Seminar 1. Germanic languages.

Old English
1. What kind of languages does English belong to?
English is a Germanic or Teutonicgroup of languages which belongs to the Indo-European languages.
2. What is the semantic change? Name types of semantic changes.
Language Change
• Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other
features of language vary over time. It’s an internal change. Semantic changes include:
• pejoration, in which a term acquires a negative association
(Attitude / originally/ was a technical term, meaning 'position, pose.' Now: 'mental state, mode of thinking‘e.g.
He's got an attitude means 'he's got a confronting manner (probably uncooperative, antagonistic)
• Amelioration, in which a term acquires a positive association (nice when it first appeared in Middle English
(about 1300) was '(of persons or their actions) foolish, silly, simple; ignorant, senseless, absurd.‘)
(Naughty: Long ago, if you were naughty, you had nothing. Then it came to mean evil or immoral, and now you
are just badly behaved.)
• narrowing, in which a term acquires a narrower meaning. For example, skyline formerly referred to any
horizon, but now in the USA it has narrowed to a horizon decorated by skyscrapers.
3.Comparative linguistics.
Comparative Linguistics: Investigation of similarities and differences among languages.

Comparative reconstruction, usually referred to just as reconstruction, establishes features of the ancestor
of two or more related languages by means of the comparative method.
The Comparative Method
• If a similarity between forms in two languages is observed this can in principle be attributed to:
• Necessity (BUT: linguistic signs are arbitrary),
• Chance (this is always the most boring account of anything, but cf(compare). English dog, Mbambaram dog)
• Borrowing (e.g. Japanese kompyutaa)
• A historical connection: common origin:
• So we can conclude that English and German are quite closely related, and that Latin is more distantly related
to both, while Kannada is unrelated to either.
Comparative Method
• “One fact and one hypothesis”
- Fact: Similarities between certain languages are so numerous that there must be another explanation.
- Hypothesis: These languages must derive from a common ancestor.E.G.
“Daughter-in-law”
• Sanskrit: snusaa* • Old English: snoru • Old Church Slavonic: snǔkha • Russian: snokhá • Latin: nurus
• Greek: nuós • Armenian: nu
Steps of the Comparative Method
• 1) Assemble cognate lists (cognate – a word that looks similar in two languages and has the same meaning)
• 2) Establish correspondence sets
• 3) Discover complements
• 4) Reconstruct proto-phonemes
• 5) Examine the reconstructed system
Linguistic reconstruction – The comparative method:
When two languages can be traced back to a common ancestor language, we say that they are genetically
related.
Relationships: Proto/Parent language Daughter language/dialect Related words are referred to as cognates.
4. Division of the Germanic languages.
Germanic group begins with the appearance of what is known as the ProtoGermanic (PG) language.
*It is supposed to have split from related IE tongues sometime between the 15th and 10th с B.C.
*The would-be Germanic tribes belonged to the western division of the IE speech community.
*PG was never recorded in written form. At the earliest stages of history PG was one language.
*Dialectal differences grew - towards the beginning of our era Germanic appears divided into dialectal
groups and tribal dialects.
 Dialectal differentiation increased with the migrations and geographical expansion of the Teutons caused by
overpopulation, poor agricultural technique and scanty natural resources in the areas of their original settlement.
 PG split into three branches:
-East Germanic (Vindili in Pliny's classification),
-North Germanic (Hilleviones) and
-West Germanic (which embraces Ingveones, Istsevones and Herminones in Pliny's list).
5. East Germanic Languages.
East Germanic was spoken by peoples who migrated back to southeastern Europe. No
East Germanic language is spoken today, and the only written East Germanic language
that survives is Gothic
6. North Germanic Languages.
-The Teutons who stayed in Scandinavia after the departure of the Goths gave rise to the North Germanic
subgroup of languages.
-The speech of the North Germanic tribes showed little dialectal variation until the 9th c. and is regarded as a
sort of common North Germanic parent-language called Old Norse or Old Scandinavian. It has come down to
us in runic inscriptions dated from the 3rd to the 9th c.
(-Runic inscriptions were carved on objects made of hard material in an original Germanic alphabet known as the runic
alphabet or the runes. The runes were used by North and West Germanic tribes.
-The disintegration of Old Norse into separate dialects and languages began after the 9th c., when the Scandinavians
started out on their sea voyages.)

