Language Change: Module 6
Historical Factors
Before English began - up to ca. 450 AD
* British (Celtic) tribes - language related to modern Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish (Erse).
* Only real connection with Modern English is in lexis (mostly in place names).
Origins of English - ca. 450 AD to 1066
* Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrive from north Germany
* Language (Old English) is at first spoken · only writing is runes
* Written form comes from Latin-speaking monks, who use Roman alphabet, with new letters (æ, ð and þ - spoken as "ash", "eth" and "thorn")
* About half of common vocabulary of modern English comes from Old English
* Word forms vary according to syntax (inflection, case endings and declension) and grammatical gender
* Vikings establish Danelaw · some erosion of grammar and addition of new vocabulary.
Middle English Period - 1066 to 1485
* Lexis - terms for law and politics from Norman French
* General expansion of lexis, esp. abstract terms
* Case-endings, declension and gender disappear
* Inflection goes except in pronouns and related forms
* Writers concerned about change, want to stabilize language
* 1458 - Gutenberg invents printing (1475 - Caxton introduces it to England)
* Press enables some standardizing.
Tudor Period - 1485 to 1603
* Rise of nationalism linked to desire for more expressive language
* Flowering of literature and experiments in style
* Idea of elevated diction
* Vocabulary enlarged by new learning (Renaissance)
* Imports from Greek and Latin
* Lexis expanded by travel to New World, and ideas in maths and science
* English settlers begin to found colonies in North America.
* In 1582 Richard Mulcaster publishes a list of 7,000 words with spelling forms, but this does not become a universal standard
The 17th Century
* Influences of Puritanism and Catholicism (Roundhead and Cavalier) and of science.
* Puritan ideas of clarity and simplicity influence writing of prose.
* Reasonableness and less verbose language
* English preferred to Dutch as official tongue of American colonies.
The 18th Century
* Age of reason
* Ideas of order and priority
* Standardizing of spelling (Johnson' s Dictionary of the English Language in 1755) and grammar (Robert Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar in 1762 and Lindley Murray's English Grammar in 1794)
* Classical languages are seen as ideal models for English
* Romantic Movement begins
* Interest in regional and social class varieties of English.
The 19th Century
* Interest in past
* Use of archaic words
* Noan Webster publishes American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828
* Due to growth in Brittish empire the English language travels to other countries and imports many loanwords
* Modern language science begins with Jakob Grimm and others
* James Murray begins to compile the New English Dictionary (which later becomes the Oxford English Dictionary) in 1879
The 20th Century and beyond
* Modern language science developed
* Descriptive not prescriptive
* Non-standard varieties have raised status
* Ideas of formal and informal change
* Modern recording technology allows study of spoken English
* Influence of overseas forms grows
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* Due to growth in Brittish empire the English language travels to other countries and imports many loanwords
* Modern language science begins with Jakob Grimm and others
* James Murray begins to compile the New English Dictionary (which later becomes the Oxford English Dictionary) in 1879
The 20th Century and beyond
* Modern language science developed
* Descriptive not prescriptive
* Non-standard varieties have raised status
* Ideas of formal and informal change
* Modern recording technology allows study of spoken English
* Influence of overseas forms grows
* US and International English dominant
* English becomes global language (e.g. in computing, communications, entertainment).
Inflection
German, Latin, Russian, Greek, and French are inflected languages. This is because many words in theses languages undergo changes of form to show changes of grammar. Such changes (in European languages) include tense and mood of verbs, gender of nouns, case or number of nouns, agreement of adjectives, and other distinctions. Old English was a highly inflected language.
Modern English is relatively uninflected. Adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections are invariable. Their form remains the same no matter how they are used. Nouns, pronouns and verbs are inflected:
* Most English nouns show plural by adding an s or an es: bed, beds, box, boxes.
Some nouns have what are called mutated, or changed, plurals: man, men; woman, women; foot, feet; tooth, teeth; goose, geese; mouse, mice; louse, lice.
A very few nouns - for example, ox, oxen - have plurals ending in -en. A few noun forms are unchanged in the plural: deer, sheep, moose and grouse.
* Five of the seven personal pronouns have inflected forms for subject or object use: I, me; he, him; she, her; we, us and they, them. And there are also distinctive possessives (adjectives and pronouns): my/mine, his, her/hers, our/ours, their theirs.
* Verb forms are inflected, but mostly in straightforward ways. The one English verb with the most forms is "to be" (be, am, is, are, was, were, been and being).
* Weak (regular) verbs have only four forms: talk, talks, talked and talking, for example.
* Strong, or irregular, verbs have five forms: sing, sings, sang, sung and singing. A few verbs (that end in a -t or -d) do not form the past tense with -ed, and have only three forms: cut, cuts, cutting.
* These verb inflections are in marked contrast to Old English, in which ridan, or "ride", had 13 forms, and to Modern German, in which reiten (="ride") has 16.
Grammar
Models or examples that we imitate may become real or de facto standards. Texts with a large audience may thus create patterns to which we conform. Prescriptive rules are compiled because the writer presumably wishes to "correct" some real language tendency - these invented rules (akin to matters of etiquette or table manners) are likely to fail, but may in the meantime promote social attitudes about "correct" or "incorrect" English that are confused with genuine rules.
Some "rules", like those drawn up by Lowth in 1762, have acquired currency: for example, that one should not put a preposition at the end of a sentence, use double or multiple negatives, split the infinitive, or use they as a gender-neutral pronoun. Professor R.W. Zandvoort describes how English usage ignores these pseudo-rules, while Jean Aitchison in her lecture A Web of Worries gives historical and modern examples to show what Zandvoort describes.
