Changes in English Language over Time

INTRODUCTION

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other
languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called
Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the
southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral
speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and
Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish), and West
(German, Dutch [and Flemish], Frisian, and English). Though closely related to English, German
remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of
inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands
off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English.
Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most
nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.

Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the

ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian,
Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years, English words have
been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin,
Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The German and
Chinese words for the noun man are exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne,
Männer, Männern. Chinese has one form: ren. English stands in between, with four forms: man,
man’s, men, men’s. In English, only nouns, pronouns (as in he, him, his), adjectives (as in big,
bigger, biggest), and verbs are inflected. English is the only European language to employ
uninflected adjectives; e.g., the tall man, the tall woman, compared to Spanish el hombre alto
and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the Modern English word ride is compared with the
corresponding words in Old English and Modern German, it will be found that English now has
only 5 forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern
German reiten has 16.
Changes over Time

Over the last 1,200 years or so, English has undergone extensive changes in its vowel system but
many fewer changes to its consonants.

In the Old English period, a number of umlaut processes affected vowels in complex ways, and
unstressed vowels were gradually eroded, eventually leading to a loss of grammatical
case and grammatical gender in the Early Middle English period. The most important umlaut
process was *i-mutation (c. 500 CE), which led to pervasive alternations of all sorts, many of
which survive in the modern language: e.g. in noun paradigms
(foot vs. feet, mouse vs. mice, brother vs. brethren); in verb paradigms (sold vs. sell); nominal
derivatives from adjectives ("strong" vs. "strength", broad vs. breadth, foul vs. filth) and from
other nouns (fox vs. "vixen"); verbal derivatives ("food" vs. "to feed"); and comparative
adjectives ("old" vs. "elder"). Consonants were more stable, although velar consonants were
significantly modified by palatalization, which produced alternations such
as speak vs. speech, drink vs. drench, wake vs. watch, bake vs. batch.

The Middle English period saw further vowel changes. Most significant was the Great Vowel
Shift (c. 1500 CE), which transformed the pronunciation of all long vowels. This occurred after
the spelling system was fixed, and accounts for the drastic differences in pronunciation between
"short" mat, met, bit, cot vs. "long" mate, mete/meet, bite, coat. Other changes that left echoes in
the modern language were homorganic lengthening before ld, mb, nd, which accounts for the
long vowels in child, mind, climb, etc.; pre-cluster shortening, which resulted in the vowel
alternations in child vs. children, keep vs. kept, meet vs. met; and trisyllabic laxing, which is
responsible for alternations such as grateful vs. gratitude, divine vs. divinity, sole vs. solitary.

Among the more significant recent changes to the language have been the development of rhotic
and non-rhotic accents (i.e. "r-dropping"); the trap-bath split in many dialects of British English;
and flapping of t and d between vowels in American English and Australian English.

In the present day, English is used in many parts of the world, as a first, second or foreign
language, having been carried from its country of origin by former colonial and imperial activity,
the slave trade, and recently, economic, cultural and educational prestige. It continues to change
at all linguistic levels, in both standard and non-standard varieties, in response to external
influences (e.g. modern communications technologies; contact with other world languages) and
pressures internal to the language system (e.g. the continuing impulse towards an efficient,
symmetrical sound-system and the avoidance of grammatical ambiguity).

1. Below are a few examples of semantic change;

 The word “awful” originally meant "inspiring wonder or fear". It is a portmanteau of the
words "awe" and "full", used originally as a shortening for "full of awe". In contemporary usage
the word usually has negative meaning.

 The word “demagogue” originally meant "a popular leader". Now the word has strong
connotations of a politician who panders to emotions and prejudice.

 The word “egregious” originally meant something that was remarkably good. Now it means
something that is remarkably bad or flagrant.

 The word "guy" was used as a term for any "person of grotesque appearance" and then to a
general reference for a male person. However, in the 20th century under the influence of
American popular culture, the word "guy" has been gradually replacing "fellow," "bloke,"
"chap" and now in plural , it refers to a mixture of genders (e.g., "Come on, you guys!" could be
directed to a group of men and women).

 The word “gay” used to mean “bright, cheerful” before the 1960s but now it generally means
“homosexual’ (McMahon, 1994, p. 175)

2. Syntax Change (Grammar)

History records change in grammatical constructions. English syntax is very slow to change
compared with vocabulary change which can be seen as fairly superficial and ephemeral.

Modern English grammar is different from old English in many aspects. One example would be,
old English distinguished gender - the third person singular demonstrative nominative pronoun
had three froms: /se/ was the masculine form,/ paet/ was neuter form, and / seo/ was the
feminine form. However, in modern English, there is only one form of the third person singular
demonstrative pronoun, that, regardless of case of gender ( Rowe & Levine, 2009, p.359).

In another example, in modern English, the word “you” is used for both the singular and the
plural form. In old English, the word “thou” was used for addressing one person; ye for more
than one. However, the word “You” was around then, and while thou and ye were used as a
subject of a clause, “you” was used as the object. In Early Modern English, the distinction
between subject and object uses of ye and you had virtually disappeared, and you became the
norm in all grammatical functions and social situations. The use of “Ye” had eventually become
old-fashioned (Thomasom, n.d).

3. Phonological Change (SOUND)

Sound change consists of the practice of language change which causes the phonetic change or
phonological change. It also includes the substitution of phonetic feature which lead to the total
loss of the original sound and a new one is introduced (Wikipedia, 2012).

English pronunciation is gradually changing, although it continues to reflect both geographical

and social differences among speakers. No longer is it true, if it ever was that all educated people
speak with Received Pronunciation (RP). A person’s speech can gradually alter over the years in
the direction of those around, as is shown by British people who pick up an American accent in a
very short time (Aitchison, 1991, p. 108).

A few examples of sound changes based on different periods are mentioned below. In the early
twentieth century,

 the vowel in words such as cloth and cross switched from being that of thought to that of lot;

 people stopped making a distinction in pairs such as flaw and floor;

 the quality of the "long O" vowel changed (goat, home, know);

 the quality of the "short A" vowel changed (back, man);

 people stopped using a "tapped" r-sound between vowels (very sorry).

In the mid twentieth century,

 words like sure, poor, tour started to sound identical to shore, pour, tore;

 the weak vowels in words such as visibility, carelessness drifted away from the sound of kit;

 people started to insert a t-sound in words such as prince, making it sound like prints;

 a ch-sound became respectable in words such as perpetual, and a j-sound in graduate;

 the glottal stop started to replace the traditional t-sound in phrases such as quite nice, it seems.
In the late twentieth century,

 the vowel sound at the end of words such as happy, coffee, valley is growing tenser;

 the OO-sounds of goose and foot are losing their lip-rounding and backness;

 the glottal stop extends into ever more phonetic environments (not only, but also);

 in certain positions, the l-sound is changing into a kind of w-sound (milk, myself, middle)

 ch- and j-sounds are spreading to words such as Tuesday, reduce (like chooseday,

rejuice) (Wells, 1999).

4. Spelling Change

There are regulatory organizations to preserve national languages in many countries but neither
the US nor Great Britain has such regulatory bodies in place. The English language changes with
the publication of new dictionaries, or the way media uses language, or with the creation of
colloquial terms. Below are a few examples of spelling changes that took place in the history of
the English language.

Spelling during 16 and 17 century Re-spelling

aventure adventure
crume crumb
avice advice
descryve describe
Nevew nephew
Langage language
Samon salmon

2.7 Self Evaluation

1. Describe lexical, phonological and grammatical features that characterize modern English
2. Distinguish between early modern English and the current modern English on the bases
of vocabulary, phonology and grammar