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Context, Contact and Development Editor: Laura Wright (Cambridge) Volume I: Context, contact and development Editor: Laura Wright (Cambridge) Introduction: English, Englishes and the English Language (Raymond Hickey) I The context of English 1. The Indo-European framework (Donald Ringe) 2. English in its Germanic surrounding (Wayne Harbert) 3. Key events in the history of English (Julia Cuesta) 4. The geography of English in England (Merja Steenroos) 5. Philology and the history of English (Haruko Momma) II Contact and external influences 6. Early contact with Celtic (Raymond Hickey) 7. Classical languages in the history of English (Olga Timofeeva) 8. The Scandinavian period (Richard Dance and Sarah Pons-Sanz) 9. French and English in the later Middle Ages (Geert de Wilde) 10. Code-switching and language mixing (Herbert Schendl) 11. Early standardisation (Louise Sylvester) 12. Neoclassical borrowing and influence on English (Letitia Vezzosi) 13. Typological reorientation in the history of English (Marion Elenbaas) III The long view by levels of language These chapters are intended to cover the entire period of the history of English and thus to satisfy the need for chronological overviews. To achieve this, the authors are to be given more space with a target length for the chapters of between 40 and 50 pages. Each chapter is to have sections on Old, Middle, Early Modern and Late Modern English (up to present-day English) to allow for direct comparison between chapters. 14. Historical phonology (Donka Minkova) 15. Historical morphology (Elżbieta Adamczyk) 16. Historical syntax (Bettelou Los) 17. Historical semantics (Kathryn Allan) 18. Historical pragmatics (Andreas Jucker) NewCHEL, Vol. 1: Context, contact and development Page 2 of 45 19. Historical sociolinguistics (Terttu Nevalainen and Tanja Säily) 20. Hisotrical onomastics (Richard Coates) NewCHEL, Vol. 1: Context, contact and development Page 3 of 45 1 The Indo-European framework Donald Ringe University of Pennsylvania I begin with the Uniformitarian Principle, the only scientific way of fleshing out the records of the past and extrapolating into prehistory. Since a consequence of the UP is that languages of the past must have been spoken by actual populations, it follows that Proto-Indo-European (PIE, the earliest recoverable ancestor of English) was really spoken somewhere by some community. I discuss the recent archaeological, DNA, and computational evidence, as well as the indeterminacy resulting from absence of linguistic records at so early a date. (Citations: Paul, Nichols, Anthony, Reich and coauthors, Garrett and coauthors.) From the historical record of languages we learn that sound change is overwhelmingly regular: not a tendency, but a large-scale statistical fact. It is the basis of the Comparative Method (CM), the applied mathematics by which we reconstruct ancestor languages by comparison of their descendants. I briefly discuss the CM and its reliability and limitations. The marginal usefulness of typology will also be addressed. (Citations: Hoenigswald, Labov, Meid, Kümmel.) I give a very brief sketch of PIE grammar, including the sound system (very different from that of any modern European language), the (extensive) system of inflectional categories, headfinal syntax (with COMP on the left), and fused inflectional markers. I emphasize the pervasiveness of accent and ablaut alternations. (Citations: Clackson, Fortson, Ringe, others.) Since an aim of this chapter is to indicate what inherited material survived in Proto-Germanic (PGmc.) and in English, I next sketch the diversification of the IE family. (Citations: Warnow, Cowgill, Jasanoff, Winter, Schindler.) A major section of this chapter will sketch the complete restructuring of the PIE sound system and verb inflection in the development of PGmc., noting that further developments between PGmc. and Old English (OE) were modest in scope. Strong verb ablaut, preteritepresent verbs, and the archaic system of pronoun inflection will be cited as the most robust survivals of PIE grammar in OE; the Verner’s Law alternation, the weak past suffix, and the double inflection of adjectives will be cited as the most obvious Germanic innovations. (Citations: Ringe, Fulk, both with extensive references; Katz, Rasmussen, Hill, McFadden, Bernhardsson, Euler.) There will be a brief sketch of the PIE lexicon (with discussion of the limitations on what we can recover) and examples of words that survive in Modern English (ModE; for instance it turns out that arse is one of the PIE words that survives in ModE!). Possible loanwords from other languages in PIE will be mentioned. The dramatic innovations that occurred in the development of PGmc. will be discussed, as well as the extent to which they can be attributed to borrowing from other languages (e.g. *langaz ‘long’ probably borrowed from pre-Proto-Italic; *saiwiz ‘lake’ [ModE sea] plausibly derived from a PGmc. verb; NewCHEL, Vol. 1: Context, contact and development Page 4 of 45 *drinkaną ‘drink’ without cognates, but with PIE-type root; *saiwalō ‘soul’ very un-IE-looking, and of a semantic type often borrowed in archaic IE languages). (Citations: Nakhleh and others.) References Ringe, Donald 1996. On the Chronology of Sound Changes in Tocharian. Volume 1: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Tocharian. New Haven: American Oriental Society. Ringe, Donald 2017 [2006] A History of English, vol. 1: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ringe, Donald and Ann Taylor 2914. A Linguistic History of English, vol. 2: The Development of Old English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. NewCHEL, Vol. 1: Context, contact and development Page 5 of 45 2 English in its Germanic Surrounding Wayne Harbert Cornell University English is a member of the Germanic subgroup of Indo-European, sharing with others of that group a robust set of innovations, including phonological developments such as the Germanic Consonant Shift and fixing of initial stress, characteristic developments in the inflectional system of verbs and adjectives, a vocabulary which includes a large number of words of apparently non-IE origin, and, in its syntax, V-2 word order in various contexts. In recent times, English has become something of an outlier in the Germanic family, in part perhaps as a result of contact with other languages in the British Isles, but, in its earliest attested forms, Old English looks in many respects like a garden-variety Germanic language, with some particular hallmarks of significance to its later development. English shares some features with smaller subsets of languages within the Germanic family,. Several innovations unite it with the “Northwest Germanic” languages, to the exclusion of Gothic. A smaller number of features ally it with German, Old Saxon, Dutch, and Frisian—the “West Germanic” languages—to the exclusion of the North Germanic languages. Yet another substantial set of features is shared between English and other “North Sea Coast Germanic” languages, viz., Old Saxon and Old Frisian, to the exclusion of Franconian and Upper German. Finally, English shares a small number of features exclusively with Frisian. These facts have standardly been interpreted as reflecting successive splits in the Germanic family tree; English is, in turn, a member of Northwest Germanic, West Germanic, North Sea Germanic, and Anglo-Frisian, on this account. This chapter will catalogue the main linguistic innovations at each of these levels. The linguistic facts themselves are well-established, having been the objects of intensive scholarship for two hundred years. Their interpretation, however, is not always straightforward. Overlapping isoglosses must be explained, and alternatives to shared descent as an explanation for correspondences must be weighed. The examination of such questions has taken on renewed vitality in the past few years, informed by new understandings of language contact. The traditional view of the Germanic tree has been challenged/ reassessed at every one of these levels, ranging from contemplation of a possible role for language contact in shaping Germanic to alternatives to the ‘Anglo-Frisian hypothesis’ as an account of shared English-Frisian features. Some aspects of the problem of ‘English as a Germanic language’ persist even after its relocation from the European continent. For example, how did a relatively uniform language, recognized by its speakers in all regions from a very early date as Englisc, emerge in only a few centuries, in the absence of political unity, given the standard story that its roots lie in a variety of different language varieties on the continent? To what extent and by what mechanisms is it the product of convergence? NewCHEL, Vol. 1: Context, contact and development Page 6 of 45 Conversely, to what extent can the dialect differences reflected in Old English be traced back to differences in source languages on the continent? This chapter will survey recent scholarship on such questions. References Harbert, Wayne 2006. The Germanic Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Penzl, Herbert 1975. Vom Urgermanischen zum Neuhochdeutschen. Eine historische Phonologie [From Proto-Germanic to Modern High German. A historical phonology]. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Ringe, Donald 2017 [2006] A History of English, vol. 1: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russ, Charles 1978. Historical German phonology and morphology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. NewCHEL, Vol. 1: Context, contact and development Page 7 of 45 3 Key events in the history
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