History of the English language (0)

Suppletion
Present in languages of different families . Present in Old, Middle and Modern English , though the general tendency is towards more regularity/iconicity so the number of suppletive forms has decreased.In the text: goon – to go wenden - to turn
Gan was suppletive in Old English , past form: eode.Eode was supplanted by went (past form of wenden) at the end of the Middle English period .To wend has survived in Modern English in phrases such as to wend one’s way, we wended homewards (ironic usage ).
Thus: suppletivity- suppletion – different parts of one and the same paradigm come from what were originally different paradigms (different words with close meanings or words in different but close dialects).Suppletion embraces verbs , adjectives, nouns .
Be – was/were –been (Old English beon/wesan)
(am, art, is, are); in Old English some suppletive
forms were used parallel to one another )
Good –better – best
Bad – worse – worst
Much – more – most
Little – less – least
Estonian: hea – parem (cf “paras” – fitting , in Finnish “the best” - metonymical link ), palju - rohkem
Finnish: mennä (to go), lähteä (to leave)
Estonian: minema, mine, lähen, läksin
French : aller , je vais/ nous allons, ira (future)
Russian : chelovek –ljudi, French: personne-
gens, English: person – persons/people
byt’ – est’
hodit’ –idti – shol, shla.
horoshij – luchij Essentially the same words suppletive in various languages, including non- related ones. The most common words (‘good’, ‘to be’, ‘to go’, ‘much’, “people”, etc).
General principle: the more frequently used a word, the more one can “ afford ” it to be irregular/non-iconic. Suppletion perhaps the most drastic form of irregularity/iconicity), covers mainly the most frequent words
Metathesis-Two sounds, at least one of which is a consonant, change places inside a word. When one of the sounds is a vowel ,the other is usually /r/. Fyrst/ first /frist – a typical case of metathesis.Another case in the passage : beorht/briht.Metathesis present in many languages, a universal phenomenon . For Instance , Proto-Indo-European had tworoots – *spek- and the metathetical *skep-, both with the basic meaning of “ look , observe, examine”. The first is behind Latin words that produced such English loans as spectacle, spectator, expect, inspect, perspective, etc. The second is behind the Greek word for “examine” with the derivatives sceptic, sceptical, scepticism (one who examines things inevitably becomes sceptical about them !). Metathesis, essentially in the same sense , is also a term used in psycholinguistics. People assemble whole words in the brain , before actually uttering them. Thus, it is not unusual for slips of the tongue to happen in which sounds of the same word change places e.g. “ brake fluid” turns into “blake fruid” ,“past fashion ” > “fast passion ” The same principle applies to whole phrasesand even sentences , which shows that they, too, are largely preassembled in the mind before being uttered. On the sentence level sometimes the term “spoonerisms” is used Spooner (19th century ) – famous for metathetic slips of the tongue:“You have tasted two worms ” (pro “You have wasted two terms ”).The defining feature in the case of metathesis is that all sounds remain in theword (sentence), they just change places. It is this feature that allows psycholinguists to infer that words and sentences are preassembled in the mind: all sounds are there but the order gets mixed up in the process of actual uttering/pronouncing.
NB! Slips of the tongue in which sounds of a word or sentence are not dropped but merely change places

are made possible by preassembling and therefore

serve as evidence of preassembling.
What causes slips of the tongue, includingmetathetical slips of the tongue, in the first place , and why some people are more prone to them than others is not yet clear : more needs to be known about how the brain works. However , for the present purposes this question is immaterial
Why do metathetical forms oust old forms?
ease of pronunciation (suhkrut- suhkurt )
analogy-Nucular pro nuclear ,Cf circular, muscular
Proto-Indo-European *kailo-“whole, uninjured, of good omen ”
Proto- Germanic *hailaz

Old English hal – HALE ( sound in health, vigorous, robust (HALE AND HEARTY), WHOLE

Old English halsum – WHOLESOME (e.g. WHOLESOME FOOD)

