etc. The Latin words introduced in the Old English period were brought from the continent by the invaders. They include: street, mile, ancor, devil, dish, wine, sign, wall. Note that most of these are still encountered on the continent: Straße, Meile, Anker, Teufel, Tisch, Wein, Wall. With the Christianization of England (beginning in 563), additional church related terms were introduced. These included: church, bishop, priest, abbot, monk, school. Interestingly, a number of terms were not borrowed, but translated so that OE has hælend, hálga (cf. German Heiland, Heilige ) for modern savior, saint. 1.5 The first literary language The first English literary language, Old English or Anglo Saxon was established under the reign of King Alfred (871 899) and was based on West Saxon. Alfred had the most important works of theology, history and philosophy of his time translated into English from Latin and is even credited with doing some of the translating himself. In addition there is a substantial body of religious and heroic poetry in Old English that has come down to us in West Saxon versions (best known is the epic Beowulf ). Remains of other Old English dialects are rather fragmentary. The following is an excerpt (Matth. 2, 1 4) from the West Saxon Gospels (ca. 1000 AD). 47 It tells the story of the three kings: 1 Eornustlice þá sé Hæland ácenned wæs on Iudeiscre Bethleem, on Þæs cyninges dagum Herrodes, Þá comon Þá tungolwitegan fram éastdæle to Hierusalem, 2 and cwædon, Hwær ys sé Iudea Cyning þe acenned ys? Soðlíce wé gesáwon hys steorran on éastdæle, and we comon ús him to geéadmédenne. 3 Ðá Herodes þæt gehyrde, ðá wearð hé gedréfed and eal Hierosolim waru mid him. 4 And þá gegaderode Herodes ealle ealdras þæra sácerda and folces writeras, and áxode hwær Críst ácenned wære. Here a literal translation into German: 1 Ernstlich, da der Heiland geboren wurde im jüdischen Bethlehem, in des Königs Tagen Herrodes, da kamen da Sternkundige vom Osten zu Jerusalem, 2 und sagten, Wo ist der Jüdenkönig, der geboren ist? Wahrlich, wir sahen seinen Stern im Osten, und wir kommen, (uns) ihn zu hüldigen. 3 Da Herodes das hörte, da wurde er bange und all Jerusalem waren [es] mit ihm. 4 Und da sammelte Herodes alle Eltern des Tempels und Volksschreiber und fragte, wo Christus geboren wäre. In overall appearance, this language bears little resemblance to modern English. Notice that it is highly inflected like modern German. Instead of having one word for “the” there are several in the text: sé, þæs, þæt, þæra. These correspond to German: der, des, das, der (plural). As in German, the verb is placed at the end in subordinate clauses: Hwær ys sé Iudea Cyning þe acenned ys? ‘Wo ist der jüdische König, der geboren ist?’. 1.6 The submergence of English After the Norman Conquest in 1066, English was replaced by Norman French (Old French) as the official language of the realm. This break in the English tradition has left a deep and lasting mark on the English language of today and accounts for its mixed character. This is rather neatly illustrated by comparing the English terms for farm animals and their meat with the German and French terms for the animals: German Animal Meat French Kuh cow beef boeuf Kalb calf veal veau Schwein swine pork porc Lamm lamb mutton mouton As the table shows, the names of the animals in English are of Germanic origin, while the terms for the meat derived from the animals is of French origin. This can be taken to reflect the social structure in Norman England, where the common folk spoke English and tended to the animals while the nobility spoke French and ate the meat. As we shall see, there is a deep split between the Germanic and the foreign (French, Latin, Greek) element in English, which affects not only the vocabulary, but the phonology of English as well. Although the vast majority of people in England continued to speak English, for a period of 48 about three centuries after the Norman Conquest, French was the language of the schools, government, the law courts and the church. In short, most literate activity was conducted in French. Native speakers of English who wanted to “get ahead” had to learn French. Naturally they sent their children to French schools. The social situation could be roughly compared to French dominance in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium up till WWII or the English dominance in French speaking Quebec (Canada) today. In the first century and a half following the Norman conquest, it was, naturally enough, Norman French that was spoken in England. This dialect differed in a number of points from central (Parisian) French, which later became the prestige dialect in France as in England. Writing ca. 1390, Geoffrey Chaucer describes the Prioress (one of the pilgrims in his Canterbury Tales ): “And French she spoke full fair and [elegantly] / After the school of Stratford at Bow [a nunnery in Middlesex] / For French of Paris was to her unknown” [text modernized]. Among the differences between Norman and Parisian French, there are a number worth mentioning. First of all, the treatment of /w/ in Germanic loan words is notable. Norman French retained /w/, while Parisian French (like the other Romance languages) substituted /gw/ > /g/. A number of words were borrowed in both forms: thus we have both warden and guard, also compare German Garderobe, Gage with English wardrobe, wage, English war but French guerre. There also was a difference in the treatment of initial /ka/, /ga/. In Parisian French they shifted to affricates, but in Norman they remained. Thus, we have both cattle and chattle, catch and chase, garden but judge. In modern French the affricates are simplified to fricatives, hence modern chase and juge with / S / and / Z/. 1.7 The re-emergence of English The reestablishment of English as a national language was the result of a number of political and social developments. In the century following the Norman invasion there was considerable intermingling between the English and the Normans. In the Latin Dialogus de Scaccario ‘Dialog on the Exchequer’ written about 1180, the author tells us: The English and the Normans having lived together and given and taken wives from each other, the nations are so intermingled that it is hardly possible today (I am speaking of free men) to determine who is of English and who of Norman origin; except, of course, for the bondsmen, who are called “villani,” and not allowed to depart from the condition of their station if their lords object. [Dialogus de Scaccario ‘Dialog on the Exchequer’ ca. 1180 (probably by Richard of Ely) trans. from Latin text in T.N. Toller Outlines of the History of the English Language (1900:208).] It is interesting here that the author excludes only the “bondsmen” (surfs) – those who attended to the animals. Both the aristocracy and the middle classes of the towns participated in this process of integration. There must have been considerable bilingualism. But, French was en vogue. A century later Robert of Gloucester in his rhyming chronicle of English history (ca. 1300) tells us: Thus came England in to Normandy's hand. And the Normans could not speak but their own speech And speak French as they did at home and their children do so teach. 49 So that the high men of this land that come of her blood, They all hold to the speech that they took from home. Unless a man knows French he is of small repute. But low men hold to English and to their own good speech. I imagine that there are not in all the world countries none That hold to their own speech, except England one. But, as I am well aware, it is well to know both. The more a man knows, the more his worth is. [See Appendix for original text.] That there was some English language patriotism around this time is shown by a speech Edward I held before the clergy in 1295 in which he attempted to rally to support for the war he was fighting for control of Aquitania (west central France). One argument he uses is that the French king, should he prevail (heaven forbid) has vowed to wipe the English language from the face of the earth. These developments are paralleled by historical developments. Normandy was lost to the English crown in 1214, severing traditional economic, political and social ties between England and the Norman homeland on the continent. In 1259, King Henry III was forced to sign a peace agreement that de facto ceded the rest of the English territories in France. Moreover, there was a kind of backlash against French administrators and churchmen led by the English barons and the middle class. In the same year, 1259, the barons forced King Henry III to sign the Provisions of Oxford, guaranteeing certain baronial rights. This document was issued in English (along side French and Latin versions) and was the first public document in English in almost two hundred years. The flood of French words entering the written English language begins around this time. It seems ironic that French vocabulary should enter the English language en masse just at the time that English is reasserting itself over French, but this is really quite normal. As long as English was banished to the barn and French was the language of business there was little contamination. Each language had its separate purpose. When French speakers started switching to English, they took along much of the vocabulary they were accustomed to as a matter of convenience. If we compare the passages in the Bible from Old and Middle English (see below), we can see that perfectly serviceable words like tungolwitigan and leorningcnihtas are replaced with astronomyenes ‘astronomers’ and disciplis ‘disciples’. Using foreign words becomes fashionable as in TV talk shows of today. The schools also played an important role. In his Polychronicon , a history of the world from the creation to 1352 written in Latin, the monk Ranulph Higden complains: The corruption of the birth tongue is because of two things. One is [that] children in school, against the usage and manner of all other nations, are compelled . . . to leave their own language and to construe [translate] their lessons and their things in French and have since the Normans came to England. And gentlemen’s children are taught to speak French from the time they are rocked in the cradle . . . . and rustic men wish to liken themselves to gentlemen and make great efforts to speak French so as to be more highly spoken of. But, some thirty years later, in an English translation of Higden’s work, the translator, John Trevisa, comments: 50 Now in the year of our Lord thousand, three hundred, four score and five [1385] . . . children in all the grammar schools of English are leaving French and construing and learning in English (modernized spelling). Trevisa sees this as a mixed blessing: one the one hand it is easier to learn when using ones own language as the language of instruction in school, on the other, children are no longer learning French, which can be quite useful when traveling in “strange lands.” Even gentlemen, he remarks, are having difficulty teaching their children French. In 1362, the King opened Parliament with a speech in English. In the same year, a law was passed making English the official language of the law courts (although records were to be kept in Latin). The final separation of the two nations and the two languages was settled in a series of conflicts known as the Hundred Year's War (1337 1453). During this period French was clearly the language of the enemy and English gained in prestige. The dramatic change in the English literary language can be illustrated by comparing the same passage from the Bible in John Wycliff’s version (1388) with the West Saxon Gospel version given earlier: 1 Therfor whanne Jhesus was borun in Bethleem of Juda, in the daies of king Eroude, lo! astromyenes camen fro the eest to Jerusalem, 2 and seiden, Where is he, that is borun king of Jewis? for we han seyn his sterre in the eest, and we comen to worshipe him. 3 But king Eroude herde, and was trublid, and al Jerusalem with hym. 4 And he gaderide to gidre alle the prynces of prestis, and scribis of the puple, and enqueride of hem, where Crist shulde be borun. Except for the strange spelling, this is the English we all know and love. To be sure, the pronunciation is radically different from modern English, but the text offers no difficulties if read off word for word in modern English. The only archaic feature is the use of hem for modern them. As pointed out before, them was introduced by the Viking raiders, but did not supplant the native hem in London English until much later. This massive infusion of French words in the prestige dialect (astronomers, worship, troubled, princes, priests, scribes, people, inquire ) just to list those from the short passage above, opened the flood gates for the major invasion of foreign words to come later. 1.8 The London standard The new literary standard that arose around the turn of the fourteenth century is best known through the works of Chaucer. It bears little resemblance to King Alfred's Old English. Although the structure of the language is basically English, nearly half of the content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are of French origin. The fact that these words were pronounced more or less as in French had profound consequences for English phonology. A second marked difference is one of dialect. While Alfred's Old English was based on West Saxon, the new standard took the London dialect as its point of departure. There were two basic reasons for this development. First of all, London was the seat of government and the social and commercial center of England. This alone might have sufficed to establish its hegemony, but another factor was also very influential. The London dialect was by virtue of its geographic location well suited as a standard. The Southeast Midlands area occupied an intermediate position between northern and southern regions. Speakers of both regions could understand 51 speakers of the central East Saxon dialect better than they could understand each other. Another factor worth mentioning is the introduction of printing. William Caxton established his press in London in 1476 and issued numerous books in the South Midlands dialect, which helped to establish it as a literary standard. By the time Caxton started printing, the major changes in the pronunciation of English that separate Middle English from Modern English were well underway. Caxton chose, however, to adopt the traditional spelling of the scribes (reflecting the pronunciation of a century earlier) rather than adopting an orthography based on how English was actually pronounced at the time. This tradition has been maintained up to the present day. English is still spelled more or less the way it was pronounced in the year 1400! It must not be thought that the new London standard (exemplified by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ca. 1400) was the language of all Englishmen. It started out as the language of the court, government and educated elite. Even a century after Chaucer, Caxton prefaces his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1490) with the statement that it “is not for a rude uplandish man to labor therein, nor read it, but only for a clerk and a noble gentleman” (modernized spelling). 