История английского языка. Часть I. Конспект лекций. Учебно-методическое пособие

he came, and when he the house approached, he heard the noise and the crowd. Then called he a servant, and asked him what it was. Then said he, Your brother came, and your father killed a fat calf, because he him safe received. There we see three different types of word-order, different arrangements of Subject–Verb– Object. Some clauses have the normal present-day order of S–V–O: ‘he heard the noise’, ‘your father killed a fat calf’. But some have the order V–S–O: ‘then called he a servant’, ‘Then said he …’ This construction often occurs when the clause begins with an adverbial expression, especially adverbs like then and there. Yet other clauses have the order S–O–V: ‘when he the house approached’, ‘because he him safe received’. This word-order occurs in subordinate clauses, opened in this case by the conjunctions because and when. These three types of word-order are common in the earliestforms of English, and are still found in Modern German. One of the major syntactic changes in the English language since Anglo-Saxon times has been the disappearance of the S–O–V and V–S–O types of word-order, and the establishment of the S–V–O type as normal. The S–O–V type disappeared in the early MiddleAges, and theV–S–O type was rare after the middle of the seventeenth century.V–S word-order does indeed still exist in English as a less common variant, as in sentences like ‘Down the road came a whole crowd of children’, but the full V–S–O type hardly occurs today [1].

The English language, then, has changed enormously in the last thousand years. New words have appeared, and some old ones disappeared. Words have changed in meaning. The grammatical endings of words have changed, and many such endings have disappeared from the language. The membership of ‘closed class’word-forms, the grammatical words, has changed: the system of personal pronouns, for example, has lost the forms thou and thee. There have been changes in word-order, the permissible ways in which words can be arranged to make meaningful utterances. Pronunciation has changed. Taken all together, these changes add up to a major transformation of the language.

All living languages undergo changes analogous to those we have just seen exemplified in English.What causes such changes?There is no single answer to this question: changes in a language are of various kinds, and there seem to be various reasons for them.

1. During childhood, we learn our mother tongue very thoroughly, and acquire a whole set of speech habits which become second nature to us. If later we learn a foreign language, we inevitably carry over some of these speech habits into it, and

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so do not speak it exactly like a native.

2.Changes may also be due to contact between speakers of different dialects. In the long term, this can lead to the creation of a new variety of the language, as was the case in New Zealand, where English-speaking settlers from different parts of the British Isles came together in the nineteenth century, all bringing their own dialects.

3.Some changes have often been attributed to ‘fashion’, or the prestige of the incoming feature. Some of the changes in accepted English pronunciation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could be seen as consisting in the replacement of one style of pronunciation by another style already existing, and it is likely that suchsubstitutionswerearesultofthegreatsocialchangesoftheperiod:theincreased powerandwealthofthemiddleclasses,andtheirsteadyinfiltrationupwardsintothe ranks of the landed gentry, probably carried elements of middle-class pronunciation into upper-class speech.

4.Another possible explanation for changes in pronunciation is that the imitation of children is imperfect: they copy their parents’ speech, but never reproduce it exactly.

5.We all try to economize energy in our actions, it is argued, so we tend to take short cuts in the movements of our speech organs, to replace movements calling for great accuracy or energy by less demanding ones, to omit sounds if they are not essential for understanding, and so on. Such changes increase the efficiency of the language as a communication system, and are undoubtedly a factor in linguistic change, though we have to add that what seems easy or difficult to a speaker will depend on the particular language that has been learnt.

6.The very common kind of change is assimilation or the changing of a sound under the influence of a neighbouring one. For example, the word scant was once skamt, but the /m/ has been changed to /n/ under the influence of the following /t/. Greater efficiency has hereby been achieved, because /n/ and /t/ are articulated in the same place (with the tip of the tongue against the teeth-ridge), whereas /m/ is articulated elsewhere (with the two lips). So the place of articulation of the nasal consonant has been changed to conform with that of the following plosive.

