A H ISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE COURSE GUIDE
Professor Michael D.C. Drout WHEATON COLLEGE A History of the English Language Professor Michael D.C. Drout Wheaton College
Recorded Books ™ is a trademark of Recorded Books, LLC. All rights reserved. A History of the English Language Professor Michael D.C. Drout
Executive Producer John J. Alexander
Executive Editor Donna F. Carnahan
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Lecture content ©2006 by Michael D.C. Drout Course guide ©2006 by Recorded Books, LLC 72006 by Recorded Books, LLC Cover image: © PhotoDisc #UT088 ISBN: 978-1-4281-1730-3 All beliefs and opinions expressed in this audio/video program and accompanying course guide are those of the author and not of Recorded Books, LLC, or its employees. Course Syllabus
A History of the English Language
About Your Professor ...... 4
Introduction ...... 5
Lecture 1 The Foundations of Language: Brain, Development, Acquisition ...... 6
Lecture 2 Signs and Meanings: Semantics ...... 13
Lecture 3 Sounds of Language: Phonetics ...... 20
Lecture 4 Sound and Meaning: Phonology ...... 28
Lecture 5 Sound Shifts and History ...... 34
Lecture 6 The Rules: Syntax ...... 41
Lecture 7 Words, Words, Words ...... 50
Lecture 8 The History of the English Language ...... 57
Lecture 9 From Germanic to Old English ...... 64
Lecture 10 Borrowing and Influence: Romans, Celts, Danes (Latin, Celtic, Scandinavian) ...... 73
Lecture 11 The Norman Conquest, the Influence of French, and the Development of Middle English ...... 80
Lecture 12 To Modern English: The Great Vowel Shift ...... 87
Lecture 13 You Say Soda, I Say Pop: Dialect, Variants, and the Development of American English ...... 94
Lecture 14 A Global Language: The Present and Future of English ...... 101
Course Materials ...... 108
3 About Your Professor Michael D.C. Drout
Michael D.C. Drout is the William and Elsie m o c . s Prentice Professor of English at Wheaton e g a m I College in Norton, Massachusetts, where he C C B
, teaches courses in Old and Middle English, r e i l l o
C medieval literature, Chaucer, fantasy, and n i m a j science fiction, and the history of the n e B
© English language. Professor Drout received his Ph.D. in medieval literature from Loyola University in 1997. He also holds M.A. degrees from Stanford (journalism) and the University of Missouri-Columbia (English literature) and a B.A. from Carnegie Mellon. In 2006, Professor Drout was chosen as a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. In 2005, he was awarded the Prentice Professorship for outstanding teaching. The Wheaton College class of 2003 presented him with the Faculty Appreciation Award in that year. He is editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics, which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies for 2003. He is also the author of How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century (Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Studies). Drout is one of the founding editors of the journal Tolkien Studies and is editor of The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (Routledge). Drout has published extensively on medieval literature, including articles on William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon wills, the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang, the Exeter Book “wisdom poems,” and Anglo-Saxon medical texts. He has also published articles on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books and Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising series of children’s fantasy novels. Drout has written an Old English grammar book, King Alfred’s Grammar, which is available for free at his website, www.michaeldrout.com. He has given lectures in England, Finland, Italy, Canada, and throughout the United States. Drout lives in Dedham, Massachusetts, with his wife Raquel D’Oyen, their daughter Rhys, and their son Mitchell.
A Note on Typesetting in This Booklet There is a distinct typefont change between our standard typeface (Arial, a sans serif typeface) and Junius Modern (a serif typeface) used for special character settings for passages set in Old English.
4 c s i D o t o h P © Introduction Language defines people as human. In fact, all of humanity’s greatest cultur - al accomplishments are either made out of language or rely on language for their dissemination. In A History of the English Language, highly regarded professor Michael D.C. Drout of Wheaton College leads a fascinating discus - sion of the origin and development of the English language. Professor Drout addresses the foundation of language and its connection to specific portions of the brain. The components of language are e xplained in easy-to-understand terms and the progression of the language from Germanic to Old, Middle, and Modern English is fully illustrated—including such revolutionary language upheavals as those brought about by the Norman Conquest and the Great Vowel Shift. One of the most interesting aspects of the English language lies in its vari - ants, such as the “soda” vs. “pop” debate and the place of African-American English in modern culture. These and other dialectual curiosities are looked at in detail and placed in the context of today’s world. Finally, Professor Drout examines the future not only of the English language, but of all the world’s languages. 5 Lecture 1: The Foundations of Language: Brain, Development, Acquisition
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams’s (eds.) An Introduction to Language, chapters 1–2.
The study of language is the foundation of all other learning. In the Middle Ages, education was divided into the Trivium and the Quadrivium , which together made up The Seven Liberal Arts . The Trivium was made up of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; the Quadrivium included arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. So even in the Middle Ages, long before the great lin - guistic discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the study of lan - guage was the base upon which everything else was built. Language defines us as human. All the other old clear separations between human and animal—social organization, tool use, altruism—have been seen to be much less clear as more research has been done, but the possession of abstract language is thus far still uniquely human (some animals seem to possess the rudiments of language, but even the most advanced of these does not have the ability of a human two-year-old). All of our greatest cultural achievements are either made out of language or rely upon language for their accomplishment and dissemination. Even when someone achieves some - thing great in art, or athletics or music, we immediately turn to language to tell other people about it. The massive proliferation of cell phones, instant messaging, podcasts, and voice mails simply illustrates a simple fact about humanity: we love to talk. In fact, we just cannot stop talking. Language is our medium of communication, but it can also be a barrier to understanding. There are over six thousand languages in the world today, though we are rapidly losing the smaller ones the same way we are losing endangered species. Anyone who has been stranded in a place where no one around you speaks your language knows the frustration that arises from being unable to communicate in an articulate, complex fashion. We spend billions of dollars and countless hours on translation, on attempting to learn new languages and on developing machines that can translate for us (with surprisingly little success). The six thousand living languages would need an entire library of dictionaries and grammars just to document them, not to mention that at the present state of our knowledge, each language needs a dictionary and grammar in terms of every other language: a book that teach - es Japanese in Korean is no use to a speaker of English or German or Russian who wants to learn Japanese. E
N Some languages have reputations for being particularly difficult. Finnish has O
E more than ten noun cases; the verb system of Spanish is exceedingly com -
R plex; Japanese has the most difficult alphabet system in the world; Chinese U T and many other Asian languages rely on tones that are very difficult for adult C E L
6 speakers of non-Asian languages even to hear; Kho i-san and other African languages rely on click sounds that are not phonemes in many other lan - guages. English has numerous exceptions to all of its rules and adopts new vocabulary so readily that dictionaries must be constantly updated. And yet take a tiny child from any linguistic environment, bring him or her to another linguistic environment, and essentially do nothing except carry on normal behavior and the child will grow up as a fluent speaker of the new language. Before the age of six children learn new languages effortlessly. There seems to be no upper limit to the number of languages that can be learned this way, and not only can children learn as many languages as they are exposed to, but they also never seem to confuse languages: A child growing up in a bilin - gual environment can switch easily from, say, Finnish to Swedish or Spanish to English or Polish to Russian without confusing the two languages or mak - ing fundamental mistakes in grammar. Multilingual people can do this switch - ing without confusion. And yet adults can study languages for decades and not achieve perfect pronunciation. So how does this all work? Where does language come from? If it is a com - pletely “natural” phenomenon, why do we have six thousand world lan - guages? If language is a completely “cultural” phenomenon, why is it the common capability of every human? Why can even people who are unable to hear or speak develop complex language? Why do we speak a language dif - ferent from that of our ancestors? Why do some people, even within America, speaking English, use different words for the same things? In this course, we will learn the answers to all these questions and more, tracing language from the brain, through the throat and mouth and out into the world, examining the ways it changes over time and space. In the end, although we will not have all the answers, we will have a much better idea about how language works and how this supremely human achievement helps make us what we are. This course can be divided into two parts. In the first half, lectures one through seven, we will examine how language works in general. In the sec - ond half, lectures eight through fourteen, we will take these general princi - ples and apply them to the specific language of English in all its fascinating and complex history and development. We will therefore start off with the very big picture—the logical structures of languages, the ways linguistic sounds are produced, the connection between sound and meaning, the power of syntax—and then zoom in to the particular ways English puts together sound and meaning. Interwoven throughout the entire argument will be the history of English, a language that began among a small group of relatively primitive forest-dwellers many thou - sands of years ago in the north of Europe and has expanded to become the first truly global language. The Foundations and the Brain We could begin our discussion of language with mathematics, with the types of communications systems that can be described mathematically. The key ideas in this field were developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, who were researchers for Bell Labs (the telephone company) in 1949.
7 LECTURE ONE 8 br e w sou e h t ar im s d n u o s d n a e r a r o f h w c a r t n e h T t u o m (d fM th e ma n wh th at con me a sp po r br a wo r kin th at in t c e n c n e r F n i a r b n a h c n u e h t e g a u g a l of a amo off Oth er Sh co O S T B I t s n ju g a u g n bit a r e he ee uld p r o RI o f a a ich d c i oc an al in in tai w o n r ds l l i w ort nd tempo b u . t n u o s a l p x e cour n t nge s i d e y ni n un t la p t h , d a e n e h es ch b ra r e h , h u o r h no (fu n a g c ar ti d le kn ( e h T h a h w , o be ng d eyo n mat he ant th i a u l c n i n i eu a com t y in . a w f bu g. oc to rs d di d e g d t dev el p i l n re d, h p h th at ru s) ll h t nctio ow e of o t i b se ling ua ge cu la u c s i nk in g d ed h t ave ss e t tra nsmi rob a n n a r and h g e s as t e w a r Th ra s u , s In t s elm s i s a i c i s y and eur i m i e no t d binat nfo r s d u t e d e p a h th n i th t s n t f uistc We ma ke s o h n a m i s mat i e ha ve io o i ot he ct e r y o r s s u o s ope f n i o f the p p is l l i w o a is? s h c e olingu p p W f e g al an d ar ea u m is logica n o r di y s e s l u lingu m lso ab ou t gr a how s d l g u ent d mat ion r e the rn i d t rea t io p n sc ov er eav er d e h r o f u d s i h tte d ? s n e n no t ma s e t a r e n d ci sco pe r . s g n u l B g e b s e n e G y l r o i e t t h th e . d i ns s d pr c a P mm at ic al s a ans wo n i the li ng ui st s y . ly d e c ke b ist d t lowed no r e i th t a t r o p m i gn oc ist o d P o n o m t a o r h e h si mp ly be rain r a r f o tha thr ough l e v a r t h t n i la ng rd s, if fe r f i br a st ’s eo pl e ic e d o t n l a t n o e r e h T ics etic esing. dis cipl ine tha t dem onst rate d wh e t an y se ns e; b e in oe ud e m e v y b of hear n e t s i x e i w ar ea e W resa a w l a s i e of o c in , t g P t en t are g n a l d ua g are ich t a o r h s we is y u o s h t thi s a d n a a n a h c r n exp t co n g i s r e v n of log ic B esona h t t n of not pr od u u g n o of l u wi th sp ee ch . r y g euro o r p also t f i g e h t ro ca ’s s y ki nd e l l a c — t n funct (i n sou e g u o r ha ve uld a e g a u mea r d n a rch. sp ee ch o t it lang cou r a c o r B St osed d e h t — e c t s u wi th ou t s l a wir e; explain e c u d g n i g d e t pe r e h ian s r a t s f ha s ecod th e of r b udies da ma m o r lin , e t o n y b nds a be ce nce of nigfu h io f o PET f o , n i a uage se m o r f s guist a inf orma tion bit e w o T n i u o m an d a b t d nig e h t e e h t o le ft to con veye d ap ha si a: th Pe o too k e h t in t l u m “l an g e h t t i w mat hema , s i d o s o v are n o G in m o s t im im pa ir me nt s, d beyond k c ge e par ticu larl y s t a h of tha r e h w h oth er wi th ver (p s d n u l a c po st er io r , h t r i a h We rn ic ke o m r a r e v o c th l rh yt hm t the av in g is , d agin) pl r a r r f when e h n i e l p i chosen stroke in to ositrn to up e h t ua ge e t a l u c i t f o e e t n o y e h t n a r one o t d n a , s p i l m e v t n i r o c langu m. some br ai n, ap h e Br a r b y a w wi th m mu l e b a B whe re wo b l a u g n a l T t c e l e o d e r b u g n a l e m e g ap oc a’ s th to b n a — s d tic ally y thr The the ory. he y an of scan t n e n i ch, o f e h t o as ia n i a r of . n i a rds , n a o l no i victms e f rg an .” da ma age re ly emiso a h t a h t n i c r o oug h se ct io n ’s the by r e b the sin ce v a r t langu sco bu t indvu r l a c i r d u o b a eg ul ar s e g a pr o n i — a bra o t s f o r a e e g a le d ar ea , Sha nnon s t n ar ea t t s n I e g wha t the e t a l a p an d s how f o brain up on enou a e w faste- pe d l e r i a in alo g it But . y r du ce ge in s t a r e n h t a to u p m i e c f o e h t age, t and we m a t g e b leavs bra n w o d n e h ve ry n f o e m a c e cer tain o no ti ce d of ob a h t ar e r i an d o w t muc h w to t u B was th e h c u n i a t r al sp ee ch e h t f e r inf or gh tom . M in fo rm at io n in h g u o r a t u o are this r o c in, viously th e . s n i re no rm al -s ou nd n I s e an sufer s e s l d e l d d i but m m l l i t s ab le i l a s more un de rs ta nd in g oes to d n a s u o h t th e n i sear v o m , r e n e t s ography) the pe ci o t nd how e r u t c e l ot he r ) x e t mat ion g n i y f i d o ovin t r a p t e r p l a c o u p m i f o abl e su pe ri or ou course). inf orma tion p r u S learn “ba ndwi dth. ” 1 6 8 1 how a t n i u g i f e r st ud y Wea ver e h e h t t bu t t difernt to max imu e g A chers e h fi c l y t g cho d es io n a w the they e h t f o t c a r t s e s l a t e d to etail pa rt pr od uc e g n i r o r h t g n i s i r ares does pa rt s hc u m a c o v ha s ts e h c of it. er e h w eh t the s ee r h t , s h t th e do rea t r b by y and c eh se te m e brain T a , t , l i na l ta h t ,t a sr a e of no o ory in u o .n i a in g re or y. hus no mos t m lef t ly l ,y l tu b the of se in th e - - - t . is e we get to the biggest “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” problem since the original “chicken and the egg” problem: How did language arise? There are a variety of theories, and they are all bad. Some researchers think that language came from imitation of sounds (the “ding dong”) theory, others from the need to keep groups of people in rhythm (the “yo hee ho” theory). We simply do not know, as humans have been using spoken language far, far longer than they have been using writing. Language Acquisition and Development We do know that once a language exists, exposing a young child’s mind to that language results in the child learning the language. The language organ is clearly universal: Take a baby from an American family to China and put that child with a Chinese-speaking family, and that child will grow up speak - ing fluent Chinese. But wait too long, and bring an adult to China, and that adult will not even be able to distinguish key aspects of Chinese, such as ris - ing and falling tones. The difficulty that adult Japanese speakers have in dis - tinguishing L and R, for example, has led to many unpleasant ethnic jokes and also World War II-era attempts to separate out Japanese Americans from potential spies based on the pronunciation of L and R words. So we can conclude that the language organ is both hard-wired (anyone can learn a language with no instruction if he or she is exposed early enough) and programmable. Our best research suggests that the brain’s language capabili - ty is completely open until the age of six. Then, between six and puberty, there is a bit less flexibility. After puberty something hardens in the brain and it becomes far more difficult to learn new languages without a great deal of com - plex intellectual material (i.e., memorizing paradigms, figuring out parallels, understanding rules) that children do not need in order to pick up a language. But, as anyone who has spent time around a young child knows, children do not pick up language completely and immediately. The field of Developmental Linguistics investigates the ways children learn languages, and this investiga - tion has shown us much about how the brain works in general. It all begins with sounds. Babies babble, repeating sounds like “da, da, da,” or “ma, ma, ma.” Research shows that babies can babble any sound in any of the world’s languages, but they rapidly restrict their babbling to the sounds that make up the language that is spoken around them. Sound acquisition continues throughout language development. Although babies can babble any given sound from any language, they cannot combine all of these sounds in any order. Neither can older children, which is why “baby talk” is often character - ized by phenomena such as consonant cluster simplification, in which groups of consonants, such as those at the beginning of the word “squirrel,” are sim - plified; “squirrel” becomes “skel,” “truck” becomes “tuck.” These processes of substitution are the same as those that go into language change in general, and we will discuss them in some detail in lecture five. Around the age of one year, children begin to use one-word utterances, moving from sounds to words. These words are, at the beginning, nearly all nouns. Then follow the verbs, and then other words that can be combined with nouns and verbs: adjectives and adverbs. The two-word stage lasts for a while, with children able to communicate through expressions like “my book”
9 LECTURE ONE 1 0 e e So g e d ch a Ha m la a wi Ch p m e e d d so h T t i t i k “ g n i k a m t k c a b d n a i d g n E d d a s u m a n e r d l i h c c i d e r p s e s h sta d En to b o , g n o i y e h Oth Eve e W R no ach ua nt if nd l le rs. r uce re is ist ecom r ck f an al th fe il me n e r e f s e l u r s u “more me o g w i o . g t ir n, ul dren nes inct e v i s exc formed y ug ge rs li s i l f ren e, D e y f o g n i o g Bu i n e h t e h t ai ers na co nt t o n k sh) d o r p es t e b s g n i spo p ly d l i h c rat u hes l g b a t h h a c n e ar u e e l an an b e evo u r mplex ti ri t p p a o t pe , s fro ven al n t u a c ut rfe ( y b se ve l b “ ng her on wh e e h w l l i w od mo e lan distngu le to (Ca .s e l - ew ken gua milk” a l e l c u eliv o t ly, p d e Cr , ) u m e r th par lve nt , at ctly b d e h c g n y l ars d a e s Hawin o t use the dife th e s gua re s evidn m incor e t e h t u eol e tha ” n o s nto of lang or “ ges q e b a spo r d l i s e s ” . la n e a u Siste syn a t s i n i d ation e n e e w “ n e r ok f “ rou comp o t o gr o t o ir w o h e m aw s r i t n cour ” s i ngu this ge coln n c n e u ges k i L o t r re f e g t he g n i d n e ishe t o r a l u g e r r i am way hat re g es) uag ke o t has tax b , s e k “ e h t o a t ha nd ogr nt Da d n a s h e s i w e ega ce r ma y l n , b mon d e - “ ct n r a e l age s r o r r e way se, lan e r a e s u a y c e j b u s th le bit dif ve .e sp la e iza ” , t a d t ap wor m spe , r e h w y r e v e t he a to ter atic x. the e o nd o s n o t ng e fer th b gu Ja ou , s a w “ l ” ea r a e l n a m “ g s i a ch acum y n hic tio et n a a h t su Th t t ( e ial Mitche rise th o t age s e k a t o u ds e h t o akers. pa a c ent ew a t chie t g mon vocab kers ir t ildren wen o f s i h e h d a m e n ages h t it dults. ge e l of gest ive t com n e a m bar from le e r d l i pla nes, u j s m r an d n a and p e r p o n ” , s ” co la e h t ch a l langu t ). of r d l i h c f t s s i vin .” breakd n e h t he g in ulates d could e k ngua e rie y r Hawi, mplexity h t l. ild - e g ulary). g “ Ther devl d e l l a c ch subject two n A m e m lear , e e k i l we g tha Hawin y b sent b o a whic o i t i s o u r ” tha y e old unicate e s o o a n r a e l and “ T lear ild t ages single separ o s e l a c s e l n e pidgn” r a hat , ) t c e j l- s e r p he t e r d l i h c n and e k a m e e w “ ren. com own o e pron th a z i r o s e l c i t op t ne a u o y t a h ns nes. n a c s n nces. is ot a But ” , s is child spea ey virtuosy, variety l lang l t and w ” t n t n e at her ates t a h th n e d a no t g n i b s and in t so gen ” n i “ he given : o t o n d n a u o y b r t t u g lang e lang n Creo half the unced unicate home a “ Many T egan u t c u r o uage t e a u kers separ r p is So difer langu n a sa richne l a t e m o c e h rule h w o s l a se eration ” n a peo ob difer e b e r g o e h “ “ m of “ children uages d n a thus uage me years, m a c me t o o f t a le s “ e r p by r u d a d jects: sing e k a s e of change t i m i to the wer chan the ” ate o t sen ages , n o “ is y e h t of a e le f o s nt way e v i s s ling f (“p t i r e t theor n i d n e ” . s t “ ” . e Spa m o r movin spon s t l nt . le the h t y so orist ” e h g n i t a a ” d e t t fr e h t from Lin tencs h thre arise of idgn” ” expr “ ge pr e om uist n a M la t s a p n u o r a e s Mitchel ) e t a L clau exp e r a e h of n e h t nish, mingled ist h t any most n oduce ngua o w guist s. as taneously n a g b r e v lang e t n e s e- a r o d n a g thes r e e e de esion h t its osed Stev m b rise. y After se e s n e t - in d s d r ach bio fr lan eliv r e v o o “ . m e beliv s n a e o t d n a other d f o velopd h t as uage r e t s i s P om s r source groups f ( f o amous ortuges, e h t e , g n i n n u r logica y e r o e c n four- guaes theo en h t bite a e k a m and e h t othe native wor to on n o a az i l a r e n e g entir F The merly .s e v l e s m e r gre a m k c i p g n i t a e p e b r e v r o a Pinker long la tha ver a so devlop e k i l ( er o m d e n n u r the e l i h w rize word siter” h g u o r h t (in kers nd tha , l a r u l p nguae, r e r a at re a t s n i (and of so r u l p and t speci: m y exa ly: u speak deal lan u pro isla ni is ya l p rapidly any tha chil p eh t sualy to n words tha thes of ,s l a ye h t in m ,e c n so p - ” is - nd - os - ti - an ro - o a - f - from other languages that have developed separately) that the languages are no longer mutually understandable. The best evidence for this theory comes from the languages of Papua New Guinea, a relatively small island in which 820 languages are currently spoken. Mountain ranges, difficult terrain, and climate variation divide New Guinea into numerous well-defined smaller areas in which cultural isolation was very strong for very long periods of time, and New Guinea thus seems to have developed the greatest linguistic diversity per square mile of any place on Earth. Isolation, acquisition, conquest, borrowing, and development are all processes that have made English what it is today. In studying the history of the English language, we will see how English developed in both ways, both through internal evolution and external influence. But first we need to under - stand in more detail how language works. We will begin with the connections between words and meanings (lecture two) and then link these to the funda - mental particles of language: the individual sounds made by the vocal tract (lecture three), the ways in which they are linked to meanings (lecture four), and the ways they change (lecture five). In lecture six we examine the rules by which words can be combined to create sentences, and in lecture seven we discuss words, their creation, and their change. The course then exam - ines the specifics of the development of English, beginning with the very deepest roots of the language (lecture eight) and moving from Gothic to Old English in lecture nine. We investigate the influences of the Vikings, Celts, and Romans in lecture ten before analyzing the linguistic cataclysm of the Norman Conquest in lecture eleven. Lecture twelve shows how Chaucer’s language became Shakespeare’s (and our own) language because of an event called the Great Vowel Shift. Then we cross the sea from England to America for a discussion of the development of American English, investigat - ing why some people say “soda” and others “pop,” and why you can “pahk a cah” in Boston but not in Tennessee. Our final lecture discusses the present and future of English, the first truly global language and most widely used tongue in the history of the planet.
11 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What areas of the brain are most closely tied to language production? 2. What are the key stages of language acquisition in children?
Suggested Reading
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Algeo, John, and Thomas Pyles, eds. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle, 2004. Kosslyn, Stephen M., and Olivier Koenig. Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience. New York: Free Press, 1995. Pinker, Steven. Chapters 1–2. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. ———. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. E N O E R U T C E L
12 Lecture 2: Signs and Meanings: Semantics
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams’s (eds.) An Introduction to Language, chapter 5. m o c . t r a p i l C © When we are addressing the question of how languages work, we can go in several directions. In the previous lecture we examined how language works in the brain and how children acquire languages. These two overlapping fields are neurolinguistics and developmental linguistics . Each is closely related to the field of psychology, and in fact in many universities the developmentalists and neurolinguists are housed in the psychology department or even in the biology department. Developmental and neurolinguistics are both very useful ways of looking at language, but they are not the only ways. Another direction from which to approach language is to examine the way it works as a system , as a set of logi - cal structures. This approach is more akin to math or logic (or philosophy) than it is to psychology or biology (though it is different from information theory, also). Looking at language as a logical system is usually called semiology (the study of signs), a term coined by the great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Semiology attempts to address the biggest questions in linguistics not with a PET scanner or a one-way mirror and a tape recorder for observing children, but through logic alone. Rather than asking so much “how does language work?” (although it does this), semiology asks “how must language work?” The
13 LECTURE TWO 1 4 li th al at ma ar wi to ser Sig be me wa th sin qu som be g me a en d wa r at e es wo r pr e we wo r la b di s Sign in g we be g wo r ou th es a tio de la How such fi Wi Al On T gh eld l n at ed ge e si g th he t n cause i t fi c s ce th red el ) ckly). gua d i a tt y ued nif t th c are gnif ni n ds ds ds es , nit p o in in s le a e us , e e ni n e ns t up mean an has sto most o im o n mu her beca an i th Doe n b = t ie l ef n h ion ug or wi s u d m i se up g or ar an d in o ig t ge th er l is i il a si g. e ni igh rs “st i not w Si fe ct iv e p tha can di a f fer le ch uc h th . g approac b ge h e ei r d a s bl e al T fr ts ny it h in be lectu gr ou p rl y. de of sc us s s gn of ee ps , Se mig op” use conve s in we he om w ts bit d bu i in l T, fi n st th les ent t exact If ca n L ce of ur ep, ow the i g ath t a syte w mea th e th if un i co la wo me en le ct ur ang ge r T l we R, qu lt sig a ht in ha t not ( res rta sign, the the h ck he er I n w b kn nd , an s ter , u ts . g um the ba co m con he an d . estion an kno y out se e sa me . inclu E, parts, ay nife h. p th er e in ni ly o co m pu u A own + b m his l wo rd mino be me (wh strengths no f i a ter age ng ou t es B n ut, an al th ou gh su ha E. con stop: Signfe wo r si ng le na ly s to noise vince lingu w gu is ts th ut bi of cause ot he r ho w te h r de ani o bi n re th re e, ich y s (I n e in g in blod t T pr oc ee d is as of wn ar e s so un ds logy, her me a in texs ds A e. Conv “s to his is b si s tersingly myse ways the e wha of the istc sig ecom sm al le r Ther s he pi ct ur e th ey lin a g? a anyoe It fuly anig lifetm “m ” in to do . no nl in ot he ca ll from stude p” of signfe red stud bu tt o guistc wo ul d d nife and is red fo ur , a a is su a nevr t T ey or l s th e an d tha f we T he wo rd wi co m som con on e si gn s ch ( r rface r wo ul d am lights signfe hu s al th ed, , is ent r pictora light, Mean the ve ry gu is th w famo nts n of a un arge an proble mea and sm al le st tha eaknesses a the ventio a r th er ef or e langu bi n al so e signfer no eno pu gr ou p ou gh no a and it s of by we is d . is r mo re d wh ti cs mar a ed t s are sa w blished us e, be the d). t fi ve Swis rgume n ing? a po ss ib ly ot he r the also m of I r/signfed ugh, itse sur uth l o n r m am tha b age lig sig ep re se nt bu t tr a al l or m ker; ee d fo to th so un d y som h wo rd s be in cu tt in g sound e has ht is ea ns lf u ad r ey ff ic nife me or un it s the aud st ar t is righ ni ts lingust co n th er e e se em eping t ha ma gr ea t nt conve ling tha hat on a it xplicatng that durin ehow ar e atend asocited letr anig. li gh t, evol s is th e so me wh at tha itory har d , t y te xt of of my uist a -relat an d sm al l no I of ab ge schola (I what th ro ug h inde nd in fo ve ry you ar e ca to de ta il ) soun dest me g ys tr an sf er ri ng si mp s me an i w out ts red inher fo r p me is (like ed n F h th in gs on ma ke have so i ower d rm at io n sh io mea an in g ed tw o is erdina ver would no t co an d in te re st i we anig i it). tha nship d, them), to how l and ns ta nc e, rs th ey the es t life h mpose a be do y ng with a e the pr ob le ms . nig bi gg e de re al ly ntly can t he T be dril, bu il d warnig se n confused l ha nd equ li ng but ha his ik e page an da nd th no t sign fine: associate th at . ar e ar in noise A not e a n stopy, d d of Sausre ng nger in fo rm at io n se ev ui st i de re d may ates r whic or for th e case, co nv ey a signfed red able up such come th en se em no t ca te go ry se em langu (a s How mean to an d agr un it se. work. Sausr n instace, c li gh ts , fr om bep), sa me ar lig st ar t sem red Fi rs t, thoug th e very ut te r “t-re” a e to se e a e wer wi l but of but ht up with age, does to wa rn in g to de asoci fig me an some on lights . sm al l I th er e, l n wi th an ce be ho w op er , with The wa y be not ure to fin like is e we a a put or ------thing because they are conventionally linked with an idea: press on the brake pedal, get out of the way of the car that is backing up, that green and brown thing growing in the yard. The combination of the signifier and the signified is the sign ; it is a representation plus an idea. Saussure argued that we commu - nicate by means of signs and that the dual nature of the sign (signifier plus signified) had significant implications for communication. Let us examine the word “tree.” You want to tell me something about a tree. There is, at this point, some kind of representation in your mind of a tree. You then say the signifier, t-r-ee. I hear that signifier, and it calls to mind in me some kind of a mental representation of a tree. But your representation and my representation are not the same. The tree you were thinking of is a towering redwood; the tree I think of when you say “tree” is a child’s repre - sentation of a tree, complete with a nice hole in the middle for the owl to live in. Each person has his or her own image/idea of a tree, and that image or idea may even change from day to day, moment to moment. So you are thinking of one thing; you produce a sound based on conventions that have evolved for human communication over millennia, then I hear that sound and get a related but still unique image in my head. When you start to think about this with any depth, you start seriously to wonder how any communi - cation occurs at all. And yet it does. This communication is facilitated by the existence of a sys - tem of conventions and linkages between signifiers and signifieds and between signs and other signs. The system links the signifiers to signifieds, and it also links specific signs to each other in logical relationships. “Tree” is related to “tree-like,” “tree-ish,” etc. Saussure called this system a langue . The langue is held in the minds of many individuals. It is the system that allows you to say “tree” and me to think of something at least related to what you are trying to communicate (as opposed to, say, a cow). The langue is collective; one person can not change it (or at least cannot change it very much). But there is no way for us to put our hands on the langue . We can approxi - mate it with dictionaries and grammar books, but the entire thing, the system, resides in millions of minds as well as being evidenced by millions of books. What we see, each time a person speaks or writes, is an example of what Saussure called parole . That both you and I are trying to say “tree” is part of the system of langue , but that you pronounce the vowel slightly different from me is an example of parole . Both of these observations underlie all the processes of language change that we will be studying in this course. You and I both might use the same signifier “tree” to indicate the signified thing, the tree, but there is some vari - ability in what is communicated. This space between signified and signifier among different people (what some semioticians call slippage ) allows words to slowly change meaning without our recognizing (and thus correcting) it. You can imagine slippage occurring when you say one thing, I interpret it, then I say the thing to someone else, who interprets it, who says it to some - one else, and so on. If all of the slippages are in one particular direction (say that the signifier “cow” begins to mean not cows in general, but specific kinds of cows), over time the meaning of the signifier “cow” within the langue will slowly shift. Although there will still be some variability, it will be variability
15 s n o m m i S e i o J / C L L , s k o o B d e d r o c e R ©
Speech is linear, sound succeeding sound through time, as in this illustration showing a “speech circuit” adapted from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.
