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The history of the English language.doc
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1. Spelling

After the introduction of Christianity in the 7th century the runic alphabet was superseded by the Latin. Like elsewhere in Western Europe Latin in England was the language of the church and also the language of writing and education. The monks were practically the only literate people; they read and wrote Latin and therefore began to use Latin letters to write down English words. As the OE sound system differed materially from the Latin, the Latin alphabet proved insufficient to denote all OE sounds. To fill this gap Anglo-Saxon scribes borrowed some letters from the runic alphabet.

The letters v and z were not much used by Old English scribes. The letter y is a symbol for a vowel. There were three letters in OE not used today:

E (ash), (thorn), and D (eth or, as the Anglo-Saxons appear to have called it, ). The word ‘that’ was written as or , for represents the vowel in ‘that’ and or were used interchangeably for th in ‘that’ or in ‘thin’. stood for w and was called wynn ‘joy’.

2. PRONUNCIATION

Obviously there are no native speakers of Old English alive today; so any attempt to reconstruct the pronunciation can be only approximate. But we can be reasonably confident of the pronunciation as a result of comparing the way words are pronounced in the various Indo-European languages, both reconstructed and existing. The pronunciations given here are in terms of the nearest equivalent in the Received Pronunciation of England today.

Vowels

Old English distinguishes short vowels and long vowels (marked~) by taking longer to articulate the sound. Thus MnE ‘aha’ contains first the sound of OE a (short) and then the sound of OE a. MnE ‘hat’ has the sound of OE and MnE ‘bad’ the sound of OE . Approximate pronunciations are:

Fig. 12 “Spelling, ptonunciation, and punctuation”

Diphthongs

In words like ‘meat’ and ‘field’, we have one vowel sound represented by two vowel characters. But, as you will hear if you say them aloud, words like ‘find’, ‘fly’, and ‘go’, contain one vowel character which represents a combination of sounds made by gliding from one vowel position to another. These sounds are called ‘diphthongs’. Diphthongs also occur in words like ‘raid’ and ‘road’, which contain two vowel characters. Old English diphthongs are always represented by two vowel characters and can be pronounced both short and long. With approximate pronunciations, they are:

Fig. 12 “Spelling, ptonunciation, and punctuation”

Consonants

Fig. 12 “Spelling, ptonunciation, and punctuation”

Word Stress

In English today, the stress falls on the most meaningful syllable of a word, often called the root or the stem, e.g. ‘found-’ in ‘founded’, ‘founder’, and ‘founding’. The same is true in Old English. The root is very often the first syllable, e.g. ‘hindmost’, OE hindan ‘from behind’; ‘coming’, OE cumende; and ‘standing’, OE standende. But again as in English today, the root remains stressed in compounds even when it is not the first syllable, e.g. ‘behind’, OE behindan; ‘overcome’, OE ofercuman; ‘withstand’, OE wipstandan; and in OE words beginning with the prefix ge-, e.g. gedrifan ‘to drive’. Compounds in which both elements retain full meaning have secondary stress on the second element in both periods of English, e.g. sa -weall ‘sea-wall’ and niht-waco ‘night-watch’.

Phonetic Changes In Old English Period

After we have presented the Old English system of letters and sounds, and the rules of pronunciation we should explain the changes that resulted in this system.

1. THE DOUBLING OF CONSONANTS

All the consonants, except [r], were doubled (in spelling) or lengthened (in pronunciation) between a short vowel and sound [j] (sometimes [l] or [r]). The phonetic essence of lengthening appearsto be assimilation: the consonant j is assimilated to the preceding consonant.

A long f later developed into long b (spelt bb). E.g. Gt. saljan, OI. selja > OE.sellan, OHG. sellen (E. sell) Gt. bidjan > OE. biddan (E. bid), OHG. bitten OI. epli > OE. eppel (E. apple)  *s etian > settan ‘set’ (Goth. satjan) *st epian > steppan ‘step’ *framian > fremman ‘fulfil’ *t elian > tellan ‘tell’ *sw efian > *sweffan > swebban ‘kill’ *hleahian > hliehhan, hlyhhan ‘laugh’

Note 1. The sound [j] which caused the doubling in the West-Germanic languages, was lost very early.

Note 2. A similar phenomenon can be noticed in the Ukrainian language. Compare: R. веселье U. весiлля та R. коренья U. корiння

2. a > o CHANGES

The Germanic phoneme [a] formed several variants in different dialects, depending on its position in the word.

a) Before nasal consonants the Gmc. [a] was slightly labialized and raised, so that it became intermediate between [a] and [o]. OE scribes wrote sometimes the letter a, sometimes the letter o in this position. We shall use here the symbol a. E.g. G. land, lang > OE. land, lan (E. land, long)

b) In other positions the Gmc. [a] was usually palatalized and became [a ] (in some dialects [e]). E.g. Gt. dags, OI. dagr > OE. n. d e , g. d e es, d. d e e (E.day)

3. BREAKING AND DIPHTHONGISATION

Under the influence of succeeding and preceding consonants some Early English monophthongs developed into diphthongs.

a) OE breaking is diphthongization of short vowels before certain consonant clusters. It is the vowels a, e and i that undergo breaking.

The Gmc. [a], [e] and [i] were diphthongized before the clusters ‘r + consonant’, ‘l + consonant’, ‘h + consonant’, and before h final:

The phonetic essence of breaking is as follows: if a front vowel stood before a velar consonant there developed a short glide between them, as the organs of speech prepared themselves for the transition from one sound to the other. The glide, together with the original monophthong formed a diphthong.

b) Diphthongisation of vowels could also be caused by preceding consonants: a glide arose after a palatal consonants as a sort of transition to the succeeding vowel. That is why this process is called ‘palatalization’.

After the initial palatal consonants g or ... [j], c [k’ or t ] and the combination sc [ ] most vowels were diphthongized.

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