Appunti Lingua Inglese III B

Lingua inglese III

Portare il documento del riconoscimento certificazione linguistica il giorno dell'esame.

• Prepare a presentation of a topic (10-12 mins maximum), record it, send the link to the folder in which the recording is saved, and it will be evaluated. On the day of the oral exam, start from that (don’t read, don’t memorize, present a topic using PowerPoint slides, etc.).
• Deadline: 5th of January

History of English

When you look at the history of a language, you can look at it from different points of view. Typically, we make a distinction between the internal history of a language and the external history of a language. The internal history of a language looks at how a language has changed historically across time in relation to syntax, morphology, phonology, vocabulary, and pragmatics. So, you look at the system of a language and study how different features have evolved.

XX-century English is quite different from Shakespeare’s English. The "do" auxiliary has not always existed; it is a relatively recent development. You can’t say "I didn’t see nobody," even if it exists, but it has become restrictive for certain varieties. The internal history of a language looks at syntax, morphology, even spelling, and vocabulary (that can change).

External history

The external history of a language studies how a language has changed and varied as a result of external elements and factors. A typical example is the Norman conquest in 1066. Old English is different from Middle English because in 1066 the Duke of Normandy invades England and introduces what would become Anglo-Norman (lots of French, and as a result, Anglo-Norman would develop). Another turning point is the Protestant Renovation, with which religion started to become more accessible in the vernacular. The language of the Church was Latin, but then it was English thanks to the Renovation. Also, science starts to use more and more English.

English is an immigrant language: if you look at a map of England before the Roman conquest, you realize that in the English islands the language used was Celtic. When the Roman Empire spread to England, the Celtic language became more peripheral, but you still had the coexistence of the Celtic language and Latin in England. The Roman Empire never reached Ireland, and Scotland, their last remains are around Glasgow, but there are no Roman settlements further than that.

At the fall of the Roman Empire, there are new settlers coming in from the continent, such as Germanic settlers moving from the continent to England. Later there would be also Scandinavian settlers. There is the coexistence of different languages in the same place. This blend of languages has brought about what today we call English.

The best way to see how English was influenced is to look at place names because you see immediately what happened in that area. Manchester, Doncaster have the same suffix because they were originally Roman settlements (from the Latin “castro”). In some areas, the consonant was palatalized, while in other areas, the consonant was palatalized. Indeed, you cannot find this type of names in Ireland or Scotland because the Romans did not arrive up there.

• Names of rivers, like -ex, -isk, derive from the Celtic word meaning “water.” You can find this root in “Whiskey.”
• The names of natural features are those that are most likely to have traces of original languages, because a place is a place, and if a river is called “water,” it retains the name, but later generations who do not use this language anymore, they forget the original meaning of this item, and therefore they forget that “esk” means “water,” and they just consider it as the name of the river.

Influence of other languages

Raymond Hickey is an Irish teacher who created a set of websites that have many resources regarding the history of Old English (such as names whose roots come from Latin).

When we talk about Germanic languages (North Germanic: Icelandic, Faroese, Scot, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish; East Germanic: Gothic; West Germanic: Old High German, Old English, Old Saxon), we are talking about Indoeuropean languages.

Latin: pes; English: foot; Old English: fot. Become fricatives, and also voiced becomes voiceless. In Old English, the vowel was long, and it was probably represented with a diacritic. With the invention of the printing press, representing diacritics became difficult, so there was a different system to interpret long vowels, that is, printing two graphemes exactly the same, to indicate that this is a long vowel. The problem is that with the invention of the printing press at the end of the XV century, spelling became more stable (before there were scribes that had to manually copy the text, and the spelling could vary since the language varied).

Old English: umbrella term (West Saxon, East Umbrian…), so if you had a text that originated in one area, and you copied it in a different place, did you actually copy the text exactly as you found it, or you changed it to adjust it to your own variety? In Old English, manuscripts could represent different varieties, so you have different sources for different areas. With the invention of the printing press, spelling becomes more stable (even if you printed in different areas). That led to spelling becoming relatively stable and fixed. The problem was that pronunciation kept changing because pronunciation changes all the time, and also relatively quickly. Even within the same area or age group, pronunciation does change, also rather quickly, because speakers imitate one another, and pick up one another’s accents (you are still you, but your pronunciation has changed because your context has changed, and you tend to imitate the other person’s pronunciation). When you know a language, you pick up the accent of other speakers, even without doing it deliberately, because you are a part of the context. Spelling is fixed, but pronunciation is changing, and what it used to be “fot” has become “foot.”

