Misc-Major Changes Flashcards

Question

i-umlaut in OE

Answer 1

i-umlaut is one of the most important developments of the prehistoric Old English period when Old English had separated from its sister languages but was not yet written down. The essence of this process was that a high front vowel or palatal glide in one syllable caused a back vowel in the preceding syllable to become a front vowel, to oversimplify greatly. This is a type of anticipatory assimilation, in which the speaker anticipates the vowel of an upcoming syllable by moving the tongue into a front position too early. An assimilation of an even earlier period involved the palatalization of velar consonants that were adjacent to front vowels or a palatal glide in the same syllable. Palatal stops have a tendency to turn into affricates, and this is what happened in Old English, with the result that Germanic *dı¯k has come down to us as ditch.

Answer 2

difference between Old English and ModE - voicing was not a distinctive feature for most fricatives. In Modern English, [f] and [v], written as f and v, are perceived as two distinct sounds, as the difference between fat and vat illustrates. But in Old English, they were perceived as variants of essentially the same sound or phoneme. The labiodental fricative was pronounced as voiced [v] when surrounded by voiced sounds (such as vowels), but pronounced as voiceless [f] otherwise; e.g., although deofol was written with an f, it was pronounced more like modern devil than the spelling suggests.

Answer 3

changes like the generalization of -es as the genitive singular inflection to declensional classes where it historically does not belong, are harbingers of more general changes of the Middle English period. (saxon genitive mostly found for human-noun, now also non-human nouns, like "the cover's book") It is certain that large numbers of everyday words such as take which replaced native niman are of Scandinavian origin. Contact with French did not begin with the Conquest; especially notable is that there was a strong Norman presence at the court of Edward the Confessor (reigned 1042– 1066). Several French loan words entered the language in the Old English period, including pru¯ d ‘proud’, first attested c. 1000.

Answer 4

In historical linguistics and language change, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (affixes, prepositions, etc.). Thus it creates new function words by a process other than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions, instead deriving them from content words. For example, the Old English verb willan 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb will, which expresses intention or simply futurity. Where grammaticalization takes place, nouns and verbs which carry certain lexical meaning develop over time into grammatical items such as auxiliaries, case markers, inflections, and sentence connectives.

Answer 5

vowels: - length contrast not only in monophthongs, but also in diphthongs (in PDE vowel length doesn’t contrast, although they are phonemic, : long/short vowel ‘kid’ ‘keep’, although difference in quality is more distinct and esp in GA) also: - Umlaut/i-mutation (fo_t-->fe_t) (7th c) - inherited germanic "au" --> "ea" --> Baum, beam; Traum, dream - inherited germanic "ei" --> /a:/ --> gāt / Geiß, bān / Bein, stān / Stein, consonants: - "geminates" - double consonants pronounced (longer) (in PDE, not pronounced in root word, e.g. baggage w/o g: ) - voiced/voiceless sibilants and fricatives are allophones

Answer 6

Word formation: - compounding "sea goer" sægenga - derivation: æftergengness (“after-go(ing)-ness” = succession) - -> complex inventory of verbal prefixes (cf. modG) most important contact languages for borrowing: Latin, Scandinavian - loan-translations / calques (“Lehnübersetzungen”): godspel(boc) (< evangelium) - loan-renditions (“Lehnübertragungen”): leorningcniht (< discipulus) - loan-creations (“Lehnschöpfungen”): cwildeflod (= “destruction / pestilence” + “flood”) - semantic loans: God

Answer 7

elaborate inflectional paradigms for nouns, pronouns, articles, verbs and adjectives

Answer 8

- simplification of strong-verb (“ablaut” literally meaning "sound gradation") paradigms e. g. OE ridan/rad-ridon/geriden --> ME: ride(n) / rod-ride(n) / yride(n) --> EME ride rode ridden - further reduction to patterns with identical past and participle forms: slide - slid - slid, strike - struck, shine - shone - fossilised participial / adjectival forms: stricken with grief, panic-stricken vs. *struck with grief, *panic-struck horror-struck, horror-stricken sunken ships vs. sunk ships molten lava, molten metal, but melted butter, melted snow - gradient of irregularity in Modern English: spoil / spoilt (minimal deviation from the regular, productive pattern) put / put find / found hide / hid / hidden

Answer 9

- OE diphthongs monophthongised (new diphthongs emerging eventually) - voiced and voiceless fricatives gain phonemic status - loss of full vowels in inflectional endings (--> grammar) - word stress system complicated by influences from French, with consequences that have persisted to the present-day: GARage vs. garAGE, ADDress vs. adDRESS, etc. - end of the ME period: start of the “Great Vowel Shift”

