Pre-Englisch

• English derived from a series of basic languages

o Indo-European -> Germanic -> West Germanic -> Low West Germanic
• Indo-European
o Language family extending from the SE to the NW
o As colonizer languages in the shape of English, Spanish, French and Portuguese
across the world
• Proto-Indo-European: hypothetical language spoken from 4000-5000 years ago
o All IE languages derived from one common Ursprache = PIE
• Plosives
o PDE there are 6 plosives: p/b, k/g, t/d
§ In PIE: there were three types of realizations (voiced, unvoiced and voiced
aspirated) and five places of articulation (Bilabial, Alveolar, Velar + Palatal,
Labiovelar)
§ Results in 15 plosives
• Centum vs. Satem languages
o Centum: West branch
§ Celtic, Italic, Germanic
§ Palatal merged with the velar
o Satem: Eastern brange
§ Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavonic)
§ Palatalization: shift from plosive to fricative/affricative realization
§ Words like get, give, god are not palatalized and therefore have Germanic
roots
§ Words like George, gist derived from French
• Proto-Germanic: hypothetical language spoken in Northern Europe, from 1500 BCE
afterwards
o Common base language of the Germanic branch of the IE languages
o Further differentiation
§ East Germanic: Gothic
§ West Germanic: English, German, Dutch
§ North Germanic: Scandinavian

Criteria from distinguishing Germanic languages from other IE languages

• Accent shift
o While there was a free accent in PIE (stress was not fixes), in Proto-Germanic there is
a fixed stress on the first syllable
§ Often resulted in suffixes getting weakened and lost -> ich geh (process of
neutalization)
§ Fewer inflections in Germanic languages than in Roman languages
• First Germanic consonant shift
o Major sound change
o Happened in the first millennium after BCE
o Plosives are relevant
o Velar stops merged: 3 places of articulation and 3 places of realization (only 9
plosives anymore)
o Rules were formulated
§ Grimm´s Law
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 • Voiceless stops -> fricatives (centum to hundred, penta to five)
• Voiced stops -> voiceless stops (decem to ten)
• Voiced aspirated stops -> voiced stops (bhrart to brother)
§ Vener´s Law: formulated separate rules
• Voiceless plosives -> voiced plosives
o If it is not the beginning of the word
o If is not preceeded by stress (centum to hundred)
• Second German Consonant Shift (High German Consonant Shift)
o Happened between the 3rd and the 9th century
§ Voiceless plosives -> affricatives (sepecially word initially)
• Apple- Apfel
• Ten – zehn
§ Voiceless plosives -> fricatives, especially not word initially, but in the middle
of words
• Hate – hassen
• Hope – hoffen
§ Voiced plosives -> voiceless plosvies
• Door – Tor
• Deer – Tier
• Ablaut
o Ablaut (=regular change of the stem vowel -> swim/swam/swum) = strong verbs
o Was not the only option of inflection verbs to tense
o Suffix could now be added (talk/talked/talked) = weak verbs
§ Invention of Germanic languages

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Old English (5th to the 11th century)

Historical context

• Up to the 5th century Celts and Romans on British Island: In this period English emerged as a
language
• 5th century: Great Migration -> Germanic invasion and settlement
o Germanic languages came to England
o Important document: Beda Venerabilis (Historica ecclesastica)
§ Used the term anglos (English) for all the people in England
§ The first to descrive the English as people
• th
8 century: Viking raids
• 9th century: permanent settlements by Danish und Norwegians
o Brought their language Old Norse
o It is not known how culturally close the Germanic and the Scandinavian were
§ Partly peaceful, because terms have been borrowed: sky, skirt, the
• The term English
o English: term for the language
o Angelycnn: term for the Germanic people living in England
o Englaland: term for the land
• Textual tradition
o Beowulf
§ Written around 8th and 11th century
§ Folk epic
§ Preserved in its entity
o Other important texts
§ Poems
§ Bible translations
§ Anglo-Saxon chronicles

