Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Английский язык в его национальных вариантах. Учебно-методическое пособие
.pdf
11
A change associated with the simplification of the inflectional
system has been the move from a relatively free to a relatively fixed
word order. The presence of inflections
means that word order can
be much more flexible. Here are the following
example of this. The
Modern English sentences “the king betrayed the queen” and “the
queen betrayed the king” have fundamentally different meanings. In
OE, however, the sentences “sēo cwēn beswāc pone cyning” and
“pone cyning beswāc sēo cwēn’ mean the same thing (“the queen
betrayed the king”), despite their quite different word order, as the
subject and object of the sentences are indicated through inflections.
Latin has influenced English at different periods. As pointed out
earlier, the Germanic languages that we now call English had had
4 oo years of contact with Latin before their speakers even arrived in
England. The second phase of Latin influence occurred with the
adoption of Christianity. This saw Latin words entering the
language and these words becoming nativised, so “papdom” (today'
“papacy”) developed from “papa” plus the OE suffix “ -dom”, which
survives today in words such as “kingdom”.
Scandinavian languages also provided a major influence on OE.
ln addition to influencing the syntax of OE, these languages also
supplied many words. A very common word of Norse origin is
“husbonda”, householder or husband.
After the influences and consequent changes to English
brought about by contact with Latin and Scandinavian languages, a
third major influence was felt from 1066 when the Normans invaded
from France and conquered England. For around the next 300 years
the official language of Britain was French and French words
routinely replaced OE words. Here are the examples below:
OE
French
eam
uncle
sige
victory
stow
place
12
Thousands of French words entered English during the time of
the Normans. Today we use English and French pairs in many
expressions, possibly without realising their different origins. The
following pairs have the OE word mentioned first and the French one
second:
will and testament
keep and maintain
breaking and entering
final and conclusive
English also developed different words of similar meanings
from different languages as these examples of OE, French and Latin
words show. The dates in brackets after each word give an
approximate date of their entry into English:
OE
French
Latin
ask (885)
question (1470)
interrogate (1483)
fast (888)
firm (1340)
secure (1533)
rise (1000)
mount (1362)
ascend (1382)
These several influences mean that there are words in English
that might look the same, but actually have quite different linguistic
origins. For example, the “boil” that you lance comes from Old
English but you do to water in a kettle comes from French.
The French influence was not limited to vocabulary, but was
evident in syntax too. French left an indelible mark on Anglo Saxon
by drastically simplifying its syntax, modifying its spelling and
vastly enlarging and enriching its vocabulary.
From Middle English
The period of Middle English was a period in which variation
was at its greatest. It is the dialect phase “par excellence” of English.
Consider these alternative spellings of the word “knight” for
13
example, bearing in mind that “knight” would have been a key word
during this time:
knight, knighte, knyght, knyghte, knith, knizt, knyzt, knyzte, knict,
kincth, cnipte, cniht
By 1400 the amount of variation presented cumulative difficulty
in writing between literate people. Note this occurred with the rise of
the importance of English, as English started to gain ascendancy over
French as the language of the English court at this time. It was also the
time of the so-called Great Vowel Shift, when the pronunciation of
vowels altered significantly.
Middle English was, above all, a dialect age and ‘for a
glorious 300 years, people could write as they wanted to, and nobody
would say they were wrong. It was also the time when many of the
OE inflections dropped out of common usage, but when the
progressive form emerged (I am going) along with a range of
auxiliaries (I have seen, does she know, I didn’t go, they can ask).
Not everyone was happy with this variation and linguistic
prejudices were voiced. York, a city in the north of England, was the
earliest town to be publicly berated by a Southerner for its ‘bad’
accent.
The period 1475-76 was a further period of great change. The
introduction of printing into England by Caxton in 1476 meant that
reading and writing became popular and not pastimes restricted to
the educated elite. But even after Caxton there remained a great deal
of variation. The Renaissance brought many new words from Latin
and Greek and this started to upset people.
Examples of change (1476-1776)
Many varieties of English have retained some of these
features:
1. The initial /fn/ of OE becomes /sn/ So “fnesen” becomes
“sneeze”.
2. The /t/ in words like “listen”, “castle” and “whistle” has
become silent, but it remains optional in words like “chestnut” and
14
“often” The /r/ before a consonant in final position has also become
silent in the many non-rhotic varieties of English in words such as
“beard”, “scared” and “part”.
3. Most nouns lose their “-en” plural inflection. Instead
plural is marked by “-s”.
4. The changes associated with the second person pronouns
give a good example of how significant the changes were:
OE
thou (singular nominative), thee (accusative), ye (plural nominative),
you (accusative)
When talking to people, ‘thou’ (sing) and “you” (pl) were used.
13th C
“you” had become singular.
16th C
“thou” and “you” were playing the tu-vous role, where “tu”
indicated friendship and intimacy and “you” social distance and
formality, as well as singular and plural.
17th C
“thou” disappears from standard English.
5. The third person present simple inflection changes. In 1620,
Mayflower settlers to the United States all said “he runs, he lives”,
but their parents probably said “he runneth, he liveth”.