about a new center. This is precisely what happened in the history of the word “deer.” In Old English, the word “deor” meant “any kind of animal.” But as time went on, the signifieds that were matched up with the signifier “deor” became more and more specific, until “deer” began to mean not any animal, but only animals belonging to the family Cervidae of the order Artiodactyla. The Arbitrariness of the Sign Slippage between signified and signifier is possible because there is thought to be no “natural” relationship between the signifier and the signified: Any sig - nifier can be linked, through the conventions of the langue , to any signified. Saussure insisted, and contemporary semioticians—and, when they can be bothered to think about it, most linguists—insist on the arbitrariness of the sign . There is not supposed to be an essential tree-ness in the word “tree,” merely a set of linguistic conventions evolved and inherited. And this central dogma makes sense. If there is an essential tree-ness associated with the word “tree” in the abstract, then why do we have different words, still repre - senting the same category of objects, that do not have any of the same sounds? We can assume that Spanish speakers do not think English “tree” represents essential tree-ness any more than Spanish “arbol.” The enormous variety of different words for the same things suggests the arbitrary nature of the sign. Furthermore, early linguists spent enormous energies trying to find underlying patterns that would show that there is some inherent logic to which sounds are paired with which ideas, with absolutely no luck in generalizing a basic system. However, there is some intriguing research that suggests some connections to in-built, hard-wired human tendencies and language: shown two pictures, one of a sharp-edged, jagged object and the other of a smooth, rounded object, and told that they could label one object “kiki” and the other
O “booba,” 98 percent of experi - W
T mental subjects labeled the E sharp object “kiki.” But research, R U
T despite many efforts, has not C © Michael D.C. Drout progressed very far in this direction. E L
16 It is worth noting, however, that some very significant students of language have questioned the arbitrariness of the sign in various ways. Roman Jakobson pointed out that in a great many languages, there appears to be a connection between the gradation of vowels (from low to high) and colors (from dark to light, with the lightest color having the highest vowels). The great “structural anthropologist” Claude Lévi-Strauss was willing to accept that the initial link - ages between sound and meaning might indeed be arbitrary. But, he argued, once a language had settled on some particular sign—for example, that the sig - nifier “r-e-d” meant a color of a certain wavelength—the rest of the language was somewhat constrained: There would be some nonarbitrary relationship between the sound “red” and the sound chosen for another, related color. Sadly, much of the discussion of the nature of the sign goes back to the unbelievably tedious nature/nurture debate, a debate that is so futile, and whose partisans of either side have so hardened their positions, that there is no real hope of coming to any kind of agreement, even for the sake of discus - sion. So I propose that we take a mushy middle ground and accept the idea that the sign is mostly arbitrary (i.e., given the wide range of words in different languages for the same signified), which mean that a language could link almost any signifier with almost any signified. Then can we see how linguistic evolution can occur. Language Evolution For this argument to make sense, we have to go back to langue and parole for a moment and then tie signs, signifiers, signifieds, langue and parole all together. Remember that langue is the underlying system that tells both you and I to make the sound “tree” when we want to communicate about the idea of a tree (note that this is very difficult to talk about because we are trying to discuss language within language). The langue causes us both to use “tree,” but we never actually hear the langue . We hear the parole , in the way that you pronounce tree versus the way I pronounce tree. There is some slight differ - ence between each speaker, and if you are, say, from Boston or from Texas or India or Japan, your parole may even be systematically different from mine (i.e., if you are from Boston, you will pronounce the phoneme that I pronounce as “r” with a different sound, though not in the word “tree”). Because the langue is only ever manifested in the parole of individual speakers, that parole is subject to change even though parts of the underly - ing system remain the same. I can say “car” and my students say “cah,” and we can still communicate. Likewise in the space between what you want to communicate and what I receive from you there is room for change. And there is feedback between parole and langue and between what you say and what I hear. For example, when I first came to live in Boston I was riding in a giant elevator in a storage facility. Several of us began discussing how much the elevator could lift. The operator said “This elevator could lift a cow.” At least that is what I heard. I was shocked. “It could lift more than a cow,” I said. “More like twenty cows.” My wife began to laugh. “He didn’t say ‘cow,’” she said. “He said ‘car.’” I had misheard the Boston retroflex “r” and misun - derstood the word. Had this man and I needed to communicate on a regular basis, something would have changed. Either I would have come to under - stand his pronunciation, or he would have had to change his pronunciation to
17 make himself understood. The signifier “cah” would have to be clarified so that I did not think it referred to a bovine animal. Such changes, summed across thousands of people over long periods of time, allow languages to change as a whole. People have decried the imperfect links between signifier and signified for millennia. Christian theories of language from the Middle Ages, for example, suggested that the first languages on Earth were perfect, that the word was always equal to the exact thing. In such a language you could never lie, because a lie would be ungrammatical: not only would a sentence that was not true not fit the world, but it would not fit the rules of the language itself. In the Earthsea books, a fantasy series by Ursula K. Le Guin, there is a lan - guage, the Old Speech, that allows people to manipulate the physical world because the word can become equal to the thing. In that language, Le Guin says, people cannot lie. But such a language does not exist, and, I would argue, this is a good thing. Not because we want lying, but because if there had not been change and variation, there would be no evolution. Language itself might never have evolved if somehow humans had not developed the ability to make an arbi - trary (or somewhat arbitrary) sign mean a certain thing. Communication is certainly not perfect, and we can wish that it was better, but it is within the imperfections, the errors and the difficulties that the room to evolve is found. And from that evolution comes one of the things that makes us human: lan - guage, the ability to convey meaning through signs. O W T E R U m o T c . t r C a p i l E C L © 18 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What is the difference between signifier and signified? Between langue and parole ? 2. Why are linguists concerned about “the arbitrariness of the sign”?
Suggested Reading
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Roy Harris. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1986. Pinker, Steven. Chapters 3–4. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. ———. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
19 Lecture 3: Sounds of Language: Phonetics
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams’s (eds.) An Introduction to Language, chapter 6.
The study of speech sounds and their production is called phonetics . The study of a language’s sound system (i.e., which sounds and sound combina - tions are allowed in the language) is called phonology . Phonetics focuses on what happens in the throat and mouth, phonology on what happens in the mind. There are three types of phonetics. Articulatory phonetics describes speech in terms of the positions of the elements of the vocal tract. We will focus almost entirely on articulatory phonetics, and it is worth noting that for most of the history of linguistics, articulatory phonetics was all that people studied. But with developments in tape recording and sound analysis, researchers were able to begin to look at the sounds themselves, not only the ways in which they are produced. This research is called acoustic phonetics . Auditory phonetics analyzes the way people hear and perceive sounds. Acoustic and auditory phonetics are beyond the scope of this course; articulatory phonetics gives enough detail for the types of phenomena that we want to study. Articulatory phonetics describes speech sounds based on the ways the vocal tract is engaged in their production. Air from the lungs is pushed through the vocal tract and the position and action of elements of the tract determines which speech sounds are uttered. At the base of the vocal tract is the larynx, or voicebox. Moving up the throat from the voicebox, we have the epiglottis (used in the “glottal stop” sound), the uvula (used for the French “uvular” “r” sound), the soft palate and the hard palate at the top of the mouth, the tongue on the bottom of the mouth, the alveolar ridge just behind the teeth, the teeth themselves, and the lips. Each of these features of the vocal tract can influence the sound that eventu - ally comes out of the mouth. Articulatory phonetics describes each speech sound in terms of three variables: whether a sound is voiced or unvoiced , how the air flows through the mouth and nose (called the manner of articulation ), and the positioning of the lips and tongue (called the place of articulation ). First, we have to distinguish between vowels and consonants. Vowels are produced by allowing the air to flow through the vocal tract without interrup - E
E tion. Consonants obstruct the flow of air either partially or completely. This is R
H why when you sing, you sing vowels, (you support your vowels with pitch). T
E Consonants do not have pitch. You can sing an “a” sound for as long as you
R can generate the breath; try singing the “p” sound without any vowels and U T you will see the difference between vowels and consonants. We will begin C E
L our analysis with consonants and then move on to the vowels.
20 Voicing Put your hand on your throat and say “buzz”; you will feel the vocal cords vibrating. Now say “fluff”; you may feel a tiny buzz on the “l” sound, but mostly the vocal cords will hold still. Voicing is simply engaging the vocal cords to make a buzzing in the throat that is then articulat - ed through the mouth. Voiced con - sonants have this buzzing, un-voiced consonants do not. Put your hand on your throat and say “d”; you will feel a buzz. Now say “t”; notice there is no buzz. Now say these other pairs of sounds: “b” and “p,” “g” and “k,” “v” and “f,” “z” and “s.” Notice that for the first sound in each pair, you make a buzz in the vocal
C LL cords while for the second you do not. s, ook ed B That is the difference between voiced © Record and unvoiced sounds. Manner of Articulation Voiced versus unvoiced is one way in which we can distinguish sounds. We can also note the way the air flows in different consonants. For example, say the “b” sound; now say “sh.” Notice that the air flows through your lips with “sh” but stops with “b.” Now say “m”; note that the air is flowing through your nose rather than through your mouth, which is actually closed when you say “m.” These sounds, “sh,” “b,” and “m” use three different manners of articula - tion. There are in fact six different manners of articulation in English: stops, fricatives, affricates, nasals, approximants, and “others,” a catch-all category. Stops: In a stop , the flow of air is completely blocked, either by the lips touching together or the tongue touching the roof of the mouth: “b,” “p,” “t,” “d,” “k,” and “g” are all stops. Fricatives: Air can also be allowed to flow with only a partial obstruction, and consonants that use this manner of articulation are called fricatives. The sounds “f,” “v,” “th” (both the “th” in “theater” and the “th” in “leather”), “s,” “z,” “sh,” and “zh” and “h” are all fricatives. Affricates: Sounds can also be made by starting with the tongue in a stop
21 position but then releasing the air so that it flows like a fricative. These sounds are called affricates , and include the “ch” in “chicken” and the “dg” sound in “edge.” The “ts” sound in “pizza,” not originally present in English, is also an affricate. Nasals: If air is prevented from exiting the mouth and instead is allowed to come through the nose, we get a nasal consonant. In English, “m,” “n,” and the “ng” sound at the end of “-ing” are all nasals. Approximants: Consonants that are articulated by two articulators (such as the tongue and the roof of the mouth) coming together almost like a frica - tive, but not quite, are called approximants . The consonants “w,” “r,” “l,” and the consonant form of “y” are all approximants. Sometimes “r” and “l” are called liquids. Others: The most important “other” consonant in English is the flap , which is created when we tap the tongue against the roof of the mouth. The sound in the middle of the word “platter” or “batter” in most American dialects (some - thing between the “d” and a “t”) is a flap. The trilled “r” sound (often called a “rolled r”) in many European languages is also categorized as “other.” Place of Articulation We now have in place two of the three variables for English consonants. We can have sounds that are voiced or unvoiced, and we can control the flow of air in six ways, thus creating the stops, fricatives, affricates, nasals, approxi -
CONSONANT CHART MANNER OF PLACE OF ARTICULATION ARTICULATION Bilabial Labio-dental Inter-dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Stop voiceless ptkuh-oh voiced bdg
Nasal mning
Fricative voiceless f th (thin) s sh h voiced v th (that) z zh
Affricate voiceless ts (pizz a) voiced dg (edg e)
Glide voiceless voiced w E E
R Liquid (voiced) H
T lateral l E
R retroflex r U
T Examine this chart carefully, pronouncing the sounds and noting the voicing, place of articulation, and C
E manner of articulation. L
22 mants, and the flap. Now we only need to examine the places in the vocal tract in which the articulation occurs. For example, there are various places we can stop the flow of air: with the lips, with the tongue (in various positions within the mouth), and with the epiglottis. The place of articulation is thus our last variable. In discussing place of articulation, we will begin with the lips and work our way backwards down the vocal tract. Lips: Consonants that are created by controlling the flow of air with the lips are called bilabial (“two lips”). These include “p,” “b,” “m,” and “w.” Teeth and Lips: If you say “f” or “v” you will notice that the lower lip comes inside the upper teeth, and the flow of air runs between the teeth and the lip. These are labio-dental (“lip-teeth”) consonants, sounds articulated between the lip and teeth. Tongue and Teeth: Say the “th” sound in “thin” or in “feather.” The tongue is touching the back of the upper teeth and the air is escaping between the tongue and teeth. These are called inter-dental (“between teeth”) consonants. Tongue and the Front of the Roof of the Mouth: There is a small ridge in the roof of the mouth, just behind the teeth. This is called the alveolar ridge , and sounds made by touching the tongue to the ridge are called alveolar conso - nants. They include “t,” “d,” “n,” “s,” “z,” “r,” and “l.” Tongue and the Middle of the Roof of the Mouth: If we articulate with the tongue held just a bit below the roof of the mouth, just behind the alveolar ridge, but before the palate, we produce the alveo-palatal consonants rep - resented by “sh” and “zh” as well as “ch” and “dg” (the last is the final sound in “edge”). Tongue and Palate: When the back of the tongue is brought up toward the hard palate on the roof of the mouth, we get sounds like the consonant use of “y” (for example, in the word “yes”), which are called palatal . Tongue and Velum: Moving the tongue further back from the hard palate to the soft palate at the very back of the mouth, we get “k,” “g,” and the “ng” sound in “-ing.” These are called velar consonants. Throat: Finally, if we articulate all the way down the throat, with the epiglottis (the valve that we open and close to avoid inhaling water when we drink), we get the “h” sound and the glottal stop , the sound in “uh-oh” and (in some American dialects) in the middle of the words “button,” “mitten,” or “kitten.” Now that we have all three variables in place—voicing, manner of articula - tion, and place of articulation—we are able to describe precisely all of the consonants in English. Let us examine the consonant “b.” Put your hand on your throat and say “b”—you will feel a buzz in your vocal cords, so “b” is a voiced consonant. Now feel the flow of air when you say “b”—it is not contin - uous, but it stops; therefore “b” is a stop . Now where does that stop occur? You will note that the tongue is not involved in “b,” but instead the two lips are used to stop the flow of air. Thus “b” is a bilabial . If we put all of this infor - mation together, we can determine that “b” is a voiced, bilabial stop : we engage the vocal cords for voicing , and we use the lips to stop the flow of air. We characterize all other consonants the same way, based on the voicing, flow of air, and place of articulation. So “m” is a voiced, bilabial nasal; “s” is
23 LECTURE THREE 2 4 Th le in de Vowe acord ob s we ma th be c to ng ti on ne v to te et h vo na n to ng la r on be “p voi sto li sam na an HE A C Al st ve e er TO ” we l ge si e tw n on s a e ced th ps vow tel u IG and al w s. tr a e Hi th ts ts n L e Mi ls gne e NG ue ue smal n g en o us e r ow uc t ly H il gh y e or s, voi a ra a ls U ug d (“p” o a l i i ob st ru ct ed t T o n n in UE h p re el a de te t na nd la an an up nl i f dat “b, d ed . hirte OF th e yo u nd g h ced one gr h th er e ter th roxim can a ke nt s t er ef o d d bila an eight cha t o we ” i oup io s ctualy o e er rm i “ Vo li it s a , en p” lok use ar n d th a ps . tw tw or lt ar e alveo thu lip nge think hou s we l e ne d of e “ co ns on an t, po s ar e ia re , ant is o o b”) by two and so no t, Vo we ls fo un d . ls: to bein s va t sou like so un d un s , he Vo we l gh m , , ha s it i b mo in fi ni te ly be b su th e is o n ar e riab “p voiced. o a va ee y th x r f asl vo we ls Fro n f g at n n b a ch ,” ront plain st on de Eng vo we l f ds. at io n re riables y oth a ricatve, tb at in r les, so un ds s n “b,” the ough coun mo e ar e bi mu ch scrib as so un ds t in th e th Th li are vowels of wh er e bilas (“m”) tb sh m re sm al l heigt e grou goin wh ic h fo r Only “m, mo re ar e at pr on un ci at io n. b the uch ts ed fr on t as t b schema ia pro op as gr ea te r V sp e ut we ” a i ( , n p cl a and OW nd fr as a tb ar e und a one yo u havin ad ju st me nt s l of nou difer wh ic h nd ca om fro e is th e di ff ic ul t nd and or ec h be can ss if ie d ft, and “ so t n EL hig comp erlying ch m he thre “w.” th e ar e an varib t tic front and fl ow b va ri et y ced g o ch ar ac te r an ge d fron ba mo vo e stop history nt CHART n. th e C of five apro e ba ck front ei th er h We ice to entr osed tbo dify ba se d you in of d We eard vowels tnes to the t P le TONGUE princ ip fl ow s, de sc ri be d h vowels ART oth al ai r back. , can hton th an by ” th at e t o of ximant a can can th o mo of o of ne to uc hi ng re in ers. is ti cs is . r of e th e th e on u OF The the the “ cons uth nvoiced the in difer l st op pe d ca n vo pr on un ci at io n mid sound se e the a gs). th e s ir (“a,” So, di ff er en t mo ut h. th n icng, th an langu “w.” li ke turne of folwin n folwing is e be se ce tha Vowe re la ti v ar fo co nt in soun la nt yo ur “e par ants ntral into ac ce ma d range Then co n ngu r or is or age d in ,” ther ex Pr on un ci at io s difernt f po si ti on s “ ls d g tha to ng ue pa rt ia ll y e ” te ro an so na nt s i,” age—proxi ideways; ample, e tha uo us ; nt , . or change e chart wo he ig ht are m we in thes other the “o,” of are b wh ic h “lo “b a rds: th es e are o co ns o Back note clas ” oo cons fricatve w it and u oo ao to is th is we by h g is of p into the of back.” re k tha imag t t t i he s n tha po si ifed th e “ - can th e only t u” - of t - t ) - , - bea t bit bai t bet bat When you pronounce these, you will note how the tongue moves down from the top to the bottom of the mouth. Now pronounce the mid vowels from front to back: bai t th e boa t You will feel the vowels move back in the mouth. If we pronounce the back vowels from the top of the mouth to the bottom, we hear the following gradation: boo t boo k boa t bou ght bop Diphthongs occur where the tongue starts in one place in the mouth to say one vowel and then moves to another. They are represented by digraphs , two letters written together. English has three diphthongs, which are found in the words “bite,” “bout,” and “boy.” In some places in America, particularly around Pittsburgh, there are only two recognized diphthongs—there is no clear dis - tinction made between the diphthong in “caught” and the vowel in “cot.” Phonetic Environment The discussion above explains the basics of vowel and consonant pronunci - ation, and you will note that our writing system is relatively well-suited for rep - resenting these distinctions. Although we use digraphs or consonant combi - nations for a few of the major consonants such as “sh” or “ch” or “zh,” in gen - eral, we can represent consonants and the major vowels in such a way that a person can “sound out” many English words (and it was far easier to sound out English words when writing first was applied to English). But there are other aspects of English sounds that are not captured in the writing system. Say the words “cup” and “pot.” Both of these words have “p” in them, and both “p” sounds are unvoiced bilabial stops, but the “p” sounds are still different. Say them again and notice the position of your lips after each sound. In “cup,” the lips are closed; in “pot,” they are open. The “p” in “pot” is called aspirated and the “p” in “cup” is un-aspirated . The aspirated and un-aspirated form of “p” are called allophones of the phoneme “p.” Note that you do not have to think about whether or not you use the aspirated or un-aspirated form: It is automatic in the particular phonetic environment of “cup” or “pot.”
25 LECTURE THREE 2 6 a b th ve o so a a th Al a p is vo In Vo s et th nd nt ar e e n th nas ry und wel b we e ic as t th wels ch upco icu oug et r, t cl he pati e s we arts an e lar c l l n n ized b se h ize ar han ext min efo also on d an ly t h n as d, a lo it . e weird ges. nd re vowel. le a g unvo calize Ot is p “ to ch ctur i” lo na in n ver her b a w an vowe the ch e sal sal ice w e y d fro ce g ph For yo ith we e impo ways ch d con rta co nt l one ur b inte your ang is eca nso wil exam in vo sona nose rtan t tic he t r-d tha wel es hat use nat discu no e ental sam t ple, t can nvirom closed se a th t you we of s nd in at, s e be p say their often descr “pin fricatve in a unde in befor th come ched m an e bo “ ents ” pit” id phon ca w ib lead rstand d th e b ays e use sa closed, naslized and ack we wo chang and co eti y to sound rds, nsoa the be c vo “pin” the larg the a e gin we e voiced nvirom you wor the dif t er vowel he . l. with nts t T hat cha d. and ernc phon are o vo a If de alveo your d nd nge wels ents. to trying iscuon the more termin etic vo be , fro nose lar w fo in wels. For enviro naslized ord r sig m to o stop exampl, ther one pronu nifcat if exampl, pin , soun Lok you a nmet as ched. ways, vowel to ds are we in the nce over l of FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What are the three variables articulatory phonetics uses to describe speech sounds? 2. How are vowels classified?
Suggested Reading
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. ———. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
Suggested Viewing
My Fair Lady. Director George Cukor. Warner Home Video, 1964.
27 Lecture 4: Sound and Meaning: Phonology
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams’s (eds.) An Introduction to Language, chapter 7.
