Ie g
Vioced Voiceless
stops stops
b > p (Ukr. болото – E pool; Lat. labi – Goth. slepan, E sleep, G. schlafen)
d > t (Lat. duo, Ukr. два - Goth. twai, E two; Lat. videre – OE witan)
g > k (Lat. iugum, Rus. иго – E yoke; Lat. gelidus – Goth. kalds, E cold; Lat. genu – Goth kniu, E knee)
Ie g
Voiceless Voiceless
stops fricatives
p > f (Sanskr. pitár –Goth. fadar; Lat.pedem \Gr. poda – Goth fotus, OE fōt; Lat. piscis – OE fisc)
t > þ (OInd. trayas, Ukr. три – Goth. þreis, E three; Lat. tenius – E thin)
k > h (Lat. octo – Goth. ahtau, E.eight; Lat. decem, Welsh deg – Goth. taihun, E ten, OHG zehan)
K.Verner, a Danish linguist, in 1877 noticed and analyzed the development of IE voiceless stops in the intervocal position, and in the position at the end of the word after a vowel. Old IE stress doesn’t fall on the preceding vowel. Under such conditions these sounds appeared in Germanic as voiced stops. This addition came to be called as “Verner’s Law”. (Note: if the old IE stress fell on the preceding vowel Germanic voicless stops remained voiceless). Ex. OInd mátar, Rus. мать(тери) – OSax. modar. In PG voiced variant of s [z] was seldom used, mostly before voiced consonant. As a result of the Verner’s Law its sphere widened. Later in North and West Germanic (independently) this development continued to r. This process was called rhotacism. Perhaps, phonetically this development went through some intermediate steps: s > z > ž > ř > r. Eg. OE ceosan – curon (to choose)
As a result of the first consonant shift the PG consonant system was formed, different from PIE consonants.
- Germanic consonants (except r) are lengthened if they are followed by j, w, r, l, m, n, and are preceded by a short vowel. This process is also called “doubling” or “gemination”. After a long vowel the lengthening didn’t occur. The most frequent cases occurred before j, less frequent before m. E.g. Goth. bidjan (просити) – OE biddan.
- In PIE the opposition between short and long vowels could be reduced or even lost, but in Proto-Germanic this opposition was very strict. The Germanic Vowel Shift reflected as the following:
IE short vowels G short vowels IE long vowels G long vowels
a (Lat. ager поле) > a (Goth. akrs) i (Lat. svīnus) > i (OE svīn)
o (Lat. hostis гість) > a (Goth. gasts) ū (Lat. m ūs) > ū (OE m ūs)
i (Lat. piscis риба) > i (OE fisc) ō (Lat. pōs) > ō (OE fōt)
(Lat. vir чоловік) > e (OIcl verr) ā (Lat. m āter) > ō (OE m ōdor)
e
(Lat. edere їсти)
> e
(OE etan)
Goth. ē
(became front)
(Lat.
medius середній)
>
i
(OE midd) ē
(complex > æ
u (OInd upa на) > u (OE uppe) development) West G., North.G ā
( Lat. iugum ярмо) > o (OE eok)
Thus, we have the opposition of “short – long” vowels in PG completed.
- In the domain of vowels the most important property of the Germanic languages is Ablaut or Gradation. This is a spontaneous vowel variation mostly inside a root which is common to all Indo-European languages. Germanic Ablaut goes back to some regular changes inherent in IE parent language. This vowel variation became a very important grammatical means especially in the verb system where it is employed for making past verb-forms of strong verbs. The old system of gradation is vividly seen in Gothic: Goth.: reisan-rais-risum-risans, OE: rīson-rās-rison-risen, ModE: rise-rose-risen
Ablaut is also used in Germanic as a word-forming means: faran їхати– fōr мандрівка, length – long. Other IE languages also possess features of Ablaut: укр. віз – возити – везу.
- The term Umlaut was introduced by J.Grimm for marking a regressive assimilation of a vowel which aquires articulation of the following vowel. In Germanic languages there were 2 types of umlaut: i-umlaut, and u-umlaut. The most widely used was the first type.
