1English as a Changing Language

1.1 Introduction

Chapter 3 begins our historical narrative of English in earnest, looking at the language in a series of snapshots which reveal something of the significant linguistic changes, as well as important socio-historical issues, which have characterized its existence at various points in its history. This approach is neither untried nor untested: texts such as Baugh and Cable (2002), Fennell (2001), Barber (1993), Strang (1970), to name but a few, have shown that this kind of historical (re-)construction effectively conveys both a general sense of linguistic change through time and a more specific awareness of significant changes at particular times. It is arguable, however, that this framework, in its inevitable representation of a language’s history as a chronological series of discrete, significant ‘linguistic events’, does not wholly capture the dynamic and ongoing nature of linguistic change. For instance, discussions of lexical change which focus on the importance of compounding in Old English (OE), but on borrowing in Middle English (ME) and Early Modern English (EModE), obscure somewhat the continuous importance of both processes throughout all three periods. Similarly, a focus on inflectional change in OE and ME potentially marginalizes its ongoing significance in other periods, as well as creating the impression that it is the only notable dimension of morphosyntactic change. We will therefore attempt here to complement the period-based framework of later chapters by outlining some of the more common changes that have been (and continue to be) significant for English. There are, however, a few provisos to bear in mind before we begin. First, the following sections do not offer a comprehensive discussion of language change. Research in this area covers a great deal of ground: it is approached not only within different theoretical frameworks but also with differing (but related) questions in mind. Studies of language change can (and do) therefore address issues such as the differentiation between internally and externally motivated change (that is, change that occurs and proceeds because of factors either intrinsic to the language system or present in the external social context), or focus on determining the factors that actuate change in the first instance, and facilitate the transmission and retention of some features and the discarding of others. Change can also be measured sociolinguistically, in terms of variables such as age, gender and ethnicity, as well as of attitudes to it. All of these (plus others we have not mentioned) constitute huge areas of research and debate in themselves,1 and it is impossible to do them all justice in the space of this one

6The History of English

chapter. We will therefore confine our discussion to major processes of linguistic change, and – given the constraints of space as well as the primary focus of this book – our database deals largely with historical and contemporary examples from English. We begin with processes of sound change.

1.2 Sound Change

As McMahon (1994: 14) points out, sound change can actually be viewed as an umbrella term for a wide variety of changes. Its processes may affect single sound segments (vowels or consonants), combinations of sounds such as consonant clusters and diphthongs, prosodic features such as rhythm, stress and intonation, as well as underlie large-scale sound shifts. This section, however, considers some of the more common segmental sound changes and sound shifts which have affected English and continue to do so.

Sound changes which affect segments can either be conditioned, meaning that they only occur in specific phonetic environments, or unconditioned, meaning that they can affect all occurrences of a particular sound. One regularly occurring type of conditioned change is assimilation, a process through which one sound becomes more like another in its environment. Assimilation can be complete, in that the sounds involved in the process become identical (as in Latin septem Italian sette), or it can be partial, so that instead they come to share certain features. For example, texts indicate that medial [v] in OE efen/efn ‘even’ was sometimes replaced by nasal [m] through assimilation to final nasal [n], resulting in spellings such as emn. A more recent example of partial assimilation can be heard in the pronunciation [hambæg] (handbag), which results from the replacement of [n] by bilabial nasal [m], because of conditioning bilabial [b]. In all of these examples, assimilation is considered anticipatory or regressive, in that the affected sound precedes the conditioning one. In peseverative or progressive assimilation, however, that order is reversed, as can be seen in the derivation of OE wull ‘wool’ from ancestral Germanic *wulno.2 Finally, assimilation can also be distant, in that the conditioning and affected sounds are separated by intervening segments. In Chapter 3, we will look at a particular instance of such assimilation, namely i-mutation, which affected certain nouns in the Germanic ancestor of English. Words such as feet and goose are descended from forms which marked their respective plurals with a final inflectional –i, as in *fo¯t/*fo¯ti (‘foot/feet’) and *go¯s/*go¯si (‘goose/geese’). Anticipatory but distant assimilation with final –i caused fronting of the stem vowel and by the late OE period, this long o¯ [o:] had been replaced by long front [e:]. Final conditioning –i had also been obliterated, hence OE spellings such as fe¯t and ge¯s. A much later shift from [e:] to [i:] (see Chapter 5) resulted in our modern pronunciations of these words.

Dissimilation, the opposite of assimilation, occurs only sporadically in individual words. Examples include the change in Latin peregrı¯nus to Old French pelerin (the source of English pilgrim), and Old French purpre to English purpel (‘purple’) (McMahon, 1994: 15). Another type of segmental sound change is epenthesis, a process by which segments are inserted into a phonetic sequence. Epenthetic vowels, for example, typically break up consonant clusters, as in