Language Change

Language Change/Historical Linguistics

1. Language change - a constant process of change along the dimension of time

2. Periods of the history of the English language:

• Old English (450–1100)

• Middle English (1100–1500)

• Modern English (1500–present)

3. Old English:

• Germanic tribes coming from the continent  - settled down in the 5th century

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

• had diphthongs that later disappeared

• had three genders (feminine, masculine, neutral)

4. Middle English:

• 1066 - Norman Conquest

• French words entering English (lost most its inflections and a substantial number of loanword entered the language)

• quality of many of its original sounds had changed

5. Modern 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

• lexical changes: many loanwords entered the language (not only French, but also Latin ones)

• grammatical changes: question inversion, semantic meaning changes

Language families and branches

1. Language family - is a group of languages that share a common ancestral origin, meaning they evolved from the same proto-language (a reconstructed, prehistoric parent language)

2. There are mother-to-daughter; sister-to-sister relationships; and there are language isolate - languages that do not have any demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages (Korean)

3. Major Branches:

• Slavic

• Baltic

• Germanic

• Hellenic

• Italic (Romance)

• Celtic

Proofs for the relatedness of languages

1. These are some genetic relationships that exist among the world’s languages

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

• Grimm: published a book in which he explained the sound correspondences by means of rules of phonological change (= sound shift / sound change)

• he discovered that certain rules of sound change that applied to the Germanic family of languages didn’t apply to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin

• Grimm’s law: is a key principle in historical linguistics that explains how certain consonant sounds in Proto-Indo-European (PIE)systematically changed in the transition to Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of English, German, Dutch, and other Germanic languages

• Verner’s law: when the preceding vowel was unstressed, f, θ, and x underwent a further change to b, d, and g

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