1.9 The Renaissance In the two centuries that followed, the revival of interest in learning and the new possibilities for disseminating knowledge opened up by the printing press led to a veritable flood of books in English, including hundreds of translations of Greek and Latin works on history, politics, science and philosophy as well as the standard works of classical literature. Although great weight was placed on issuing these (and many original works) in the vernacular, it was considered fashionable, more elegant or perhaps just easier to import Latin and Greek vocabulary for the new technical and philosophical terminology required, rather than attempting to invent native English equivalents. (A similar phenomenon can be observed today in modern German, where thousands of Latin and Greek words began to flow into the language, via English, after the Second World War.) As a result, large numbers of learned (Greek and Latin) words entered the English language affecting not only the vocabulary, but the phonology of English as well since the rules of Latin pronunciation (in modified form) were borrowed along with the words themselves. The different pronunciations of the letter c in electric, electricity, electrician as well as the shift stress from the second syllable in electric to the third syllable in electricity and electrician are due to the Latin pronunciation of these words, which are ultimately derived from Greek elektron ‘amber’. The pronunciation of the learned vocabulary is the result of a complex fusion between native English, Old French and Renaissance Latin rules of phonology. It is also worth noting that the first English dictionaries, published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were dictionaries of “hard words” not unlike the Duden Fremdwörterbuch. In his Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Thomas Wilson complains: “poor simple men are much troubled, and talk oftentimes they know not what for lack of wit, and want of Latin and French, whereof many of our strange [foreign] words full often are derived.” The author of the Arte of Poesie (1589), presumably one George Puttenham, raises the same concerns: We find in our English writers many words and speeches amendable; and [you] shall see in some many “inkhorn” [pedantic] terms so ill affected, brought in by men of learning, as preachers and schoolmasters and merchants and travelers, and many dark words, and not usual nor well sounding, though they be daily spoken in court” [spelling modernized]. 52 Words like cecit y ‘blindness’, facinorous ‘infamous’, ludibund ‘playful’ and immanity ‘monstrosity’ have, of course, not made the cut and are not to be found among the 165,000 entries in the eleventh edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , but countless others introduced at this time have become part of our normal learned vocabulary. Despite his critique of the rhetoric of the court, Puttenham later recommends: [You] shall therefore take the usual speech of the shires [districts] lying about London within lx [60] miles and not much above. I say not this but that in every shire of England there be gentlemen and others that speak but specially write as good southern as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not the common people of every shire” [spelling modernized]. From these passages, we can conclude that “Standard English” was a literary language, based on the language of the court and the spoken language of London and environs and that it was spread though the influence of “gentlemen” and others who had cause to be fluent in it. Gradually this London upperclass standard spoken by the landed gentry from all over the country, who spent their winters in London and educated their children with tutors who spoke the prestige London dialect, gained precedence. For comparison, we cite the same passage from the Christmas story in William Tyndale’s translation of 1526: 1 When Iesus was borne at Bethleem in Iury in the tyme of Herode the kynge. Beholde there came wyse me from the eest to Ierusalem 2 saynge: Where is he yt [that] is borne kynge of ye [the] Iues? We have sene his starre in ye [the] eest and are come to worship him. 3 When Herode ye [the] kynge had herde thys he was troubled and all Ierusalem with hym. 4 and he gathered all ye [the] chefe Prestes and Scribes of the people and axed of them where Christ shulde be borne. (Matthiew 2,2) For all intents and purposes, this is the modern English we all know and love. Except for some peculiar spelling ( Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament (1526) is the first “modern” translation of the Bible into English as it is based on Erasmus’ critical edition of original Greek text (1522), rather than on the Latin Vulgate. Tyndale follows the lead of Martin Luther (with whom he was in contact) in providing a vigorous, idiomatic translation, avoiding the frequent Latinisms of earlier translations. Tyndale did not live to finish his translation. He was burned at the stake for protestant heresy in 1536. Ironically, King James’s “Authorized” translation of 1611 is based on Tyndale. See Appendix for another text comparison. 1.10 Dissociation in the vocabulary An important effect of the foreign onslaught on the vocabulary of English is the phenomenon of “dissociation,” which makes English far more difficult to learn than other European languages. Dissociation simply means that different parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) are not derived from the same root. Compare the following noun adjective pairs: 53 Noun Adjective house, home domestic death mortal hand manual year annual God divine sun solar In the same spirit, we also find a dissociation between so called nominal and verbal style. In spoken English we tend to use Germanic vocabulary whereas in written, formal English Latinate vocabulary is required. Consider the following: Germanic Latin Verb turn down reject Noun rejection Unlike German, where we have a transparent relationship between ablehnen ~ Ablehnung, English relates turn down to rejection. This unfortunate tendency makes English rather undemocratic one needs far more education to master the literary language in English than is the case in German. “Vorsicht Feuergefahr” is somehow more to the point than “Caution Inflammable.” 1.11 Codification of the Received Standard English Although the South Midlands standard emerged at the beginning of the fifteenth century, it wasn't until the eighteenth century that the spelling, grammar and pronunciation of English underwent standardization. We can mention three basic reasons for this development. First of all, the eighteenth century was The Age of Reason. Orderliness and regularity was on the intellectual agenda. The recognition of the fact that there are "laws of nature" underlying the apparent chaos of the universe gave impetus to the search for "laws" of grammar, orthography and pronunciation. If it was possible to precisely characterize the way the moon circled the earth, it must be possible to characterize the way English is or should be spoken. Secondly, it may be argued that standardization at least in orthography had become a dire necessity. Since English is not a language that is easily or consistently spelled the way it sounds (cf. the examples in the previous sections) and language change had removed the spoken language considerably from traditional orthography, spelling had become thoroughly chaotic. People even spelled their own names different ways on different occasions! Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) put an end to this state of affairs and correct (i.e., normalized, consistent) spelling was soon established as the mark of an educated person. 54 Samuel Johnson’s dictionary is a most extraordinary intellectual accomplishment. It includes some forty thousand definitions buttressed by more than a hundred thousand quotations. He compiled it on commission from British publishers with only six secretarial assistants over a period of just nine years. Thirdly, deep going social and economic changes affected England at this time. The rise of the new, monied mercantile and industrial classes threatened the traditional status of the landed gentry. Since the nouveaux riches could acquire all the status symbols money could buy servants, houses, furniture, etc. the old aristocracy was forced to fall back on intangibles like its prestige dialect, in order to maintain its continuity. This led to flurries of activity on both sides of the class line – some attempting to maintain the aristocratic prestige standard, others attempting to teach it a middle class, determined to rise in the world. The most influential grammars were Bishop Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) and Lindley Murray’s English Grammar (1795). Lowth, who was the Bishop of London, does not, oddly enough, base his grammatical judgments on the usage of the best authors, but rather on what he feels to be right or wrong and does not hesitate to criticize some of the most respected authors of his day. Murray, an American merchant, who retired to England after backing the losing side in the American Revolution, takes a more realistic view of grammar as based on usage. His grammar had sold 1 million copies in the United States by 1850. Toward the end of the century John Walker published his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), which enjoyed great popularity. The prestige dialect (or more accurately sociolect), often called Received Standard English (RSE), became fixed as the speech of the upper class during the nineteenth century. The importance of being "well spoken" for those who are eager for social advancement was satirized in G.B. Shaw's play Pygmalian (1913) better known in the musical comedy version My Fair Lady . The argument of the play goes as follows: Prof. Henry Higgins (patterned on Henry Sweet, a pioneer in phonetics research at the end of the nineteenth century) brags to a new acquaintance (Col. Pickering) that he can earn “quite a fat” living from instructing the nouveaux riches in RSE. He explains: This is an age of upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with 80 pounds a year, and end in Park Lane with a hundred thousand. They want to drop Kentish Town; but they give themselves away every time they open their mouths. Eliza has a similar problem – if not accompanied by a similar income. In Act II, she visits Higgins and explains her problem: I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of selling at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. But they won't take me unless I can talk more genteel. The difficulty is clear enough. Ladies buy flowers in flower shops, not on the street. They expect the people that serve them to speak “genteel” (RSE) English as they do. Hence, if you want to get off the street and into the shop, you have to “clean up your act.” A similar phenomenon can be observed in small shops in Munich. The personnel tend to regulate their speech from the broadest Bavarian to the variety used by the Bavarian Radio – depending on the variety of German spoken by the customer. The problem is not what you speak, but what you can speak – adjusting to the proper circumstances. 55 1.12 The modern period After the advent of the radio, RSE was widely disseminated as "BBC English" since the British Broadcasting Corporation recommended this form of nonregional pronunciation for its news readers. This form of educated Southern British English is the one most widely described in books on English phonetics and the one generally taught to foreigners. When we loosely refer to British English (BE) in this outline, we mean RSE although the phenomena discussed for the most part characterize many other varieties of British English as well. In recent years, RSE has been on the decline, perhaps because many people felt it to be a "posh" or snobbish and associated it with unwarranted social privilege. Some authorities believe that a new standard is arising once again based on the colloquial speech of London. 1.13 Other varieties of English Most of the other varieties of English spoken as a native language in the world today are based on nineteenth century British English. These include Australian, New Zealand and South African English. North American English (USA and Canada) does not follow the modern British standard. There is ample evidence to indicate that North American English is derived from an earlier common British American standard that was established by the middle of the eighteenth century. Speakers of the British prestige dialect who visited the American colonies between 1770 and 1800 report that the Americans as a whole spoke better, “purer” English then the English did. They found a perfect uniformity of speech and an absence of dialect in the thirteen colonies. This impression does not change until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when complaints about the “barbarism” of American English begin to make themselves heard. More important than these subjective impressions is the scientific evidence. Consider the pronunciation of historically short u as in bush and cut . Originally, this vowel was / U/ as in bush. In the seventeenth century, this vowel migrated toward a central vowel and ended up as / √/ as in cut . This change started in London and spread throughout England. It did not, however, cover the entire country, which accounts for the mixed pronunciation of original short u the modern language. The prestige standard mostly adopted the new pronunciation, but sometimes borrowed the original dialect form. In America, the pronunciation of short u exactly conforms to the mixed forms of the British standard (RSE). This indicates a common basis, from which later divergence proceeded. An additional piece of evidence is Elisa Doolittle’s problem ( My Fair Lady ). In order to master RSE, she had to repeat the sentence The rain in Spain falls mostly on the plain. In America, not even the most underprivileged flower girl has this problem as the vowels in rain, Spain, plain are pronounced / eI/ in all varieties of American English just as in RSE. This once again indicates the existence of a common standard from which the two varieties American Network English and British RSE are derived. 