ENG 4820

History of the English Language

Dr. Michael Getty | Spring 2009
WEEK 5:
FROM AFRICA TO PROTO-GERMANIC
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
A Language is a System of Arbitrary
Symbols…
• Which of the following best captures the concept of ‘five’?

• Kannada aydu (South Asia)

• Basque bost (Western Europe)
• Arabic xamsa (Middle East)
Answer:
• Coptic
p tiw ((Egypt)
gyp ) All of them and none
• Somali shanti (Northeastern Africa)
• Hausa biyar (Western Africa)
of them.
• Yoruba erin (Western Africa)
• Guarani po
p ((South America))
• Finnish viisi (Northern Europe)
• Indonesian lima (Southeast Asia)
• Japanese itsutsu (Eastern Asia)
• Mohawk wisk (North America)

2
ENG4820 | Week 5
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
Regular vs. irregular morphemes

• Regular Morphemes Irregular Morphemes

– Rule-governed
R l d forms
f Arbitrary
A bit fforms; No
N rhyme
h or reason!!
– Apply to all new words Apply only to certain existing words
– Learned early by children Learned late by children
– Appear more frequently Appear less frequently

ENG4820 | Week 3 3
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
Regular vs. irregular morphemes
• Regular Morphemes Irregular Morphemes
– Rule-governed
Rule governed forms Arbitrary forms; No rhyme or reason!
– Apply to all new words Apply only to certain existing words

• Plural forms of nouns

– Nouns that end in [s,z] Æ /-Iz/ horse, rose
– Nouns that end in other, voiceless consonants Æ /-s/ mat, tiff
– Nouns that end in other voiced consonants Æ /-z/ lab, grave, name
• Past tense forms of verbs
– Verbs that end in [t,d] Æ /-Id/ wait, raid
– Verbs that end in other, voiceless consonants Æ /-t/ thank, laugh
– Verbs that end in other, voiced consonants Æ /-d/ beg, bathe, name
v

• P
Pretend d that
h the
h following
f ll i made-up
d wordsd are nouns or verbs:
b
biss, lozz, veck, drid
• You already know their plural forms if they are nouns, their past-
tense forms if theyy are verbs!

ENG4820 | Week 3 4
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
Regular vs. irregular morphemes
• Regular Morphemes Irregular Morphemes
– Rule-governed
Rule governed forms Arbitrary forms; No rhyme or reason!
– Apply to all new words Apply only to certain existing words

• Why oxen, children, and sheep instead of oxes,

oxes childs,
childs and
sheeps?
• For that matter, why not ox, childen, and sheepren?
• Whyyaate, o e, and
e, wrote, a ds u instead
swum stead of
o not
ot ea
eated, ed, and
ed, writed, a d
swimmed?
• For that matter, why not ote, wrate, and swom?
• Pretend that the following made-up words are nouns or verbs:
biss, lozz, veck, drid
– No one would guess plural forms like bissen, lozzren, and vock
– No one would guess past tense forms like bass, vock, or drod

ENG4820 | Week 3 5
 WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD
AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE
• Overt case marking: A relationship between the shape
of a phrase and its role in the action of a sentence
THE KING,
KING THE BISHOP,
BISHOP AND THE DOG
• cyning = ‘king’ biscop = ‘bishop’ hund = ‘dog’
• geaf = ‘gave’ se / tham / thone = ‘the’
Giver Givee Gift
King Bishop Dog

King Dog Bishop

Bishop King Dog

Dog King Bishop

Bishop Dog King

Dog Bishop King

ENG4820 | Week 5 6
 WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

Wh h
What happened
dbbetween the
h 88th
h and
d 11
11th
h centuries?
i ?

• Phonological changes: Reduction of unstressed syllables, already

underway since the early Germanic period

Primary Stress

ENG4820 | Week 5 7
 WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

Wh h
What happened
dbbetween the
h 88th
h and
d 11
11th
h centuries?
i ?

