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13 History of the English Language 1 - Coggle Diagram
13 History of the English Language 1
Comparative Historical Linguistics
Language Change
design features
arbitrariness
structural diversity is restricted by universalv, but grammar and lexicon are not, in their details, determined by logical or biological necessity
openness
While the memory of any individual speaker is limited, there is no structural limit to the productivity of word-formation patterns
cultural transmission:
While the ability and urge to acquire some language(langage) is innate, the knowledge of a particular language(langue) is not simply copied from one speaker to another but recreated every time an individual acquires a language
Similarities across languages
Some similarities are random (like in bioinformatics genetic code)
Zuni(Native American) nas(wet) = nass (wet)
iconic imitation of extralinguistic sound (onomatopoeia)
Chinese bu gu - English cuckoo - German Kuckuck
borrowing(language contact)
German Weltanschauung - English Weltanschauung
genetic relation
Spanish uno, dos, tres French un deux trois
Words that have the same origin are called
cognates
The family tree of the Indo-European Language Family (simplified)
Proto-Indo-European
Celtic
Welsh
Irish
Gaelic
Italic
Latin
Italian
French
Spanish
Catalan
Portuguese
Romanian
Greek
Anatolian
Hittite
Balto-Slavic
Baltic
Latvian
Lithuanian
Slavic
Russian
Ukrainian
Polish
Cyech
Bulgarian
Serbian
Croatian
Indo Iranian
Sanskrit
Hindi
Urdu
Farsi
Pashto
Kurdish
Germanic
West
English
German
Dutch
North
Danish
Swedish
Norwegian
Icelandic
East
Gothic
Germanic/English History
3000 BCE Break-up of Proto-Indo-European speech community
43 CE Roman conquest of Britain
Hadrian's Wall in Northern England (begun in 122)
Emperor CLaudius(reigned 41-54)
Finally English
Barbarians
449 Migration to Britain of West Germanic Angles and Saxons
Roman troops had been withdrawn
Migration Period: West Germanic tribes from the continent invade Britain: German-to-be and English-to-be part company
Celtic population killed, enslaved and displaced
during the ensuing Dark Ages a new Germanic language takes shape
597 Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England
Pope Gregory the Great
Anglo-Saxon Church at Escomb (Durham)
700-1100 Old English
West-Germanic language
Large corpus of texts written in latin alphabet: laws,charters,chronicles,medical treatises, traditional and Christian poetry, homilies, legends, scholarly translations from latin
Christian terminology rendered by native woards or loan translation
Latin Spiritus -> OE gast -> Ghost
Synthetic grammar: 4 cases, 3 genders
793 First Viking incursion
Existential threat to Anglo-Saxon civilisation in the 9th century and 10th century
Danelaw
Wassex
Vikings lost battle-> danish not dominant langauage
Existential threat to Anglo-Saxon civilisation in the 9th and 10th century
borrowing from Old Norse
anger, cake, call, cast, fellow, flat, hit, husband .....they, till,...
1066 The Norman Conquest
King Edward dies childless
succeeded by Cousin William Duke of Normandy
Battle of Hastings: William defeats Harold and is crowned King of England
Linguistic Consequences: Norman French becomes the language of the court, nobility ...
1100-1500 Middle English
French influence on spelling
mus-mouse
loss of unstressed endings, shift from synthetic to analytic grammar
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Tales of Caunterbury, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" (1390s)
OE god-sibb "god-parent" -> acquantance -> "female friend"-> gossip?("idle talk")