7.Thechangesproducedinpursuitofefficiencycanoftenbetolerated,becausea languagealwaysprovidesmoresignalsthantheabsoluteminimumnecessaryforthe transmissionofthemessage,togiveamarginofsafety:likeallgoodcommunication systems, human language has built in to it a considerable amount of redundancy. But there is a limit to this toleration: the necessities of communication, the urgent needs

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of humans as users of language, provide a counterforce to the principle of minimum effort. If, through excessive economy of effort, an utterance is not understood, or is misunderstood, the speaker is obliged to repeat it or recast it, making more effort. The necessities of communication, moreover, may be responsible for the selection of some of the random variations of a phoneme rather than others, so that a change in pronunciation occurs in a certain direction. This direction may be chosen because it makes the sound inherently more audible: for example, open nasal vowels seem to be more distinctive in quality than close ones, and in languages which have such vowels it is not uncommon for a nasal [e] to develop into a nasal [a].

8. In the realm of vocabulary and meaning, the influence of general social and cultural change is obvious. As society changes, there are new things that need new names: physical objects, institutions, sets of attitudes, values, concepts; and new words are produced to handle them (or existing words are given new meanings). Sentimentality, classicism, wave mechanics, parliaments, post-Impressionism, privatization – these are human inventions just as much as steam engines or aircraft or nylon: and people inevitably invented names for them. Moreover, because the world is constantly changing, many words insensibly change their meanings. It is particularly easy to overlook shifts of meaning in words that refer to values or to complexesofattitudes:forexample,inShakespeare’sdaytheadjectivegentlemeant a good deal more than ‘kind, sweet-natured, mild, not violent’, for it referred to high birth as well as to moral qualities, and had a whole social theory behind it.

9. There is also interplay between the needs of the users and the inherent tendencies of the language system itself. One way in which the language system promotes change, especially in grammar, is through the operation of analogy, which also tends to produce economy.Analogy is seen at work when children are learning their language. A child learns pairs like dog/dogs, bed/beds, bag/bags, and so on. Then it learns a new word, say plug, and quite correctly forms the plural plugs from it, by analogy with these other pairs.Analogy, then, is the process of inventing a new element in conformity with some part of the language system that you already know. The way in which analogy can lead to change is seen when the child learns words like man and mouse, and forms the analogical plurals mans and mouses. Ultimately such childish errors are usually corrected, but analogical formations also take place in adult speech, and quite often persist and become accepted.

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The subject of history of English. The aims of the course. Periodisation of the history of the English language.

Alanguage can be considered from different angles. In studying Modern English we regard the language as fixed in time and describe each linguistic level – phonetic, grammar or lexis – synchronically. Diachronic approach presupposes that each linguistic fact is interpreted as a stage in the evolution of language.

The subject of the History of English is the historical development of the English language: development of its phonetic structure and spelling, evolution of its grammatical system, growth of its vocabulary, and also the changing historical conditions Of English-speaking communities relevant to the language history.

Aims of the course are both theoretical and practical:

-to provide the students with a knowledge of linguistic history sufficient to account for the principal features of present-day English;

-to provide the students with a wider philologicak outlook.

Sources of the language history: -written records of different periods;

-facts of prewritten history in the works of ancient historians and georaphers; -early borrowings from Germanic made by other languages.

Statics and dynamics in language history

Many features of the language remain static in the diachrony: they do not alter through time. These are permanent, universal properties: division into vowels and consonants, the parts of speech, the parts of the sentence. In addition to these universal properties, English has many stable characteristics: some parts of the vocabulary, many ways of word-formation, some grammatical categories.

There are also other categories in the language which undergone profound changes. These are called dynamics. The proportion of stable and changeable features varies at different historical periods and different linguistic levels.

Linguistic changes are usually slow and gradual. Different linguistic levels develop at different rates.