Linguistic dimension

• Grahology and Orthography: Writing systems

o Runes
§ Before settlement
§ Either phonographic (sounds) or ideographic (concepts)
§ Mostly used for inscripts
o Insular script
§ Roman alphabet was introduced by Iro-Scottish missionaries
§ Initially used for Gaelic and then adopted to English
§ Distinct shape of letters
§ And special characters
o Orthography
§ More consistently phonographic

• Phonetic and Phonology

o Consonants

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 § (x)h is no longer a phoneme
§ PDE has voiced fricatives -> OE had the sound but did not have phonemic
status
• Voiced and voiceless fricatives were complementary distributed
§ /r/ realized as a trill
§ Consonant clusters
• /h/+consonants
• Plosive + /n/ was pronounced: knight, gnaw
• Postvocalic /h/ was also pronounced
o Vowels: Monophongs are still the same, but diphthongs changed drastically, as OE
had no closing diphthongs

• Morphosyntax
o OE was an inflectional language
o Categories were marked on main words (tense, person, number)
o Much more similar to German than English

• Grammatical Gender
o Nouns or words that agree with nouns are categorized
o Catgeorization is partly (grammatical gender in the narrow sense) or fully (natural
gender) motivated by meaning, share for example biological sex
o In OE
§ Grammatical gender was arbitrary and did not correspond with biological
sex (wifmann was masculine)
§ Grammatical Gender was marked in personal pronouns, but also in elements
inside the noun phrase (adjectives, articles, possesives)
o PDE
§ Gender differences only with singular personal pronoun

• Word classes
o Nouns: were inflected for number and case
§ The paradigms (different set of endings depending on the number and case)
depend on the declensional class the noun belongs
• These depend on the stems of the noun
• Four vocalic stems and three consonatial stems
§ Irregular nouns
• Plural was formed though the change of the stem vowel (mouse -
mice)
• Reason for that i/Umlaut or i/mutation: originally, a plural suffix
containing i or e resulted in fronting of the stem vowel
• Also common in German plural (Turm – Türme) and derivation
(dumm – dümmlich)
o Adjectives
§ Agreement with nouns in number, case and grammatical gender

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 § Adjective is used with a define article or demonstrative article = weak
inflection (der neue Turm)
§ Adjective is used with no article or with an indefinite article = strong
inflection (ein neuer Turm)
o Pronouns
§ PDE pronouns still have grammatical categories: If you use words a lot, they
seem to survive
§ OE had dual forms (two, and more than two)
§ No suppletive forms yet: she, they
• Suppletion: forms of the same lexemes historically had different
roots
• Go: modern past tense is went
• Wend: modern past tense is wended
§ Demonstrative pronouns
• Are also used as definite articles
o Verbs
§ Inflected for number, person, tense, mood
§ Strong verbs: Verbs that form the preterite by changes to the stem vowel
• Was regular in OE
• In PDE these are often now the irregular verbs
§ Weak verbs: Verbs that form the preterite by adding a suffix, which usually
ends in an alveolar/dental sound
• -ed

o Syntax
o Word order was less constrained as relations were marked by case rather than
structural position
o Word order similar to modern German
§ V2: occurs in the second position of the main clause
§ Vlast: occurs in the last position in dependet clauses
o Questions
§ OE: subject-object inversion without do-support
§ PDE: do-support
• Main verbs (normally) cannot undergo subject-object inversion
• If there is no modal (should, will, must) or auxiliary (have, be) verb,
we use the dummy auxiliary do (invention of the Early Modern
English Phase)
§ Negation
• Preposed particle “ne”

o Lexicology and semantics

o Word origins
§ Mostly words with Germanic origin
o Extensive use of compounding (combination of two words in a word) and derivation
(adding a suffix/prefix to an existing base)
o Latin
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 § Contact mostly before migration
§ Borrowings: only in domains of superior culture (street, wine, butter)
§ Toponyms: Lancaster, Chester
o Celtic
§ Practically no contact
§ Only Toponyms: river names (Dover, Thames)
o Scandinavian (Old Norse)
§ Real cultural assimilation
§ Linguistic integration of Old Norse
§ Borrowings of everyday words: sky, egg, root
• Indicator: initial /sk/ -> in German this has become “sch”
§ Toponyms: places ending in -thorpe, Derby/Rugby
§ Influence also in function words: they, forms of be

