History of the English Language
- human speech: 100,000 to 20,000 BC
common IE language spoken ca. 5000-3000 BC (migrations ca. 3000BC)
- (a) IE shares words for: cold, winter, honey, wolf, snow, beech, pine
(b) but not: ocean, palm, elephant, camel
- non-Indo-European languages in Europe:
(a) Finnish, Estonian, Lapp, Hungarian (Finno-Ugric or Uralic family)
(b) Turkish (Altaic family)
(c) Basque (no known family)
(d) Georgian (Caucasian)
- moveable stress in IE:
compare MnE photograph/photographer, Shakespeare/Shakespearean
- Germanic – stress on first syllable whenever possible:
seven, mother, forehead, hollow
- verbs in Germanic languages inflected only for present and past (unique to the Germanic branch of IE):
I talk, I talked
other tenses require a verb phrase:
I will talk, I would talk
compare French je parlerai (I will talk), je parlerais (I would talk)
Latin dicebatur, “it was being said” – called ‘synthetic’ verb forms (one word)
- dental suffix in English (unique to the Germanic branch of IE):
talked, bragged, boasted
past participle: I have talked
new verbs in English add –ed: I spammed the list.
- some words common to Germanic branch but not to other IE branches:
e.g., earth, loaf, meat, drink, begin, bed
some words common to West Germanic languages – e.g., ghost
some words common to English and Frisian only – e.g., key
some words common to English only – e.g., dog, log, pig
why is English a Germanic language?
1. large Germanic vocabulary
2. dental past tense verbs
3. fixed syllable stress
4. 2-tense verb system (present and past; no ‘synthetic’ future tense)
5. Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws
- consider some word pairs:
tooth (from OE) vs. dental (from Latin)
heart (OE) vs. cardiac (Latin)
lip (OE) vs. labial (Latin)
foot (OE) vs. pedal (Latin)
knee (OE) vs. genuflect (Latin)
gall (OE) vs. choler (borrowed from Greek; cf. melancholy, cholesterol)
(choleric = abundant gall – cholesterol occurs in bile, melancholy is black bile)
door (OE) vs. thyroid (from Greek - thyroid gland looks like a door)
- Grimm’s Law (see illustration and chart)
voiced stops (b d g) become voiceless stops (p t k)
voiceless stops (p t k) become voiceless fricatives (f th h)
voiceless fricatives ( f th h) become voiced stops (b d g)
- Verner’s Law
an example of the same process from later English: beauty/beautician, extra/exam
worked on the voiceless fricatives:
a voiceless fricative ( f th h), when not initial and followed by a stressed syllable, becomes a voiced stop (b d g)
the accent then shifts to the first syllable, thus hiding the condition that led to the change in the first place