 In Scandinavia the linguistic division followed the political division: there were 3 kingdoms (Sweden,
Denmark and Norway) that were constantly fighting for dominance and they had 3 respective languages
(earliest records in these languages date back to the 13th c.):
 Old Danish – later it developed into Danish
 Old Swedish - later it developed into Swedish
 Old Norwegian – was the last to develop, later transformed into Norwegian
 In the 8th c. A.D. two more North Germanic languages appeared:
 Faroese (In the Faroe Islands the writing was done in Danish for centuries. The first written records in
Faroese appeared only in the 18th c.);
 Icelandic (9th c. A.D.)

7. West Germanic Languages.

 The West Germanic tribes were divided into :
- the Franconians /Franks/ (subdivided into Low, Middle and High Franconians) – settled the lower basin of
the Rhine and with time began to speak the language of the Romanised Celts, The Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes
and the Frisians – settled the coastal territories of the Netherlands, Germany, the south of Denmark and the
British Isles.
 The languages they spoke were:
 Old English – later developed into  English (national language – 16th c.; first written records – 7th c.);
 Old Saxon – later developed into a territorial dialect in Germany;
 Old Frisian – later developed into  Frisian
 High Germans – settled the southern mountainous areas of Germany and spoke Old High German that later
developed into two distinctive languages: German and Yiddish..
8. Main features of the Germanic languages

PHONETIC FEATURES OF GERMANIC

LANGUAGES
 Word Stress
 Force and expiratory stress became the only
type of stress used.
 In Early PG word stress was still as movable as
in ancient IE but in Late PG its position in the
word was stabilized.
 The stress was now fixed on the first syllable,
which was usually the root of the word and
sometimes the prefix; the other syllables were
unstressed.

*In MdE the stress falls on the root morpheme.

9. Periodization of the English language

The Primitive Old English Period (450-700A.D.)

About 500 B.C., Britain was invaded by Celtic tribes, who ruled the islands undisputed for about 500 years. In
43 A.D., however, the islands were invaded by Emperor Claudius and Britain became part of the Roman
Empire. Britain was totally conquered except for Scotland where the Celtic Scots and non-Indo-European Picts
reigned sovereign.
When the Roman empire collapsed and the Roman legionaries went home, they left a power vacuum in
Britain. The Scots and Picts advanced southwards and the weak Celts could not keep them back. The distressed
Celts decided to seek help from three Germanic tribes living in present-day southern Denmark and north-
western Germany. This proved to be a fatal mistake: the three Germanic tribes called the Angles, the Saxons
and the Jutes did not only conquer the Scots, but seeing that the islands were fertile they pushed the weakened
Celts to the peripheries of the island (Wales, Cornwall and Ireland) and took the land for themselves. By
600A.D. the victory was complete and Englaland and English was born.

The Old English Period (700-1100 A.D.)

The oldest manuscripts written with Roman letters found in Britain date from 700 A.D. This thus marks the
beginning of the Old English period. Prior to this date the Jutes, Angles and Saxons had been Christianised,
which meant that they adopted the Roman alphabet and started to produce a comprehensive primarily Christian
literature in English. A number of manuscripts found from this time have given us a fairly good idea of what
Old English looked like, or rather what some old English dialects, primarily the dialect of West Saxon spoken in
Wessex, looked like.

Vikings and their Influence on English

The first Viking attacks on England started around 800 AD and were at first merely plundering raids, but some
fifty years later these attacks had become more serious and groups had even started settling in Britain.

