English and German A Comparison of both Languages
1 Introduction
The purpose of this presentation is to highlight the major differences in the histories of German and English and so help students better understand how languages which are related and stem from a common ancestor –in this case Germanic –can come to have such diverging forms today.
2 The Germanic Languages
3 4 Like German, English is an Indo- European language. Both belong to the German group of languages found in northern and north- western Europe. You can tell that German and English are genetically related.
5 English is a Germanic language as are German, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese and Icelandic. This means that it belongs to an early grouping of Indo-European which distinguishes itself from other languages of this family by having undergone a series of changes to consonants in initial position. In general, stops become fricatives due to the operation of the Germanic Sound Shift (sometimes also called Grimm’s Law). This is assumed to have taken place many centuries BC. The operation of this law can be recognised by comparing words in Latin with their cognates (etymologically related forms) in English as in the following table.
Latin English Old English
pes [p] foot [f] fot
tres [t] three [þ] þreo
collis [k] hill [x] hyl
quod [kw] what [xw] hwæt
6 7 8 9 10 11 The History of English
12 Periods in the history of English
0)Runic period, pre-5c 1) Old English (450-1066) 2) Middle English (1066-1500) 3) Early Modern English (1500-1800) 4)Late Modern English (1800-)
13 CeCeltltiicc BBrriittaainin
Historical distribution of Celts in Europe
14 TThhee RRoommaannss iinn BBrrititaainin
In 55 BC the emperor Julius Caesar invades Britain establishing Roman rule in the south and south-eeaast. The Romans build roads and viaducts as well as baths in centres in England. The most famous of these is the city of Bath itself. In 410 the Romans leave Britain because of pressure in Italy from Germanic raiders. The departure of the Romans left a political vacuum in England which was eventually filled by the Germanic tribes who came from the North Sea coastal areas around 450 AD.
15 The source areas of Germanic tribes who came to England in the middle of the 5th century AD.
16 17 The Anglo-Saxons lands of England began to be christianised in 597 when St Augustine arrived on a mission initiated by Pope Gregory. Augustine established his centre in the south, in Canterbury, Kent.
18 In the Old English period, the people who wrote were all monks at monasteries. They used a form of the Latin alphabet which had been developed previously in Ireland as this country was converted to Christianity before England.
19 England during the Viking period Invasions started at the end of late 8th century, first plunderings, later settlement in Scotland and the north of England
20 21 Open page of Beowulf manuscript. This epic is the first in England and was probably composed in Mercia (central England) in the 8th century but the only surviving manuscript dates from about 1000 CE.
22 There is a considerable body of poetry from the Old English period. The monk Caedmon (7th century) was the first to compose a hymn. Later poetry was both of a religious and a secular nature.
23 England at the time of the Norman Invasion
William the Conqueror 24 Who were the Normans?
The Normans were original descendants of Vikings who had settled in the north of France some centuries before and had adopted the French language of the region. In the dispute over the successor of Edward the Confessor (1042-1066), the Norman lord, William, Duke of Normandy (c. 1027-1087), who felt he had a claim to the English throne, enforced this by successfully invading
England in 1066. 25 26 Middle English dialect areas
27 The Canterbury Tales are the major work of Middle English literature and Chaucer is regarded as second only to Shakespeare among English authors
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1399)
28 The introduction of printing to England
Printing was introduced to England in 1476 by William Caxton (c. 1442-1491). This led to an increasing regularisation of orthography and morphology.
29 House of Henry VIII (1509-1547), known popularly Tudor for his six wives, two of whom he had executed, introduced the Reformation into England and established the English monarch as head of the Church of England (the Anglican Church).
30 The Great Vowel Shift
Themajor change to affect the sound system of Middle English is that which resulted in a re-alignment of the system of long vowels and diphthongs which is traditionally known as the Great Vowel Shift. Essentially long vowels are raised one level and the two high vowels are diphthongised. The shift took several centuries to complete and is still continuing in Cockney (popular London speech). The shift of short /u/ to a lower vowel as in present-day southern English but, which began in the mid 17th century, is not part of the vowel shift.