Causes of language evolution lie both within the linguistic system (balance of the system or its symmetrical structural arrangement produces pressure) or outside it (social conditions, events in external history).

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Periodisation of the history of the English language

Traditional periodization divides E into 3 periods: OE, ME, NE. OE begins with Germanic settlements of Britain (5th century) or with the beginning of writing and ends with Norman Conquest.(1066). ME –with Norman Conquest and ends on the introduction of printing (1475). So then start NE and lasts to the present day. Some authors called them – early, classical and late.

The 1st period, which may be termed Early Old English. It is the stage of the tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders, which were gradually losing contacts with the related continental tongues. The tribal dialects were used for oral communication, there being no written form of English. The 2ndperiod OE/ Anglo-Saxon extends from the 8th c. till the end of the 11th. The tribal dialects gradually changed into local or regional dialects. The language of this period is usually described synchronically and is treated as a more or less stable system. The 3rd period, known as Early Middle English, starts after 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, and covers the 12th, 13th and half of the 14th c. It was the stage of the greatest dialectal divergence caused by the feudal system and by foreign influences

–ScandinavianandFrench.UnderNormanruletheofficiallanguageinEnglandwas French, or rather its variety called Anglo-French or Anglo-Norman; it was also the dominantlanguageofliterature.(fromsyntacticintoanalytic).The4th period–from the later 14th c. till the end of the 15th – known the age of Chaucer, Classical ME. It was the time of literary flourishing.The main dialect used in writing and literature was the mixed dialect of London. H. Sweet called this period” leveled endings”, because most of inflections in the nominal system had fallen together.The 5th period is called Early New English, lasted from the introduction of printing to the age of Shakespeare. The first printed book in English was published by William Caxton in 1475.This period was also a time of sweeping changes at all levels, in the first place lexical and phonetic. The 6th period extends from the mid-17th c. to the close of the 18th c. In the history of the language it is often called “the age of normalization and correctness.The18thc.hasbeencalledtheperiodof“fixingthepronunciation”.The greatsoundshiftswereoverandpronunciationwasbeingstabilized.Wordusageand grammatical construction were subjected to restriction and normalization. The 7th period in the history of English. It is called Late New English or Modern English. The 20th c. witnessed considerable intermixture of dialects. The local dialects were retreated and displaced by Standard English. The English vocabulary has grown.

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The old Germanic languages,

their classification and principal features

ThehistoryoftheGermanicgroupbeginswiththeappearanceofwhatisknownas theProto-Germaniclanguage.AstheIndo-Europeansextendedoveralargeterritory, the ancient Germans or Teutons moved further north than other tribes and settled on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea in the region of the Elbe. PG is an entirely pre-historical language: it was never recorded in written form. The first mention of Germanic tribes was made by Pitheas, a Greek historian and geographer of the 4th. C.B.C. in COMMENTARIES ON THE GALLIC WAR. In the 1st c. A.D. Pliny the Elder, a prominent Roman scientist and writer, in NATURAL HISRORY made a classified list of Germanic tribes grouping them under six headings. Tacitus – the Roman historian – compiled a detailed description of the life and customs of the ancient Teutons. According to this division PG split into three branches: East Germanic (Vindili in Pliny’s classification), North Germanic (Hillevonies) andWest Germanic (which embraces Ingveones, Istevones and Herminones),

East Germanic. The East Germanic subgroup was formed by the tribes who returned from Scandinavia at the beginning of our era. The most numerous and powerful of them were Goths. Their western branch, the Visigote, invaded Roman territory. Linguistically the Western Goths were soon absorbed by the native population, the Romanised Celts. The Eastern Goths, Ostrogote, consolidated into a powerful tribal alliance in the lower basin of the Dniester. They set up a kingdom in NorthernItaly.TheGothiclanguage,nowdead,hasbeenpreservedinwrittenrecords of the 4th – 6th century. The Goths were the first of the Teutons to become Christian. In the 4th c. Ulfilas, a West Gothic bishop, made a translation of the Gospels from Greek into Gothic using a modified form of the Greek alphabet. It is written on red parchment with silver and golden letters and is known as the SILVER CODEX. It is one of the earliest texts in thelanguages of the Germanic group.