Why do English speakers say “father” but Latin speakers say “pater”? Why do some people in America say “kitten,” “mitten,” and “button” with a glottal stop rather than a “t” in the middle of the word? Why do kids say “aminal” instead of “animal” and politicians say “nuc – yu – lar” instead of “nuclear”? Why does my son call the ’80s singer “Hooley Loolis”? The discipline of phonology , the study of how sounds are combined to form words, can explain these and many other mysteries. In the previous chapter we discussed phonetics , the study of how the vocal tract makes different sounds. We classified these sounds into vowel and consonant categories, and then we further divided them into groups based on the ways they are made. We now need to distinguish between a sound, which can be described simply phonetically, and a phoneme , which is a sound linked to some sort of meaning. In this chapter we will examine the rules that determine which sounds and meanings can be put together and which must stay apart, and we will discuss sound change , the process by which one sound in a word is converted to another. Sound change over periods of time produces language changes and, eventually, new languages. clort ngburga tlop oofick slimp lporta ipple zpigly chzhaba poom None of the words I have written above are likely to be familiar to you. If you were forced to guess which ones were English words, you would probably choose clort, oofick, slimp, ipple, and poom. You might even guess that ngburga was from an African language or from Vietnamese, that tlop was Central American, and that chzhaba and zpigly were eastern European. In fact, I made up all of the words above. None of them are, as far as I know, words in real languages, though they very well might be. So how were you able to say that a few could be English and a few others definitely could not be English? Your ability to separate possible English from non-English words demon - strates that, although you are very unlikely ever to have been taught the phonological rules of English, you have nevertheless internalized English phonology . The human vocal tract can produce a very large number of differ -
R ent sounds, but no language uses all of them. Many sounds, such as the U clicks used by the !Kung-San or the uvular “r” used in French, are not used O F by English at all. Still others are used in English but are subject to phonotac - E
R tic constraints that limit where in a word they can be used. For example, U
T English does have the voiced velar nasal “ng” at the end of words such as C
E “long” or “song,” but the phonology of English does not allow this sound to be L
28 used initially , at the beginning of a word. The sound “tl” is likewise not allowed initially but can be used medially or terminally in words like “battle” and “cattlecar.” The “lp” sound also cannot be used initially, but it can appear terminally in a word like “help.” English also has rules about the clustering of different sounds. Three-consonant clusters are allowed in words such as “squirrel” or “squirt” (the u after the q is simply a convention; the actual sounds in these words is “skw,” all three of which are consonants), but English does not permit “pdb” or “kwm.” There are also distinctions made in some languages that are not relevant in others. Say “cup” and “pitcher” and pay close attention to the “p” sound in each word. You will notice that the “p” in cup is pronounced with the lips clos - ing and staying closed, while the “p” in “pitcher” ends with open lips. In the previous chapter we noted this difference between aspirated and un-aspirated forms of “p.” This difference occurs automatically in English depending upon the other sounds that are around the “p”—English speakers do not switch between aspirated and un-aspirated “p” in order to make a distinction, but we do make a distinction between the voiced and unvoiced bilabial stop, which is why “but” and “put” mean different things. English also makes a distinction between the lateral and the retroflex liquids, “l” and “r,” which is why English speakers distinguish “rip” and “lip”—there is no distinction in Japanese, and in fact many adult Japanese speakers do not even hear a difference between the “l” and “r” phonemes. Turkish makes a distinction between the l sound in “leaf” and that at the end of “wool” that English speakers have much difficulty hear - ing (but pronounce both words very carefully and you will note that the first “l” seems “lighter” and the second “darker”). Assimilation and Dissimilation Every language also has rules about the ways sound-segments are pronounced depending upon their phonetic environments within a word. For example, the presence of nasal consonants within a word changes the subsequent vowels into nasalized vowels: say the words “seep” and “seem.” You will notice that the vowel in the middle is the same in terms of height and frontness (it is a high, front vowel), but it sounds somewhat dif - ferent because in the latter word, some air escapes through the nose as the vocal tract prepares to pronounce the nasal consonant, “m.” In French, nasalized vowels can occur even without a nasal consonant in the same syllable; because this does not happen in English, it can be difficult for English speakers to learn to pronounce French correctly. Nasalization is a form of assimilation in which adjacent sound segments are made more sim - ilar. In English, the standard plural is made by adding a voiced alveolar fricative, the /z/ sound, to the end of a word: dog dogz, kid kidz. But when the singular form of the word ends with a voiceless consonant, such as the word “cat” (the t is a voiceless alveolar stop), the plural is made by adding a voiceless alveolar fricative, the /s/ sound. Cat cats, cap caps. This is assimilation based on voicing: a voiceless terminal consonant gets a matching voiceless plural. There is also assimilation based on place of articulation rather than voicing. For example, English uses a Latin negative prefix on words like “possible” and “tolerant.” When the root word begins with a bilabial sound like the “p” in
29 LECTURE FOUR 3 0 me ei d nu s c mo c (w be s the la T Ho s me n o n so b b is ex th e me a no of too wo se sp m n Se Se th wh m u sp “ po En An T Se top han hap ome tres ou f ot y ef asl la he ther tion en ake e is h he a e am nat. gme el eak nc co te s th gm g wev rd s e r a re dia uth an nt s o is si gl ay ot gme nce ch sim pro past me l n ch va will t re ve e s . s ia ge ter me ( wo th a . ish m pl e, s he s t tre de i The in bl l . in the an words en the s wo n a ri at i tions Thu p in n e rb r or no th nt c i r ir i We th ). athe g lar g e,” nged t atter r s in t di an nt r r, i T -t t l ss onsonan to ror th t. ge d etion to t al e ve at rd, de th i Eng ens hus im en d unce sou “t oy in “m a scu -fina ro “t” in on : In mann e s dr so delt ) h En g plu th p l avoid se e ser ry flap s the i letion por ot of of r d ave se occurs a s ns en t- a plu in atterns som ead such chan or e ss s nd, than li fr i . d whe i ra s bo a ma dif voi l f sh ass i “b wor tion rti “ om li ele pr If mar in tan the , o ral: “d na si io ad th e th e ve r sh . l er this ed to utter,” b f e a t efix on ced icu mi l” /z such de n t li s” ” has a ged t” ut tes the rule n sa rying dition as d so t ma mi a diale of r one y be ker is “g “ in no pr in La ti n no “ egu pa or of “ in- lt b sou sile much the not l and stop unds g” d lat ion do es .” u in a a or egin a oc es s king its co wo Eng . a for b un if fi cu n- the pr ir se wor rticulation: tole “s ix th lso a nd of “ The Howev etween would is lar cts “ to nt stress-related batte nd: s vo nso na of o ono unce d place in sign un rds a ha s D se f th t s fo s lish so wa ds o rant. caled much pr g” d the iceless more no t th lt no sal suffixes the m is el o str e with or je ct iv es cond- l voice bos a of lo f onu can be ca us e e sh ee p ature iroe r,” etion y we ant in un are dis simi l vo esse a A is e we fla full of a z, ha ve mann bila they di ss im il at io n ” n merican xp a r, wo lve “kitten,” ice one an p: when ends like ge t l influence En a d ep or d stre particularly
la nce T wh ect articulation ,” in d alveo rticulation d rds olar d ” clo se he b the (such ve ngua enth alveo d when glish g the p an b y er fi ve vo it , “s im il ar ” en a ati o a of id ssed en er al ly roces from os la of two lveoar “n voiced in rule like nasl. rapidly we wels tongue th e of stop l r from the lar the “mitten,” rule English ,” n ge th e an d ti me s a st tog eth e la in si as articulatio , it siblan lo the s. and “sign op the whether siblan that, stop en di ng r sert whi c , aspe le “g” o at ok . (t re pe ti ti on co does -ing, is pa ancestral Th important be co me s curs ra th er Thu arne or stop of ha ve “g” p deltion or wo rk spe flicks in nsoa basically an at rtic er. ronounced ocur are is h ” (t when the a un ct a ts and d), a qu ic k t, s is o -tion, Verner’s or i rs, stop. lling. not ula s u be nd nser (d) Tr sch vo c we to a n, i segmn or th e nstressed de n th an c i flap of a n we d) y co s u italy iced geth nt, con rl a : “button,” gainst “gnom but a ap not wa r of letd th e y the languages nd the pu med get ted ru “m en ta l” s for su cc es s become me s -ette) en di ng The Thus non-nasal in rule in the we ply whe n si mi la r sona le “s im il a nt in sert child ( alveo a mo ve me nt old unde lang a “d” “im- vo rapid Law b r. ialy, a t
vowel when ge flap the e” efor alveolar “a r an the mi plie is inserto Li wel that we syllable, ton gue- twis ters rather a r in t punted. posible.” kewis, d “- al is ,” is uage sou nds is .” d-central modified t io n. en, s lar rstanding l. ” in an in place e so un d- se g roof schwa rule in tha speech. we which have a ca alows s into change a the it En gl is h. is alveolar stop S th voiceless alveo to and used Yo u nas is o, d th than of deleted. ridge. e is pr of o bu t lea next English of and folwed at the fo r midle the tha t oduces if a the the b pro we La ti n and wi ll the vowel) lar articu efor rn a l This But by why th er e the con pro - seg t reg - Bu t are do to or a - - - - - glottal stop . The manner of articulation has remained the same (stop), but the place of articulation has moved back in the mouth from the alveolar ridge to the epiglottis. The relationship of stress patterns to deletions, although it makes life difficult for people learning English and for spellers who already know it, is particularly valuable in reconstructing earlier forms of a language. And those frustrated by deletion rules can at least feel lucky that they do not have to master the con - ventions of French, which has so many deletion rules that it sometimes seems as if the best way to pronounce a French word is to lop off its second half. Metathesis The final process we will discuss is called metathesis , the rearrangement of sequences of phonemes. Metathesis is perhaps the most visible of all the sound-change processes because it so often produces pronunciations that native speakers (or at least sticklers) view as wrong. The three most famous of these are perhaps the words “ask,” “animal,” and “nuclear,” all of which are very commonly rearranged by metathesis. The general rule underlying vari - ous metatheses is that segments will be rearranged to make them easier to pronounce. In the case of “ask,” we have a word in which the “s” and “k” are often switched, producing “aks” as in “I aksed you a question.” This metathe - sis is often associated with African American English (also called Black English Vernacular) and thus has received a great deal of condemnation. However, it is a completely natural metathesis in English. In fact, the Old English verb for “to ask” was “acsian,” with the voiceless velar stop (k) com - ing before the voiceless alveolar fricative (s). A metathesis long ago switched the ks consonant cluster to sk, but in some dialects of English this metathesis is reversed, possibly because the terminal “sk” is more difficult to pronounce: Even in dialects that use the metathesis and say “aks,” the present progres - sive form of the verb is “asking,” not “aksing.” “Aminal” is usually associated with the speech of children. The correct pro - nunciation is a low, central vowel (æ) followed by a voiced alveolar nasal, fol - lowed by a high front vowel, a voiced bilabial nasal, a mid, central vowel, and an alveolar liquid. The metathesis switches the order of the two nasals. Say the two forms slowly and feel the movements of your tongue in your mouth, and you will understand how one pronunciation is easier than the other for beginning speakers. “Nuclear” pronounced “nuc – yu – lar” has been used at the highest levels of American government since the time of President Eisenhower. It is the source of much hilarity, but, like the previous two metatheses, is only a marker of a very normal sound-change process. The three examples given for metathesis also demonstrate that language change and variation is inextricably entangled with culture and society. All three of the metatheses are generally associated with groups or individu - als—African Americans, children, the uneducated—that are not given as much respect as other groups in American society. Although the process of metathesis may be completely normal for English, and although it may make some words easier to pronounce for all speakers, it is resisted for socio- cultural reasons.
31 This leads us toward our next lecture, when we will discuss how large-scale sound change brings about the process of language change, by which all the world’s languages evolved from previous, now-lost tongues in the deep human past. When the processes of sound change that we have examined occur in many words rather than one word, we observe sound shifts , which serve to separate branches of languages from each other. These processes occur, most scholars believe, in the acquisition stage of languages, either when peo - ple learn languages as children or when they acquire them as adults. Language seems to be influenced by two competing processes. Language change is slowed because all the speakers of a language need to understand each other. Language change is accelerated because of the factors we have discussed above, and also because of phenomena like the borrowing of words, the desire of children or other subgroups to speak distinctively different from others, and physical and cultural isolation. The shifting balance between change and stasis leads to the development of languages at different rates and in different environments. The inventions of language-preserving technolo - gies such as writing, tape-recording, and schools, along with language-spread - ing technologies like telecommunications and fast travel, all play a part in a process that has been going on since the first words were spoken. R U O F E R U T C E L
32 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What is the definition of phonology? 2. When does the phonetic environment of a sound influence its pronunciation?
Suggested Reading
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Pinker, Steven. Chapters 5–6. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. ———. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
33 Lecture 5: Sound Shifts and History
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams’s (eds.) An Introduction to Language, chapter 11.
In lecture 3 we learned about the phonetic properties of speech, discovering the ways that specific speech sounds are articulated in the vocal tract . In lec - ture 4 we examined the phonological properties of speech, the ways those speech sounds are combined and re-combined in any given language to make meaningful words. The sound-combinations that make up words change depending upon their local environments (as is shown by processes like assimilation or nasalization ), and they also change during the process of language acquisition. In this chapter we will discuss the ways that sound changes can operate across the whole spectrum of words in a language, pro - ducing the sound shifts that are characteristic of different languages and which help us to determine the ways that languages divided and evolved from one another. Historical Roots When in 1786 William Jones informed the English-speaking world that Sanskrit was related to Germanic and Celtic languages as well as to Latin and Greek (he argued that Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit came from a common source), he began a research program that continues to this day. It was not so much that Jones noticed similar words in the various languages but that he began to note regular correspondences. Rasmus Rask, the Danish philol - ogist, later was able to point out that these correspondences seemed to be based on regular rules. Rask also was able to add Lithuanian and Armenian into the mix, showing that there were regular correspondences between these languages and those previously linked by Jones. But it was Jakob Grimm who really managed to tie everything together. Grimm took Rask’s observations and divined the underlying rule that explained both the similari - ties and the differences. His Deutsche Grammatik , first published in 1819, was as important for the humanities as Darwin’s Origin of Species was to be for biology (and in fact, Grimm’s work in part inspired Darwin). Grimm’s Law Grimm’s argument can be hard to follow, particularly because his linguistic terminology is sometimes different from ours, so rather than delving directly
E into nineteenth-century vergleichende Philologie , I am going to simplify a bit V I and be more explanatory than historical. Grimm himself did not call the con - F
E sonant shift that he had explained a “law.” The German word he uses, R
U “Regel,” means “rule,” and could just as easily mean “correspondence.” It is T
C also worth noting that Grimm could find no way of including the vowels in his E L
34 scheme and did not have much luck with the liquids (r, l). Grimm began with the assumption that had been in place since the time of Jones, that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other European languages—most importantly those in the Germanic branch—had a common ancestor. This common ancestor, which, following contemporary practice rather than Grimm’s own, we will call Proto- Indo-European, could be reconstructed by examining its descendants. Those elements that appeared in the majority of the descendant languages were assumed to be more likely to have appeared in the original language (they were ancestral rather than derived characteristics; alternately, they could be called homologies ). So, for example, we examine the words for “father” and “foot” in a variety of Indo-European languages: Sanskrit Latin Ancient Greek English pitar pater pa–te–` r father pad ped pu–s foot Because the “p” sound appears in a wider variety of languages, it is assumed to be ancestral and the “f” in English to be derived from a conso - nant shift. Grimm concluded that the ancestral forms were p, t, k, b, d, g, bh, dh, and gh (the “h” represents aspiration). They shifted, in the Germanic lan - guages, in the following manner: p f t th k h b p d t g k bh f dh d gh g If you refer back to our chart of the consonants, or simply say these slowly and note the voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation, you may be able to reconstruct Grimm’s Law on your own. P is a voiceless, bil - abial stop. It becomes f, a voiceless, labio-dental fricative. By itself this is not helpful, but remember it: voicing stays the same, bilabial goes to labio-dental, and stop goes to fricative. Now we move on to the next consonant. T is a voiceless alveolar stop. It becomes th, a voiceless inter-dental fricative. K is a voiceless velar stop. It becomes h, a voiceless glottal fricative. Do you see the pattern? Although the voicing remains the same throughout the changes (they are all voiceless) and the place of articulation does not seem to change regularly (bilabial moves back in the mouth to labio-dental and velar moves back to glottal, but the alveolar t moves forward to become inter-dental), all of these stops become fricatives . This is a consistent pattern. So the first part of Grimm’s Law is the following: The voiceless stops in Proto-Indo-European became voiceless fricatives in Germanic.
35 LECTURE FIVE 3 6 s r u o c l a l a c t o r P l a n i n n i g e b a w op r o t al of we no Exc te we we tio be th voi cl o th as pa en d th en di s So Th be c in it le c sou vel le voi G T T G L th s o l o s is m en e e h he pi r n S e t comin r th e ri s ’ m m i r s c tu r ced a cel s i Th Th t n i t the e e w note se are o k o j oug nds s n rat becom la an m ed , us eptio m r I - o o of e th of i u a c i g o l re at e me s b “p be nt la st e wi e sto f ng G P e e ea e s e se ir d sk r ion sp d e d n a it ch er ,” the s er t sto se th o r h er wer le n th w he conti voi voi th d, tha ua u spir n a ni e r a h t g p. g tha d ir n o -de re e. ft n hi l it , o d e s - o t ns man el o th lso cond d at bila ant a L of ng l th e ps bi a e s u n i e in ot ge E - c ced l en sh t e T w em e e re e vo e an d t nasp as pi ated t ed r n I la nta o cha his fr w Grim’s g e Ex ith r u th e o n a “ s es s im no b o tire if b th e ne A o t w ue ic. ” f s ice icatves bi a l o d r lso , ip s p t e f ia s r e h c is s i o stop sp a l u par co ns on o pla l posib nt aspirte in ted ay ocu comin ra ti on the e h t n i nge g p . n a e p n a l f l - ir sto uld d pr e shift sto l d n i d la a be ca us e “ e p o r u E h s ate ir at io n stop ate som op p st op , i a of own y t i r a o t ng sto ined ng m fricatve be co me s ” e g a u g tha p. thr o s p vi ou s wor h G en . o p m i r in Gr im m’ s t d f in r s t e h u ca ave is a ps, cl os e Law. g o n . e d n u ed le, is if e a m r e G e Grim’s an ts g n i s U t age. vo as d e e r g “p it ch er ” t D , be co me s Prot- d d he voicel o c e r is they the th n e W is si gn n a n i n a e m Ver is is (t iced xception t n a t r but is gr sto ime es tw o star no mean easir e a h c it au he list. a g n i y l r c i n on difcult oups at te nt io n a voicng, b a is r t s n di sc us se d ner i ps lso, had fi ca nt voiced g. to ma ti c n a g e voice r G tha n o La w Indo- t voiced voicels d e g n ch ap te rs , sto shift si mp th n s. u g n a l B a diately L So in s ’ m m i b ’s (e ve n t o t c u s g e aw t ecom to casd a of ps. is n a l si m be s i h gful gap s li st nd T Law le is y l n o Eu h t i w we (t ha t ly to f o a notice to hat cons s a e h t with are vela s is e g a u g e g a th e pl to Sou in o c e r inte n a vo the rope re qu ir e say. units h t o is this if , w a L befor ca n y the th is a r p sto En gl is h: th e fa ct or c e b leavs “ s o l stop ice th at we is , linked e b, r recd ” . p voiced file lo ss r-den voiced nds y l d i p e s i w r e d n a fricatve/ u r t s n sto t an ps. be chan folwing: We t hat d ge ne ra li ze a it ph en om en o ant e s u a “p ” in h c do e T d a I th e - o d n b is vo ic ed p. cause of s i h shufle becom so me a r of th e g n a b But h c s becom ila tal ed o s a e n i n o i t c so un ds . chang no t can to anot chang , ph y ge. It voice e th We sound “p ” th bial un b o t i d n i k e h t th st o r u E by one b r a l o G on em ic i fricatve tha e s sa y ecoms e d e -aspir op. , e r u c s th The her erman y l b a n , in the ex pl an at io n. as pi bi la bi al ph on et ic d t u b a st aro le in es a a n i n us es t r t s n o m o n an d ano f o “c up ” d l u o c spirated d n n a e p voice op. s ga s g th e It n, Yo u gap, no t only s. voicels e e t e the und, ra ti on . say be o s l a a o c e r voice beco p r o w t i ca ll ed nd stop as e f n i ther. ic ted This It sa y: combinat re st comin is th in k s i k, les st op . ph en ds w a u g n a l becoms langu t d e t a tha aspe h t n since we ll a e k a n . s d an b e r then il l n a m stop. a les lso r t s onlgica s e s u a c e nv ir on me nt . blocked t a h t voiced When of Bh , makes t es d no te , vo as pi ra ti o stop y r u t n e c Sa y ab ou t g s r a l o h c S n o i t c u the d l o as Li ke wi se ct a wi th t a h t th e the in sto icels, ther filed fricatv t, voicel . e g ges. th e dr o w t i of the ph on et ic s a o l i h p pre ps “c up ” wo rd ) as elimna the p, h t th e stop the se c n a sen ti voice , fO vo it , the c by end er e senc Thus di wo w n es. sa a u o es) ic ed , sy an d fir ig o l , l e ip s a c dh an d Bu t the in uld st dl - , - - - ). n - if often reconstruct the meanings of words by using context or by using texts that are translations of known languages. But there are some words for which this is impossible. They might be hapax legomena , words that appear only one time in the written corpus of a language. Now, scholars could apply the various sound-change laws and look for correspondences in other Indo- European languages. The corresponding words are called cognates : pater, pitar, father, and vater are all cognates. Scholars also learned that there are false cognates , words that appear to be related but, upon further investiga - tion, turn out not to be. Verner’s Law Grimm’s Law had remarkable explanatory power, but there were exceptions to it that were not easily explained. This did not bother Grimm himself, who accepted the idea that there were exceptions to his rules, but subsequent lin - guists were determined to figure out additional regularities. The most suc - cessful was the Danish linguist, Karl Verner (1846–1896), who in 1875 formu - lated Verner’s Law . Verner examined words in which p did not become f, t did not become th, and k did not become h in the shift from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic. Thus in Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek, as well as Baltic and Slavic languages, there were words that included p in which the cognates in Germanic languages also had p, rather than f. For example, the p in the Proto-Indo-European word for father does indeed become an f, as Grimm’s Law would predict. But in Proto-Germanic the word is “fæder,” with a “d” rather than the “th” we would expect from Grimm’s Law. Even more confus - ing, the Proto-Indo-European word for “brother” does follow Grimm’s Law, with the Proto-Germanic form being “brother” rather than “broder.” Why was Grimm’s Law working sometimes and not others in words that were obviously equally old and closely related? Verner studied these words very carefully and noted a correspondence: When the vowels before the p, t, or k (the unvoiced stops) were unstressed, Grimm’s Law did not come into effect. In Proto-Indo-European, the stress was on the second syllable of “father” (compare the Sanskrit pit-á ) while it was on the first syllable of “brother” (Sanskrit bhrá-ta). One reason it had taken so long for linguists to figure out Verner’s Law was that somewhat later in the development of the Germanic languages stress had become fixed on the root syllable of a word (this had not been the case in Proto-Indo- European or Proto-Germanic). That early stress patterns (which are not usu - ally represented in early writing systems, but have to be inferred) could modi - fy major processes like consonant shifts was enormously important to philolo - gists: They now had an additional tool for understanding language change. I-mutation Grimm’s and Verner’s Law explained changes in the consonant systems of the Indo-European languages, but Grimm had been unable to figure out laws for the Indo-European vowel system. Later linguists, however, were able to explain various regular changes in vowel systems of Indo-European lan - guages. The most important of the processes they described is i-mutation , also called umlaut . I-mutation occurs when a back vowel, such as that in “f oo t,” is moved to the front of the mouth ( fronted ), as in “f ee t,” or when a
37 LECTURE FIVE 3 8 Old wa po ver in style Ge ar com th po schol Thr ea ed of th its th “f th be pl th con in is sin Br ro (m in i- to be in Ge it ra sho say th fr I T T I m ea on n -m stead u fl g chan e e at ro e e g w i hi he i th i e r sing g e come cause th ju i mpo s u g gre nt nesi s rma y nt ut ume ly 18 e ed so r th m e ak Bib rul a mo ht” w t s en le u E t p e d t-i e w foun one he i at vow ars i ta nte o os ) o li ge e ng a o i n i 7 na e at , ing n sa G es nfo la ter vow ce g the f G l io n w nd ut f l s rt (fo 5 ti a it w e. l nt, on it a ed pro next en on de ng l “f pho on nt re e a re ter n me ish d be w f h ve io d to if a th atu el, w mo a rom rm a o nt ugh r tr ip S mon e he ys s. can sting h g-i, el bat nd uag at n ( b t” e it f in e t . an nou aut vo ry r ocur r cho ht he si ad nolg ased ation pa G aised su i- res. ecov beca r wa in is ca Br wh n syla g is e th A t mu t) we sla e a w en the he rea o y e. e , ch rticula con ong cer e c ocu nce alre cons ply ea O n at la sp y el r h amo en y), w d wa ntir hie l-re tion taio ld ad An rs t d s ir tha edu Va use ble t hic y ki on ) abo he lit as si th tain ate r o cl s, ph ad whe bu the p su s n En in e an v h e r, d re late lo them in tica u n the t red , g r em tha ad var y- n, t o ction, so n B vo ilo y de g ut t c hat st it Ver two tha m to ch “b d glish se part i-muta f words is ant aplies d. h sound “cometa n f sch p demo d we n a lo ecsor, ore wel ronted. at” sound- ancestor iato sou infor ents lon when anges a as tha oem. a n t a Th ne vo in gist it p Libr cor langu was (such d pa roces of Old olars. sylabe g can but o was (d iphto wels likey, in r’s nd Old us sytem ns, r mation tion n its ent nstrae raph ary, the one ectly, Ed in “ O we oted to Sie cat”). L change “ not change it ” Saxon the ages con I-m mone t l comple English ancesto aw “ uard d ( combin hat wo ar to yes.” short But comet) poem “fæht” red vers’ rase, tweny- ng f by had so we English in just utaion e first clude is some t yo de uld abo s he d at f of (two are a unde in t” olwed into folwe Sievrs wil th u par monstr a s s a In fro , le an p d tely one, fourth f Old proba in n 18 ut e ations co r rom in (t “str ma b oet Lat eductio ast do rela six each tha nt was O ut he discu inte inf English. Old combin rstand 94, abstr uld is the “str Indo phra ld y es a log in En vo Siev who l fro tha lines Latin ng u d import “æ” ted ated se bly resting English it e or by was enc reconst a te Eng “wer past wels glish, n ical: as b case -Europ ng ntig ” se came ot, n y xt copy in fith ct ( to m h re t section eithr ed strong thu” he “ht” a was rs is of ave lish the get g o in pan.” If studying sugetin pres ex ant and each If e of such f sylabe caled the it was Old whic vowel a it xceptiona cons vari cen fron a you s ruct of , or ean into word is influe cons (str pro remain La if rcise. fo Latin of i-m knew ) to mouth an it vita Likew “rp” turies nts Nor r t was other as tin the is e parts could ven tions th of the is two langue bet utae ngth). bre over so Old like mo nce the e l tha ). an the word se, th a te g him A first for the ed und ants not earli lang . aking Thes , evn ise e , xt. ly r back ved tha ts de t eason. of in r Second, we lap d “weorpan Saxon Anglo-Sax in under of e and short-a ) contais u mer understa h, bo s). complex, to to an This ep ndersta speling show but Old tha in pr uage vowels on higer can it with r , s r, thoug make vowel “myn eparing “ Breaking Old ely orign knowl whe vers was k vow pet” alowed stand vowels was an English bok was poe of use First, t sound befo a d he Hig the re ” et” els ions nd bor and in on the and al l (to or m - b a he a it - of h ut to re - had had no knowledge of the Vatican manuscript. This was an enormous tri - umph for scientific philology, which was shown to have some of the predictive power of hard science. In 1879 the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure concluded that Proto- Indo-European must have had one or more laryngeal consonants, which would have been pronounced deep in the throat, in the voicebox or larynx (the exact pronunciation is still disputed). Saussure’s theory was controversial: Although it did explain how particular sound changes could have occurred, there was no hard evidence in existing Indo-European languages for laryn - geals. But in the early twentieth century, the Hittite language was discovered and eventually deciphered. There is a group of phonemes in Hittite that can best be explained by the existence of laryngeals in that language, suggesting that Saussure’s theory was correct even though he had had no knowledge of Hittite. Finally, the great English philologist J.R.R. Tolkien (known more widely, of course, as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ) studied some unusual twelfth-century texts called collectively “The Katherine Group” because among them was a Life of St. Katherine. Tolkien noticed some regu - larities in the unusual spellings of certain words that had been part of one particular class of verbs in Old English. He was able to demonstrate that these spellings indicated that Old English had continued to be spoken in the West Midlands of England much longer than had previously been recog - nized—long enough to undergo linguistic evolution before becoming Middle English. Tolkien thus used philology to uncover a lost history of England, showing a persistence of English culture (in certain locations) that had main - tained its integrity through the cataclysm of the Norman Conquest. In all three of these cases, and in many more that are lesser known, the power of philology and the understanding of the logical processes of sound changes recovered lost history, giving us information about our ancestors that would otherwise be completely impossible to recover. Philologists were even able to go back before the advent of writing to conclude that the Indo- European homeland was somewhere in the north, probably in a forest of beech, oak, and birch trees populated by animals like the bear, boar, and squirrel. They could also give us some insight into that lost, pre-historic cul - ture. For example, the English word “daughter” can be traced back to Sanskrit “duhitar,” which means “the little milker,” suggesting an ancient culture in which a customary duty of daughters was to milk the cows, sheep, or goats. The word “hammer” is cognate with Old Slavic “kamy,” which means “stone,” and by noting this correspondence, philology is actually able to take us all the way back through history to the lost world of our Stone Age ancestors.
39 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What is Grimm’s Law? 2. How can laws of sound change be used to reconstruct lost languages?
Suggested Reading
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Pinker, Steven. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. E V I F E R U T C E L
40 Lecture 6: The Rules: Syntax
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams’s (eds.) An Introduction to Language, chapter 4.
We have seen how languages change from one to another in part through sound shifts , in which the pronunciation of words changes in a regular way. When Germanic split off from the rest of Indo-European, the sound-shift described by Grimm’s Law occurred. The voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives, the voiced stops become voiceless, thus moving into the space vacated by the voiceless stops, and the aspirated voiced stops moved into the place that the voiced stops had vacated. This sound shift, plus the others described, and some additional shifts that we have left out for reasons of time and complexity, explain many of the differences between Germanic lan - guages and others. We can even see how multiple different sound shifts operating at different times can cause languages to further evolve and split into more and more lineages. Also, although languages change their large- scale sound-systems, they are also continually undergoing the processes of change that we discussed in lecture four. Assimilation, dissimilation, metathe - sis, and other processes all modify languages as time passes. But sound shifts and changes in pronunciation are not the whole story. If they were, we would be able to program a computer with the proper sound shifts, put in a poem in English, and have that same poem come out in, say, German or Gothic or Latin. Obviously we cannot do this. Languages change not only in their sound systems, but also in the ways they express logical relationships (their grammar and syntax ), the ways that they change words from one function to another within themselves ( morphology ), and in the words they use ( lexicon ). In this chapter we will investigate syntax and syn - tactic changes, which are, unfortunately, not as regular or as easy to concep - tualize as sound changes. Infinite Sentences from Finite Resources The logical structures of human languages allow speakers to create an infi - nite number of sentences with a finite number of words. At first I resisted this conclusion, thinking that because there are a finite number of words, there could not be an infinite number of possible sentences. A very large number of sentences, even a Vast (to use Daniel Dennett’s terminology) number of sentences, certainly. Even a number of sentences greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe. But not an infinite number. But let us try the following experiment. Take a very long sentence, perhaps one from (of all the authors in whose works we could look for a long sentence) Ernest Hemingway:
41 That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not con - sider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as impor - tant and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when on the sea, you are alone with it and know this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white- flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronts, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occa - sional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream (Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa , 149–50). Now that’s a long sentence, but I can easily make it longer: Ernest Hemingway said that “That something I cannot yet define com - pletely . . . one single, lasting thing—the stream.” If you want it longer still, I can say: I heard that Mike Drout said that Ernest Hemingway said that “That something I cannot yet define completely . . . one single, lasting thing—the stream.” Or longer still: Ellen completed a fabricated story in which Professor Jones said that John told her that he heard that Mike Drout said that Ernest Heming- X
I way said that “That something I cannot yet define completely . . . one S single, lasting thing—the stream.” E R
U The number of possible sentences is infinite because however long a T
C sentence you create, you can always add to it and still have it remain E L
42 grammatical. This quality of infinite expandability is generated by the rules of syntax of languages. In the case of English, we can take any sentence we want, no matter how long, and put it inside another sentence after the word “that.” A bit later in this discussion we will examine the specific rules that allow this in English, but a more interesting point is that all known human languages have this quality: You can always make a sentence just a little bit longer, and a little bit longer after that. Sentences and Trees There are other aspects of language syntax that are, as far as we know, uni - versal to all human languages. Every language has the idea of a subject , something that does something, and a verb, the thing that gets done. In fact, you can conceptualize the basic idea of a sentence in all human languages as being made up of a doer and the action the doer does. Linguists describe this relationship as S = NP + VP S means a sentence, NP means a noun phrase, and VP means a verb phrase. Let us look at these building blocks for a moment. You will probably remem - ber from grammar school that “a noun is a person, place, or thing.” A noun is a naming word. A noun phrase is at its most basic just a noun, but it can also include a noun and other, related words. Cows is a noun phrase. So is big cows . So is big, stupid cows . So is the big, stupid cows . So is the big, stupid cows with the little horns . By itself a noun phrase does not make a sentence. For that we also need a verb phrase such as slept or kicked over the stool or kicked over the stool and set the barn on fire or attacked the professor with violent kicks and buffetings Verb phrases can contain noun phrases inside them. In the verb phrase above, “the stool” and “the barn” and “the professor” are noun phrases. Sentences in English also contain prepositional phrases, which are created by putting a preposition in front of a noun phrase: with violent kicks and buffetings or with their short little horns and nasty tempers or despite their wretched, tiny brains English has other constituents as well, such as determiners (including “the,” “a,” “this,” “that,” “those”), auxiliaries (such as “will,” “should,” “could”) and complementizers (such as “that” used in the sentence “He said that I should
43 stop talking about cows”). But all of the sentences that use these other con - stituents fit into the basic S = NP + VP structure. Linguists use these functional categories to create tree diagrams of sen - tences. These are not the sentence diagrams that your eighth-grade English teacher struggled to teach you, but a new development in linguistics that focuses on syntactic relationships. The root of the tree is the sentence itself, marked by S, and every unit below that sentence (the noun phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrases, etc.) has to be divided into two pieces. When I teach linguistics I can spend two or three weeks on tree diagrams, because they really do show the syntactic relationships very well. Diagramming a very complex sentence, such as one of those in Milton’s Paradise Lost , can give you insight into the ways authors arrange their words for various effects. Very complex sentences also show how amazing the human “language organ” is: You can spend a good hour trying to analyze a sentence that an intelligent nine-year-old can produce without thinking very much about it.