31 32 Tudor England (16th century)
33 34 35 The King James bible of 1611 The Book of Common Prayer (known as the Authorized Version) (revised version of 1662)
36 37 38 The legacy of Samuel Johnson Johnson’s dictionary became the standard work of English lexicography because of its range, objectivity and use of quotations from major authors to back up definitions given. It was not until over a century later that it was superseded by the dictionary which was to become the Oxford English Dictionary.
39 Robert Lowth (1710-1787) Author of a normative grammar A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) which achieved great popularity for the manner in which it made recommendations for grammatical usage, something which was interpreted as very prescriptive, even though this may not have been intended as such. Lowthwas professor of poetry in Oxford and later bishop of Oxford and of London (as of 1777).
40 41 The English concern with pronunciation
Pronunciation in English is a yardstick of one‘s language. More than European countries, the English judge the standardness of someone’s speech by its phonetics. The ideal which arose during the 18th century and established itself in the 19th century was that one’s speech was not to betray where one came from, i.e. regional accents were frowned upon.
42 English dialects (present-day)
43 The codification of Received Pronunciation
Daniel Jones (1881-1967) major English phonetician of the 20th century 44 45 46 47 The dominance of London in England is obvious in the linguistic innovations which spread from London and the Home Counties to other parts of the country and not the other way around. 48 TThehe OOxxffoorrdd EEngnglilishsh DiDiccttiionaonaryry
49 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles
A proposal was made by Richard Trench in 1857 to the Philological Society to design a new dictionary which would serve as a definitive work on the vocabulary of English with complete historical coverage. The Scotsman James Murray (1837-1915) became the main editor (see inset on right). The first letter was published as a volume in 1888 and all the 12 volswere completed in 1928. A thirteenth supplement volume came out in 1933 (after which it was called the Oxford English Dictionary published by Oxford University Press. The twenty-volume second edition appeared in 1989 (this is also available electronically). Work on a much expanded third edition is underway at present. 50 51 52 For more information on the history of English please consult the following website, accessible at: http://www.uni-due.de/SHE
53 The History of German
54 Periods in the history of German
0)Runic period, pre-5c 1) Old High German (500-1050) 2) Middle High German (1050-1350) 3) Early New High German (1350-1650) 4)New High German (1650-)
55 Old High German
56 Runes are an early type of writing used primarily for inscriptions on stone by Germanic speakers. Celtic runes, collectively known as Ogam, also existed at the same time (first few centuries CE).
57 Earliest forms of continental Germanic languages.Note that Slavic peoples occupied the area east of the rivers Elbe and Saale. The Lombards were a Germanic group which lived south of the Alps for several centuries.
58 The written documents of Old High German were produced in monastaries like St Gallen (in present-day Switzerland), Reichenau or Fulda (probably where the Hildebrandslied was written down); this situation is similar to that of Old English. One of the main pieces of Old High German epic poetry is the Muspilli (now in the Bayersche Staatsbibliothek) probably written about 870. It deals with the theme of the afterlife, what happens to the soul after death.
59 The Hildebrandslied (see the two pages of the manuscript on the following slide) is a poem of alliterative verse, some 68 lines of which have survived. It was written down in the early 9th century in a mixture of Old Bavarian and Old Saxon. The poem is an item of oral literature and was composed some time before the date given here.
60 Hildebrandslied
61 Middle High German
62 Middle High German
Middle High German refers to dialects spoken in the central and southern parts of German from the latter half of the eleventh century onwards. These were distinguished from forms of Low German and early Dutch found in the north of Germany, especially in the coastal areas. A general form of Middle High German was the Dichtersprache based on south-wester dialects, such as Swabian and Alemannic. The geographical extent of German increased to the spread of the language east of the Elbe-Saale river border. In addition early forms of Yiddish (varieties of German used by Jews with elements of liturgical Hebrew and some Slavic loans) began to appear in writing in the late Middle Ages (13th and 14th centuries). A variety of linguistic featues characterise Middle High German,notably umlaut (for noun plurals, comparative, certain verb forms) as well as final devoicing and the phonetic reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables).
