HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS Language change Historical Linguistics What is now called historical linguistics was developed in the course

of the 19th century. Scholars had long been aware that languages change with time. They also knew that many of the modern languages of Europe were descended, in some sense, from more ancient languages. For example, it was known that English had developed out of Anglo-Saxon, and that what we now refer to as the Romance languages all had their origin in Latin. However, until the principles of historical linguistics were established it was not generally realized that language-change is universal, continuous and, to a very considerable degree, regular. Here it may be noted that the universality and continuity of the process of language-change the fact that all living languages are subject to change and that the process itself is going on all the time was unknown due to the conservatism of the standard literary languages (the register or dialect that is used in literary writing) and the prescriptive attitudes of traditional grammar.

The status of Latin is particularly important in this respect. It had been used for centuries in Western Europe as the language of scholarship, administration and international diplomacy. By the 19th century Latin was close to being a dead language, but it still enjoyed a prestige that set it apart from most other languages. And it does so to this day for traditionally minded grammarians.

Literary languages were more highly regarded than non-literary languages and dialects; and any differences that were noted by grammarians tended to be condemned and attributed to lack of education. It was only after a great deal of detailed work had been done during the 19th century, in what we may now think of as the classical period of historical linguistics, from the 1820s to the 1870s, that scholars came to a better understanding of the relation between written and spoken languages, on the one hand, and between standard and non-standard languages, on the other.

On the basis of this detailed research and by applying the so-called comparative method, it was demonstrated that all the great literary languages of Europe had originated as spoken dialects, and also that their origin and development could only be explained in terms of principles which determine the acquisition and use of the associated spoken language.

The truth of the matter is that the transformation of one language into another is not sudden, but gradual. It is largely a matter of convention and arbitrary decision that leads us to divide the history of English into three periods Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), Middle English and Modern English . What is now Standard English is, in the essential features of its phonology, grammar and vocabulary, a descendant of the dialect
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of London, which was close to where three of the four major Anglo-Saxon dialects came into contact Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish contains features from all three.

Although there may be a good reason to divide the history of language into more or less distinct periods, the process of language-change itself is continuous. What produces the illusion of discontinuity between, for example, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English or between Middle English and Modern English, is the coincidence of several factors, including gaps in the historical records and the relative stability of literary languages over quite long stretches of time.

Languages change more rapidly in certain periods that they do in others. Even literary languages change in the course of time; and spoken languages acquired in childhood and employed throughout life change far more obviously than literary languages do. Furthermore no living language is completely uniform. And this fact is crucial to the explanation of language-change.

The Comparative Method

The standard way of demonstrating the genetic relatedness of languages is by means of the so-called comparative method. This was developed and refined in what was referred to earlier as the classical period of historical linguistics: between the 1820s and the 1870s. It rests upon the fact that many of the most obviously related words across languages can be put into systematic correspondence in terms of their phonological and morphological structure.

Thing Head Horse Sing Dog Goat Plant Key Rain

Latin Causa Caput Caballus Cantare Canis capra

French Chose Chef Cheval Chanter Chien Chvre

Italian Cosa Capo Cavallo Cantare Cane Capra

Spanish Cosa Cabo Caballo Cantar Cabra

Planta Clavis Pluvia Octo Nox/noctis Factum Facte Filia Formosus

Plante Clef Pluie Huit Nuit Fait Lait

Pianta Chiave Ploggia Otto Notte Fatto Latte

Llanta Llave Lluvia Ocho Noche Hecho Leche

Eight Night Fact Milk Daughter Beautiful

Filie

Figlia

Hermoso

The first point to note is that the words brought together in each row of the table are related, not only in form but also in meaning.
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Very often, however, it is not clear whether two words are semantically related or not. It is for this reason that the comparative method gives priority to relatedness of form. It should also be noted that words may change their meaning in time and also, for various reasons, fall into disuse or are replaced. How do we explain these systematic correspondences? The answer given by the 19th century inventors of the comparative method was that the sound-changes which take place in a language in the course of its history are regular. Grammarians proclaimed The sound changes which we can observe in documented linguistic history proceed according to fixed laws which suffer no disturbance save (except) in accordance with other laws. At first sight, the thesis that sound-laws operated without exception was clearly false. There were many instances of obviously related words which did not exhibit the expected correspondences.