S LEGEND S=Sentence NP = Noun Phrase VP = Verb Phrase PP = Prepositional Phrase Adj = Adjective VP Det = Determiner Prep = Preposition N=Noun V=Verb
NP NP PP
NP NP
NP
NP NP NP X
I Det Adj NVDet Adj Adj Adj N Prep Det Adj N S t u E o r D R . C . U D T l e a C h c
The angry cows attacked the kind old English professor with their pointy horns. i E M L ©
44 Theories of Syntax It was this phenomenon that intrigued the linguist Noam Chomsky back in the 1950s. At that time theories of language-production were based on B.F. Skinner’s theories of behaviorism: Skinner believed that speaking came as a response to various stimuli and thus was a trained activity. Chomsky demon - strated mathematically that mere response to stimulus could not possibly pro - duce the variety of sentences produced by human speakers: Even children simply could not be producing so many different sentences as part of a set of stimuli and responses. There must be some other factor at work, and Chomsky argued that it was the possession of what he called universal gram - mar that allowed children to acquire complete languages without enough time to have heard even a small portion of the sentences that can be created in them and to understand sentences that they had never before encountered. Children must acquire a set of rules and from these make their own sen - tences, and in fact the syntax of the sentences generated by the rules is more important than the content of the sentences themselves. Chomsky illus - trated this point with his famous sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furi - ously,” which is syntactically perfect but absolutely nonsensical. Transformations Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures is short, mathematical, and absolutely groundbreaking. In it he showed how a “universal grammar” could at least theoretically explain both the contour of language acquisition and the struc - tures of sentences that we observe speakers creating and understanding. But the most important contribution of Syntactic Structures is Chomsky’s idea of the transformation . Two different sentences can mean the same thing: The cow attacked the professor. The professor was attacked by the cow. Other, very closely related sentences would be the following: Did the cow attack the professor? Yes, the cow attacked the professor. What attacked the professor? The cow attacked whom? By whom was the professor attacked? Chomsky posited that sitting underneath all of these sentences was some set of abstract relationships, something like ACTOR ACTION RECEIVER. Into the logical outline of these relationships, the brain plugged in specific words like “cow,” “professor,” and “attacked.” Then a set of rules, based on each language’s individual characteristics, transformed these rules into the specific sentences in each language (for example, adding determiners to the nouns, putting the verb in the past tense). Chomsky called the underlying relationships deep structures and the actual form of the sentence that a per - son would utter surface structures . But most importantly, he outlined some of the rules that would transform a given deep structure into more than one sur - face structure. The theory opened up an entirely new era in linguistics.
45 This can be somewhat confusing, so let us look at some sentences: The cow attacked the professor. The professor was attacked by the cow. Who was attacked by the cow? Did the cow attack the professor? We intuitively recognize that these sentences are all closely related to each other. Previously we noted that all sentences are composed of at least a noun phrase plus a verb phrase, and this is obviously true for the first sen - tence, in which the noun phrase is “the cow” and the verb phrase is “attacked the professor.” But something has happened in sentence number two. Now the subject of the sentence, the doer of the action, the cow, is no longer inside the noun phrase but instead is inside a noun phrase inside the verb phrase (“was attacked by the cow”). Also, an auxiliary verb (“was”) and a preposition (“by”) have appeared, but the information is exactly the same. What happened? According to Chomsky’s theory, a transformation was applied to the deep structure that moved the subject noun phrase (“the cow”) into a prepositional phrase (“by the cow”) inside the verb phrase (“attacked by the cow”). At the same time the object noun phrase (“the professor”) was moved up to the front of the sentence. A verbal auxiliary (“was”) was generat - ed to mark the passive voice. This sounds confusing, but Chomsky was able to show how this and many other transformations could be made by a simple set of rules. It was now pos - sible to show that ambiguous sentences like “Visiting relatives can be boring” were ambiguous because two different deep structures could lead to the same surface structures. In this case, one deep structure would have “visiting” as part of the noun phrase “visiting relatives” (i.e., it is a participle, a verb acting as an adjective, and it modifies the noun “relatives”). The meaning of this sen - tence is that Uncle Earl and Aunt Flossie come to stay over and do nothing but talk about their collection of ceramic opossums. The other deep structure would take “visiting relatives” as a verb phrase (meaning “to visit relatives”). In this case the sentence explains what it is like to go to Uncle Earl and Aunt Flossie’s house and have to look at all those stupid ceramic opossums. It does not really make a lot of sense to have such ambiguities in a language, particularly if that language had to be learned as a series of stimuli and responses as the behaviorists had proposed. But it makes a lot of sense once we learn that the underlying rules of a language might end up producing con - fusing but grammatical sentences—there were no contradictions or ambigui - ties in the deep structure, and the rules were fine, but the combination was something more difficult. Universal Grammar, Universal Translation Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar took the linguistic world by storm. All of a sudden there was a new way to approach language, and lin - X
I guists in the 1960s charged right in, describing new transformations, making S new and better tree diagrams, and fighting viciously with each other. It E
R seemed as if, with enough work, universal grammar might be understood: U T There must be an underlying basic design for all languages, and if we could C E L
46 figure it out, a great many good things would happen. First, and most impor - tantly, we would have great insight into how the human mind works. Second, understanding universal grammar would potentially allow for universal trans - lation. All you would need to do was to take your sentence in, say, English, translate it into universal grammar, then apply, say, the Japanese linguistic rules to the underlying universal grammar sentence, plug in the Japanese words, and you would have a grammatical sentence in Japanese. This would be an enormous boon to human communication. But, unfortunately, attempts to build a complete language system and to ferret out true universal grammar and thus universal translation have not been successful, even though the Chomskyan transformational generative grammar program has been running for nearly fifty years. But we have discovered some universals, and a new version of transformational grammar called X-Bar Syntax shows some promise: All languages have phrases that consist of a head and a comple - ment . But different languages handle these constituents in different ways. For example, in English, the head of a phrase comes at the beginning, while in Japanese it comes at the end. Synthetic and Analytic Languages All languages have sentences that include a subject (the doer of the action), a verb (the action), and an object (the receiver of the action), but they have different ways of indicating these relationships. English is what is called an analytic language: The order of words in the sentence indicates the logical relationship, so that “The cow attacked the professor” means something very different from “The professor attacked the cow.” You will notice that the words in the sentences are exactly the same, only their order is different. If you have studied Latin, however, you will note that the order of words in a Latin sentence is far more flexible. You can say “Carthago delenda est” or “Delenda est Carthago” and mean the same thing. Why? Because Latin is a synthetic language. Rather than relying on very fixed word order to indicate subject and object, Latin uses inflections , various sounds, called morphemes attached to the ends of words. Thus when learning Latin, we have to memo - rize the various endings for a noun in the various cases : the nominative, when the noun is the subject; the accusative, when the noun is the direct object, and so forth. Synthetic languages can pile more and more mor - phemes together, and they can allow words to be scrambled around in a sen - tence but still maintain their meanings. Polysynthetic languages can have as many as ten morphemes attached to any given word. But even in these languages there is a preferred order in which the informa - tion is presented. There are six possible arrangements of subject, verb, and object (SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV), but 90 percent of the world’s languages either use SVO or SOV (about half use SVO and the other half use SOV). Most of the remaining languages are VSO. Only Yoda, from Star Wars, speaks OSV (from a parody of Revenge of the Sith : “Told you I did. Listen you did not. Now screwed we all shall be.”). The analytic versus syn - thetic distinction (word order versus inflections) and the order of subject, verb, and object are both significant in the history of English. The earliest ancestors and relatives of Old English were highly inflected, with a well- defined case structure for nouns. As time passed, English became more and
47 LECTURE SIX 4 8 to to so m g r o vid se u so w e r o m G n r e d o M ul Ch ua f nd e r e , n a m r e aj und e und e p a cha u or s: ge erstan a rod not al ho ng o c a n a t ng p sent h c w s he (a uce es art han hifts. e v n ose n E es nalytic) it r o m t y l d in enc of ( ca s i l g me subje e y ges t h , c i o rig e r soun ow n Ch la f d anig h ge u sou ngu ch o s. a t t n ang a f h g u o r h to synta ct nd re ang e r d a l i A nd age a d ver e t f a ocu e j b u s . es few wh e j b u s no by e and x b , the in ac ich r is the t r o w obje c r hes e h t t c synta hange ros t c to r t lea hose g (synthe word e j b o d et r e v entir ct). o N rned d r o chan an pluge x b n a m r s t c of We s ar r e t c e j b o in entir an tha b r e v e clase syntax. tic), . ges—an tran ha ju d l O d d t o C st sto g ve o int ( sforma lang et ( O S ne s e u q n as g n E O V S o red n p It of ow th word d ) V impo ron uage is h s i l e w we as .) a u g n a l t tional ma no ords syn m unced rtan. a s a w orde can w t s o ra sterd se tacil time ther i n rules—a t . e g go a c i g o l r , o s l a of Becaus a (su acor than lang to from two rule d d i M bject stru exam e k i l l ding s, r uage separt nd sp i h s n o i t a l e simp one e l ctu it nr e d o m obje we the ine h s i l g n E is res to ly kin th easir now ct casde the the rough in in d verb) set ind of or o dn a ther der lan to - of - FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What is an aspect of syntax that is universal to all languages? 2. Why did B.F. Skinner believe that speaking was a trained activity?
Suggested Reading
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. 2nd ed. Ossining, NY: Walter de Gruyter, Inc., 2002. Kaplan, Jeffrey P. English Grammar: Principles and Facts. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994. Pinker, Steven. Chapters 7–10. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. ———. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
49 Lecture 7: Words, Words, Words
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams’s (eds.) An Introduction to Language, chapter 3.
It is somewhat remarkable that we are nearly half way into this course and we are only now just getting to words. But words occupy a very interesting intermediate point in language. At the smallest scale we have sounds , the building blocks of words, and at the largest scale we have grammar and syn - tax, which determine the ways that words are arranged, but the words them - selves are just in between, and it was useful for us to see them in both other contexts before examining them in detail. “In the beginning there was the word” begins the Gospel of John, and at some point in the very, very, very distant past there must indeed have been one first word. That first word could very well have been “snake!” This is not entirely a joke. Scientists who attempt to find language or lan - guage-like behavior in animals often cite the cries of the vervet monkey as being something like what the origins of human language might have been in the prehistoric past. Vervet monkeys have three separate alarm calls, one for eagles, one for leopards, and one for snakes. This linkage of specific sounds to specific meanings is one of the basic elements of languages that researchers look for in animals, and a vervet call could be interpreted as a word. But vervets lack syntax ; they have no way to say “the snake is behind the leopard!” Medieval philosophers of language did not look to animals because they did not recognize language as having evolved. Nevertheless they too were inter - ested in the first word. In De vulgari eloquentia Dante argues that the first word must have been “El,” the Hebrew word for God, addressed to God by Adam. Dante arrives at this conclusion by noting that since Jesus spoke Hebrew, Hebrew must have been the original language of God (because God and Jesus are the same). Thus the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel added many other languages, but kept Hebrew in place. If God spoke Hebrew, Dante concludes, Adam must have known Hebrew so that he could speak to God. And what word would be more appropriate than “God”? Although contemporary research does not follow his lead, Dante did reason his way to a conclusion that is not that different from what current linguistic
N scholars think: The key development in language is thought to be the creation E
V of words for “self” and “other”—logically equivalent to Dante’s “God” and E
S “Adam.” With self and other linguistically marked, the reasoning goes, lan -
E guage can begin to develop as a means of communication. The Oxford R
U philosopher Owen Barfield followed some of the same lines of reasoning in T
C understanding words. He also began with “In the beginning was the word,” E L
50 and argued that human language had developed through a process of diver - sification. The Greeks had the word “pneuma,” which means “breath,” “life,” and “soul.” English, millennia later, had multiple words for the different con - cepts. Barfield saw language continually splintering into finer and finer distinc - tions, giving humans more and more ways to label and discuss the world around them. A story, whose source I cannot document, might illustrate this point. A mother and father were taking their very young daughter to the zoo. She was just learning to talk, and at that stage classified all animals into two cat - egories, “doggies” and “birdies.” Anything that walked on four legs was a “doggie.” Zebra? “Doggie.” Giraffe? “Doggie.” Ostrich? “Birdie.” Then the family walked up to the gorilla exhibit. The gorilla happened to be standing up on its hind legs. “What’s that?” the mother asked the daughter, wondering whether the gorilla would be a doggie or a birdie. The little girl thought for a moment, looked the gorilla up and down, and then said, happily, “Daddy!” She had found another classification for animals. So perhaps Barfield was on to something. However, we are unable to study languages that would have such an impoverished set of words. The most primitive peoples that have been stud - ied have incredibly complex languages with thousands of words. They must have come from somewhere, and scholars have turned to living languages to see how words can enter a language. There are several processes, divid - ed into two categories: external and autochthonous (a technical term for “arising from within”). We honestly cannot say where the “original” set of words in a language comes from, again, because every language that we can study has had many years to evolve from some other language. But for the sake of argument, let us begin with a language that has a full set of its “own” words. At this particular point, our language is isolated from other lan - guages (perhaps the speakers live in a deep val - ley between two seemingly impassable moun - tain ranges). Where do new words come from? First of all, we can create words from the words we already have. Depending upon the morphology of the language, this can be as simple as adding a single morpheme to a word. So if we have an adjective, such as “pleasant,” we can add the morpheme “un-” to make “unpleas - ant” a new word. Likewise, we can use the addition of different mor - phemes to change the grammatical categories of words, thus making new words. Take the noun “cow” and add the morpheme “-like,”
and you now have an adjective. m o c . t r a
Other morphemes that turn p i Daddy! l C nouns into adjectives in © 51 LECTURE SEVEN 5 2 the W with no the po la Old c “s c b fr p yo n the s le tw u Ge str p m E in b M b te m e ta b ca fr p ve b n En T Co m Ne Th La omp omp pea or la ow ni le e y xpand ecom he ut ou i o ng r xi ve tri en an ak ea r ki or o he u n rb un un g o n m g ce.” o r te a m y cre n, cal n ng e ke e man ng me n su w oth s lis li ds nti N sep n wi ge d y i ni s). ve gua als k h din ng sh soun on p ou ou pri w po ne ,” g se of b or h er out” h w ffix ave ng i of a l on roc f i n ives s un t er y rb as li or ts i L Th en ted an e o ord se ar ng s g. nded nded nciple speaker n s t i er ke un w n i wor ge Ne nclud c s. ikews into th using s ds ot o of it. “ g b a la of th ess ate the d den ate a e d -er” b w lang Spe com ds t e g have ra asic s s T t “baker w n fro us en very een h m sh ds, “ cal posiblte, ive ord som no “ ( n he two Fire gu can can birth ma em rat the ew wi wi ca n no ost W cy of mor e m if akers a “pa o un uag subtra bin “- ou age s t. us whic stock her ad th th s f o s “ n th crea un a ewhat nes. back-formation p sp a -ish,” a to into se mid tha also word also com rds place o ns ” a he es yd lace” e “cow” al tical e nom adjectives verbs es, very “pr f “ n and ecif s pa cr “ it girlf tha so th bu th ru ay.” t ar ted to io apply “age also a ct mor ea oofread” po had o an rat le ” es cr en s in n” fo n an rn ina ca b ,” noun n f the mo cre En “ th is limted te ea tha ien un e firefighter” becom r word by of o e to ed ter tu “Waterp t a thing m (a 4 d te e ntive” e he re f tive have a cr ea te d not glish se lthou re would ate terms, te word rn ding morphological any, wor x “- s pre d” gory cre gr suffix, ad ason spo god the ar esqu, with ad 1 in in new specialzd amt words s can has previously , ending din 0 ate a fixes and e ds. or es an gh a diton a i t words s 26 a (it alows lang man n can to word nd n roof” a lo g ignal be fixes a one- by evn exa d, detr ot posi creating wo words indicates a t fr om it En tha “fir anoth he the “babysit,” have ws pr ” if a as sp ica uage is b nose y b co be a rds nd glish eposition mple. of eplac,” of y you uilt mile tha , is verb nd like ne tualy ecial in for an “-er” mpou mine having vocabul are l b whic ap o se “r” morp sufixe cate a de le er this existed. th w like t me u you hroug a , plying im the bu by e “Anglo-Saxon.” noun p nsical, e a a r nalysis (when two- no while word “to (we n un). Yes, suffix that r lso m anig. mens becom i o word whet ndig gories agentive. “sle an ld the hems a pa t can ut alow ad eanig the . th a s cow”; e word –adjective d alows a can r s someone So ry ough ntirely suffix the diton o epwalk.” ts difer also it orign comb Fo coi a nice to f but the can pla without turn , to is ( o p verb us a as a speakr r num r verb a nag mirror-image f rexistng s the to comp words a ce example, o n sep m sp ee ch . noun chang obviusly lan it “-er” be bonfir re words of aly inato But wel r an nt under pla aly existing er existng m e no whe ber compounded cogniz verb guae arte pre nou , ge m Adjec ight “-er” Nouns adjectiv ce is compound, the t un regular and is a by tweny-six orp and und s es a ner e of re fixes doing s stod, fo dersto to the to “ wor of on be Ve rb s s ch linkg delibrat to hems, m that the new fr Engl r some ed tives ated. s). assume word. can with wor be generate a inse om a existng orphems. angi run” compounded your “the nd subject). of d and as nouns fire something). stre Of shifted never ds). is ish in ha words e com a rt can such nou one ca n xpand a to to , E course afectd fire and with wor “g ve sufixe lawn, mor as but uses nglish single gethr a that irl the - be com be was in a p actu from the ds a - to at a it ir by is - s - - , ally existed. For example, a “berserkr” is a crazy fighter who enters a kind of killing frenzy in which he cannot be controlled and seems to be immune to most attacks. English speakers created the back-formation of an adjective “berserk” from “berserkr,” assuming it meant “one who is berserk.” The singu - lar form of the word for the pea (the vegetable) was in fact “pease,” but some speakers took the “s” on the end of this word as indicating a plural and back- formed the word “pea.” “Edit,” “peddle,” and “swindle” were all created by back-formation. As was “enthuse” (from “enthusiasm”). If we want someone to be less ruthless and say “have some ruth” or tell someone else to “be couth” or suggest that while I was unhappy at my job yesterday, today I am perfectly “gruntled,” we are creating words through back-formation. Proper names can also be a source of new words in a language. If a per - son becomes famous or infamous for a particular thing, his or her name can gain immortality by becoming a common noun or verb. These eponyms are often not recognized as being related to proper nouns, outlasting the fame of the individual who inspired them. “Sandwich” is perhaps the most famous eponym in English (named after the Earl of Sandwich, as we all learned in grammar school, who wanted to be able to eat quickly while gambling). “Algorithm,” “Caesarian,” “diesel,” “leotard,” “maverick,” “sadism,” “side - burns,” “teddy bear,” “valentine,” and “volt” are all nouns created from proper names. Verbs can also be eponymous. Recently I overheard one student say to another, “Don’t Homer that donut,” telling him not to eat it in one bite. The proper noun “Homer” (from Homer Simpson, of course) was changed into a verb. “To Bogart,” “to galvanize,” and “to guillotine” are also epony - mous verbs. Brand names can also become verbs, such as “to Xerox” and “to Hoover.” Languages also generate new words, or reassign meanings of words from within by processes called broadening and narrowing. Linguistic broadening occurs when a word that once had a specific meaning begins to include a wider semantic range in its possible meanings. For instance, “holiday” was originally “halig dæg,” which translates as “holy day,” meaning a feast or celebration of the church. Some wags joke that English as a language makes no sense because, among other things, we can ship a car but not car a ship, but “ship” is a broadening of the original definition, to send by ship, to mean to transport in any way. Narrowing can make a word more specific rather than less so. In Anglo- Saxon England you could kill a really nice deer and have some tasty pork for dinner: “Deor” meant any animal rather than the specific white-tailed beast with horns we think of today when we use the word. “Starve” simply meant “to die” in Chaucer’s time; to die due to lack of food is a narrowing that has occurred since the fourteenth century. One form of narrowing is called linguistic degradation. If I were to say that my wife was spending an evening with her gossips, you might think I was a pretty obnoxious husband, and if she found out I said such a thing, she would probably be angry. But for the Puritans who used to live in my town outside of Boston, saying that you had spent time with your “gossips” just meant that you had visited some close friends or relatives: Your “gossips” were your “god-sibs” (good-kinsmen). If I called my wife a “hussy” you would, I hope, be
53 LECTURE SEVEN 5 4 ten thi tor mo ga fro wo an ow re v ar me ry ly Wh la u co ti m ti r o Bo wa “ e co sm wi “fe wo e g b th e wo s g n i w o r t t r a h g u o r h ep po T Al An Pr s A erte ve ca nd f re ld en ei ven ngu od e -b ou th hi s bas s nt lo ve aly as a ian m lds . rd n. rds s me r el e n re an oce l l nce en ly tion ot aced it erw era we wo or i t s o M o pr r” t inu rly g i nd n co repl ow l ica fi s i h d Hin z f So m p ag in words he “ani , mo o ch con ed ro an , er n oc a “ is e th t t ar ma se hi to s mplet ften gi ti , he “an a he wi r 19 l in wed so es, a r elativs an ge o go ly e a t i ace d a ess di p ly a story a nt .” to to re vi on nd ma with “ani n l not sema h c s nd re r a n n g lr l e 10, me r fore t s ng co ime pro cor “Moo to e h ang l d ea deg b the r ag tha scand ook as in u c i t la d ub d of for a ted,” is m e ed co back uld sp r mé” a l o describ th ng ua d ly ces mo st ly - e o, e then th by ,” l wr ig La h ch e ect, po n an gu a do deg lan e y ntin rad ntic sen con up ecialzto e a l m y r o t s i m se sm at n b e iso wh s r not u su iter b tin ar un of sitve “sme g n i w o r r o r appe ining ber alized me fo sing, gua e wor man L to ” ,” atio the rad a ues ge s, ge a x e el ch k n i h t late b ich atin fie der socialy llowing ) whic r go gain mic orro “chipmunk,” the oot e aning English s ge oc cu rs beco d discue ge ld f o atio wor o of n. a l, y ma od aran e l p m is go of d clot a a tod f ha s in . su ” nd fo pla n te st tha nd wed (“ m a l n E the sme po “ But co p the ing m whic n. Aro ew ny n ds or anima”), s their r mes ch , s ay. hin a u g n articula was ange e “od ce “alive,” ce inorty the specific ntac, h s i l g wh ic h mig are a no ach Bu s w o h s bad th ulation ho wo d n a tod se as ceptab l. a ma” i word term in as g n “P of names. w ro ug h t pro in own orign usehold rules forms ht In e g r” rds th very Japan ay, “anime.” in ajamas” m . En g other ms abo being be r, and s i t e A “Ste rly and for langu e e h Anglo-Sax th ey gro ost ces “co then t is t n o c , being brought nglo-Saxon urn ven come borr r a p sixte minerals, b terms. could a u g n a l to li sh ve interesting frequnt aly of th sim ut le polite u s e r “ ups. lored, not nch” p woo “pe as Japanese in r a l u c i t e un alive,” do , t c a . is opulat Japanese ages owe d d at reapp evn o enth in T ply p isco emonst a a the f thrif dergo p peo mo degr rfume g n i t l he ro times n ne nd dchuck” de What revio positve th e T becam s e g conver in ” ot d e t ce taken hus stly verth whic post-World urse. grad y l chan to ly wo thes centu ple lied i “jodhp such by o l o n h c then y n, o ha ve ade ss o b ea rl y “tidwr ns e ” sen an English v a e w usly be cont rd rate be a was English r e g a the ne a has travel, y d o ation, in phonology, e ge. d re sation, ca a into “ f Th ap evn come ry, as le stench” descr I gative neutra ar re a urs” a bo rr ow in g. eno clev the Ol d known inu , y g f o word can use itere” proba s t e i plied pe given, e si mp le n h e ver b “cobalt” a not the e a s d r o w h t o ne al words be in ugh rfectly as gro sixteen trade “h u q n o c were had War En gl is h in ways ipton. y t the rem from r. but d e l g n a olgism degr “historigraphus” l). the usy” ing (tho iso language. (time-writer). to bly ne di its o t w ( in am ste tha “ eq ui va le nt wo co lated; , moving II gative Smel” tha in a o r r o b both d s a h fourteenth English. early ugh and mbe the Native tha , t s e adtion and acep the tha nd th Pe op le ong nc egrad era n t rd ra was pe ri od , notais it b e w ) century word nge, then most de r e t t a c s “ was p is it “quartz” r t ref borrowed was conquer. person-f and w a lan , e d a r other period, hrase term, hearing can was table no simply In langu cartoons American sd r o w f o guaes are German renc he ar recently original sophi . also con lecture in just But posi wi ll longer centu ro b ta a to an th ei r a (his of ref ke dn and but - re - - a a ge - d - - a - - - and to coin new ones. So profligate is the language in its continued expan - sion that dictionaries cannot keep up: New words are added to spoken English more rapidly than they can be recorded. And although words do die out for various reasons, including technological change and the evolution of social customs, English at least, continued to increase the stock of new words, giving us new ideas and new ways to express them.
55 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. How can new words be created from existing words in a language? 2. What is the process called in which words enter one language from another?
Suggested Reading
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Crystal, David. Words, Words, Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. ———. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. N E V E S E R U T C E L
56 Lecture 8: The History of the English Language
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran’s (eds.) The Story of English.
