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ENG 4820 History of The English Language: Dr. Michael Getty - Spring 2009
ENG 4820 History of The English Language: Dr. Michael Getty - Spring 2009
2
ENG4820 | Week 5
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
Regular vs. irregular morphemes
– Rule-governed
R l d forms
f Arbitrary
A bit fforms; No
N rhyme
h or reason!!
– Apply to all new words Apply only to certain existing words
– Learned early by children Learned late by children
– Appear more frequently Appear less frequently
ENG4820 | Week 3 3
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
Regular vs. irregular morphemes
• Regular Morphemes Irregular Morphemes
– Rule-governed
Rule governed forms Arbitrary forms; No rhyme or reason!
– Apply to all new words Apply only to certain existing words
• P
Pretend d that
h the
h following
f ll i made-up
d wordsd are nouns or verbs:
b
biss, lozz, veck, drid
• You already know their plural forms if they are nouns, their past-
tense forms if theyy are verbs!
ENG4820 | Week 3 4
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
Regular vs. irregular morphemes
• Regular Morphemes Irregular Morphemes
– Rule-governed
Rule governed forms Arbitrary forms; No rhyme or reason!
– Apply to all new words Apply only to certain existing words
ENG4820 | Week 3 5
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD
AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE
• Overt case marking: A relationship between the shape
of a phrase and its role in the action of a sentence
THE KING,
KING THE BISHOP,
BISHOP AND THE DOG
• cyning = ‘king’ biscop = ‘bishop’ hund = ‘dog’
• geaf = ‘gave’ se / tham / thone = ‘the’
Giver Givee Gift
King Bishop Dog
ENG4820 | Week 5 6
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE
Wh h
What happened
dbbetween the
h 88th
h and
d 11
11th
h centuries?
i ?
Primary Stress
ENG4820 | Week 5 7
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE
Wh h
What happened
dbbetween the
h 88th
h and
d 11
11th
h centuries?
i ?
ENG4820 | Week 5 8
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?
Q i k answer: Variation,
Quick V i ti Interaction,
I t ti and
d Time
Ti
ENG4820 | Week 5 9
IN THE BEGINNING…
• Anatomically (skeletal structure) and behaviorally (art, tools, fire) modern
humans were first present in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
• About 80 thousand years ago, during a time of dramatic climate change, a
group or groups left Africa via what we now call the Red Sea and
colonized areas straddling the equator. (source)
• When people tried moving into more northern latitudes, they ran into two
problems …
– Vitamin D deficiency
– Ice
ENG4820 | Week 5 10
IN THE BEGINNING…
• We humans need Vitamin D (cholecalciferol) in order to absorb calcium
from our food. It also plays a crucial biochemical role in our immune and
neurological systems. With too little vitamin D, we're at severe risk for
bone disease, heart disease, cancer, and depression. (source)
• We can get Vitamin D from meat and dairy products, but our most
reliable source of Vitamin D is our skins. Skin cells close to the surface
take a form of cholesterol from our blood, which, when exposed to
ultraviolet light from the sun, becomes Vitamin D. (source)
• Too much ultraviolet light can cause skin cancer, though, but melanin, a
dark pigment that absorbs ultraviolet light, can reduce that risk.
ENG4820 | Week 5 11
IN THE BEGINNING…
• Close to the equator, high levels of melanin gave the earliest humans the
right balance between vitamin D production and the risk of skin cancer.
• At higher latitudes, though, sunlight is more spread out (diagram), and it
takes more exposure for the skin to produce the same amount of Vitamin
D it would closer to the equator. With their melanin-rich skin, the earliest
human populations couldn't live much further north than what we call the
Tropic of Cancer (image) without the risk of Vitamin D deficiency.
• At the northern extremes of this area, individuals with less melanin in
their skins had slightly more children per generation than their darker-
skinned neighbors, because they were at lower risk for vitamin D
deficiency.
• Over many thousands of generations, the low-melanin adaptation
spread, allowing populations to push further and further north. By about
55,000 years ago, northern-dwelling humans had adapted enough to
settle
ttl allll off what
h t we now callll E
Europe.
ENG4820 | Week 5 12
IN THE BEGINNING…
• The past 55,000 years have seen dramatic climate changes including
two distinct ice ages, when much of the northern hemisphere was
covered by glaciers.
• The last ice age ended definitively only about 10,000 years ago,
eventually leading to:
– Better climate
– Booming populations
– Invention of agriculture
– D
Development
l t off centrally
t ll managed
d settlement
ttl t areas
• 1000 years is enough time for a language to change to the extent that it
becomes mostly unrecognizable to original speakers.
• M l i l that
Multiply h bby a ffactor off 50 or so, add
dd iin d
dramatic
i population
l i
movements, and you get scenario that can easily lead to thousands of
wildly different languages, many of which show no transparent
relationship to each other
other.
ENG4820 | Week 5 13
IN THE BEGINNING…
• About 7000 years ago (source), a
culture emerges in what we now call the
Caucasus or possibly northeastern
Turkey.
• An educated guess at the geographic
origin of Indo-European comes from
side-by-side
id b id comparison i off th
the
vocabularies of the daughter languages.
