Sound changes in Old English

  

1. Mechanisms of linguistic change

2. OE vowel system

1. Qualitative changes:

• PG correspondences;

• Anglo-Frisian Brightening and Restoration of a;

• OE Breaking;

• Palatalization;

• I-umlaut;

• U-umlaut, velar umlaut

• 2) Quantitative changes:

• Contraction

• Lengthening

  

3. OE consonant system

1. West Germanic germination of consonants

2. Palatalisation and assibilation

3. Voicing and devoicing of fricatives

4. Metathesis

5. Hardening

6. Loss of consonants in some positions

  

1. 1. Mechanisms of linguistic change

All living languages undergo changes. What causes such changes? There are different reasons for them.

When we study the pronunciation over any period of time, we find there are always large-scale regularities in the changes: e.g.over a certain period of time, all the [b] consonants in a certain position may change into [p]. Such regular changes are called sound laws. We mustn’t think of a sound law as a sudden change which immediately affects all the words concerned. If [b] changes to [p] in a given language, the change may first appear in words which are friquently used, and gradually spread through the rest of the vocabulary.

Reasons for changes in pronunciation:

1. geographic or climatic

2. biological or racial

3. fashion: one person immitates another, and people with the most prestige are likely to be immitated, so that a change that takes in one social group may be immitated by speakers of another. The important thing about fashion is that it is exclusive. This can be seen in clothes; fashionable people want to be exclusive and mark themselves off from othe groups. A group with high prestige may find that its style of speech is being immitated by other groups, and then its members may begin to change it.

4. Minimization of effort. We all try to economize energy in our actions, so we tend to take short cuts in the movements of our speech organs, to replace movements calling for energy and efforts by less demanding ones, to omit sounds if they are not essential for understanding.

Assimilation is the changing of a sound under the influence of a neighbouring one. E.g. i-umlaut

Changes in Grammar, syntax or vocabulary.

1. The influence of other languages. Nations with high commercial, political and cultural prestige tend to influence their neighbours: for centuries, French influenced all the languages of Europe, whiletiday the influence of English is penetratinf all over the world, largely because of the power of the USA. This ibfluence is strongest in the field of vocabulary. But one language may also influence the grammar and syntax od another. Such influence may occur if languages are in intimate contact over an extended period, and laso when a religious spreads and its sacred books are translated: in the OE period there were many translations from the Latin, and there is some evedence that Latin syntax infkuenced the structure of Old English.

2. Human inventions

3. Changes in social culture and moral values: e.g. in Shakespeare’s days the adj. gentle (ModE – kind, sweet-natured, not violent) referred to high birth as well as moral qualities.

4. Analogy (in grammar) is the process of inventing a new element in conformity with some part of the language system that you already know. (e.g. dog – dogs and cat – cats). The unusual noun-plural forms in ModE, which are the ones that have managed to resist the analogy of the plural in –s, are mostly very common words, like men, feet, children ot the words which were very common a few centuries ago, like geese and oxen [Barber, pg. 39-50].

II. Old English vowel system

1) Qualitative changes

- PG correspondences

It must always be borne in mind that where changes took place before the time of our earliest texts we are engaged in a process of hypothetical reconstruction, and this means that we can do no more than establish, at best, a helpful relative chronology. That is to say, we can only say that some sound change occurred before another, or later than another, or at much the same time as another [Hogg 1066].

OE shows certain phonological developments of its own compared with the other Germanic languages. The PG diphthongs were changed in Old English irrespective of environment [see Rastorgueva, Moskow, 2003,  pg. 77, $ 118]:

The PG diphthongs [ei, ai, iu, eu, au] underwent regular changes in Early English

The diphthongs with the i-glide were monophthongized into [I:] and [a:]:

Ai = a: Gh stains = OE stān (stone)

Ei = i:        meins = OE mīn (mine)

The diphthongs in u- were reflected as long diphthongs [io:], [eo:], [ea:]

Au = ea:

Eu = eo:

Iu = io:

The exact dates of these various changes are unknown, but they must have taken place sometime between the middle of the 5^th and the middle of the 8 ^th c.

