ENG 4820History of the English Language

Dr. Michael Getty | Spring 2009WEEK 5:

FROM AFRICA TO PROTO-GERMANIC

ENG4820 | Week 52

WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCKA Language is a System of Arbitrary

Symbols…

• Which of the following best captures the concept of ‘five’?

• Kannada aydu (South Asia)

• Basque bost (Western Europe)

• Arabic xamsa (Middle East)

• Coptic tiw (Egypt)

• Somali shanti (Northeastern Africa)

• Hausa biyar (Western Africa)

• Yoruba erin (Western Africa)

• Guarani po (South America)

• Finnish viisi (Northern Europe)

• Indonesian lima (Southeast Asia)

• Japanese itsutsu (Eastern Asia)

• Mohawk wisk (North America)

Answer: All of them and noneof them.

ENG4820 | Week 3 3

WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK

v

Regular vs. irregular morphemes

• Regular Morphemes Irregular Morphemes

– Rule-governed forms Arbitrary forms; No rhyme or reason!– Apply to all new words Apply only to certain existing words– Learned early by children Learned late by children– Appear more frequently Appear less frequently

ENG4820 | Week 3 4

WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCKRegular vs. irregular morphemes• Regular Morphemes Irregular Morphemes

– Rule-governed forms Arbitrary forms; No rhyme or reason!– Apply to all new words Apply only to certain existing words

• Plural forms of nouns– Nouns that end in [s,z] /-Iz/    horse, rose– Nouns that end in other, voiceless consonants /-s/    mat, tiff– Nouns that end in other voiced consonants /-z/    lab, grave, name

• Past tense forms of verbs        – Verbs that end in [t,d] /-Id/    wait, raid       – Verbs that end in other, voiceless consonants /-t/    thank, laugh       – Verbs that end in other, voiced consonants /-d/    beg, bathe, name

• Pretend that the following made-up words are nouns or verbs:biss, lozz, veck, drid

• You already know their plural forms if they are nouns, their past-tense forms if they are verbs!

ENG4820 | Week 3 5

WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCKRegular vs. irregular morphemes• Regular Morphemes Irregular Morphemes

– Rule-governed forms Arbitrary forms; No rhyme or reason!– Apply to all new words Apply only to certain existing words

• Why oxen, children, and sheep instead of oxes, childs, and sheeps? 

• For that matter, why not ox, childen, and sheepren?        • Why ate, wrote, and swum instead of not eated, writed, and

swimmed?• For that matter, why not ote, wrate, and swom?• Pretend that the following made-up words are nouns or verbs:

biss, lozz, veck, drid – No one would guess plural forms like bissen, lozzren, and

vock    – No one would guess past tense forms like bass, vock, or drod

ENG4820 | Week 5 6

WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCKTHE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND

SENTENCE STRUCTURE• Overt case marking: A relationship between the shape

of a phrase and its role in the action of a sentence

THE KING, THE BISHOP, AND THE DOG• cyning = ‘king’ biscop = ‘bishop’ hund = ‘dog’• geaf = ‘gave’ se / tham / thone = ‘the’

Giver Givee Gift

King Bishop Dog

King Dog Bishop

Bishop King Dog

Dog King Bishop

Bishop Dog King

Dog Bishop King

ENG4820 | Week 5 7

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

What happened between the 8th and 11th centuries?

• Phonological changes: Reduction of unstressed syllables, already underway since the early Germanic period

Primary Stress

WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK

ENG4820 | Week 5 8

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN WORD AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE

What happened between the 8th and 11th centuries?

• Phonological changes: Reduction of unstressed syllables, already underway since the early Germanic period

– Loss of final consonants– Loss of range of possible vowels

• Since overt case marking in Old English is realized in unstressed syllables, the system collapses, leaving us with the essentially fixed word order system we have today.

WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK

ENG4820 | Week 5 9

WHY DO LANGUAGES CHANGE?