2 The problem of “style” A sufficient supply of words (whether borrowed or constructed from native stock), a standardized grammar and rules of spelling and punctuation do not alone a literary language make. There is the elusive element of “style” that must be considered – style: the art of putting words together in an appropriate and pleasing fashion. Authors in English had to deal with this problem from the outset. King Alfred, for instance, explains in the preface to his translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care how he went about his task. He first consulted with clerics who helped him understand the sense of the original Latin and 56 then: “After I had learned it, as I understood it, and as I could most intelligibly explain it, I turned it into English” (Toller [1900:153, ft.3]). One can hardly imagine a more sensible approach to translation. The difficulty arises, however, when there are no established literary standards for the target language (here Anglo Saxon). I f you use the target language mostly for discussing the weather, battle plans or what to have for lunch, there is no established canon as to what a noble, literary text should look like. The earliest Germanic Bible translation (Wulfila’s translation into Gothic, ca. 350 AD) simply avoided the problem by translating word for word from the Greek text insofar as possible.) In the sixteenth century, Tyndale in English and Luther in German made a bold attempt to adapt the living language to their task while maintaining the necessary dignity worthy of a sacred text. What other varieties of text should look like, was, of course, anybody’s guess. To get a feeling for this problem, imagine, if you will, a hypothetical situation in which Bavaria decides to sever dependency on “Standard German” and strike out on its own. From now on, radio, television, newspapers, school instruction, etc., in Bavaria will only be offered in Bavarian. How could this project be managed? Understandably, literary languages take sometime to find their “voice.” They are often influenced by foreign models and, of course, reserve different voices for different types of literature. Here, we will confine ourselves to some brief remarks about expository prose (writing meant to convey information) since this is the only sort of English writing the reader is personally likely to need. 2.1 National style The greatest problem for foreign producers of English text is not vocabulary or even grammar – but style. The author’s own editorial experience over the years has included much looking through of scholarly papers for German colleagues. All too often, after fixing a few minor errors of grammar and punctuation, he has found himself confronted with an essay in formally “correct” English, which was, however, impossible to read! Objections that the article would most likely end up on the editorial rejection pile, were usually of no avail. The German author wanted to say what he had to say – understanding the text was the reader’s problem. German readers seem to accept this proposition. What they do not understand, they consider profound – perhaps “out of their depth.” The Anglo American reader reacts in just the opposite fashion: If the author cannot express himself clearly, then he probably has no important thoughts to convey. Fuzzy writing indicates fuzzy thinking. “Obscurantism,” deliberately making things hard to see, suggests that there is nothing to see. And, in any case, who has the time to waste on someone who can’t say what he means? 2.2 Origins of the Anglo-American style The basic elements of Anglo American style: clarity, succinctness, concreteness (reliance on examples to show what is meant) and illustration through personal experience were established in England during the Restoration, that is the restoration of the British monarchy (in 1660) after the fall of the Puritan Commonwealth. The most important figures involved were John Dryden (1631 1700), best known as a poet; Joseph Addison (1672 1719) and Richard Steele (1672 1729), boyhood friends who are best known for their collaboration on two early periodicals: The Tatler and The Spectator, which were aimed at entertainment and witty social criticism, and the incomparable Jonathan Swift (1667 1745), perhaps the greatest satirist and political pam 57 phleteer of all times. His anonymous political pamphlets “The Drapier Letters,” in which he presents the objections of a simple draper (cloth merchant) to the imposition of bad English money on Ireland, nearly fomented a revolution, but Swift is best remembered for his Gulliver’s Travels , which lives on largely as children’s book. As an example of the bitter social satire in Gulliver , much beyond the reach of children and strikingly modern in content (at least for those acquainted with the modern academy), consider the following passage from Gulliver’s visit to the Academy of Lagado: The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me “to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.” I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them. 2.3 Influence of the English essayists An excellent example of the influence of the English essayists and their style is provided by America’s first “great writer”: Benjamin Franklin (1706 1790). In his Autobiography , Ame rica’s first great book, Franklin tells us how he learned to write. Franklin had entered into a dispute with a friend about “the propriety of educating the female sex in learning” (Franklin was for it). They engaged in a written debate on the subject: Three or four letters of a side had passed, when my father happened to find my papers and read them. Without entering into the discussion, he took occasion to talk to me about the manner of my writing; observed that, though I had the advantage of my antagonist in correct spelling and pointing [punctuation] (which I ow'd to the printing house) [Franklin was a printer’s apprentice at this time], I fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity [‘clarity’], of which he convinced me by several instances. I saw the justice of his remark, and thence grew more attentive to the manner in writing, and determined to endeavor at improvement. About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator [Addison and Steele’s periodical mentioned above]. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my “Spectator” with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. This is certainly not bad advice for the modern student, who might take The New York Times Magazine or News Week as a model. 58 Unit 6: The chaos of English spelling 1 The origins of writing The most primitive form of writing is a drawing. From earliest times, people have used simple drawings to communicate a message. A smoking cigarette enclosed in a circle with a line through it is almost universally understood as an indication that smoking is not allowed. In the same manner, in Mesopotamia six thousand years ago, simple drawings were used to indicate the contents of vessels or to catalog inventories of goods. These language independent signs are not writing as we generally understand it. The smoking cigarette sign can be verbalized as “No Smoking,” “Rauchen Verboten,” or “Défense de Fumer.” The sign gives no indication of the language spoken by those who are supposed to interpret it. In the terminology introduced by Charles S. Pearce in the nineteenth century, such drawings are “icons,” signs that bear a physical resemblance to the concepts they represent. Until English finally conquers the world, they will continue to do service to humankind. In Pearce’s system, “symbols” display a higher level of abstraction. Symbols are related to their referents purely by convention. Consider the up and down motion of the head for “yes.” If the meaning of such symbols is lost in the course of history, interpreting them is extremely difficult. Writing, as we understand it, first arises when the writer goes beyond icons and symbols and attempts to represent speech sounds. 2 Sounds and Sumerians Fortunately, enough of the historical record is intact so that we can reconstruct the quantum leap between symbolic writing and the transcription of sounds. It should be clear that iconic writing can only be effective if an object can be directly represented by a sign. For example, if we wish to represent a physical object like an arrow, nothing could be simpler: ¼. If, on the other hand, we have to represent an abstract concept such as ‘life’ matters become more difficult. Around 3100 BC, it occurred to a Sumerian scribe that the Sumerian words for ‘life’ and ‘arrow’ sound the same: /ti/. He hit upon the idea of using the symbol for ‘arrow’ to represent the word ‘life’. To be sure, the meaning was clear in context. He was searching for a way to represent the name of the god Entil ti ‘Entil the life giver’. In this context, /ti/ clearly meant ‘life’ rather than ‘arrow’. Proper names presented a similar problem. There was a sign for the concept CITY, but how could one distinguish between cities? In order to write the name of the city Girsu, the scribe combined the signs for the concept KNIFE /gir/ and MEAT /su/. The result had nothing to do with knives or meat. The scribe had adapted the icons to write the sound sequence /girsu/ as if we were to write the German word Urlaub with a sign meaning ‘clock’ followed by a sign depicting a leaf: UHR + LAUB. To clarify the meaning, a system of classifiers was introduced. Thus, the city name Girsu was written with the symbol for CITY followed by the symbols for KNIFE and MEAT. The classifier CITY indicated that what followed was the name of a city. The symbols for KNIFE and MEAT were interpreted phonetically as /gir + su/. 3 Syllabaries and alphabets The next important step in the development of writing was taken by the Semitic tribes which were in close geographical contact with the Egyptians (e.g., the Hebrews). The Egyptian hieroglyphic script developed parallel to the Sumerian script at about the same time. The earliest 59 examples are dated around 3500 BC. Like the Sumerians, the Egyptians developed a rather complicated writing system with classifiers, ideograms (sign standing for concepts) and phonetic symbols. The odd thing about the Egyptian system is that no attempt was made to represent the vowels. Thus, words like ‘four’ fdw and ‘good’ nfr are recorded, but not being ancient Egyptians, we can at best make educated guesses about how they were pronounced. This rather odd procedure was well suited to the structure of the Egyptian language, which, like its Semitic neighbors, constructed words from roots consisting of three consonants. To demonstrate how this works, we can take an example from Modern Hebrew: katala ‘he killed’ kutila ‘he was killed’ katlun ‘killing’ The basic consonantal skeleton remains the same: ktl, the differing vowel forms can be supplied from context as in the following English sentence: y shld be bl t rd ths sntc. Indeed, in Modern Hebrew this sort of consonant writing is still in use despite the availability of a system of pointing (diacritics) that can be used to indicate the vowels. In Sumerian and the languages that adopted the Sumerian script, separate symbols were used to indicate consonant plus vowel (ba ), vowel plus consonant (ab ) and consonant plus vowel plus consonant (bat ). For those of us who are used to an alphabetic script, this seems overly complicated. For a language with 20 consonants and 5 vowels, 100 different symbols would be necessary just to represent the consonant plus vowel combinations, where an alphabetic script would require only 25. An additional problem is posed by languages with frequent consonant clusters. Imagine trying to write a word like strict without separate consonant symbols. Nevertheless, syllabaries are found through out the world and not just in ancient times. In 1821 the Cherokee Indian Sequoya devised a syllabary of 85 symbols for his language. Most of the symbols are derived from the Latin letters although they have a completely different value: H = /mi/, M = /lu/, etc. The inspiration certainly came from the English alphabet, but the principle was syllabic. The reason for the constant reinvention of syllabic writing is two fold. First, as pointed out above, it is quite well suited to some languages. Second, it reflects an important characteristic of acoustic phonetics. The stop sounds /p,t,k,b,d,g/, which are an important part of the inventory of sounds of virtually every language, have no existence without a following vowel. If you record /ti/ and shave off the vowel /i/, you will find that the /t/ disappears as well when the /i/ has been removed. Hence, sounds like /ti/, /ta/, /to/ really exist, while /t/ does not it is simply an abstraction. 4 The alphabet Our familiar alphabet is ultimately derived from the Semitic alphabets devised some three thousand years ago. There seems little doubt that the Semites learned the principle of writing (without vowels) from the Egyptians. Interestingly enough, they did not borrow the Egyptian consonant symbols or the complex system of ideograms, determiners and phonetic symbols, but constructed a minimal system consisting of consonant symbols (syllables without vowels) based 60 on Semitic words. Thus, the first symbol of the “alphabet,” Alef means ‘ox’ and looks like an ox’s head in the earliest versions of the Semitic script. Even today, if we turn a capital “A” on its head (œ) we can see the ox, horns and all. Similarly, Daleth means ‘door’ and represents the triangular opening of a tent (cf. Greek ). The letter Shin ( :) resembles a molar and the word shin means ‘tooth’. Unburdened with a long tradition of writing, the Semites simply adopted and adapted the best from their neighbors. The honor of inventing the alphabet as we know it belongs, however, to the Greeks. Around 750 BC, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician version of the Semitic alphabet. In contrast to the Semitic languages, Greek was not at all suited to a consonant syllabary without vowels. A word like akousomai ‘I will hear’, if reduced to consonants, would yield ksm , which would be difficult to interpret – even in context. Earlier the Greeks in the Minoan civilization located in Crete (ca. 1500 BC) had used a crude syllabary (Linear B) to keep records. This form of writing was highly unsatisfactory as there was no way to represent consonant clusters or final consonants. A word like tripos ‘tripod’ was written as ti ri po. Laburinthos ‘labyrinth’ comes out: da pu ri to. Now, (ca. 800 BC) the Greeks hit upon an ingenious solution. They borrowed their writing system from the Phoenicians (a Semitic seafaring and trading people living in North Africa). The Phoenician language had more consonants than Greek so that a few letters were left over after all the Greek consonants were accounted for. The extra letters were simply recycled as vowel symbols. Thus Phoenician Aleph (originally some sort of glottal consonant) became Greek Alpha (α). Phoenician Ayin ‘eye’ (also a glottal consonant) became Omicron (ο). The Greeks passed their alphabet on to the Etruscans – a people of unknown origin living in central Italy (modern Tusany). Etruscan apparently did not make the contrast between voiced and voiceless stops /p,t,k/ vs. /b,d,g/. Hence, the Etruscans dispensed with Beta (Β) and Delta ( ). Strangely enough, however, they used all three available Greek letters for velar stops, depending on the following vowel: Γ+ e,i; Κ + a; û + u. The Romans did away with K (or perhaps they borrowed the alphabet from Etruscans who had already done away with this letter, which was superfluous in Etruscan). They maintained û before /u/, which explains why 61 theology, chemistry. In Modern Greek, the voiceless aspirates became voiceless fricatives. And the words were borrowed in this form during the Renaissance. English has maintained /f/ and /T/ since these are native sounds. For 5 Writing among the Germanic tribes The earliest Germanic writing dates back to ca. 250 AD and takes the form of inscriptions. The content of the inscriptions has only been preserved in fragmentary form and is mostly uninteresting. The oldest complete sentence in any Germanic language, dating from ca. 400 AD reads: dagaR þar runo faihido ‘(I) Dag painted these signs’. Not much different from the inscriptions left by modern tourists. The word runo refers to the Runic alphabet which seems to derive from the Etruscan alphabet and was known to all the Germanic tribes. The word rune means ‘secret’ (cf. German raunen ). Below is a reconstruction of the original runic alphabet: The modern literary tradition starts with the Christianization of the Germanic tribes in the eighth and ninth centuries and the introduction of Latin as “the world language.” The handful of people who could read and write, mostly monks, read and wrote Latin. The vernacular (common language of the people) was only spoken, not written. The introduction to writing English took place via glosses (translations of difficult words in Latin manuscripts). The monks’ practice of writing the English equivalents of Latin words between the lines or in the margins of Latin manuscripts is no different than the modern practice of children who write German translations into English texts they have to read in school. Later this practice was extended to give word for word translations of important texts. This, by the way, is the reason that the German “Vater Unser” is not the more natural sounding “Unser Vater.” The phrase results from a literal translation of the Latin prayer, which begins: “Pater noster.” King Alfred’s project to make English (Anglo Saxon) a full blown literary language has been mentioned above. For the monks, who primarily read and wrote Latin, it was natural enough to use the Roman alphabet to write English, where required. Unfortunately, the Latin alphabet was not up to the task since Old English had a number of sounds that did not occur in Late Latin. One of these was /w/. On the continent, the symbol for the vowel /u/ was used and doubled to indicate the glide, i.e., uu or vv. Hence, the name “double u.” Old English, however, fell back on the runic alphabet and borrowed the letter “win” <Þ>. 