Language Variation over Time

Question 1

Eponym

Answer 1

A word that comes from the name of a person

Question 2

Back formation

Answer 2

A particular form of shortening where one word of one class (usually a noun) is shortened to form a word of another class

Question 3

Spelling Variation theory

Answer 3

Sidney Greenbaum (1986):

• Carried out a survey to estimate spelling variation in Modern English
• He identified all of the words in an average dictionary (not online, large or specialist) under the letter ‘A’ which were spelt in more than one way
• He then used his findings to work out an estimate for the whole dictionary
• He estimated that there would be around 500 variants of words, or 5.6%

Question 4

1066

Answer 4

Normans invade England. William the Conqueror crowned King of England. The next decades bring the French language to the senior members of the English kingdom. English is no longer a written language

Question 5

Mid-Late 14th century

Answer 5

• The Hundred Years War - leads to the loss of almost all of England’s French possessions
• The Black Death kills roughly 1/3 of the English population, and also stopped people from travelling - restricting the spread of English
• Geoffrey Chaucer composes the Canterbury Tales in Middle English
• The Great Vowel Shift begins
• English becomes the official language of the law courts

Question 6

1590-1611

Answer 6

William Shakespeare writes his sonnets and the majority of his plays - enhanced the amount of English that most people knew, as they were given a factor of enjoyment by what Shakespeare’s actors performed

Question 7

1604

Answer 7

Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, the first English Dictionary, is published. This is the first attempt to categorise words, try to define them and distribute it out for all to see

Question 8

1755

Answer 8

Samuel Johnson publishes his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language. This further educated people on the definitions and spellings of words and made English more standardised

Question 9

1876

Answer 9

Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, thus modernising private communication. People could now use spoken speech with someone who wasn’t close by without having to travel

Question 10

1928

Answer 10

The Oxford English Dictionary is published. This further standardised the the English Language, and also added new words from the last dictionary so more people could familiarise themselves with them

Question 11

1988

Answer 11

The Internet (under development for more than 20 years) is opened to commercial interest. This creates new words for the English Language itself, but also creates a unanimous space for people to do things online with each other

Question 12

1994

Answer 12

Text messaging is introduced, and the first modern blogs go online. This is the first time that people can quickly send messages to each other without letters - spreads English further

Question 13

Why was paragraphing introduced?

Answer 13

-Ancient Greek manuscripts separated units of text by a horizontal line called a ‘paragraphos’
- Greeks sometimes began paragraphs with an outdent, sometimes called a hanging indent
Policy indent at the start of paragraphs was standardised in the 17th century

Question 14

Punctuation developments

Answer 14

• 11th century - hyphen (used initially in Spanish)
• 14th century - ‘mark of admiration’ (exclamation mark) appears, but is used inconsistently (not used on a typewriter until 1970)
• Early 16th century - Question mark, possibly in resemblance to the capital letter ‘Q,’ from the Latin word quaestio.

The pilcrow is now obsolete. Roots in Ancient Greece, the pilcrow started life during the fourth century BC as the paragraphos, a horizontal line drawn in the margin to hint that the subject was changing. They started to disappear from language after the invention of the printing press because it cost a lot in ink to use one