language change Flashcards
What are neologisms?
- new words, coinages and usages
What are some examples of neologisms?
- selfie = wasn’t needed until front-facing cameras
- gaslight
- NPC
- mewing
- lore
- rizz
In what order did different groups come to England and what languages did they speak?
- Celts - Celtic
- Romans - Latin
- Saxons - Old English
- Vikings - Old Norse
- Normans - French
- Romans - Latin
Roughly where and when did English originate?
- somewhere between South Russia and the Baltic around 4000BC
What kind of language is English?
- an Indo-European language
What type of words came from Mercian Old English?
- man
- woman
- bairn
- eat
- drink
- sleep
What words did English borrow from the Romanised Celts?
- pear
- cup
- pail
- anchor
What Latin words did English take from Rome missionaries?
- minister
- alms
- altar
What words did the Vikings introduce?
- are
- ugly
- trust
- they
- their
- though
What words did the French invaders introduce?
- castle
- tower
- moat
- court
- chimney
- cooking words e.g. fry, boil, beef, pork, mutton and sausage
What English words come from dutch?
- buoy
- skipper
- deck
- dock
What English words come from Spain?
- galleon
- comrade
- armada
- grenade
What words come from portugal?
- port wine
What words come from South and Central America?
- tobacco
- potato
- maize
What English words come from Germany?
- quartz
- plunder
What English words come from Italy?
- cameo
- miniature
- balcony
- umbrella
What words have been borrowed from India?
cockatoo and chintz
What words have been borrowed from China?
tea
What words have been borrowed from Arabia?
sash and sofa
What words have been borrowed from Turkey?
coffee
What words have been borrowed from Persia?
divan and shawl
What words have been borrowed from West Africa?
chimpanzee and zebra
What words have been borrowed from Australia?
kangaroo and budgerigar
What is meant by synchronic variation?
variation at any given time
What is meant by diachronic variation?
variation over time
How are new words made?
- borrowings
- compounds
- blends
- acronyms
- initialisms
- word class changes
- morphology
- coinages
- abbreviations
What is meant by borrowings?
- words from other languages are incorporated into English e.g. shampoo
What is meant by compounds?
- new words are made by joining two words together e.g. laptop
What is meant by blends?
- new words are made by blending other words e.g. bromance
What is meant by acronyms?
- acronyms become words through common usage e.g. radar, scuba, asap
What is meant by initialisms?
- initialisms for phrases can become so commonly used that they become lexicalised e.g. FYI
What is meant by word class changes?
- new meanings are formes when words are used in different word classes e.g. ‘friend’ as a verb
What is meant by morphology?
- new words are formed when prefixes or suffixes are added to existing words e.g. ‘unfriend’
What is meant by coinages?
- completely invented new words e.g. leng
What is semantic change?
- general term for how words change their meanings
What is meant by amelioration?
- a word develops more positive connotations over time
e.g. ‘nice’ originally meant ignorant q
What is meant by pejoration?
- words take on a more negative meaning
e.g. silly originally meant happy/fortunate
What is meant by semantic reclamation?
- particular groups consciously reclaim a pejorative and start to self-consciously ameliorate the meaning
e.g. ‘queer’
What is meant by broadening?
- when words pick up wider and less specific meanings
e.g. ‘navigate’ is no longer just about ships
What is meant by narrowing?
- when words gain more specific meanings and lose their broader meaning
e.g. ‘meat’ originally meant ‘food’
What are the different grammatical cases in modern English?
- subjective/nominative = a noun/pronoun is the subject of a verb
- objective = object of a verb (direct = accussative or indirect = dative)
- possessive/genitive = ownership or relationship
What is an inflection?
a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender
What is one of the key grammatical changes in English?
the loss of inflections
What are some inflections in modern English?
- the possessive ‘s
- the plural -s
- the third person singular -s
- the past tense -d, -ed, or -t
- the negative particle ‘nt
- -ing forms of verbs
- -en forms of verbs
- the comparative -er
- the superlative -est
What are some early modern english verb inflections?
- -st
- -th
- art
How are verb inflections determined in Early Modern English?
- by the person
- ‘th’ = 3rd person singular
- ‘st’ = 2nd person singular
What is needed in Modern English to form a question or a negative?
an auxiliary verb
What do we do when the original sentence doesn’t have an auxiliary?
we add one - the periphrastic ‘do’ in the correct tense
What is meant by periphrasis?
the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed through an inflection - the resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one inflected word
Why have some of these grammatical changes taken place?
In his book ‘Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue’ (2008), **John McWhorter argues that they have their roots in the Celtic languages, which, also have these two features:
1. the necessary use of present progressive to describe a present action
2. the required periphrastic ‘do’ to form questions and negatives
What is meant by the Great Vowel Shift?
- the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels was changed
- it is the major reason why English spellings now often deviate from how they represent pronunciations
Around what time did the Great Vowel shift occur?
- primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in Southern England
What is meant by uptalk?
- where the intonation rises at the end of a sentence
- sometimes this can be used to form questions, or perhaps to express doubt/uncertainty
What are some examples of recent phonological changes?
- vocal fry
- glottal stop/dropping of consonants
- ASMR
What is an example of a major graphological change?
- emoticons and emojis
Why did emojis emerge?
- developments in communication technology such as phones and the internet, means that written mode became electronic mode with the key difference being the informality
- people were writing far fewer words and it began to mimic spoken mode, BUT the electronic mode lacked paralinguistic features and therefore pragmatic meaning of the conversation is lost
When did people speak Old English?
500-1100
When did people speak Early Middle English?
1100-1300
When did people speak Late Middle English?
1300-1500
When did people speak Early Modern English?
1500-1700
When did people speak Modern English?
1700-present day
When was the printing press invented?
1476
When was Shakespeare writing?
1540s-1611
When was the first settlement in America?
1607
When was the King James Bible written?
1611
When was the Oxford English dictionary written?
1886
When was the telephone made?
1876
When was the first iphone made?
2007
Who invented the printing press?
William Caxton
When was the first dictionary made and by whom?
1604 - Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall
