ENG 346: Aspects of the English Language |
|
ENG 346: Aspects of the English Language By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do each of the following:
Read Chapter
8 of Contemporary Linguistics before you come to class on Monday. Revise one of your “Think Again” essays and bring it to class on Friday. Think Fast:
Analyze the Old English passage I assign you in class. Presentations:
Introduction to Old English (Professor Canada), Old English phonology
(Professor Canada), Old English morphology (Jamie Griffith), Old English
lexicon (Ashleigh Mitchell), Old English syntax (Edna Haywood), Old English
writing (Trina Rising) Discussion: During
this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged
during our “Think Fast” exercise, my presentation, and cooperative learning. Think Again: Using
what you have learned or reviewed in this lesson, analyze a passage written
in Old English. Conferences: During
these one-on-one conferences, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz
you on lesson objectives, and field your questions. Announcements: We
will wrap up this lesson with announcements regarding upcoming lessons, as
well as other relevant subjects. Make sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following terms:
The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European
Roots
features an introductory essay with background on the structure and study of
Proto-Indo-European. The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the English Language contains extensive information
on Old English. The Cambridge History of
the English Language contains extensive information on Old English. The Early
History of Indo-European Languages contains a map, a “family
tree” of Indo-European Languages,
and historical information. Old
English Pages features links to sites dealing with aspects of Old
English. The Origins and
Development of the English Language contains extensive information
on Old English. The Village of Wichamstow offers a
peek into the everyday lives of Anglo-Saxons. A History of the English
Language contains extensive information on Old English. Updated March 10, 2003
|
IntroductionWelcome back! I hope that you have a relaxing and rejuvenating spring break. I hope, too, that you haven’t forgotten all of the valuable information you learned about phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and writing because you will need that information in the next several lessons as we take a tour of the history of English, from its origins in Proto-Indo-European to the present day. It has been said that humans learn best when they teach someone else. We will put that concept to use over the next several weeks as each of you teaches your classmates about some event, person, or concept in the history of English. DiscussionProto-Indo-European
Where did English come from? The question has several correct answers. Most recently, it came--and comes--from other languages. A voracious borrower of words, English has thousands of words from scores of other languages, notably French, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and German. If we go back a bit further, we might say Modern English came from Middle English, which in turn came from Old English. Even Old English came from some place. Scholars trace it back to the Germanic family of languages, just as they trace Spanish, French, and other Romance languages back to Latin. We can go back even further, however. Indeed, we can say that English--and, for that matter, French, German, Greek, Persian, and many other languages--comes from a language spoken by people thousands of years ago. We call this language Proto-Indo-European. Scholars know little about these people, not even exactly where they lived, although some have suggested a homeland east of the Caspian Sea. How, then, can we possibly know anything about the language they spoke, especially since we have no written records of it? The answer lies in something called the comparative method. Building on work done by German Franz Bopp and others some two hundred years ago, linguists have reconstructed this language by studying similar words in various languages spoken in Europe and parts of Asia. By comparing these words, they have developed some principles by which the sounds of the words changed as they evolved in the different languages. One of these scholars, Jakob Grimm of fairy-tale fame, devised a set of principles known as Grimm's Law, which explains how words in Germanic languages such as English differ from words in languages such as Latin. According to Grimm's Law, for instance, the "d" sound still found in Romance languages changed in the Germanic languages to the "t" sound, and the "t" sound changed to the "th" sound. Thus, Spanish speakers say diente, but English speakers say tooth. Words such as these, which though occurring in different languages can be traced back to the same ancestral language, are called cognates. As in the case of diente and tooth, these cognates often have the same meaning, but look and sound slightly or even dramatically different because of sound changes they have undergone. Thanks to their study of these languages, scholars have developed a rather detailed "family tree" of languages that originated with Proto-Indo-European. This tree includes 11 large groups, some of which include many languages. English, for example, belongs to the Germanic group, which also includes German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Frisian, Dutch, Yiddish, and other languages. Outside the Germanic group, we have the Italic group, which includes French and Spanish; the Slavic group, which includes Polish and Russian; the Iranian group, which includes Persian and Kurdish; and other groups. Indeed, the influence of Proto-Indo-European is quite large. In The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Calvert Watkins observes that about half of the people in the world speak a language that originated with Proto-Indo-European. Old EnglishThe English language was born when three Germanic tribes--the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes--came to Britain in A.D. 449. At the time, the people in these tribes were speaking their own language, the same Germanic dialects that they and others had spoken back on the European continent. Because they were now separated from the speakers still on the continent, however, their version of the language changed along different lines, eventually evolving into a separate language: English. Although we recognize the language these people spoke in Britain back in the 5th century and for many ensuing centuries as an early version of our own, it is dramatically different from our own in its phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax, and graphic system. For this reason, we refer to it as Old English, or Anglo-Saxon--after the names of two of the tribes who spoke it. For example, Old English had many words and letters that are no longer part of Modern English--words such as scop and letters such as ð, known as an eth. Furthermore, Old English nouns had different forms according to whether they appeared as the subject of the sentence, direct object, and so on. Because of these differences, or inflections, Old English had a syntactic system quite different from that of Modern English. Old English continued to change over the centuries, gradually developing into what has come to be known as Middle English. PracticeBelow are some activities designed to help you master the knowledge and skills covered in this unit.
ConclusionIn this lesson, we have examined the first stages in the history of the English language. In our next lesson, we move ahead to the next stage, Middle English. |