Old Norse heill (healthy) – HAIL (as a greeting), TO HAIL (to greet, also: to hail a taxi, also fig. to praise highly, to acclaim , as in “critics hailed her new book”), WASSAIL; German “Heil!” not used any more (“Heil Hitler ! and the associated shame (just as with Reich )
Germanic *hailitho > Old English hælth – HEALTH
Germanic *hailjan > Old English hælan – TO HEAL
Germanic *hailagaz > Old English halig – HOLY
Germanic *hailigon > Old English halgian to
consecrate, to bless,
halga – sacred, a saint, Middle English halwe (see Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: ferne halwes – distant shrines – metonymic from the meaning “saint”
TO HALLOW (as in “Our Father who art in heaven ,hallowedbe thy name”), HALLOW meaning “saint” (the latter is a French loan (ALL HALLOWS’ DAY, HALLOWEEN ).
The metonymic link between “being in one piece ” and “being healthy” is fairly universal (cf. the two meanings of the Estonian word “terve” – a Finno -Ugric, i.e. a non-Indo European word! – or Russian “целый” (whole) and “целить” – to heal (NB! Modern medicine uses “ treat ” and “ cure ” – the latter when the result is positive, “heal” is generally used in alternative medicine as is “целить”, cf also Healer and Целитель as names for Jesus ).
The use of a word denoting “health” in greetings and other ritual formulas ( as in HAIL!) is also fairlyuniversal (cf. Estonian “terviseks” and “tere” HOLY is related to magic/ religion linked with healing and being healthy (cf. Healer above ).
nu – now (NOW).
Spelling changed in the Middle English period (French scribes used ou or ow for /u:/).
Pronunciation changed during the Great Vowel Shift ( 14th - 16th century, possibly also later ) when long /u:/ > /au/
The re-emergence of English: Starting with the 14th century. A relatively unique phenomenon: conquerors do not leave but the language of the conquered returns.
In the case of English peasants – as the Black Death killed off so many of them, the nobility did not have enough people to till the land and generally work for them. Peasants had been serfs, tied to their land: whenever they tried to escape from a lord who treated them badly, they had nowhere to go (except towns) – another lord would have “extradited” them at once. Not so after the Black Death – all lords were happy to receive new working hands . So because there were few of them and their was a great demand for them, the peasants were finally able to dictate their own terms. Serfdom ceased to exist. Free peasants – yeomen – acquired a sense of dignity. Accordingly, their language – English – also came to be valued.

• The black death
  
• The Hundred Years ’ War* - need for English identity (French fighting the French!)
  
  • need for money to finance the war (the merchants were English)
    
  • need for soldiers (the English archers!)
    
• The genius of Chaucer ( 1340 – 1400 )
  
• The Wars of the Roses (1455 – 1485) – the remaining French-speaking noblemen killed one another off!
  

1362 English becomes the language of Parliament and the courts of law.

• 1485 – end of the Wars of the Roses
  
• 1500 – turn of the century
  
• 1533 – Reformation (Henry VIII)
  
  • Individual responsibility before God, no need for the mediation of the ( Roman Catholic) Church
    
  • Need for religious literature, particularly the Bible , in the vernacular – the language of the native speakers (as opposed to Latin as a lingua franca)
    
  • Need for general literacy
    
• Renaissance - Need for terminology and new ( scientific , philosophical, etc) vocabulary in the vernacular
  

The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1450 and 1750. First studied by Otto Jespersen, who coined the term. The phonetic values of the long vowels form the main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English and Modern English, and the Great Vowel Shift is one of the historical events marking the separation of Middle and Modern English. Originally, these vowels had "continental" values
Great Vowel Shift in short (a very simplified account !):
Long vowels turned into diphthongs or other
long vowels and diphtongs into long vowels.
/i:/ into /ai/
/u:/ into /au/
/o:/ into /ou/
/a:/ into /ei/
/e:/ into /i:/
/au/ into /o:/ etc. GVS did not affect short vowels.
Causes of the Great Vowel Shift largely a mystery ; possible causes:

• the mass immigration to the South-East of England after the Black Death. The different dialects and the rise of a standardised middle class in London led to changes in pronunciation, which continued to spread out from that city.
  
• The sudden social mobility after the Black Death may have caused the shift, with people from lower levels in society moving to higher levels.
  
• The medieval aristocracy had spoken French, but by the early fifteenth century, they were using English. This may have caused a change to the "prestige accent" of English, either by making pronunciation more French in style, or by changing it in some other way, perhaps by hypercorrection to something thought to be "more English"
  
• The great political and social upheavals of the fifteenth century, which were largely contemporaneous with the Great Vowel Shift.
  

