Lecture 2. Old English historical background.

The earliest inhabitants of the British Isles were the Celts. They were a tribal society made up of kinship groups, clans and tribes. They practiced a primitive agriculture and carried on trade with Celtic Gaul.

The first millennium B.C. was the period of Celtic migrations and expansion. The traces of their civilization are still found all over Europe. Celtic languages were spoken over extensive territory of Europe before our era. The Gaelic branch has survived as Irish in Ireland, has expanded to Scotland as Scotch-Gaelic of the Highlands and is still spoken by a few hundred people of the Isle of Man. The Britonnic branch is represented by Welsh in modern Wales and by Breton or Armorican spoken over a million people in modern France. Another Britonnic dialect in Great Britain, Cornish, had been spoken in Cornwall until end of the 18^th c.

In 55 and 54 BC Julius Caesar made two raids on Britain. He attacked Britain for economic reasons, to obtain tin, pearls, and corn, and also for strategic reasons. In 43 AD Britain was again attacked by Roman legions under Emperor Claudius and towards the end of the century was made a province of the Roman Empire. The Roman occupation of Britain lasted nearly 400 years, it came to an end in the early 5^th c.

The 5^th c was the age of increased Germanic expansion. The first wave of the invaders, the Jutes or the Frisians, occupied the extreme south-west. The second wave of immigrants was largely made up of the Saxons who had been expanding westwards across Frisia to the Rhine and to what is now known as Normandy. The final stage of the drift brought them to Britain by way of the Thames and the south coast. They set up their settlements along the south coast and on both banks of the Thames. The Angles came last from the lower valley of the Elbe and southern Denmark, they made their landing on the east coast and moved up the rivers to the central part of the island to occupy the districts between the Wash and the Humber and to the North of the Humber. They founded large kingdoms which absorbed their weaker neighbors: East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. The bulk of the new population sprang from the Germanic invaders, though, to a certain extent, they intermixed with the Britons.

Lecture 3. The Old English phonetic system.

The OE sound system developed from the PG system. It underwent multiple changes in the pre-written periods of its history, especially in Early OE.

The tendency to assimilative vowel changes characteristic of later PG and of the OG languages accounts for many modifications of vowels in Early OE. Under the influence of succeeding and preceding consonants some early OE monophthongs developed into diphthongs. If a front vowel stood before a velar consonant there developed a short glide between them, as theorgans of speech prepared themselves for the transition from one sound to the other. The glide together with the original monophthong formed a diphthong. The front vowels /i, e/ changed into diphthongs with a back glide when they stood before /h/, /r/, /l/ plus another consonant. The change is known as breaking or fracture. Breaking produced a new set of vowels in OE – short diphthongs /ea/ and /eo/.

Diphthongisation of vowels could also be caused by preceding consonants: a glide arose after a palatal consonant as a sort of transition to the succeeding vowel. After the palatal consonants /k’/, /g’/, /sk’/, /j/ short and long /e/ and / / turned into diphthongs with a more front close vowel as their final element.

Mutation is the change of one vowel to another through the influence of a vowel in the succeeding syllable. In early OE mutation affected numerous vowels and brought about profound changes in the system and use of vowels. Palatal mutation is the fronting and raising of vowels through the influence of /i/ or /j/ in the immediate following syllable.

Another kind of change referred to umlaut in early OE is the so called velar mutation found in some OE dialects. It was caused by the influence of back vowels in the succeeding syllables which transformed the accented root vowels into diphthongs.

As for consonants they were more stable than vowels, though certain changes took place in all historical periods. The mutually exclusive phonetic conditions for voiced and voiceless fricatives prove that there were no phonemes but allophones in OE.

In early OE velar consonants split into 2 distinct sets of consonants which eventually led to the growth of new phonemes. The velar consonants were palatalized before a front vowel and sometimes also after a front vowel, unless followed by a back vowel.