Latin: tres; English: three; Old English: þreo. Latin: collis |k|; English: hill |x|; Old English: hyl. Latin: quod |kw|; English: what |xw|; Old English: hwæt.

Grimm’s Law

Think about “bread” and “breed.” Slightly different spelling, and different pronunciation, but there are spaces in which the same combination of graphemes leads to different phonemes.

• “Bread,” “speak,” “breed” - Two lexical items have the same phonemes even if the spelling is different. The first word still retains the vowel that you have initially.

There are historical reasons why spelling looks crazy. “Light” two consonants and a diphthong. Originally this was the same lexical item that you have in German originally “Licht,” then “ch” changed, and “i” became a diphthong.

English is an immigrant language; we have talked about the influence of Celtic and other languages that has led to what English is today.

Language change

When we study the history of a language, we can look at its internal and external history, and how it has varied and changed. You cannot have language change if you don’t have variation, that is at the base of everything. Languages can vary based on different elements.

You get to think of a language in three different ways:

• Time
• Space
• Social medium

They are crucial because all the documents we will be looking at are written elements because we cannot access the spoken language of the past, which we can access only if it was recorded, but it began being recorded only at the end of the XIX century. Dramas are written to be spoken, but it is written languages. Those languages can be studied in the way they were represented by writing in ballads, and songs, and you get an idea of what it was like, but you cannot interview the native speakers like we would be doing today. Everything can be studied from the linguistic point of view.

Phonology changes

How does a language change? Why? Phonology changes because speakers somehow want to sound more fashionable and want to set the trend. Phonology changes over time because speakers want to use language differently.

• XVIII century Scotland and England were divided; when they were united, people that wanted to stay into politics had to acquire the London accent to blend in.
• At one point, London English became a model for people that wanted to get a new life, and that idea is still with us today. From the point of view of a non-linguist, London has this image to be “the standard.” There is no such thing as “the standard” since all varieties are equally valid.

Vocabulary changes

Why does vocabulary change? Because you have different communicative needs. Languages changed quite interestingly and dramatically over the last few years a lot of vocabulary was created to meet special needs (COVID itself was a new lexical item to meet a new communicative need). This happens all the time but think about all the vocabulary related to technology (smartphone, hard disc, printer in the 1980s “hard-disc” was a new word, that is now not used anymore). Vocabulary changes based on modernization. At a certain point, words that sound archaic become no longer understandable.

Lexical change and creation of new vocabulary

New vocabulary can be created, or lexical items can be borrowed. There are some words that are used in both English and Italian, and this means that Italian has borrowed English words to borrow needs. In French, lexical items were often more frequently created than in Italian. English borrowed lexical items from the French language after the Normandy conquest and then adjusted them.

• “Royalty,” “liberty” borrowed and then became specialized.
• “Queen,” “king,” “monarch,” “prince,” “princess,” and “duke” some lexical items are Germanic, and some are Latinate. They were borrowed to introduce titles that were not present in Old English, in which “princess” and “prince,” “duke”… did not exist.

Lexical items can be borrowed, and then can be derived from existing lexical items. You can have compounds (combine elements to create new lexical items). The semantic level can also change.

• “Printer” now we would think of an object, in the XVI century, they would have connected this word with a person. This has lost a certain quality, going from animate to inanimate.

Lexical change to meet new communicative requirements:

• Cultural change: “White paper” talking about a white paper on something was a bit loaded, a bit racist.
• If you listen to or read books from American literature, you still find that they refer to “n words,” and now they would not talk about it anymore because it is considered racist.
• When you look at the history of a language, you always have to look at texts in their historical and cultural contexts.

Grammar and syntax

Grammar changes: Shakespeare the third person singular in his works is “-st,” but today we do not use that morpheme anymore because it was more difficult to pronounce, and it was used in different varieties (varieties from the North).

Morphology can change, but also something else, such as declensions.

• Nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental. Saxon Genitive comes from when English had declination. Today we represent it as “’s,” previously it was a morpheme, a suffix, and gradually the representation of that suffix changed.
• The accusative was assimilated to the nominative, and then gradually English lost declensions.
• What happened in the development from Latin to Italian rosa-rose, you do not have the whole declination like we had in Latin. It has lost the declensions that were typical of that state of the language.
• English gradually all the English varieties lost declensions. Changes in pronunciation occurred because closed syllables became open syllables, and vowels in open syllables became lengthened and became diphthongised.