Two lines of evidence con - verge to suggest that the ori - gins of human language lie in the very, very deep past. First, all humans, no matter how isolated they are or how primitive their society is, have language, and the languages of primitive soci - eties are not structurally any less developed or complex than those of more technologically advanced cultures. Second, casts of the insides of fossil skulls show the presence of Broca’s and Wernicke’s
areas (key brain structures devoted to lan - k c o t S guage) in very early hominid skulls that are l a t i g i up to two million years old. Most D researchers conclude that humans have had © language as long as there have been humans, and some even hypothesize that the development of language was the major evolutionary leap that sepa - rated humans from their closest ape relatives. But the sounds of language disappear as soon as they are uttered, so there are no records of all those millennia of talking until we reach the relatively recent past, in which writing was developed. And because writing was only developed once (possibly twice) and then spread throughout human culture, many cultures only had memory and oral tradition with which to preserve their languages. Even though oral tradition can preserve some information about old languages, it cannot preserve very much when the language changes suf - ficiently. Thus most of the information we would like to have about human language and history is lost due to want of writing. For a long time the histories of languages seemed to have been lost forev - er. But several remarkable developments in the late eighteenth and nine - teenth centuries allow ed researchers to reconstruct long-lost languages and to begin piecing together a history of human migration and conquest that had never been written down. It began with Sir William Jones in 1786. Jones (who had worked with Benjamin Franklin at one point to try to negotiate the differences between the colonies and England) was a judge in India and 57 became fascinated by the cultures he encountered there. Jones studied the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit and recognized that it must be in some way related to both Latin and Greek and also to Persian, Gothic, and the Celtic languages. His “The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus” is often seen as the beginning of comparative historical linguistics: The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and 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. Jones’s work implied that all of the various languages he had mentioned had once been connected, and he inspired subsequent researchers to attempt to deduce the relationships of the languages and the form of the language that must have been their common ancestor. Scholars called this proto-language Indo-European to indicate that the language family included most of the lan - guages of Europe (Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are exceptions) and those of India. The German scholar Franz Bopp was the first to work out some of the relationships between languages, demonstrating not just that Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit were related, but showing how they were related: Bopp focused on comparative grammar , analyzing the way the different lan - guages accomplished similar grammatical tasks. Rasmus Rask, a Danish philologist, recognized that there were regular sound shifts between languages, but it was left to a German scholar, Jakob Grimm (who with his brother Wilhelm is now remembered for his Fairy-Tale collection), to deduce that there were regular rules of sound change. Grimm’s Law , which we discussed in lecture five, explains the systematic ways that sounds changed between languages. For example, the evolution of Indo- European into various other language groups was characterized by certain specific sound changes: Words that begin in “p” in Italic languages such as Latin begin with “f” in Germanic languages. Grimm’s Law, and its subsequent elaborations by other scholars—most importantly the Danish linguist Karl Verner, who deduced Verner’s Law —gave scholars the tools to reconstruct the family tree of the Indo-European languages. The basic strategy was to figure out the ancestral sound-changes (such as that from “p” to “f” in Germanic languages) and then run them in reverse: If you had a word begin - ning in “f” in English, it was likely to have begun with a “p” in Proto-Indo- European. Through years and years of painstaking work, scholars were able to figure out how most European languages related to each other and what their ancestors must have been.
T The Indo-Europeans H G I They also were able to reconstruct some of the history of the otherwise dark E
E prehistoric period in Europe. The original Indo-Europeans had no words for
R things like monkeys, lions, bamboo, rice, parrots, palm trees, or camels. U T They did have words for snow, ice, and bitter cold, suggesting that they C E
L came originally from somewhere toward the north of Europe. The patterns of
58 Simplified Indo-European Family Tree
Proto-Indo-European
“Satem” “Centum” t u o r D . C Indo- Armenian Albanian Balto- Anatolian Hellenic Italic Celtic Germanic . D l e
Iranian Slavic a h c i M ©
languages—and recently discovered genetic characteristics of peoples—sug - gests that the Indo-Europeans lived originally in the north east of Europe, possibly in the foothills of the Ural mountains, around 3500 to 2500 BCE. From their language, scholars have deduced that they lived in or near forests of beech, oak, pine, and birch trees, encountered bears, wolves, and deer, raised pigs, goats, and sheep, and searched the forest for honey from bees. They mostly used stone tools (the word “kamy,” which means “stone” in Indo- European, evolved into Modern English “hammer”), but they cultivated land and raised cattle in addition to hunting. They had kings, and they believed in the existence of their own souls and of various supernatural beings or gods. Over the next millennia, these Indo-Europeans spread throughout Europe, settling in different areas. Over time, their languages changed and diversified into those we have today. Scholars infer that the Indo-European migration throughout Europe occurred as a process of branching and splitting. The Indo-European family could be broken into two large groups, the “Satem” languages and the “Centum” lan - guages. This terminology is based on the words for “one hundred” in the vari - ous languages and indicates a very early consonant shift. These two large groups probably indicate an original divide of the Indo-Europeans in two large groups. The Satem group includes the Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, and Balto-Slavic families. The Centum group includes the Tocharian, Anatolian, Hellenic (Greek), Italic (Latin), Celtic, and Germanic languages families. The exact relationships between the language families is somewhat disputed, but because we are examining English in this course, we can quickly move to the Germanic branch of the Centum family, the branch and family to which English belongs. Germanic The Germanic family tree itself is divided into three branches, based on the location in Europe in which the speakers of those languages had settled and lived for long periods of time (so that their languages had time to split from their common Germanic ancestor into separate languages). Thus we have the East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic branches. Only one language survives from the East Germanic family, and that only in a very few texts. Gothic was the language spoken by the Goths, and it is preserved in a few translations made by the missionary Ulfilas in the fourth century (we have a few place names and proper names from Burgundian and Vandalic, but not enough material to reconstruct the languages).
59 Germanic Family Tree
Germanic
West No rth East
High Low Old Norse Gothic
Old High German West Norse East Norse t
Modern German Icelandic Norwegian Danish Swedish u o r D . C . D l e a h c [See West Low Germanic Family Tree on the next page] i M ©
Other Germanic speakers settled in the very north of Europe, in Denmark and Scandinavia. Their language was Old Norse , but this language also began to change and diversify, splitting into East Norse and West Norse. East Norse eventually evolved into Swedish and Danish, and West Norse became Norwegian and Icelandic. Old Icelandic is particularly important because so many of our most important medieval texts are preserved in this language. Old Norse is also significant because it would later influence the development of English. But English itself belongs to the West Germanic group, which is divided into two branches, High and Low. High German was spoken in the mountains and uplands of Germany and, after Martin Luther translated the Bible into this language, became the standard literary language of Germany. The Low German languages include Old Saxon (which has evolved into modern Low German or Plattdeutsch), Old Low Franconian (which became Dutch and Flemish), Old Frisian (which became Frisian, still spoken in a few places in the Netherlands), and Old English. Old English Old English evolved on the continent, probably in what is today northern Germany or southern Denmark. In the early fifth century, after the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain, three tribes of continental Germans
TIMELINE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
OLD MIIDDLE
T ENGLISH Scandinavian Influence ENGLIISH H G I 1066 E
E 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 R U T Norman Loss of C
E Conquest Normandy L
60 [Continued from the Germanic Family Tree on Germanic Family Tree the previous page] West Low Germanic
Old Dutch
Modern Dutch Flemish Afrikaans
Old Saxon Old Frisian Old English t u o Modern Low German Modern Frisian Middle English r D . C . D l e a h c Modern English i M ©
migrated to England. They were called the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. The Angles settled the north of England, the Saxons settled the south, and the Jutes settled in Kent, to the east. Each of the three tribes spoke Old English, but of a different dialect. For several centuries, Old English (also called Anglo- Saxon) was the language of England. It was influenced by Latin, particularly in the adoption of words having to do with the Church, and by Celtic (surprisingly little, however), but it was essentially a West Germanic language. Then, beginning at the very end of the eighth century, England suffered through more than a century’s worth of invasions by the Vikings, who came from Denmark and Scandinavia and who spoke a North Germanic language. At first the Vikings were content with ravaging and pillaging, but soon they began to colonize England, settling throughout the north and east of the country. Whole sections of England were under Viking rule even after King Alfred withstood the harshest Viking attacks—an area of the east and north of England was the Danelaw. During this time Old Norse strongly influenced Old English. Many, many words were borrowed, not only nouns and verbs, which were borrowed in great numbers, but also such fundamental building blocks as pronouns and such language basics as pronunciation. The Norman Conquest and Middle English But even the massive influence of Old Norse pales before the cataclysm of 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded England from Normandy and made Norman French the language of the aristocracy and the law courts for
MIIDDLE Great MODERN ENGLISH Vowel ENGLISH ENGLISH Shift ENGLISH t u o
1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000 r D . C . D l e a h c i M © 61 LECTURE EIGHT 6 2 h to th sli fi ti m th ca d b in la M fo p ti Th ti a The co Ga En En It in o ch h e to En g h e sti r la in Wi m ul Th Th No Fo r o o cu ist om ot ro fe rd ad s, ua un no cr n g n i st aj n r od or e r ha g l ti ns ti n nt ange e b o l m e g g g g w . g g h nu er htl at ory on, lary us e r iam or em bu r ct ge dre rmou wa e ugho e sp la li la uag ine uag g (l W ue i ern d b e s s. Grea ai G na sev sh to e h in ed lo ig e xte y nci n n se t o t u to oken n s rea han e th ave rs But en cha d d d f w ve n un ba ht co d: tro this a phe mo the r ntal e’s e was par s , in E and cal e e wo ta ce atio ep Mid rn dvan holesa th ut s lost nig of t a ntio mbin ra til l ng t I o of n the l sto nflect nge st in al its e nd, V a la it al la f V avls rd g ate E stan voca E o E l th wel it n ch dle lish o this fluen th wor pr ngu ow t the se ce centu ced f ur uro widely contr ev nglish r s he ry wel liter ced e finaly com la egio sp of th d e d. ed like ang onu ope of in ntu le twe , dar ngu el io o E e ds (a pe. bula cou in ms age ed la Gr ne nea nt wh Eng f t in ary ce nglish, the Sh ns p with he ma b hig ol bined to lthou ngu nal ry. ries, Shi e nciat English , al dizat rint en ntie w eyo b co age t was ich rt, dif sp th . he b since o ift rly o or ry. t a in sac n lish f he lang sen Peo ecam f la mp orm f ft at flav t ag in ob oke the row an o nd Fre er sea Norma gh io th Mid h lingustc ng is de Knigh a io Aditon g, of and cur to a e twelfh e bu ilty l ar n en te ca d e cent n ors, ple s, res uag esn ven uage velopm n the ed, s Eng then nch Fre ve th Englad En of is s able sprea nce dle peo e end t of tiang, me o tha and e a it but ry Mod tha the Chauce ed: contiu n glish t of e ury, nd nch ndy hun . with English but amo cr lish chan on E , ple s, s t t It now d back Mid tialy centu to he al t o eation n we it he d ifern he time of langu of Over wa f slowy of glish ern ter-g the Old and gram and h lang h the ng nt Eng le vo cou ve ado face ged word ove comer ad ist di A the now s co le arne ed in r, the w ry of ry. n Eng for entir the orical stil Eng gram N rse, ather age the nveyd the lish to e glo-Saxn uage pting, the English. persi also t Langl of r mar not d Eng radic to l orman ls of lan chang s angue Stil, a English d ifern use. a regula dict nobilty, strong lish wer e lish shifte sp dev cour cen Fr the th but F tha chang gua mar colnize er b ce, ’s sted lish was evnts—co g rench rough ench eak blen egun iona ram we . e nd, Th l ten tury stage, ly ed earth mo ther se Not Con . t lopmen we the r d m and ly e d is n as no u of Old sh e dency ding, ries, inha uch f and and st ia ot of o form se rom th and out influe e to befor to was know on o quest f rise ould lects toda . t of an the tical Engla f adopte he a h lite ethls. tha com bor a En ly su ave bitans. les devlo the the and primtve s mong the ts English and their lonizat the the o langue e. nced wer to y: glish, ch vast t of not row f sp today str of more sem mun evn poet b world the Its Th bo gram imp the Old ma Old be rea en d). b d uctre mas Midle minze egin ped. m the expansio row er from gr h by ing Fr icate ion, Un of ortan, Around gnitude) tualy d Aroun spre or undres nobilty s who than English and English , amr society, no ench throug Fren course: up to e making ited has reshap of com Mid fre Englad’s o France words tical more ad per Eng with have the f wro a Englad spre d ely, the ch, Staes, be a dle was th of genra 150, of nd be 120, the clas ha wer lish th te mean a e only unica of the out ed it ad ed nd par led lan n gan at fr d the Sir th o the the om ir u r by - e - - . - - - - FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What are the two major branches of Indo-European? 2. What are English’s closest relatives on the West branch of the Germanic language family?
Suggested Reading
McCrum, Robert, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran, eds. The Story of English. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. Crystal, David, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
63 Lecture 9 From Germanic to Old English
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable’s (eds.) A History of the English Language, chapters 1–2.
In the previous lecture we were able to place English in its context in the Indo-European family tree of languages: English is one of the Low Germanic languages of the West Germanic branch of the great Germanic language family. It is thus most closely related to the living languages of Frisian and Low German (Plattsdeutsch) and then Dutch, Flemish, and Afrikaans. Its nearest relatives on the High German branch of the West Germanic family are Modern German and Yiddish. More distant relations are the Scandinavian languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic. The more recent ancestors of these modern Germanic languages are rela - tively well known. Old English, Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German all are recorded in written texts dating from the Middle Ages, so we have a fairly good idea of how people were speaking in the various Germanic branches somewhat less than fifteen hundred years ago. The earli - est Old English dates from approximately 700. Before that time, we must rely on Latin chronicles and the techniques of the comparative method, vergle - ichende Philologie, because writing had not reached the Germans in the long period between the time that Germanic split from the main Indo-European tree and their contact with the Latin-speaking world. Thus only the recon - structions of comparative philology can give us any idea of the language of the Germanic peoples up until about the fourth century. Even then, the West and North branches of the Germanic family have no significant texts for sev - eral more hundred years. Gothic We are very fortunate, however, in having a small corpus of earlier texts in a Germanic language, although it is not in our own West Germanic branch. The Goths were a people who lived in the eastern part of Germanic Europe. In the fourth century a Christian missionary, Ulfilas (who was half Goth himself), translated the Gospels and a few other parts of the New Testament into Gothic. The vast majority of all remaining Gothic is preserved in the Codex Argenteus (the “Silver Bible”) held in Uppsala, Sweden, and the Codex Ambrosianus in Milan. There are also a few scattered runic inscriptions and names and words in various manuscripts. A fragment of the Gothic transla -
E tion of the Gospel of Luke was found in Egypt in 1907, but this was destroyed N I
N in 1945. We also possess some names (personal names and place names)
E from Burgundian and Vandalic, languages closely related to Gothic and part R
U of the East Germanic family, but we do not have enough material to even T
C attempt reconstruction of these lost languages. E L
64 Gothic was thought to have died out in the very early Middle Ages, but in the sixteenth century Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the ambassador from the Habsburg Empire to Ottoman Empire in Istanbul was curious about the lan - guage of two speakers from the Crimea and took down some of their words. These turned out to be in a form of Gothic, indicating that an evolved version of the language was still being spoken in the Crimea a thousand years after it had been assumed to have become extinct. A glance at the Germanic language family tree will show that Gothic is not a direct ancestor of English, as it is a member of the East Germanic branch of the family. However, because our written Gothic is several centuries earlier than the written records of other branches of the Germanic (and because it is really all that we have), scholars assume that Gothic is closer to the common Germanic ancestor language than any of the other ancient and modern lan - guages. Here is The Lord’s Prayer in Gothic to give you an idea of the lan - guage. Note that Gothic used its own alphabet, but for the purposes of this course I have used Roman characters with the exception of the Anglo-Saxon letters † (thorn) and ∂ (eth). Both of these letters are used to transcribe the “th” sounds (both the voiced “th” in “feather” and the voiceless “th” in “the - ater”); they are based on Germanic runes and were used regularly in Anglo- Saxon manuscripts. The Lord’s Prayer (Gothic) Atta unsar, †u in himinam, weihnai namo †ein, Qimai †iudinassus †eins, Wair†ai wilja †eins, swe in himina jah ana air†ai. Hlaif unsarana †ana sinteinan gif uns himma daga, Jah aflet uns †atei skulans sijáima, swaswe jah weis afletam †aim skulam unsaraim, Jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai, ak lausei uns af †amma ubilin; [unte †eina ist †iudangardi jah mahts jah wul†us in aiwins.] Amen. ~From Bright’s Grammar of the Gothic Language You will probably find that most of the above appears very foreign, and it is doubtful that most Modern English speakers would, upon seeing the pas - sage, believe that they could make out more than a word or two of the Gothic. But let us examine the first two lines more closely. “Atta” is “father” and the source of the name “Attila” (“Little Father”) who, although a Hun, was given this name by Goths who served in his army. “Unsar” is “our,” “†u” is “thou,” and “in himinam” is “in heaven.” “Namo †ein” is “thine name.” “Weihnai” is indeed unfamiliar, but putting the two lines together we note a relatively robust correspondence with Modern English:
65 LECTURE NINE 6 6 s u o d a n e d a o t u g t En t m En En h t w h ch a a ve f l b p p ca ( L syn w G t t cu co y he he ig he ai e r e h : e e r r G N In ( s p i h b a a n s u r o i a e o I ke ra a o tw h a n r se l n je d d d t se t e j e r i t e j , s e g a ot t o g ther g g rds, t h d r b se, m [ w [ A no f theic wi ti nge nect ve as a ho Fa k m l l l ac th ave ct t c t c man o . we stron repl ish ish ish c i h o eihn ng Old t onl I ta th l G e u t e d m s i t , si u s a e v i e v i rb O l e s t, th p f in y] we ven n o a h ). v tha b a n d , s oth e eop ar i u ld a a y a a n s. er ons Ger h c erb r de ut k cluding ai iscu but y on n o t a s s r e E ns in the na re lso Old o s l g ced p o lang l s no do t o ] ver n En pa nglish, i Go n ast c n a ar, n i m libe c m , with e ver f th a e d le s a o w t t ou ) me amo n a we ma ens wor uns y es le an s in t ha verb uch ra x e lan glish , a h t e d e h En bs, thic it uag †u e t r, ap s t a bs ra us c e j b u s e ak: les ens d vocab b en out nic k a e w d b i h Go m with thine t a r a p e s , r e n i m r e s r d gua t glish †e “r sing t e tely i (no hou , da visb whic s n of wea h c u s ( ore es Goth d t e s or ing, ver or ear in, in aly c e d thic s t i ver “ lang n i d n e also for hi walk, tive t of ge, its de . mina o mo num ular wh th left s mina bs ular , t Like in e j d a in k e n o re bs le ma an e n i l Mo r lin the r, at i co t g an c ua t c e r i d ver m e h da e i tai indcate s a t while f h a h ch ram a in h or d, out t ke ) s g ( l tive ha ber y ea and nt use wa he a d m, r c e j d a g M e ges, se v i t c d m l ns f o traing Mo e sent bs, ve ern tha , mor “ d ain when indrect au a odern d ven , e h t a y b oment . lked,” ru co . the way a e h t v i t c e j d in th is vowel I dern no inflecto e j b o ind a Old Mod xilar t r a p n ar ng,” and njugate English anciet e m d d a e v i t e langu some for ” plura . nce, c i h t o G minatve gra cha o m icatve, any is o A ” , a “ d an soun . English , t c English bvious). ), ern ual “type ies f Ger g n i the “bu subject, the m o r ob r t s e l c e d e m in t s nges a l, age. a lytic w r i d n i “ mar nd t i way je g n o , s i h t like form d English y, the de r t s man, Go a s gre f l e s ords tend a tha sam a , cts a m f nd to impera f f u s , d n b or Mode typ n o i s n k i t c e thic in langu ought acustive Th at ver also of “cou has ” e j d a (hu g n i out s a h i y n a e modern, in can first, acus n r o n i tha ed,” tens Goth x i nd ncy m us the dicate a b b o pron sband h e h t o has d l O . s t a e f rn ajority h t “ s most or l o e v i t c has as d st ages o t tive ,” objects Go alow t c e j r th are ” second, “fish, ab th e m e R em En ic ) ” t a evn n i d n e “ a s a at e r u or give, at h s i l g n E comple tive s r thic ove nd l a n g i many has ly logica uns, a glish d h t ( a t s cognate ar , and o is like nd numb of is n o n i ual s u lost gen f fishe “would” e s e fo loke is r e b m g chan s d n Old f o sentc of shar ve r f a g subjn often e h t b to s t i r d M o t and fo ave.” wife, t n o re an strong itve, tend ut ted the e h t no i s n e l c e pr rbs ob rela er e h t ode d” rm, deciphr tains e t a c i d n i En n o a m m a r g ed ged epositn) d n n I SO ject, t a h t with o with t a ot ). a s r e G in e r much h ency at e p o r u E - o d glish. f tionshp lovers, rn ctive l Gothic s t i used ubjnctive and with ird . t i shift V Gothic for Modern to ve ad some r a clo English s n u o n genitv c i n a m Old n w o (subject, a e B to person e rbs indcate dative evry to sely, Old sufix. l a c i t mods, o i t a l e r les Both s i for to bits gn o r t s make es u a c “-ed” two English , also ha (wh h t of also S ht i w and exa n a na l VO. e ve o a c dif na co d s, a fo m for f ich n to o) Old d r the ,e s n - ct - e - rm en - . - - and it does so by the means of a suffix, or inflection. Gothic also has weak adjectives , which do have “the” or “a” or “this” or “that” in front of them. In these cases, the ending on the adjective was considered superfluous, since all the information about number, gender, and case was coming from the determiner. But because the grammatical case of the adjective always agrees with that of the noun that the adjective is modifying, the inflection of the adjective (and the determiner, for that matter) was redundant information from the point of view of a person listening to a language: The grammatical function of the modified noun is still obvious, so eventually the “strong” declension of the adjective withers away in Modern English. In general, Gothic was more irregular, with more exceptions, more synthetic (using more inflections), and more liable to use sound changes within a word rather than suffixes to indicate important information. Vocabulary Some Gothic words have come down to Modern English relatively unchanged (the Gothic nominative case ending was “s,” so to find the closest comparison to a Modern English word, simply mentally delete the “s” from the Gothic words): Dags (day), hlaifs (loaf), akrs (field, acre), hunds (dog, hound), fisks (fish), stains (stone), láifs (leaf), gras (grass), daúr (door), skip (ship), tagl (hair, but survives as “tail”), managei (many), bro†ar (brother), frijonds (friend), beidan (to wait, to bide), hilpan (to help), and letan (to let). Gothic words have undergone several consonant and vowel shifts in coming into English. It is important to reemphasize that Gothic is not the direct ancestor of Old English. Rather, both languages have a common ancestor in Germanic; they are cousins rather than mother and daughter. Thus we do not usually apply a sound-shift to a Gothic word to come up immediately with the English word; instead we must work back from Gothic to Proto-Germanic and then down the West Germanic branch to English. Nevertheless, knowledge of Gothic is vitally important for language history because although the Goths did not migrate through Europe to Western Germany and then eventually invade England, people related to them did. English History and Old English The British Isles were originally settled by Celts, people who spoke lan - guages that were part of the great Celtic branch of the Indo-European family tree. Celtic languages were once dominant in Europe, and the earliest peo - ples who crossed the English channel spoke related languages. Within the boundaries of what is now the main part of England, the ancestors of the Celtic languages (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton) were spoken. The ancestors of Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Manx were spoken in more peripheral areas. But in 55 BCE, Julius Caesar invaded Britain and made it part of the Roman Empire. Latin became the language of the military and the aristocracy in Roman Britain, where it dominated for approximately four hundred years. For a long time historians argued that Latin was spoken throughout Britain and that, had the Anglo-Saxon invasions not occurred, the English would still be speaking a Latinate tongue. More recently, other scholars have argued that while Latin may have been spoken in the towns, Celtic languages persisted in the countryside. The question has not yet been resolved.
67 Major problems in Rome, however, brought about the withdrawal of the Roman legions in the late fourth century. The remaining Romano-British were sorely oppressed by the Celtic-speaking peoples whom they had for so long dominated. The story goes (given to us by the greatest of all early medieval historians, the Venerable Bede) that the Romano-British sent across the sea to tribes living in the part of Europe that is now north-western Germany and southern Denmark. These tribes were “invited” to come to England and pro - tect the Romano-British from the Celts. Whether it was an invitation or an invasion, around 449 Germanic tribes began migrating to England and rapidly took over the island. According to Bede, and to tradition, there were three tribes, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. The Jutes settled in Kent (the east of England) and on the Isle of Wight. The Angles settled the northeast of England, and the Saxons in the center and west. There are definitely dialect variations in Old English that basically correspond to those boundaries, so it is likely there is some truth to this story, at least to the point of different tribes with different language vari - ants settling in specific areas. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes spoke a form of Old English, and this lan - guage rapidly replaced whatever language the Romano-British had spoken, Latin or Celtic. Although England was divided into many petty kingdoms, the people seem to have been able to communicate with each other without diffi - culty. However, we know very, very little of either the history or the culture of E N I N C L L , E s k R o o B U d T e d r C o c e E R L ©
68 England in the period between the migrations from Europe and the end of the sixth century. But that changed in 597, when Pope Gregory the Great sent the missionary Augustine of Canterbury to England. Augustine was able to convert King Ethelberht of Kent and soon set up a Roman Catholic see in Canterbury (Kent – wara – byrig : the town of the dwellers in Kent). England underwent a remarkably bloodless conversion over the next sev - enty years: There are no records of priests being martyred or pagans being killed, possibly because Pope Gregory had thought to tell Augustine not to destroy the pagan temples, but to enter into them and replace the idols with the Christian cross, therefore allowing people to maintain many of their traditional customs in their traditional places. There is some dispute as to whether England and Ireland would follow Roman church customs or Irish church customs (which were more similar to those of the church in Greece), but by the last third of the seventh century, all of England is Christian and unified under Roman practice. With Christianity came both Latin and writing, and it is from the Christian era in Anglo-Saxon England that our first written records of language come. Here is The Lord’s Prayer in Old English, from the West Saxon Gospels.
The Lord’s Prayer (Old English) Fæder ure †u †e eart on heofonum; Si †in nama gehalgod to becume †in rice gewur†e ∂in willa on eor∂an swa swa on heofonum. Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfa∂ urum gyltendum and ne gelæd †u us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele so†lice. ~Corpus Christi College MS 14; from Roy Liuzza’s edition of the West Saxon Gospels As we did with the Gothic Lord’s Prayer , let us examine the first few lines in detail.
Fæder ure †u †e eart on heofonum father our thou [who] are in the heavens
Si †in nama gehalgod [may] thine name holy-ed
“Fæder” is recognizable as “father,” and “ure” is close enough to “our” for us to be able to guess that the two are related. “ˇu” means “thou,” “†e” is a rela - tive particle which can be translated as “who.” “Eart” is “art” and “on heofonum” means “in the heavens.”
69 LECTURE NINE 7 0 d kn m l m G C b p cu w d sh yo g “ “ b ve r b “ st M m ( ve l t ( it a ha e fo str ”g ge he Ol L If Ol Ol i e a u ) e i “Si” tl h o d er te ng em a o o a g ike o sed o u r r e r ced e r o e ha we urch rds ofnum, n n b d r b n d d d A F F w b m S o ti ul in w uld , no ma n n r exam ua w ag cul s ern s, æder i e n of at in eihn lgod t bi a wi i Eng Eng Eng a vel i s ta i no lo Mod † g Ol thi il s s t wer r, y c bl flu h ou t” in ges i new ni ed l th th . a n b G st af omp a er i cha u a b d you es ar s with n Eng rly Lat e ai c ,” com enc hesita nd e ns lish lish lish nam oth t u whic e ple, Goth e fr for ect to er Eng b le re ” our lang of a n if (like lang ar, but om ab ecau nge op co er a ble r whic amo ar ctur n wea ic. lish , , we m p † d fewr es lso the thu n u , d wor like be le t ick †u e mpo E en lish we ame ge he ic uag n tion wh you Mo o uag No d to † nglish by an th e th fr d ame se to k) s cause †e f tha ha e ir i existng due to t n ds up elt om e th 1 vo e ich Got o wil no e t beg can in, der is und e lgod egu oth d se en e art hi exc t th on n e be “ first indcate bo o wel ecln . y” b with a te a wh is mina you ose Old wou . to ding n th hic, ver Old or se ad er ins ctua ly on a s: la r fe be . ble so the it o so slowy ose nd English. o . . owin a ptions two r sh ha opt w th owed lan Th b is rs . . heofnum; a lexicon und m, its English sion ld are in pa me stil eithr English, sed co th . . ly er is ift Mode “to Latin s ”“ge native West e . . guae of b e Go rticula Lat lines cha mon tenur . g . . . a ad core a th Ge e of i has . . . . in n be” e n e Pr of a later to at . . . two-p . thic, prefix, lo norm de in voling nd a nges [the] the pa . . . “ˇin” . “yes”) rman rn words ot-G ad st in Ger ditona its . . . . change in e b “ wor vocabu s but strong sponde agin . . . lat . ). modifyng German, an in al je in word itan of . to . . . evolut but . Got r ous art manic, . . . . Bu ules. he ctives, . ic ds in is i cestor. Mod the , givn . . . . erman n whic indcate pe . , evn toward . . . . we (the ” a hic, overa comp . t shift), “thine” n t . . . . s e range like he vens riods d l verbs . “ Old lary, umbe nces . . . . it Bri io bat.” set ern . ha Old . . . . t her can he . n Ol way subjn . . . . is so Ol ti us be ic we . ve it . . . . ound English ne At l o sh of s making . much d English. . . . . much of tha Eng “i” Old d the f from r or throu an Old fore of i posibly . . ch . . . . “hal n Mo w u E its th are o sound . . Eng Moder Isl . . . . Old nderg d in r n Got w t English arcte ...... e word in pa cti lish gli dern English o te es . . ear go . . . . En hic “nam” ar la “himna” Celtic g ghou of awre f ...... closer lish nse: ve st sh, Eng hic, d,” was Mo Go Old Go Old Mo Mo ngua te the glish as h liest ivng also whic one s; n shift ten ndec m se desc the thic thic and dern very dern dern istc and Eng t an lish, ther bu En En wor bor Mod od; p or is the se. also stage (thoug oised is sound-hift to ha in vowel t e: glish glish esntialy “holy-ed.” “na the d lish rowin com Mode i also e o d somewhat readily s Eng Modern English English as y d ndat, Englad; ern to irectly praye. Many f s this sem held made ha the n the me.” more the wil pronuce to h e lish. note th English d it of g. rn form it into Germ d go e had wea in ireg “eo” from be the pro was ouble had For English, gram such Eng like You to com th pla we dis th - has k m b verb a in ula ha an a e the at t “to lish or y - lso - - ve s ic r n e through several very significant contact periods in which foreign language influences would radically change the language. We will discuss this contact in the next chapter, but at this stage I think it is important to read and hear Old English and gain some subconscious understanding of its sound system and possibly its grammar. I have therefore concluded the chapter with some examples of Old English followed by Modern English translations. Try to read through (or listen to) the Old English without looking at the Modern English translation; you may surprise yourself as to how much you understand.