Quick answer: Variation, Interaction, and Time

• Variation is constant in language use in all communities and at all times.• We vary constantly in our pronunciation of various phonemes and which affixes and words we use in particular contexts.• We have a genetically endowed but mostly subconscious ability to monitor the statistical prevalence of one variant over another

in a given setting.• Children acquiring their native language(s) are especially sensitive to statistical patterns, and their speech tends to reflect and

amplify statistical trends in the variation to which they are exposed.

WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK

ENG4820 | Week 5 10

• Anatomically (skeletal structure) and behaviorally (art, tools, fire) modern humans were first present in Africa about 200,000 years ago. 

• About 80 thousand years ago, during a time of dramatic climate change, a group or groups left Africa via what we now call the Red Sea and colonized areas straddling the equator. (source)

• When people tried moving into more northern latitudes, they ran into two problems … – Vitamin D deficiency– Ice

IN THE BEGINNING…

ENG4820 | Week 5 11

• We humans need Vitamin D (cholecalciferol) in order to absorb calcium from our food. It also plays a crucial biochemical role in our immune and neurological systems. With too little vitamin D, we're at severe risk for bone disease, heart disease, cancer, and depression. (source)

• We can get Vitamin D from meat and dairy products, but our most reliable source of Vitamin D is our skins. Skin cells close to the surface take a form of cholesterol from our blood, which, when exposed to ultraviolet light from the sun, becomes Vitamin D. (source)

• Too much ultraviolet light can cause skin cancer, though, but melanin, a dark pigment that absorbs ultraviolet light, can reduce that risk. 

IN THE BEGINNING…

ENG4820 | Week 5 12

• Close to the equator, high levels of melanin gave the earliest humans the right balance between vitamin D production and the risk of skin cancer.

• At higher latitudes, though, sunlight is more spread out (diagram), and it takes more exposure for the skin to produce the same amount of Vitamin D it would closer to the equator. With their melanin-rich skin, the earliest human populations couldn't live much further north than what we call the Tropic of Cancer (image) without the risk of Vitamin D deficiency. 

• At the northern extremes of this area, individuals with less melanin in their skins had slightly more children per generation than their darker-skinned neighbors, because they were at lower risk for vitamin D deficiency.

• Over many thousands of generations, the low-melanin adaptation spread, allowing populations to push further and further north. By about 55,000 years ago, northern-dwelling humans had adapted enough to settle all of what we now call Europe.

IN THE BEGINNING…

ENG4820 | Week 5 13

• The past 55,000 years have seen dramatic climate changes including two distinct ice ages, when much of the northern hemisphere was covered by glaciers.• The last ice age ended definitively only about 10,000 years ago, eventually leading to:

– Better climate– Booming populations– Invention of agriculture– Development of centrally managed settlement areas

• 1000 years is enough time for a language to change to the extent that it becomes mostly unrecognizable to original speakers. • Multiply that by a factor of 50 or so, add in dramatic population movements, and you get scenario that can easily lead to thousands of wildly different languages,

many of which show no transparent relationship to each other.

IN THE BEGINNING…

ENG4820 | Week 5 14

• About 7000 years ago (source), a culture emerges in what we now call the Caucasus or possibly northeastern Turkey.

• An educated guess at the geographic origin of Indo-European comes from side-by-side comparison of the vocabularies of the daughter languages. Common, similar-sounding words for ’snow,’ ‘cow,’ and ’salmon,’ along with a lack of common words for things like ‘lion,’ ‘olive,’ and ‘palm tree’ point towards farming cultures in temperate, wooded areas.

• The best educated guesses point towards what is now called the Caucasus region, an area encompassing southeastern  Ukraine, southern Russia, and Georgia.

IN THE BEGINNING…

Source: Google Maps

ENG4820 | Week 5 15

• Over the next centuries, the descendants of the Indo-Europeans spread across what we now call Europe and Central and Southern Asia. We now call this culture Proto-Indo-European, and we know that the languages that descended from it encompass such far-flung tongues as …

– The Celtic languages: Gaelic, Welsh, Breton– The Germanic languages: English, German, Danish/Swedish/Norwegian– The Romance languages– All the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, etc.), – Greek, Albanian– Many of the languages of Central and South Asia – Farsi/Dari (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan)– Pashto (Afghanistan)– Armenian, Abkhaz (Caucasus)– Dozens of languages of South Asia: Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujerati, Sinhalese, Sindhi, but not Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, or Malayalam 

IN THE BEGINNING…

ENG4820 | Week 5 16

• After 7000 years, the daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European had become so dissimilar that it took the work of scholars to figure out that they were all related. 

