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Philology 3: Barber's "The English language: A Historical Introduction" Summary
A summary on chapter 1-12 of "The English language: A Historical Introduction" by Barber, Shaw, and Beal
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The English Language: A Historical Introduction - Charles Barber, Joan Beal, and Philip Shaw§1 What is language?
The study of language has been closely linked to the search for language universals, which are
features that all languages possess, and must possess.
Some proposed universals are absolute, for example that all languages have vowels. It can be
added that all languages have oral vowels, but not all languages have nasal vowels.
§2 The ux of language
The death of a language
Languages sometimes die out, usually because of competition from another language or when
the last native speaker dies. But, a language can also become dead in another way, nobody today
speaks Classical Latin as Julius Caesar and no one speak Classical Greek like Pericles did.
However, when a language becomes ‘extinct’ is sometimes di cult to determine. And in fact, all
living languages change, though the rate of change varies from time to time and from language
to language.
The extent to which the English has changed in the past thousand years can be seen by looking
at passages of the English from di erent periods. Between Old-, Middle-, Modern English there
are a lot of di erences, and yet a lot of similarities. The English language has had the in uence of
many other languages and dialect over the years. Some words have disappeared, others changed
their meaning.
All living languages undergo changes, but what exactly causes those changes? There is no single
answer to this question: changes in a language are of various kinds and for various reasons.
Changes in pronunciation
The biggest enigma is change in pronunciation. When we study pronunciation of a language over
any period of a few generations or more, we nd there are always large-scale regularities in the
changes. Such regular changes are called sound laws. There are no universal sound laws, but
simply particular sound laws for one given language (or dialect) at one given period.
↳ this is, of course, (still) always gradual change
Further on, many historical changes may have been due to a linguistic substratum: a conquering
minority that imposed its language on a conquered population must often had its language
modi ed by its victims. Changes may also be due to contact between speakers of di erent
dialects, sometimes even related to social status. These kind of changes have often been
attributed to ‘fashion’, or the prestige of the incoming feature. Another possible explanation for
changes in pronunciation is that the imitation of children is imperfect: they copy their parents’
speech, but never exactly.
There must be further force at work, for all of these changes to occur randomly. One such force
which often is provoked is the principle of ease or minimisation of e ort. We tend to take short-
cuts in the movement of our speech organs. Assimilation is a very common kind of change due
to this laziness, it is the changing of a sound under the in uence of a neighbouring one. It is also
very common for consonants at the end of a word to disappear. Or for a whole syllable to be
dropped when two syllables start with the same consonant (haplology).
On the other hand, ease of pronunciation can lead to an extra phoneme being inserted in a word.
Sometimes, the ease of pronunciation leads us to reverse the order of two phonemes in a word
(metathesis).
↳ we must never look at a single phoneme for changes, but at the sound system of a language
as a whole
Divergent development
The process of change in a language often leads to divergent (uiteenlopend) development. When
a language into two forms, we say that it has two dialects. When these two dialects grow apart
and change so much that they are unrecognisable as the same language, we speak of two
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, di erent languages. Both started out as the same language, but through the divergent
development are now two languages instead of one.
There are numerous examples in history of divergent development leading to the formation of a
related language. For example, when the Romans conquered a large part of Europe, North
Africa, and the Near East, their language, Latin, became spoken over wide areas as the standard.
When the empire disintegrated, some areas rid of Latin quickly because of new invaders, but in
other places Latin was rmly enough rooted to survive as the language of a new nation, as in
France, Italy and Spain.
But, as there was no single unifying centre the language developed in all the areas in a di erent
way, and Latin evolved into a bunch of new languages. The words in the new languages that
closely resembled or derived from the mother language are called cognates.
The process of divergent development leading to the formation of new languages has occurred
many times in human history, which is why there are now over six thousand di erent languages in
the world. An examination of these languages shows that many of them are related and belong to
the same so-called language family.
Less well-known, but also present is the process of convergent development which is the exact
opposite of divergent development, and it describes language family reducing or even branch to a
single language again.
§3 The Indo-European languages
When we look for relationships between languages, it is desirable to go back to the earliest known
forms of the languages. It is also important to note that resemblances alone do not prove
relationship, and that the resemblances must be systematic.
After establishing systematic resemblance, you can still come across di erence due to loan words
or other in uences. Still, if the resemblance is convincing enough, the languages are related. As
for the group of Germanic languages it has been proven.
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, English, then, belongs to the group of Germanic languages. And as French and English have a lot
of similar vocabulary, is French then also part of the Germanic languages? Wrong.
The ancestor of French is Latin, part of the Romance family. They, of course, are all part of the
bigger Indo-European family, so their resemblance is not shocking.
Branches of the Indo-European Family
One branch of Indo-European is Indo-Iranian, or Aryan. The branch has two groups, the Indian,
including the ancient Vedic hymns of north-west India and the Iranian, which includes Modern
Persian and Kurdish.
Another branch with ancient texts is Greek, which has a literature from the 7th century BC. The
Greek branch includes all the various ancient Hellenic dialects, and it is from one of these that
Modern Greek is descended.
Two branches which have some things in common are the Italic and the Celtic. Both branches
have a verb-in ection in -r used to form the passive voice. Italic consisted of a number of dialects
of ancient Italy, including Oscan, Umbrian and Latin. Celtic, once widely di used over Europe,
can be divided into three groups: Gaulish, Britannic, and Gaelic. Gaulish was spoken in France
and northern Italy in the time of the Roman Republic. Britannic was the branch of Celtic spoken in
most of Britain before the Anglo-Saxon invasions. It survived into modern times into three
branches: Cornish, Welsh, and Breton. Gaelic was the Celtic language of Ireland.
Another two branches that have things in common are Baltic and Slavonic. The Baltic languages
include Lithuanian, Latvian and Old Prussian. The Slavonic branch has many members, which fall
into three main groups: Eastern Slavonic includes Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian; West
Slavonic includes Polish, Czech and Wendish; while South Slavonic includes Servo-Croat,
Slovenian and Bulgarian.
Grouping the Indo-European Languages
We have noted the distinctive features of the di erent branches of the Indo-European, and we
have considered how regular correspondences between di erent Indo-European languages allow
us to demonstrate their interrelatedness. But how do we actually produce a family tree from this
sort of evidence?
The rst division into an Eastern Group and a Western Group is important. One of the distinctive
di erences in phonology between the two groups is the treatment of palatal /k/. This palatal k
appears as a velar [k] in the Western languages, but as some kind of palatal fricative [s] or [ ʃ ], in
the Eastern languages. For this reason, the two groups are often referred to as the Kentum
languages (West) and the Satem (East) languages.
Then we establish cognates between di erent language, which are words that are related. Having
established the cognates, the next step is to calculate the percentage of shared cognates in each
pair of languages. Eg. German and English share 30% of cognates.
If you nd out the pair of languages with the highest percentage of cognates, this allows us to
draw the rst part of the family tree. We can then repeat this process with the next most similar
languages, and so on until we have grouped all languages.
It is important to note that languages can converge, to merge together, as well as diverge, to
move apart and become less similar.
Who were the Indo-Europeans?
The Indo-European family of languages, with its numerous branches and millions of speakers, has
developed, if we’re correct, out of some single language. This original language we can call
Proto-Indo-European (PIE). For convenience, we will call the speakers of this language Indo-
Europeans, but we must remember that this does not imply anything about race or culture, only
language.
The traditional view has been that the Indo-Europeans were a (semi-)nomadic people who
invaded neighbouring agricultural/urban areas and imposed their language on them. However,
other archeologists believe that they were agricultural people from 7000BC.
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