†æs ymb .iiii. niht Ɔelred Cyning & ælfred his brò†ur †år micle fierd tò Readingum gelåddon & wi† †one here gefuhton. & †år wæs micel wæl geslægen on gehwæ†re hond, & Ɔelwulf Aldormon wear† ofslægen, & †à Deniscan àhton wælstòwe gewald. & †æs ymb .iiii. niht gefeaht Ɔelred Cyning & Ælfred his brò†ur wi† alne †one here on Æscesdùne, & hìe wårun on twåm gefylcum: on ò†rum wæs Bachsecg & Halfdene †à hå†nan cyningas, & on ò†rum wåron †à eorlas. & †à gefeaht sè cyning æ†elred wi† †àra cyninga getruman, & †år wear† sè cyning Bagsecg ofslægen. From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 871: Then four nights afterward King Athelred and Alfred his brother led a great army there into Reading and fought against the army [of the Danes]. And there was great slaughter on either hand, and Athelwulf the Ealdorman was slain, and the Danes had control over the place of slaughter. And after four nights King Athelred and Alfred his brother fought against the entire army at Ashdown, and they were in two groups: in the one was Bagsecg and Halfdane, the heathen kings, and in the other were the [Danish] earls. And then King Athelred fought against the troop of the kings, and there was King Bagsecg slain.
†à hìe †à fela wucena såton on twà healfe †åre, & sè cyng wæs west on Defnum wi† †one sciphere, †à wåron hìe mid metelìeste gewågde, & hæfdon miclne dål †àra horsa freten. & †à ò†re wåron hungre àcwolen. †à èodon hìe ùt tò †åm monnum †e on èasthealfe †åre wìcodon, & him wi† gefuhton, & †à Crìstnan hæfdon sige. From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 893: When they had sat on both sides of that [of the river] for many weeks, and the king was in the west in Devon [fighting] against the pirate- army, they suffered lack of food and had eaten the greater portion of their horses, and the others were perishing with hunger. Then they went out to the men who were camped on the east side, and fought against them, and the Christians had the victory.
71 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. Why is Gothic’s position in the East branch of the Germanic language fam - ily significant? 2. How did the Old English language arrive in England?
Suggested Reading
Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Crystal, David, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jesperson, Otto. Chapters 1–2. Growth and Structure of the English Language. New York: Free Press, 1968. E N I N E R U T C E L
72 Lecture 10: Borrowing and Influence: Romans, Celts, Danes (Latin, Celtic, Scandinavian)
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable’s (eds.) A History of the English Language, chapter 3.
All languages borrow words from other languages, but English has been especially prolific in its adoption of new words from outside sources. Even at the very beginning, when the Anglo-Saxons were an obscure group of conti - nental “barbarians” at the fringes of the Roman Empire, a few Latin words managed to work their way into Old English. We recognize these particular words because they underwent the same sound-shifts as did native words. We surmise that the Anglo-Saxons took names from the Romans for things that they did not have in their own culture, in particular items of trade. Thus we find “win” (“wine,” from Latin “vinus”; this word was borrowed again later, which is why “wine,” which is consonant-shifted, comes from a “vineyard,” which is not), “ceap” (“bargain,” the origin of our Modern English “cheap”; Old English “c” before front vowels is pronounced “ch”), “linen,” “cires” (cherry), “popig” (poppy; Old English “g” before and after front vowels is pronounced “y”), “ cytel” (kettle), “pyle” (which becomes pillow), “gimm” (gem), “butere” (but - ter), “cealc” (chalk), and “copper.” The Anglo-Saxons also borrowed words for war, including “camp” (battle, later evolving to place of battle and then our modern meaning), “weall” (wall, fortification), “pytt” (pit), “stræt” (street), and “segn” (banner, later sign). A few of the remaining words that are most interesting are “draca” (dragon; the native Old English word was “wyrm” ), “cirice” (church), “bisceop” (bishop), and even “Sæternesdæg” (Saturn’s day, i.e., Saturday). From these words we can even reconstruct some of the culture of the Anglo-Saxon tribes on the conti - nent: They traded with the Romans, fought with the Romans, and were influ - enced by some Roman customs and institutions. Celtic When the Anglo-Saxons finally arrived in England through invasion or invita - tion, they met a Romano-British population that, although it had been influ - enced by Latin for four centuries, still had deep Celtic roots. Yet Celtic lan - guages had surprisingly little influence on Old English. Scholars used to think that Celtic languages might be so fundamentally different in phonology that words could not easily be adopted from them, but that conclusion is now most - ly taken as being too speculative. Recent work by archaeologists and DNA- researchers suggests another, less wholesome possibility: Although the Anglo- Saxons did not practice widespread extermination of the native population, it is possible that they did create a social structure in which Anglo-Saxons did most of the marrying and producing of children, and native Celtic males were kept on the outskirts of society, many as slaves. Another possibility is that the
73 LECTURE TEN 7 4 hid nam pas La wi be wo Rom hav Be ve kin in key alm En na wh se La Old ver Ro m (o te r ca spe na m na m in Eng en th se “h Mawr,” na ic “W in Rom we A I T A C n ve es r i desp h d rt nt me a Engla l ti i n o m e m ti ca gla ig gd inch r ich ng go fe b th ” e ec k os s e ds n ci ms h ts ugh lt n l nt E Latin ). ed es es the s es, co s i an no ing an an an im Augusti ic w na us fi om e an c a od d ng nd. lin e: t ed Ag fr to t sh n h “C c i th n mplet id ra s est re d. w. s o l sel imme Celtic beg wh t en di c e am ir om ad po l an Cath hat l hu place l nd conta a , -B om es y at ow eno ish re omb orign en nslate w ad. es to r ain w no Lati h T T Sussex, ter et Pos sib f ich gua h baske es ndr hi eathe T en r presenta or he h ing w C r,” ter in have iti arp ), ng C t hi th is ne le rmous ms in oli ” dia e Th ds) hri n sh simp te re d elts l s) wor and w s ct me th ed s ges En re y at “ a aly lite into fr om th i c d w Ex E n er sti ar t er to i e tely of em nte rpre tati on inh abit ants in a for n, t), s nglish. as Chu e it and cre ly glish th into ans a “- wi c ds e ound ” lso barn ans na of to ly Cante “du o th wer wa fro is tr ib es e Germanic in to in Old ve p eac h “cr b a influence tion wer f th the La ti n began a me e cr ty fr t Old it dopte en rch bor w he m entr ted n O n,” s “ ry “ e ag om ra ” e great had os An g Exetr,” o ew hic ), landscpe becau ld converted and d English th e d lang Anglo-Sax Cædmon L f ” of ther h mo rbu rowed Chr “dark was exp la bu t Eng we re at lingustc th eno of is igh the by English agr com lo the into been in to is la ng ua st ry a “r d taking ha uage vario -S ax on ist hil” by w than th re lish ugh se icu pr o ock” pe cou an bu way doe s send int influ in nat ion a situation d ia n st i pound colr e English: and later oprt Celtic. the y fr rmane t lture o n he bee n is , Old quick 59 gr ea enormously ll us om sins whic of . o Latin cre from was sug in ential ge Old p (and are li vi ng turns history Welsh, f 7, fit missionar s could Anglo-Sax eriod, ed,” “Glo Ce lt ic , p the the from io English. s Celtic ating s tel ls te st ha d and vi a la wit h and there rad ical ly n not English. to nt to a T th est R ce spea is thu u” Th pa Ro he m o singing. on are on herdsman. om at Ce lt ic conver featur lear in fl ue nc e f not bo rr ow ed Welsh) the land par spe idd particularly also pr n so as in sed at a s Celtic man as “Wo is a ames Old th e (their t ans. ecisly am kers hat th variety re me ies “Glo n t le impo wo sin sto akers is “cu do scape of e es th dep lete d show (t he “Bin” ns at co nt in en t, ”r ong of Eng t “Bar Church, throu uld Latiny g. to n of rsian” ry Cædmon After , e the to “p nam ucestr” to success ame mea in times o rtant th “as” wh He n the the of o or t” f Christianity, La ti n “- ch es te r” h lish of One b in thes. e of ames: “ f th tru th. ” in W ape orwin gh o vent es, after Cædmon, La ti n seventh is tha ns Pope (whic (to fell Old e n continent “Craig (me his tori cal o cultural an d late g eolg in a was the by rcest Ce la this enra evening, wo rd s “d lmost as curse). an d asleep, n ar ndsca was the ther the left English anig One the r They on ep ltic pla gue “m ou nt ” lat Grego ry so e mi do gs, tongue not ,” ism a in a a rea the l er. century, Ol d word urce r,” last grated lso b mixed). presence whose l poe (rathe hils: vale of fr om and efor fe w the pe and mat eri va ri ou s wa to particuly di d Celtic. “Win” lm and people feast onkey, the means En gl is h (newly or heathe transled try tic. s s, and for first an d began mo re not y.” they of their the yn“Br th e at eco r but to rea very in to cons als The than “bin” the place an It least in tha Rivers ar pl ac e- pl ac e- a Great con i nom ching were n n the La ti n d tha t ive to few - - - dream an angel came to him. “Cædmon, sing for me,” the angel said. “I can - not,” said Cædmon, explaining that this is why he had left the feast. “Nevertheless, you must sing,” said the angel, instructing Cædmon to sing about the creation. Cædmon then awoke with the power to be told a story that was translated from Latin and to produce it in Old English verse. His poem, “Cædmon’s Hymn,” is preserved in the manuscript of the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, but there is some controversy as to whether we have the original Old English composition: Bede wrote down the poem in Latin, translating the original; at some point an Old English ver - sion was added to the manuscript. Here is the poem as we have it:
Nu sculon herian heofon rices weard meotodes meahte ond his mod ge†anc weorc wuldorfæder swa he wundra gehwæs ece dryhten or astealde he ærest scop ielda bearnum heofon to hrofe halig scyppend †a middangeard monncynnes weard ece dryten æfter teode firum foldan frea ælmihtig. [Now we must praise the keeper of the heavenly kingdom the might of the lord and his mind-wisdom, the work of the wonder-father, as he, each of wonders, the eternal lord, first established. He first made for the race of men heaven as a roof, the holy shaper, then middle-earth, the guardian of mankind the eternal lord, afterwards established the earth for men, the almighty lord.] Cædmon was supposedly able to translate any story into Old English poetry, once he had been told what the Latin source meant (he was himself illiterate). Similarly, Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, supposedly stood on a bridge and recited Old English poetry to the people in order to gather them together and encourage them to come to church. A century and a half later, the Old English poems of Aldhelm were said to be King Alfred’s favorites, but none of them has survived to this day (as far as we know). Similarly, in the early years after the conversion we see Latin words translated into Old English. Some examples of this translation process include “Evangelist,” which became “godspellere” (teller of good stories) and “Trinity,” which becomes “†rynnes” (three-ness). A patriarch was an “ealdfæder” (old father) or “heahfæder” (high father). To baptize was translated as “dyppan” (to dip) or “fulwihan” (to consecrate completely). Later, Latin words were imported directly into English and many of these translations were replaced by the original Latin words. During the eighth century, the church became even more significant in English culture, and here was obviously enough interaction between Latin speakers in the church and Old English speakers outside of it for a plethora of Latin terms to be borrowed by English. A large proportion of these were words for the church, its rites, clothing, buildings, and people: abbot, angel,
75 LECTURE TEN 7 6 sio la b r p th co En r Gu b Al h b b in th wo co in th n a En d th ( 8 ti t l u c t t u B d e t ca wo wo The i p in se in n e h o i at eco an Alt In Th y B o ri eo at is an et or s est 50 le n g cl f e e e e fr nt n, lu nt ndl l n I E n h g g n u r r g thru rel we tl we ir e l t d ed udi th ho e l a r u ki ( ds d i al g pl d , east kin at a n o m er hern p o r u la la n i , l enc n uag rol e t rol ruct and gn f o d Vi e h and l e v co la n much e e, i l Vik e a L ab o nd n n l u the of n g l t i c 9 7 ent for g ). . n a k rge m iz f t d n h n g 8 li n cks e h as g dom omp ge chalie, e i o c d tin ing n e ou m , an ving ed on h 70s . e in f o o tro of Ed th T ( whic, a , 3 the th a e t s such a thou of er f with So ot be en. he n gs ner p a l l th e d gre t pila Da nd a l s i itself h T W t n i eir En l, of ingto d E wer t o h t her th lety In th hat er in in ver y r o mer and it f Vikng ng wit the esx, f wer ea e al n e l l e e f e ed t Bu orm .e s t gland gh va e to g indvu n war he Old he lo ge. ish ter f o e h t e d , s g n i k i V lish b n e d i c n i o c inte ar h ster the a ch the m cle wer re n. oked wer set sion t Eng e to l a u t c de sm outs mo f ms “ r r a f s i d n i L York ticle Vikngs atio co Alfr ban ajor m o r to f urch Even est English. This po we l h g i e ric, gra e la b fea n kin En Da e al-sc mar (so nqu ng was lish ets e co a ed ws), se n id Eng s ds ma al re as b o Vikng s glish tion g n a e m o s h ne t b (Jarvik) or e ok”) h t o f in of o tualy led ymn caled sh ap er th a r a m m cap be was fo G f Europ a ther r sa i red of d r s e c f avg land bega this n e c t o e t sed cloth onaste di uthr , e n lo es he tized le, Englad th o gan would r a . wed th to his and Vikng , f , uced cres f o Word e win f o c i t s i t able is cent sock, u th with Scand almost m , y r u t le Dane much a are um e b of ed beca was Vikngs r e d e). n ing h t an in are to ading as, time e h t at and trea g the to g n i n n i g ries, su e gs, a: on d stay E s s to arive Da and At s to a r g and t d n a l g n E rs m . la n his sack, con u perio n o c use Dub re r f s at inav sch to smal Dane n Alfre gland h t w o and Alfred skul y nder oca raly e i d e al first nish w m o o on, of lating to but the in f time quer fod n e n i t in ol, lin of the in a ha d, n a c S l a v be - s - in t s a echnol nu e c . ve to gram s a w l a t also m r a w t, e w r u t n a i v a n i d educa , n p s r a w p pe Nor s Lin Nor th th En a s D th Nor loc th a Ic be a Nor de Bu ha ni Sc s e evr l l ear, h t Mos ome ome inc ta c s a wer riest, ogy y a e s a ey e at is c c a g op s v g n i g t c nis e a la aticl, ura h th o g ndi c un e c omin la na wa wa we we tion e this e e uis f f nd ke t s o m tion le c e w o l l a t rad othe ben be e olws nda a nd h it and of Englis , u r t s e d a a tive te o i r e p c i m o n o c of r y y gia gia to r bor d m nd A ic) d e k c a s “ tic ly , while ule, is avi s. Da ish, the or is n wer g a to e an nt the also W dife r. n. n, , notary, nd, s A like rowed te miltary poula a a r e p s o r p fr fr a ta ne re it oth d ord sp m na ble d d lso la n h I Sw shrin nth om om e I n o i t c c lo ge n Sc place is t s ngua onve a n a p o s ea r ly wor wil lys he c ca suget ” er bster, , e pe the d n the er e a a to a on not “ ntiae be p o l e v e d “ k Denmark, e dish, c me ndiavs led tha n d n Old is Old haps, d e c e r p n u a e, ven Scandiv e b c and ds of understa rs a kers cause nturies h t niet e, ges organiz often se s u o y d. discu Nam suget d n en a fr n r u b e English, t bor owings came came alt “Danes” most and Norse” nd tled Latin thoug Norse.” om and tirely into ( the ar a p e s Swedn. t n u o c the Dan in houg es sion labe, .t n e m cal evn tem de mu in the would from from its tn e vital ish - who tha - the had yr s - by at - , - in the Danelaw thoroughly mixed with each other, both through intermarriage and in culture. The conversion of Guthrum to Christianity meant that the reli - gion of the Danes and the English in England was the same, leading to greater cultural integration. In addition, the language of the Vikings was a North Germanic language and possibly was understandable to the people who spoke the Anglian dialect of Old English—a West Germanic language. Most of the English in the Danelaw were Anglian speakers. The influence of Scandinavian on English was enormous. Not only were hundreds of individual nouns, verbs, and adjectives borrowed (as they had been, in smaller numbers, from Latin), but the pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, and even a form of the verb “to be” were incorporated from the lan - guage of the Danes. This kind of transference of these kinds of parts of speech is very rare historically. The pronouns “they” and “them” are Scandinavian, as is the word “are” (the standard Old English plural for “to be” was “syndon”). Prepositions “to,” “fro,” and the conjunction “though” were bor - rowed from the Danes as well. In terms of grammar, using “-s” in the third person singular, present indica - tive form of verbs (“he walks,” “she thinks”) comes from Scandinavian. But far more significant was the influence of the Scandinavian languages on the inflectional system of Old English. There were many, many words in common between Old English and the language of the Danes ( man, wife, father, moth - er, winter, summer, smile, ride, stand, set, spin, over, under, and many more); the major differences between words would be in the different endings added to them for grammatical purposes. Speakers of Old English and Scandinavian could thus more easily understand each other if they stripped away the inflections and relied upon other cues, most significantly word order, to indicate grammatical relationships. This reduction or elimination of the inflectional system was a major step toward modifying English from a synthet - ic language to the analytic language it is today (although it was the Norman Conquest that dealt the final blow to the inflectional system). As noted, there were many identical words in Old English and the Scandinavian languages. But there were some sound shifts that had occurred differently in North Germanic and West Germanic. The most obvious of these is the “sk” versus “sh” distinction. The voiceless velar stop “k” in the “sk” sound was, in early Old English, palatalizated , meaning that the entire consonant cluster was pronounced “sh.” Old English writers used “sc” rather than our “sh” to indicate the voiceless palatal fricative. We can see this sound shift in words like “scip” (pronounced “ship” as in Modern English), “sceall” (shall), and “fisc” (fish). Old Norse retained the ancestral “sk” pronunciation, so when we find an “sk” spelling, we can usually assume that the word has been borrowed from Old Norse. “Sky,” “skin,” “scrape,” and “scrub” as all such borrowings. Old English had “scirt” (shirt) as a word for a garment; “skyrta” (skirt) was bor - rowed from Old Norse. Other sounds that had been palatalized in Old English include “g” in many words, so when we find velar g (or velar k) spellings, we know that the word has likely come from the Scandinavian languages: “get,” “give,” and “egg” are all such words. Word borrowing from Scandinavian languages is not limited, as was Latin, to a few semantic fields. It has long been a truism of history of the language
77 study that Old Norse contributed many words for violence: “to die,” “to ran - sack,” “to rive,” “to scare,” and “to thrust” are all borrowings from Scandinavian, as are the nouns “slaughter” and “scab.” But in fact the words that entered into English via contact with the Danes are spread throughout the language. Bank, birth, bull, dirt, fellow, guess, kid, leg, race, foot, sister, skill, want, and window all come from Scandinavian, as do flat, loose, crave, gape, get, give, raise, screech, snub, and take. As Otto Jesperson noted, you cannot “thrive,” be “ill,” or “die” without Scandinavian words, nor can you even eat “bread” and “eggs.” The influence of Scandinavian languages on English is enormous and we should recognize that the language of the Danes not only greatly enriched English but also primed the language for some of the major steps in its future evolutions. Even before the cataclysm of the Norman Conquest, England was well on its way toward evolving into its modern form as an analytic (rather than synthetic language) that promiscuously borrowed words from nearly any source. But all of the changes we have thus discussed, even the influence of Scandinavian languages, have been evolutionary. The events of 1066 were to prove revolu - tionary and would change English forever. N E T E R U T C E L
78 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. Why do linguists think so few Celtic words entered into English? 2. Why were Scandinavian languages so influential in Old English?
Suggested Reading
Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Crystal, David, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jesperson, Otto. Chapters 3–4. Growth and Structure of the English Language. New York: Free Press, 1968.
79 Lecture 11: The Norman Conquest, the Influence of French, and the Development of Middle English
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable’s (eds.) A History of the English Language, chapter 4.
