Historical Linguistics, Indo-European and the History of English

CLAS/LING 1010

January 25-30, 2012

I. The Main Idea • Noam Chomsky says that language is a biologically based ability.

• It is the ability to create an infinite number of sentences from a finite number of words

and a finite number of rules for combining those words.

• We do not simply memorize sentences and output them mechanically.

• Instead, we can create new sentences to express our novel thoughts.

• But language does not merely exist in the head; it also exists in time and space.

• Now we will examine the history of a language family, Indo-European, its subfamilies

(like Germanic) and its daughter language English.

II. Indo-European and Historical-Comparative Linguistics

A. There is a great deal of linguistic diversity in the world, although it is declining.

• There are about 6900 languages spoken in the world today.

• English has the third-largest number of speakers.

• There are 94 major language families.

• The Indo-European language family is the most widely spoken family in the world, with

2.7 billion native speakers (Sino-Tibetan is second).

• About 350 languages (5%) are spoken by 94% of the world’s population.

• The remaining 95% of the languages face extinction by the end of this century.

B. Why do languages exhibit similarities?

• Language universals. All languages have consonants and vowels. All languages have

ways of indicating the difference between a question and a statement.

• Language contact. When language communities are in close contact, they tend to

borrow words and expressions from one another. French has borrowed weekend, nonstop,

snack from English.

• Genetic affiliation. Two languages may represent distinct dialects of a given ‘source’

language—dialects that have diverged to the extent that they are no longer mutually

intelligible.

C. The most well studied language family is Indo-European.

• In 1786, Sir William Jones observes that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin must be “sprung from

some common source”.

• August Schleicher, a 19th century German linguist, suggests a genetic metaphor for

understanding relationships within the Indo-European ‘family’.

D. What languages are in the family?

• Germanic (Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia)

• Baltic (Lithuania and Latvia)

• Slavic (Poland, Bulgaria, Russia)

• Celtic (Ireland, Wales, France, Brittany)

• Italic-Romance (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Romania)

• Hellenic (Greece)

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• Albanian

• Armenian

• Indo-Iranian (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh)

E. What is the geographic extent of the Indo-European languages?

• They are distributed from the Ireland at the far western end to Assam at the far eastern

end.

• Not all European languages are Indo-European!

F. What is Proto-Indo-European (PIE)?

• PIE is a hypothetical, reconstructed Neolithic language.

• It represents the mother language for all Indo-European languages.

• No written records of PIE exist.

• Our oldest written records of an Indo-European language come from Mycenaean, an

older dialect of Greek, written in a script called Linear B, ca. 1000 BC.

• PIE was probably spoken around 3500 BC.

G. Evidence for genetic affiliation among Indo-European languages comes from the

comparative method

• Examine cognate words (words that mean roughly the same thing and that sound fairly

similar).

• Establish sound correspondences.

• Attempt to describe sounds changes in terms of what happened in the daughter languages.

• Sometimes languages are conservative relative to PIE and sometimes languages are

innovative relative to PIE.

• Examples of the comparative method (consonant correspondences):

PIE Sanskrit Greek Latin Germanic

*septm

‘seven’

sapta

hepta septem sibun (Gothic)

*ped

‘foot’

pad- pod- ped- fot (Old English)

*bher

‘carry’

bhar-

pher- fer- bear (English)

*kwel(kwl)

‘revolve’

chakra

‘wheel’

kuklos

‘wheel’

inquilinus

‘dweller’

hweol (Old English)

‘wheel’

*dheigh

‘to mold (from

mud)’

dhehi

‘wall, dam’

theikhos

‘wall’

figura

‘statue’

dig (English)

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H. Where was PIE spoken?

• Linguists and anthropologists have argued for two distinct homelands.

o A homeland north and east of the Black Sea, on the Pontic-Caspian plain.

o A homeland south of the Black Sea, in modern Turkey.

I. How did PIE spread across Europe and South Asia?

• The Agricultural model o Farmers migrate from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) around 6500 BCE.

o Agriculture supports high population densities, and so there was a wave of

advance of farmers through Europe and South Asia.

o These farmers typically assimilated hunter-gatherer communities and their

languages.

o Evidence: early agricultural sites in Turkey date

from 7500 BCE, prototypes of sheep and goats,

and wheat and barley, existed in their wild state

only in Turkey.