Common, similar-sounding words for
’snow,’ ‘cow,’ and ’salmon,’ along with a
l k off common words
lack d ffor thi
things like
lik
‘lion,’ ‘olive,’ and ‘palm tree’ point
towards farming cultures in temperate,
wooded areas.
• The best educated guesses point
towards what is now called the
Source: Google Maps
Caucasus region, an area
encompassing southeastern Ukraine,
southern Russia, and Georgia.
ENG4820 | Week 5 14
IN THE BEGINNING…
• Over the next centuries, the descendants of the Indo-Europeans spread
across what we now call Europe and Central and Southern Asia. We now
call this culture Proto-Indo-European, and we know that the languages
that descended from it encompass such far-flung tongues as …
– The Celtic languages: Gaelic, Welsh, Breton
– The Germanic languages: English, German, Danish/Swedish/Norwegian
– The Romance languages
– All the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, etc.),
– Greek, Albanian
– Many of the languages of Central and South Asia
– Farsi/Dari (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan)
– Pashto (Afghanistan)
– Armenian, Abkhaz (Caucasus)
– Dozens of languages of South Asia: Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi,
Gujerati, Sinhalese, Sindhi, but not Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, or Malayalam
ENG4820 | Week 5 15
BUT HOW DO WE KNOW THIS?
• After 7000 years, the daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European had
become so dissimilar that it took the work of scholars to figure out that
they were all related.
Source:
AvuncularFeldspar
ENG4820 | Week 5 16
THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
• Assemble a list of words in languages you’re interested in
• Preferably very common words: family,
family nature,
nature agriculture
• Determine, based on phonological similarity, which words
are transparently
p y similar to each other: cognates
g
• WARNING:
– Some words may have been displaced by foreign loans
over time
ti
– Some unrelated languages may have borrowed Indo-
European words
ENG4820 | Week 5 17
THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 6
ENG4820 | Week 5 19
THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
• Change tends to reduce complexity over time. A form that seems more
complex than its cousins is probably closer to the original
• Voiced, aspirated stops are complex and relatively more difficult to
pronounce than
h unaspirated
d or voiceless
l stops.
• They required fine manipulation of the airstream, the vocal chords, and
the oral articulators.
• It makes more sense that a language should have them and then lose
them
h than
h spontaneouslyl acquire
i them.
h
ENG4820 | Week 5 20
THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
Once you think you’ve found a relationship, probe a little further.
Look for grammatical similarities.
ENG4820 | Week 5 21
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• The Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops {bh, dh, gh} are lost in
all of the daughter languages outside India.
• bh > L
Latin
i f Greekk ph
G h>f Germanic
G i b
• dh > Latin f Greek θ Germanic d
• gh > Latin h Greek x Germanic g
ENG4820 | Week 5 22
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
No one knows why Proto-Germanic didn't go in a direction like Latin and Greek.
Whatever the reason, the change created a big problem for the speakers of the time.
ENG4820 | Week 5 23
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• /bh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/
• /dh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/
• /gh/ Æ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic /g/
ENG4820 | Week 5 24
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• /bh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/
• /dh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/
• /gh/ Æ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic /g/
ENG4820 | Week 5 25
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• /bh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/
• /dh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/
• /gh/ Æ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic /g/
• But the language already had those consonants, so all the original
stops {p
{p,t,k}
t k} shifted to their fricative counterparts {f
{f,θ,x/h}
θ x/h} (source)
Voiceless fricative
ENG4820 | Week 5 26
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
Proto-Indo-
Proto Indo Proto-
Proto Original Meaning Eventually … Compare
Compare…
European Germanic
*ghel- *gel- ‘shine, bright’ yellow Greek chloros > chloroform
*gel- *kel- ‘freeze, cold’ cool, chill via Latin congeal, gelato
*kel- *hel- ‘cover, hide’ hell via Latin conceal
*dher- *der- ‘hold firm, support’ not attested in Latin firm, Greek throne, Sanskrit dharma
English
*der *ter- ‘split, peel’ tear (i.e. rip) via Greek dermatologist, epidermis
*ter *θer ‘rub, turn, twist’ thread, thresh Latin turn, Greek torus
ENG4820 | Week 5 27
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• This explains why English, once it acquired its taste for Latin and Greek
loan words, in many cases has two copies of the same word.
ENG4820 | Week 5 29
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
Verner’s Law and Germanic Stress
Germanic regularized stress and
accent onto the first syllable of a root
morpheme:
Source: AvuncularFeldspar
Primary Stress
ENG4820 | Week 5 30
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
Verner’s Law and Germanic Stress
Germanic regularized stress and
accent onto the first syllable of a root
morpheme:
ENG4820 | Week 5 32
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• Most of the Latin borrowings into English we talk about are from the
Middle Ages, the language of civil society. But there was a wave of
Latin loans from way before that, dating to contacts between
Romans and Germanic tribal groups between 500 BCE and 500
CE, a period which overlaps with the Christianization of Roman
culture.
• Stop anyone on the street
street, and they’d
they d tell you that these words are
about as English as you can get. In fact, they were borrowed from
Latin before Latin was cool, you might say:
• cheap, cheese, pan, dish, kitchen, cook, cherry, pillow, mile,
tile, beer, street
• After Christianity became associated with Roman power and
institutions, we got:
• church, monk, bishop, nun, and candle, to name a few.
ENG4820 | Week 5 33