- Anglo-Frisian Brightening (or First Fronting).

The Anglo-Frisian languages underwent a sound change in their development from Proto-West Germanic by which the vowels *a, ā were fronted to /æ, æː/ unless followed by a nasal consonant, a process known in the literature as Anglo-Frisian brightening

Restoration of a or Retraction

Later in Old English, short /æ/ (and in some dialects long /æː/ as well), was backed to /ɑ/ when there was a back vowel in the following syllable. Because strong masculine and neuter nouns have back vowels in the plural, alternations like /æ/ in the singular vs. /ɑ/ in the plural are common in this noun class

Nominative Dæ ġ dagas

Accusative dæ ġ   dæġ

Genitive     dæġ es   daga

Dative        dæġ e    dagum

- OE Breaking or fracture:

(6^th c.)

it is diphthongization of short vowels before certain consonant clusters. It is vowels a and e that undergone fracture.

A > ea   before r, l, h + consonant and before h final

E > eo   before r+consonant; lc, lh, h + consonant and h final

• weorpan "to throw" < /werpan/

• wearp "threw < /wærp/

• feoh "money" < /feh/ 

• healp "helped (sing.)" < /hælp/ (but no breaking in helpan "to help" because the consonant after /l/ is not /h/)

• It is mostly carried out in the West Saxon and Kentish dialects and the Anglian dialects have unbroken vowels (e.g. WS tealde, Mercian talde “told”; WS and Kentish ceald “cold” and the Anglian dialects cald)

Breaking produced a new set of vowels in OE = the short [ea] and [eo], they could enter the system as counterparts of the long [ea:] and [eo:], which had developed from PG prototypes.

- Palatalization / Palatal diphthongization (6 ^th.)

OE vowels also change under the influence of the initial palatal consonants ʒ [j], c [k’] and cluster sc [sc’]. As a result of palatalization the vowel [e] and [æ] is diphthongized.

e> ie  

Æ > ea

Æ: > ea:

• OE scÆmu > OE sceamu (shame)

• West Saxon gēar “year”, but this change didn’t take place in Kentish or Mercian dialects = gēr .

Breaking and palatal diphthongization are the main sources of short diphthongs in OE.

- Front mutation or i-umlaut:

This was a series of changes to vowels which took place when there was an i, ī or j in the following syllable. It was a kind of assimilation, the affected vowels being moved to a place of articulation nearer to that of the following vowel j. Subsequently, the i, ī or j disappeared, or changed to e.

e.g. OE mūs, pl. mūsiz, but the i caused the ū to change to ȳ; then the ending –iz was lost, giving the OE plural mȳs.

Examples of i-umlaut in Mod English: food and feed, goose and geese, tooth and teeth, blood and bleed, man and men.

Mutation is the change of one vowel to another through the influence of a vowel in the succeeding syllable.

Mutation brings about a complete change in vowel quality: one phoneme is replaced by another. The process began in the 5^th or 6 ^th c.

In OE i-mitation affects almost all vowels. Only short e and I have no connection with it.

e.g. OE ān (one) and OE ænig (an y) = they derived from the same root.

  

A	æ
Ā	Ǣ
O	E
Ō	Ē
U	Y
Ū	ȳ
ea	Ie
ēa	Īe
eo	Ie
ēo	Īe

i-umlaut led to the appearance of new vowels:

• [y] and [y:] arose from palatal mutation

• Diphthongs [ie] and [ie:]

- Velar umlaut:

It was the diphthongization caused by an unstressed back vowel (u, o, a) in the following syllable, when only a single consonant intervened.

e.g. OE heofon “heaven”

I > io hira > hiora (their)

E > eo hefon > heofon

A > ea  saru > searu (armour)

 

It didn’t spread  equally to all OE dialects. It occurred extensively in Kentish and Anglian, but in West Saxon is found only before a limited number of consonants [r,l,p,b,f,m] [Baber].