Preface

PART III.

PART II.

PART I

Lecture 1. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE OLD ENGLISH PERIOD……………………………………………………………………………….6

Lecture 2. PHOHOLOGICAL SYSTEM………………………………………...10

Lecture 3. MORPHOLOGY. PARTS OF SPEECH…………………………......17

Lecture 4. VERBS…………………………………………………………………..26

Lecture 5. SYNTAX AND WORD STOCK……………………………….....37

Lecture 6. THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD.GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS……………………………………………………………….44

Lecture 7. MIDDLE ENGLISH PHONETICAL SYSTEM………………………...51

Lecture 8. MORPHOLOGY………………………………………………………...58

Lecture 9. VERBS…………………………………………………………………..64

Lecture 10. SYNTAX AND VOCABULARY……………………………………...76

Lecture 11. THE MAKING OF THE NATIONAL LANGUAGE…………………82

Lecture 12. THE NEW ENGLISH PERIOD EVOLUTION OF THE LITERARY ENGLISH LANGUAGE……………………………...……………………………..86

Lecture 13. CHANGES IN THE SYSTEM OF NEW ENGLISH PHONEMES………….94

Lecture 14. ALTERATIONS IN NEW ENGLISH GRAMMAR……………………...104

Lecture 15. REGIONAL VARIETIES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE……………113

LITERATURE ………………………………………………………………………...125

There can never be a moment of the
standstill in language, just as little as in the
ceaseless/laming thought of men. By nature
it is a continuous process of development.

Wilhelm von Humboldt. Lehrmann.

Language change is a topic which, perhaps more than most others, spreads itself
over a wide range of areas. These lectures are an attempt to pull the various strands together into a coherent whole and to provide an overview of the phenomenon of human language change.

With the help of it you can judge where our evidence comes from, how changes
happen and why they happen.

The extent to which the English language has changed in the past thousand years
can be seen by looking at a passage of English from faraway period.

Sōþlice his yldra sunu wæs on æcere; and h ē cōm, and þā h ē þam hūse gen ē alæhte, he gehỹrde þæne sw ē g and þæt wered.

Part of the difficulty of this lies in an amount of unfamiliar words: þ a "when, then", gen ē alæhte "approached", sw ē g "noise", wered "multitude, band"; these are all words that have died out from the language.

The passage also differs from present-day English in the way words change their
endings according to their grammatical function in the sentence. This could be
demonstrated from word æcer "field" which after the preposition "on" has to add the
ending -e (pronounced) and so in the text we have the expression on æcere. The
expression for "the house" is þam hūse, but "to the house" is Pam huse, and this is the form that appears in the text; æcere and hūse are the dative case of the nouns æcer and hūs.

The normal word for "was" is wæs, as in the sentence but there is also a form wære (the so called subjunctive form).

The passage also differs from present-day English in word-order. Translated literally word for word, it runs as follows:

Indeed, this elder son was on field; and he came, and when he the house
approached, he heard the noise and the crowd.

Then we see different types of word-order, different arrangements of Subject-Verb-Object. Some clauses have the normal present-day order of S-V-O:

He gehỹrde þæne sw ē g / He heard the noice.

Yet other clauses have the order S-O-V:

þā h ē þam hūse gen ē alæhte / when he the house approached

The English language, then, has changed enormously in the last thousand years.
New words have appeared, and some old ones disappeared. Words have changes in
meaning. The grammatical endings of words have changed, and many such endings have disappeared from the language. There have been changes in word-order, the permissible ways in which words can be arranged to make meaningful utterances.

Pronunciation has changes. Taken all together, these changes add up to a major
transformation of the language.

These lectures can be helpful to fill in the gap in your knowledge of the English language, to find the answers for some vital questions about Modern English spelling and pronunciation and to follow the transformation of a synthetic-typed Old English into its analytical-typed modern counterpart.

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