Booklet_4th_ed_12-13_injaz
.pdfM. Babenko. Lecture Notes and Practical Tasks in the History of English Language and its Varieties
A vowel articulated with the highest point of the tongue placed at the back of the mouth. Back vowels include /u, υ, o, ɔ, a/.
Breaking: The term ‘breaking’ describes an early OE sound change, in which front vowels diphthongized before certain back consonants, namely before /r/ or /l/ + following consonant and before the velar fricative /x/ (=<h>).
Borrowing: A term used in comparative and historical linguistics to refer to a linguistic form taken over by one language or dialect from another; such borrowings are usually known as ‘loan words’ (e.g. restaurant, chagrin, which have come into English from French), and several types have been recognized.
Refers to inflections, or grammatical forms, of pronouns, nouns, and
adjectives to denote their syntactic functions within the clause. OE had at least four cases. Nominative and Accusative were cases for the subject and direct object of a clause, respectively. The Dative case was most typically used for indirect objects, the Genitive was typically a case to denote possession. The 5th case was Instrumental.
Clause: A syntactic unit that contains at least a subject and a verb: e.g., She spoke. Cluster (consonant cluster): Two or more consonants occurring together: e.g., ‘cl’ in clever or ‘str’ in street. The term is used to refer to any sequence of adjacent consonants, especially those occurring initially or finally in a syllable, such as the initial ‘br’of bread, or the final ‘st’ of best.
Cognate: Having a common linguistic ancestor. Cognate languages have derived from a shared parent language: e.g., English and German from ProtoGermanic. Cognate words derive from an earlier single word or word element: e.g., the English eight and the Latin octo from IE oktō(u).
The method used in comparative philology. The technique involves comparing cognate forms from genetically related languages (such as those of the Indo-European family) with a view to reconstructing the proto-language from which all others can be taken to have derived. Such a
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Diachronic: Pertaining to historical dimensions of language: e.g., linguistic change over the course of time. Cf. synchronic.
Old English dialects include Anglian (which consists of
Northumbrian and Mercian), Kentish, and West Saxon. From the late tenth century onwards, late West Saxon was widely used as a written standard. Middle English dialects are conventionally identified by the regions like Northern, Midlands, and Southern, although they comprised a continuum with many more varieties. The dialect of London, which evolved in stages during the late Middle English period, became a privilege dialect on which the standard form for ModE was based.
Digraph: The combination of two letters to represent a single sound, to signify one phoneme, as in the ‘th’ of this.
Vowel sounds that are made up of two distinct sounds joined together, produced by having one sound gliding into another, as the sound [~s] in the modern English word house).
Disyllabic: Consisting of two syllables: e.g., e-cho and be-lieve are disyllabic words. A word is monosyllabic when having only one syllable (e.g., bid, stretch) or trisyllabic when having three syllables (e.g., un-der-stand, com-pa-ny).
Early New English (ENE): The language that emerged as English national
language at the beginning of the Great Vowel shift, roughly in the middle of the 15th century and was spoken during the time necessary for the completion of the Great Vowel Shift (15th – 16th centuries).
Ending: Also called grammatical suffixes, endings or inflections are groups of letters attached to the ends of words to indicate the grammatical relationships.
Family: A term used in historical linguistic studies to characterize a genetic
model of the relationships between languages. A ‘family’ of languages is the set of languages deriving from a common ancestor, or ‘parent’, e.g. the IndoEuropean (IE) family consists of the ‘daughter’ languages Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, etc., which all developed out of Indo-European (IE). Groupings within a
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family may be referred to as sub-families (e.g. the Romance sub-family within the Italic family). The family tree is a representation of these relationships devised by comparative philologists in the nineteenth century.
Family tree: A model of language development common in the last century (the term derives from August Schleicher) which sees languages as splitting further in a manner reminiscent of genetic relationships.
Francophone: French-speaking, having French as a first or main language, usually pertaining to a person or a region in a colonial or post-colonial setting. A Francophone is a French-speaking person typically in Canada.
Fricative: A consonant having audible friction produced by forcing air through a constricted part in the mouth: e.g., /f, v, s, z, θ, ð/.
Front vowel: A vowel articulated with the highest point of the tongue placed at the front of the mouth. Front vowels include /i, e, ε, æ/.
Gender: Syntactically and morphologically relevant classification of nouns,
present in Old English (as in modern German and French) but lost in modern English. The gender to which an animate noun belongs may be determined by sex, but for most nouns in Old English gender (namely, masculine, feminine, or neuter) was grammatical, not directly related to natural genders.
Germanic: A branch of the Indo-European family to which English belongs.
English is a member of the West Germanic division, together with German, Dutch, etc. The other two divisions are North Germanic (e.g., Danish,
Norwegian) and East Germanic (e.g., Gothic).