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Pic. 1. Germanic tribes in Europe

North Germanic. The North Germanic tribes lived on the southern coast of the Scandinavian peninsula and in Northern Denmark. They didn’t take part in the migrations and were relatively isolated. The speech of the North Germanic tribes showed little dialectal variation until the 9th c. and called Old Norse or Old Scandinavian.Ithascomedowntousinrunicinscriptions.RIwerecarvedonobjectsmade of hard material in an original Germanic alphabet known as the runic alphabet or the runes. The principal linguistic differentiation in Scandinavia corresponded to the political division into Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The earliest written records in Old Danish, Old Norwegian and Old Swedish date from the 13th c. Later Danish and Swedish developed into national literary languages. Norwegian was the last to develop into an independent national language.

Also this group include the Icelandic and Faroese languages, whose origin goes back to the Viking Age. In the Faroe Islands the West Norwegian dialects brought by the Scandinavians developed into a separate language called Faroese. For many centuries all writing was done in Danish, it was until 18th c. Faroese is spoken nowadays by about 30.000 people. Icelandic developed as a separate language in spite of the political dependence of Iceland upon Denmark and the dominance of Danish in official spheres. Icelandic has retained a more archaic vocabulary and grammatical system, Written records date from the 12th and 13th c. The most important records are: the ELDER EDDA- a collection of heroic songs of the 12th c., the YOUNGER EDDA(a text-book for poets) and Old Icelandic Sagas.

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West Germanic. The would-be West Germanic tribes dwelt in the Lowlands between the Oder and the Elbe bordering on the Slavonian tribes in the East and the Celtic tribes in the South.TheWest Germans include several tribes: the Franconians (or Franks), occupied the lower basin of the Rhine. They divided into Low, Middle and High Franconians. TheAngles anf the Frisians, the Jutes and the Saxons inhabited the coastal area of the modern Netherlands, the Federal Republic of Germany and the southern part of Denmark. A group of tribes known as High Germans (the Alemanians, the Swabians, the Bavarians, the Thuringians and others) lived in the mountainous southern regions of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the Early Middle Ages the Franks consolidated into a powerful tribal alliance. Towards the 8th c. their kingdom grew into one of the largest states in Western Europe. In the 9th c. it broke up into parts. Its western part eventually became the basis of France. The eastern part, the east Franconian Empire, comprised several kingdoms: Swabia or Alemania, Bavaria, East Franconian and Saxony, Lorraine and Friesland. The Franconian dialects were spoken in the extreme north of the Empire; in the later Middle AgestheydevelopintoDutch–thelanguageoftheLowCountries(theNetherlands) and Flemish – the language of Flanders. The earliest texts in Low Franconian date from the 10th c. The modern language of the Netherlands, formerly called Dutch, and its variant in Belgium, known as the Flemish dialect, are now treated as a single language, Netherlandish (20 mln people). The High German group of tribes did not go far in their migration. The High German dialects consolidated into a common language known as Old High German. The first written records in OHG date from the 8th and 9th c. Towards the 12th c. High German had intermixed with neighboring tongues, especially Middle and High Franconian, and eventually developed into the literary German language. (100 mln people) Yiddish grew from the High German dialects which were adopted by numerous Jewish communities in the 11th and 12th c. These dialects blended with elements of Hebrew and Slavonic.At the later stage of the great migration period – in the 5th c. – a group of West Germanic tribes started out on their invasion of the British Isles. They were The Angles, part of the Saxon andFrisian,and,probably,theJutes.TheirdialectsintheBritishIslesdevelopedinto the English language.