62 Similarly, the Latin alphabet had no symbol for the dental fricatives / T/ and /D/. The runic letters þ and ð were added for this purpose. Finally, the vowels /æ/ and /y/ (German ü) were added, using the runic letter æ and Greek y (upsilon). After unrounding took place (ca. 1000 AD), y was also used for i yielding historical spellings like kyng for modern king, where the y was originally a front rounded vowel (cf. German König ), but now pronounced as in Modern English and ahistorical spellings like hys for his , where no front rounded vowel ever occurred. In other words, after unrounding there were two letters y,i and one sound /i/. The letters were then used interchangeably (whatever looked nicer). Later, y came to be used for the glide /j/ and i for the vowel sound. There are numerous problems of Old English spelling that will probably never be decided with certainty due to lack of evidence. We will mention just one here in passing – the problem of the so called short diphthongs. In Anglo Saxon the word young was written 6 Norman spellings With the Norman conquest, the English “literate class” was joined by a dominant Norman French speaking element. The Norman scribes revised the old traditions and contributed a number of elements that have survived to the present day. The dental fricative written as <Þ> or <ð> was replaced by 7 The phonemic principle The phonemic principle is essential for the understanding of spelling systems. In order to elucidate this principle, let us take an example form Modern German. Consider the pronunciation 63 of the pairs: Buch ~ Bücher, Dach ~ Dächer, Loch ~ Löcher. In each case, the first word of the pair is pronounced with the 8 The conservatism of writing systems If we consider human language to be a characteristic of our species homo sapiens sapiens, as seems likely, then humans have been speaking for some sixty thousand years or more. The oldest versions of writing we have uncovered to date are, however, no more than five thousand five 64 hundred years old. Writing is clearly a secondary development and, as we have seen, true writing is based on an attempt to represent the sounds of language rather than the underlying concepts (even largely ideographic writing systems as employed in Chinese and Japanese, for example, have a phonetic component). Why then do traditional writing systems (particularly English) provide such a poor representation of the sounds of the language? Here we will consider three components of this problem: (1) Reading and writing as a privilege. (2) Resistance to change on the part of the literate (3) The difficulties arising from the structure of the language. 8.1 Reading and writing as a privilege The ancient Egyptians could have adequately written their language with just 24 hieroglyphs, representing the consonantal sounds. Yet, several thousand hieroglyphs are recorded and more than six hundred were in common use. Why clutter the system with hundreds of unnecessary symbols while avoiding the logical step of representing the vowels? One answer is “tradition” or perhaps better – junk left over from an earlier stage of writing (ideograms, classifiers, etc.). This, however, does not explain why the junk was not cast overboard. The answer to this question is most likely the desire to maintain privilege. Just as nowadays “computer literacy” is far from universal and commands its price, reading and writing were then rare skills and commanded privilege. If everyone were able to deal adequately with computers, there would no need for highly paid experts. Similarly, if everyone in ancient Egypt had been able to read and write, the priests would have had no special skill to justify their position. Hence, they had little interest in simplifying and improving the Egyptian writing system. Rather, they had a vested interest in maintaining the secret art for themselves, initiating only a chosen handful to continue the tradition. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the most recent hieroglyphic inscription that has come to light is dated 384 AD. After that time, the advance of Christianity displaced the old religion and its priests. The “old orthography” fell into disuse and was forgotten. A new (and far more practical) system using a modified form of the Greek alphabet took its place. Another instructive example comes from Modern Greek, which has five different ways of spelling the sound /i/. How did this condition arise? In just the same way as the multiple spellings of /Œ’ / in English bird, word, nurse, herd, earth, etc. Sounds (we can now call them phonemes) that were once distinct fell together, but the old spellings were retained. How so? Without totally discounting motives like “tradition,” and “respect for the past,” retention of privilege certainly was important. Those who could afford to attend school for many years and learn the useless distinctions in spelling were able to separate themselves from the great unwashed mass with little formal education and no time to learn five ways to spell a single sound. As Henry Sweet put it in 1891: But as the sounds of the language [in the modern period– R.B.] went on changing with even greater rapidity than before, the difficulty of mastering the traditional spelling has increased year by year; so that although a knowledge of the standard orthography is the main test of education and refinement, few even of the upper classes have a perfect mastery of it [ New English Grammar, p. 269]. 8.2 Resistance to change on the part of the literate A related, but less self serving reason for resisting orthographic change is the desire to avoid relearning. This is making itself particularly felt at present in Germany, where the “new 65 orthography” has few friends among the literate. Outspoken opponents emphasize the shortcomings of the new proposal (and there certainly are some). For the average man and woman on the street, the matter is much simpler: Who wants to learn a new set of spelling conventions? You suffered through that in the sixth grade. Why learn a bunch of arbitrary new rules that (for the most part) aren’t any better than those you use now? (Answer: Because you will have to teach the new rules to your children. ) Another source of resistance to orthographic change has to do with the nature of reading. Sounding out words letter for letter plays an important role in learning to read, but is superfluous thereafter. As adults, we do not read letter for letter, but capture words as complete pictures. Thus, it would be perfectly reasonable from the phonemic point of view to eliminate the “Vogel V” and replace it by 8.3 The difficulties arising from the structure of the language The correspondence between sound and sign in English is particularly worrisome. George Bernard Shaw, the author of Pygmalion (1913), the play on which My Fair Lady was based, once remarked that the word fish could be spelled ghoti . That is, 66 of sync. The word feed looks like it should be pronounced / feId /, but in fact it is pronounced /fid /. On the other hand, the short e in fed is pronounced / E/ as expected. The following chart illustrates the problem: Letter Long Short Examples i aI I divine, divinity e i E obscene, obscenity a eI Q nation, national o oU, u ç, A nose, lose, lost, not The details of the changes that produced this condition are complex. In what follows we will confine ourselves to those details that help us achieve our declared goal: explaining the chaos of modern English spelling. 8.4 Middle English vowel system Let us take as our starting point, a somewhat idealized picture of the Middle English vowel system, presented in the following chart: i˘ I u˘ U e˘ o˘ E˘ E ´ ç˘ ç a˘ a A The vowels with the symbol /˘/ are long vowels in Middle English. The correlation with modern English spelling is quite good, as we can see from the following table: i˘ bite u˘ house I bit U cup e˘ green o˘ boot E set ç˘ boat E˘ death ç not a˘ bathe A all a cat ´ smok e 67 This table requires some comment: 1. The sound 2. The sound 3. The back vowel / A/ occurs before /l/ (remember a back sound in English). Later the /l/ caused the rounding of / A/ to /ç/ finally and before /t,d,s/, e.g., all, alternate, alderman, also. Otherwise, the vowel was fronted to /Q/ as in Alps, Albert, Alfred, Alvarez, alcohol, algebra, allophone. Before /m/ it remained, usually with the loss of the following /l/ as in alms. 4. The spelling 5. The silent e in smoke, bite were actually pronounced in ME. On the other hand, the silent e in house is “ahistorical,” that is, it was never pronounced. It is just there to indicate that the s belongs to the stem of the word and is not the genitive ending. The main lines of development that account for modern English spelling involve seven simple historical changes : 1. The Great Vowel Shift, which shifted the long vowels while leaving the short vowels in place. 2. The Third Syllable Shortening Rule, which shortened the long vowel in words like obscēne in derivatives like obscenity, where the long vowel was followed by two short vowels. 3. The open syllable lengthening rule that lengthened vowels followed by a single consonant and another vowel in two syllable words: OE sm 4ca > ME smōke. 4. The shortening of vowels before a double consonant (cf. lose ~ lost ). 5 The vocalization of Old English /g/ as in bow, day . 6. The smoothing of /aI / to /a˘ /, making the vowels of maid and made identical (both are shifted to /eI / in the modern language). The smoothing of / çU/ to /ç˘ / as in know, grow, with raising by the Great Vowel Shift. Finally, the smoothing of / aU / to / ç˘ / accounting for the pronunciation of law, cause. 7. The centering of short u, accounting for the pronunciation of cup, but. These changes are summarized in the Appendix. Here we will consider them in a bit more detail. 8.4.1 The Great Vowel Shift The cataclysmic change in the English vowel system called “The Great Vowel Shift” started in central England around the year 1400. The outlying areas were not and still are not affected. This is the origin of the vast dialect differences in British English. American English is based 68 on the British standard and hence American dialects do not reflect this historic development. Most of the other changes to be considered below occurred earlier and “fed” the Great Vowel Shift. Now, what was “The Great Vowel Shift”? It can best be characterized as an upward movement of the long (tense) vowels. You can follow the developments with the chart in the Appendix. The vowel /u˘ / may have led the way. Having no place to go, it broke into a diphthong /´U /. Much later this sound arrived at its present value / aU/. Middle English hous /hu˘s / becomes modern house /haUs /. This left a hole in the chart and the vowel / o˘/ as in boot moved up to fill it. Hence, the modern pronunciation / bu˘t /. The upward movement of / o˘/ once again left a hole. This was filled by smoothing the diphthong / aU / found in words like law, taught. The front vowels developed in a similar (if somewhat more complicated fashion). First, / i˘/ diphthongized, eventually arriving at its present value /aI /. Middle English min becomes modern mine. Notice, that the silent e is added to show that the vowel was long in Middle English and hence shifted to the diphthong. Next in the dominant Middle English dialect /E˘ / and /e˘ / move up one slot. In Shakespeare’s time see was pronounced /si˘ / and sea /se˘ /. In other dialects, / E˘/ is raised and falls together with /e˘ / Later they move up to / i˘/ . Thus, sea and see are both pronounced / si˘ /. In the eighteenth century, this pronunciation prevails. See the discussion of “ousting”. Then / ai / as in maid fell together with /eI / as in they and /a˘ / as in made, stake, brake and moved up to /e˘ /. In other dialects / a˘/ and /E˘ / fall together > /e˘ /, giving us 8.4.2 The Third-Syllable Shortening Rule Strange as it may seem, there was a rule in Middle English that shortened vowels that occurred in the third syllable from the end of the word. Consider our example above. The word obscene was borrowed from Old French as obscēne . With addition of the suffix { iti}: ob scē ni ti. The third from the last syllable was shortened, yielding: ob scě ni ti . The Great Vowel Shift (see above) later shifted the long vowel /ē/ to /ī/ while the shortened vowel /ě/ remained. The same process applied to the other vowels. The result was that the “long” and “short” vowels were no longer synchronized. The vowel symbol 8.4.3 Lengthening in words of two syllables The accented vowels e, o, a, in open syllables of two syllable words underwent lengthening as in the case of smoke above. A similar case is provide by Old English nama, where the original vowel is lengthened in the open, accented syllable and then raised by the Great Vowel Shift, yielding the present pronunciation of name. The high vowels u, i, are unaffected by this change so we have nut, 69 the other. Thus, path ~ pāthes, generalizes the short vowel of the uninflected form. On the other hand, in gate the long vowel of the inflected form is generalized. The same problem arises in words of two syllables. Here the uninflected form is lengthened and the inflected form (three syllables, cf. Third Syllable Shortening Rule above) is not. Thus, the uninflected form heaven ‘heaven’ had a lengthened vowel. The inflected three syllable form hevenes had a short stem vowel. In Modern English, the short vowel of the inflected (three syllable) form has prevailed in the pronunciation. In the spelling of the word 8.4.4 Silent- e The purpose of silent e in modern English spelling is to indicate that the preceding vowel is “long” (i.e., says its name, was long in Middle English). This useful convention arose through the weakening of final vowels to /´/ and the lengthening of vowels in open syllables. Consider Old English sm 4ca /smçkA / which develops to Middle English sm 4ke (weakening of the final vowel) and then to smōke /smç˘k´ / (Two Syllable Lengthening Rule). Thanks to The Great Vowel Shift, we arrive at the modern pronunciation of smoke. Later the final e became silent, but was retained as an indication that the preceding vowel was in a formerly open syllable and underwent lengthening. This ingenious system for distinguishing between long and short vowels was (is) disturbed by the practice of using silent e for other purposes as well. Around 1250, the so called Gothic script was introduced into England. This writing style (much like German Fraktur) featured thick down stokes joined by small hooks and was extremely difficult to read – a sequence like in was hardly distinguishable from m. In addition, u and v were not distinguished. The apostrophe s (’s ) had not yet been introduced and a silent e was used to show that the s belonged to the stem of the word and was not the genitive ending. This led to spellings like house, cheese, where the double vowel indicates length and the e indicates that the preceding s is not an ending – house not hou’s . This practice – relatively harmless in the preceding examples – led to misleading spellings like promise (earlier promis ), where the spelling incorrectly suggests a long vowel. A silent e was also written in words like live to indicate that the unclear u/v was to be interpreted as v. This came into collision with the interpretation of silent e as an indicator of a long stem vowel. Hence, the double pronunciation of live, where the silent e indicates a long vowel in one case and a preceding v in the other. This also explains the misleading spellings with ive – protective, connective, etc. The silent e does not indicate a long vowel, but rather a preceding v rather than a u – a problem long since solved by handwriting reform, but still with us thanks to convention. The same considerations apply to sequences like uv, which were realized as four downstrokes. To make them more readable the u was changed to an o. Thus, love (still pronounced /lUv/ in the north of England got a final e indicating a preceding v and an o indicating a u before a following v! The American lexicographer Noah Webster (1758 1843) tried to correct this nonsense by proposing logical and historically correct spellings like luv and abuv and avoiding silent e, where it does not indicate a preceding long vowel, but he did not succeed. 