Great Vowel Shift: The systematic shift in the pronunciation of stressed, long vowels in English, which occurred from the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth century in England and which permanently changed the pronunciation of the English language. It effectively marks the shift from Middle English to Modern English.
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Grimm’s Law: A sound law first worked out in 1822 by Jakob Grimm (1785– 1863) which shows the regular way in which the Germanic sound system diverged from that of Indo-European. Nine sets of correspondences were shown, which fell into a clear phonetic pattern. Voiceless stops in Indo-European became voiceless fricatives in Germanic; voiced stops became voiceless stops; and voiced aspirated stops became voiced stops. These relationships explain, for example, why words which begin with /p/ in Latin, Greek or Sanskrit generally have /f/ in English (e.g. pater – father).
Homorganic consonants: (from homo- "same" and organ "(speech) organ") a phonetics term for consonant sounds which are articulated in the same position or place of articulation in the mouth, such as [m], [p], [b] (pronounced with both lips), or [t], [d], [s], [z], [n], [l] (pronounced by touching the tip of the tongue to the upper gums).
Indo-European: The term used to describe the related languages of Europe,
India, and Iran, which are believed to have descended from a common tongue spoken roughly in the third millennium B.C. by an agricultural peoples originating in Southeastern Europe. English is a member of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Inflection: A change in the form of a word to provide grammatical information: e.g., –s as in texts for plural; –ed as in worked for past tense. Applies to both conjugation and declension.
Kinship terms: The system of lexical items used in a language to express
personal relationships within the family, in both narrow and extended senses.
Lengthening: Sound change usually involving the turning of a short vowel
into a long vowel: e.g., a set of quantitative changes in ME. Sound change from long to short vowels is called shortening.
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Leveling: In historical linguistics, the gradual loss of a linguistic distinction, so that forms which were originally contrastive become identical. For example, Old English nouns generally distinguished nominative and accusative cases, but in Modern English these have been levelled to a single form.
Also called a “semi-vowel”, a liquid falls between a vowel and a consonant: the air flow from the lungs and through the mouth or nose is only partially obstructed, unlike a consonant, in which the stream is obstructed, or a vowel, in which it is not obstructed. Liquids in Modern English and Old English include “r,” “l” and “w”.
Loan word: A word borrowed from another language: e.g., castle (French), inflammation (Latin), koala (Australian aboriginal). In English, borrowing was a particularly productive method of word formation in the early modern period.
Macron: A horizontal bar over the top of a vowel to indicate a long vowel
(ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) is called a macron. Macrons to indicate vowel length are not found in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.
Any unit that indicates a specific feature: e.g., –ed as a tense marker for preterite; –’s as a case marker for the possessive.
Metathesis: The reversal of the linear sequence of sounds in a word. A common form of metathesis is the reversal of /r/ and a short vowel in the histories of both English and German, e.g. three ~ third; bird < ME brid(d). Metathesis is most frequent with vowels but is also found with consonants, e.g. aks, waps for ask, wasp respectively, both historically and regionally in English.
The language, in its various dialects, spoken by the inhabitants of England from roughly the period following the Norman Conquest (the late 11th century) until roughly the period of completion of the Great Vowel Shift (late 15th – early 16th century).
Minor declension noun: Nouns that do not fall into the major declensions (strong and weak) are considered “minor” declension nouns.
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Modern English: The language, in its various dialects, that emerged after the end of the Great Vowel Shift, roughly in the middle of the 16th century. Monophthongs: Vowel sounds that are made up of only one continuously, without any noticeable change in its quality, produced sound: e.g., /i/ in bid, /^/ in bug, /g/ feet.
Multiple negation: Use of two or more negative elements in one sentence to denote negation: e.g., I cannot go no further (Shakespere). It came to be considered non-standard in the prescriptive grammar of the eighteenth century.
Number: Grammatical category for counting, associated especially with
nouns. In English, ‘plural’ and ‘singular’ numbers are distinguished inflectionally (e.g. ‘dogs’ versus ‘dog’). In Old English there was also a dual category, occasionally used with pronouns and adjectives.
Old English: The language, or group of related dialects, spoken by the
Anglo-Saxon people in England from 449 until roughly the end of the 11th century.
Palatalization: Sound change involving consonants adjacent to [i / j] or a
front vowel: e.g., OE [g’] became [d]; ModE [z] has become [w] in occasion. Paradigm: The set of forms associated with a noun or an adjective in forming a declensional class, or with a verb in a conjugational class.
Periodization: The history of English is conventionally divided into three periods. Old English (OE) started in 449 and lasted through the Norman Conquest and the few subsequent decades. The term Anglo-Saxon may be used for Old English to underline its connection with the Germanic languages of the Continent. The second period is Middle English (ME), which ends in the late fifteenth century. The third period is New English (NE) that lasts until nowadays. A subperiod of the New English period that corresponds roughly with the Renaissance period and covers the time necessary for the completion of
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the Great Vowel Shift (15th – 16th centuries) is often referred to as Early New English period (ENE). Contemporary English may be called Present-Day English (PDE) or Modern English (ModE), although there is no consensus as to when it begins.