Answer 10

a) OE prefixed verbs replaced by phrasal verbs (see 2.2.3 above) b) new derivational morphemes from French: e.g. -able / -ible, -ment main stages unanalysable: possible, edible, probable analysable but not separable: immutable analysable, and separable: governable productive use on native roots: eatable, get-at-able c) loss of inflections on the noun, the adjective, and the definite article: OE: stān stānas & tunga tungan transition: stān stānes & tung(e) tung(en/e) ME: stone stones & tongue tongues d) emergence of a characteristic ME pronominal system: - fully functioning thou / ye-contrast (note case distinction in: thou / thee and ye / you) - replacement of the Anglo-Saxon 3rd person plural pronouns (hi / hire / hem) with the Scandinavian forms (they / their / them) - appearance of she as the nominative 3rd person singular feminine e) verbal inflections: -(e)st for the second person singular 3rd-person variation with –s / –eth inflections common for the plural present f) periphrastic verb forms (present perfect, progressive, etc.) emerging, but free variation rather than grammatically regulated distribution g) word order: very slow transition to the modern SVO principle, but certain ‘deviant’ orders such as AVS (then came he) still widely current

Answer 11

integration of thousands of Norman French, Central French, Latin and Scandinavian words into the general vocabulary e.g. begin - commence; and also in culinar: pig -pork, calf -veal then tree names: Germanic alder, ash, aspen, beech, birch, box, elm, fir, hazel, holly, ivy, linden, maple, oak, thorn, willow, yew french: chestnut, laurel, plane, poplar - The Norman / French vocabulary of power and prestige in power war religion chase art fashion architecture e.g. court; justice; miracle, grace, beauty, aisle - Etymological “doublets”: Norman French / Central French: catch – chase, warden – guardian, display – deploy Anglo-Saxon / Scandinavian: shirt – skirt French / French: travel – travail (< Latin trepalium) French / Latin: royal – regal, loyal – legal, deduce – deduct, construe – construct English / English: thorough – through, of – off

