Historical Linguistics and Language Change Flashcards
Celtic populations that inhabited England (3)
Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish
the ___ occupied most of modern Europe from 1st to 5th Century.
Romans
West Germanic people that crossed over to Britain after Roman troops withdrew. (3)
Angles, Jutes, Saxons
What did the Anglo-Saxons do with the English language?
Began to write the language down using Latin symbols.
Extensive case-marking system
Large corpus of Literature
The Dane Law - when, what.
800 AD
Vikings from Scandinavia (North Germanic) moved to Britain.
Influence on OE from Scandinavian languages, mainly lexical.
The Norman conquest - who, what, when, what effect?
1066AD
William the Conqueror of Normandy invaded England.
Originally Viking settlers but spoke French by 1066AD. Profound effect on English Language.
End of Old English Era.
Describe Middle English
circa 1200 Simplification of paradigms Spelling largely standardized, although much variation Class English became apparent Norman French loanwords
Phonological features of Old English
no contrast between voiced/voiceless
Phonological effects of Norman French on English
introduced voiced fricatives
voiced/voiceless fricatives became distinct.
Why is written English orthography so inconsistent? (3)
- The latin alphabet
- Sound change (assimilation)
- the great vowel shift
Describe the great vowel shift
long vowels - diphthongs
pronunciation deviated
- Rhymes/puns no longer worked.
What are formal English words derived from?
Latinate
What are informal English words derived from?
Germanic
two languages are ___ ____ when they share a common ancestor.
genetically related
English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages are all a part of the ____ family.
Germanic
Germanic is a branch of the __-______ family.
Indo-European
____-____-_______ is a hypothetical ancestor language of all members of the IE family.
Proto-Indo-European
What is a proto language?
hypothetical reconstruction of language
We use asterisk (*) to show that a form has been reconstructed.
What does Grimm’s law prove?
Germanic is IE
Systematic sound changes
Sound changes from Grimm’s law (3)
Voiceless stops / p t k / became fricatives
Voiced stops / b d g / became voiceless / p t k /
Aspirated voice stops became non-aspirated (see book for table)
What type of analysis is used in reconstructing proto-languages?
Comparative method
What is a cognate?
Words of similar form and meaning found across a set of languages.
Not due to chance or language change
Must be inherited by common ancestor
Possible cognates: shared/ core vocabulary (3)
Body parts
Kinship terms
Natural phenomena
What does the comparative method help to understand?
IE languages
What is George Kingsley Zipf’s principle?
Of least effort
- Sound change tends towards reducing effort expended.
Explain Zipf’s principle of least effort.
words that are most frequent tend to be shortest
Freq of words is an indicator of phonological methods
Groups of words reduced to single word
Words become affixes
Effects of grammaticalisation
Reduced phonetically and broadened semantically.
What is a cognate set?
A set of words descending from the same ancestor in the protolanguage.
What are sound correspondences?
Set of sounds found in same position across set