6. Up to 1776, negation continued to be cumulative and not
self-cancelling as this 1576 example shows: “they should not need no
more to feare him that his shadowe”.
These examples of continual change who that Caxton and
printing did not produce a ‘standard’ language. When people from
different parts of England met, they were not able to understand what
the others say. It is perhaps not surprising then that, at the time when
people were increasingly beginning to show concern about the wide
range in variation, we see the appearance of the first dictionaries and
grammars. One might have expected that the publication of all the
15
manuals would have led to some form of stability and a decrease in
variation and change. However, change continued.
Examples of change (since 1776)
As with the examples of earlier changes, it should be noted
that many varieties of English have retained some of these features:
1. /n/ — /ng/ so “huntin” becomes “hunting”, although
“huntin” remains common.
2. Initial /h/ in words of French origin was silent until about
1830 and then we get “herb”/”hospital”/”hotel”.
3.’Lost”/”cloth”/”cross” (/ɔ:/ etc.,) becomes /ɑ/ etc.
4.
Four-syllable words have two main models, as in the
words “matrimony” and “monotony” and this is unstable in some
words. For example, there is “
con
troversy” over the pronunciation
of “con
tro
versy”.
5. New verb forms and the use of the passive develop. These
were not available before 1800. For example, we first see forms such
as: “we were having”, “he is having to give up..”, “he has been known
to..”.
From these examples and the account above, it is clear that the
development of English is characterized by variation and change.
Changes routinely occurred in pronunciation, vocabulary and syntax,
and a major cause of these changes was contact with other languages.
Variation in contemporary England
While there is some debate over the number of major
varieties of English spoken in England today, there is no debate
that varieties continue to exist. Ellis (1890) identified six major
dialects, which he then subdivided into forty-two districts.
Viereck (1960) identifies seven major dialect
areas of England,
namely the
north
, the northwest, the county of Lincolnshire, East
Anglia, the Midlands, the extreme southeast and the southwest.
Trudgill distinguishes between traditional (rural) dialects and
16
modern (urban) dialects and lists 13 of the former and I2 of the
latter.
There is not space here to consider many distinctive features
of so many varieties, but ‘the northern subject rule’ is of particular
interest to people involved in the study of World Englishes. This rule
says that plural present tense verbs take ‘-s’ unless they are
immediately preceded by a personal pronoun subject. Here is a list of
the ways different varieties mark the present tense:
The North (following the subject rule): ‘He makes them / they
make them / farmers makes them.’
Northwest Midlands: “He makes them / they maken them /
farmers maken them.”
East Anglia: “He make them / they make them / farmers make
them.”
The South: “He makes them / they makes them / farmers
makes them.”
Further variation from other British varieties include the
double modal in Scots, “he’ll can get it”, and the “do + be”
construction of Irish English, ‘these pancakes do be gorgeous’. Some
of these features will be seen in other varieties of English, including
American. Two features of Welsh English that appear in some of the
English varieties of East Asia are the “isn’t it” all-purpose tag
question and a preference for topic-comment sentence constructions
as in “coal, they’re getting out mostly”.
Scottish English and variation in Scotland
Scots developed from the variety spoken in the north of
England (Northumbria) from the seventh century. The north of
Northumbria eventually became part of Scotland, while the south
remained part of England and the varieties diverged. The “golden
age” of Scots is considered to be the century between 1460 and 1560.
It was a full national language and “as distinct from English as
Portuguese is from Spanish”. This was the final period of the alliance
17
with France against England, a period during which Scots gained
French words that English did not have, including the word for the
quintessentially Scottish New Year’s Eve celebration, “Hogmanay”.
Thus, while the Scots variety was influenced by the same
languages as its southern counterparts (Latin, Scandinavian and
French), it was influenced by them to different degrees. Apart from
the additional influence French had until the Reformation of 1560,
the influence of Scandinavian languages on Scots had been greater
than it has on other varieties of English. For example the
Scandinavian word quine refers to girls in general in certain varieties
of Scottish English, but has the specific meaning of “queen” in other
varieties of English. From 1560, the increasing political power of
England over Scotland led to the southern varieties of English
reasserting great influence on Scots. The Union of 1707 saw the
Scottish legislature move to London and English became the official
language, both spoken and written. The increased influence of
English is viewed with distaste by many. Standard English is not
only a lingua franca, it is “the chief influence at present disrupting
the status and make-up of regional dialects”. However, all is not lost.
In the words of one scholar, despite the Anglicisation of Scottish
speech over recent centuries, there is still “a vast amount of Scots
material current in everyday spoken usage as well as in literary and
oral tradition generally”.
There are seven dialects of Scots, namely Southern, South,
West and East Central, Northern, Highland and Insular.
Below there are examples of the Northern dialect, which is
also called the Doric or Buchan Doric that is spoken around and
north of Aberdeen in the northeast of Scotland.