In 1822, Jacob Grimm pointed out that there is a systematic correspondence between the consonants of the Germanic languages and the consonants of other Indo-European languages. The sound law that was postulated to account for the observed correspondences is generally known as Grimms Law. (a) Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiced aspirates [*b, *d, *g] became voiced stops [*b, *d, *g] or possibly voiced fricatives [*, *, *] in Proto-Germanic (PGmc);

(b) PIE voiced stops [*b, *d, *g] became voiceless stops [*p, *t, *k] in PGmc; (c) PIE voiceless stops [*p, *t, *k] became voiceless fricatives [*f, *, *h] in PGmc. Now, Grimms Law covers a large number of observed correspondences. For example, it accounts for the fact that English has [f], where Latin, Greek, French, Sanskrit, etc. have [p], for instance: father(English), pater (Latin), pater (Greek), pitar (Sanskrit); also in foot (English), pedis (Latin), podus (Greek), padas (Sanskrit). Even though Grimms Law is supported by an impressively large number of instances of systematic correspondence, there were many apparent exceptions. For example, the [p] of split, spew corresponds to a [p] in other languages, in apparent violation of Grimms Law, spuo (Latin), etc. More interesting is another class of apparent exceptions. If we take the words for father and brother in various Germanic languages other than English, we see that they differ in respect of the medial consonant: Go. fadar : broar, G. vater : bruder, etc.

<d> can be represented by either a stop [d] or a fricative [], but in any case it is voiced and different from the voiceless fricative [] of the word for brother, so the word for father appears to be irregular.

This problem was solved by Verner. He demonstrated that, on the assumption that the PIE words for father and brother were different with respect to the place of the word stress, as they do in Sanskrit (pitar : bhratar), the apparent exception *fader could be explained in terms of what is now called Verners Law: intervocalic voiceless fricatives, for example [], become voiced unless they are immediately preceded by the word-stress. *ptr- : *brater*far- : *broar*far- : *broar*fader- : *broar-

(i) PIE (ii)

(iii) (iv) PGmc

Grimms Law is traditionally held to account for the transition from (i) to (ii) and Verners Law for the transition from (ii) to (iii).

Several other so-called sound-laws were formulated. Taken together, they gave scholars a much better idea of the relative chronology of developments within the different branches of the Indo-European family of languages. More important, they made the grammarian principle of the regularity of sound-change far more likely than it would have seemed to an earlier generation of historical linguists. Language history and change

In 1786, Sir William Jones (a British government official who was working as a judge of the high court in India) came up with quite a revolutionary idea for that time. By observing the ancient language of Indian law he thought that many languages coming from very distant geographical places must have some ancestor in common. However as there were no existing records, the study had to be hypothesized on the basis of familiar features existing in records of languages which were believed to be descendants. These type of linguistic investigations were carried out for long, and it focuses on the historical development of languages and attempts to characterize the regular processes which are involved in language change.

Family Trees During the 19th century, linguists main concern was to study the history of languages (described as PHILOLOGY) and a new term came into existence to describe the common ancestor. It incorporated the notion that this was the original form (proto) of a language which was the source of modern languages in

the Indian sub-continent (Indo) and in Europe (European). So, Proto-Indo-European was established as the great-grandmother, scholars tried to set out the branches of her family tree.

Only one family is shown above. There are 30 such language families which have produced the more than 4000 languages in the world. In terms of numbers of speakers, Chinese has the most native speakers (near to 1 billion); English (about 350 million) is more used in parts of the world. Spanish has 300 million native speakers and Hindi 200 million and Arabic and Russian have about 150 million each.

Family relationships

One way to see these family relationships more clearly is by looking at the records of an older generation, like Latin and Sanskrit, from which the modern languages developed. For example, if we use familiar letters to write out words the words for father and brother in Sanskrit, Latin and Ancient Greek we could see some common features.

The fact that close similarities occur (especially in the probable pronunciation of the forms) is good evidence for proposing a family connection.

Cognates

Within groups of related languages, we often find close similarities in particular sets of terms. A cognate of a word in one language (e.g. English) is a word in another language (e.g. German) which has a similar form and is or was, used with a similar meaning. For example; the English forms of mother, father and friend are cognates of the German forms Mutter, Vater and Freund. We could then say that such sets in modern
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English and modern German probably have a common ancestor in what has been labeled the Germanic branch of the Indo-European.

