This document contains a summary of the 'History of English' section of the English Linguistics II course at KULeuven. The summary contains info from the slides, some notes and info from the handbook 'The English Language: A Linguistic History'.
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Engelse taalkunde II – History of English
Chapter 1: Studying the History of English
Setti ng the scene
Why study history of English?
- 1200 years of recorded history good documentary evidence
- English has experienced important changes
o Synthetic analytic
Synthetic: suffixes encode grammatical meaning
Analytic: word order and function words encode grammatical meaning)
o Important external influences (e.g. Norman Conquest: effect on vocabulary)
- Considerable amount of scholarship about it
- English is one of the most widely spoken languages: global importance results from
o Colonialism
o Emergence of US as economic and political power
- Way to become familiar with methods and principles of linguistics in general and language change
in particular
- Can make us more appreciative of literary works
- Makes us aware that language change is inevitable
Language domains
- Phonology: sound system of language (distinctive speech sounds, combinations of sounds,
prosodic features)
- Morphology
o Morphemes as minimal meaningful units in language
o Studies various processed of word building (inflection, derivation, compounding)
o Major parts of speech vs. function words
- Syntax: how words are arranged into higher units (phrases, clauses, sentences) + word order
- Semantics: lexical and grammatical meaning
- Pragmatics: study of language in use
o Function of language in its social context
o Communicative intensions of speakers
Linguistic change in English: periods
- Old English (OE): 450 -1100
o Invasion of Germanic tribes Norman invasion
o Highly infected language, variable word order, Germanic vocabulary
o Surviving literature mostly in West Saxon
- Middle English (ME): 1066-1500
o Norman invasion introduction of printing press
o English largely spoken language (French as official language) important changes when
English re-emerged as written language in 13 th century
English lost inflection
Important influx of French words
o No preservation of standard form
, - Early Modern English (EModE): 1500-1700
o Renaissance death of poet John Dryden
o Rise of standard dialect
o Major linguistic development: Great Vowel Shift
- Late Modern English (LModE): 1700-1900
o Beginning of English plain style
o Spread op English around the globe
- Present-Day English (PDE): 1900-now
Chapter 2: Sounds and Sound Change of English
The sounds and writi ng in English
Writing of English
- Origin: Semitic alphabet 1800 BC: 22 symbols representing consonant sounds
Greeks (10th century BC)
Etruscans: Runic alphabet (Northwest Germanic tribes): came to England with Anglo-
Saxon invasions
Latin alphabet: brought to British Isles with Roman legionnaires and with
missionaries (to spread Christianity)
, Chapter 4: The Indo-European Language Family and Proto-Indo-
European
The classifi cati on of languages – The Indo-European language family
2 types of classification
- Typological classification
o Isolating/agglutinating/inflecting (fairly old categorization)
Isolating: 1 word = 1 morpheme
Agglutinating:
1 word > 1 meaning (root + affixes)
1 morpheme = 1 meaning
Inflecting:
1 word > 1 morpheme (root+affix(es))
1 morpheme > 1 meaning
o Analytic/synthetic/polysynthetic (new categorization)
Analytic: grammatical relations expressed by word order + function words
Synthetic: grammatical relations primarily expressed by affixes (inflecting +
agglutinating affixes)
Polysynthetic: long string of morphemes (stem + affixes)
o Classification in terms of order of subject, object, verb
SVO, SOV, VSO are most common orders cross-linguistically
Describing change from OE to PDE in terms of these categories
More inflecting more agglutinative and isolating
Inflecting: inflections in OE indicating more than one meaning: case, gender,
number)
Agglutinative: comparative/plural/preterite suffix
Isolating: more monomorphemic function words
- Genealogical classification (starting from common origin)
o Family tree model
o Wave model: acknowledges that language spreads through contact (but very hard to
represent)
Indo-European language family
- Branches: see pp; 102-109, 107
- Reconstruction of unattested proto-language through comparative method
o Rests on assumption that similarities of form and meaning among words are not product
of chance but must be result from common origin
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