63 Middle High German
As in England, there was a general movement away from a purely ecclesiastical written culture to a secular one, often centred around royal courts, e.g. those of the Hohenstaufen or Habsburg in the south of Germany. Poets often worked for monarchs and wrote courtly poetry.
64 Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170 –c. 1220) is the author of the famous medieval romance Parzival which is in the Arthurian tradition describing the spiritual quest of the knights, with some others, for the Holy Grail. This story was the basis of the opera Parsifal by Richard Wagner. As a Minnesänger, Wolfram also wrote lyrics.
65 Other major writers of the Middle High German period are Gottfried von Strassburg (died early 13th century), known for his Tristan (on the love story of Tristan and Iseult) and Hartmann von Aue (flourished late 12th and early 13th centuries), known for his Der arme Heinrich (a narrative poem about a leper cured by a young girl who offers her life forhim).
66 Gottfried von Strassburg Hartmann von Aue Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170 -c. 1230) is the most famous of the German Minnesängers, composers of lyric poetry in the courtly love tradition of the High Middle Ages (approximately 1000-1300).
67 The Nibelungenlied is a Middle High German epic which recounts the actions of the young hero Siegfried including his death and the revenge by his wife Kriemhild. The events of the epic were the source of the opera Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner.
68 The Holy Roman Empire was a complex union of regions in central Europe which existed from 962 (under Otto I) to 1806 (dissolved in the Napoleonic era). It was dominated by Germany but never formed a tight political unit.
This term was introduced by the German philologist Wilhelm Scherer (1841-1886) and is taken to cover the period 1350-1650, the beginning and end of which are marked by the Black Death, bubonic plague in northern Europe, and the Peace of Westphalia, ending the Thirty Years‘War. The major events of this period are (i) the introduction of printing by Johannes Gutenberg (1456) and (ii) the Protestant Reformation and Bible translation by Martin Luther (1534).
70 71 The Holy Roman Empire at the time of Luther, c. 1500
72 Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546)
73 Luther published his translation of the New Testament in 1522 and with his collaborators he published that of the entire Bible in 1534.The type of language used by the sächsische Kanzleisprache which wsa thought to be comprehensible to Germans from various parts of the county.
74 New High German
German literature flourished in the Renaissance period (1400 onwards) with such early authors as Sebastian Brant (1457- 1521), the author of the satire Das Narrenschiff. The Barock Period (1600 onwards) also gave rise to major works of literature such as the early novel Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen (1621-1676)
75 The eighteenth century was also a period of flourishing literature, for example Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), a dramatist and enlightenment author, the philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744– 1803) or the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724– 1803).
76 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832), the author of many standard works of literature, including Faust, is considered the greatest writer in the German language. Goethe had a close association with the dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) and the literary movement they formed is known as Weimar Classicism.
77 The early nineteenth century saw the rise of Indo-European philology, a historically oriented science and the precursor to modern linguistics. It was very strongly a German discipline and Jakob Grimm (1985-1863) was a major representative of this field, publishing his Deutsche Grammatik (1816, 1821) in which he formulated the Germanic Sound Shift (also known as Grimm‘s Law).
Together with his brother Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) he published fairy tales, known as Grimms Märchen, and a major dictionary the Deutsches Wörterbuch.
78 Die Brüder Grimm
79 German unification
In 1871 after a number of wars, with Denmark and France, and after gaining dominance over Bavaria, Prussia suceeded under its then leader, Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), in unifying the entire German-speaking region except Switzerland (an independent federation with several languages) and Austria (a monarchy of its own at the time). The Second German Empire was a stable political entity from 1871 to 1914 due to the balance of power achieved by Bismarck.