Language Change

The reconstruction of proto-forms is an attempt to determine what a language must have been like before written records began. Even when we have written records from an older period of a language they may not bear any resemblance to the written language of these days. So in order to see how one language has undergone substantial changes though time, we need to take a brief look to the history of that language, in this case English. The historical development of English is divided into 3 periods: 1) The Old English Period: from the time of the earliest written records (7th century) to the end of the 11th century;

2) The Middle English Period: from 1100 to 1500;

3) The Modern English Period: from 1500 to the present.

Old English

The British Isles were invaded by a group of Germanic Tribes from Northern Europe. They were tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes. We have the term Anglo-Saxons from the 1st two tribes to describe these people and from the Angles we get the word for their language; Englisc, and for their new home, Englaland. Many of the basic English terms come from this early variety of Englisc. Terms such as: Mann (man), wif (woman), cild (child), hs (house), mete (food), etan (eat), drincan (drink) and feohtan (fight). These tribes were pagan but they did not stay like that for long. From the 6th to the 8th century, AngloSaxons were converted into Christianity. A number of words connected to religion and Latin came into English at that time. The origin of words like: angel, bishop, candle, church, martyr, priest and school date from this period. In the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries another group came to settle in England: The Vikings. From their language, Old Norse, we derived the forms which gave us a number of common modern terms such as give, law, leg, skin, sky, take and they.

Middle English

The arrival of the Norman French in England and their victory at Hastings under William the Conqueror in 1066 marked the beginning of the Middle English period. These French-speaking invaders took over the
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whole of England. They turned into the ruling class, so for the next 200 years French was the language of the nobility, the government, the law and civilized behavior. It is the source of such modern terms as army, court, defense, faith, prison and tax. Peasants kept speaking English. They worked on the land and reared sheep, cows and swine (word from OE). While the French-speaking upper class used words such as mutton, beef and pork (words of French origin). Different words in modern English to refer to these creatures on the hoof as opposed to on the place. By the late 14th century, Middle English had substantially changed from Old English. But several changed were yet to take place before the language took on its modern form. Vowel sounds were very different from what they are now. In the 200 years that separated writers like Chaucer and Shakespeare the sounds of English underwent a substantial change to form the basis of Modern English pronunciation.

Sound Changes

The most obvious difference between Modern English and previous periods is the quality of the vowel sounds. Here are some examples (their general forms have remained the same but their vowel sounds have changed considerably)

Some sounds changed, but some even disappeared from the general English pronunciation. An example is the voiceless velar fricative (x) which was used in the old English pronunciation of nicht as /nixt/. Metathesis involves a reversal in position of two adjoining sounds. For example (they are from the Old

English period)

The reversal of position of metathesis may actually occur between non adjoining sounds. The Spanish form

palabra was created from the Latin parabola, via the reversal of /l/ and /r/ sounds. Epenthesis is another change which involves the addition of a sound to the middle of a word.

Another important change, though it does not occur in English, involves the addition of a sound to the beginning of a word and is called prosthesis. It is very common in the change of pronunciation of some forms from Latin to Spanish.

Syntactic Changes

There are some differences between the structure of sentences in Old and Modern English, they involve word order. In old English texts, we find the subject-verb-object ordering most common in Modern English, but we can also find some other orderings which are no longer possible. For example, the subject can follow the verb or the object can be placed before the verb or at the beginning of a sentence. The use of negative also differs from Modern English, since the sequence *not gave is no longer grammatical. A double-negative was also possible, with both not and never.

The loss of a large number of inflectional affixes from many parts of speech. For instance, sealed (he gave) and sealdest (you gave) are differentiated by inflectional suffixes which are no longer found in Modern English.

Lexical Changes

Many words in Old English came from Latin and Greek. Many of these words have ceased to be used. The old English term form man was / were, it is no longer used though in horror movies this word has survived in a compound form werewolf. There are two interesting processes that of broadening and that of narrowing of meaning. An example of Broadening of meaning is the change from holy day as a religious feast to the very general break from work called a holiday. The reverse process called narrowing of meaning, has took the Old English word hund (once used for any kind of dog) but now as hound, used only for an specific breed. The Old version of the word wife could be used to refer to any woman, but it has narrowed its application to only married women. A different kind of narrowing can lead to a negative meaning for words that previously were simply ordinary (=vulgar) or worth noting (=naughty).

