Historical Linguistics Flashcards
Introduction of English to Britain
brought about by contact with Anglo-Saxon settlers who came to Britain as military support, invaders, traders, and immigrants. These settlers quickly dominated Britain linguistically (they spoke dialects of West Germanic - an ancestor of Old English)
Introduction of English to Britain
brought about by contact with Anglo-Saxon settlers who came to Britain as military support, invaders, traders, and immigrants. These settlers quickly dominated Britain linguistically (they spoke dialects of West Germanic - an ancestor of Old English)
transcription of written form
Old English Grammar
inflectional for nouns, adjectives, pronouns
- gender
- case (nom, acc, gen, dat)
- number
reduced during Middle English period - through a process of ANOLOGICAL LEVELLING, the strong masculine nouns were used for most other noun categories
Old English Grammar
inflectional for nouns, adjectives, pronouns
- gender
- case (nom, acc, gen, dat)
- number
Semi-Standard Written Form of OE
West-Saxon
Danelaw
political territory controlled by the Vikings (many place names in this area still find their roots in settlement - Rugby, Derby, Corby…)
Influence from Norman French
English borrowed many lexical items
diglossia
a situation where there is two languages and one is considered more prestigious than the other
diglossia
a situation where there is two languages and one is considered more prestigious than the other
Great Vowel Shift - push chain
a series of changes whereby the phonetic realisations of phonemes change in step to avoid merger
- affected long vowels, which all rose in height in the vowel space:
the two high long vowels diphthongised
Orthography of Old English
only one series of fricatives, underlyingly voiceless (but pronounced as voiced between vowels and voiced consonants)
= /f/ = [f] and [v]
language also contrasted long and short vowels
- used a macron [-] above the letter to signify it was a long vowel when written down
Old English Grammar
inflectional for nouns, adjectives, pronouns
- gender
- case (nom, acc, gen, dat)
- number
Semi-Standard Written Form of OE
West-Saxon
High German Sound Shift (=/= prestige)
(the second sound shift)
plosives become fricatives (intervocalically and word finally) and affricated (word initial)
number of voiceless stops significantly reduced
p -> pf (-> f)
t -> ts (-> t)
voiceless stops -> affricate -> fricatives)
Influence from Norman French
English borrowed many lexical items
Relationship between OE and Old Norse
contact led to the adoption of many Old Norse words in English:
- vocab items (sister, sky, egg)
- production of some doublets (church-kirk)
- 3rd plural pronouns (they, them, their)
diglossia
a situation where there is two languages and one is considered more prestigious than the other
Neogrammarian Hypothesis
sound changes are regular and exceptionless
- if /p/ changes to /f/, then all instances of /p/ in the ancestor language change to /f/ in the descendant language, all other things being equal
Great Vowel Shift
a series of changes whereby the phonetic realisations of phonemes change in step to avoid merger
proto-language
common ancestor language
proto-Indo-European
hypothesis that all Indo-European languages ultimately emerged from a single ancestor
- hypothesised as a mainly head-final language
- can be reasonably confident that nouns could be inflected for number, gender and case, and verbs could be inflected for tense and mood
Grimm’s Law
a set of changes that all Germanic languages have undergone (the first sound shift)
Generalisations:
voiceless plosives become fricatives
voiced plosives become voiceless
voiced ‘aspirated’ plosives become deaspirated
p -> f k -> x b -> p d -> t g -> k d^h -> d g^h -> g
High German Sound Shift (=/= prestige)
(the second sound shift)
plosives become fricatives (intervocalically and word finally) and affricated (word initial)
assimilation
adapting a sound to a neighbouring sound
- can be place, manner or voicing assimilation
voice
voicing an obstruent between two vowels
lenition
deleting or weakening of an obstruent
Neogrammarian Hypothesis
sound changes are regular and exceptionless
- if /p/ changes to /f/, then all instances of /p/ in the ancestor language change to /f/ in the descendant language, all other things being equal
Vowel Harmony
when a sound, in particular a vowel, adapts itself to the place of a vowel in a following syllable
Paragoge
when a new sound is inserted at the end of a word
Prothesis
when a new sound is inserted at the beginning of a word
Epenthesis
when a new sound is inserted/shows up in the middle of a word
Aphesis or Procope
when a new sound disappears from the beginning of a word
Syncope
when a sound disappears in the middle of a word
Apocope
when a sound disappears at the end of a word
Conditioned sound change
when a sound change only takes place in only certain contexts - it is restricted by its environment
Unconditioned sound change
when a sound change is not restricted by it’s environment
secondary split
some allophones of a phoneme abandon the original phoneme and join another phoneme instead, leaving a gap in the environments in the language where the phoneme can occur
primary split
the total number of phonemes in a language increases - new phonological contrasts are produced
excrescence
insertion which refers to a consonant being inserted between other consonants (results in easier pronunciations)
haplology
repeated sequences of sounds are simplified into a single occurence:
- library pronounced libry
