语言学基础教程

Chapter 8 Historical Linguistics: Language Through Time

8.1 What is historical linguistics?

It is an indisputable fact that all languages have been constantly changing through time. Essentially, modern linguistics has centered around two dimensions to deal with language change: the synchronic dimension and the diachronic dimension. The synchronic dimension has dominantly been applied to describe and explain differences or variations within one language in different places and among different groups at the same time. The synchronic dimension is usually the topic of sociolinguistics, which will be discussed in Chapter 10. This chapter will focus on the diachronic dimension of language change. Those who study language from this latter point of view are working in the field of historical linguistics(Poole, 2000: 123). To put it more specifically, historical linguistics is the study of the developments in languages in the course of time, of the ways in which languages change from period to period, and of the causes and results of such changes, both outside the languages and within them (Robins, 2000: 5).

8.2 When language changes

Although language change does not take place overnight, certain changes are noticeable because they usually conflate with a certain historical period or major social changes caused by wars, invasions and other upheavals. The development of the English language is a case in point. Generally speaking, the historical development of English is divided into three major periods: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Modern English (ModE).

500 (the time when Germanic tribes invaded Britain)

Old English

1100 (the time after the Norman Conquest in 1066)

Middle English

1500 (the beginning of Renaissance and the first printing

press set up in 1476 in England)

Modern English

the present

In about the year 449 AD, the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes from northern Europe invaded Britain and became the founders of the English nation. Their language, with the Germanic language as the source, is called, the name derived from the first tribe, the Angles. It

had a vocabulary inherited almost entirely from Germanic or formed by compounding or derivation from Germanic elements (Dension, 1993: 9). From this early variety of Englisc,many of the most basic terms in the English language came into being: mann (“man”), cild (“child”), mete (“food”), etan (“eat”), drincan (“drink”) and feohtan (“fight”). From the sixth to the eighth centuries AD, the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, and a number of terms, mainly to do with religion, philosophy and medicine, were borrowed into English from Latin,the language of religion. The origins of the modern words angel,bishop,candle,church,martyr,priest and school all date from that period. From the eighth century to the tenth century, the Vikings from northern Europe invaded England and brought words such as give, law, leg, skin, sky, take and they from their language, Old Norse (Yule, 2000: 218).

In the year of 1066 AD, the Norman French conquered the whole of England, bringing French speakers into the ruling class and then pushing French to the position as the “prestige language” for the next two hundred years. This language was used by the nobility, the government, the law and civilized behavior, providing the source of such modern terms as army, court, defense, prison and tax (Yule, 2000: 219). Yet the language of the peasants remained English.

By the end of the ME period, when English had once again become the first language of all classes, the bulk of OE lexis had become obsolete, and some ten thousand French words had been incorporated into English, maybe 75% surviving into ModE (Baugh & Cable, 2001:174).

During the early ModE period, which coincided with the Renaissance period, English borrowed enormous lexical resources from the classical languages of Latin and Greek. And, later on as the British Empire expanded, the range of lexical influence widened to ever more exotic source languages (Dension, 1993: 13).

The types of borrowed words noted above are examples of external changes in English, and the internal changes overlap with the historical periods described above. According to Fennell (2005: 2), the year 500 AD marks the branching off of English from other Germanic dialects; the year 1100 AD marks the period in which English lost the vast majority of its inflections, signaling the change from a language that relied upon morphological marking of grammatical roles to one that relied on word order to maintain basic grammatical relations; and the year 1500 AD marks the end of major French influence on the language and the time when the use of English was established in all communicative contexts. Thus, those internal changes will be elaborated below

at the phonological, lexical, semantic and grammatical levels.

8.3 How language changes

The change of the English language with the passage of time is so dramatic that today people hardly read OE or ME without special study. In general, the differences among OE, ME and ModE involve sound, lexicon and grammar, as discussed below.

8.3.1 Phonological change

The principle that sound change is normally regular is a very fruitful basis for examining the phonological history of a language. The majority of sound changes can be understood in terms of the movements of the vocal organs during speech, and sometimes more particularly in terms of a tendency to reduce articulatory effort (Trask, 2000: 70, 96).