BUT HOW DO WE KNOW THIS?

Source:AvuncularFeldspar

ENG4820 | Week 5 17

• Assemble a list of words in languages you’re interested in

• Preferably very common words: family, nature, agriculture

• Determine, based on phonological similarity, which words are transparently similar to each other: cognates

• WARNING:

– Some words may have been displaced by foreign loans over time

– Some unrelated languages may have borrowed Indo-European words

THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

ENG4820 | Week 5 18

THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

• These forms are spelled, not transcribed• Accent and vowel length marks• Sanskrit bh – an aspirated voiced stop. Say ‘rib hut’ and gradually take of the sounds leading up to b.

J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 6

ENG4820 | Week 5 19

THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

• You can start to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European form just on the visible commonalities. The word for ‘mother’ was probably *mater or *matar.

• As if things weren’t confusing enough, we’re now using the asterisk for a different purpose than last week. Now it’s signifying that this is a reconstructed form, one that we can support but that isn’t actually attested.

• What to make of the four different sounds at the beginning of ‘brother’?

J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 5

ENG4820 | Week 5 20

THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

• Change tends to reduce complexity over time. A form that seems more complex than its cousins is probably closer to the original

• Voiced, aspirated stops are complex and relatively more difficult to pronounce than unaspirated or voiceless stops.

• They required fine manipulation of the airstream, the vocal chords, and the oral articulators.

• It makes more sense that a language should have them and then lose them than spontaneously acquire them.

J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 6

ENG4820 | Week 5 21

THE COMPARATIVE METHODOnce you think you’ve found a relationship, probe a little further.Look for grammatical similarities.

• Proto-Indo-European was a heavily inflected language, as was Old English.• Rich, overt morphology matching the grammatical features of words within phrases.• Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin speakers had little use for pronouns like I, he, she…

J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 6

ENG4820 | Week 5 22

Proto-Indo-European to Germanic

• The Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops {bh, dh, gh} are lost in all of the daughter languages outside India.

• bh > Latin f Greek ph > f Germanic b• dh > Latin f Greek θ Germanic d• gh > Latin h Greek x Germanic g

ENG4820 | Week 5 23

• bh > Latin f Greek ph > f Germanic b• dh > Latin f Greek θ Germanic d• gh > Latin h Greek x Germanic g

No one knows why Proto-Germanic didn't go in a direction like Latin and Greek. Whatever the reason, the change created a big problem for the speakers of the time.

Proto-Indo-European to Germanic

ENG4820 | Week 5 24

• /bh / Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/ • /dh / Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/• /gh/ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic

/g/

• No one knows why Proto-Germanic didn't go in a direction like Latin and Greek. Whatever the reason, the change created a big problem for the speakers of the time.

• The difference between {bh,dh,gh} and {b,d,g} was meaning-bearing, and in a big way: many morphemes differed from each other only in whether the aspirated or unaspirated voiced stop was present.

• *ghel- 'shine, bright' *gel- 'cold, freeze‘• *dher- 'hold firmly, support' *der- 'split, peel'

(source)

Proto-Indo-European to Germanic

ENG4820 | Week 5 25

• /bh / Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/ • /dh / Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/• /gh/ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic

/g/

• So what happens? As the original voiced aspirated stops {bh,dh,gh} lose their aspiration, the original unaspirated voiced stops {b,d,g} shift to voiceless {p,t,k}.