The Process of change

All the changes mentioned above were gradual and probably difficult to discern while they were in progress. The most pervasive source of change in language seems to be in the continual process of
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cultural transmission. Each new generation has to find a way to of using the language of the previous generation. Each new language-user has to recreate for him or herself the language of the community, and it is unavoidable to pick up some elements exactly and others only approximately and there also is the desire to be different. So languages will not remain stable but they will change and vary. The change of language has been diachronically dealt in this summary that is from the historical perspective of change through time. The type of variation which can be viewed synchronically, that is in terms of differences within one language in different places and among different groups at the same time. Change in Language Old English Old English was the West Germanic language spoken in England area during 5th to 11th centuries. Old English began to appear in written language in the 8th century. It was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), three grammatical numbers (singular, plural, dual) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only and referred to groups of two. Adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) participles agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, number and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subject in person and number. Within the Germanic group the family tree looks like this:

Example of Old English: Hwt! W Gr-Dena in gerdagum, odcyninga h elingas Oft Scyld Scfing rym gefrnon, ellen fremedon. sceaena ratum,

monegum mgum, meodosetla oftah, egsode eorlas. fasceaft funden, Syan rest wear h s frfre gebd,

wox under wolcnum, weormyndum h, ot him ghwylc ofer hronrde gomban gyldan. ra ymbsittendra hran scolde, t ws gd cyning!

Translation to modern English: Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped, we have heard, and what honor the athelings won! Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes, from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore, awing the earls. Since erst he lay friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him: for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve, till before him the folk, both far and near, who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate, gave him gifts: a good king he!

The main differences between Old English and modern English are grammatical ones. Old English has different word order and often the words a and the are missing. But the biggest difference is the large number of grammatical endings in Old English. Old English was similar to modern German, because it had three genders, many different classes of nouns and verbs, as just about as many endings of German. English had been changing since the day the Angles and the Saxons arrived in Britain about AD 500. Since then English lost a lot of endings and now it has only few, eg. Dog, dogs, dogs, love, loves, loved, loving. English has gone so far that now it has fewer grammatical endings than any other European language.

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Borrowing

About 60 per cent of the vocabulary of Old English has disappeared, and been replaced by different words. Even before the ancestral English- speakers arrived in England they had already borrowed a number of words from Latin: wine, soap, church, angel, devil, anchor, butter, cheese, etc. When the English-speakers first settled in Britain, that country was already occupied by the Celtic-speakers of British, but only a few Celtic words were taken into English, even though a large number of Celtic place names were adopted into English: London, Kent, York, etc. In the 9th century Vikings invaded Britain from Scandinavia and settled in large numbers. English adopted a big amount of words from it: skirt, window, scrub, sky, skill, scowl, score, skin, etc. The majority of the words have sk or sc which marks the Scandinavian origin. In 1066 French-speaking Normans conquered England and French became official language for a couple centuries. French words adapted to English are mostly from warfare, administration, social organizations and law spheres: government, castle, service, royal, prince, soldier, chief, etc. As well as from every sphere of human activity: fry, boil, language, sentence, color, pity, fruit, etc. By around 1400, English had reasserted its dominion over French in England and the flood of French loans began to slow down, but the usage of French words never stopped. The reduced rate of borrowing French words changed into Indian loans, when English-speaking people settled in North America: skunk, moccasin, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Mississippi, Chicago, etc. Settlers in Australia and New Zealand borrowed: kangaroo, kiwi, koala, etc. From Dutch English borrowed: boss, brandy, yacht, etc. From Spanish: patio, mosquito, sherry, etc. Borrowings were adapted also from other languages like German, Italian, Arabian, Turkish, Chinese, Russian (perestroika and glasnost), etc.

Phonetic changes

In the last thousand years not only vocabulary but also phonetics changed. The most important change in pronunciation is the one with h. In Old English h was very common consonant, and it could occur in almost any position in a word, eg. Hiw color, hit it, hnutu nut, hring ring, etc. H was pronounced in all these words very vigorously. The time was passing and h became less and less usable, especially in written language. In the USA though pronouncing h in the first word marks you as an uneducated person, e.g. Instead of hotel, educated people say otel. In the 19th century h began to disappear from all the words beginning with hw. Dropping of h is still continuing and now in England it is said that you can easily differ middle class from upper class by h pronunciation (middle class keep dropping h while upper class sticks to h).

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http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar http://www.jebbo.co.uk/learn-oe/origins.htm

Bibliography

LYONS, JOHN (1991) Language and Linguistics: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. YULE, GEORGE (1985-1998) The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press.

Dos Santos, Fernanda Kleivaite, Sarune Santolin, Mariana

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