![(1) a. Puella est tarda.
‘[The] girl is late’
b. Puellae sunt tardae.
‘[The] girls are late’
In (2a) and (b), puell- is a direct object, resulting in the accusative form puellam for the singular and
puellas for the plural.
(2) a. Ego amo puellam.
‘I like [the] girl’
b. Ego amo puellas.
‘I like [the] girls’
3. Historical/archeological information. Non-linguistic evidence, such as historical
information and archeological evidence, can supplement linguistic evidence to help in the
classification of languages, especially to help date the origins of proto-languages for which
no linguistic evidence exists.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/developmentofenglish-180325083604/85/Development-of-english-10-320.jpg)
![ Schneider (2003: 233) remarks that while many view English as “the world’s leading language
... [an] indispensable tool for international economy, diplomacy, sciences, the media, and also
individual interactions across language boundaries,” others regard it as “a ‘killer language,’
responsible for the extinction of innumerable indigenous languages, dialects, and cultures
around the globe.”
The Nature of Language Change
Language change is natural, normal, and (ultimately) inevitable. While many describe changes
in the language as “corruptions” or markers of “decay,” in reality so-called “errors” of usage can
often be precursors of change.
All of the so-called mistakes illustrate the capability of human languages to adapt and change
in response to the needs of their users in a manner that is consistent with the mechanisms of
change inherent in all languages.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/developmentofenglish-180325083604/85/Development-of-english-21-320.jpg)
Development of english
- 2. Language studies are classified into two: 1. SYNCHRONIC- involve investigating a language in its present form as it is currently spoken and written. A synchronic study of English would focus on Contemporary English: the current version of English spoken around the world. 2. DIACHRONIC- examine the historical development of a language, taking into consideration changes it has undergone over time. The changes that English experienced have led to the positing of five distinct forms of English: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Modern English, and Contemporary English.
- 3. LANGUAGE # of First Language Speakers # of Second Language Speakers Total Chinese (Mandarin) 873 (83%) 178 (17%) 1,051 English 340 (25-40%) 500-1,000 (60-75%) 840-1,340 Hindi 370 (76%) 120 (24%) 490 Spanish 360 (86%) 60 (14%) 420 Russian 167 (60%) 110 (40%) 277 Arabic (Standard) 206 (90%) 24 (10%) 230 Portuguese 203 (95%) 10 (5%) 213 Bengali 207 (98%) 4 (2%) 211 Indonesian 23 (14%) 140 (86%) 163 Japanese 126 (99%) 1 (1%) 127 German 95 (77%) 28 (23%) 123 French 65 (57%) 50 (43%) 115 MOST WIDELY SPOKEN LANGUAGES *Numbers are in millions
- 4. In theory, what distinguishes a language from a dialect is the notion of mutual intelligibility. If I speak Northern American English and you speak Southern American English, we will be able to understand each other. Therefore, we speak dialects of the same language. On the other hand, if I speak French and you speak Vietnamese, we will not be able to understand each other, meaning that we speak different languages. The issue of what is considered a dialect of a language also affects how one counts the number of speakers of a language. Crystal (2003: 68) also notes that there are many countries in which English is spoken for which there is no information of numbers of speakers, and in which English is spoken as a second or foreign language. English is the most widely spoken language not just in the world but in the history of civilization. It is important to remember, however, that the widespread use of English has little to do with the language itself but more with the fact that British colonization spread English around the world, a phenomenon that was followed by the emergence of the United States (which has the highest percentage of native speakers) as a political and economic force.
- 5. Genetic Classifications of Languages Languages have been traditionally classified in terms of the genetic relationships that they exhibit. The term “genetic” is being used metaphorically to describe relationships among languages Indo-European Germanic Italic Celtic Balto-Slavic Hellenic Indo-Iranian Albanian English German Dutch Swedish Danish Latin* Spanish French Italian Portuguese Sanskrit* Hindi Bengali Persian (Farsi) Russian Polish Czech Greek Irish Welsh Albanian *Indicates a dead, or extinct, language; two additional branches not represented above, Anatolian and Tocharian, are also dead.
- 6. English is a member of a language family, Germanic, that is a direct descendant of Indo- European and that consists of fifty-three languages (www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid-90017). Germanic West North East English German Dutch/ Flemish Frisian Afrikaans Yiddish Old English (AD 400-1100) Middle English (1100-1500) Early Modern English (1500-1800) Modern English (1800-present) Contemporary English (present and onwards) Danish Icelandic Faroese Norwegian Swedish Gothic* *Indicates a dead, or extinct, language.
- 7. The Comparative Method To develop family trees and establish genetic relationships between languages, various kinds of historical, archeological, and linguistic evidence are examined. In the case of English, this evidence can be directly obtained, since we have written records of settlement patterns in England and surviving manuscripts written in Old English. For Indo- European and Germanic, however, no such records exist. These languages are therefore proto-languages – languages whose existence has been established through the process of linguistic reconstruction. The process of examining languages, grouping them into language families, and reconstructing ancestral languages is known as the comparative method.