“Ye’ve nivver haen tae dee that, hiv ye? Ging tae the skweel
wi yer mither’s sheen on? I wis near greeting aboot it in front o aa
the ither loons, and then I saw another lad wi his mither’s sheen on,
and then I didna feel sae bad. At least my mither’s sheen werna
marless”.
18
The pronunciation of this variety is obviously distinctive. In
addition there is significant variation in vocabulary. A common
grammatical feature of this and other varieties of Scottish English is
the “-it” suffix as a past tense ending. The above extract could be
‘translated’ as:
You’ve never had to do that, have you? Go to school with your
mother’s shoes on? I was close to crying about it in front of all the
other boys, and then I saw another lad with his mother’s shoes on,
and then I didn’t feel so bad. At least my mother’s shoes were a
matching pair (were not matchless).
Welsh English and variation in Wales
The English language is used in Wales. English is, however,
the majority language of Wales and, as in other parts of the Englishspeaking world, a concise term such as Welsh English appears
unavoidable, however politically contentious. It is increasingly
applied by sociolinguists to a continuum of usage that includes three
groups of overlapping varieties of English: those influenced by the
Welsh language; those influenced by dialects in adjacent counties of
England; and those influenced by the standard language as taught in
the schools and used in the media. The influence of Welsh is
strongest in the northern counties (sometimes referred to as Welsh
Wales), where Welsh/English bilingualism is most commonly found;
it is weaker in mid-Wales, and weakest in the south, but even in such
southern cities as Cardiff and Swansea the influence of Welsh is
present.
The accent of English in Wales is strongly influenced by the
phonology of the Welsh language, which more than 20% of the
population of Wales speak as their first or second language. The
North Wales accent is distinct from South Wales and north east
Wales is influenced by Scouse and Cheshire accents. South Wales
border accents are influenced by West Country accents. The
19
Wenglish of the South Wales Valleys shows a deep cross –
fertilisation between the two.
Welsh English is characterized by a sing-song quality and
lightly rolled r's. It has been strongly influenced by the Welsh
language, although it is increasingly influenced today by standard
English, due to the large number of English people vacationing and
retiring there.
It is not certain when speakers of an English dialect arrived in
Wales, but it seems probable that Mercian settlers were in the Wye
valley by the 8c. In the winter of 1108–9, Henry I established a
group of Flemish settlers in Pembrokeshire and it is likely that there
were English-speakers among that group. Other English settlements
grew up in the 12–13c. Since most trade was in the hands of the
English, the earliest regular Welsh users of English were almost
certainly traders.
The first presence of English in Wales took place during the
Norman conquest of the country in the twelfth century but the
presence intensified upon the passing of the Laws in Wales Acts of
1535-1542, the statutes having promoted the dominance of English
in Wales; this, coupled with the closure of the monasteries, which
closed down many centres of Welsh education, led to the decline of
the Welsh language.
The decline of Welsh and the ascendancy of English was
intensified further during the Industrial Revolution, when many
Welsh speakers moved to England to find work and the recentlydeveloped mining and smelting industries came to be manned by
Anglophones.
The long-term interest of the English in Wales, the porous
border between the two lands, and the English conquest in the 13c
led to three types of place-name: (1) Old English names, as with
Chepstow (“market place”), Holyhead (“holy headland”, on
Anglesey), Knighton (“knight's settlement”), and Wrexham
(“Wryhtel's pasture”); (2) Modern English names, such as Newport
20
and Welshpool; (3) Anglicized Welsh names, such as Cardiff
(adapting Caerdydd), Carmarthen (adapting Caerfyrrdin), Denbigh
(adapting Dinbych), and Lampeter (adapting Llanbedr, “Peter's
church”). Because English has been spoken in the Gower Peninsula
and south Pembrokeshire since the 12c, the area is known as “Little
England in Wales”; English names in the area include Cheriton
(‘church settlement’), Middleton (“middle settlement”), and Newton
(“new settlement”).
Perhaps the most famous of phonological qualities attributed
to Welsh influence on the English spoken in Wales is the “singsong”
intonation of the language. As intonation in Welsh and other Celtic
languages is commonly distributed by stress and emotion rather than
rigidly defined word inflections, nuclear pitch movement in Welsh
English is often applied to the entire word, rather than just the tonic
syllable of the sound unit. This aspect of the Welsh language also
reveals itself in the Welsh English use of long vowels; the exception
to the Welsh English preference for short vowels is almost
universally localized in long vowels located in stressed syllables – if
a long vowel exists in a stressed syllable, the “singsong” Celtic
influence will support its length (though the stress may continue
almost indefinitely, based on the disposition of the speaker).
Irish English
The first colonies were established in the south-east of Ireland
towards the end of the twelfth century. English law was introduced to
protect the colonists and disadvantage the Irish. New towns or
boroughs – which were a distinctive form of Anglo-Saxon settlement
that contrasted with local dispersed habitations – were built and
became centres of Anglo-Norman influence (records from the late
twelfth century show immigration to Dublin, Ireland’s capital, from
towns in the south-west of England and Wales). A century later, twothirds of Ireland had been conquered after military campaigns against
the Irish earls. It is a feature of colonial activity that personal
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]