4 - language change

Language change/Diachronic Variation

• constant process of change along the dimension of time

• periods of the history of the English language:

  • Old English (450–1100)

  • Middle English (1100–1500)

  • Modern English (1500–present)

Old English

• Germanic tribes coming from the continent  

  • tribes: the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes

  • settled down in the 5^th century

  • spoke Germanic dialects → various dialects of OE developed from these

• phonology

  • contains short [a] and long [ā]

  • diphthongs that later disappeared

• syntax

  • verb preceding the indirect object

  • indirect object preceding the subject

• morphology

  • elaborate inflection system for both verbs and nominal phrases

Middle English

• 1066 Normal Conquest

• French words entering English (government, legal system, religion)

• English lost most of its inflections

• quality of many of its original sounds had changed

• dominant dialect of ME: Mid-South-Eastern dialect (around London), this later became Standard English

Phonological changes

sound changes that directly affect a language’s phonological system.

• Great Vowel Shift (somewhere between 1400–1600)

  • 7 long vowels of ME underwent changes

  • /i:/ and /u:/ became diphthongs /ai/ and /au/

  • each of these vowels was replaced by the next higher vowels

Syntactic changes

• around 1200, direct objects were mostly before the verb

  • by about 1500, the direct objects were majorly put after the verb, and the verb-object word order had become dominant

• question inversion

  • OE: the inversion applied to all the verbs

  • MoE: only auxiliary verbs can be present before the subject (or do-insertion in case when no auxiliary is present)

Morphological changes

Old English

• rich conjugation system for verbs

  • verbs had different endings depending on person, number, and tense

• nouns were divided into 3 gender classes: masculine, feminine, neuter

  • each gender class was associated with a different set of case endings in both singular and plural

Middle English

• disappeared by the end of the Middle English period

• in terms of nouns, the ones thar remained distinguished were the non-genitive singular form (dog) and the form with the suffix -s (standing for non-genitive plural (dogs), genitive singular (dog’s), and genitive plural (dogs’))

Lexical changes

• loan words

  • English has borrowed words, especially from French as a consequence of the Norman Conquest

    • French were used to refer to political, judicial, and cultural notions

  • Latin loanwords as well

Semantic changes

the meaning of the words undergo changes over time.

• semantic broadening: the meaning of a word becomes more general than its earlier meaning

• semantic narrowing: the meaning of a word becomes less general than its earlier meaning

• semantic shift: the word loses its earlier meaning and acquires a new one

Language Families and Branches

Indo-European

• Indo-Iranian

  • Sanskrit (Bengali, Hindi)

  • Old Persian (Persian, Kurdish)

• Slavic (Russian, Polish, Ukrainian)

• Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian)

• Celtic (Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic)

• Italic

  • Romance/Latin (French, Italian, Spanish)

• Germanic

  • North (Danish, Swedish, Icelandic)

  • West (German, English, Dutch)

• Hellenic (Greek)

• Albanian

• Armenian

Relatedness of Languages

related languages

• mother-to-daughter (Latin - Italic)

• sister-to-sistern (Italian - Spanish)

• language isolate: languages that have no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages (Basque)

Genetic relationships

based on regular sound correspondences (sound changes) among certain languages.

• Sir William Jones (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages came from a common source) → Franz Bopp (methods for comparing grammatical structures)

• Jakob Grimm

  • published a book with rules for predictable sound changes between languages

  • certain rules that applied to the Germanic family didn’t apply to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin

Grimm’s Law

explains systematic sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic.

• These sound shifts happened in natural classes (voiced aspirates → unaspirated, voiced stops → voiceless, voiceless stops → fricatives)

Cognates

words in related languages that developed from the same ancestral root.

• they often have a similar meaning and show regular sound patterns across languages.

• by comparing cognates, linguists can observe sound correspondences and figure out how sounds have changed over time

Verner’s law

explains an exception to Grimm’s Law.

• It says that when the vowel before a consonant was unstressed, the sounds /f/, /θ/, and /x/ changed to /b/, /d/, and /g/ in early Germanic languages.

Neo-Grammarian Hypothesis

sound changes happen regularly and without exceptions, as long as the conditions (environment) are right.

Comparative Reconstruction

languages that have no written records may be reconstructed based on their descendants.

• done by applying the comparative method (compare related Ls → find cognates → look for regular sound correspondence → reconstruct)

• based on

  • Vocabulary

  • Irregular verb patterns

  • Syntactic structures (like verb movement)

Historical Evidence

• Old documents, letters, and grammars can also help.

• Misspellings in private letters often reflect how people actually pronounced words.

• Early grammar books sometimes describe how things were said at the time

Internal Reconstruction

when we apply the same method within one language, comparing earlier and later stages of that language.

Types of Sound Changes

Unconditioned Sound Change: happens in all environments, not influenced by the surrounding sounds

Conditioned Sound Change: sound changes only in certain environments.