• Phonological changes: Reduction of unstressed syllables, already

underway since the early Germanic period

– Loss of final consonants

– Loss of range of possible vowels

• Since overt case marking in Old English is realized in unstressed

syllables, the system collapses, leaving us with the essentially fixed word
y
order system we have today.
y

ENG4820 | Week 5 8
 WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

Q i k answer: Variation,
Quick V i ti Interaction,
I t ti and
d Time
Ti

• Variation is constant in language use in all communities and at

all times.
times
• We vary constantly in our pronunciation of various phonemes
and which affixes and words we use in particular contexts.
• We have a g geneticallyy endowed but mostly y subconscious ability
y
to monitor the statistical prevalence of one variant over another
in a given setting.
• Children acquiring their native language(s) are especially
sensitive to statistical patterns, and their speech tends to reflect
and amplify statistical trends in the variation to which they are
exposed.

ENG4820 | Week 5 9
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• Anatomically (skeletal structure) and behaviorally (art, tools, fire) modern
humans were first present in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
• About 80 thousand years ago, during a time of dramatic climate change
(source), a group or groups left Africa via what we now call the Red Sea
and colonized areas straddling the equator. (source).
• When people tried moving into more northern latitudes, they ran into two
problems …
• Vitamin D deficiencyy and Ice

ENG4820 | Week 5 10
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• We humans need Vitamin D (cholecalciferol) in order to absorb calcium
from our food. It also plays a crucial biochemical role in our immune and
neurological systems. With too little vitamin D, we're at severe risk for
bone disease, heart disease, cancer, and depression. (source)
• We can get Vitamin D from meat and dairy products, but our most
reliable source of Vitamin D is our skins. Skin cells close to the surface
take a form of cholesterol from our blood, which, when exposed to
ultraviolet light from the sun, becomes Vitamin D. (source)
• Too much ultraviolet light can cause skin cancer, though, but melanin, a
dark pigment that absorbs ultraviolet light, can reduce that risk.

ENG4820 | Week 5 11
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• Close to the equator, high levels of melanin gave the earliest humans the
right balance between vitamin D production and the risk of skin cancer.
• At higher latitudes, though, sunlight is more spread out (diagram), and it
takes more exposure for the skin to produce the same amount of Vitamin
D it would closer to the equator. With their melanin-rich skin, the earliest
human populations couldn't live much further north than what we call the
Tropic of Cancer (image) without the risk of Vitamin D deficiency.
• At the northern extremes of this area, individuals with less melanin in
their skins had slightly more children per generation than their darker-
skinned neighbors, because they were at lower risk for vitamin D
deficiency.
• Over many thousands of generations, the low-melanin adaptation
spread, allowing populations to push further and further north. By about
55,000 years ago, northern-dwelling humans had adapted enough to
settle
ttl allll off what
h t we now callll E
Europe.
ENG4820 | Week 5 12
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• The past 55,000 years have seen dramatic climate changes including
two distinct ice ages, when much of the northern hemisphere was
covered by glaciers.
• The last ice age ended definitively only about 10,000 years ago.
– Better climate
– Booming populations
– Invention of agriculture
– Development of centrally managed settlement areas
• 1000 years is enough time for f a language to change to the extent that it
becomes mostly unrecognizable to original speakers.
• Multiply that by a factor of 50 or so, add in dramatic population
movements, and d you get scenario
i that
h can easilyil llead
d to thousands
h d off
wildly different languages, many of which show no transparent
relationship to each other.

ENG4820 | Week 5 13
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• About 7000 years ago (source), a
culture emerges in what we now call the
Caucasus or possibly northeastern
Turkey.
• An educated guess at the geographic
origin of Indo-European comes from
side-by-side
id b id comparison i off th
the
vocabularies of the daughter languages.
Common, similar-sounding words for
’snow,’ ‘cow,’ and ’salmon,’ along with a
l k off common words
lack d ffor thi
things like
lik
‘lion,’ ‘olive,’ and ‘palm tree’ point
towards farming cultures in temperate,
wooded areas.
• The best educated guesses point
towards what is now called the
Source: Google Maps
Caucasus region, an area
encompassing southeastern Ukraine,
southern Russia, and Georgia.

ENG4820 | Week 5 14
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• Over the next centuries, it spreads across what we now call Europe and
Central and Southern Asia. We now call this culture Proto-Indo-
European, and we know that the languages that descended from it
encompass such far-flung tongues as …
– The Celtic languages: Gaelic, Welsh, Breton
– The Germanic languages: English, German, Danish/Swedish/Norwegian
– The Romance languages
– All the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, etc.),
– Greek, Albanian
– Many of the languages of Central and South Asia
– Farsi/Dari (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan)
– Pashto (Afghanistan)
– Armenian, Abkhaz (Caucasus)
– Dozens of languages of South Asia: Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi,
Gujerati, Sinhalese, Sindhi, but not Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, or Malayalam
ENG4820 | Week 5 15
 BUT HOW DO WE KNOW THIS?
• After 7000 years, the daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European had
become so dissimilar that it took the work of scholars to figure out that
they were all related.

ENG4820 | Week 5 16
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
• Assemble a list of words in languages you’re interested in
• Preferably very common words: family,
family nature,
nature agriculture
• Determine, based on phonological similarity, which words
are transparently
p y similar to each other: cognates
g
• WARNING:
– Some words may have been displaced by foreign loans
over time
ti
– Some unrelated languages may have borrowed Indo-
European words

ENG4820 | Week 5 17
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

• These forms are spelled, not transcribed

• Accent and vowel length marks
• Sanskrit bh – an aspirated voiced stop. Say ‘rib hut’ and
gradually take of the sounds leading up to b.
b
ENG4820 | Week 5 18
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

• You can start to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European form just on

the visible commonalities. The word for ‘mother’ was probably
*mater or *matar.
• As if things weren’t confusing enough, we’re now using the asterisk for a different purpose than last week.
Now it’s signifying that this is a reconstructed form, one that we can support but that isn’t actually attested.
• What to make of the four different sounds at the beginning of
‘brother’?
J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 5

ENG4820 | Week 5 19
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

• Change tends to reduce complexity over time. A form that seems more
complex than its cousins is probably closer to the original
• Voiced, aspirated stops are complex and relatively more difficult to
pronounce than
h unaspirated
d or voiceless
l stops.
• They required fine manipulation of the airstream, the vocal chords, and
the oral articulators.
• It makes more sense that a language should have them and then lose
them
h than
h spontaneouslyl acquire
i them.
h

ENG4820 | Week 5 20
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
Once you think you’ve found a relationship, probe a little further.
Look for grammatical similarities.

• Proto-Indo-European was a heavily inflected language, as was Old English.

• Rich,
Ri h overtt morphology
h l matching
t hi th
the grammatical
ti l ffeatures
t off words
d within
ithi
phrases.
• Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin speakers had little use for pronouns like I, he, she…
J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 6

ENG4820 | Week 5 21
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic

• The Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops {bh, dh, gh} are lost in
all of the daughter languages outside India.

• bh > L
Latin
i f Greekk ph
G h>f Germanic
G i b
• dh > Latin f Greek θ Germanic d
• gh > Latin h Greek x Germanic g

ENG4820 | Week 5 22
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic

• bh > Latin f Greek ph > f Germanic b

• dh > Latin f Greek θ Germanic d
• gh > Latin h
g Greek x Germanic g

No one knows why Proto-Germanic didn't go in a direction like Latin and Greek.
Whatever the reason, the change created a big problem for the speakers of the time.

ENG4820 | Week 5 23
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• /bh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/
• /dh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/
• /gh/ Æ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic /g/

• No one knows why Proto-Germanic didn't go in a direction like Latin

and Greek.
Greek Whatever the reason
reason, the change created a big problem
for the speakers of the time.
• The difference between {bh,dh,gh} and {b,d,g} was meaning-
bearing, and in a big way: many morphemes differed from each
other only in whether the aspirated or unaspirated voiced stop was
present.

