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Trask's Historical Linguistics Summary 1
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Detailed summary + glossary for Trask's Historical Linguistics chapter 1, 2, 5, 6.
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TRASK’S HISTORICAL LINGUISTICSCHAPTER 1: THE FACT OF LANGUAGE CHANGE
The language we now call English was introduced into the Island of Britain about 1400 to 1500 years ago by
invaders from the North Sea coasts of continental Europe. These invaders, the Anglo-Saxons, were at first non-
literate, but within a few centuries of settling in Britannia, they had acquired the use of writing and began to
write down all sorts of things in their English language. Their language is called Old English.
E.g. of Old English:
Her . . . Ælfred cyning . . . gefeaht wið ealne here, and hine gefl ymde, and him æfter rad oð þet geweorc, and
þær sæt XIIII niht, and þa sealde se here him gislas and myccle aðas, þet hi of his rice woldon, and him eac
geheton þet heora cyng fulwihte onfon wolde, and hi þæt gelaston . . .
Here [in this year] King Alfred fought against the whole army, and put it to flight, and rode after it to the
fortress, and there he camped for fourteen nights. And then the army gave him hostages and great oaths that
they would depart from his kingdom, and they also promised that their king would receive baptism. And they
did these things.
English has been changing throughout its history. By the late Middle Ages, English had already undergone
about five centuries of change, and it was beginning to look more like Modern English. The English in this
period is called Middle English.
E.g. of Middle English:
Lyte Lowys my sone, I aperceyve wel by certeyne evidences thyn abilite to lerne sciences touching nombres and
proportions; and as wel consider I thy besy praier in special to lerne the tretys of the Astrelabie. Than for as
mochel as a philosofre saith, ‘he wrappith him in his frend, that condescendith to the rightfulle praiers of his
frend,’ therefore have I yeven the a suffi sant Astrolabie as for oure orizonte, compowned after the latitude of
Oxenforde; upon which, by mediacioun of this litel tretys, I purpose to teche the a certain nombre of conclusions
aperteynyng to the same instrument.
By the time Shakespeare, in the late sixteenth century, the English of the day was beginning to become
something we can easily recognize as English. We call the language of this period Early Modern English.
E.g. of Early Modern English:
As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns; and, as
thou sayest, charged my brother on his blessing, to breed me well; and there begins my sadness. My brother
Jacques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit; for my part, he keeps me rustically at
home, or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept; for call you that keeping for a gentleman of
my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox?
By the eighteenth century, 100 years or so after Shakespeare, several more generations of change had
produced a form of English which scholars recognize as Modern English, essentially the kind of English we use
now.
E.g. of Modern English:
MY LORD, I do here, in the Name of all the Learned and Polite Perʃons of the Nation, complain to your
LORDSHIP, as Firʃt Miniʃter, that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no
,means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; that the Pretenders to poliʃh and refi ne it, have chiefl y multiplied
Abuʃes and Abʃurdities; and, that in many Inʃtances, it offends againʃt every Part of Grammar.
CHAPTER 2: LEXICAL AND SEMANTIC CHANGE
2.1 BORROWING
Everybody is in a position to learn some of the words used by their neighbours, and very frequently people take
a liking to some of their neighbours’ words and take those words over into their own language. This process is
called borrowing. Words that are borrowed are called loan words. Borrowing is one of the most frequent ways
of acquiring new words, and speakers of all languages do it.
Why should people be so eager to borrow somebody else’s word? There are several reasons, but the simplest
is that the word is the name of something genuinely new to speakers of the borrowing language.
Why should English speakers go to the trouble of trying to borrow a French word for something when English
already has a perfectly good word with the same meaning? The reason is a simple one: prestige. For two or
three centuries, before the rise of English in the twentieth century, French was the most prestigious language
in the European World. French was everywhere the language of diplomacy, of fine arts, of high culture
generally – indeed, virtually the language of Western civilization. Consequently, many speakers of English (and
of other languages) were eager to show off their command of this prestigious language by spattering their
speech and writing with words and phrases borrowed from French.