Lexis and semantics
This is less problematic or, rather, the problems are readily grasped. Some lexical items with some meanings are certainly standard features of English at a given time - the OED is full of them. Equally, some other items are obviously not standard or have n/s meanings. And many items are in the process of becoming or ceasing to be standard. Thus, in spite of continual language change, we can create a standard lexicon at any time. We can take this further and show how a given lexical item with a given meaning may be standard in a given context or within a variety but be n/s as regards the mainstream.
For example Hoover began life as a brand name, a proper-noun equivalent to generic vacuum cleaner. Nowadays, in spoken UK English Hoover or arguably hoover is acceptable as a generic name or common noun. At the turn of the century supplements to the OED recorded various forms of Kodak (small portable camera) including kodaker (photographer) and kodakry photography. These are no longer standard although Polaroid is acceptable to denote the instant photographs produced in such cameras.
Both lexis and semantics (especially semantic change or drift) may be culturally determined. They may depend on some other thing (a process or object) which ceases to be familiar, and so the word disappears or the meaning shifts. This has happened to words like wireless, telegram or terms from imperial measurement and pre-decimal currency (foot, inch, gallon, bushel, halfpenny, and shilling).
Spelling
Discussion of spelling is bedevilled by strong social attitudes. Even teachers, who should know better, characterize n/s spelling by epithets such as "bad", "poor", "awful" or "appalling" - as if the writer wilfully ignored the standard form. The National Curriculum draws attention to many other features of written performance as well as spelling, but the social attitudes persist. Yet Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton (necessarily) wrote without regard to a standard, so standard spelling can hardly be a measure of merit. The allegation that n/s spelling confuses the reader is often false (as with n/s omission or adding of a second consonant or n/s e before -ing in verbs). Non-standard spellings used in marketing (Kwik Fit, Kwik Save, Toys R Us) rarely appear unintentionally in children's writing, as any teacher knows. On the other hand, the commonest "errors" such as alot for (standard) a lot, grammer for (standard) grammar or belive for standard believe all make clear what the writer intends.
Johnson's dictionary establishes a standard because it is not prescriptive but descriptive. It records what is in Johnson's (very wide) reading the most common form, making allowance for consistency of like elements, and showing etymology, for those who know other languages. Thus cede (verb=give, from Latin) and seed (noun) are differently spelt though homophones (having more or less the same sound value). Johnson also disarms critics by quoting usage, not merely laying down a preferred form.
The modern reader sees Noah Webster's variants as distinctly American (ax, color, plow, theater, waggon) but often Webster has recorded an older English form than Dr. Johnson.
Punctuation
Punctuation, which may be more critical to communicating meaning than spelling, provokes much less strong social attitudes - perhaps because n/s forms are less obvious, perhaps because punctuation has no defining moment like the publication of Johnson's dictionary, but has evolved gradually and has standard forms but is open to change.
From the 18th century onwards one sees most punctuation marks which are considered standard today. Some have changed their use - in general, late 20th century texts, especially non-literary texts, have less frequent use of marks which are deemed optional. In modern German, a comma to separate clauses is obligatory, but not in English. Businesses use so-called "open punctuation" of addresses (no comma after each element). In many cases ignorance or confusion about conventions may cause writers to avoid some marks: the semi-colon and colon are problematic, while the great difference of function between hyphen and dash may be confused by lack of difference in appearance: on a typewriter the same key served for both (some typists would repeat the stroke for a dash). Some modern computer software restores the difference, where the grammar checking can detect that the context calls for the (longer) dash.
Some writers may have caused punctuation marks to lose impact by over-use. Teachers will be familiar with multiple exclamation marks, or with exclamation marks in contexts where only mild emphasis is intended.
Phonology
Before the advent of modern recording and broadcasting technology debate about sounds was reliant on written transcripts, which could at best approximate to real phonology. Much is made of inference from, for example, rhyming words in poetry - did the poet use imperfect rhyme or have sounds changed in, for example, John Donne's "And find/What wind/Serves to advance an honest mind". Does US (rhymes with lurk) or UK (rhymes with dark) pronunciation of clerk preserve the older English form - or have two rival sounds fared differently in separate locations? And what of lieutenant? US loo-ten-unt (with stress on first or second syllable) is closer to the French original than UK lef-ten-unt (stress on second syllable).
The various phonetic alphabets give a symbolic representation of sounds that are described in terms of physical performance (for example the position of tongue relative to teeth). Modern recording technology can be used to give a far more precise and objective description of a sound produced, as a waveform or a measure of frequency and so on.
As sound recording is now more than a century old, we can observe change and standardizing tendencies in spoken English. Received Pronunciation (RP) is a notional standard form of pronunciation. RP is associated with prestige and formal public spoken discourse, such as the law, parliament, education or broadcasting. In some of these it may be in tension with regional variations. RP currently is a modified form of the accent heard in independent and grammar schools or spoken by newsreaders; the accent is largely neutral as regards region, but long/soft vowels are preferred to hard/short vowel sounds. Listening to a recording of a broadcast from an earlier period will show how far RP has changed over time - the earlier RP survives in part in the accent of Queen Elizabeth II, who speaks with much less clearly differentiated (or less open) vowels than the modern RP speaker (the stiff upper lip is literal as well as a metaphor). Our notion of RP in earlier times may also derive from the accents heard in UK feature films (think of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter). We have no easy way of knowing how far this corresponded to the prestige accent of the time.