So, English belongs to IE family, Germanic group, Westgermanic branch. All Germanic languages have specific phonetic features as compared with other IE languages.
2. Specific lexical and grammatical features of the Germanic languages (etymological layers of English vocabulary; noun structure and declensions, stem suffixes in nouns; categories; verb structure, morphological classes of verbs; categories).
- The PG vocabulary is composed of 3 major groups of words: Words of the IE stock, i.e. those which have cognates in different IE languages: OE – sunu (Germ. – Sohn, ModE – son, Ukr. - син); Words of the Common Germanic stock, i.e. words having cognates in other Germ. languages, but none in the rest of the IE family: OE – lānd (Germ. – Land, Sw. – land, Goth. – land).
- PIE was a highly inflected language, that is it made great use of endings. Not much of IE system of inflections is left in ModE, which prefers other grammatical devices like prepositions and word order. Also in PG there were some declensions of nouns. All nouns had grammatical gender, that is every noun had to be either masculine, or feminine, or neuter. This grammatical gender had no necessary connection with sex or with animacy, which means that the names of inanimate objects could be masculine or feminine, and the names of sexed creatures could be neuter. Similar considerations apply to adjectives. In PG they developed 2 declensions, which has not survived in ModE, but can be found in some other Germanic languages (for ex. in Swedish the weak form is used after the definite article, or after words like this, that, my, your, in other cases the strong adjective is used. In OE gōd mann – strong, sē gōda mann – weak). The historical grammar of all Indo-European languages bases its description of the Noun on the original Indo-European noun-system. The Indo-European Noun conformed to a three-part structure: root – stem-suffix – inflexion. (пор. рос. Реб-ят-а, гот. Dag-a-m). Nouns were divided into classes (groups) according to the type of their stem-suffix, which, perhaps, had been of certain semantic significance to the ancient mind. The most important Indo-European classes (groups) of nouns are: o-stems,i-stems, ā-stems, u-stems, n-stems, root-stems, other cons. Stems. OE
- Noun had 3 grammatical (or morphological) categories: number, case & gender.
By the beginning of the historic period of the Germanic languages stem-suffixation had evidently lost their former significance and the distinctions between different classes of nouns had become obliterated (стерті), which resulted in the reshaping of the noun-structure: thr stem-suffix and the inflexion merged into one.
- PG had only two tense forms of the verb – present and past, plus different endings for different persons and numbers. From PIE PG inherited a set of verbs which showed change of tense by the change of the root-vowel (in ModE sing-sang-sung). These were Strong Verbs. The gradation of vowels for grammatical purpose was highly characteristic of the IE languages. Accordingly, in PG there was a large number of strong verbs. But, alongside, PG developed a new type, called Weak Verbs. The IE verb-stem had the following structure: consonant-vowel-consonant. The sounding of the vowel in the root was dependent on the conditions of the stress falling upon it. This vowel-variation, termed Ablaut, was primarily a phonetic process in IE. In Germanic languages it was widely employed as a grammatical means. The root-vowel could either change its quality (qualitative Ablaut), or its quantity/length (quantitative Ablaut). IE gradation was first widely used in the category of aspect which represented actions as completed/non-completed, repeated, etc. In IE there existed many aspect forms: the durative, the perfective, and the momentary aspects. In the course of time both sounding and the grammatical meaning of these forms changed: 1) the changes in sounding took place in accordance with the Germanic Vowel Shift: IE e > Germ. e/i, IE o > Germ. a. 2) grammatically, the aspects changed into tenses, that is the categories expressing the time of the action in its relation to the time of the utterance.
3. The development of English from a synthetic to an analytic type (synthetic and analytic ways of expressing grammar meanings; the loss of synthetic features by nominal/verbal parts of speech; the formation of analytical forms).
- Old English was a synthetic (or inflected) type of a language, i.e. the relations between words and other grammatical meanings were expressed by synthetic grammatical forms: endings, sound-interchange in the root, grammatical prefixes and suppletive forms. Modern English is an analytical type of a language, which uses a set of analytical means to connect the words in the sentence (prepositions, articles, fixed word order).. In other words, synthetic languages are defined as ones of ‘internal’ grammar of the word – most of grammatical meanings and grammatical relations of words are expressed with the help of inflexions (Ukrainian - зроблю, Russian, Latin, etc). Analytical languages are those of ‘external’ grammar because most grammatical meanings and grammatical forms are expressed with the help of words (will do).