8.4.5 Shortening and lengthening before two consonants Just as vowels were lengthened in open syllables, they were shortened in closed syllables (vowel followed by two consonants). This configuration arose particularly among the weak verbs which 70 joined the past tense ending directly to the stem. For example, lose /lo˘z´ / ~ loste /lçst´ / (see Unit 7). Thanks to the Great Vowel Shift and the loss of the final unaccented vowel, we arrive at the modern forms: lose /luz / and lost / lçst /. The same effect occurred with derivatives. Thus, we have wise with a long vowel shifted by The Great Vowel Shift, but wisdom with a shortened vowel before the double consonant sd . A few consonant clusters caused lengthening, however. All vowels are lengthened before /ld/ (e.g., child, field, cf. Germ. Feld ). There are, however, numerous complications. For instance, short a is rounded before lengthening and raising via The Great Vowel Shift, cf. German kalt, Anglian cald, Modern Eng. cold. The progression is /A/ > /ç/ > /çU / > /oU /. This accounts for numerous correspondencies like German English: falten, halten, alt, bald ~ fold, hold, old, bold. The high vowels /u/ and /i/ are lengthened before /nd/ and broken via the Great Vowel Shift (bind, find, bound, found, round ). Compare the German equivalents: binden, finden, gebunden, gefunden, rund. The consonant cluster st deserves special mention. It goes with a following vowel leaving behind an open syllable. Consider the word Chrīst. In the inflected forms Chīstes, Chrīste, the vowel of the stem remained long and was shifted by The Great Vowel Shift. This form was generalized, hence the modern pronunciation of Christ. In Christmas , the vowel is shortened before stm , similarly in christen , where we have final stn . In Christendom , third syllable shorting clearly applies. In Christian, the earlier form had three syllables: chri sti an , invoking third syllable shortening once again. Here, however, subsequent development has obscured matters by reducing three syllables to two: / krIstS´n /. 8.4.6 The vocalization of /g/ Old English /g/ came to be vocalized after a vowel. After a front vowel, it became the glide /j/ and after a back vowel /w/. Compare Mod. Germ. Tag, Weg, Bogen, Vogel ~ day, way, bow, fowl. Modern day from Old English dæg, with a front vowel. 8.4.7 Insertion of glide before /x/ In Middle English a glide was inserted between a stem vowel and following /x/ ([ç] or [x]) as in eight < eght, doughter < doghter. (The modern spelling daughter is not historically motivated.). Where there are inflected forms, ei > ī , as in fight, night cf. German er ficht, Nächte. 8.4.8 Smoothing The new diphthongs created by the vocalization of /g/ are leveled in Middle English. The diphthong /aI / falls together with /a˘ /, making the vowels of maid and made identical (both are shifted to /eI / in the modern language). Similarly, the smoothing of / aU/ to /ç˘ / accounts for the pronunciation of law, taught. Smoothing also affects the diphthongs created by glide insertion (see above). The vowel of eight falls together with the vowel of maid and made , giving us three interesting ways to spell this sound. Similarly, the / çU / of doughter (Germ. Tochter ), thought, is smoothed to / ç˘ /. When 71 8.4.9 The vowel /ju/ Speaking of long vowels saying their names How is it that is called /ju/ and not /u/ as one might expect from the parallels to other European languages? Recall that the vowel /u/ was written in the French style as 8.4.10 Loss of initial /g/, /k/, /h/ At the beginning of a word the group /gn/ is simplified to /n/ as in gnaw, gnash. Similarly, /kn/ simplifies to /n/ as in knight, knowledge. Note, however, that the /k/ remains in ak nowledge thanks to the syllable break. Initial /h/ before the liquids /r/ and /l/ (O.E. hrōf, hlāf ~ modern roof, loaf ) disappeared in Middle English without leaving a trace in the orthography. The combination /hw/ was retained in the written language as 8.4.11 The vowel / Œ’Œ’Œ’ / Another riddle of English spelling is presented by the numerous ways of representing the sound /Œ’ / as in bird, herd, earth, nurse, worse. Clearly, these words were once pronounced differently (approximately as their spelling indicates). Over time, the original sounds fell together into / Œ’/. The original spelling remained although the pronunciation had changed. We can look at this systematically: IU E ç Œ’ A Notice that the four high and middle short vowels were reduced to /Œ’ / before /r/ + Consonant in standard English (BE and AE) while the low vowel remained unaffected (cf. charm, hard, carbon, etc.). In addition, / çrt /, remains unaffected as in wort, sort, court. 8.4.12 Fun with unrounding As pointed out above, the original front rounded vowels of Old English resulting from i/j umlaut, which persist in German to this day, disappeared early from English. Thus, we find corres 72 pondencies like hören ~ hear < *horjan; füllen ~ fill <*fuljan. The unrounding of the mid central vowel( = NHG /ö/) was mostly completed in preliterary times. In West Saxon, the unrounding of the high vowel (= NHG /ü/) is completed by ca. 1000 A.D. Thus, in the manuscripts of the West Saxon Gospels written around this time, we find “reverse spellings” like hys, ys for his, is. Since these words never had a front rounded vowel, the spelling indicates that the front rounded vowel had been unrounded and 8.5 British dialects It is to be remembered that the complex changes described here (along with a number of other complications that go beyond the scope of this treatment) did not affect all English dialects, but were, as a whole, only changes that took place in the London prestige dialect. Since getting the vowels “right” was necessary for social acceptance, the East End flower girl and her tutor had their work cut out for them. Eliza’s new world counterparts had a much easier task since they inherited the proper vowels with the common eighteenth century British American standard. Since then, the British standard has continued to innovate in order to stay ahead of the common folk while General American (spoken in two thirds of the United States and Canada) has remained largely conservative – but this is a story to be told in “The American Language.” 73 Unit 7: The simplification of the English inflectional system 1 The English inflectional system A comparison between German and English inflectional systems shows an enormous simplification of the English system over the inherited system, which remains remarkably intact in German. In this section, we will present a brief overview of the changes between Old and Modern English. 2 The strong (ablauting) verb The so called strong verb (the term comes from J. Grimm) alters its stem vowel to form past and past participle (cf. Ablaut under sound changes). As can be seen in the table below, there were originally four forms in the Germanic languages: infinitive (present), past singular, past plural, past participle. One German verb still has four forms (although the past singular is obsolete): werden ~ ward ~ wurden ~ geworden. In English, the difference between past singular and plural is preserved in was ~ were. In all other cases, one form or the other for the past has prevailed. In German, this leveling has taken place with great consistency in English considerably less so. Thus in Class IIIb we find stink ~ stank ~ stunk with the vowel of the past singular, but slink ~ slunk ~ slunk with the vowel of the past plural. Most of the verb classes are based on a simple pattern: e grade (present) ~ o grade (past singular) ~ zero grade (past plural and past participle). The rest has to do with the nature of the stem. In Class I, for example, the stem vowel is combined with the off glide /j/. This is clearest in the zero grade forms, where the glide between consonants becomes a vowel /i/. Readers interested in the details can consult the notes to the chart. The important thing to note is that four original forms were reduced to three and in various, arbitrary ways. Germanic Strong Verb Middle High German and Modern English Class Infinitive Past Sg. Past Pl. Past Part. I rīten reit riten geriten ride rode ridden II vriesen vrōs vruren gevroren freeze froze frozen IIIa swelhen swalh swulhen geswolhen swell swoll swollen IIIb finden fand funden gefunden find found found IV stelen stal stālen gestolen steal stole stolen V ezzen āz āzzen gegezzen 74 Class Infinitive Past Sg. Past Pl. Past Part. eat ate eaten VI swerien swuor sworen gesworen swear swore sworn VII halten hielt hielten gehalten hold held Notes: I. Germanic (Gmc) e ~ a ~ /0 ~ /0. The ablaut vowel is followed by the glide /j/. In the zero grade, /j/ > /i/. Germ. generalized the vowel of the past plural, Eng. of the past sg. ai > ā > ō (cf. Stein ~ stone ). This group also includes, drive, rise, write, arise. Bite generalizes the vowel of the past plural, shine loses the n of the past part. II. Gmc. e ~ a ~ /0 ~ /0. The ablaut vowel is followed by the glide /w/. In the zero grade, /w/ > /u/. Both Germ. and Eng. generalize o < u of the past plural. The alternation of s ~ r is due to Verner’s law. Eng. generalized s, Germ. r. IIIa. Gmc. e ~ a + ~ /0 ~ /0 . The stem ends in a liquid + consonant (cf. helfen, werfen ). The verb fight also belongs here. All others have become weak, but note the adj. molten orig. participle of melt. IIIb. Gmc. e ~ a ~ /0 ~ /0. The stem ends in nasal + consonant. This group has remained fairly intact in Eng. The verbs with nd ( find, bind, wind ) generalize the past plur. (with lengthening of preceding vowel). Those in nk/ng take the vowel of the past sing. (sink, stink, sing ) as do those with an original double nasal ( swim < swimman, begin ). IV. Gmc. e ~ a ~ ē ~ /0. The stem contains a single liquid or nasal: swear, tear, bear, steal. The verb come < queman also belongs here. V. Gmc. e ~ a ~ ē ~ e. The stem contains an obstruent. Also give and the obsolete wesan which gives us was, were with alternation of consonant resulting from Verner’s law. Some verbs of this class (sit, bid, lie ) had j in the present ending causing umlaut (e > i) and doubling of the stem consonant ( setjan > sitjan > sittjan > sittan). The double consonants developed differently in Germ., yielding: sitzen, bitten, liegen. VI. Gmc. a ~ ō ~ ō ~ a. Only swear, shake and stand with an n infix in the present. The vowel of swear is accounted for by the original j present ( swerian ). VII. Gmc. reduplicating verbs (cf. Gothic haldan ~ hehald ~ haldan ‘halten’, letan ~ lelōt ~ letan ‘lassen’). The only vestige of reduplication in Eng. and Germ is the verb did/tat cf Greek tith emi ‘I put’. The vowel of the present and the past part. is always identical. In Germ. these all have a past in ie (cf. halten, lassen ). In Eng. we have fall, hold (with rounding before ld as in old ), grow, know, blow, and with weak past: show, mow. 75 3 Weak verbs The so called weak verbs (the term was coined once again by Jacob Grimm) are mostly secondary verbs derived from other verbs, adjectives or nouns. Thus in Goth., where the relations are clearest, we have salbo 'die Salbe' and salbon 'salben', hails 'heil' and hailjan 'heilen'. A prominent subgroup is formed by the causative verbs. These verbs were formed from adjectives (cf. hailjan, above) or from the ablaut grade of a strong verb plus the suffix jan. Thus, from Gmc. set ~ sat 'sit' we have satjan (OE setten, Germ. setzen ) literally 'cause to sit'. Similarly, we have pairs like lie ~ lay, liegen ~ legen, sinken ~ (ver)senken. Very few pairs of this type have survived in ModEng. The past tense of the weak verbs was formed from the stem plus a form of the verb do. Thus, Goth. satidedun (they set + did ). This is like the future in the Romance languages, e.g., French j'aimerai (aimer + ai ) literally 'I to love have' = 'I have to (will) love'. One subgroup of the weak verbs joined the auxiliary to the stem without a connecting vowel in the past, which lead to further changes. This is clear in Germ. where we have Gedanke with the original ablaut grade of the stem and denken < dankjan with the past dachte < danxte < dankte. That is, k + t > x + t. Before x, n disappeared. The past has no umlaut because there is no i/j to cause umlaut. Grimm called this phenomenon “Rückumlaut.” The equivalent in Eng. is think ~ thought , also buy ~ bought, seek ~ sought, teach ~ taught, bring ~ brought . Germ. has a few others without stem changes, e.g. nennen ~ nannte, kennen ~ kannte, brennen ~ brannte. English tell ~ told (< talde with rounding as in old ) also belongs here as does sell ~ sold. 3.1 Regular and irregular weak verbs in Modern English The past and past participle of the weak verbs in Modern English is formed by adding the suffix { ed} to the verb stem. This suffix is realized as / t/ if the final sound of the stem is unvoiced, e.g., laughed /lQft /, /d/ if the stem is voiced, e.g., loved /l√vd / and / ´d / if the stem ends in / t/ or / d/, e.g. wanted / wAnt´d /. The irregular past tense verbs (aside from those discussed above) arose in Middle English. In Middle English there were two kinds of past tenses: (1) Those that retained e (i.e., /´/) between the stem and the ending de and (2) Those that joined the ending de directly to the stem without the linking vowel. The first class is exemplified by love ~ loved. In Middle English loved had two syllables, hence the spelling. With these verbs, the present and the past were treated alike by sound change. Thus, the stem vowel of love underwent a whole series of changes before reaching its present value, but these affect both the present and the past. In the case of group (2), we have to distinguish between verbs with an originally short stem vowel and those with an originally long stem vowel. The former case is exemplified by hit. With voicing assimilation the past tense was hitte . After loss of the final vowel, the past had the same form as the present as is still the case: hit ~ hit. Other verbs that belong here include: put, bet, cast, cost, cut, let, slit, etc. Verbs with a long stem vowel underwent shortening in the past because of the double consonant. This is reflected in verbs like sweep ~ swept, bleed ~ bled, breed ~ bred. Here the originally long vowel of the present was raised by The Great Vowel Shift /e˘ / > /i˘ /, the shortened vowel of the past remained unaffected. Similarly, we have hide ~ hid, lose ~ lost, leave ~ left, read ~ read, mean ~ meant. In the last case, the vowel /E˘ /, written 76 reason why the past tenses read (< readde ) or meant should be spelled 4 Other categories If the verbs in Modern English provide a wonderful archaeological dig, the other categories are far less fruitful for the investigation of the past. We will consider them in turn. 5 Adjectives Modern English has made life easier for learners by simply abandoning the functionally useless multiplicity of adjective endings preserved in German. The last vestige of adjective inflection remains in the two syllable rule for participial adjectives. Thus, we have the blesséd virgin and a drunken sailor (cf. the virgin was bless’d, the sailor was drunk ). The two syllable rule determines that attributive participial adjectives have to have at least two syllables which explains the retention of the older forms as adjectives. True inflectional endings have disappeared completely. 