History of english review questions and answers 2016 (0)

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF OLD ENGLISH -
15 monophtongs, (7 long, 7 short, 1 central), 4 diphtongs, 17 consonants. Free variaton of R, and it was pronounced everywhere. Very much Germanic in character. Quite some special consonants that no longer exist . About morphology : synthetic with numerous aglutinating tendencies. System of tenses Germanic, but with a reduction of tenses. Paradigmatic leveling; Stress shift ; Word order; Loan words (Old Norse, Old French ). Dual pronouns . Determiners - no separate definite article. Strong and weak verbs . Word order relatively free with tendencies towards SVO. SVO, SOV, VSO most common. Adposition and podposition were both possible ( eesliide ja tagaliide). About syntax: clauses were joined much simpler than nowadays , using and, then etc. Because of case syncretion the word order in a sentence became much more important to be able to tell the difference between words. 
FIRST CONSONANT SHIFT ( GRIMM 'S LAW)
Grimm's Law (also known as the First Germanic  Sound Shift or  Rask 's rule) is a set of statements named after Jakob Grimm describing the inherited  Proto -Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early  Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other  centum Indo-European languages  (Grimm used mostly  Latin  and  Greek  for illustration).
Grimm's law consists of three parts which form consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift.[1] The phases are usually constructed as follows:
- Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops  change into voiceless fricatives.
- Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.
- Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives (as allophones).
Grimm himself already noticed that there were many words that had different consonants from what his law predicted. These exceptions defied linguists for a few decades, but eventually received explanation from Danish linguist Karl Verner  in the form of Verner's law.
VERNER'S LAW
Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language  whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives[1] *b, *d, *z, *g, *gʷ.
Significance: 
Karl Verner published his discovery in the article "Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung" (an exception to the first sound shift) in Kuhn's Journal of Comparative Linguistic Research in 1876, but he had presented his theory already on 1 May, 1875 in a comprehensive personal letter to his friend and mentor , Vilhelm Thomsen .
It was received with great enthusiasm by the young generation of comparative philologists, the so-called Junggrammatiker, because it was an important argument in favour of theNeogrammarian  dogma that the sound laws were without exceptions ("die Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze").
BREAKING IN OLD ENGLISH
Vowel breaking is a sound change whereby a single vowel changes to become a diphthong in specific environments. The resulting sound preserves the original vowel, which is either preceded or followed by a glide. This process is manifested in a variety of Germanic languages and is characteristic of Old English.
Certain front vowels , /æ/ /e/ and /i/, in their short and long variants, were diphthongized when immediately followed by a velar /x/ or a cluster containing a velarized consonant and /ł/ or /r/, as its first element.
I- UMLAUT
In linguistics, umlaut (from  German  "sound alteration") is a sound change in which a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. (ö ü).
Umlaut is a form of assimilation, the process by which one speech sound is altered to make it more like another adjacent sound. If a word has two vowels, one far back in the mouth and the other far forward , more effort is required to pronounce the word than if the vowels were closer together. Thus, one possible linguistic development is for these two vowels to be drawn closer together.
The Germanic umlaut (more usually called i-umlaut or i-mutation) is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel (fronting) or a front vowelbecomes closer to /i/ (raising) when the following syllable contains /i/, /iː/, or /j/. It took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 Ad and affected all of the early languages[1] except Gothic.[2] An example of the resulting vowel alternation is the English plural   foot ~ feet (from Germanic */fōts/, pl. */fōtiz/).
ABLAUT
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language. It has significantly influenced modern Indo-European languages. An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb   sing , sang, sung  and its related noun   song .
The term  ablaut (German for "off-sound") was coined in the early nineteenth century by linguist  Jacob Grimm. However , the phenomenon itself was first recorded more than 2000 years earlier by the  Sanskrit grammarians and was codified by Pāṇini in his Ashtadhyayi, where the terms  guṇa and vṛddhi were used to describe the phenomena now known respectively as thefull grade and lengthened grade. In the context of European languages, the phenomenon was first described in the early 18th century by the Dutch linguist  Lambert ten Kate
STRONG VERBS:
With the exception of some (mostly high frequency ) irregular or anomalous verbs, Old English verbs belong to one of two main groupings: strong verbs and weak verbs.
The strong verbs realize differences of tense by variation in the stem vowel. They are assigned to seven main classes, according to the vowel variation shown. Thus RIDE v., a Class I strong verb, shows the following vowel gradation in its “principal parts”, from which all of its other inflections can be inferred:

infinitive : rīdan

past tense singular : rād

past tense plural: ridon

past participle: (ge)riden
Similarly, the Class III strong verb BIND v. shows the following principal parts:

infinitive: bindan

past tense singular:  band (or bond)