• But that only changed the problem instead of solving. The difference between voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops was also meaning-bearing:

• *gel- 'cold, freeze‘ *kel 'cover, hide‘• *der- 'split, peel' *ter- 'rub, turn, twist'  (source)

Proto-Indo-European to Germanic

ENG4820 | Week 5 26

• /bh / Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/ • /dh / Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/• /gh/ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic

/g/

• But the language already had those consonants, so all the original stops {p,t,k} shifted to their fricative counterparts {f,θ,x/h} (source)

• So it’s another game of musical chairs

Proto-Indo-European to Germanic

voiced, aspirated stop

voiced, unaspirated stop

voiceless, unaspirated stop

Voiceless fricative

Labial Alveolar Velar

ENG4820 | Week 5 27

Proto-Indo-European

Proto-Germanic

Original Meaning Eventually … Compare…

*ghel- *gel- ‘shine, bright’ yellow Greek chloros > chloroform

*gel- *kel- ‘freeze, cold’ cool, chill via Latin congeal, gelato

*kel- *hel- ‘cover, hide’ hell via Latin conceal

*dher- *der- ‘hold firm, support’

not attested in English

Latin firm, Greek throne, Sanskrit dharma

*der *ter- ‘split, peel’ tear (i.e. rip) via Greek dermatologist, epidermis

*ter *θer ‘rub, turn, twist’ thread, thresh Latin turn, Greek torus

Proto-Indo-European to Germanic

ENG4820 | Week 5 28

• This explains why English, once it acquired its taste for Latin and Greek loan words, in many cases has two copies of the same word. 

foot podiatrist, pedestrian, pedal, etc.father paternity, paternalthree triad, trimester, triple, etc.tooth dental, dentistheart cardio, cardiologist, etc.kin gene, geneology (originally pronounced as /g/)knee genuflect queen gynecology, misogyny (from Greek gyné, ‘woman)night ([nIxt]) nocturnal

Proto-Indo-European to Germanic

ENG4820 | Week 5 29

Proto-Indo-European to GermanicVerner’s Law and Germanic Stress

Stress and accent in Indo-European were irregular: unpredictable features located unpredictably

Source: AvuncularFeldspar

ENG4820 | Week 5 30

Proto-Indo-European to GermanicVerner’s Law and Germanic Stress

Germanic regularized stress and accent onto the first syllable of a root morpheme:

Primary Stress

Source: AvuncularFeldspar

ENG4820 | Week 5 31

Proto-Indo-European to GermanicVerner’s Law and Germanic Stress

Germanic regularized stress and accent onto the first syllable of a root morpheme:

Before this change was complete, voiceless consonants became voiced if they appeared just before the main stress of a word.

PGmc. ‘chosen’ *kusun *kuzun *kurun Old English curonBut ‘to choose’ *keusan Old English ceosan

PGmc. ‘were’ *wasun *wazun *warun Old English weronBut ‘was’ *wasi Old English wæs

ENG4820 | Week 5 32

Proto-Indo-European to Germanic• When descendants of the Indo-European tribes who we call

‘Germanic’ settled on the coast of the Baltic Sea from about the 18th to about the 8th century BCE, they encountered tribal groups that had been their for millennia.

• We don’t know who these people were, as their language died out well before the invention of writing, but the Germanic tribes settled among them, intermarried, and borrowed vast numbers of their words, which now form a big part of the core vocabulary of the Germanic languages.

• They weren’t the Finns, because our word Finn and Finnish bears no resemblance to what the Finns call themselves, Suomi and Suomalainen.

• We know these are non-Indo-European words because only the Germanic languages have them.• house, leg, hand, shoulder, bone, sick, all, boat, ship,

sail, net, oar, shoe, hound, lamb, sheep, seal, sturgeon, herring 

ENG4820 | Week 5 33

Proto-Indo-European to Germanic• Most of the Latin borrowings into English we talk about are

from the Middle Ages, the language of civil society. But there was a wave of Latin loans from way before that, dating to contacts between Romans and Germanic tribal groups between 500 BCE and 500 CE, a period which overlaps with the Christianization of Roman culture.

• Stop anyone on the street, and they’d tell you that these words are about as English as you can get. In fact, they were borrowed from Latin before Latin was cool, you might say: • cheap, cheese, pan, dish, kitchen, cook, cherry, pillow,

mile, tile, beer, street• After Christianity became associated with Roman power

and institutions, we got:• church, monk, bishop, nun, and candle, to name a few.