We concluded the previous lecture with a discussion of the deep influence of Scandinavian languages on Old English. The political influence of the Danes on England itself was also enormous through the century of Viking raids, the sacking of monasteries and cities, and later the establishment of the Danelaw. But even though English and Danes lived together for two centuries and eventually combined into one people, the difficulties with Scandinavian invasions were not over. In 991, Olaf Tryggvason, who would soon become king of Norway, led an invasion of England. In 994, Olaf allied himself with Svein Forkbeard, king of Denmark, and struck at London. Olaf and Svein allowed themselves to be bought off with the payment of the “Danegeld,” an enormous ransom, but soon came back for more. Eventually, in 1014, Svein became king of England. Later that year he died and his son Cnut became king, eventually ruling England, Denmark, and Norway as well as Schlesweig and Pomerania. Cnut married Emma, the widow of Athelred, the king his father had deposed. Some scholars say that Cnut attempted to become more English than the English, forging a new identity in the Danelaw and through - out the country. He brought two decades of peace and prosperity to England and appears to have been much loved, but his fathering of two sons, one legitimate with Emma (Harthacanute) and one illegitimate (Harold) led to enormous strife later on. Harthacanute invited his half brother Edward the Confessor back into his household (Edward was the son of Emma and Athelred) and upon Harthacanute’s death, Edward became king of England. But the seeds of destruction were sown. Edward was childless. William of Normandy claimed that Edward had promised him the throne of England, but the crown in fact went to Harold Godwinson, the son of the powerful Earl of Wessex. In 1066, William led an invasion of England and decisively defeated Harold at Hastings. This was the last time England was conquered by a for - eign power. William’s Conquest was accomplished with very few men, and although he ravaged and burned some of the countryside, he did not massacre the inhab - itants of England. Rather, he killed or exiled all of the nobles, replacing them with Normans loyal to him. It is important to note that although the Normans N
E were ethnically Danish (they were “North-men” who had settled in the north - V
E west part of France during the Scandinavian conquests), they were culturally L
E and linguistically French. Thus when William completely replaced the English E
R aristocracy, he did so with French speakers. William also replaced the lead - U
T ers of the Church (the bishops and archbishops) with Normans who were C
E loyal to him. L
80 For the next century and a half, England and Normandy were one kingdom. The kings spent half their time in England and the other half in France, and nearly all of the nobles had holdings in both countries. Although English was not spoken at the court, it is likely that some members of the aristocracy learned the language, if only to better manage their estates. Interestingly enough, charters continued to be written in English and Latin, not French (the diplomatic language was Latin, the description of the boundaries of the land was English). We know that Old English continued to be spoken for some time after the Conquest because, among other evidence, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be updated, in Old English, at Peterborough until 1154. The famous Katherine Group texts also support the idea that Old English continued to be spoken rather widely after the Conquest. The Katherine Group includes the Lives of three virgin martyr saints (St. Katherine, St. Juliana, and St. Margaret), Hali Me i∂had (a discussion of the benefits of virginity), and Sawles Warde (a treatise on the care of the soul). These texts are also associ - ated with Ancrene Wisse (a guide for nuns). J.R.R. Tolkien demonstrated that these writings showed the continued use of Old English (the Mercian rather than West Saxon dialect) as a literary language long after the Conquest: Tolkien showed that the language had continued to develop grammatically, making some new distinctions between certain types of verbs. He also argued that the person or persons who wrote these texts for a community of nuns in the west midlands were educated and knowledgeable, calling into question the traditional idea that Old English had remained only as a language of the uncul - tured. However, that idea, that English was spoken, but only by the lower classes, and was rarely written, is often used as an explanation for the further development of the language. The argument goes that because Old English was a completely oral language after the Conquest, it was free to evolve more quickly than it would have been if there was some written standard. There is probably truth in both arguments: Old English was certainly primarily oral in the context of the years between 1066 and 1204, but there were certainly peo - ple who could and did write in the language as well. Despite its widespread use, Old English might still have been replaced by French if it were not for the events of 1204, when King John fell in love with the incredibly beautiful Isabel of Angoulême and married her. Unfortunately, Isabel was already engaged to Hugh of Lusignan, who complained to Philip, King of France (John was King of England and Duke of Normandy). John refused to attend his trial, and so Philip invaded Normandy. From this time on, England and France were politically separated, though the two countries were, of course, intimately involved in each other’s affairs. In a relatively short time the close connections between England and France were severed. Nobles were forced to choose which of their holdings to retain, and England and France entered into a long period of hostility culminating in the Hundred Years’ War. French remained as the language of some of the aristocracy, but it is clear from many documents that it was no longer a regu - larly spoken language. Upper class individuals learned French for their visits to the continent and because it was one of the things that aristocrats needed to know, like heraldry, courtesy, or hunting. But regular speech in French among the English rather rapidly became rare, and those people who did speak
81 LECTURE ELEVEN 8 2 En a b ca co sio lo ch Ol a “ fr wo b in ti o b b b in o ti d sta th En le ve b wa M F F e” Th Yo So o o l e ny ecam th ecam ecam y f oe ef re re o n g ct idl e se mp ange d n n rsi b M th m g g n r s g g a e o Oure The †i A Be Ye A nc nc so ure at d. u eca th n s pra li li s er e i di ch o n af rw re. Eng e n o d nd nd sh sh th ue agr reu d l e f n w t h h u e o o et n f so A fo te “o †i he Mi e an i s o v a ei nd yer f t i se me l e ch t s we t Her l e E le for L o o “ i sp r t r to l ” me fad und n th w n ren n lish e “n “so “sh pea ker dle r st syn th ou ly f ge we or ng de m n in t 1 and oun E ine ang il he o in the an e ye eak re th T ote u ” 204 e ar ir ext l men ri flect nglish ake e elim rigna d’s o e s ce ” ” he u lis a ls u sam the e se ” s “th r sam e cha al †at s ) t to a in is e do nd e s a e En , od †a end cons wa ky evo i th nd , h nor no nd em fo mos t b s t L whic e” and r, Pr s n inat t a M fr t o E t M ic etw ay ngd hose or a a glish nge t e d und some n am t om l s e hen rt i who ). nglish e in idle us t “hwa g mo aye s ed s idle lution t for d’s i la Eng fo en. specia o exa pr nt th tim ra ed to This in om very ure ad h ong o na ngu cer tain ly, rm Old e ms o ec us pave er† t mar in ure r the o wa pe men heuns wor Pr ” e, ha n wha je in mp lish tempacion pr English c (Mid ech becam M a f Eng ts was age o ctive fro chan the ay riod. ch or n de in d t s sma detis ayer fa l to me ly he as oder “n” ds le ouns d to rem †a t pron com e er for a m vor ange : d the Mid it d . the s da var o when lish fina t vowels to in once s le a l was b ges if T ms Old wi f Th ha is ha han is yes at n fern y ained e †a he wer of M but u dative ounce very be. whic io English) and t way do lwid l Eng h e an niform t now d “ me id le thi s to Gr us o who” “- a but bred. in t is syn drop i un th co o it n b f dle ag en m” other English. wor Eng land t, am flectiona en th ant oure vo ad ose in is dife lish in M mo b nsoa for larg ned poi nt, ai u dely in de b d b e e it singu flectiona (tha id En we ped, re asicl j th ut n (obvi d-or e †i mid “ stly heun. n h tha dle t ston-e spoken ctives. ( in syn ad ely rent he e con in t oun, ad glish. “reum l o he name; up er r pr inf nly Go der b us. is, lar, leaving elimn En aloud, Chan most “W” ts not un l spea le ili ngua l sona ly wit h onucia ys la making le usly from us sytem thic givn in “m” nguae h.” glish. r chang understa vowe ctional You as (an genitv emaind The ” end from alre a was the Wil li is kers we moe ges ated, pr In hun a Old at t, an in “r nd a lytic) ma onu rat her l, “e” the fo By tion so stre spelin euyl. ed. ealm” an the lo dy am. gs. d had vowe wha dre endi could yeun r English, of Old st y tha as ndable end the plura ntous 1204 ma eno fo sed wish mo Ano th nced end sytem. Engla whe be t urtenh t wa tha n ). l at Eng gs and de we ing, Old gs al stly at rmous no come Th ther l, to , s c of n s to gr like Eng ome “ho”), the the of and wer cal ylabes. lish to nd. the e oure it bu longer the English fity whic a th amticl compare the was pron pr The a e word) t lish “ change, end almost But n d “shwa” stone” printed dative century it mon oglo t onucia at Mod same years ed ifernc chang words set and uncia folwed decln th had was hear of th “ This ern e swa” for is the plur the end (Old this d ”“sc ing (the in no b - the ur - in ut - - - terminal “e” stopped being pronounced, giving us a pronunciation of “stone” that lacks only the Great Vowel Shift to give us Modern English (and note that the spelling is the same). The plural “-s” is one of the inflections that remains in Modern English, but for a while this form was balanced between another Old English plural form, “-en” (the rare form found in “oxen”). Up to the thirteenth century, “-en” was popular throughout the south of England, but for some reason “-s” then took over completely. Also, to the lasting joy of those who have to learn English as adults, Middle English lost all grammati - cal gender. Even in the Old English period there were contradictions between grammatical gender and natural gender, with “wif-mann” (“woman”) being a masculine noun. In the Middle English period these contradictions were elimi - nated by dropping grammatical gender entirely. Demonstrative pronouns were radically reduced, leaving only “the” and “that” from what had been one much larger, inflected group ( se, seo †æt ), and anoth - er group of Old English demonstratives was compressed to “this,” “those,” and “these.” Dual forms of personal pronouns were lost, and the Old English “heo” becomes “she” (though there is some dispute about the reasons why). Among the verbs, the biggest change was the decay of the strong verb sys - tem (strong verbs, remember, are those in which a stem vowel changes to indicate tense and number). Many strong verbs were lost entirely, and anoth - er large group of strong verbs were transformed into weak verbs. Middle English is grammatically almost the same as Modern English. For reasons not completely understood, participles were more likely to survive than other forms of the verb, and so knowing an Old English participle will often give you a very good hint as to the Modern English word into which it has evolved. Thus although they shared a core vocabulary, Middle English and Old English are grammatically different languages. It is unlikely that Old English and Middle English speakers would have understood each other even though a very large percentage of the words that they used were the same. It is very important to note that this change did not occur through English adopting French grammar. In fact, almost no French grammar managed to move into English. Rather, the influence of the Conquest, the movement of English from an elite language partially controlled through writing to (in general) an entirely oral language, and the continuation of processes begun by the mixing of lan - guages in the Danelaw led to the massive grammatical changes that created Middle English. French Borrowings The Conquest provided the impetus for the grammatical changes, but in fact English and French did not mix very much until after 1204: The vast majority of French words that enter English are borrowed after this date. Why? Because when French was the main language, and even later when there was a significant bilingual population, there was no need to bring French words into English: A speaker could just switch to French. But once French and English separated, a massive influx of French words changed forever the English language, enriching its vocabulary with thousands of new words. Through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, hundreds of French words poured into English. Entire semantic fields became dependent upon French vocabulary. For example, nearly all English words dealing with government
83 LECTURE ELEVEN 8 4 t En “ En h d vo f En C g m p co F b f w l T a f w d w se g a f a co n a a ur am ace o ro Ge Th Fo a r u o o n o e n l e n ra he h o o h ng so o a cab m m u ve a wer. r d m m d y, d i m g g g aucer rds” rds en e r d A T W H T T I W Of A wi row nce e o nt, ne ou ge e l l l nspi e a , ua s est sto medicn wo la ish ish ish Enric re d c n n mo and ha he he a Fre ng nt han han creat cruel, wid o ula th d d t wou in w ra s w ar h w ge. coun in i t me rds , i i nes rat Ye n a red was hi s b c c dr t es wo l rt b l ord , ( nch as in s mal gs. fro i en e as re at ry ely n wit ecom le its P ga t Z fo ch anim sphe og on her s, h ld es, hm h ed Wr F de pe ro rds e fr th h f m t at o s th ( tes, he gra or ed e ht phy re h hose : a ve at Bu e o om the diam th d go re r f n logu e e, also fow itng gove ey nim wn en Apr h e F h th tha n b the ar rt c o f e er als res pr R al a in es de in is ru t ashion ro ren ch: ut v o f u h i e on d e F le am er t n Fr f e do epa el , the t s pe eir, n a rig bar a e” il ond art mon e re he who of exc M h b a ading con y car also e in e ev m nge rnm of ls e ch is en be s w Fren e ne to oth nd nte nch h ht, v bo t arch s, e an k ra night on maken ith o t Eng eyn wit thr are a is le Fre y r ch wr , ry, he g tine w, ta stra with a en th tion. enjo ru ar d th ption gac r ual dre f, sp ive halve a hea , nd be , e ho ote holt ke e ep his ch English d nd cu sq e n temp b e ha includg simplfed lish Lan p co t, on are in nt id autif ch tes s y, with the ut ork, lore y, Canter Eng pred gre th lture uire, yed. over vily his ju or shoure melod oked . th in is Words en swich a in co the sap of Cha stice, the n gua are a so bea ousan percd when the t, yon Latin the ates d nd swet courag urs fact lish mut o F the the omina l verign str pen het But of a the phire, English rench. from and contrib ye, ucer al and ge ge uty flour; nd bury En licuor, yron hand ife, army ton, Europe so a crime, adi word for enorm Mid ds so poet he ye to Old lingustc te Midle glish page ote gre breth about po e the ne ne, F spirt, spoke art the em Tale f tly o , as descr s rench, ti orms st ution ignat le f ater s Eng pr and on tra “law,” ir of , udent ot ously erald, Fr a jury, in rote, wel ince, liter ar English at m re s, diton hers Old a English of ench, pure, lish e the eat ib sema navy Fr (tho of this globe genu using most . ature F an a es felon, as s whic ench Her enrich rench English, l princes Fren pea histor word placed tha to d ugh and Fre “ time, many, re includ al ntic and ine gra i e : , use t obvius. a becam rl, al, ph ch. i wel nch. a are pu s Go s: is such mix the y words mar, re m the and r sold h ilosphy s, and an ange nishme simple, Scan of ox, on aster er Yet d’s a many ju also a duke techn nd d M of g E En nd st “simple” ier. a the p the any stou n a ple perhas methys he Fr a The to ig, dinav) it glish Chaucer a l tha glish, in works like nd beautifl , ench d o Luxry nt, nty” table, oth iques th , “Anglo-Sax words was duches, shep word esrv f fact architeu wo e a the more in Geofry prison, er lang re Mid English in words rds later an ). prou of could words s tha the majo French and ’s his . th gods uage d for come bea poe B lan for m le at to dly ut cen the a o war r a r n - u tor st tic b e for . s n ot ty, e , - - (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages) Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages And Chaucer was not the only great poet. William Langland’s Piers Plowman is known more for its social commentary, but at times Langland soars to poet - ic heights. Likewise the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was able to create beautiful art without ever avoiding French:
Sumwhyle wyth worme3 he werre3, and with wolues, als, Sumwhyle with wodwos, †at woned in †e knarre3 Bo†e wiyth bulle3 and bere3, and bore3 o†erquyle, And etayne3, †at him anelede of †e he3e felle.
85 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What support is there for the idea that Old English continued to be spoken long after the Norman Conquest? 2. What was the most momentous grammatical change in the evolution from Old to Middle English?
Suggested Reading
Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Crystal, David, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jesperson, Otto. Chapters 5–6. Growth and Structure of the English Language. New York: Free Press, 1968.
Recorded Books
Drout, Michael D.C. Bard of the Middle Ages: The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Modern Scholar series. Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, LLC, 2005. 14 lectures/7 cassettes or 7 compact discs/3.5 hours. N E V E L E E R U T C E L
86 Lecture 12: To Modern English: The Great Vowel Shift
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable’s (eds.) A History of the English Language, chapter 8.
The Norman Conquest was the most monumental external influence on the English language. Although English did not adopt French grammar, the vari - ous pressures put upon the language caused it to evolve very rapidly from its old synthetic, inflected form into the analytic language that we know today. The influx of French words after the loss of Normandy in 1204 radi - cally enriched the vocabulary of English, making it nearly as much a Romance language (that is, descended eventually from Latin) as it was a Germanic one. Much of the historical change in English was accomplished by the thirteenth century: Middle English grammar is very close to Modern English grammar, and while it takes a full semester to learn Old English, a student can pick up Chaucer’s Middle English with three weeks of relatively intensive study. But why is Chaucer’s Middle English different from Modern English in any way at all? Why do we have to work to read Chaucer at all. As noted, England was never again conquered, so there was no cataclysm to cause any kind of massive change in English. And yet anyone who listens to Chaucer knows that there is a bigger difference between him and Shakespeare in language than there is between Shakespeare and us. Yet Shakespeare and Chaucer were closer to each other in time by far than Shakespeare is to us. What happened? A slightly oversimplified answer is The Great Vowel Shift . In a relatively short time toward the beginning of the sixteenth century, the pronunciation of many English vowels changed. This was the most thoroughgoing phonetic change in English since it separated from Proto-Germanic. Although the Great Vowel Shift did not really change the spelling of words, it changed the way almost all of them were pronounced. We will examine this shift in some detail because it explains so much, from rhymes in Chaucer to word-play in Shakespeare to why the English spelling system seems to be so bizarre. The Great Vowel Shift was the most momentous linguistic change since the Normal Conquest. The Great Vowel Shift Itself The simplest description of the Great Vowel Shift is that the seven tense or, more commonly, long vowels of Middle English shifted higher (that is, the tongue was raised somewhat more) with greater closing of the mouth. Those vowels that were already raised as far as they could be became diphthongs. I recommend that you refer back to the chart in lecture three where we looked at the Modern English vowel system. Remember that we classified the vowels by the position of the tongue in the mouth (high, middle, and low) and
87 LECTURE TWELVE 8 8 Wo v wh bu str E de le no sh p in “ slo M d n th b a m ( fr n vo b sp b ( “ a th ro wh wi e It A Usi As oic ro ip un ecom lso ou e ecom nd o ur ss t id or e e o or wel ot t sc e n w i ich th t h sim vo f me b n g r m no ” s r ope dle i s ci nce n that lo rel e t if el ote d ch n mo you th ot w rek t ame f stop fo r j in us – ro u vo umpe atio g ibed th ice n ess. vo a unce co de h e on seful a we a un . pa g t nt lar a wa i l ved e E th th d wel, ti eh” mid ch fter em . . . s s we gap mp le n ca g, ve vowels. nglish s ). n ...... d ter es “ e “ “n a di iy” s ss maid ...... shu th and Th be d th ) n ents ls d bu T in hig givn lica ...... scu th the at p d ame pr fro e an b hu ns w so ...... e se int stops. ositn ip at d ca are “ t e ter ecam ...... on fle change as be h thi ip pr nt ted, Ger d ht dif s met ...... ssed o “ me hig soun a left – tha ht fr ms, ...... m .” , s eviou vowels into ( ( ( ( ( ( ( nd The vo filled un th pr pr pr pr pro pro pro ont eh (Ta h unce er u th ong us t”) You point manic. hing ap s e i as a ong voice o o o o we But s is stre ” t ”) f bl wer d fr nothe in we he no no no no no no no or rom Mo “r th nt (p vowel sp s sho e : ont s is a be t l by o d en such at hat wil “ i in un un un un un un un ron “low sed noth n moved spe th pr lik fi” e lo ot: to dern se ca a less fl “ cam t. limnato ed rt bray ue t t at slot w l vo consonants onu W ced ced ced ced ced ced ced e n r he he ve ” comp e oun n h not (whic “na ot vowels ling nce gap T “ space, hen b er we ad gap d centra in th gaw b ry vowels, e fricatives; hat ack English aspirate back etail move stred ”me e e “fe “maid “bra “nah “gawt” “row “mo d at – ced vowel, ciaton t l “ (i.e , ben th s. he by med d are th be the keh”) was since i in escribd orughi vo – n at Ba y ( was ., in l” came ba ”) m “mose of di whic into – d se”) of te the t we the – first urn t ug “brea ) – ( lecture he a filled ck teh”) you h”) th d – the t “mo .” t in inflect keh” in he . . be h his ther eh”) not l pron mid di e voiced Gr eh the . . No whic Gr a mo left mid of th part M . . . came becom n a p “a” mouth use.” wa can k” d eat ”) . . . time e ea e ,” oder revious ) in by w chan t not diphto ved: language . . . . C ng back he ounce an io evolutionary five. would a ...... s but f a t soun the such of ront the ble nd Vow ...... nal Vo se the pr stop shif mout un ...... n fr “br open Into ge the es , re “go ...... onu to meani om wel “nam vowel: Eng p. Remember dergo voiced sufixe ...... d vowel d eak.” vowel el t why ng): form low s “ very , ...... wa th the 23 sh goat.” th in “ h...... but in te the fe”) becoming Shift, en Shift 8; lish would ...... at s ift g ” e” “ba Th ...... front ced fron Fromkin s med ou (wh an Her m vowel ...... g for it be “ro op occurred, back becam ). tha stops h as split e ...... t”). uch r five me brea nam goat rot mou is “ was with ave the T bec mou en t op hig “ ta no ich a have nahm vowel: t his “hig (b only ( e th lk h things mid whic eni between ” o h and a ack, d e se omes k changes. ad hig voiced the so becoming Grimm’s in at f unaspirated se”) (pro igh t o left back the al. f a a English been Grimm’s Rodman, pre back g im fr changi – the plicabe same back central, ”brek “ hig ont” nouced an fro for becam was g he”) portan: m And “five” viously et vowel stops, nt outh, voice op Indo- a left vowel (the Law, a fr vowel pro pro vowel mid since en p. was ont lite Law e with 46) - - - to in a voiced stops. There is a significant cascade of sound changes, all related to one another across many, many words. The same is true of the Great Vowel Shift. Linguists have been arguing for nearly a century about whether the Shift happened in the front of the mouth and the back of the mouth separately or at the same time and whether the shuffle occurred via pushing or pulling . Some theorize, for example, that the high vowels becoming diphthongs opened up gaps that pulled all the other vowels along. Others argue that the first changes happened at the bottom, with these new vowels thus pushing the other vowels up and, in the case of the vowels that were already high vowels, into diph - thongs. The movement of the one type of low back vowel to a mid front vowel is taken as supporting evidence by both sides. Why the Vowels Shifted Equally controversial (possibly even more controversial) is the explanation for why the Great Vowel Shift happened. In one sense the name, coined by the great linguist Otto Jesperson (he was Danish, but is still possibly the greatest English linguist who ever lived), is misleading, as it tends to suggest rapid or immediate change. And indeed, the Shift occurred at lightning speed for a linguistic event: It is usually dated from approximately 150 0 to 1600, and traditionally has been seen as occurring mostly from 150 0 to 1550 (although newer linguistics textbooks hedge a bit and spread it out over the 150 0 to 1600 period). The traditional view, which has not been overturned so much as questioned, was that the Shift occurred over the course of a genera - tion. But why? A number of theories have been proposed. At the time of the Shift, a major demographic change was affecting England. There was mass immigration from the north to the south of England after the Black Death and a similar shift in living patterns from rural to urban environ - ments. Although the plague had spread more rapidly in cities and towns, these began to grow rapidly in size while many villages were completely abandoned. Linguists theorize that the sudden arrival in the south of many individuals with northern accents or the arrival of many rural dwellers in urban areas triggered, somehow, a major pronunciation change. Another related theory is that the rise of the Middle Class in London required the creation of a common dialect. Because there was continual growth in the importance of trading and commerce from the end of the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, people needed to be able to communicate more clearly in English. Thus a new kind of English pronunciation evolved that would split the differences between various dialects in England, with the London dialect (spoken by Chaucer, among many others) eventually winning out, but adopting many of the pronunciations of the other dialects. Others argue that it was not so much immigration but social mobility that changed the language. After the Black Death there was such a labor shortage, the argument goes, that many more people were able to move into the middle and even the upper class. These people had other, class-based ways of talk - ing, and in the process of modifying their own speech, also ended up causing the modifications of previously existing standard speech. The result was a new pronunciation for everyone. A related possibility is to interpret the Shift as a form of hypercorrection , an
89 LECTURE TWELVE 9 0 tha by we an or F S v s fav an ad gy ca p s s so id a a th g m Th h a ca Ca to L En in co En fa o h n Fr e Un so a o I Al Fin ery ome ize ize ro no re en ave bo on f ad ew vid te f, inc hift. e an e m e c , scad me use nsi und t d oth ap kno th e the g g xt f or n lin he t ces o nch ort w an il t era ut do mp bou wi re al s li la a o l enc h ti they y he for e a me of on y iar lon ed tati sh , ill gu ste l f t es er. f so l No n ly, th i d d wet un re sm laws, w ways sam n que an f d ri es. i t l t r, th, , ti i d s e fi , get he e , fte nd esir ch ists, set g on to i was o aso to E nch nt . to as of F th n not s te ate eith som pr d Si no to e s al vi n T tha nglish run ran arie stion but S years fe at both abo the e the fa oces sem mi in thi goro di he the some to that e nth wil F up m cont ocial ly n gre b conse chan er al by line be mile ren t ct t so e ce. to la s spe en he ar the of in s o most for pro the ve pr Gran n t Gala rly, scho due co aks: ce ccasionally p at was usly he met k bio an th of set in ot ch si th with in occurre ron thin f in like Eng ling mo ges. r i avor s exp nclusion is e this blem nt ent t rich. ank mila a s y pr ter e nsu a self log h at f nviro chan was o nd hing ir oneself to ury cep ts pago all is oun lars tha old S on suppo en onu e g re rde st al, s the lish ; lan the on evera arly y h it r fashion started my Min like is th sma e of ou in as e En ypoth p t wit wo an cond ce cha nme e am r a nc st d se. ged a m ey rintg re ta larg also s o English spea Lon gh nd whom t tio rgu time il glish own or sep sixte d o h an ajor f the rt. rked ble ia tard b Island a l. ong all l nge evn ap p ecause My ns langu get t asoci nt. tion e dry itions to a d shift his esi, the word rinte e don) So asoci arte seeing of art. or German kers, sp ch new the or interp had th h cha creat at P pr , lingust, to o the nth back, ir year th ave the s. ech shift as what ange, at comparison eter wn de printe es another age a p Usually s, ling lock eory average an for with in , nge: Over ronu alre the vo spacing lib fa we centur ted it time wil various retation on view s some d m pr ted and could in r is uist on wel the erat and th realy when ic in th in ore d as e bu onucia one arivl is ca wit Peopl p thoug Engla e e dy time consonant en a whe in ciaton n re who wit ron a th t n certain is Rosemar syte Gr these y, I species eds h on row of pl by se beak ly par can ch the at be se acen is h disemna th righ push-pull caused it th an th eat ausib n ce with em these spe they ht, unce ange ce are e a at the of e is e es ticular an Eng d seem tion d m mid arly tell, can only ve process t. th sound u in rtain Vowel an the t size would is in pronunciations le to he per t other wou of ha And e atem ry n actually l o variou d y l or i not things d ocur a 147 in ty, sh oticed printe impo have h rde ch ra le the Great rmoni cour pr nd Grant to b similar ave to pron shifted wo kinds on ld the ift effects ther y te ange int of alth but clase change necessarily Shift. 6. compar m langua pt favor the was Gre e rds do or of rtan to it se s the their ake fo al population. unciato s dife stre to an ough al throug agresivly g to stab Vowel inheritance stud the soun und us of just time processes we at fam tw got pres back. the at sound sixte split will certain o of evr part s s ges : s o own rently. converg V scillation re e Great ilzaton pech. war, ied So ously just tha go o Lond th will d difern will time: Wilam Chauce patern line wel anythig Shift off em as y of ing, or It at endorsed the nth t. al theories ut (tha more shift efort as be on takes beak their from Vowel up if solidarity Ther Shift? But the fractio also th One and For Cactus century the in was th much and t ose police in and r’s back and most ey ways biolo e then to e the nd a but us of - Other Changes That Brought About Modern English The Great Vowel Shift rightfully dominates discussion of the change from Middle English to Modern English because it is systematic, logical, and com - prehensive (all of the long vowels in words that were in Middle English were affected). But the Shift is not the only factor in changing Middle English into the language that we now speak. Grammatically the language changed little. The old “-n” plural continued to lose ground: Chaucer uses “eyen” (for “eyes”) and even Shakespeare uses a few “-n” plurals, but “-s” had won the battle. One additional inflectional ending that deserves some discussion is the development of apostrophe s (’s) as the genitive ending. The genitive case was the Old English method of indicating possession. For strong nouns, the genitive singular ending was “-es,” thus “stan” (stone), “stanes” (pronounced “stahn – ehs”; “of the stone”). Because in Middle English the genitive ending was unaccented (that lack of stress is one reason most of the inflectional endings were lost), it ends up being spelled with a variety of vowels, such as “-is” or “-ys” (the unstressed, mid central vowel in English, schwa, does not have a specific orthographic symbol). The pronoun “his” in English was pronounced “-is” because the h was not pro - nounced when it was not stressed. Thus “stonis” (stone’s) and “ston [h]is” would be pronounced exactly the same. Some early grammarians, ignorant of Old English, were confused, and argued that the apostrophe s was a shorten - ing of “his,” and so the genitive was really a contracted form of the pronoun. This makes absolutely no sense when applied to forms like “the queen’s dress” (“the queen, his dress”?), but the error has persisted even to the point where it is repeated in the popular (and very good) book on grammar Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. The real reason for the apostrophe is that it marks the missing “e” in the “-es” ending. The only other grammar changes of significance are in the pronouns and the verbs. In Old English, “ge” (pronounced “ye”) and “†u” (pronounced “thoo”) indicated different numbers in the second person ( “ge” was plural and “†u” was singular). In the thirteenth century, however, the “th-” forms (thou, thy, thee) became familiar ; they were used when addressing social inferiors, chil - dren, and close friends. The “ye” forms (ye, your, you) were used as a sign of respect. It was either a social error or a form of rudeness accidentally to use “thou” in a formal situation: It either marked you as a boor or as being deliber - ately rude to an inferior. There are some Shakespearean jokes to this effect, for example in Twelfth Night , when Sir Toby Belch encourages Sir Andrew Aguecheek to write an insulting letter: “if thou thou’st him some thrice, it shall not be amisse.” Eventually the “thou” forms disappeared from polite speech and then from all speech (though they persisted longer in America among the Quakers than they did in England). The ending of the third person singular verb was consistently “-eth” in Middle English. In Shakespeare’s time it is becoming “-s,” but Shakespeare actually uses “-eth” and “-s” in the same line, indicating that the two are interchange - able. By the first half of the eighteenth century, “-eth” had almost certainly been lost from all speech, but it continued to be written for many years after - wards, particularly in formal prose.
91 There are still some minor changes from Shakespeare’s English to today, but when you compare, say, Beowulf , The Canterbury Tales, and Hamlet , you see that Shakespeare was far closer to Modern English. English would continue to be enriched by new words—there was a massive influx of Greek and Latin terms into English in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as these languages became standards of a widespread school curriculum—but the basic structure and pronunciation of English was now set. As we will see, there was great growth in English, but not as much change. E V L E W T E R U T C E L
92 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What was the Great Vowel Shift? 2. What are some of the theories for why the Great Vowel Shift occurred?
Suggested Reading
Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Crystal, David, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. Chapter 11. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002.
93 Lecture 13: You Say Soda, I Say Pop: Dialect, Variants, and the Development of American English
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams’s (eds.) An Introduction to Language, chapter 10. m o c . t r a p i l C ©
In one technical sense, once we get past the Great Vowel Shift, almost everything interesting has already happened in the history of English. After 1600, when the Shift was basically complete, there were no major develop - ments in the phonology or grammar. The English lexicon kept expanding as English adopted new words from a variety of sources, but it was nothing com - pared to what had already happened with Scandinavian, Latin, and especially French. There have been no more Norman Conquests or Great Vowel Shifts in the past four hundred years, and we can read Shakespeare’s English almost as well as we read our own. The closest English has ever come to such a long period of stability is the beginning of the Old English period, from the fifth century to the beginning of the ninth, and even then it is rather a stretch to put together four hundred years without a major change. But the story of English from the Great Vowel Shift to the present is anything but boring. It is also unprecedented. Although Latin conquered Europe with N
E the soldiers of the Roman army, its spread was trivial compared to that of E
T English, which is spoken now on every continent. How this came to be, and R I
H how English continued (and continues) to expand even after the end of the T years of British military conquest is the story of our final two lectures. Up until E
R this point we have been examining the unity of English; now it is time to look U
T at the internal diversity of this largest of languages. In this lecture we will be C
E examining dialects and variations within England and America. L
94 Spread to the New World Undoubtedly the most significant political development in the history of English after the Norman Conquest was the spread of English to the new world. And just as the development of the British Empire was a process of happenstance, so too the conquest of English was unplanned and haphaz - ard. England was not as early or effective as Spain or France at amassing territories. By the time the settlements on the east coast of America were founded, the Spanish, Portuguese, and French had already acquired the most desirable colonies for the purposes of exploitation. England ended up settling in North America and India, putting down institutions and the English language. Colonies in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa and East Asia came later. The colonies did three important things for the language: First, they increased the spread of English (increasing both the number of English speakers and the regions in which English was spoken); second, they brought English into close contact with a wider variety of other cultures; third, they created more opportunities for variation. All of these processes led to the evolution of different English dialects .