Because English spelling was slowly but steadily becoming standardised in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of the peculiarities of English spelling, including the peculiarities of the pronunciation of the alphabet /ei/, /bi:/, /si:/, etc. Spellings that made sense according to Middle English pronunciation were retained in Modern English because of the adoption and use of the printing press ( invented by Johann Gutenberg in Germany around 1440, and introduced to England in the 1470s by William Caxton and later Richard Pynso
Beowulf
Time passed by;      the ship was on the waves,
the boat under the cliffs ;      the warriors ready  
stepped up into the prow      - the currents curled round ,
Sea (buffeted) against sand .     the men bore  
into the bosom of the boat      bright arms and armour,
war- gear noble;      the fellows shoved off,  
men on a welcome voyage,      a timberbound ship.
Went then over the water-waves      urged by the wind,  
the foamy-necked floater     remarkably bird -like.
Caedmon’s hymn
Now (we) must praise the kingdom of heaven’s guardian,
The Creator’s might/ power , and his mind’s thought (i.e. intention , conception),
work of the glorious father, how he for wonders each,
eternal Lord, the beginning established.
He first created for the earth’s children
heaven for a roof , holy Creator.
Then the earth, mankind’s guardian,
eternal Lord, afterwards made,
for the men the earth, Lord almighty.
The Cantebury tales
When April with its showers sweet
The dryness of March has utterly destroyed
(“pierced to the root ”)
And bathed every sap- vessel /crack in the
earth in such moisture
By virtue of which the flower is brought into existence
When Zephyrus also with is sweet breath
Inspired has in every grove and heath
The tender shoots (new plants ); and the young sun
Has in the Aries its half - course run,
And small birds sing
That sleep all the night with open eye,
So pricks them nature in their hearts
Then long/yearn people to go on pilgrimages
And “palmers” to seek foreign shores
To distant shrines could in various lands.
And especially from every counties end
Of England to Canterbury they turn
The holy blessed martyr to seek
That them has helped when they were ill.
n).
Two types of Celtic loan words were likely targets of permanent Anglo-Saxon adaptation before the Norman Conquest: Toponyms or place-names. For instance, Cornwall, Carlisle, Avon, Devon , Dover, London are originally Celtic names. Latin words the Celts borrowed from Rome, which were in turn borrowed by the Anglo-Saxon invaders--including words like candle and ass.
1066 – the Battle of Hastings-During the next century approximately 200 000 Normans settled in Britain . (Norman) French was prestigious. Ample borrowing. Otto Jespersen: “The Norman invasion broke the proud Teutonic backbone of the English language” From now on, English open to loanwords Flower, forest , valley, river *, face -norman french loans
Peculiarities of Old English pronunciation and spelling
/f/ and /v/ were allophones, i.e. there was no phonemic difference between them: no minimal pairs where /f/ and /v/ would make a difference in meaning.
The letter f used for both. In a voiced environment the pronunciation voiced, ie /v/, in a voiceless environment – unvoiced, ie /f/. At the beginning of words: debatable.
By constrast, vowel length was phonemic:
man /man/ – human being, man
mān /ma :n/ - evil ; witchcraft
In old manuscripts vowel length indicated by ´ (like a stress mark), in modern editions a strike over the vowel.
The scribes proceeded from the Latin alphabet. However, there were sounds in Old English that Latin did not have. Solutions had to be found .
/æ/ - the sound is between /a/ and /e/, so a digraph (Greek for “two + letter”) was created: æ (A similar thing in French, the digraph œ still in
use, e.g. œil – eye)
Old English had /ü/ like other Germanic languages today (e.g. German). (The sound was lost during the Middle English period).Latin had no such sound. y (a form of i) was used to indicate the sound. How do we know ? Cf Old English “fyrst” and Modern German “Fürst”, Estonian “vürst” (an old Low German loan).
In Old English texts we come across several

• runic letters
  
• modified Latin letters.
  

Both used to denote sounds that Old English had and Latin did not.
Thorn-letter (runic) and edh-letter (modified Latin d) for the /ө/ sound (close to t and d) used indiscriminately for both the voiceless and the voiced variant.
Thorn, or þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic alphabets. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th. The letter originated from a rune in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs ("Thor", "giant") in the Scandinavian rune poems , its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being *Thurisaz.
It has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative, like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative, like th as in the English word the. (In Modern Icelandic the usage is restricted to the former . The voiced form is represented with the letter eth (Ð, ð), though eth can be unvoiced, depending on its position within a sentence).
Yogh-letter (cf yoke – Estonian “ike”) – modified Latin g. Probably stood for several sounds starting with /j/ up to /g/. Prefix ge – probably

• not stressed
  
• yokh-letter stood for /j/.
  

Reasons for surmising this:

The prefix is still there in German (Past Participle, e.g. gehen , ging. gegangen). It is not stressed in German.

The prefix was lost during the Middle English times (geholpan – holpen), it is easier to drop unstressed syllables.

The middle version was /i/ (spelt in Middle English as y): y-ronne (run Past participle). More logical that /je/ turns into /i/ than that /ge/ turns into /i/. Modern English still had the obsolete form “yclept” – so-called.
C stood for /k/, except when there was a dot on it – then it stood for /kj/ which later turned into /tS/ in the Southern part of Britain, but not in the Northern part.
Cf ċiriċe – church, but in Scottish English (i.e. Northern English) Auld Kirk, Free Kirk (German Kirche, Est. kirik – Low German loanword).
Cg – probably /kjkj/ which later turned into
/dž/.
/r/ - trilled, rolled, again preserved in Scottish English.
/r/ was still rolled in Shakespeare ’s time
(“When that warlike Harry ...”)
In Old English poetry the number ofsyllables per line was not important
What counted was thenumber of stresses.
Four stresses per line, the stresses evenly spaced
A pause (in Latin called caesura) in the middle of the line. Two stresses before the pause, two stresses after the pause. The number of unstressed syllables between the stressed syllables is not significant, varies.
Old English poetry: initial rhymes (importantfor remembering! After all, the poetry was mainly oral, only selected poems written down by clerks at the command of
noblemen/ kings ).
Alliteration – consonants at the beginning of
words are repeated. Alliteration applied to stressed syllables. Alliteration bound together the two halves of the line. Therefore, the third stressed syllable (first in the second half) had to alliterate with at least one stressed syllable in the first half of the line.
Old forms in general survive more easily in

compound words (BRIDEGROOM, WEREWOLF),

place names (SCARBOROUGH, CANTERBURY),

idiomatic phrases (e.g. OVER HILL AND DALE , HALE AND HEARTY),

rarely used archaic words with special meanings (e.g. WROUGHT IRON , where “wrought” is the old Past Participle form of “work”)