- next – give example of a OE noun (sunu) or verb (to beran) and explain how they lose their endings. Mind the influence of stress. Mention analytical innovations (noun: prepositional phrases, articles, more and most for degrees of comparison), (verb: Perfect, Passive, Future, Continuous).
4. Historical background of English spelling (the main principles of spelling (phonological, morphological, historical, etymological, differentiating); Old English principle of spelling; the main reasons for the historical background of English spelling (influence of French ways of writing, non-reflection of the Great Vowel Shift in writing).
- The English Orthography is based on some definite principles: 1) The word milk is spelt exactly as it is pronounced, that is each phoneme has its letter-counterpart in the alphabet (milk: 4 phonemes, 4 graphemes). In such cases of exact correspondence between pronunciation and spelling the latter is based on phonetic principle, and the spelling is called phonetic. 2) The spelling of the word milked doesn’t exactly correspond to its pronunciation [milkt]. So, in such cases when the spelling of the whole word or of some part of it doesn’t correspond to its pronunciation, but vividly reflects its relation with other morphemes, we say that spelling is based on morphological principle. 3) In order to spell the word know correctly we should have a look at its historical development (that is 1) in OE it was spelt like cnawan; 2) in OE it was pronounced as [knāwan]; 3) in OE k was pronounced before n; only in the 17th century it stopped being pronounced when the spelling was already fixed; 4) the digraph ow emerged only in MidE for the newly appeared diphthong ou which descended from OE ā+w)). In such cases we say that the spelling of such words cannot be explained by the norms of Modern English but historically. It is based on historical principle. Other examples are take, knife, delight, scent, quick, busy, ache, thorough etc. 4) In order to spell such words as cent, or psychology correctly it is not enough to know the spelling rules according to which some variants are possible, like sent, scent, cent or sikology, cicology, sicology. So, in such cases when the spelling is explained only by the peculiarities of the original language but not English, we speak about etymological principle. 5) The meanings of the words die and dye are not the same, though their pronunciation is identical (whole-hole, night-knight, scent-cent etc.). So, when the spelling serves as a means of differentiating the meanings of the words which sound the same, this spelling is based on differentiating or hieroglyphic principle.
- The main difficulty of ModE spelling is the non-correspondence between phonetic and graphic representation od words, that is between how the word is pronounced and how it is spelt. There are some reasons for this. The main one is that the spelling of the majority of English words was established in the 13-15 centuries and at the end of MidE was fixed in printed texts (remember: introduction of printing). But later, during 15-18 centuries phonetic system underwent essential changes: new phonemes appeared, some changed, some disappeared forever. Logically, with the changes in pronunciation one could expect the corresponding changes in spelling (e.g. introducing new letters to express new phonemes, or excluding some letters which expressed “mute” sounds, or substituting some letters in case they undergo changes). But nothing of this kind happened in English orthography.
Let’s take such an example. In OE the word boc was pronounced [bōk]. So, the spelling, as we see, corresponds to the pronunciation. Only the length of o was not marked anyhow. In MidE to mark the long o the digraph oo was introduced, and c was marked by the French letter k which didn’t exist in OE alphabet. In such a way this word acquired a new spelling book which more exactly corresponded to its OE pronunciation [bōk]. When in late MidE (15th cent.) long ō shifted into long ū, the spelling book was already fixed in English texts. So, nowadays we have the discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation of this word. A bit later, again, in the 18th cent. long [u:] shortened in the position before [k] and some dental consonants. Since that time, digraph oo means short u, though we see that non-correspondence between –ook (spelling) and [uk] (pronunciation) is vivid. Other examples are look, hook, took etc.
- the existence of a great number of non-pronounced elements, and a lot of digraphs, trigraphs and polygraphs may be explained, on one hand, by the disappearance of some sounds out of phonetic system of English, and, on the other hand, by the disappearance of some sounds out of pronunciation of the words
Теоретична граматика англійської мови