Grammatical category associated especially with pronouns, identifying individuals in relation to the speaker and hearer. English distinguishes ‘first person’, referring to the speaker(s) – I, we, ‘second person’, referring to the addressee(s) – you, and ‘third person’, referring to one or more individuals who are neither the speaker(s) nor the addressee(s) – he, she, it, they.
Personal pronoun: A word that stands in for a noun and can be used to designate the first, second or third person is a personal pronoun (contrasted with a demonstrative pronoun, which points out something).
Possessive: A grammatical form for indicating possession: –’s is a possessive ending for nouns (e.g., dog’s tail); possessive adjectives include my, their, etc. and possessive pronouns include mine, theirs, etc.
Preterite: A term used especially in traditional grammar to refer to a form of the verb expressing past time without any aspectual consideration; also called a ‘simple past tense’.
Protolanguage: An unrecorded or unattested language from which a group of historically attested languages have presumably derived. Hence all IndoEuropean languages are supposed to share (Proto-) Indo-European as parent language. Likewise, Proto-Germanic is the presumed ancestor of all Germanic languages.
Runic alphabet: Germanic and early OE writing; consisted at first of some
24 symbols to be scratched upon or coloured into stone or hard wood or metal, signs which generally by means of straight (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) lines could very roughly represent common OE sounds. These runes, at first the secret of a priestly class (the OE word rūn means ‘secret’), were employed in England to some extent after the conversion to Christianity for religious
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inscriptions such as that on the Ruthwell Cross, and also at times more widely; but they were unsuitable for any sort of continuous writing and remained only as tokens of antiquarian interest in the late OE period.
Rhotacism: A common kind of phonetic change whereby a voiced sibilant [z] develops further into [r]. This is found, for instance, in German, compare English lose and German verlieren, and in Latin, compare flos (‘flower' – nom.)
– floris (‘flower' – gen.). As can be seen in English was – were, rhotacism was an important feature of Germanic verbal morphology because in some points in verbal paradigms an [s] was voiced (due to Verner’s Law) and this [z] developed further to [r].
Root: 1) In grammar the unalterable core of a word to which all suffixes are added, e.g. friend in un-friend-li-ness. 2) In etymology, the earliest form of a word. 3) In phonetics, the part of the tongue which lies furthest back in the mouth.
Schwa / shwa [∫wa:]: The usual name for the neutral vowel [ ], heard in
English at the beginning of such words as ago, amaze, or in the middle of afterwards; sometimes called the indefinite vowel. It is a particularly frequent vowel in English.
Second person singular and plural (you, thou, etc.): In Old and Early Middle English, second person singular and plural were morphologically distinguished (e.g., þu and we). In the 13th century, English adopted the French custom of using the plural form for the singular to register respect or politeness. This dual usage of thou/ye for second-person singular lasted until early Modern English when the plural form (you) became the norm for the singular.
Semantic change: The change in the meaning of a word over time.
Semantic field: A collective term for sets of meanings which are taken to belong together, e.g. colour, furniture, food, clothes. Most of the vocabulary of any language is organised into such fields, i.e. there are few if any words which are semantically isolated.
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Stem: The stem of a word includes only those elements of the word that are unchanged regardless of the word's grammatical function. It is the part of the word onto which endings are attached. The stem may coincide with the “root” of the word if it contains no lexical suffixes.
Refers to consonants such as /p, t, k, b, d, g/, produced by blocking the flow of air before articulating. Also called plosive.
An Old English adjective that is not preceded by a demonstrative is called a strong adjective.
Strong verb: In the Germanic languages, a verb that signals change in tense through a meaningful change in the root vowel. For example, “Today I run, yesterday I ran”. In Old English and other, older forms of the Germanic languages, strong verbs were classified into groups according to the specific sets of vowel changes in their principle parts.
Suppletion: Phenomenon whereby one lexeme is represented by two or more different roots, depending on the context; for example, the verb ‘go’ is represented by ‘went’ in the past tense and ‘go’ elsewhere; the verb ‘be’ is represented by ‘am’, ‘is’, ‘are’ in the present.
Syllable: Consists of a vowel and its immediately preceding and following consonants. Synchronic: Pertaining to language at a specific historical point (and at least within a generation): e.g., analysis of syntax, phonology, etc. in PDE. Cf. diachronic.
Synthetic language: A language in which grammatical relationships among words in a sentence are determined by the inflections (for example, case endings) added to the words. OE was more synthetic than ModE.
Tense: A grammatical category for the indication of time through the forms of
verbs. Historically, (Proto-) Indo-European had three (according to some scholars, from five to six) formal tenses, but the number was reduced to two in
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