• The Mounted Warrior model (the Kurgan

hypothesis) o Horse-loving charioteers from the Russian

steppes entered South Asia and Europe after

3500 BCE, conquering indigenous people.

o Evidence: Sintashta burial sites (south of the

Ural Mountains) dating from 1600 BC contain

chariot-wheel imprints, show similar burial

rituals to those described in the northern Indian

religious text the Rig Veda (1700 BC, ‘praise

knowledge’).

o I-E languages contain cognate words for axel

(*axs), wagon (*wegh), and wheel (*kwel).

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III. The History of English

A. The history of English is divided into three periods, each of which is initiated by a

historical event.

• Old English: starts with Germanic incursions in the 4th century AD

• Middle English: starts with the Norman Conquest in 1066

• Modern English: starts with the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603)

B. Roman Conquest of the British Isles

• Until about 428 AD, the British Isles were

inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages.

• These peoples were subdued multiple times by

the Romans: Julius Caesar (54 BC), Claudius (48

AD), the Antonine emperors Antoninus Pius and

Marcus Aurelius (ca. 180 AD).

• In 122 AD, the emperor Hadrian ordered the

construction of a series of forts, ditches and walls

to secure Romans against raids by a Scottish

tribe called they called the Picts.

• The wall, now called Hadrian’s Wall, is at the

northern extreme of England; it is 73 miles long.

• Latin was spoken in cities, Celtic dialects in the

country.

• Latin influences: duke from dux ‘leader’, -

c(h)ester from castra ‘camp’, as found in

Dorchester, Leicester, -wich from vicus ‘village’,

as in Greenwich, Norwich.

• The names of the city London and of the river

Thames survive from Celtic.

C. Germanic Incursions (OLD ENGLISH, 450-1066).

• The last Romans abandoned the British Isles in 410 AD to fight against a Gothic invasion

in Rome.

• The Romans left behind a somewhat decadent Romano-British culture, Britannia.

• Into this power vacuum came

Northern Germanic invaders.

• They had originally been invited in

as mercenaries by the British-

Roman puppet government.

• They had a short distance to travel:

by modern roadways it’s about 500

miles from Hannover, Germany to

London, UK.

• The Celts were driven to the

northern and western extremes of

the island, where Welsh, Irish and

Scots Gaelic continued to be

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spoken.

• There were three tribes of incoming Germans:

o Jutes (from northern Jutland in modern Denmark)

o Saxons (from modern Lower Saxony)

o Angles (from modern Angeln, in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein)

established kingdoms in England.

• Frisian, spoken in Lower Saxony, the Netherlands and the Frisian Islands, is essentially

the Saxon language.

• The three tribes established kingdoms in Britannia:

o The Saxons establish Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Middlesex (now part of London).

o The Angles establish Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia.

o The Jutes settled in Kent (modern starting point of channel tunnel, location of city

of Canterbury).

• In the 6th century, Arthur, a British chieftain, fought against these Germanic pagans on

behalf of the Christianized Celts.

• In the 7th century, Rome comes back, “not with a sword but

with a cross”.

o Greek enters English via missionaries sent by Pope

Gregory.

o Words include: bishop, angel, apostle, church.

• In the late 8th century, Danish Vikings (< Old Norse ‘bay

explorer’) begin a series of raids on coastal monasteries

including Lindisfarne, eventually founding settlements.

• Alfred the Great of Wessex (871-899 AD) unites the Angles and

Saxons against the Vikings.

o After subduing the Vikings, he makes a treaty with

them.

o Alfred establishes the Danelaw and unites England.

o The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (9th c.) and Beowulf (8

th c.) date from this period.

• Doublets from Old Norse and English survive, including

shirt/skirt, ship/skipper, shin/skin, shatter/scatter.