Answer 12

``` [till today french-derived vocab higher register] begin – commence fight – combat help – aid hide – conceal bother – annoy gain – profit lonely – solitary clean – pure clothes – dress hinder – prevent homely – domestic shun – avoid end – finish holy – saintly feed – nourish shape – forge ``` a special culinary case: cow – beef, sheep – mutton, pig – pork, calf – veal, deer – venison

Answer 13

1. 1300 onwards: final becomes [f] in Western dialects, stigmatised in London 2. 17th C: all fricative pronunciations of other than [f] given up ``` 3. process interacting with the Great Vowel Shift (GVS) from 15th century onwards class 1: silent and long /u:/ before the GVS class 2: dialect borrowing from the West class 3: diphthong monophthongised and merged with /o:/ after GVS class 4: /u:/ shortened before fricative early enough to become /ʌ/ class 5: lengthening, after the GVS, of a weak form containing /ə/ or /ʊ/? ```

Answer 14

northern features more Scandinavian lexical items southern features fewer Scandinavian lexical items -ough ending variety: - cough, bough, through, dough depending on northern or southern

Answer 15

(1) Great Vowel Shift under way, often with complications, e.g. interaction with various lengthening and shortening processes - leave / left, keep / kept, breathe / breath ... - wild / wilderness - South / Southern (2) Middle English /ʊ/ /ʌ/ - butter, much, some, money, book, … (survives as important dialectal isogloss separating the English “North” from the South / Southeast) note: this change also interacts with the GVS in interesting ways: (a) food, mood (b) good, book (c) blood, flood (3) some further changes: - Middle English short /a/ splits into two phonemes: cat / what - lowering of vowel in words such as dance, path, demand in London English and, eventually, the British Standard (RP) - reduction of initial kn-, gn-: gnat, knee, … - loss of post-vocalic /r/ in Southeastern England (late 18th century)

Answer 16

Many of the grammatical developments originating in the previous centuries continued in EModE, including morphological simplification and the stabilization of word order. On the whole, English acquired its present analytical structure during the early modern period. These developments are perceptible, for example, in the decline of inflectional endings, the increasing use of auxiliaries, and the diminishment of inversion. Natural gender, in particular, the distinction between human and nonhuman reference, became an important factor among pronouns. The grammaticalization process created new closed-class elements in several areas of grammar. a) aspect: progressive (EModE turning point) Old English: beon / wesan + V-ende - -> [Jesus] wæs on temple lærende - -> is feohtende / wuniende / dwellynge Middle English: conflation of several forms and constructions toward the end of the period, no clear grammatical function yet be on + V-ing --> be + a-V --> Whyle Torrent an huntyng wase --> a knight that had been on huntynge Early Modern English: examples from Shakespeare --> What do you read, my lord? Ham. Words, words, words. Pol. What is the matter, my lord? Ham. Between who? Pol. I mean, the matter you read, my lord. “How now! What letter are you reading there?” (Two Gentlemen, I.3.51) “What are you reading?” (Troilus and Cressida, III.3.95) Late Modern English – 18th century to present: rapid rise in frequency and increasingly obligatory use; filling of empty slots in the passive paradigm --> the road is / was building the road is / was being built the road would be being built the road has been being built b) present perfect / past contrast: - Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind c) auxiliary do Mistress Page: Why went you not with master doctor, maid? (Shakespeaere, Merry Wives of Windsor, V.5) Cressida: Did not I tell you. Would he were knocked i’ th’head! (Shakespeaere, Troilus and Cressida, IV.2) - Shakespeare says things like: do not you know, Do you not know, I know you not etc etc d) double comparatives and double negatives: e) "which" as a relative pronoun for human antecedents - -> “Our Father which art in Heaven” f) personal and possessive pronouns: - -> thou, thee, thine; ye, you; my / mine, etc.; his / it / its-variation g) in spite of basic SVO order, greater freedom possible than today:

Answer 17

An inkhorn term is any foreign borrowing (or a word created from existing word roots by an English speaker) into English deemed to be unnecessary or overly pretentious. Some filled a lexical gap, while others seemed to create a problem as they had similar meanings in one lg vs another --> Deceptive similarities: be careful to avoid misreading classic works of English literature! e.g. "eat him quick." --> from quicklebendig, eat him alive (vgl. Quicksilver) "extravagant" --> extra = outside; vagare = travel, so travel around, wanderer "nice" --> nice - latin origin; nescius - ignorant (not knowing) „there are nice distinctions between the synonyms“ - nice means precise, tricky; so here nice means tricky "want" --> "the good want power" modern: want = desire but back then: want = lack actually then: 90% lack, 10% desire 200yrs later its been flipped around, your first idea is that someone means desire, some old-fashioned or formal context where means lack "wonderful" --> sonderbar, verwunderlich "cute" --> intelligent; from acute --> 'cute; sharp as a knife "pathetic" --> full of Pathos, Pathetisch Pathos: an element in experience or in artistic representation evoking pity or compassion

Answer 18

e.g. like in German: Dem König gefiel der Name | still present in OE but got lost towards end and entirely in ME.

Answer 19

during EME time (but rather end of period) -->primarily between 1350 and the 1600s and 1700s - all Middle English (ME) long vowels changed at various times after 1400. - Some consonant sounds changed as well, esp. those that became silent; sometimes included in GVS Before (LME) --> after GVS (ModE) bite: /I:/ --> /ai/ meet: /e:/ --> /i:/ meat: /Epsilon:/ --> s.o. mate: /a:/ --> /eI/ out: /u:/ --> /au/ (umgekehrter omega) boot: /o:/ --> /u:/ boat: /spiegelv. c:/ --> /ou/ "omega" - diphthongization of two ME long vowels, /i:/ and /u:/ into /ai/ and /au/, as in write and house, and the later - merger of /e:/ and /E:/, as in meet and meat, left English with four long vowels, /i:, e:, o:, u:/. - supplemented by /a (aufkopf):/, which developed from the diphthong /au/, as in cause. - During the early modern period, the ME diphthongs, /iu, eu, au, ai, ou/, were monothongized, -->/u:, u:, a(kopf):, e:, o:/, - whereas /oi/ and /ui/ remained unchanged, as in joy and boil. A combination of these and new diphthongs that developed from long vowels resulted in three diphthong phonemes, /ai, au, Oi/, at the end of the period. The impact of postvocalic /r/ which, among other things, often lowered preceding vowels, also created new diphthongs, when an epenthetic [e] was inserted between a vowel and [r], as in fire. Although there may have been sporadic cases of the loss of postvocalic /r/ in the early modern period, its systematic deletion took place later. The ME short vowels /i, e, a, o, u, e/ remained mostly unchanged. A significant change was the southern split of /u/ into two phonemes, /u/ and /V/, e.g., put and cut. The consonant system lost the phoneme /x/, which was often spelled , with its two allophones [x, c¸] Its realizations were replaced by vowel lengthening, e.g., right or by /f/, as in enough. Two new consonant phonemes, /Z, N/, developed, and since that occurred, the inventory of English consonants has remained unchanged. The consonant /h/, was very weak and occasionally dropped, as contemporary spellings like for helmet and the excrescent in for every show, but there is no evidence of its stigmatization.