Dialects and Dialectology There have always been English dialects. Even in the Old English period we can recognize Anglian, Kentish, and Saxon variations of Old English (from, respectively, the northern, the eastern, and the western sections of England). Although there was broad dialect mixing after the Black Death, we know that there were recognizable dialects in Middle English not only from our own analysis of texts, but from the testimony of individuals who lived at the time. Much of the humor of Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale , for instance, is based on the accents of the two main characters, Allen and John, who are northerners at Cambridge. This is the same sort of joke that would be made by an author depicting two students with strong Mississippi accents getting the best of the townsfolk in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chaucer himself later makes fun of northern accents, or at least the tradition of alliterative poetry that he locates in the north, having his Parson say that he is a southern man and does not speak “rum, ram, ruf.” Dialects in Britain have been among the most studied linguistic phenomena since the nineteenth century. George Bernard Shaw was only somewhat exaggerating when he wrote, in Pygmalion , that Henry Higgins could, through a short sample of speech alone, “place a man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.” Or perhaps Shaw was just a little ahead of his time. In the late 1970s, Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper,” murdered thirteen women (and attempted to murder seven others). During this time a number of tapes were sent to the British police from “Wearside Jack” claiming to be responsible for the crimes. Because in part Sutcliffe’s accent did not match that of the man on the tapes, he was released after being picked up for questioning and went on to murder three additional women before being caught and sent to prison for life in 1981. Stanley Ellis, a British dialectologist at the University of Leeds, later analyzed the tapes of “Wearside Jack” and was able to trace the accent of the hoaxer to the specific village of Castletown in Sunderland. Police arrested the person who made the tapes for “perverting the course of justice” and
95 LECTURE THIRTEEN 9 6 ti e Ca Wit sp fr u in b co So Ba Ca th e V En s ex E E pr wo of ic g p Bo g m o va fr u E E s th a se B Lo V T se di D W Th H om e pe e o vol na et ive eo ra r s he o o ow e ng ng riti li z ng ow e ff ic u g an on Lond am n eak lo ri vera ndi nd ia en th m m the u n g sto ul d n n e can r t ter ph hi e ab ati w bl pl sh li s li s li s th gl la uti adin nie ad n lect a y e Sh un ev A c c on ry th us hi ng wh at pl e. g n e e n l l a ic nd n lt h ons me r an h h, et ha n h the p tr at b on: ar Am re Sh i Sh i l d E o ci desh , e ch ak es pe ar s), rs o d t e in Am , to H ut h. e s i a of pr e o (ev lu ti En ). Lyn ngl n ea at io are n police wo o ople at evolu an Up lo st ar t diton i ar be tw In g oft ic an incre Lo er ft , ft se tr an re th e and inhe acen tha Th En Unde when calizn a gli on se eric divso i d ul d e a sh “s to ne ), ica n, En g ro un d n gion ins A sp en par ndo n af te r clased e r sh, er gl a ev ge rv es in ou ng l sc ri East th an W o tion. . w ee if o ritan p ee ch Af peo a , m be o a c A d ate r an it h Midwest. al ro nu n rg li sed nera the A es t n nd , t nd e’ s ts, n cu r we o- Sa wh o ajor he n rica merican n sh , g a Fal be ns wh ic h ustr rou .” who th e victms. d a a 11 00 ple n En gl an la r withn dia ce pe ha For Asia p Bost Au re d, ich Vi rg in ia En Bo ot be in g m Li n su rv iv he S wild- gr ea t ge h ly in pa rt ic ul ar ly ar tog nd ( reg ge ali/ xo s rso Rive ci at io n tanley er e ost pa le mo fr stralin ca gl is h e ticula ston ar og are gu is ts worldie has ex A shap om cts n asily on, it eth pr od u to (Hong sto gr ou pi ng s rticula ion n n me ri ca n go st stricly ra so E ample, Ne tr bu t th is d be ca me ed r ma ny th e locaize come be p aditon nglish sp withn ch ps phic with s tr ad it io na l, are an d langu so un de d meon mo un ta in s rly roud ed r, w Elis re ma in s se h th er ar wi ll no w ecif anged ci ng pr on ou n wa s or ig in al fro ear althoug ( Ze a if Kong and ly e by ch ev er yw he re Lo nd o s no mobilty pr on un ci at io ns set the m wh e) , the be No age are of alnd, E is South the English fr ase the g “s to ne .” pr on ou n a th an l ng li sh . an d om. Ne ef use sou o are o in bein for g rth bu t , ea sy e vo we l rapidly American distn ir pa rt ic ul ar ly just li ke fort eogr ou t Singa ca can so h acent ce difer fact n w sa bu t tha ms o (f or rces s Am cor ou Thus t it n ur ce wn Africa) g En gl is h South d her lo wl y in Ze me whatsoe of th at extrm to is pron aphic te Le have ctive a r th is mo re a much Bu c w erica a perh to enc alnd ble pore, ect re re n e th e even l and no t el se . he ar it h t proce wh il e day’s ative d of to t American if are gions of us ma ke not is unciato in . Asia ace ir “s ta hn .” t surpin a th at New aps a , such al l o in co rr ec t withn Spea boun li ke Sh ak es pe ar e’ s e (the si mi la r geo m betw al ha s wa y ta th e an p since sl ig ht acents on dif Yo u ver, loca necsa se e tongu m ore th e it erson ke wo xamples nts than d alowed ha ve (India “s ta wn ” fi ne r graph os t wa s ernc th e Engla En gl is h Unite daries ev ol obvi kers to rld). o th e lize and wo ul d ot he r a “conservative” en ther s Th e World u- gl id e: being tha to gly ex ac tl y ch al le ng e e are town au di o ar they comes ar gu ed to ve d di st in ct io ns . fu rt he r wo rd , Ame a and in ic co nt em po ra ry are d us likews rily t e Pakistn, n oft s), forme sa y d vo we l such drive be fo re ne va ri an ts Sutclife Sta and a of n th in k of a mo re compare (to acent o War are en, otriusly genraly found cent Sou way rican fo r verthls Carib r “s to ne ” what st o En gl an d, th e tes po st –G re at th at fr two. ev ol th at social insder) as lingustc espcia om a th is ch an ge d th at u th e th II. Br n t th e difer ther ra pi dl y op po si te and an Am er ic an detrmin Lond to in ve d of most (t hi to probaly African itsh than I ean/ South Th e le ct ur e) . id ea d th e d kn as Gr ea t sp isola kil s much are in a a ow nt ecif ly on g an i fi rs t s re of in fu r eo - - - - - owes quite a bit to the fact that most of the people who originally settled in New England were from locations within a sixty-mile radius in East Anglia. By 1776 there were three major varieties of North American English: Northern , which was spoken in New England and New York State, Midland , spoken in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and Southern , spoken from Maryland to Georgia. The famous dropped “r” in New England speech was already pre - sent at this time, inherited from pronunciation in the south of England, and this form was also spoken in the South. Later settlers came from the north of England, where “r” was still pronounced. Geographic expansion westward carried along dialects, and American English is still divided into bands of northern, middle, and southern forms. However, there was some additional diversification. For example, the Northern dialect area is split, with an eastern and a western form with the dividing line in the Connecticut River Valley. West of this line is further sepa - rated into Upper North , including southern Vermont, parts of New York state, the very uppermost portions of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Michigan, northern Illinois, and eastern Wisconsin. Then Upper Midwest includes the rest of Wisconsin, all of Minnesota, and the northern half of Iowa. Lower North , which is based upon the old Midland dialect range, includes New Jersey, most of Pennsylvania and Ohio (excepting the very northern parts of those states), Indiana, and southern Illinois. The Upper South includes most of western Maryland, western Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, northern Arkansas, and the very northernmost parts of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and a tiny bit of east Texas. Lower South includes most of North Carolina, all of South Carolina, and nearly all of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as part of southern Arkansas and east Texas. Within the Lower South, there are divisions between the Atlantic South, Southern Florida, Alabama, the Delta South , and Northern and Southern Louisiana . Things get less clear cut as one moves further west, but there are differences between Southwest, California, Colorado , the Utah West, and the Northwest .
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 97 Linguists mark these dialect areas by constructing isoglosses : They interview many subjects and record their pronunciations and word usage, plotting the responses on a map. A boundary beyond which a form is never or always used is an isogloss. When many isoglosses line up, we can identify a dialect region. For example, the boundary between the Upper North and the Lower North dialect is marked by isoglosses for the pronunciation of “greazy” (with a z pronunciation) versus “greasy” (with the “s” unvoiced), calling an insect a “snake feeder” versus a “dragonfly,” calling “Sook!” to the cows or not, and calling a tree whose sap you get syrup from a “sugar tree” rather than a “maple tree.” In each of these cases, the more southern term is listed first, and none of these are consistently found above that Upper North/Lower North isogloss (and the southern forms are found much more consistently in the southern dialect areas). Here is an experiment: Ask various people whom you know to say the name of the canine animal the “wolf” (you will have to figure out a clever way to do this without saying the name yourself). Listen carefully to how your respon - dents pronounce the word: If you have a big enough sample that covers a variety of regions, some will pronounce the word “wolf” and others “woof” (without the l). Those who drop the l will almost certainly be from the Upper North dialect zone. There may actually be quite a few speakers in the Upper North area who say “wolf” rather than “woof,” but nearly all who do say “woof” will be Upper Northern speakers. Since the 1930s, linguists have been collecting isoglosses throughout America. Some seem to match up very well with settlement patterns. For example, my home dialect region, in Monmouth County, NJ, is on the one hand part of the Philadelphia dialect region. On the other hand it is linked to New York City. We say, for example, “water” as “wood-er,” we do not pro - nounce the “h” in “huge” or “human,” and we pronounce the words “orange,” “horrible,” and “forest” as if they were spelled “arr-inge,” “harr-ible,” and “farr- est.” The last two pronunciations are linked to New York and the first to Philadelphia, just as you might expect from the migratory patterns of the peo - ple who settled Monmouth County (some came south from New York, some came east from Philadelphia). Other famous isoglosses are “bucket”/“pail,” “faucet”/“tap,” and “quarter of” versus “quarter to.” Various alternative names for “See-Saw” provide a partic - ularly interesting example. Although the unmarked term “See-Saw” is recog - nized throughout America, there are alternative forms on the East Coast. “Teeter-totter,” for example, is a heavily Northern word; the form is “Teeter” or “Teeter Board” in New England and New York state and “Teeter-Totter” in New Jersey. There are almost no “Teeter-” forms in Pennsylvania, and if you go to western West Virginia and down into western North Carolina there is a band of “Ridey-Horse” that heads almost straight south. This pattern sug - N
E gests a New England origin or importation of the term that spread down the E
T coast and a separate development in Appalachia, where Scotts-Irish settlers R I
H did not come from New England. “Hickey-horse” in the coastal regions of T North Carolina is consistent with other linguistic and ethnic variations. E R
U For whatever reasons, the insect known most commonly as the dragonfly T
C has a variety of names. In northern and eastern New Jersey it is a “Darning E L
98 Needle” (my grandmother’s name for it), but in Pennsylvania and West Virginia it is a “Spindle,” in Virginia a “Snake Doctor” and on the coast through Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, a “Snake Feeder.” Some migration patterns into Tennessee and even Texas are consistent with the variation in dragonfly names. When dialectologists plot all of their collected isoglosses—both those for word use and for pronunciation on the map—they generally confirm the major divisions discussed above. But there are some particularly interesting small areas of dialects that are highlighted by the map (though early dialectologists, and simple observers of American English, had already noticed them). The first is a pocket on the East Coast that includes the cities of Charleston, SC, and Savannah, GA, and is called the Charleston Dialect. One of its character - istic features is a pronunciation of “lawyer” that sounds so much like “liar” as almost to be a social commentary. Charleston Dialect is often considered to be the highest prestige dialect of all Southern English and has more in com - mon with upper-class British English of the eighteenth century than other dialects (New England dialects, despite their prestige in America, have more in common with middle- and lower-class East Anglian settlers). Other distinc - tive dialect pockets include Providence, RI, with its very characteristic naming of a milkshake a “cabinet,” and Pittsburgh, PA, with a variety of nonstandard lexical items and pronunciations. There is also a dialect region around St. Louis, MO, that separates this metropolitan area very firmly from the sur - rounding countryside. All of this leads us to that earthshaking question debated by millions of American college students: Is a fizzy drink “soda” or “pop”? As the map at http://www.popvssoda.com shows, “soda” is used mainly on the East Coast, in California, and from Chicago north along Lake Superior and around St Louis, MO. “Pop” is Midwestern and Northwestern, and “coke” is used in the south. But all forms are used at least somewhat in all regions, not only demonstrating geographic mobility, but also suggesting that the reasons for preferring one term to another might be complex. Some studies suggest that “soda” is urban and suburban while “pop” is rural, but not in each term’s home range (i.e., in the Midwest, those who do use “soda” are far more likely to be found in the cities than in the countryside; likewise on the East Coast, “pop” is found in small towns more than in cities). “Soda” is often considered the term with more prestige or social cachet, but it can also be interpreted as a pretentious or, in the South, a “Yankee” word. Pop versus soda has led to many a vigorous late-night debate over pizza and is related to other disputed topics such as the hero versus the grinder versus the sub. This is all good fun (and useful for excellent cocktail party repartee if you have some linguistic knowledge or have listened to this course), but it leads us to a much more serious subtext, which we will discuss in the next lecture, on the politics and social implications of language variation. English is the first global language, and its variations are an incitement to study. But the various word choices that people make (or make unconsciously) can have social consequences in both the small and the large scale: Some variations may be neutral, but others have the ability to express social class, cultural solidarity, and ethnic identity.
99 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What led to the evolution of different English dialects? 2. What are the forces that shape dialects and linguistic evolution?
Suggested Reading
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002.
Other Books of Interest
Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. “American Dialects.” Part 5. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Ed. David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. N E E T R I H T E R U T C E L
100 Lecture 14: A Global Language: The Present and Future of English
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is David Crystal’s The Stories of English.
“You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as a lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English.” ~Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion
Pygmalion (and its even more entertaining musical adaptation, My Fair Lady ) is a play about the interaction of language—from phonetics to grammar to syntax to word choice—and social class. It illustrates beautifully the com - plex nexus between what we speak and who we are and the difficulties of try - ing to change either. The connection between language and identity, which is not a simple one, lies along a fault line in linguistics, one that is evident in the character of Henry Higgins as well, and it is a fitting topic for the end of our course, for as English has become a world language with more variants than even scholars can track, the problems of identity and language change have become more and more evident. On the one hand, Henry Higgins is a brilliant descriptive linguist. He has invented “Higgins’s Universal Alphabet” in order to transcribe accurately the speech of any person. Even Higgins’s friend and admirer Colonel Pickering (author of Spoken Sanscrit ) cannot match Higgins’s ability to make fine dis - criminations among sounds: “I rather fancied myself because I can pronounce twenty-four distinct vowel sounds,” says Pickering, “But your one hundred and thirty beat me. I can’t hear a bit of difference between most of them.” On the other hand, Higgins is a prescriptive linguist. He notes that Eliza’s lower-class speech patterns will “keep her in the gutter to the end of her days,” but he is not troubled existentially by this, arguing that she simply needs to change. That people judge others on language is simply a fact of life to Higgins, and in fact, although he is aware of the language and social systems at play, he also supports them: “A woman who utters such depress - ing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.” Most linguists today would be (and are, when they watch the film or read the play) rather horrified by Higgins’s attitude toward language. Hardcore de scrip - tive linguistics is pretty much the reigning paradigm. Linguists essentially
101 LECTURE FOURTEEN 1 0 n a r m t r Po H m p ( b m b b i E e th w c m w to e p s E s p i a d l n m a b o a b u Pr t b st mp r in ha el e e R Th In As ha ib om oo ti es mp le e eo ct i etwe 2 o cen a e e o m w ctu e se e n n or k or th o os or a e a a g g g P) l e t st come scrip n t li me e gl is gl is l il it y wev n th a d n t jor inst o pr ion ion it o on uist ev i those ng stige to ks pl e er sta ove e. s e e E al i ov ha e ic t, un pe ne in li s d es is of y ng t la en , n t ly h h e wh o of s e al s in a and Th g w a ( re to e o nda si t t op s l of yo u t tu dy ), a I t rwhe cade erved re e st th ns th se ive Ge or En f as o th ei when ays r, so me o l tr to ze s th am do the ace m ish RP I e “standa f e so le f e en as a y at re spea ie ma ke is kn ns e, RP mo ei r nf or ci rd ore gl i the go who nd co nv i no nj u a d ra i w to r ld sp no t, eva s cla se ph o t t ha lmed s, e th e li lin ow as in ia sh ge o heir w s i acen od ngu nt. the re so xceptio ll ex tr em e i is biol chan ec t. o spea f S ki n le pr or l cou kers guistc RP s hu ve I whic ud g th se ci re peo lu b spea oli ca n ne ti cs ng ci Be th o nc e would my se lf ), per ct a ag re f estigou rd” r spre Ho eing al d e or ists d ating jo nt al lso e oth a th is rts. Th is dar stil fo rn ar gist: me nt al la Qu ee n ge king of on b s nd t. ple po si ti o sua we th at how peo an o dialects si tu at io ns . ex pr e e th e no rm k ng ua naly e ad er is I view r L it e no r ly o it Alth ch a p in (o ver, ca in kn ma fish be d ve or we te sive. f pre is y is to eo “s ta nd ar d” pa ple re of f li n he pu bl ic guist thro s n a to or Sh an d you ow, xtbo RP led m. a ry a ly ge ’s spoken rks ss gional re ng es ns ver ough e ple’s r impo t l gu is ts po se h scriptve. the te ro do x han ti cu la r or the d spea the xamine with arg aw , no bl e ig mu ch wi th E B ugho and given in th ou gh ha an d with is y Sp li ng ui st s stud t her ng li sh u gro y he Roya ks umen th at M t have un rtan hom Par othe that pronu s th in it of te n ech ra k. gen if varin os t a their vi ew , pr ob ab ey speakr cu lt ur al go qua wilng y ne ed is ho ap pr oa ch , wi th yo u ted hi s m ce E T t more qu al if ie d lia a al l and th e ts l rs. re the he uine , som ng li sh . nd (o r stily and de si re . la yp eo pl e ts an t rtain Fa ment e nciato th lity heir a do The Pr ef ac e h gio the h th ei r of va ri an ts re ad th is ts udienc in I ome anlog ey a av e fo wo ul d th e mily, n wo ideo un es ly ewhat to tools nimals; th tha nal expl articul r th id en ti ti es . lega rapist. Eng argu fur. dialects or as m dersta e de st ro ye d an yo ne rld switch a work r a Sp ea ke rs roug Am er ic an a th e te ol e My n p logica for ight bu t sa me variations supicon th ains di ss er vi ce edu p va ri et y ac he r! la have to be and The ide y to ments ro o se ms. s . e case les to ol s nd ow n hout I f Some I you b with as ac as Py g nd e io ntical lo ok ed e cated have sp ee ch Th wo ul d e to wh lite di and kinds to Recivd n ri ch ne ss h. no th in g comite be No able pu wel in what versifd ey a t he ma li on , p of do an d y the he on ce mad ch an ge some of rated T v fluentia rg um en t, scho roble en bl ic pr ar ia nt , res hea would he spe in argum le ss cu rr en t do and ex ho rt s) to di ff er en t n li ke d be up on to of estig world, p ar e kn ow le dg e ot some sp ialects e de ve lo pm en t in te ll ec tu al s pe op le ushed ols, an rd an d ms, wr on g switch lingu arch the invsb in an d a ch socialy tr eak ne to en Pronucia in te re st in g y hi s a throug b ents Br oa dc as te r’ ho ar y nt enorm th wi th than e the se e forms li ng ui st ic s co ur ag es to fo r wh ic h a few to but dialects wh pla e ist co mp le xi ha to in rguments more of di al ec t rs or o teach w le, wi th change regiona easily y, mad al l govern ut ces. sc or n s or de r being li ng ui st s as it their say, ho ling he r hout ol d imp who shown to in and was into have an y us I far likel wi sh su ch as e mu st uist tio he lp fact, sp ee ch of o so ci ha va ri the an d n own in to the d r pe o by ty te xt th l n o - th as po s tan in a o y s ve t m a e e as - al to do an to to - ir t. - - - people persist in using stigmatized forms of language when they could con - ceivably switch to those, like Eliza’s learned pronunciation in Pygmalion , that would open up additional social opportunities for them. I can perhaps illus - trate with a few examples: • A child of Jamaican descent said something to a friend in the dialect form that speakers from outside of the Caribbean would think of as “Jamaican” (which Jamaicans call “patois”). Her mother turned to her and said “Don’t speak patois!” A few minutes later the mother was speaking on her cell phone, in perfect Jamaican patois. • The accent of presidential candidate John Kerry is that of a Boston Brahmin. It is the regional accent of an exceptionally high-prestige, privileged group in Massachusetts. Yet you could listen to radio commercials in Massachusetts all day and not hear one minute of Boston Brahmin speech. Instead, you would often hear the local accents of South Boston, Dorchester, Lynn, or Chelsea being used to sell cars, mattresses, and furniture. • In the Boston area, the stage in school before first grade is pronounced “kindy-garden,” and topsoil, spelled “loam ,” is pronounced “loom.” In Pittsburgh English, the words “to be” can be dropped after the word “needs”: for example, “that homework needs done” or “that room needs cleaned,” and the plural of “you” is not “you” (or even “y’all”), but “younz.” In parts of the Chicagoland area, the university I attended, Loyola Chicago, is pronounced “Ly-ola.” I have lived in all of these areas (for a cumulative eleven years in Boston, four in Pittsburgh, and four in Chicago) and yet I have never pronounced any of these words this way. The complicated ties between language and identity can explain these three seemingly separate sets of observations. In each case, the individuals involved recognize that there is a trade-off between prestige and solidarity . On the one hand, you can adopt the prestige dialect or avoid the more stig - matized form (such as, for example, when the mother told her daughter not to speak patois to her friend). This signals social goods such as education, dis - cipline, and cultural connections. On the other hand, you can choose the dialects of solidarity, expressing trustworthiness, friendliness, and being from the same locality. When people change the forms of dialect that they use, they are said to practice code switching . Code switching is a very complicated process that allows individuals to mediate their own identities. One of the reasons I never say “loom” or “Ly-ola” or “that needs done” is that to adopt the regionalism of an area I was not from seemed to me phony—and this may even be a defensive rationalization, because speakers native to the region might very well catch the fact that I was not a native speaker from some other cues in my language and think that I was mocking them or putting on airs by using a dialect not my own. A person’s attitude toward identity is also extremely significant in regional dialect performance. The great socio-linguist William Labov first made a name for himself by doing research on accent on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Labov found that the traditional Martha’s Vineyard accent, to his surprise, did not reflect gender, ethnicity, or class. Instead, it was closely cor - related to a person’s attitude toward traditional Martha’s Vineyard life. The accent was weakest in those individuals who were planning on leaving the
103 LECTURE FOURTEEN 1 0 “ q w m p Ve m st ca co ch co u t t “ Ja p G a b d “ e t st g r i o a o ye “Pa n t vi b l n h a Vi w i g e sla he in ur ud To p b e Bl In “ 4 u r se a l e e n u f s f a a e a b h d h Pa ig ra so an na s o o o a e ce n te m i m ct m a e sive come n d a te ck ti d le th th e r it ldren ual o a d r d e ba lm,” st.” eyard. l nd r nacu matize d c), r nt matic ta s ge l ” ph s. toi es. ck ec fort, p a s da t e i ern nt s d s tois e e le of f ap s ha io t fo rom ha an ican xical as o of ly l b t socia it t ft Fo ag ol di var in at an s n bl b f owar yea us ly Ther En r a p d ri ma : a Like nt ” ” i d wa y ut og alect th wor Am ct la n tiude e) spea is ar “to an ca “ t ainst nd r “ d tr left co i hey tink,” io /En it an (i.e s glish m S e d r Th A e ye . a ent rs aly ical, also rk ite f s pro re t ld” us l rom tan ge E xamp an erica, e nso ive d ds, ore dito P in frican island fo “ ly, d p co a ar is dup ., the glish set nglish) ms to spe atois k sult; for is ide u ato rm, s t blem n Car Afr i a s dar d cre s or W hesio n “th se co V stan lexica, br be p evr nd o re o towa ism a the n m ar ant the py” ntiy ling ern rod islan can cif, “a ig is, ne f est le lso al eak.” -Amer nclusio ica is” la ated the par d ib cause p on lexicon e so for inaly itse h ks” “fity” , atic, ato isve be dar Ma bea mo Bla Britsh the acu ucing as of th n shift is clu id for rd be Ind n- a me e, on tialy at d, e spe a l no er ea a lf is fo almost th so xplain rth d fr a Amer re Voca les ck dis it co id ste su nd n ican la le “g tim ia b liv th e have nd om r Fre ed n for e educa m English. f “Cr entiy u ecaus r ech , of a rely, c a mes Britsh ns term ge host.” -subjectiv “ask,” e tincve Eng is “tek” e r beca nd wa more ountr ost ’ in solida st or English e s syntac d to sim persit. nch m “fity” a mu eol bulary English stro cluding ican and and Vineyar pla why o s African sting shift, of ret ainld “Stand cert lish voiced resa “dis,” n ted use rath so ltipe use plifcaton, fo almo ies. It ng term “de usibly lower ained distnc t English rity. En creol outsid r he mingled But ar phon ainly Eng d shou Vern extra ic d “ West but er tha include wh ialect consa talked,” ks” it e glish” Altho and “fo mainld than -American to st la d chers fea . lingu meani is or amon ju -midle than rd er lish ngua It the a b stil aculr ld cer de th fo ers), ordina st ive evn in cent. e is tures. logica, t-bo voicels was I We used “th e r ugh ndias forms n in scribe am with both linke or whic ist tainly fa s a ter “ o ot (Blac indvu had m fe g desk,” at” “wek” ng nt st f most ne ct te ic and es “West tom” ost ature ong m strong acen fr hig b ther , ry and has chnial by Th In cl ver e d arly iends othe Instea fea becom “broken a voice sup Engl whose “ t gram becaus u nd in dian k h hat verna patois” ofte hap a to stigmazed the e the ster the e other y fo t tures for s and char alveo En wor p al pa fiten m r posed a West t India est deci h close restig r is y ish wer n d l sp was and ave d, ost exp maticl, “ glish rt elit, E most “sole es ens walked,” simplfcaton ate term king-clas cular surp wil the a acteris “flim” nglish” eakrs spea in spech.” be tho re nd (i.e, (or (an sign erinc “d Afr b in closey its r to gion tho mpt cause thou not m tha not u Creol,” ,” en . risng se at.” educat vo sto obv tha African Ve d se sit Cariben “Pa uch kers ican to the “ for u they se ifcant dialect han the icels and se mut who al ic ps: uations use rnacul) to has sand would ind of ious re-stl Metahsi es. ate s and tois” mea “ indvuals next mor phonlg variets. film.” Labov F tha southern comu rots. make are tied d-mile” Creol “ ivduals “think” wer get” lexica or -American it Thes di gr mpts aly speak of examp “ at items ns form e in bes” has own, many discr clase inter most- h man to of thes fre the ave com as mixe un English their a ph wa o l ind ni in d so b th - n fea lan - in fo d a y a im ical, e wh e o - in dis le r is s us e er the ti s cial for s - r - of d i s. - - - is n a - - - o - African-American English also regularly deletes final consonants if they are stops, so “tired” becomes “tire.” In recent years another deletion rule has led to more and more speakers pronouncing “all right” as “a–ight,” with a glottal stop replacing the two liquids, the first of which has already been deleted from most casual American speech. One of the most distinctive grammatical features of African-American English is the complete deletion of the copula (forms of the word “to be”) in situations in which in Standard English the form can be contracted. For example: Hyper-correct Standard English African American English This is my friend. That’s my friend. That my friend. The girl is late. The girl’s late. The girl late. African-American English uses the verb “be” instead to indicate the aspect of a verb: “The girl be late” means that the girl is regularly or habitually late. The “be” form is then inflected as a regular rather than an irregular verb, as in “I listen to the radio when I bees on my way to work” instead of changing the “be” to “am,” it gets an “-s” inflection. Double and triple negatives are also regular forms in African-American English, as they were in Old and Middle (and Shakespearean) English, indicating emphasis. African-American English can communicate “authenticity,” honesty, or per - sonal connection. In the entertainment industry it is obviously linked to the popularity and appeal of many figures. The dialect is certainly stigmatized in many sectors of society, and many African-Americans practice code switching, speaking one way in mixed-race groupings and another in mono-racial groups. The Future of English The development of regional and class-based variations of English, and the persistence of even those forms that are stigmatized, tells us something very important about the future of English, a language spoken in one form or anoth - er by nearly one fifth of the population of the earth. And there is a network effect with any one dominant language: The more people who speak it, the more valuable it is to learn to speak it. For native English speakers this is obvi - ously a good thing, as their natural linguistic ability, acquired with no effort in childhood, provides advantages in the worlds of commerce, entertainment, and technology, to name only three areas in which English is rapidly becoming a global standard. But the success of English has come at the expense of many other languages: Scholars and speakers rightly worry that the more than six thousand living languages will be radically reduced in the next century, with only relatively few major languages (perhaps the top one hundred in numbers of speakers) surviving the next five hundred years. This would be a tragedy, a loss of human accomplishment and invention no less important than the loss of species from the rainforests and tropical seas of the world. But the spread of new dialect forms, the diversification of English, and the persistence of even the most stigmatized variants are cause for some opti - mism. It seems that we humans will preserve, even in the face of incessant and intense pressure, our home languages. We may switch codes, we may even choose to adopt prestige dialects, but somehow we retain the ability and the desire to speak in the languages that make us feel solidarity and
105 LECTURE FOURTEEN 1 0 w o co b 6 f u il m il Eng l t be fort. i n l al i a sh so E d ven rive ha . s if t be o ou br n r anch lan o ne gu o of age ut, chang to star diversfy, e ts a fr nd om diversty, and the same to chan and ro ge I t, e co xpect it se ntiualy. ems tha to its T have he fut sto re r y FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. What is “patois”? 2. What does the development of regional and class-based variations of English, and the persistence of stigmatized forms, tell us about the future of English?
Suggested Reading
Crystal, David. The Stories of English . New York: Overlook Press, 2005.
Other Books of Interest
Cassidy, Frederic G. Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Maalouf, Amin. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. New York: Penguin, 2003. Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994.
107 COURSE MATERIALS
Suggested Readings:
Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. Crystal, David. The Stories of English . New York: Overlook Press, 2005. Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, eds. An Introduction to Language. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle Publishing, 2002. McCrum, Robert, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran, eds. The Story of English. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Other Books of Interest:
Algeo, John, and Thomas Pyles, eds. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Heinle, 2004. Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. 2nd ed. Ossining, NY: Walter de Gruyter, Inc., 2002. Cassidy, Frederic G. Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006. Crystal, David. Words, Words, Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Crystal, David, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Roy Harris. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1986. Jesperson, Otto. Growth and Structure of the English Language. New York: Free Press, 1968. Kaplan, Jeffrey P. English Grammar: Principles and Facts. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994. Kosslyn, Stephen M., and Olivier Koenig. Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience. New York: Free Press, 1995. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Maalouf, Amin. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. New York: Penguin, 2003. Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. ———. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. S
L Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994. A I
R Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. “American Dialects.” Part 5. The Cambridge E
T Encyclopedia of the English Language. Ed. David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge
A University Press, 2003. M E
S These books are available online through www.modernscholar.com R or by calling Recorded Books at 1-800-636-3399. U O C
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