Unified Germany was ruled from the north and thus northern German pronunciation became the supraregional standard of the spoken language and has remained so to this day, despite the acceptance of local forms of language elsewhere, especially in the southern regions. 80 The territorial extent of Germany after unification in 1871
81 82 83 84 German-speaking areas in present-day Europe
85 The concern with orthography
86 87 88 The Dialects of German
89 Broad dialect areas
90 91 A famous isogloss dividing Northern and Southern varieties of German
92 The Low German region of North Germany. Note that Low German is a separate language and its historical origins are in Old Saxon, not Old High German, which is the earliest form of present-day German.
93 German ancestry and language use outside Europe
94 95 Countries in the world where German is spoken as a native language
96 Guides to Language Usage
97 98 Konrad Alexander Friedrich Duden (1829 –1911)
99 100 Forms of Address in English and German
101 The major European languages use different personal pronouns depending on the degree of acquaintance which speakers have with those they address. The systems found in Europe show a twofold distinction: one form for addressing acquaintances, friends and relatives and one for addressing strangers or more distant acquaintances. The formal means for realisingthis distinction vary from case to case. Each language uses the second person singular for informal address but there are a variety of ways for expressing formality pronominally as can be seen from the following table.
102 The forms from different languages in the above table have various sources. For instance, the third person singular feminine in Italian lei ‘she’refers originally to maiestà ‘majesty’. The German use of sie ‘she-SG’with plural verb forms (with an initial capital Sie) is attested and would appear to be a combination of indirect third person address and respectful plural as augmented deference. In French and Russian the vous and vy, both ‘you-PL’ respectively, attained a double function: as a reference to morethan one individual with whom one is on informal terms and as a form for more distant acquaintances and strangers which could be used in the singular or plural. 103 Because of the differences in realisations, it is practice in linguistic discussions to refer to the informal marker as the T form and the formal one as the V form (corresponding to the first letters of the French and Russian pronouns). Such systems are termed dyadic as they have two possible pronouns for addressing individuals.
In those languages with the above distinction the higher levels of society tend to use V-forms more and the lower levels the T-forms. This fact may be a remnant of the historical situation out of which the pronominal distinction arose.
104 105 The German address system
The general rule in German is that the formal Sie ‘you’is used for strangers and the informal Du ‘you’for friends and relatives. However, the matter is considerably more nuanced than this simple statement implies.
Social maturation and the use of T/V A system of address in a language is something which is learned consciously by children in their society. The rule always holds that children use the familiar form with each other and with their relatives. However, they must learn (by 5 or 6 at thelatest) that there is a marked formal form which is to be used with strangers. As opposed to the acquisition of other aspects of language (morphology, syntax, etc.) children require a fair degree of correction as they overgeneralisethe T form (here: Du) to begin with. Because the T form is the original unmarked form, there is a general correlation between age and the use of the formal V form. The T form is used among peers up to their twenties (unless some professional situation forbids this or theparties in a conversation are complete strangers).
106 The German address system
Because the Du form implies close acquaintance it can be used to force this. Very often such a move is taken by one partner in an exchange and frowned upon by the other. Speakers often resist attempts on the part ofothers to use Du so as to keep their social distance from them. Forcing the Du form on someone is regarded as bad social behaviour. Retention of the Sie form can often occur simply where individuals want to be on the safe side: stick to politeness and you cannot go wrong.
Solidarity and the T form A frequent function of the Du form is to demonstrate solidarity, i.e. strong common interests, with another individual or group of individuals. In this environment the requirement of close acquaintance can be waived. This is evident in many groupings in society. For instance, there is a tradition that members of the social democratic party say Du to each other. Equally, if one deliberately engages in a special activity with other individuals then joining the group usually involves using the Du form, e.g. engaging in various forms of sports. The use of the Du form for reasons of solidarity probably has its origin in working class usage. For example among miners, road workers, hauliers, etc. reciprocal Du is ubiquitous.
107 The German address system
Switching from the V to the T form In all languages with a distinction between a familiar and a formal form of address there is continual switching from the V to the T form. Indeed it is socially codified in many languages, e.g. in German there is a quaint ceremony of Bruderschaft trinken ‘to trinkbrotherhood’, which is optional. The same term and ceremony also exists in Polish. Once the Du form has been established it is impossible to return to the Sie form without insulting the other person. In situations in which there is a disparity in a relationship itis always up to the social superior to take the initiative and propose the Du form. This is a residue of the original situation where the morepowerful members always said Du to the less powerful.