English has been borrowing French words in their thousands ever since the eleventh century, long before
French had acquired the worldwide prestige that it later achieved. This was for a particular reason: in 1066-7,
the French-speaking Normans conquered England, and for the next 200 years or so Norman French was the
language of the ruling élite. Royalty and the aristocracy spoke French; The law spoke French; the upper
echelons of the administration and the military spoke French. Consequently, Norman French words like Prince,
duke, baron, judge, attorney, etc. inevitably passed into English, displacing their native English equivalents,
which passed out of use.
Thanks to the vastly greater prestige of French, English speakers eagerly borrowed almost any French words
they could get their hands on, regardless of the fact that English in many cases already had perfectly good
equivalents.
One of the chief reasons that Old English texts are so difficult for us to read is that so many of the native English
words used in those texts were later driven out of the language by borrowings from French. More than 60
percent of the Old English vocabulary has disappeared, and the Norman Conquest is the greatest single reason
for this.
Perhaps we no longer borrow words so often for reasons of prestige – because English itself has become the
most prestigious language on earth, today it is primarily a donor language. Just as French words once poured
into English, now English words are pouring into French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese in great
numbers.
A calque, or loan translation, is a new word or phrase constructed by taking a foreign word or phrase as a
model and translating it morpheme-by-morpheme. The Romans frequently used this technique to expand the
vocabulary of Latin by appealing to the then more prestigious Greek. For example, the Greek word sympathia
‘sympathy’ consists of two morphemes: a prefix syn ‘with’ and a stem pathia ‘suffering’.
, In English, we have refrained from using the obvious calques suchness and muchness, and simply borrowed
quality and quantity from Latin. Very occasionally we do form calques in English: German Ubermensch and
Weltanschauung have been calqued into English as Superman.
Another way of exploiting foreign languages is to inspect their vocabularies in order to extract morphemes
which can then be imported and used as building blocks for constructing words in another language. Such
building blocks are called combining forms, and English does this on a massive scale to create technical and
scientific terms by combining forms extracted from Greek and Latin.
There is clear evidence that certain semantic classes of words are much less likely to be borrowed than other
words. These are chiefly the items of very high frequency which we would expect to find in every language:
pronouns; lower numerals; kinship terms; names of body parts; simple verbs like go, be, have, want, see, eat,
and die; widespread colour terms like black, white, and red; simple adjectives like big, small, good, and bad;
names of natural phenomena like sun, moon, star, and rain; grammatical words like when, here, if, and; and
more. Such words are often called the basic vocabulary, and that they are barely borrowed makes them of
great importance in historical linguistics. Although, we will see later that it is possible for such words to be
borrowed. Still, the frequency of such borrowings is sufficiently low to make such basic words valuable in
investigating the prehistories of languages.
2.2 PHONOLOGICAL TREATMENT OF LOANS
Every language has its own phonological system: its own collection of available speech sounds and its own
rules for combining these sounds into pronounceable words. However the phonological systems of English,
French, German, Italian, and Japanese are all rather different, and hence a loan word can be very difficult for
speakers to pronounce.
How do they get pronounced? First, if you have some idea of how the word is pronounced in the donor
language, you can try your best to reproduce that pronunciation in your own language, producing as a result
something which is conspicuously foreign. Second, you can abandon such efforts and just pronounce the loan
word as though it were a native word, following the ordinary phonological patterns of your language, and as a
result, changing the original pronunciation of the word.
On the whole, especially if the loans are few in number, or if they present formidable phonological difficulties,
or if they quickly come into use as everyday words, we may expect speakers to prefer the second option,
nativization.
It is, however, the first option which chiefly concerns us here. If a few English speakers pronounce a few French
loans in a more-or-less French manner, then such words are just oddities in English. However, if a considerable
number of us pronounce many French loans in the same way, something has happened to the phonological
system of English.
Lexical borrowing can also affect the phonotactics of the borrowing language. Lexical borrowing is the
adoption of individual or sets of words from another language or dialect. It can include roots and affixes,
sounds, collocations, and grammatical processes.
As a result, the phonotactics of English now permit a whole series of initial clusters which were formerly
impossible.
2.3 PHONOLOGICAL TREATMENT OF LOANS
Light verbs are verbs that have little or no semantic content of their own and serve only to provide a usable
verbal form of an item which carries the semantic content of a verb but which is formally a noun.
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