Naturally, the massive migration and settlement that the Scandinavians undertook led to extensive use of the
Norse (Scandinavian) tongue in the area of the Danelaw, and we can see evidence of it even today through its
influences on the English language. The Anglo Saxons and the Vikings were culturally quite similar. They
spoke similar languages and had similar traditions and it appears that the Vikings soon started integrating with
the Anglo Saxons. Scandinavian vocabulary penetrated nearly every area of the English language, but most
words of Scandinavian origin in English are concrete everyday words. A few examples follow here:
o Nouns bank, birth, booth, egg, husband, law, leg, root, score, sister, skin, trust, wing and window
o Adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, low, odd, sly, ugly, weak, and wrong
o Verbs to cast, clip, crawl, cut, die, drown, gasp, give, lift, nag, scare, sprint, take, and want. And of course
the present plural of ‘to be’, are.
o Pronouns both, same, they, them and their
The fact that even the Norse pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ were accepted into English is remarkable; it is
very unusual that grammatical items are borrowed. This suggests that there was extensive contact between the
Anglo Saxons and the Vikings and a gradual integration of the two groups.
Middle English Period (1100-1500)
The Middle English period begins with the Norman conquest at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the duke
of Normandy, William the Conqueror, defeated King Harold and became king of England. The Norman
invasion England in 1066, brought French (F) into England. The Normans (North-men, descendants of Danes),
spoke a French influenced by Germanic dialect. This dialect was Norman French. This led to the unusual
situation, in which the common people spoke one language (English), and the aristocrats another (Norman
French). Naturally, the two languages gradually began to mix into what we now call Middle English.
Norman French Influences on English Vocabulary
By the 13th century approximately 10,000 French words had come into English. About threequarters of these
French loans are still in the language today. These new words duplicated words that existed in Old English from
Anglo-Saxon times. Sometimes one word would supplant the other or both would co-exist, but develop slightly
different meanings. For example, doom (OE) and judgment (F), hearty (OE) and cordial (F), and house (OE)
and mansion (F).
A study of the types of words that were borrowed from Norman French says much about the socio- cultural
situation of the time. The vast majority of the borrowed words belong to the spheres of court, administration,
law, the army, the Church, art, literature, medicine and the sciences. Some examples include prince, duke,
count, baron, crown, majesty, mayor, minister, parliament, state, accuse, crime, defend, judge, justice, prison,
punish, army, battle, lieutenant, navy, soldier, dean, divine, prayer, preach, saint, vicar, image, paint,
literature, poem, medicine, physician, surgeon, science, theory, invent etc. It is significant that the names of the
domestic animals (which were tended by the Englishmen of the lower classes) remained native, while the
corresponding dishes (which were eaten by the Norman lords) are often French: ox-beef, calf-veal, pig-pork,
sheep-mutton,
hen- poultry. Not only did Norman French bring great changes to Old English vocabulary, spelling changes also
occurred. The Norman scribes listened to the English they heard around them, and began to spell it according to
the conventions they had previously used for French, such as qu for cw (queen for cwen). The scribes also
introduced gh (instead of h) in such words as night and enough, and ch (instead of c) in such words as church.
Another change introduced was ou for u (as in house). Yet one more change was the use of c before e (instead
of s) in such words as cercle (‘circle’) and cell.
Grammatical Changes in Middle English
Perhaps as a result of the influence of French pronunciation patterns, unstressed vowels were gradually lost in
English. This phonological change had extreme consequences on the grammar of English. As we have seen Old
English was a highly inflected language. These inflections appeared at the end of words and were unstressed.
Because the inflectional endings showed the relationships between words in a sentence, the word order of Old
English was fairly free. As a consequence of the loss of inflectional endings, grammatical relationships began to
be marked through word order and the use of preposition. English thus changed from being a synthetic language
to become an analytic language.
¾ the loss of inflections
¾ loss of grammatical gender
¾ loss of case system
¾ less freedom in word order
¾ greater use of prepositions
The Emergence of a Standard
The Normans gradually became isolated from their French roots. In 1204 King John, a descendant of William
the Conqueror, lost the province of Normandy to the king of France. At the end of the 14th century the Anglo-
Normans no longer had any land left in France. The Normans decided to adopt English as their official language
and in 1362, Parliament was opened in English. This parliament was situated in Westminster, London and this
resulted in the eventual dominance of the London dialect as the standard spoken and written language due to
London’s importance as a commercial centre and seaport, as well as its proximity to the court in Westminster. A
process of standardisation of English had begun.
Modern English (1500-)
Two major factors that influenced the language and served to separate Middle and Modern English were the
Great Vowel Shift and the advent of the printing press.
The Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a change in pronunciation that began around 1400. During the next two centuries
there was a great influx of people into the London region and the different dialects began to affect the
pronunciation patterns of the standard. While modern English speakers can read Chaucer with some difficulty,
Chaucer's pronunciation would have been completely unintelligible to the modern ear. Shakespeare, on the
other hand, would be accented, but understandable. In short we can summarise the vowel shift as a process
which led to long vowel sounds being raised and diphthongised. Chaucer's Lyf (pronounced /lif/), for
example became the modern life.
The principal changes were roughly the following — though exceptions occur; the transitions were not always
complete.
/a:/ -> /e:/ (in e.g. make)
/e:/ -> /i:/ (in e.g. feet)
/i:/ -> /ai/ (in e.g. mice)
/o:/ -> /u:/ (in e.g. boot)
/u:/ -> /au/ (in e.g. mouse)
The Printing Press
The last major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press. William
Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. Books became cheaper and as a result, literacy became
more common. Publishing for the masses became a profitable enterprise, and works in English, as opposed to
Latin, became more common. Finally, the printing press brought standardization to English. The dialect of
London, where most publishing houses were located, became the standard. Spelling and grammar became fixed,
and the first English dictionary was published in 1604. Note that much of this standardisation in spelling took
place before the Great Vowel shift was completed, and old pronunciation patterns are often reflected in English
spelling.
Early Modern English Vocabulary
The Early Modern English period coincided with the Renaissance. This was a great time of learning and
discovery. Many new words had to be found for all the new concepts that needed naming. At the time, there was
a heated debate going on in England whether these terms should be coined from Anglo Saxon words or whether
they should be borrowed from Latin and Greek, which were considered to be the languages of learning. To cut a
long story short, the Latin/Greek promoters won the dispute (later called the Inkhorn Controversy), and a great
number of Latin and Greek terms were borrowed into English. A final factor which affected the vocabulary of
English was the expansion of the British Empire. People came in contact with languages all over the world and
borrowed freely from them, especially words denoting objects and phenomena that they themselves lacked
words for. Examples include taboo (Polynesian), bungalow, jungle and yoga (Indian languages), tea and
ketchup (Chinese), boomerang (Aboriginal languages), moccasin and squaw (Native American languages)
10. Old English system of vowels.
VOWELS
 They underwent different kinds of alterations:
*Qualitative changes / affect the quality of the sound
*Quantitative changes / make long sound short [ i:] -->[ i]
 dependent / positional/ - are restricted to certain positions, for example, a sound may change under the
influence of the neighboring sounds or in a certain type of a syllable
 independent /spontaneous changes – take place irrespective of phonetic conditions as they affect a certain
sound in all positions.
Ablaut
Ablaut or gradation is a spontaneous, positionally
independent alteration of vowels inhabited by the
Germanic languages from the Common IE period. This
ancient phenomenon consisted in alteration of vowels
in the root, suffix or ending depending on the
grammatical form or meaning of the word.
 I-UMLAUT
 a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel or
a front vowel becomes closer to /i/ when the following
syllable contains /i/, /i:/, or /j/. In many cases, the final
front vowels were lost.
 This process took place separately in the various
Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 AD, and
affected all of the early languages except for Gothic.