108 The English address system
109 English is remarkable among the European languages in not having a distinction between personal pronouns used for strangers and non-strangers. Indeed standard Englishdoes not even have a distinction between a pronoun for the second person singular, when addressing one person, and another for the second person plural, when addressing more than one. Both these matters are related.
110 The English address system
English used to have a distinction in pronouns for address. On the one hand, there was a singular form thou ‘you-SG’, which now only survives in a few rural regions in England and in religious usage. On the other hand there was a plural form ye ‘you-PL’which survives in some conservative varieties of English such as Scottish and Irish English. The ye form was later replaced by you, the original accusative. The singular was used for familiar and the plural for polite address. However, the system did not establish itself, most likely because it was not absolute. In the early modern period –as attested, for instance, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet –one could say thou and you to one and the same person, depending on the situation. Hamlet appears to use thou to his mother when he is addressing her in this function and uses you when addressing her as queen.
111 The English address system
The situation just described contrasts clearly with that in all European languages which have maintained the pronominal address distinction. These languages use it exclusively: one either uses the T form with someone or the V form, one cannot use now one, now the other form.
A further feature of the early modern English address system is that the thou form was often perceived as contemptuous, at least in certain varieties of the language (though not in traditional rural usage). The net effect is that the thou – you distinction did not maintain its function of social differentiation and went into decline. By the 18th century it was gone entirely in the standard language and is really only present in religious usage, e.g. in prayers.
112 Although standard English does not distinguish between first and second personal pronouns nearly all dialects of the language do.The following is a selection of forms used across the anglophone world to refer to more than one person one is addressing.
113 References
Besch, Werner 1998. Duzen, Siezen, Titulieren. ZurAnredeim Deutschenheuteund gestern. 2nd edition. Göttingen: Vandenhoeckund Ruprecht. Braun, Friederike. 1988. Terms of address. Problems of patterns and usage in various languages and cultures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987 [1978]. Politeness. Some universals of human language. Cambridge: University Press. Finkenstaedt, Thomas 1963. You und thou: StudienzurAnrede imEnglischen, miteinemExkursüberdie Anredeim Deutschen. Berlin: Gedike, Friedrich. 1794. ÜberDu und Siein derdeutschen Sprache. Berlin: de Gruyter. Hickey, Raymond 2003. ‘The German address system. Binary and scalar at once.’, in: Irma Taavitsainenand Andreas H. Jucker(eds) Diachronic perspectives on address term systems, Pragmatics and Beyond, New Series, Vol. 107. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 401-425. 114 English spoken outside Europe
115 A New and Accurate Map of the World (1627) by John Speed
116 117 Countries with English as an official language (de facto or de jure)
118 Regions where English is spoken as a primary second language
119 How English and German have changed over time
120 Handling variation across time
All languages are constantly changing is a more or less regular way. In general one can say that minority features can gain in frequency and become dominant while others recede and eventually disappear as shown graphically in the following image.
121 Language change can take place among children acquiring a language or with adults using the language which has already been acquired. Change which takes place in early childhood is largely regular and results from analogy or reanalysis. Analogy a form changes on the basis of a pattern already present in the language, e.g. Middle High German der Blume change to the feminine gender because disyllabic nouns in final –e were generally feminine, e.g. die Lampe, die Sonne, die Decke. Reanalysis a non-systemic feature is interpreted by a generation of children as being systemic. For instance, umlaut in early German(the pattern Sohn : Söhne; jung : jünger in modern German) was originally a phonetic feature without any significance for the system of the language. But later it came to be part of the indication of the plural for a number of common nouns, e.g. Hand : Hände; Kopf : Köpfe.
122 Change is generally slow and does not disrupt communication between older and younger speakers. An item of change usually starts slowly, then moves quickly, slowing down towards the end sometimes without encompassing all possible inputs. This course of change can be illustrated graphically by an S-curve as follows.