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Middle English (1066-1500)

Historical context

• 1066: Battle of Hastings

o Norman Conquest
o Normans took power in England
• French connections were really strong after the Norman Conquest
o The development of ME is a result of social bilingualism and diglossia
o There were two different identities and languages
o Which language you used was highly constrained
o French: high variety
§ Used in dominant cultural domains (politics, law, business etc.)
o English: low variety
§ Used for all aspects related to everyday life
• Promotion of English
o Emergence of national and political English identity (language is always a tool for
creating identity)
o Rise of the English-speaking middle class in urban centres
o Weakening of French after 1250
§ Only the upper class spoke French anymore and that was not the majority
• Transition from OE to ME
o After Norman Conquest, no dominance for an English variety, many dialets co-
existed
o Chancery Standard: medieval writing office -> Having a chancery meant that were
was some kind of standardization
o First printing press in the 15 centrury
• Textual traditions: Even though French was the preferred medium for written text, but there
was also a rich textual tradition in ME
o Poetry
o Legal texts
o Hand books
o Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (=most important ME text)

Graphology and Orthography

• Loss of special character, replaced by diagraphs (two letters representing one phoneme)
• Influence of French spelling
o Direct influence: French spelling was adopted (cwen -> queen)
o Indirect influence: OE /c/ -> ME /k/ as in cynn to kin
• Minim problem: to avoid problem of reading words with a lot of letters like m, I, n, u, v -> /u/
to /o/ in words such as come, love, honey

Phonology

• Loss of consonant clusters

o /w/ elided between consonant and /o/
§ swa -> so
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 § hwa -> who
o /h/ elided before consonants
§ Hlafor -> lord
• qualitative changes in words
o /ae/ -> /a/
o /a:/ -> /o:/
o /y/ -> /i/
§ mys -> mis
• Neutralization of unstressed vowels: most unstressed vowels, especially in endings, changed
to schwa (spelt as “e”)
o oxa -> oxe -> ox
o Schwah is often elided between two consonants
§ Botes -> boats
• Quantitative changes
o Lenthening of vowels before /ld, mb, nd/ -> child, climb, blind
o Not of a third consonant is in the cluster -> children

Morphosyntax

• Typological shift
o English from a synthetic language (expressing meanings and relations by bound
morpheme) to an analytic language (expressing many of these meanings and
relations by separate words or syntactic relations)
o Reason: Phonological weakening
§ Distinctive endings such as -a, -u, -e, -an, -um had by 1200 been neutralized
into –e (realized as a schwah)
§ Eventually got lost all together (also as a result of word stress in first syllable)
• Socolinguistic reason for typological shift
o Nominal endings still have survived: plural /s/ and genitive /s/
§ Fricatives are less vulnerable
o English was not used in official domains anymore

Word classes

• Nouns
o Lost most of their distinctive case endings, only plural and genitive survived
• Personal pronouns
o Loss of dual of OE
o Case differentiation retained for the most part
o Suppletive foms they and she
• Adverbs
o Earlier suffix -e lost, compensated by suffix -lic
• Verbs
o Distinction between strong and weak verbs retained
o Tendency to strong verbs becoming weak verbs
• Analytical construction
o Prepositional phrases instead of case marking
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 o Periphrastic constructions: Morphosyntactic categories realized by combination of
words rather than by single inflection
§ Passive with “be” and past participle
§ Perfect tense with “have”
• Word order
o To compensate for the loss of case marking, word order becomes more fixed
o Towards the end of the ME period, strong preference for SVO

Lexicology and Semantics

• French loan words

o Large, jury
o Extensive borrowings from French is the second significant change from OE to ME
o Espressions adopted in English are primarily from semantic domains in which this
superiority is obvious
§ Politics
§ Law
§ Social hierarchy
§ Military
• Doublets
o Borrowed from French but also Germanic roots
§ Ox -> beef
§ Sheep -> mutton
• Core family relations: Anglo-Saxon vocabulary
o Father, mother, son
• Wider-family relations: French influence
o Aunt, uncle, grandmother, father-in-law