6 Definite Article Whereas Modern German still has six different forms of the definite article der, des, dem, den, das, die and Old English had ten, Modern English has reduced to the single form the. 7 Demonstratives Once again, drastic reductions have taken place. Case endings have disappeared and only singular and plural forms have been retained: this ~ these, that ~ those. 8 Personal pronouns English still retains three case forms for personal pronouns: nominative, genitive, objective (objective from the older dative, accusative and instrumental) in addition to a genitive (possessive) pronoun, e.g. mine . All prepositions take the objective case with the exception of the preposition of , which can take the objective or the genitive (cf. a picture of me ~ a picture of mine ). The most spectacular change in the pronominal system is the replacement of the Old English forms for the third person plural hie, hira, him by the Scandinavian they, their, them. Although the Scandinavian forms were introduced by the Viking raiders in the eighth century, they did not completely replace the traditional forms until ca. 1500. A relict of the old forms is still found in the phonetically weak form: get'em, which can stand for get him or get them (older get hem ). Another important change in the pronominal system is the loss of the second person singular form thou ~ thee ~ thy ~ thine (equivalent to the German form du ~ dir ~ dich ~ dein ). The practice of “siezen,” unknown in Old English, begins in the thirteenth century, but thou and ye seem to be used interchangeably in some texts. That is, from the surviving information, it is difficult to reconstruct the conditions under which the one or the other form was socially proper. One use which seems fairly well documented is “social distancing.” People from the upper classes use the thou form when conversing with their social “inferiors” (not just with children). The use of thou in addressing social equals or superiors seems to have been a form of deliberate insult. 77 During the seventeenth century the singular disappears, as does the nominative plural ye. The objective form you (German eu in euch with a switch of accent: éow > eów ) takes over the nominative. So, you can say you to me! Another development that deserves mention is emergence of the pronoun she (O.E. heo ). Since he and she were not particularly well differentiated in Old English (he ~ heo or hie ), it is tempting to think that the demonstrative O.E. sie replaced the older feminine form that would have fallen together with the masculine through the normal process of sound change. But, why then do we tolerate one form for the plural they = sie ? Functional explanations for language change are always to be viewed with extreme caution. 9 Interrogative pronouns With the loss of grammatical gender, only two forms remain: who for persons and which for nonpersons. In the case, of closed sets, even this distinction disappears and which is used for both, cf. Who broke the window? (open set – could be anyone) ~ Which of you broke the window? (closed set – member of a specified group). The genitive whose is used for both persons and nonpersons. The objective form of the personal whom is only used after prepositions (cf. Who did you see? ~ With whom did you speak? ). 10 Relative pronouns Old English used the invariable particle þe to introduce relative clauses. In Middle English, this was replaced by that: O.E. se monn þe ic seah = M.E. þe man þat i saugh = Mod. E. the man that I saw In addition, Old English used the article as a relative pronoun similar to Modern German. This was replaced by the interrogative which in the Middle English period: O.E. se monn þone ic seah = Germ. der Mann, den ich sah = M.E. þe man which i saugh The modern distinction between who for persons and which for nonpersons is established later in the course of the sixteenth century. In both Old English and Middle English, the particle could be used together with the pronominal form: O.E. se monn þone þe ic seah = M.E. þe man which þat i saugh This is, of course, exactly what we find in Bavarian: dea Ma, den wo i gsen hab (For further remarks on the relative clause and the Bavarian connection, see my script Problems of English Grammar. ) 78 11 Reflexive and reciprocal pronouns Old English did not have special reflexive or reciprocal pronouns. Thus, hie lufoden hie could mean 'They loved them', 'They loved themselves' or 'They loved each other'. The current distinction between them, themselves, each other arose much later. 12 Nouns The varied system of noun declension, which is to a large extent preserved in Modern German, has totally disappeared in Modern English. All that is left is a handful of “irregular” plurals. The once widely represented n stems have only one regular representative in the modern language ox ~ oxen. In addition, we have the unusual plurals children, brethren . The form children is actually a double plural: r + en . The r (cf. Old English cildru ) is related to the er plural in German Lämmer, Dörfer , etc. Relicts of the umlauting plurals are found in a handful of words like mouse ~ mice, louse ~ lice, foot ~ feet, goose ~ geese, tooth ~ teeth . Unrounding and dropping of the nasal before a fricative have played a role here. Consider Ger. Gans ~ Gänse. In English, gans > gās > gōs in the singular. In the plural, gansi >gōsi > gœsi > gēse. A number of other correspondencies between German and English are explained by umlaut and unrounding. With some nouns, not only the plural, but also the genitive and dative singular had an i in the ending. English generalized this form with resulting umlaut and German the nominative accusative form without umlaut, e.g., PG *brūd(i) > Germ. Braut , Eng. bride < brīd < OE br‾yd. In both cases, the long vowel ū, ī breaks to modern /aU /, /aI /. This ultimately accounts for pairs like Bank ~ bench, Faust ~ Fist, Haut ~ hide, etc. A relict of the final devoicing rule (which only affected fricatives in Old English) is found in pairs like wife ~ wives, house ~ houses, bath ~ baths. In Middle English, wīf declines as follows: nom. sg. wīf gen. sg. wīves dat. sg. wīve acc. sg. wīf plural wīves With the loss of the dative singular ending, only the genitive had the voiced fricative in the singular while the entire plural had the voiced consonant due to the generalization of the es ending. Eventually, the voiced consonant was limited to the plural (cf. the modern pronunciation: wife's ~ wives ). With the loss of the unaccented /´/ of the endings and the loss of the final devoicing rule, a handful of historical relicts remained. Less frequent words like cliff ~ cliffs do not show the alternation. Only one word in s shows the historical alternation (house ). Words in th alternate between the voiced and unvoiced consonant in the plural. Note, however, that verb forms (e.g., to house, to bathe, to breathe ) always have the voiced final consonant. In Old English, the words deer 'wild animal', sheep and swine were members of a large class of neuter nouns that had no endings in the nominative and accusative plural. They have successfully resisted the generalization of the s plural in Modern English. 79 Appendix: 80 English Vowel Shifts and English Spelling The approximate development of the English vowel system accounting for present day relation between spelling and pronunciation. 1. /i˘ / > / aI / ( mine ) /u˘ / (written 2. /E˘ / and / e˘ / fall together and > / i˘ /. Sea and green have the vowel / i˘ /. 3. /aI / and / a˘ / fall together and > / e˘ /. Eliza’s problem maid and made are pronounced alike. 4. /au / > / ç˘ /. Cause and law have the vowel / ç˘ /. 5. Vowels in open syllables lengthen and join the Great Vowel Shift, e.g,. / ç/ > / ç˘ / >/ o˘ / in smoke, / E/ > / E˘ / > / i˘ / in meat. 6. In some dialects / a˘ / and / E˘ / fall together > / e˘ /. Spelling 7. /U/ > / √/ mostly in the prestige dialect as in cup, but. Older form is retained in a few words like push, bush. 81 Old English and Modern German Noun Declension day (masc.) land (neut.) tongue (fem.) bear (masc.) Old English Nom. daeg land tunge bera Gen. daeges landes tungan beran Dat. daege lande tungan beran Acc. daeg land tungan beran Nom. dagas land tungan beran Gen. daga landa tungana berena Dat. dagum landum tunganum berum Acc. dagas land tungan beran Modern German Nom. Tag Land Zunge Bär Gen. Tages Landes Zunge Bären Dat. Tag(e) Lande Zunge Bären Acc. Tag Land Zunge Bären Nom. Tage Länder Zungen Bären Gen. Tage Länder Zungen Bären Dat. Tagen Ländern Zungen Bären Acc. Tage Länder Zungen Bären Old English and German Verb Conjugation Form Old English Modern German inf. rīdan reiten pres. rīde reite rīdest reitest rīdeth reite rīdath reiten rīdath reitet rīdath reiten past. sing rād ritt ride rittest rād ritt past. plur. ridon ritten ridon rittet ridon ritten past. plur. ridon ritten ridon rittet ridon ritten past. part. geriden geritten 82 Indo European Cultural Words Cultural Term Indo-European Related Words Root Cities and Towns city, fortress pol acropolis, Indianapolis village vic Lat. vicus, Berwick Houses house dom Lat. domus, domestic to build dem Zimmermann , timber door dhwer Tür , door Eating and Drinking eat ed eat, edible, essen drink pok Pokal (drinking vessel) bake bhog bake salt sal salt honey wine meli medhu mead, Met wine wein wine Agriculture sow seh säen plow ar arable land field agros acre Domestic Animals cow gwous cow sheep owis Lat. ovis horse ekuos equestrian pig sūs sow, Sau pig (young) porko Ferkel dog kuon hound mouse mūs mouse cattle (money) peku pecuniary Clothing naked nogw nakt to clothe oneself wes Lat. vestare, Weste weave webh weben sew siu sew wool uln Wolle Transport to carry, ride wegh way, bewegen 83 Cultural Term Indo-European Related Words Root wheel rot Rad wheel kwekulos wheel axle aks Achse ox uksen Ochse ship naus Lat. navis, navy row rē row Family father pater Lat. pater, Vater mother māter Lat. māter, Mutter brother bhrāter Lat. frater, Bruder sister swesor Schwester daughter dhugater Tochter wife of son snusos Yid. shnur mother of son swekru Schwieger(mutter) father of son swekuros Schwäher husband demspotis despot (master of house) to marry wedh wed Religion and State god dieus pater Jupiter, *Tiwaz (cf. Tuesday) king rēgs Lat. rex, rich free man viros Wer(wolf) stranger ghostis guest, hostile 84 From Aelfric's "Homily on St. Gregory the Great" How the Pope was persuaded to send a mission to convert the Anglo Saxons: Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon. Him wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi Angle genemnode wæron. Þa cwæð he, "Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon. Again, he asked what the name of that people was that they had come from. He was answered that they were called Angels. Then he said, “Rightly are they called Angels, because they have the appearance of Angels and it is fitting that such in heaven be the companions of Angels. Notes: 1. axode metathesis from asked. 2. ðeode ‘people’ = ‘deut’ in ‘deutsch’ < theod + isk 3. Him wæs geandwyrd = ‘ihm wurde geantwortet’. Same syntax as in German. 4. cwæð = ‘said’ poetic ‘quoth’ 5. for ðan ðe = ‘für denn dass’ = ‘because’ 6. wlite = Antlitz 7. swilcum gedafenað = ‘solchen gebührt’ Impersonal construction as in German. 8. geferan = ‘Gefährten’ 85 Robert of Gloucester (1298) A Rhyming History of England: The Norman Conquest Tho Willam bastard hurde telle of Haraldes °suikelhede °betrayal Hou he hadde ymad him king & mid such falshede. . . . . Harald him sende worde that folie it was to truste To such oth as was ido[n] . . . So that biside Hastinge to Englond hii come °Hom thoghte tho hii come alond that al was in hor hond. °ihnen deuchte As sone as the duc Willam is fot sette alond One of his knightes gradde, “hold vaste Willam nou” . . . Tho duc Willam wuste that he was icome so nei A monek he sende him in message . . . That lond that him was °igive that he sholde him upyelde. °gegeben The Englisse al the night bivore vaste bigonne to singe & spende al the night in glotonie & in drinkinge. The Normans ne dude noght so, ac criede on God vaste & °shrive hom ech after other the wule the night ylaste. °beichten Thus com lo! Engelond into Normandies hond & the Normans ne °couthe speke tho °bote hor owe speche, °could, °but & speke French as hii dude at om & hor children dude also teche. Ac lowe men holdeth to English to hor owe speche . . . Ich wene ther ne beth in al the world, contreyes none That ne holdeth to hor owe spreche, bote Engelond one. Then William Bastard heard tell of Harold’s treachery How he had made him(self) king and with such falsehood. Harold him sent word that it was folly to trust To such oath as was done. So that by Hastings to England they came. They thought when they came on land that everything was in their hand. As soon as Duke William his foot set on land, One of his knights cried “William now hold fast” 86 Though Duke William knew that he had come so neigh, A monk he sent to him as a messenger, That the land that was given to him, he should yield up. The English all the night before Began mightily to sing. And spent the night in gluttony and drinking The Normans did not so, but cried to God And confessed one after the other that they might last the night. Thus, came lo! England into Normandy’s hand And the Normans could not speak but their own speech And spoke French as they did at home and also did their children teach. But low men hold to English, to their own speech . . . I ween [think] there be not in all the world countries none That hold to their own speech, but England one. [Despite Robert of Glocester’s English language patriotism, it is clear that he spoke the newly emerging English aristocratic standard.] 87 Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales The Student A Clerk 2 ther was of Oxenforde also That unto logik hadde longe ygo. 3 As lene was his hors as is a rake, And he was nought right fat, I undertake, But looked holwe,° and therto sobrely. hollow Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy, 4 For he hadde geten him yit no benefice, Ne was so worldly for to have office.° secular employment For him was levere 5 have at his beddes heed Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophye, Than robes riche, or fithele,° or gay sautrye. 6 fiddle But al be that he was a philosophre 7 Yit hadde he but litel gold in cofre;° coffer But al that he mighte of his freendes hente,° take On bookes and on lerning he it spente, And bisily gan for the soules praye Of hem that yaf him wherwith to scoleye.