Language Change

LANGUAGE CHANGE

• Happens slowly

• Means change in grammar (phonological, syntactic, morphological...) and the lexicon

Stages of English

1. Old English (449-1100)

2. Middle English (1100-1500)

3. Modern English (1500-present)

   • Regular sound correspondence = When [ai] occurs in a word in non-Southern dialects, [a:] occurs in the Southern dialect, and this is true for all such words

   • For example:

   • Middle English Modern English

   • Mus Mouse

   • Hus House

   • Sound shift = a phonological change in which [u:] became [au]

   • Many modern languages developed from regional dialects that became widely

spoken and highly differentiated, finally becoming separate languages (French, Spanish as dialects of Latin)

• These languages are genetically related

• A protolanguage = the ancestral language from which related languages have developed

• Proto-germanic – early forms of English and German were dialects of it

• Indo-European – Latin and Proto-germanic evolved from it

• How do we know that German and Spanish have a common ancestor?

• Regular sound correspondence ( /f/-/p/)

• What in English begins with F, in French and Spanish with P

• Fish/Pescado

Phonological Change

• Loss of the velar fricative /x/ (ch) in modern English – usually pronounced in words like Night, drought

• Changing phonological rules

• In some cases the sound have disappeared, in others it became /k/

• Addition of phonemes through palatalization (=change in place of articulation to palatal region), /z/ became /ž/ - leisure

• Old English lacked a /v/ phoneme, it was just an allophone of /f/, when it occured between vowels

Phonological Rules

• They can result in dialect differences

• Great vowel shift

• A process that happened between 1400-1600

• Primary source of many spelling inconsistencies of English because our spelling system still reflects the way words were pronounced before it occurred

• The most dramatic examples of regular sound shift

• Early English Vowel Shortening rule = the vowels in the second word (Serene-serenity, crime-criminal, sign-signal) were shortened

Morphological change

• English doesn’t have cases at all by now (as the Old English had), only a few pieces of it remain:

Dative – Robert’s dog

• Pronouns has a few case distinctions: He – nominative, him – accusative and dative, his – genitive

• Case is expressed by a system of prepositions – to (dative), of (genitive)

Syntactic Change

• In modern English, adjectives generally precede the nouns they modify, thus we would say sweet showers in place of showers sweet

• In Old English the verb had a richer system of subject-verb agreement (to sing had the following forms: singe (I sing), singest (you sing), singeth (he sings), and singen (we, plural you, they sing))

• In Modern English the only marker of agreement is the third person singular -s in “He signs”

• Modern English speakers must rely on word order—subject-verb-object

• The Old English VP -> NP V

• The Modern English VP -> V NP

English questions