Part II. Commentary on linguistic phenomena

2.1. History of English

When analyzing a word from the historical point of view students can try different approaches to the problem:

1. The origin of the word.

Intrigue

This word belongs to the group of later French borrowings of 17^th‑18^th centuries. As many words of this group it has retained a foreign appearance to the present day. The stress remains on the last syllable as in French. The word is pronounced with long [ i: ] indicated by the letter i like French words. It has a French spelling (the final letters –ue which are silent). All these facts prove that the word intrigue has not been completely assimilated in English.

2. Phonetic changes.

Child

The affricate [t∫] goes back to O.E. velar (plosive voiceless) [k] which was palatalised before a front vowel [i] to [k’].Toward the end of the O.E. period the palatal consonant developed to the affricate. In M.E. it was indicated by means of a special digraph ch which was introduced by French scribes.

The vowel [i] used to be a long vowel in O.E. (it was lengthened before the cluster ld in the 9^th century). In Early N.E. it became a diphthong [ai] due to the Great Vowel Shift.

The plural form of the word, children, has a short vowel in the root. The lengthening of [i] did not take place because the cluster ld was followed by another consonant.

3. Grammar phenomena.

Children

The plural form of the noun child has a non-standard ending -en. In O.E. the noun child (an s-stem, weak declension) took the ending –ru: cild – cildru. The ending of n-stems –en was added to the old forms of the plural in M.E. and later was preserved in N.E. As the ending -en was especially active in the southern dialects we can suppose that the form children might have come from this source.

4. Complex analyses.

In this type of the analyses students have to take into consideration various aspects of one and the same word (the origin of the word and its spelling, the origin of the word and phonetic changes, grammar phenomena and spelling etc). For example, the complex (and full) analyses of the word child comprises points 2 and 3 and also the information about the origin of this word (a native English word).

Here is the example of the complex analyses of the verb to give:

In O.E. this verb belonged to the group of strong verbs and formed its stems by means of vowel gradation (ablaut). Judging by the marker which followed the root vowel (a single consonant), the verb was included in class 5. The system of gradation of class 5 can be described as quantitative ablaut. The remains of it still can be clearly traced in the three forms of the verb: give – gave – given, which represent accordingly the infinitive and the present forms (i), the 3d person singular, past indicative (a) and the 2d participle (i), the former fourth form. At present the verb belongs to the group of irregular verbs.

Modern spelling and pronunciation of the verb can be traced back to ME. The letter v was introduced by the French scribes to denote the fricative voiced consonant [v] which in M.E. became a separate phoneme. The letter g which replaced O.E. з was introduced to denote the sound [g]. But here it should be mentioned that in O.E. the initial з was palatalised before a front vowel and later changed into [j] as in yard, young etc. The velar [g] of N.E. give could not result from phonetic development of palatal з. Its only source could be the Scandinavian variant. We may suppose that the word give was borrowed from the Northen dialect where O.E. and Scandinavian variants might blend. According to the textbooks the form give is found in late M.E., in the 15^th century.

The original ending of the infinitive was weakened in M.E. to [ə] which was lost in Late M.E. though it continued to be spelt as –e. This mute –e still can be seen at the end of the verb.

The word give belongs to the Germanic layer of the vocabulary and can be compared to the German verb geben. It is a native English word the phonetics of which was slightly influenced by the corresponding Scandinavian word.