° study Of studye took he most cure° and most heede. care Nought oo° word spak he more than was neede, one And that was said in forme 8 and reverence, And short and quik,° and ful of heigh sentence: 9 lively Souning° in moral vertu was his speeche, resounding And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche. ______ 2.The Clerk is a student at Oxford; in order to become a student he would have had to signify his intention of becoming a cleric, but he was not bound to proceed to a position of responsibility in the church. 3. Who had long since matriculated in philosophy. 4. Outer cloak. “Benefice”: ecclesiastical living. 5. He would rather.b 6. Psaltery (a kind of harp). 7. The word may also mean “alchemist.” 8. With decorum. 9. Elevated thought. 88 Three Kings from the Orient Matthiew 2, 1 4 West Saxon Gospels (ca. 1000): 1 Eornustice þá sé Hæland ácenned wæs on Iudeiscre Bethleem, on Þæs cyninges dagum Herrodes, Þá comon Þá tungolwitegan fram éastdæle to Hierusalem, 2 and cwædon, Hwær ys sé Iudea Cyning þe acenned ys? Soðlíce wé gesáwon hys steorran on éastdæle, and we comon ús him to geéadmédenne. 3 Ðá Herodes þæt gehyrde, ðá wearð hé gedréfed and eal Hierosolim waru mid him. 4 And þá gegaderode Herodes ealle ealdras þæra sácerda and folces writeras, and áxode hwær Crist ácenned wære. Wycliffe Bibel (1388): 1 Therfor whanne Jhesus was borun in Bethleem of Juda, in the daies of king Eroude, lo! astromyenes camen fro the eest to Jerusalem, 2 and seiden, Where is he, that is borun king of Jewis? for we han seyn his sterre in the eest, and we comen to worshipe him. 3 But king Eroude herde, and was trublid, and al Jerusalem with hym. 4 And he gaderide to gidre alle the prynces of prestis, and scribis of the puple, and enqueride of hem, where Crist shulde be borun. King James Bible (1611) (Modernized spelling as read in the churches today) Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born. 89 From the Gospel According to Luke (West Saxon Gospels ca. 1000) 22:39 And æfter gewunan he uteode on þæne munt oliuarum þæt ys elebergena: and his leorningcnihtas him fyligdon; 22:40 And þa he com to þære stowe he sæde him: gebiddað þæt ge on costnunge ne gan; 22:41 And he wæs fram him alocen swa mycel swa is anes stanes wyrp: and gebigedum cneowum he hyne gebæd 22:42 and cwæð; Fæder gif þu wylt. afyr þysne calic fram me þeah hwæðere ne gewurðe min willa ac þin; 22:43 þa ætywde him godes engel. of heofone and hyne gestrangode and he wæs on gewinne and hine lange gebæd 22:44 and hys swat wæs swylce blodes dropan on eorðan yrnende. 22:45 and þa he of gebede aras and com to his leorningcnihtum he hig funde slæpende for unrotnesse: 22:46 and he sæde him: hwi slape ge. arisað and biddað ge on costunge ne gan; 22:47 Him þa þa gyt specendum þa com þæt wered and him toforan eode an of þam twelfum se wæs genemned iudas and he genealæhte þam hælende þæt he hine cyste; From the Gospel According to Luke (Wycliffe Translation ca. 1380) 22:39 & he gon out, wente aftir kustum in to þe hil of olyues, soþly & disciplis sueden hym. 22:40 & whan he cam to þe place, he seide to hem, pree ee lest ee fallen in to temptacioun. 22:41 & he is taken awey fro hem, hou myche is a stones cast, & þe knes put, he preede 22:42 seiende, fader if þou wilt, turne ouer þis kuppe fro me, neþeles not my wil be don, but þin. 22:43 forsoþe an aungil aperede to hym fro heuene, counfortende hym. 22:44 & he maad in agonye or strif preede lengere, & his swot is maad as dropis of blod rennende doun in to þe erþe. 22:45 & whan he hadde risen fro preeer & comen to his disciples, he fond hem slepende for heuynesse. 22:46 & he seiþ to hem, what, slepen ee? riseþ & pre eþ þat ee falle not in to temptacioun. 22:47 it hym spekende, lo a kumpany, & he þat was clepid Judas, oen of þe twelue wente biforn hem, & he cam ny to Jesus, þat he shulde kissen hym. From the Gospel According to Luke (Tyndale Translation 1526) 22:39 And he came out and went as he was wote to mounte olivete. And the disciples folowed him. 22:40 And when he came to the place he sayde to the[m]: praye lest ye fall into temptacio[n]. 22:41 And he gate him selfe from them about a stones cast and kneled doune and prayed 22:42 sayinge: Father yf thou wilt withdrawe this cup fro me. Neverthelesse not my will but thyne be be fulfilled. 22:43 And ther appered an angell vnto him from heaven confortinge him. 22:44 And he was in an agonye and prayed somwhat longer. And hys sweate was lyke droppes of bloud tricklynge doune to the grounde. 90 22:45 And he rose vp from prayer and came to his disciples and foude them slepinge for sorowe 22:46 and sayde vnto them: Why slepe ye? Ryse and praye lest ye fall into temptacion. 22:47 Whill he yet spake: beholde ther came a company and he that was called Iudas one of the twelve wet before them and preased nye vnto Iesus to kysse him. From the Gospel According to Luke (King James Translation 1611) 22:39 And he came out, and went, as he was wont, to the mount of Olives; and his disciples also followed him. 22:40 And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that ye enter not into temptation. 22:41 And he was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, 22:42 Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. 22:43 And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. 22:44 And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground. 22:45 And when he rose up from prayer, and was come to his disciples, he found them sleeping for sorrow, 22:46 And said unto them, Why sleep ye? rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. 22:47 And while he yet spake, behold a multitude, and he that was called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them, and drew near unto Jesus to kiss him. 91 Northern English: To a Mouse Robert Burns (ca. 1785) Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, Small, sleek, cowering, timorous beast O, what a panic's in thy breastie! O, what a panic’s in thy breast! Thou need na start awa sae hasty Thou need not start away so hastily Wi bickering brattle! In a noisy clatter! I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee, I would be loath to run and chase thee Wi' murd’ring pattle. With murdering spade. I'm truly sorry man's dominion I’m truly sorry man’s dominion Has broken Nature's social union, Has broken Nature’s social union, An' justifies that ill opinion And justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth born companion At me, thy poor, earth born companion An' fellow mortal! And fellow mortal! I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; I doubt not, at times, that thou mayst steal What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! What then? Poor beast, you must live! A daimen icker in a thrave An odd ear in a sheave (twenty four) 'S a sma' request; Is a small request; I'll get a blessin wi' the lave, I’ll get a blessing with the rest An' never miss't. And never miss it. Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin! Thy tiny house, too, in ruin! It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! It’s fragile walls the winds are strewing! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, And nothing now to build a new one, O' foggage green! Of winter grass green. An' bleak December's win's ensuin, And bleak December’s winds ensuing, Baith snell an' keen! Both sharp and keen! Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste, Thou saw the fields laid bare and waste, An' weary winter comin fast, And weary winter coming fast, An' cozie here, beneath the blast, And cozie here, beneath the blast. Thou thought to dwell, Thou thought to dwell, Till crash! the cruel coulter past Till crash! the cruel plowshare past Out thro' thy cell. Out through thy cell. That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble, That tiny heap of leaves and stubble, Has cost thee monie a weary nibble! Has cost thee many a weary nibble! Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble, Now thou art turned out, for all thy trouble, But house or hald, Without house or hold, To thole the winter's sleety dribble, To endure the winter’s sleety dribble An' cranreuch cauld. And hoarfrost cold. 92 But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, But Mousie, thou art not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: In proving foresight may be in vain: The best laid schemes o' mice an' men The best laid schemes of mice and men Gang aft agley, Go often awry, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promis'd joy! For promised joy! Still, thou art bless’d compared wi’ me! Still, thou art blessed compared with me! The present only toucheth thee: The present only touches thee: But, och! I backward caste my e’e But, ah! I backward caste my eye On prospects drear! On prospects drear! An’ forward—thou I canna see— And forward, though I cannot see, I guess—an’ fear! I guess and fear! Note: Robert Burns (1759 1796) was the leading figure in a brief revival of Scottish literature in the eighteenth century. Never able to earn his living from poetry, Burns was forced to try his hand at farming. The poem is supposed to based on a real incident despite a similarity to an earlier poem by Thomas Wyatt (1503 1542). The language is an odd mixture of Scots dialect and learned English. The translation should make the meaning clear. 93 Merry Old England 94 The Chaos Dr. Gerald Nolst Trenité (1870 1946) Dearest creature in creation Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, Studying English pronunciation, plinth. I will teach you in my verse Have you ever yet endeavoured Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse. To pronounce revered and severed, I will keep you, Susy, busy, Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Peter, petrol and patrol? Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear; Billet does not end like ballet; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer. Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. 50 Pray, console your loving poet, Blood and flood are not like food, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! 10 Nor is mould like should and would. Just compare heart, hear and heard, Banquet is not nearly parquet, Dies and diet, lord and word. Which exactly rhymes with khaki. Sword and sward, retain and Britain Discount, viscount, load and broad, (Mind the latter how it's written). Toward, to forward, to reward, Made has not the sound of bade, Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet? Say said, pay paid, laid but plaid. Right! Your pronunciation's OK. Now I surely will not plague you Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, With such words as vague and ague, Friend and fiend, alive and live. 60 But be careful how you speak, Is your R correct in higher? Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak, Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia. Previous, precious, fuchsia, via, 21 Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot, Recipe, pipe, studding sail, choir; Buoyant, minute, but minute. Woven, oven, how and low, Say abscission with precision, Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe. Now: position and transition; Say, expecting fraud and trickery: Would it tally with my rhyme Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore, If I mentioned paradigm? Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles, Twopence, threepence, tease are easy, Missiles, similes, reviles. But cease, crease, grease and greasy? 70 Wholly, holly, signal, signing, Cornice, nice, valise, revise, Same, examining, but mining, 30 Rabies, but lullabies. Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Of such puzzling words as nauseous, Solar, mica, war and far. Rhyming well with cautious, tortious, From "desire": desirablen admirable from You'll envelop lists, I hope, "admire", In a linen envelope. Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier, Would you like some more? You'll have it! Topsham, brougham, renown, but known, Affidavit, David, davit. Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone, To abjure, to perjure. Sheik One, anemone, Balmoral, Does not sound like Czech but ache. 80 Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Gertrude, German, wind and wind, Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven. Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind, 40 We say hallowed, but allowed, Tortoise, turquoise, chamois leather, People, leopard, towed but vowed. Reading, Reading, heathen, heather. Mark the difference, moreover, This phonetic labyrinth Between mover, plover, Dover. 95 Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Rhymes (but piebald doesn't) with nibbled. Chalice, but police and lice, Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw, Camel, constable, unstable, Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw. Principle, disciple, label. 90 Don't be down, my own, but rough it, Petal, penal, and canal, And distinguish buffet, buffet; Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal, Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon, Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn. 140 Rhyme with "shirk it" and "beyond it", Say in sounds correct and sterling But it is not hard to tell Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling. Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall. Evil, devil, mezzotint, Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron, Mind the Z! (A gentle hint.) Timber, climber, bullion, lion, Now you need not pay attention Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, To such sounds as I don't mention, Senator, spectator, mayor, 100 Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws, Ivy, privy, famous; clamour Rhyming with the pronoun yours; Has the A of drachm and hammer. Nor are proper names included, Pussy, hussy and possess, Though I often heard, as you did, 150 Desert, but desert, address. Funny rhymes to unicorn, Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan. Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants. No, my maiden, coy and comely, Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb, I don't want to speak of Cholmondeley. Cow, but Cowper, some and home. No. Yet Froude compared with proud "Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker", Is no better than McLeod. Quoth he, "than liqueur or liquor", 110 But mind trivial and vial, Making, it is sad but true, Tripod, menial, denial, In bravado, much ado. Troll and trolley, realm and ream, Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme. 160 Neither does devour with clangour. Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt, May be made to rhyme with Raleigh, Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant. But you're not supposed to say Arsenic, specific, scenic, Piquet rhymes with sobriquet. Relic, rhetoric, hygienic. Had this invalid invalid Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close, Worthless documents? How pallid, Paradise, rise, rose, and dose. 120 How uncouth he, couchant, looked, Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle, When for Portsmouth I had booked! Make the latter rhyme with eagle. Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite, Mind! Meandering but mean, Paramour, enamoured, flighty, 170 Valentine and magazine. Episodes, antipodes, And I bet you, dear, a penny, Acquiesce, and obsequies. You say mani (fold) like many, Please don't monkey with the geyser, Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier, Don't peel 'taters with my razor, Tier (one who ties), but tier. Rather say in accents pure: Arch, archangel; pray, does erring Nature, stature and mature. Rhyme with herring or with stirring? 