Name :Qhusnul Amalia

Nim :200512501047
English Literature B

Read Elly Van Gelderen's A History of English Language (Chapter 1) and answer the following
questions:
1. What are some instances of recent changes in English? Discuss whether they are internal or
external changes.
-language change is actually a question of why varieties develop within a language. For
example, Canadian and South African English have developed their own language
identities even though they are still 'English' in their grammar. And changes are
linguistically motivated, or internal changes. External and internal changes.Lots of
internal and external changes interact.
-External changes are caused by language contact (between speakers of different
languages), or innovation by speakers, or political or social identity issues. Oceans can
facilitate contact whereas mountains can stop them. External changes are unpredictable
because it is impossible to predict who will migrate to where, or what modes will be
caught on They are sometimes easiest to track as, for example, in checking when loan
words.

-Internal reasons have to do with children analyzing the language they hear in a slightly
different way than the generations before them (and constructing their grammar
accordingly). This could be a case of changing vowels or consonants: Old English ham
changing to home and skip to ship. Internal changes also occur when the category of a
word is reanalyzed as, for example, when prepositions begin to be used to introduce
sentences, i.e. as complements. Such is the preposition in He swims like a fish but is
expanded to introduce sentences in She did like I said. This is an internal change, as is the
loss of case marking on who and stranding the preposition in ‘Who did you talk to’.

2. How can we stop or encourage language change? Think of an actual example

As we know Changes and developments are influenced by various factors that are difficult to
avoid, both internal and external factors. This can occur as a result of cultural acculturation
which is preceded by the process of shifting speakers of one language to the environment of
speakers of other languages, resulting in changes in new dialects, the creation of new words,
even frequent changes in the syntactic arrangement. Ss, the things that we can do to stop or
encourage language change is learn more about language (linguistics) then:

1. Describe the system of social status and social level in relation to the habit of speaking in
public.
2. Help someone improve their social status through the use of language and find
solutionsin the problem of bilingualism or multilingualism in the community.
 3. Examining the dialect phenomenon in a bilingual or multilingual society in relation to
language change and development.

for example in our daily lives, because after all the formulation of language
(sociolinguistics) given by the experts will not be separated from the problem of language
relations with activities or social aspects, now here we can do the things mentioned above to
stop or encourage language change

B. Again, Read Elly Van Gelderen's chapter 3, and answer the following questions:
1. What do you know about Grimm's Law?

Grimm’s Law is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE)

stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC.

(1) bhrater-frater-brother

dhwer-foris-door

ghordho-hortus-yard (< Old English geard)

pitr-pater-father

tu-tu-thou

krnga-cornu-horn

kanab-cannabis-hemp (< Old English henep)

danta-dentis-tooth

jna-gnoscere-know/ken

Grimm’s Law distinguishes Germanic languages from languages such as Latin

and Greek and modern Romance languages such as French and Spanish. The latter are
closer to Latin, and keep père and padre, respectively, for ‘father’. The change probably
took place a little over 2,000 years ago. Within Germanic, many changes have taken
place that help differentiate languages such as English, German, and Swedish.
2. How does linguistic reconstruction works?

One is the Comparative Method we observed at work in Sec tion 3, without giving it a
name. Linguists often compare related languages. For instance, compare French, Italian,
Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish in (5). Suppose we did not know the parent language.
How could we reconstruct it?

(5) French Italian Portuguese Catalan Spanish meaning

cheval cavallo cavalo cavall caballo ‘horse’

(the initial c represents [k]; ch in French is [w])

We might first identify the form the majority of languages use. Applying the majority
rule

to (5) produces *cavallo. (We indicate a reconstruction by means of an *).

We could also reconstruct by looking at the actual rules to see if they make phonetic
sense. To get from *cavallo to the modern languages, we would need the following rules:

(6) a. [k] → [w] (French)

b. [v] → [b], between two vowels (Spanish)

c. ending/double consonant disappears (French, Italian, and Catalan)

Rules a and c make sense since both palatalization and loss of endings and of double
consonants occur frequently. Rule b, however, does not make sense since typically stops become
fricatives between vowels and not the other way around. Therefore, instead of *cavallo, we
reconstruct *caballo. We keep rules a and c, but change b into a frication rule (stops to
fricatives). Even though the rule has to apply in two languages, it is preferable linguistically:

(7) redone (6b) [b] → [v], between two vowels (French, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan
Note that in many Spanish varieties, the b is changing to a fricative as well, and that
makes

(7) more plausible.

this kind of a methodology for reconstructions has been criticized extensively.With the
spread of agriculture and other technical advances, words could have been bor rowed
and their similarities might not be proof of linguistic relationships; they could be
coincidental.