123 The Split of English and German
Related languages can also come to differ when only one of them undergoes a shift. A case in point is the High German Sound Shift which is responsible for the pronunciatioin of words like Zeit, Zahn, Pferd, Pfarrer in German. High German also has /s/ whereas Low German, many northern German dialects and English still have the original /t/. This results in correspondences such as essen : eat; besser : better between present-day German and English. Correspondences based on the High German Sound Shift would be zehn : ten, zwei : two. Words with the same historical root (called cognates) have often undergone a meaning change, e.g. German Zaun and English town (as well as Dutch tuin ‘garden’) are all from the same root although the meanings are now different. Nonetheless, one can recognise that the meanings are related. 124 The High German Sound Shift
125 English and German: General points of contrast
Although English and German are descended from the same initial language, (West) Germanic, in their present-day structures the languages differ considerably. Typology classifies languages according to their synchronic structures and not their genetic relatedness. On this basis English is an analytic and German a synthetic language (see following slide). This situation is due to the fact that in its history English lost most of its inflections (compare, for instance, English noun and verb forms with those of German). The same did not happen to German to anything like the same extent. Why a language should lose most of its morphology (inflections, grammatical gender, cases) is uncertain, but it would seem to connected to language contact, a situation in which (adult) speakers often simplify their language in order to be understood easily. Early language shift from Celtic to Old English may also have played arole. 126 127 128 Language vary across the different levels of language (see previous slide). In their phonologies (sound systems) English and German show many similarities but also differences. Both languages have pairs of consonants, such as /p,b/, /f,v/, /s,z/, /k,g/ and both have long and short vowels. However, there are differences, e.g. in the presence of interdental fricatives in English or front rounded vowels in German (see following slide). Languages may also differ in the positions in which sounds can occur and how they are realised. For instance, German has the affricate /t$/, as in quetschen but the sound is very rare word-initially and hence is simplified in Englsh loanwords yielding [$ips] for chips [t$ips]. German, like Slavic languages, does not have a contrast between voiced and voiceless stops/fricatives in word-final position, cf. Bund : bunt which has the same pronunciation..This can lead to Germans pronouncing word pairs like dog : dock as the same which is not acceptable in English. 129 130 Standard German has a special pronunciation of /r/ as a uvular fricative (at the back of the mouth). This pronunciation is not found in English.
131 Varieties of English
There are many more varieties of English than there are of German. This is due to the fact that in the Colonial Period (1600-1900) English spread throughout the world and different forms arose under the specific sociolinguistic conditions of the colonies. For more information on these matters, please consult the dedicated website shown on the following slide.
132 http://www.uni-due.de/SVE 133 134 135 136 137 Scots, which derives from northern Old English in Scotland, is often considered a separate language from English
138 139 Pidgins are contact languages arising among adults often in trade situations. In the conditions of the slave plantations in the colonies some of these pidgins became creoles, i.e. the native language of later generations.
140 Literature on the History of English
The development of modern English
141 142 143 144 145 A standard work (published in 2004) on the late modern period (1700-present)
146 A recent overview (published in May 2009) by a leading expert on 18th century English. Published by Edinburgh University Press.
147 A more flexible view of how standard English is evolving (published in 1999)
148 Outside the mainstream: the history of varieties of English apart from southern British English
149 There are many persistent misconceptions about language. This book examines a range of these and discusses them objectively.
150 A critical look at the way in which notions of standard language are used manipulatively and to exclude others.
151 Every language which is spoken is changing. This study looks at the ways in which standard varieties of English have been evolving in the past hundred years or so.
152 Views of the development of the English language today (note the use of the article and the singular versus the plural in the following books)
153 154 155 Beyond national borders: the idea of World Englishes
English is increasingly seen in a global context, one in which the language is divorced from its origins in England. As a result of this, notions of standard English,deriving from Britain and America, are seen as increasingly inappropriate for the non-western world.
156 157 Other introductions to World Englishes
158 159 Histories of German
160 161 162 163 164 165