130 Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly, Prison, bison, treasure trove, Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly, Treason, hover, cover, cove, Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan, Perseverance, severance. Ribald Wan, sedan and artisan. 180 96 The TH will surely trouble you Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay! More than R, CH or W. Say aver, but ever, fever, Say then these phonetic gems: Neither, leisure, skein, receiver. 230 Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames. Never guess it is not safe, Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham, We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf. There are more but I forget 'em Starry, granary, canary, Wait! I've got it: Anthony, Crevice, but device, and eyrie, Lighten your anxiety. Face, but preface, then grimace, The archaic word albeit Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Does not rhyme with eight you see it; 190 Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging, With and forthwith, one has voice, Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging; One has not, you make your choice. Ear, but earn; and ere and tear Shoes, goes, does*. Now first say: finger; Do not rhyme with here but heir. 240 Then say: singer, ginger, linger. Mind the O of off and often Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge, Which may be pronounced as orphan, Marriage, foliage, mirage, age, With the sound of saw and sauce; Hero, heron, query, very, Also soft, lost, cloth and cross. Parry, tarry fury, bury, Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting? Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth, Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting. Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath. 200 Respite, spite, consent, resent. Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners, Liable, but Parliament. Bowing, bowing, banjo tuners Seven is right, but so is even, Holm you know, but noes, canoes, Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen, 250 Puisne, truism, use, to use? Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk, Though the difference seems little, Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work. We say actual, but victual, A of valour, vapid vapour, Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, S of news (compare newspaper), height, G of gibbet, gibbon, gist, Put, nut, granite, and unite. I of antichrist and grist, Reefer does not rhyme with deafer, Differ like diverse and divers, Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer. 210 Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers. Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late, Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll, Hint, pint, senate, but sedate. Polish, Polish, poll and poll. 260 Gaelic, Arabic, pacific, Pronunciation think of Psyche! Science, conscience, scientific; Is a paling, stout and spiky. Tour, but our, dour, succour, four, Won't it make you lose your wits Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Writing groats and saying 'grits'? Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit, It's a dark abyss or tunnel Next omit, which differs from it Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale, Bona fide, alibi Islington, and Isle of Wight, Gyrate, dowry and awry. 220 Housewife, verdict and indict. Sea, idea, guinea, area, Don't you think so, reader, rather, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Saying lather, bather, father? 270 Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean, Finally, which rhymes with enough, Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Though, through, bough, cough, hough, Compare alien with Italian, sough, tough?? Dandelion with battalion, Hiccough has the sound of sup. Rally with ally; yea, ye, My advice is: GIVE IT UP! 275 97 This poem first appeared in Drop Your Foreign Accent Engelse Uitspraakoefeningen , by G. Nolst Trenité (4th rev. ed., H. D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, 1920) in a shorter version. Interesting biographical details and a history of the transmission are to be found Chris Upward’s contribution “The Chaos” in The Journal of the Society for Simplified Spelling (1994/2) reproduced on line at: < http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/chaos.html>. The text follows Upward’s editorial revision of last published version. Notes: Much, probably all of “the chaos” can be explained historically. For example, the rhyme between busy and dizzy : These come from Old English bysig, dysig, 98 Review Questions: The sounds of English 1. What is the difference between tense and lax consonants? Why is this important for English pronunciation? 2. What is the German final devoicing rule? Why can this cause problems for Germans when speaking English? 3. Both English and German have the sounds /l/ and /r/. Why do these sounds present a problem for Germans when speaking English. 4. How did “w” get its name? 5. What three parameters are used to describe vowels? 6. What is the rule for vowel length in German and in English. 7. What is the difference between the pronunciation of the words house and Haus ? 8. What do we mean by “stress timing”? 9. What sounds in English are likely to cause problems for Germans? Sound change 10. Why are there five different ways of spelling the same sound in: earth, nurse, bird, word, herd ? What does this tell us about the relationship between spelling and pronunciation? 11. The present spelling of English represents the way the language was pronounced around what year? 12. The word input is usually pronounce imput. What has happened here? What is this process called? 13. In older German, there were long consonants in words like bitten, where the consonant is doubled. What does this indicate now? How did this change take place? 14. The French word veau corresponds to English veal. What sound change does this illustrate? Give an example for a similar change in Bavarian. 15. What is the relationship between German küssen and English kiss. 16. What is the relationship between German Ross and English horse ? 17. What accounts for umlaut in German Hand Hände ? How can we use this to explain the relationship between English full fill ? (Two sound changes are involved.) 99 18. What is the relationship between German Kinn and English chin ? 19. Is the word pair boat Boot an exception to regular sound change? Explain? 20. Why did Grimm believe that sound change “skipped over” some words? How did die Jungrammatiker establish the regularity of sound change? 21. What is “Systemzwang”? Give an example. German and English - affectionate sisters 22. How do we explain the strange fact that German has ch wherever English has silent gh ? 23. English and German have many similar words like: Vater father, Salz salt. How do we know that English did not borrow these words form German? 24. There are also striking parallels between English and French vocabulary, e.g., face face, sauveur savior, royal royal. How do we know that English is not a Romance language? 25. How does verb inflection show that German and English (but not French and English) are “affectionate sisters”? 26. Describe the development of p,t,k of the mother tongue in German and English. Researching the past - the comparative method 27. In the Renaissance, scholars generally believed that the source of all languages was? 28. Why were Cruciger’s attempts to prove this unscientific? 29. Jacob Grimm is best known for his collection of fairytales. What was his contribution to the science of language? 30. Is Proto Indo European the mother of all languages? Explain. 31. How can we surmise that the Indo Europeans had dogs, but no cats? The history of the English language 32. Who were the first Indo Europeans to settle in Britain? 33. Give the approx. dates of the Roman colonization. What influence did this historical period have on the English language? 34. Who were the German invaders in the fifth century. Where did they come from.? Where did they settle in Britain.? 35. Who was the original King Arthur? 100 36. What influence did the Viking raiders have on the English language? 37. Who united England and established the first literary language? What dialect was this literary language based on? 38. What language dominated public life (church, schools, courts, government administration) in the period following the Norman invasion. 39. Who were the Normans and where did they come from? 40. What does a comparison of the English words for domestic animals like cow and the meat from them ( beef ) tell us about society in Norman England? 41. What were the reasons for the decline of French as the “official language”? 42. Why is the English language flooded with French words just at the time French is going out of vogue. 43. What dialect is modern English based on? What reasons are there for the ascendence of this dialect as a standard? 44. Does everyone in England now speak this standard? Explain? 45. How did the "learned" (Greek and Latin) vocabulary enter the English language? 46. English is spelled today approximately as it was pronounced in what year? 47. What difficulty did King Alfred face as a translator? 48. What are the characteristics of English expository prose? When did this style arise? 49. Why do Germans have difficulty with English style? 50. What is the British standard called? It is based on the speech of what group of people (geographical location, social class)? 51. What was the status of American English in the last quarter of the eighteenth century? 52. What do we mean by “dissociation” in the vocabulary of English? 53. What social forces led to the standardization of English in the eighteenth century? 54. What was Eliza Doolittle’s problem? The chaos of English spelling 55. What is an icon? A symbol? How does “writing” differ from these? 101 56. How did writing first arise among the Sumerians? 57. What is a syllabary? 58. The ancient Egyptian writing system has been deciphered. Why can’t we pronounce ancient Egyptian words? 59. Who was Sequoya? 60. Who invented the “alphabet”? Explain how they did it. 61. Why does 62. What is the origin of 63. What is the runic alphabet? 64. What language was used for written communication in Europe during the first millennium? How did writing in the vernaculars (French, English, German) arise? 65. What is the phonemic principle? Why is it important for writing systems? 66. What are the principle reasons for the conservativism of writing systems? 67. G.B. Shaw remarked that fish could be spelled 68. Why is independence spelled with ence , while appearance is spelled with ance ? 69. What was The Great Vowel Shift all about? 70. Describe the third syllable shortening rule. 71. Why are maid and made pronounced alike. Why did Elisa Doolittle have to practice the sentence: The rain in Spain falls mostly on the plain ? 72. Explain the difference between the pronunciation of cup and bush. Why does this difference make it hard for people in Yorkshire to get a good job? The simplification of the English inflectional system 73. What two factors account for the difference in the vowels of in past tense German finden and English find. 74. Describe the relationship between strong and weak pairs of verbs like sit ~ set. 75. Where does { ed} past tense ending original come from? 102 76. How do we account for the vowel change in sweep ~ swept, bleed ~ bled, read ~ read. 77. Why can’t you say “du” to me in English? 78. What is the origin of the pronouns they, them, their ? 79. How do we explain “irregular” plurals like foot ~ feet, goose ~ geese. 80. What accounts for the alternation 103 Someday Reading: The following is an annotated list of works on the English language that you might actually want to read or consult sometime in the future – when you have time. General Histories: Barber, Charles (1993) The English Language A Historical Introduction , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Excellent introduction for the general reader. Barber is careful to provide you with the tools you need to understand what is happening next. Available in paperback. Pyles, Thomas and John Algeo (1993) The Origins and Development of the English Language. 4th ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. A good standard introduction that is a bit more detailed than Barber without sacrificing comprehensibility. Berndt, Rolf (1989) A History of the English Language, Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie. A book for specialists. Too detailed for beginners, but worth mentioning here because of the excellent treatment of the social aspect of language development. Wyld, Henry Cecil (1927) A Short History of English. 3rd ed., London: John Murray. Much more detailed than the other histories, but well written and understandable. The book to consult when you wake up in the middle of the night worrying that door doesn’t rhyme with poor. English and European Languages: Bodmer, Frederick (1944) The Loom of Language, New York: Norton. An excellent introduction to the languages of Europe with historical, practical aids for learning them. The one book about language that you should have read. There is a German version under the title Die Sprachen der Welt. Hogben, Lancelot (1964) The Mother Tongue , New York: Norton A more detailed guide to using English as a key to learning the Germanic and the romance languages. Older English: Blakeley, Leslie (1964) Teach Yourself Old English, London: English Universities Press. Yes, it is possible. With clear explanations, exercises, excellent readings with modern English translations, the author provides a good introduction to Old English for the general reader. For older literature, the Reclam Universal Bibliothek provides a number of excellent (cheap) editions with German translation and explanatory notes: Breuer, Rolf and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), (1981) Altenglische Lyrik. Bergner, Heinz (1986) Die englische Literatur in Text und Darstellung: Mittelalter. Good selection of original texts and notes with German translation from the beginnings to ca. 1500. 104 Mossé, Fernand [1969] Mittelenglische Kurzgrammatik, München: Hueber Verlag. Good heavens a book in German (translation of French original) published in Munich! To be read after Wardale (see below). Wardale, E.E. (1937) An Introduction to Middle English, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. A simple, lucid explanation of the transition between Old and Modern English. Some knowledge of Old English is desirable. 105 only occurs before to this very day. This left Gamma, which looked like (C), for /k/ and /g/. Later, this defect was remedied by adding a crossbar to C producing G. The Romans also needed a way to represent the sound /f/. For reasons unknown, they did not adopt the Etruscan letter 8, but borrowed the Greek Digamma ( ú) /w/. Initially, they wrote /f/ as < úh>, i.e., voiceless /w/. Later, they simplified the spelling to
, . Finally, Greek contributed the letters . Runic <æ> disappears along with the sound /æ/, which reappears later. Runic < Þ> is replaced by for both / T/ and / D/. Despite defects, the phonemic principle can help us solve a number of mysteries of sound and spelling. Consider first, the American English words dollar, boss. Both are seventeenth century loan words from Dutch daal(d)er and baas. The spelling generally now have / A/ as in MS DOS, osculate, oscillator, etc. between vowels is voiced /z/ and the final or only occur before as in
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