• In English dialects from the former Danelaw (Norfolk,

Yorkshire, Cumbria, Northumberland, we find many

Danish words: family names ending in –son, place

names ending in –by (e.g., Derby, Kirby, Bartleby), dialect expressions like yem for

‘home’, common words nay, skill and sky.

• Unlike Middle English and Modern English, Old English contained case INFLECTIONS,

e.g., þam cyninge meant the king (accusative) while þe cyning meant the king

(nominative).

• Word order is relatively free, but becomes more rigid when case endings disappear in

Middle English.

• Here is a sample of Old English, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Notice the two forms

of the name Horsa. What are they?

o Her Hengest and Horsa fuhton wiþ Wyrtgeorne þam cyninge, and his broþur

Horsan man ofslog; and æfter þam Hengest feng to rice and Æsc his sunu.

“Here Hengest and Horsa fought against Vortigern the king, and his brother Horsa

was slain; and after that Hengest and Æsc his brother took the kingdom.”

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D. The Norman Invasions (MIDDLE ENGLISH, 1066-1600).

• In 1066, the Normans (Vikings from Northern France) conquer the Anglo-Saxons under

Harold Godwinson (Harold II) at the Battle of Hastings.

• The Normans subjugate England under the leadership of William, Duke of Normandy

(Guillaume, William the Conqueror).

• William’s second most famous campaign was a property survey: the Domesday Book

(1086).

• The Norman capital is London.

• Most Anglo-Saxons became bilingual in French and English, but French did not replace

English as the language of the Anglo-Saxons.

o Because English speakers become servants to the French conquerors, they borrow

a many basic French words, resulting in doublets. Pig vs. pork, hut vs. cottage,

clothe vs. dress, cow vs. beef, calf vs. veal, sheep vs. mutton, folk vs. people.

o Norman French provides most of the English terms for government and law:

authority, judge, jury, voir dire, prosecutor, government.

o A puzzle: is a word from Latin via French or directly from Latin? Examples:

solid, distribution, exact, grave.

o Some French words are Latinized: descrive, parfait.

o Anglo-Saxon words survive, referring to basic-level categories (body parts, kin

terms). Anglo-Saxon prefixes and suffixes survive, including those found in

drunken, away, neighborhood, writer, friendship, belie.

• Eventually, the French kings become Anglicized; Henry IV (reigned 1399-1413) was the

first monarch since the Norman conquest to give his coronation speech in English.

• The standard dialect is the East Midlands dialect, the dialect of Chaucer (d. 1400).

• During the Middle English period, the invention of PRINTING in England had a great

effect.

o In 1476, William Caxton set up shop in London.

o He published 96 titles, including The Canterbury Tales.

o He spelled words as he pronounced them.

o His spelling system was adopted as the standard.

o Caxton’s system preserves archaic pronunciations to this day, e.g., knight, eye.

o Caxton’s system preserves some pronunciations that existed before the Great

English Vowel shift (1400-1600). Seven long vowel pronunciations are changed;

two vowels become diphthongs or double vowels:

1. [hus] becomes [hous] (older pronunciation preserved by Caxton’s

spelling)

2. [divin] becomes [divayn] (older pronunciation preserved by Caxton’s

spelling)

3. [swet] becomes [swit] (preserved by Caxton’s spelling)

4. [gos] becomes [gus] (preserved by Caxton’s spelling)

5. [name] becomes [neym] (preserved by Caxton’s spelling)

• The most famous work from this period is Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1343-1400) The

Canterbury Tales.

o It is a series of tales told by various pilgrims on their way from London to

Canterbury to visit the church in which St. Thomas Becket was murdered.

o It is cynical about religious authority and relies on vernacular (rather than high

flown English).

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E. The English Renaissance (MODERN ENGLISH, 1558 to the present).

• During the Renaissance (16th century return to Classical arts and letters) and

Enlightenment (17th century philosophical movement), many words are borrowed directly

from Latin and Greek: revert, critic, fortitude, nemesis, pornography (porne +graphein).

• It is difficult to identify our speech with that of Shakespeare (1564-1616). Constructions

have changed (Saw you not his ghost?), as well as the meanings of words (Deer meant

forest creature, girl meant ‘young person’, dateless meant ‘endless’).