• **ghel- 'shine, bright' **gel- 'cold, freeze‘

f ‘
• *dher- 'hold firmly, support' *der- 'split, peel' (source)

ENG4820 | Week 5 24
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• /bh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/
• /dh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/
• /gh/ Æ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic /g/

• So what happens? As the original voiced aspirated stops {bh,dh,gh}

lose their aspiration
aspiration, the original unaspirated voiced stops {b
{b,d,g}
d g}
shift to voiceless {p,t,k}.
• But that only changed the problem instead of solving. The difference
between voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops was also meaning-
meaning
bearing:

• *gel- 'cold, freeze‘ *kel 'cover, hide‘

• *der- 'split, peel' *ter- 'rub, turn, twist' (source)

ENG4820 | Week 5 25
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• /bh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/
• /dh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/
• /gh/ Æ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic /g/

• But the language already had those consonants, so all the original
stops {p
{p,t,k}
t k} shifted to their fricative counterparts {f
{f,θ,x/h}
θ x/h} (source)

• So it’s another game of musical chairs

ENG4820 | Week 5 26
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic

Proto-Indo-
Proto Indo Proto-
Proto Original Meaning Eventually … Compare
Compare…
European Germanic
*ghel- *gel- ‘shine, bright’ yellow Greek chloros > chloroform
*gel- *kel- ‘freeze, cold’ cool, chill via Latin congeal, gelato
*kel- *hel- ‘cover, hide’ hell via Latin conceal
*dher- *der- ‘hold firm, support’ not attested in Latin firm, Greek throne, Sanskrit dharma
English
*der *ter- ‘split, peel’ tear (i.e. rip) via Greek dermatologist, epidermis
*ter *θer ‘rub, turn, twist’ thread, thresh Latin turn, Greek torus

ENG4820 | Week 5 27
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic

• This explains why English, once it acquired its taste for Latin and Greek
loan words, in many cases has two copies of the same word.

foot podiatrist, pedestrian, pedal, etc.

father paternity, paternal
three triad, trimester, triple, etc.
tooth dental, dentist
heart cardio, cardiologist, etc.
kin gene, geneology (originally pronounced as /g/)
knee genuflect
queen gynecology, misogyny (from Greek gyné, ‘woman)
ENG4820 | Week 5 28
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
Verner’s Law and Germanic Stress
Stress and accent in Indo-European
Indo European
were irregular: unpredictable features
located unpredictably

ENG4820 | Week 5 29
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
Verner’s Law and Germanic Stress
Germanic regularized stress and
accent onto the first syllable of a root
morpheme:

Primary Stress

ENG4820 | Week 5 30
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
Verner’s Law and Germanic Stress
Germanic regularized stress and
accent onto the first syllable of a root
morpheme:

Before this change was complete, voiceless consonants

became voiced if they appeared just before the main
stress of a word.

PGmc. ‘chosen’ *kusun Æ *kuzun Æ *kurun Æ Old English

g curon
But ‘to choose’ *keusan Æ Old English ceosan

PGmc. ‘were’ *wasun Æ *wazun Æ *warun Æ Old English weron

But ‘was’ *wasi Æ Old English wæs
ENG4820 | Week 5 31
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• When descendants of the Indo-European tribes who we call
‘Germanic’ settled on the coast of the Baltic Sea from about the 18th
to about the 8th century BCE, they encountered tribal groups that
had been their for millennia.
• We don’t know who these people were, as their language died out
well before the invention of writing, but the Germanic tribes settled
among them,
them intermarried
intermarried, and borrowed vast numbers of their
words, which now form a big part of the core vocabulary of the
Germanic languages.
• They weren
weren’tt the Finns, because our word Finn and Finnish bears
no resemblance to what the Finns call themselves, Suomi and
Suomalainen.
• We know these are non-Indo-European words because only the
Germanic languages have them.
• house, leg, hand, shoulder, bone, sick, all, boat, ship, sail, net,
oar, shoe, hound, lamb, sheep, seal, sturgeon, herring

ENG4820 | Week 5 32
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• Most of the Latin borrowings into English we talk about are from the
Middle Ages, the language of civil society. But there was a wave of
Latin loans from way before that, dating to contacts between
Romans and Germanic tribal groups between 500 BCE and 500
CE, a period which overlaps with the Christianization of Roman
culture.
• Stop anyone on the street
street, and they’d
they d tell you that these words are
about as English as you can get. In fact, they were borrowed from
Latin before Latin was cool, you might say:
• cheap, cheese, pan, dish, kitchen, cook, cherry, pillow, mile,
tile, beer, street
• After Christianity became associated with Roman power and
institutions, we got:
• church, monk, bishop, nun, and candle, to name a few.

ENG4820 | Week 5 33