2.Breaking
• æ > ea before combinations of "r+ consonant", "l+cons.",
"h+cons.", and also before h final:
• ærm > earm, æld > eald,
æhta > eahta, sæh > seah
• e > eo before "r + cons.", "lc, lh, h +cons.", and before h
final:
• herte > heorte, melcan >
meolcan, selh > seolh, feh > feoh
3. Palatalization /softening/
• This is the process which went under the influence of g, c,
sc before vowels in the beginning of the word:
• e > ie (gefan > giefan)
• æ > ea (cæster > ceaster)
• æ' > éa (gæ'fon > géafon)
• a > ea (scacan > sceacan)
• o > eo (scort > sceort)
4. i-mutation
• It is caused by i (or j) in the next syllable, it affects all vowels, except i and e.
• Vowels move from their back position to the new front one:
• a > e (framian > fremman)
• æ > e (tælian > tellan)
• á > æ' (lárian>læ'ran)
• o > e (ofstian > efstan)
5. Back Mutation
• Appears before liquids and labial consonants (i.e. r, l; p, b, f, m):
• i > io/eo (hira > heora)
• e > eo (herot > heorot)
• a > ea (saru > searu)
Contraction of vowels due to a dropped H
• After the consonant had dropped, two vowels met, and they collided into one long vowel:
• ah + vowel > eah + vowel > éa, (slahan > sleahan > sléan)
• eh, ih + vowel > éo (sehan > seohan > séon)
• oh + vowel > ó - (fóhan > fón, hóhan > hón)
11. Old English system of consonants.
all consonants are pronounced!!!
• Identical to Modern English b [b], p [p], d [d], t [t], l [l], m [m], k [k] rare, x [ks] (uncommon), w [w]
• OE digraphs--(most Modern English digraphs come into use in during Middle English)
• cg [d] ecg (edge), secg (sedge, weeds), hrycg (ridge)
• sc [sh] disc (dish), scinu (shin), s celd (shield) sc + a, o, u - [sk] ascian /ask/, tusc / tusk/
OE short and long consonants
• The pronunciation of continuants, that is, consonants that can be held on, like the fricatives [f], [h], [s], can
obviously be made longer or shorter.
• But plosive (stop) consonants were also doubled in spelling to indicate a pronunciation similar to that of, for
example, the MnE <-pp-> combination in a compound word like hop-pole, or <- tt-> in part-time.

