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A History of the English Language - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Speech is the product of certain muscular movements. The sounds of language are produced by the passage of a current of air through cavities of the throat and face controlled by the muscles of these regions. Any voluntary muscular movement when constantly repeated is subject to gradual alteration.
    - - Members of a group, however, are influenced by one another, and there is a general similarity in the speech of a given community at any particular time. The language of any district or even the country is only the sum total of the individual speech habits of those composing it and is subject to such changes as occur in the speech of its members, so far as the changes
        become general or at least common to a large part of it.
    - - Thus each individual is constantly and quite unconsciously introducing slight changes in his or her speech. There is no such thing as uniformity in language.
- - - - When we notice that father corresponds to Dutch vader, Gothic fadar, Old Norse faðir, German vater, Greek patēr, Sanskrit pitar-, and Old Irish athir (with loss of the initial consonant), or that English brother corresponds to Dutch broeder, German
        bruder, Greek phrātēr, Sanskrit bhrātar-, Old Slavic bratŭ, Irish brathair, we are led tothe hypothesis that the languages of a large part of Europe and part of Asia were at one time identical.
- - - - It is easier, for example, to see the
        resemblance between the English word brother and the Sanskrit bhrātar-than between brother and frāter. But what is even more important, Sanskrit preserves an unusually full system of declensions and conjugations by which it became clear that the inflections of these languages could likewise be traced to a common origin.
        
        Old English: eom (am)
        eart (art)
        is (is)
        sindon (are)
        sindon (are)
        sindon (are)
        
        Gothic:
        eom (im)
        eart (is)
        is (ist)
        sindon (sijum)
        sindon (sijuþ)
        sindon (sind)
        
        Latin:
        eom (sum)
        eart (es)
        is (est)
        sindon (sumus)
        sindon (estis)
        sindon (sunt)
        
        Greek:
        eom (eimi)
        eart (ei)
        is (esti)
        sindon (esmen)
        sindon (este)
        sindon (eisi)
        
        Sanskrit:
        eom (asmi)
        eart (asi)
        is (asti)
        sindon (smas)
        sindon (stha)
        sindon (santi)
      - The material offered by Sanskrit for comparison with the other languages of the group, both in matters of vocabulary and inflection, was thus of the greatest importance.
- - - - There are words in Finnish
        borrowed from Germanic that do not show the change and that therefore must have resulted from a contact between Germanic and Finnish before the change occurred. There
        is also evidence that the shifting was still occurring as late as about the fifth century B.C. It is often assumed that the change was due to contact with a non-Germanic population.
      - Certain apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law were subsequently explained by Karl
        Verner and others. It was noted that between such a pair of words as Latin centum and
        English hundred the correspondence between the c and h was according to rule, but that
        between the t and d was not. The d in the English word should have been a voiceless
        fricative, that is, a þ. In 1875 Verner showed that when the Indo-European accent was not
        on the vowel immediately preceding, such voiceless fricatives became voiced in
        Germanic. In West Germanic the resulting ð became a d, and the word hundred is
        therefore quite regular in its correspondence with centum.
- - - - Latvian is the
        language of about two million people in Latvia.
      - Lithuanian is spoken by about three
        million people in the Baltic state of Lithuania.
      - Prussian is now extinct, having been displaced by German since the seventeenth century.