- 8. To illustrate how this method works, examine the three kinds of evidence used to establish the members of the Indo-European language family – cognate vocabulary, grammatical similarities, and historical/archeological information. 1. Cognate vocabulary. The comparison of cognate vocabulary is the hallmark of the comparative method. Cognates are words that are passed down the family tree as languages change and develop and have proven extremely important for determining not just which languages are siblings within a language family but what the parent language of the sibling languages might have looked like. The comparative method works best when vocabulary representing common human experiences is compared. GERMANIC OTHER INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES Old English fót Modern English foot Modern German Fuβ Modern Dutch voet Modern Norwegian fot Modern Danish fod Modern Swedish fot Modern French pied Modern Italian piede Modern Portuguese pé Modern Spanish pie Sanskrit pat Latin pes Greek peza
- 9. 2. Grammatical similarities. While the comparison of cognate vocabulary is crucial to the comparative method, other linguistic similarities and differences among languages can provide additional evidence that languages should be classified in similar or different language families The marking of case, number, and gender in Latin and Modern English for the word girl CASE LATIN MODERN ENGLISH Singular Plural Singular Plural Nominative puella puellae girl girls Genitive puellae puellarum girl’s girls’ Dative puellae puellis girl girls Accusative puellam puellas girl girls Ablative puella puellis girl girls Vocative puella puellae girl girls
- 10. (1) a. Puella est tarda. ‘[The] girl is late’ b. Puellae sunt tardae. ‘[The] girls are late’ In (2a) and (b), puell- is a direct object, resulting in the accusative form puellam for the singular and puellas for the plural. (2) a. Ego amo puellam. ‘I like [the] girl’ b. Ego amo puellas. ‘I like [the] girls’ 3. Historical/archeological information. Non-linguistic evidence, such as historical information and archeological evidence, can supplement linguistic evidence to help in the classification of languages, especially to help date the origins of proto-languages for which no linguistic evidence exists.
- 11. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH Although it is difficult to date the precise beginning of any language, English is thought to have had its origins around AD 400, when the Romans ended their occupation of England. After the Romans departed, England was populated by Romans who had stayed behind, Celts, and various Germanic tribes who had begun coming to England during the Roman occupation Old English. While Modern English has lost most of its inflections for case, number, and gender, many of these distinctions can be found in Old English. These grammatical features are evident in the Old English version of “The Lord’s Prayer”:
- 12. “The Lord’s Prayer” Matthew 6:9–13. 1 Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Father our thou that art in heavens 2 Si þin nama gehalgod be thy name hallowed 3 to becume þin rice come thy kingdom 4 gewurþe Din willa be-done thy will 5 on eorDan swa swa on heofonum on earth as in heavens 6 urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg our daily bread give us today 7 and forgyf us ure gyltas and forgive us our sins 8 swa swa we forgyfaD urum gyltendum as we forgive those-who-have-sinned-against-us 9 and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge and not lead thou us into temptation 10 ac alys us of yfele soþlice but deliver us from evil. truly. (Adapted from Dan Kies, “Cuneiform and Distance Learning”: papyr.com/hypertextbooks/cuneifrm.htm, accessed June 5, 2008)
- 13. The prayer illustrates some notable differences between Old English and subsequent periods of English. • In line (1), the -um on heofonum marks this noun as masculine, dative, and plural; • in line (5), the -an on eorDan marks this noun as feminine, accusative, and singular. • Lines (1) and (2) contain two forms of the verb be. In Modern English, of all the irregular verbs, be has the most different forms (e.g. is, are, was, etc.). In Old English, it had even more different forms. • In line (2), Siis a subjunctive verb form. In Modern English, subjunctive forms of be can be found in hypothetical clauses such as if I were you to mark contrary-to-fact assertions. In Old English, Si is a subjunctive form expressing a desire or wish. • Finally, the verb gehalgod in line (2) contains a prefix, ge-, commonly found on participles (i.e. verbs in English following the auxiliary have, as in have driven or had walked).
- 14. It is important to note that during this period, English was purely a spoken language: the only literate people of the era were monks in monasteries, a consequence of St. Augustine’s conversion of England to Christianity in the sixth century AD. One of the more famous pieces of English literature of this period, Beowulf, was part of the oral- formulaic style of this period and was written down by some unknown scribe or scribes who heard someone tell the story. Middle English. Old English continued being spoken in England until approximately 1100. What precipitated the change from Old English to Middle English was a significant historical event: the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The Normans came from the Normandy region of France and ruled England for approximately 300 years; they spoke a variety of French called Anglo-Norman.
- 15. General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: PROLOGUE Here bygynneth. Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open eye Words such as perced (‘pierced’), veyne (‘vein’), licour (‘liquor’), and vertu (‘virtue’) are of French origin and entered the English language during the Middle English period.