past tense plural: bundon

past participle: (ge)bunden
WEAK VERBS
The weak verbs form the past tense and past participle in a quite different way, using a suffix with a vowel followed by -d-, which is the ancestor of the modern inflection in -ed (see ‘-ED’ suffix¹). Thuslufian LOVE v.¹ (a weak Class II verb) shows 1st and 3rd person past singular lufode.
Weak verbs often originated as derivative formations, and often preserve some aspect of this in their meaning , as for example showing causative or inchoative meaning: see below on cēlan ‘to ( cause to) cool’ and cōlian ‘to become cool’.
PRETERITE- PRESENT VERBS
A few Old English verbs ( unfortunately they are important and rather common) combine features of Strong Verbs and Weak Verbs. These verbs take what would normally be a Strong Verb past tense and transfer it to the present. They then build a Weak Verb  paradigm upon that Strong Verb present tense. This sounds confusing, but makes sense when you see it applied to an actual verb. The basic idea is that preterite-present verbs are Strong Verbs that have their past tenses and present tenses swapped.
STRONG NOUNS AND WEAK NOUNS
Like adjectives and pronouns, Old English nouns are declined: different endings are attached to the stem of a word, and these endings indicate what case a word belongs to (and therefore , what grammatical function  that word is fulfilling in a sentence.
Old English nouns are divided into three main groups, strong, weak, and " minor ," based on the noun's stem and the endings that each noun takes in different grammatical cases .
A useful rule of thumb is that nouns whose stems end with a consonant are strong, while nouns whose stems end with a vowel (except for "u") are weak.
STRONG AND WEAK DECLENSIONS OF THE ADJECTIVE
What are adjectives? They are words used to describe either nouns or pronouns. Like nouns and pronouns, they are declined according to number, gender , and case; and their number, gender, and case must always agree with the noun or pronoun that they are modifying. In addition, adjective are also declined in either of two ways : strong or weak. This is governed by certain factors.
You can tell when to use the strong or weak declension:
An adjective would be declined weak if:

It was always declined weak (like most ordinal numbers , and all comparative adjectives)

It was preceded by the definitive article ("se/sēo/þæt" and all its declined forms ), either of the demonstratives ("se/sēo/þæt" and all its declined forms and "þes/þis/þēos" and all its declined forms), or any possessive personal pronoun except for the third person possessive pronouns ("his/ hire /heora") - unless the adjective was one of the few adjectives that were always declined strong, like ōðer - "second"

It was used in a nickname and came after the personal name it modified (for more info see: Old English/Titles and Nicknames
In all other cases, the adjective was declined strong, including if it came after a linking verb:

• Iċ eom grēat - "I am great"
  
• Þā wihta wǣron fǣtta - "The creatures were fat").
  

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF MIDDLE ENGLISH
A comparison of English texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries with those produced in the late twelth or early thirteenth reveals the following differences between Old and Middle English:

• phonological
  
  • Old-English diphthongs become Middle English monophthongs, e.g. on heofonum -> in hevene;
    
  • new diphthongs emerge in the Middle English period , e.g. dæg -> dai, day;
    
  • Initial [h] before consonants disappears in the Middle English period, e.g. hræven ->  raven ;
    
  • [f, v] and [s, z] , which were allophones in the Old-English period, become phonemes;
    
  • unstressed vowels in the inflectional endings become [@] .1.1
    
• morphological
  
  • the complete Old-English inflectional system is simplified in Middle English;
    
  • loss of the strong inflexion of adjectives;
    
  • loss of grammatical gender;
    
  • emergence of the unified definite article `the.'
    
• syntactical
  
  • replacement of the case functions by a fixed word order and prepositions.
    
• lexical
  
  • first borrowing of French loan-words;
    
  • increased emergence of Scandinavian loan-words.
    
• graphological
  
  • disappearance of Old English writing conventions;1.2
    
  • increased use of Latin and Anglo-Norman.
    

In general, Old English might be called a synthetic language, which uses inflectional morphemes to express the syntactical relationships. Middle English might be called an analytical language, which uses function words to constitute syntactical relationships.
SHORTENING AND LENGTHENING IN MIDDLE ENGLISH
Late in Old English, vowels were lengthened before certain clusters: /nd/, /ld/, /rd/, /mb/, /ŋɡ/. Later on, the vowels in many of these words were shortened again , giving the appearance that no lengthening happened; but evidence from the Ormulum indicates otherwise.
vt. Middle-English period: lengthening and shortening of vowels faili
GREAT VOWEL SHIFT
The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the  pronunciation of the English language that took place in England between 1350 and 1600.[1][2]  Through the Great Vowel Shift, all Middle English long vowels changed their pronunciation. English spelling was becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of the peculiarities of English spelling.[3]
The main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English in the year 1400 and Modern English is in the value of the long vowels. Long vowels in Middle English had "continental" values much like those in Italian and Standard German, but in standard Modern English they have entirely different pronunciations. This change in pronunciation is known as the Great Vowel Shift.[5]
(vt eraldi faili)
What is the Great Vowel Shift?
Middle English period: lengthening and shortening of vowels