On þȳ ȳlcan ʒēre worhte sē foresprecena here ʒeweorc bē Lyʒan twentiʒ mila būfan
Lundenbyriʒ. þā þæs on sumera fōron micel dæl þāra burʒware ond ēāc ōþres folces þæt hīē ʒedȳdon æt
þāra Deniscan ʒeweorce, ond þær wurdon ʒeflīēmde, and sume fēower cyninʒes þeʒnas ofslēānne. (The
Parker Chronicle)
Translation: In that very year the before-mentioned (Danish) army built a fortress by the river
Lea 20 miles above London. Then in summer there came a great part of those citizens and also
of different other people so that they reached the Danish fortress and there they were defeated
and about four king’s warriors were killed.
a) Old English / Anglo-Saxon was sometimes written with a version of the Runic alphabet, brought to Britain
by the AngloSaxons until about the 11th century (1000’S).
2) [i] sound , ʒēre –year , twentiʒ-twenty
3) micel- much [ch], ʒeweorc- work [k]
4) þā-[ð] –they , þæt [ð]-that , ōþres [ð] –other
5) bufan [v] –above (between voiced sounds) , ME abufen / a-boven
Translation: Ones he understood that all the people were devoted to him, he ordered that they should send him
food and horses; and after that he went southwards with all his army and entrusted the ships and the hostages to
Cnut, his son.
a) bēad , betǣhte
b) þā , ða, þæt , syððan , sūðweard [ð]