II. The purpose of this course is to explain the principal features of present-day English by resorting to history

INDO-EUROPEAN AND THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH

Language is a historical phenomenon: it is constantly changing throughout its history. The changes affect all the spheres of the language: grammar, vocabulary, phonetics and spelling.

I. The purpose of this course is to trace the development of the English language from its earliest forms to the present. English… What is it? Where did it come from? Where is it going?

1) Why is English grammar seemingly so simple? Why did English move from a highly inflected language in OE to a relatively uninflected (analytical) language in Modern English?

In an inflected language the relations between words in a phrase are expressed through their forms – grammatical endings, prefixes, etc.; all grammatical forms are synthetic.

In an uninflected language the relations between words in a phrase are expressed through their position in the sentence (word order is important) and grammatical forms are built in the analytical way, with the help of auxiliary words.

Changes in the declension of the noun “folk” (люди, народ) in the course of time:

Case and Number	OE	Early ME	Late ME	NE
N, Sg	Folc	Folc	Folc	Folk
G, Sg	Folces	Folces	Folces	Folk’s
Dat., Sg	Folce	Folc	-	-
Acc., Sg	Folc	-	-	-
N, Pl	Folc	Folc	Folc	-
G, Pl	Folca	Folce	Folces	-
Dat., Pl	Folcum	Folc	-	-
Acc., Pl	Folc	-	-	-

As you see, in the course of time the complex system of noun case endings is gradually being lost. In this process, endings are falling together into smaller and smaller groups (es, e, a, um in OE and just es, e in ME), until a limited collection of sounds comes to represent a larger set of grammatical categories (e, es in ME represent all the noun cases).

Why did these changes (grammar, spelling changes) take place? Some scientists think that they depend on pronunciation and stress. OE, like all Germanic languages, had a fixed stress on the root syllable of the word. That means that regardless of what prefixes and suffixes were added to the word, the stress remained on the root syllable: come – be come, timber – be timber ( be timber is an OE verb meaning to build), swerian – an swerian (answer). So in OE as well as in the Germanic languages there is an insistent (dynamic, forceful, repeated) stress on the root syllable. But this is not true of the Romance languages (developed from Latin – French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian) where you have a variable stress on words. But this is true of the Germanic. And this insisted stress tended to level out the sounds of unstressed syllables. This means that any sound or syllable that did not take the full word stress, such as a grammatical ending, would not have been pronounced clearly. For example, if you were saying “ man um ” for an inflected form of the noun “man”, it might be pronounced /manem/, /manm /, so it might be swallowed, gobbled, so it might gradually in everyday speech turn into the distance of the sound, so that you might no longer be able to distinguish it.

As you see, the relationship between grammar and spelling and pronunciation is the central one. And the English scholar Henry Sweet proposed to make the division of the history of English according to the state of unstressed syllables. The 1^st period (OE) is characterized as the period of full endings. This means that any vowel could be found in unstressed endings (sun u - son). The 2^nd period (ME) is characterized as the period of leveled endings (sun e). This means that vowels of unstressed syllables were leveled under the neutral vowel /э/, represented by the letter “e”. The 3d period (MnE) is characterized as the period of lost endings – the endings were dropped altogether (son). This division is based on the feature both phonemic (weakening and loss of unstressed vowel sounds) and morphological/grammatical (weakening and loss of grammatical morphemes).

2) Why is English spelling so irregular? - “silent” letters, mutable consonants, vowels (немой гласный, согласный, непроизносимая буква).

English spelling a) has remained historical and etymological (etymology – the origin and history of words). English spelling preserves older forms of the words by using conservative spelling, the history of words is preserved in spelling: knight, knee, knife, marriage, enough.

3) Why do we pronounce words the way we do? What is the evidence for language change?

a) written records: textbooks, manuals, glossaries, dictionaries, verse, scientific works;

b) handwritten letters, manuscripts, marginalia, diary entries, “eye dialect” (sez for says, wanna, gonna).

• Who were the Indo-European speakers?

• What language did they speak?

• Who discovered Indo-European?

• How can we know anything about a group of people who lived 3,000 to 5,000 years ago and left no written records and very few archaeological remains?

• Why should we study this language in the history of the English language?

Comparative philology is the technique of reconstructing earlier forms of a language or reconstructing earlier languages by comparing surviving forms in recorded languages.

Indo-Europeanis a postulated (гипотетический, предполагаемый) language or group of dialects out of which the Western and Eastern European, the Indian, and the Iranian languages developed. Indo-European was spoken by a group of people who lived in the 4th or 3rd millennium BC in southeastern Europe, probably in the area around the Black Sea. The Indo-Europeans moved into central Europe and central Asia, and then engaged in a series of later migrations.

The evidence for what the Indo-Europeans were like is in the surviving languages:

u inhumators (those who buried their dead) - burial mounds (курган); burial, sepulcher (склеп, гробница, могила)

u all I-E languages have similar-sounding words for snow, which prompts scholars to posit that the I-Es came from an area where they experienced snow

u similar word for beech tree that also mean book or letter lead us to believe that I-Es may have written on beech bark

u words shared among languages descended from I-E include corn, wolf, bear, yoke, honey, mead – that enables scholars to place the I-Es geographically and culturally

u the I-Es developed a vocabulary for the basics of the body and the concepts of the cosmos (heart, lung, foot, hand, head, star, sun, and moon) - the I-E languages have a shared core vocabulary

Thus, comparative philology allows us to recover historical context through words.

The discovery of Indo-European (the end of the 18th – 19th centuries) depended on the transplanting of English scholars to non-European colonial positions in the British Empire. They began to notice recognizable features in the exotic languages they encountered.

William Jones, the English scholar and diplomat, working in India, found similarities among Sanskrit, living Indian languages, and European languages (Sanskrit raj - kingdom, Latin rex - king, German Reich - empire and Celtic rix - ruler), which suggested to him that an earlier language root must have existed from which the modern languages emerged.

Synchronic and diachronic approaches to the study of language

Geographical classification of languages

u the western languages that descended from Indo-European are so-called “centum languages” (the Latin word for one hundred is centum)

u the eastern languages descended from Indo-European are called “satem languages” (the Old Persian or Avastan word for 100 is satem)

Characteristics of the Indo-European language:

u a highly inflected language (eight noun cases –Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Possessive, Vocative, Locative, Instrumental)

u six tenses (special verb endings)

u grammatical gender for the nouns

u “Ablaut” - the meaningful change in the root vowel of a word

Grimm’s Law

Cognate words are words of shared origin and shared meaning, or shared semantic history.

Grimm’s law is the relationships among sets of consonants in the Germanic and non-Germanic Indo-European languages. This set of relationships helps us understand the way in which words from different modern European languages are related. We can also use this sound law to recover the Indo-European originals.

Regular correspondences between consonants in Germanic and other I-E languages:

Non- Germanic	Germanic	Examples
p	f	пять – five, pisces – fish, pedal – foot, pater - father
th	t	три - three
k	h	кардио – heart, centum - hundred
b	p	яблоко - apple
d	t	два – two, dentis - tooth
g	k	Глина – clay, genuflect - knee
bh	b	Bhrator - brother
dh	d	Dhe - do
gh	g	Ghu - good

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