“Dialects” is not an optimal word to use, because it would mean considering them sub-standard.

• There were different classes of nouns and verbs. Some classes formed the plural noun adding a suffix which could be “-s” or “-n,” while other classes changed the root vowel (dog-dogs, ox-oxen, goose-geese). Originally they formed the plural noun in a different way.
• They are not irregular; they reflect a different pattern that existed in the past. The vast majority of nouns became standardized, so nowadays the vast majority of nouns finishes with “-s” in the plural form. You still find this kind of “exceptions” in lexical items that have become crystallized (tooth-teeth, foot-feet, goose-geese). There are lexical items that have not changed at all (“hair” is collective).
• Some of these lexical items changed in rather interesting ways. Mouse-Mice. The Old English lexical item was “mys,” and then the singular form changed its pronunciation as if it was “ü,” that became “ou” (such as in “house”). The plural form changed and this “ü” was transformed into “e,” and then “e” was diphthongized as in “sky.” Originally it was the same vowel “ü,” that then developed into two different patterns.

Modern auxiliaries

• Modern auxiliaries (may, might, can, could, should, must...) In the past, they functioned as full actual verbs. They became auxiliaries because their grammatical value somehow decreased and became bleached.
• “Shall” is no longer used to express the future, since now “will” is used. The fact that you can use abbreviated forms, shows that the grammatical weight of those forms has decreased, making them auxiliaries. In the past, they were quite distinctive, particularly can, may, will, and shall, that had their own grammatical value. This is something that has been stigmatized.
• Shall future, for the first person singular and plural
• Will future for other persons; Will was assumed to convey volition and force. Grammars then recommended a different pattern, which is something that pertains to the value that these auxiliaries had.
• May: perhaps I will do something. Older stages of the language auxiliaries would have a different pattern from the grammatical point of view and from the semantic point of view than today.

Discover Literature

The further back you go in time, the fewer documents you can use. What has been preserved other than official documents is typically found in literature and religion because religion is part of the daily life of ordinary people (early translations, early prayers), and literature because it is something that becomes part of what it is supposed to be the culture of the times.

David Crystal is a very important scholar that charts the evolution through the 700 years when it was written and spoken. Old English is the oldest form of the English language, spoken in Anglo-Saxon Britain from c. 450 CE until c. 1150.

The labels that we use in this module are just labels, short-hand terms that scholars use in order to identify a certain time frame (like Risorgimento, Rinascimento). They evoke a certain time frame and a certain context. These labels are useful because they help us identify periods in time, but we have to be careful because they are old-fashioned, and they are vague. They were invented in the XIX century, but the labels that we use now are different. We have created new labels, such as “Late Modern English” for the XVIII and XIX centuries, “20th century English” for the English spoken in the XX century (from WWI to the first millennium), and “Present English” for the English that is spoken today.

Sources and influences

The further back in time, the fewer resources we have. Bede, one of the most important chroniclers, from which we have some information about what happened in the V century. We know what happened thanks to chronicles. The language we speak today is a mixture of sources and features coming from different sources and text types.

Chapter II

Roughly in the IV-V centuries, there are invasions of settlers, migrations, from the continent to England, Scotland, and Ireland (invasioni barbariche). Roman legions had started to invade England in the I century. Some centuries later, Germanic settlers from the continent began to invade what today we call England. By the beginning of the V century, Latin survived in rather restricted text types, and it will come back with religion (Christianization) because in the VII century (around 600) the Christianization of England has begun by St. Augustine, so Latin comes back as the language of the Church. At first, Latin was the language of the ruling class in the period of Roman invasions, so there are some words that derive from Latin, but later Latin comes back as the language of religion.

This explains why we could study Old English through interlinear glossies. One of the sources we have for the study of Old English is the presence of Old English lexical items as translations of Latin words. When we talk about interlinear glossies are placed between lines, so if there is a Latin word in the manuscript, and just above it, you have the Anglo-Saxon lexical item, this helps to decode how Old English was.

Lindisfarne Gospel is a relatively late text (VIII century), which was created in Lindisfarne. Lindisfarne is an island on the...