8.3.1.1 Phonemic change

8.3.1.1.1 Vowel change

One of the most obvious differences between ModE and the English spoken in earlier periods is in the quality of the vowel sounds (Yule, 2000: 219). Sometimes a language experiences a wholesale shift in a large part of its phonological system. This happened to the long vowels of English in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD, each vowel becoming closer, the highest becoming diphthongs as in the words wife and house (respectively changed from wayf /wi:f/ and haws /hu:s/ in OE). We call this shift the Great Vowel Shift (Poole, 2000: 127), and the specific changes may be diagrammed as follows (Robins, 2000: 342).

In ME, the vowels in nearly all unstressed syllabic inflections were reduced to [?], spelled (Dension, 1993: 12). The general obscuring of unstressed syllables is a most significant sound change (to be elaborated further in 8.3.3 and 8.3.4), since it is one of the fundamental causes of the loss of inflections (Fennell, 2005: 99).

8.3.1.1.2 Consonant change

Consonants are produced with an obstruction of the air-stream, and tend to be less stable over time than vowels in most languages. Two fairly common processes are assimilation and lenition.

Assimilation is the process by which two sounds that occur close together in speech become more alike. This sort of change is easy to understand: moving the speech organs all over the place requires an effort, and making nearby sounds more similar reduces the amount of movement required, and hence the amount of effort (Trask, 2000: 53). Instances can be found in words such as irregular,impossible and illegal, in which the negative prefixes im-and il-should be “in-based” in accordance with etymology.

Under the influence of neighboring vowels, consonants may also be weakened. This weakening or lenition, can change a voiceless consonant into a voiced one and a plosive into a fricative (Poole, 2000: 126). Instances of [h] in native English words generally derive from the lenition of an earlier *[k]: such words as head,heart,help,hill and he all began with [k] in a remote ancestral form of English, but this [k] was lenited first to [x] and then to [h], and the modern lenition of [h] to zero merely completes a process of lenition stretching over several thousand years (Trask, 2000: 59).

8.3.1.2 Whole-segment change

Certain phonological changes are somewhat unusual in that they involve, not just changes in the nature of segments, but a change in the number or ordering of segments, and these are referred to as whole-segment processes (Trask, 2000: 66). The change known as metathesis involves a reversal in position of two adjoining sounds. The following are examples from the OE period: acsian → ask bridd → bird brinnan → beornan (burn)

frist → first hros → horse waeps → wasp

(Yule, 2000: 220).

8.3.2 Lexical change

As defined by Freeborn (2000: 23), lexical change refers to new words being needed in the vocabulary to refer to new things or concepts, with other words dropping out when they no longer

have any use in society. Lexical change may also involve semantic change, that is, change in the meaning of words. Thus, lexical change mainly consists of addition of new words, loss of words and change in the meaning of words.

8.3.2.1 Addition of new words

The conditions of life for individuals in society, their artifacts, customs, and forms of organization are constantly changing. Accordingly, many words in languages and the situations in which they are employed are equally liable to change in the course of time (Robins, 2000: 343). Floods of new words constantly need to be added to the word-stock to reflect these developments.

E tymology, which is the study of the history of individual words, shows that while the majority of words in a language are native words, there may also be loan words or borrowed words from another language. Native words are those that can be traced back to the earliest form of the language in question. In English, native words are words of Anglo-Saxon origin, such as full, hand, wind, red. Loan words are those that are borrowed or imported from another language, such as myth, career, formula, genius. Apart from borrowing, many new words are added to a language through word-formation. The following processes are quite pervasive in the addition of new words in the evolution of English.

8.3.2.1.1 Compounding and affixing

According to Fennell (2005: 77-8), new words in OE were mainly formed on the basis of compounding and affixing. Many words were formed through compounding, e.g. blod + read (“blood-red”); Engla (“Angles”) + land = England. Affixing covers suffixing and prefixing in OE, the former usually used to transform parts of speech while the latter generally used to change the semantic force. A suffix like -dom could create an abstract noun from another noun or adjective: wis + dom (“wisdom”). The perfective prefix ge- was most often used to form past participles: ceosan (“to choose), gecoren (“chosen”); findan (“to find”), gefunden (“found”). It could also be used to change the meaning of a word: hatan (“to call”), gehatan (“to promise”).

In modern English, new words are added not only through compounding and affixing, but also by means of coinage, conversion, blending, backformation and abbreviation. All these word-formation processes are discussed in Chapter 3.