It goes without saying that our chief interest will be with the Germanic (Teutonic) group, since it includes English and its nearest relatives. It is divided into three main subgroups: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic. The chief language of East Germanic was Gothic, now known mainly from fragments of

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the 4th century translation of the Holy Bible by Wulfila (Ulfilas), the Aryan bishop of the West Goths.

Pic. 2. The Germanic tribes classification

It is very important to determine genetic relations among the languages of the world as the literary monuments of the earliest period of the language are few and fragmentary. To get the reliable data about the phonetics, word-stock and the grammatical structure of a language that existed many centuries ago it is necessary to take into consideration the facts of other languages belonging to the same family or group. It goes without saying that languages may effect each other by contact, whether they are related or not. In the times of social upheavals, wars and great migrations languages could be mixed, or some nations could borrow languages of other peoples [6].

General features of the Germanic languages

Word stress. As far as word stress is concerned, one of the most important features of the Germanic languages is that both historically and synchronically they have some certain peculiarities. It is believed that in Indo-European languages there were two types of stress: musical pitch and force (dynamic) stress. Besides in IndoEuropean the word stress was free. In the Germanic languages it is fixed. So we come to the conclusion that since in Indo-European there was free stress and in the Germanic languages it was fixed some time there happened fixation of stress. It was discovered that in the course of the Common Germanic Period word stress came to be fixed on the first meaningful part of the word – e.g. Goth. skalki - non ‘to serve’, frodaba ‘cleverly’. Usually the prefix in nouns was stressed (Goth. afardags – ‘the next day’, anda-waurdi ‘answer’), and in verbs – unstressed – the stress fell on the first root syllable (Goth. andhafjan ‘to answer’, gagatilon ‘unite’). The word stress in the Germanic languages is interesting itself, but it is also important

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that this fixed stress couldn’t but result in weakening of unstressed positions which in its turn resulted in neutralization of certain vowels, dropping, change of quality and quantity.

The structure of the word. It is believed that in Indo-European the words were three-morphemic, that is root, suffix and flexion (ending) – Scr. varta-ya-ti ‘he is turning’. In the Germanic languages words regularly came to be two-morphemic: Goth. sun-u ‘son’, f ader-as ‘fathers’, eate-lic ‘difficult’.. Many notional words, mostlynouns,losttheirsuffixesdroot+ending.However,inoldGermaniclanguages the suffixes remained in verns, some adjectives and adverbs.

The sound system Vowels. The old Indo-European distinction between the long and the short vowels was in the main preserved.Apeculiar feature of the Germanic vowels is their instability. They have always been unstable, liable to different positional changes, mostly of assimilative character. Also: lengthening, shortening, neutralization, dropping. There are certain correspondences btw the Indo-European andtheGermanicvowels,whichmainlyconcerntheshortandlong[a]and[o].They are as follows: in the IE languages there are pairs of long and short ‘a’and ‘o’, while in the Germanic languages there are only a short ‘a’ and a long ‘o’. They have the following correspondences:

Lat. noctem, Rus. ночь – Goth. nahts (IE o – Germ. a) - IE o = Germ. a Skr. bhra:ta, Lat. fra:ter – OE bro:tor (IE a: - Germ. o:)– IE a: =Germ. o.

The short o and long a: evolved when the Common Proto-Germanic Language split into several lan guages.

Besides, IE e: - Goth. e:, OE a, Lat. se:men – Goth. se:ts, OE sad, Skr. jugam – OE geoc

Another important phonetic feature of vowels, common to all the Germanic languages is the so-called German Brechung or Fracture (общегерманское преломление). The fracture concerns two pairs of vowels:

the pair e-i and u-o.

The Indo-European e in the root syllable finds its counterpart in Germanic i, if it is followed by i, j, or the cluster ‘nasal+consonant’. Otherwise the Germanic languages have in the corresponding words an –e-.

Lat. medius ‘middle’– OE middle Lat, ventus ‘wind’– OE wind Lat. edere ‘eat’– OE etan

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