- •Contents
- •Unit 2: The Comparative Method ………………………..8 Unit 3: The First Consonant Shift, or Grimm’s Law ………………………10
- •Unit 1 The Indo-European Family
- •Centum and Satem Groups of ie Languages
- •Unit 2 The Comparative Method
- •Unit 3 The First Consonant Shift, or Grimm’s Law
- •Exceptions to Grimm’s law:
- •Unit 4 The Accent Shift and Verner’s Law
- •Rhotacism
- •The Palatal Mutation
- •Unit 6 The Early Germans
- •The Life and Social Organization of the Germans
- •The Great Migration
- •Unit 7 Ancient Germanic Tribes and Their Classification
- •The Proto-Germanic Language
- •Unit 8 The East Germanic Group The Goths
- •Ulfilas and the Gothic Bible
- •Unit 9 The North Germanic Group
- •Unit 10 Northern Mythology
- •The Joys of Valhalla
- •Thor and the Other Gods
- •The Death of Balder
- •Unit 11 The West Germanic Group
- •Unit 12 Old English
- •Three Periods of the History of English
- •Unit 13 Old English Alphabet and Pronunciation
- •Diphthongs
- •Consonants in Old English
- •Unit 14 Some Phonetic Changes of the Old English Period
- •Stressed Vowels
- •Oe Fracture, or Breaking
- •II. Unstressed Vowels
- •III. Consonants
- •Palatalization of Velar Consonants
- •Voicing and Unvoicing of Fricatives
- •Metathesis
- •IV. Word Stress
- •Unit 15 The Noun Grammatical Categories
- •Declensions
- •Unit 16 The Adjective
- •The Weak Declension
- •D. Other classes of pronouns
- •Unit 18 The Verb
- •Mutation or Umlaut
- •The Grammatical Forms and Categories of the Verb
- •Unit 19 Strong Verbs
- •Weak Verbs
- •To Class III belong only four verbs:
- •Preterite-Present Verbs
- •Irregular Verbs
- •Unit 20 The Middle English Period Early Middle English
- •Changes in the Orthographic System
- •Unit 21 Middle English Phonetic Changes
- •Consonants
- •Unstressed Vowels
- •Stressed Vowels
- •Quantitative Changes
- •Qualitative Changes
- •Monophthongs
- •New Diphthongs
- •Unit 22 Middle English Morphology Nouns
- •Articles
- •Pronouns
- •Adjectives
- •Unit 23 The Formation of the National English Language
- •The Great Vowel Shift (gvs)
- •Unit 25 The Mood
- •Conjugation of Strong Verbs
- •Conjugation of Weak Verbs
- •Unit 26 Development of the System of Verbids and Their Grammatical Categories
- •Unit 27 Syntactic Structure
- •Unit 28
- •Varieties of English
- •Unit 29 Etymological Composition of the English Vocabulary
- •Unit 30 The connection of the history of the English language with the history of the English people
Changes in the Orthographic System
One of the consequences of the Norman Conquest was the French influence on English spelling. The English language lost the letters which were not used on the continent, e.g. æ (ash), þ (thorn), ð(eth), ӡ (yogh), ƿ (wynn).
New letters were introduced, such as g, j, k, q, v. Many new digraphs and combinations of letters came into use, such as th, sh, ch, gh, ph, dg, ck, gue, qu, ou, ow, etc.:
-
OE wiþ > ME with
OE gæst > ME guest
OE loc > ME lock
OE cwēn > ME queen
The diagraph gh was introduced to represent the OE sound /x/ and /ç/:
-
OE cnīht / cneoht > ME knight
O.E. brōhte > ME brought
The length of a vowel was marked by doubling it, especially in closed syllables:
OE swēt > ME sweet (Mod E sweet)
OE gōd > ME good (Mod E good) [Ivanova, 2001].
The most essential way of representing the length of vowels in Middle English was a graphically open syllable. With the complete reduction of the final ‘e’ in the words like OE ‘name’ (/ٰ'na:mə/ in the 13th c.), the syllable ceased to be open (/na:m/ in the 14th c.), the final mute letter came to be a marker of the length of the root vowel. Since then it had become possible to add the final –e to other words with a long vowel: OE hām > ME hōm > home; OE mӯs > mice; OE stān > stone [Ivanova, 2001 : 93-94].
Doubled consonants, which indicated consonant length in earlier periods, in Middle English time began to indicate also that the preceding vowel was short. Surviving examples are dinner and bitter, as contrasted with diner and biter [Algeo, 2010].
Sometimes the sound [e:], chiefly in French borrowings, was represented by ie or ei:
OF chef > ME chief [e:]
Many letters changed their signification. The letter u, which had denoted only [u] in OE, was used, after the French fashion, to denote [ü] formerly expressed by y: OE bysig > ME busy. The corresponding long vowel [ü:] was usually expressed by ui:
OE fӯr > ME fuir (Mod E fire)
The letter y came to denote the sounds [i] and [j]:
OE his > ME his/hys
OE dæg > ME day
There was a tendency to use the letter i at the beginning and in the middle of words. The letter y was used at the end of a word to separate it from the next letter, as there were often no intervals between words.
The letter c was used not only for the sound [k], but also, in accordance with French usage, for the sound [s] before the letters i, e, y. Therefore, OE cēpan could no longer be written with the letter c, for it would be read as [se:pən], that’s why the letter c was replaced by k; keepen.
The letter k was frequently used to replace the letter c in other cases: OE bōc > ME book.
Sometimes the sound [k] was denoted by the digraph ck: OE bæc > ME back.
The letter o was used not only for the sound [ↄ], but also for the sound [u], e.g. in ME cumen there were too many vertical lines. It made reading rather difficult. This is why words like come [u], som(e) [u], son [u] have the letter o instead of u.
All these spelling changes weakened the phonetic character of Old English orthography. They gave rise to fluctuations in the graphic presentation of sounds and words.
In Old English, the sound [e:] was represented only by the letter ē. In Middle English, the sound [e:] could be represented by e, ee, ei, ie. In Old English, the word fisc had only one spelling. In Middle English, it could be written fish, fysh, fissh, fisch, fyssh, fysch.