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Early Modern English (1500-1700)

• External expansion: British expansion and colonialism

o Resulted in external expansion of English: people started using English as their own
language in the colonies
• Protestantism
o Promoted the use of English also in the religious domain (in Catholic churches Latin
was used)
• Golden age for literature
o Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
o Sonnet tradition
o William Shakespeare (1564-1616): most important author of EME
• English as an “Ausbau” language: more and more was used in all kinds of domains (religion,
law, science -> until the 16th c Latin was used)
• Lingustic shift in science and academia also influenced by a shift from Rationalism to
Empiricism -> empiralistic and individualistic form of doing science
• More people started being able to read and write

Graphology and Orthography

• Stabilization and standardization

o From the 15th century, after including of printing
o Active creation of a binding norm in spelling
o In the 18th century though lexicography (dictionaries)

Phonetic and Phonology

• As major sound changes happened in English after the stabilization of orthography, the
language is only vaguely phonographic
o Phonemes do not correspond to letters (light, know)
o Consonants
§ Postvocalic /h/ disappears
• Light
§ /k/ and /g/ before /n/ disappear
• Know
§ After /a:/ and / :/ and velar or labial consonant disappear
• Half, calm folk
§ /n/ becomes a separate phoneme
• Minimal pairs such as kin – king
§ /d/ becomes / / between vowels in Germanic words
• Father, slither, gather

Vowels: Most important changes

Great Vowel Shift

• Happened in the beginning of EME

• = systematic change of ME long vowels

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 • Chain shift: shift of one sound or a group of sounds is connected to other shifts
o /e:/ -> /i:/ no difference with original /i:/, so the latter must shift too
• Push chain: shift as a result of a merger of formerly differentiated sounds
• Pull chain: Shift as a result of open/empty space in the sound system

2nd vowel shift: affected short vowels, shift did not happen systematic (also the 3rd vowel)

Dialects

• Dialects exist because not all variations of English went through all of these changes or shifts
o AE did not undergo the 3rd vowel shift + North of England
o Pot (BE) vs. pat (AE)
o Word curry was probably adopted before the 19th centrury
o German Frack: was borrowed between the 2nd and the 3rd vowel shift
• Also certain English words that did not undergo the 3rd vowel shift
o Pull, bull, full, butcher
• Colonial lag: AE is more old fashioned than BE
o -> because AE has preserved an older stage of English, not undergoing the same
changes as BE
o Is not a scientific concept: linguistic changes apply to different varieties in different
ways and at different times (does not suggest innovation or modernism)

Morphosyntax

• Nouns
o Only remaining inflectional forms were the plural and the genitive
• Pronouns
o The genitive pronoun developed into possessive pronouns (myne -> my)
• Verbs
o More inflectional endings have survived than in nouns
o 2nd person still marked: -est
o Standard 3rd person singular present tense ending -> eth
§ -s becomes more and more accpetd in the 15th centrury
• Do-support

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 o Free variation of do-support in negation and questions -> you could use both options
and it did not make a difference in meaning
o Do-support sounded less formal
o Example: a platry ring that she did give me -> emphasizes
o German: do-support when talking to children
• Increase in the use of periphrasis
o Morphosyntactic categories are realized by several forms
o Progressive and passive
o Progressive passives (the house is being built) was not common in EME

Lexicology and semantics

• Increasing lexical needs: new experiences and concepts through global explorations needed
new words
o Also through the rise of science and philosophy
• Borrowing from Latin and Ancient Greek
o Climax
o Critical
o Demonstrate
• Borrowing from Romance languages
o Armada
o Barricade
• Inkhorn terms
o 16th and 17th century: excessive borrowing of classical words was critized (as being
socially rather than conceptually motivated)
o Not invented to convey meaning, but to signify status and education
o Lucribal instead of smooth
• In EME borrowings the meanings of the source language retained, often changed later
o Communicate -> share something with other -> share information with others

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