Answer 20

- intial stress causes final reduction - Viking influence: confusion leads to ignoring endings instead of endings: 1.) SVO word order - the girl saw the dog - the gardeners always welcome the king 2. ) prepositions - look at, laugh at, bet on, show to, dispose of 3. ) periphrastic constructions - I am going to win - she didn´t work - they have done it again - he will not stop

Answer 21

Phenomenon during OE where Fronting of stem vowel occurred if the following syllable contained an /i/ or /j/ for example in the Indo-European Language system. (Affected almost all Germanic lgs except for gothic) Some samples that are still in ModE Plural : goose - geese Superlative : old - elder - eldest

Answer 22

Used by Grimm to describe how in strong Germanic verbs the vowel changes for example when past tense is used. Even Today: sing - sang - sung

Answer 23

In historical linguistics and language change, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (affixes, prepositions, etc.). Thus it creates new function words by a process other than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions, instead deriving them from content words. For example, the Old English verb willan 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb will, which expresses intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are often grammaticalized, while others, such as evidentiality, are not so much.

Answer 24

Linguistics is the scientific study of both the phenomenon of language in its most general sense (as a uniquely human capacity and activity) and of individual languages. ___ Synchronic vs historical linguistics Synchronic: ... is concerned with the structure of language and individual languages at a particular, fixed point in time: for example 20th century English or 17th century German. Historical: ...is concerned with how language changes over time.

Answer 25

Phonetics ...is concerned with how people produce and perceive speech sounds. Phonology ...is concerned with how speech sounds are organized into patterns distinctive of each language. Morphology ...is concerned with how words are built up from smaller units. Syntax ...is concerned with how words are combined into larger units such as phrases and sentences. In English we say He has read a book, but in German, Dutch, and Afrikaans we say “he has a book read,” with the word “read” at the end of the sentence: Er hat ein Buch gelesen , Hij heeft een boek gelezen, Hy het ’n boek gelees. Semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and conversational analysis ...are all concerned with the way words and sentences are used in actual speech to communicate messages. Semantics ...deals with that part of the communication which actually comes from the language itself – the meaning of words and structures. For example, in some cases it seems that to redden and to turn red “mean the same thing.” Betsy’s face turned red and Betsy’s face reddened seem to be interchangeable. On the other hand, you can say Just as I got to the intersection, the traffic light turned red but not Just as I got to the intersection, the traffic light reddened. A semantician would want to why both sentences are possible in the first case but not the second. How does redden differ from the phrase turn red. A semantician of German might want to know how the German verbs cognate with English must, and shall, namely müssen and sollen, differ from each other, especially since the Dutch verb moeten appears to do duty for both of them. Pragmatics ...deals with language as used by people, taking into account everything else that people know besides language when they talk to one another. For example, the sentence Can you speak French? asks whether you know how to talk French but does not actually invite you to go and start speaking French. In contrast, Can you turn down the television? is not really concerned with whether you have the physical ability to turn off the set every now and then but is requesting that you do so. And right now. Discourse analysis and conversational analysis ...all deal with how language (phrases, sentences) is put together to form larger entities such as texts and discourses and conversations. For example, one can conclude a lecture with the word therefore (as in Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I am against my opponent’s proposal) but one would not begin a lecture with it (Ladies and gentlemen! Therefore I am glad to be here this afternoon). Moreover, German and Dutch and other Germanic language have many puzzling little words (called “discourse particles”) like mal or ja or eben or eens or maar which are analogous to English then or y’know and which can only be learned when one understands precisely what the social rules are for using them in discourse or conversational contexts. As might be expected in fields as complex as linguistic behavior, linguistic knowledge, and linguistic structure, there are various competing theoretical approaches to the study of language. Formal linguistics adopts a relatively mathematical and logical approach to language and languages, with the goal of integrating all the parts of language mentioned above into a comprehensive system of rules and constraints interacting with one another. It is best represented on the UCLA campus by Generative Grammar, originated by Noam Chomsky. These include Grammaticalization Theory, Cognitive Grammar, and what could be a kind of intellectual mirror-image of Cognitive Grammar known as the Columbia School.

Answer 26

Generally: linguistic reconstruction 1. internal reconstruction - -> hypothesis: irregularities can be explained by lg change 2. comparative reconstruction - -> hypothesis: lgs which show similar structures go back to a common ancestor lg Challenging due to the fact that there are only written data. But large text corpora of ME exists. In contrast with OE and ModE, spelling was usually phonetic rather than conventional. Words were written mostly how the writer thought they sounded like. Some examples of change: - Open syllable lengthening (13. c.) - -> short vowels were lengthened in an open syllable - -> and non-low vowels were lowered

Misc-Major Changes Flashcards

(50 cards)