- 16. Early Modern English. The transition from Middle to Modern English is not marked by any specific cultural event but rather by a linguistic event: the Great Vowel Shift. One way that vowels can be classified is according to how high the tongue is placed in the mouth when the vowel is articulated. What happened between Middle and Early Modern English is that in certain words, vowels began to be replaced by vowels pronounced higher in the mouth. • For instance, in Middle English the first vowel in word swete would have been pronounced /eI/ (similar to the first vowel in Modern English race). However, in Modern English, /eI/ was raised to /i/. Thus, we get the Modern English pronunciation of sweet. But while this sound change marks a formal change between Middle and Modern English, there were a number of other historical events that clearly contributed to English becoming the language that it currently is: • The Shift from an Oral to a Print Culture • The Publication of Dictionaries and Grammars, and the Subsequent Codification of English • The Colonization of America, its Independence from England, and its Rise as a Superpower
- 17. Typological Classifications of Languages While the comparative method involves classifying languages on the basis of linguistic and non-linguistic evidence, the typological method relies exclusively on linguistic information and uses this information to classify languages according to the linguistic characteristics that they share or do not share. • For instance, languages can be classified as having subject–verb–object word order (SVO), as having subject–object–verb (SOV), and so forth. Although languages are classified typologically on the basis of phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics that they share or do not share, much of the research in this area has been centered on morphology and syntax.
- 18. Change or Evolution? Many linguists have used the terms “change” and “evolution” interchangeably. This reflects the fact that in common usage, these two words have become roughly synonymous. “Evolution” has become a metaphor and its meaning has been extended to cover not just the development of a species but development in general. In linguistics, there is considerable confusion over the use of the term “evolution” to describe language change. Some linguists use this term metaphorically, never implying a direct relationship between language and evolutionary theories of biology but instead using the term to describe the gradual changes that any language experiences over time. Metaphorically, the term language evolution has some explanatory value, since languages do change slowly in a step-by-step manner. But to claim that the processes by which species and languages evolve are the same creates an equivalence that not all linguists accept, particularly because many examples of linguistic change, such as the replacement of whom by who, have other explanations, such as internal and external influences on languages that cause them to change.
- 19. Internal and External Influences on Language Change Internally influenced changes result from natural processes that all languages undergo. To explain why English has lost so many inflections over time and changed from a fusional language to an isolating language, Whaley (1997: 138) describes a cyclic process that all languages undergo. Externally influenced changes, as suggested above, result more from the social and cultural contexts in which languages are used. External changes result from some kind of language contact: speakers of different languages coming into contact, resulting in changes to the languages that they speak.
- 20. Language Death Language death is a type of language shift. However, unlike bilingualism, which involves speakers shifting from one language to another in different contexts, language death occurs when, over time, a language loses all its speakers. • Latin is sometimes referred to as a dead language because it no longer has any native speakers and exists only in written texts surviving from earlier periods. But while Latin may have died, its legacy survives in its direct descendants, such as Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese. • In other contexts, however, some languages simply die, leaving no direct descendants. For instance, as a result of the colonization of the Americas, numerous indigenous languages have died or are endangered. The issue of language death is relevant to any discussion of the English language, since it is sometimes argued that the globalization of English has led to the death or displacement of many of the languages of the world.
- 21. Schneider (2003: 233) remarks that while many view English as “the world’s leading language ... [an] indispensable tool for international economy, diplomacy, sciences, the media, and also individual interactions across language boundaries,” others regard it as “a ‘killer language,’ responsible for the extinction of innumerable indigenous languages, dialects, and cultures around the globe.” The Nature of Language Change Language change is natural, normal, and (ultimately) inevitable. While many describe changes in the language as “corruptions” or markers of “decay,” in reality so-called “errors” of usage can often be precursors of change. All of the so-called mistakes illustrate the capability of human languages to adapt and change in response to the needs of their users in a manner that is consistent with the mechanisms of change inherent in all languages.
- 22. Answer the following questions comprehensively: 1. What role does cognate vocabulary play in grouping languages into language families? 2. Are borrowings into a language a consequence of an internal or external influence on a language? 3. In many of his writings, John Simon laments that English is in decline. Does this mean that English is undergoing the process of language death?
- 23. • One way to study the historical and cultural influences on a language is to research place names, or toponyms, which often provide interesting information not just on the people who settled a region and the languages they spoke but on the history or the area, even features of its geography. • A number of dictionaries and reference guides provide information on place names, including J. EverettHeath’s The Concise Dictionary of World Place Names (Oxford University Press, 2005) or V. Watts et al.’s The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (Cambridge University Press, 2004). • Select a place name in any English-speaking country and record (1) the etymology of the place name (the language on which it is based and its date of origin, however approximate), (2) whether any other place names preceded the place name you chose, and (3) what the name literally means. Does it describe a particular group of people who originally populated the area? Does it provide any geographical information about the area? Note any additional information you find too.