Da Old English a Present Day English (Modulo Teorico)

Introduzione all'inglese antico

English is an IE (Indo-European) language (like Italian, French, German...) and it belongs to the (Low West) Germanic branch of the IE tree. Germanic languages are divided into three branches: East, West, and North Germanic (e.g. Gothic; English, German, Dutch; Norwegian). The diagram represents the idea that languages evolve and change (in language there is a lot of variation).

Tipi di variazioni linguistiche

Internal variation

It has to do with what happens within a community of speakers independently of the influence of other languages.

External variation

Basically, a synonym for “language contact”, resulting in changes in the language we are dealing with. We will see that “language contact” is of paramount importance in the history of OE in particular.

Contatti linguistici rilevanti

• OE and Celtic languages (for simplicity we will refer to the Celtic);
• OE and Latin;
• OE and Norse (the language of the Vikings, who started invading the British areas).

Classificazioni linguistiche

Classifications are always different from scholars to another. Some scholars classified English as a Low West Germanic language; others associate it with another Germanic language called Frisian (Netherlands). But this is not so important. These diagrams are based on geography.

The idea is that geographical distance results in a decrease of natural intelligibility, leading to different languages. There is an obvious drawback, there are some weaknesses behind this model:

• It ignores questions of politics in power (because sometimes we tend to classify two dialects as separate languages only for reasons that are of political nature; for example, there are many differences between Swedish and Danish, yet they are classified as two separate languages because they belong to two different countries).
• It ignores borrowing between two languages. Especially in less ancient times, like nowadays, languages are in contact with one another. But this model seems to suggest that, for example, English and Danish are no longer in contact at all (they now belong to two different branches).

Lingue celtiche oggi

The major Celtic languages spoken in the British Isles today are: Welsh (Cymraeg /kə'mræ:ig/), Irish and Scottish Gaelic, which are IE languages belonging to the Celtic branch.

Scottish Gaelic vs Scots

• Scots is a Germanic language (related to the Northumbrian dialect of OE) and is a variety of English spoken in Scotland (it is not Scottish-English, it is something else).
• Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language.

Distinzione tra lingue germaniche e altre lingue IE

The answer has to do more than anything else with phonology, because Germanic languages can be distinguished from IE languages on the basis of the set of changes which affected mainly plosives (stop) consonants. These set of changes were still probably taking place as late as the 5th century BC and (again, some scholars have speculated that these set of changes that separate Germanic languages from other IE languages) may have been due to language contact with speakers of a non-IE language. This group of people probably nowadays live in Switzerland and are called the Raeti /riti/.

Grimm's Law

• p > f: The voiceless plosive /p/ becomes the corresponding voiceless fricative /f/. In OE, the word fish was exactly the same as present-day English. *pisk derives from the IE root which gives even Italian "pesce". When we talk about the sign of the Zodiac, one of the signs, the Italian "pesci", in English is "pisces" /paisis/ (with a /p/ not an /f/). Why? The name for this sign of the Zodiac was borrowed to English after this law was no longer relevant. So, it's a later borrowing, so we keep the /p/ from the IE root, and therefore we have pisces instead of fish.
• b > p: The voiced plosive /b/ takes the place of the voiceless plosive /p/. The verb "puff" in OE was "pyffan" and the p at the beginning derives from the b we have in the IE root "beu". A later borrowing is "buccal" which preserves the IE b and the reason is the same as before. This one was borrowed after the law was no longer operative.
• bh > β > b: bh takes the place of the voiced plosive non-aspirated /b/. For instance, the present English word "break" derives from OE "brecan", which derives from a root which in IE had an aspirated voiced plosive bh. /bh/ becomes /b/, however, if we look at later borrowings from Latin into English, we come across words like "fracture" which derives from the same root of "break" but it has a different consonant at the beginning, f. The reason is that this sound, the aspirated voiced b becomes a /f/ in Latin. We borrow the term "fracture" from Latin and that's why we have /f/.

The point is that, as we saw in all three instances, we can have two words: one going back to the IE root affected by the Grimm's Law and the other where there is no change because it was borrowed later. Scholars noticed that there were some problems with Grimm's law.

Verner's Law

A typical example is the word "hundred" (in OE it was hundred). The problem here is that the word used in Latin to indicate “hundred” was "centum". In Latin there was a /t/. If we look at the table above, what would we expect in OE if in Latin we have a /t/. A /t/ should change into a /θ/, the corresponding voiceless fricative. But we have a /d/. The problem is that instead of a /θ/, we know that originally there was a /d/. Why? There is an important exception to Grimm's Law, which was discovered by another German scholar, Karl Verner (1875), which is known as Verner's Law, which says that voiceless fricatives (like /f/) by Grimm's Law become voiced (/d/) if the IE stress was not on the immediately preceding syllable.

Which means that from /t/ we move to /θ/ and we end up with /ð/ because the word "hundred" originally had stress later on in the word. This point about stress caused a change to /ð/, which eventually becomes /d/ in OE. That's why we have a /d/ and not a /t/ in OE. This exception is very important because it explains a lot of strange things in OE.

Esempi di Verner's Law

• For instance, the word used in OE to say "say" in the infinitive was cweþan, pronounced /kweθan/. þ is a letter used in the OE writing system called a thorn and it represents either the sounds /θ/ (thin) and /ð/ (this). Later on, when we have the sound /ð/ between two vowels, it is voiced. But originally, it derives from a /t/. The past participle of the word is cweden, pronounced /kweðen/. It is with a /d/. The reason is because of Verner's Law because in the past participle originally stress was not there, but later on.
• Another example has to do with the OE word for "choose". The infinitive for this one is "ċēosan". ċ: represents the sound /tʃ/. eo: is a diphthong ē: it stands for a long vowel: it is pronounced /z/ because it stands between two vowels. The past participle is "coren". Here, instead of a /s/ or a /z/, we have a /r/. The reason is that originally, we had a fricative /s/. This one is fricative, it's not a plosive, but it is also affected by the Verner Law. So, this /s/ becomes a /z/ in the context where Verner's Law applies, and /z/ in OE eventually becomes a /r/.

We don't have to confuse this with something that is only relevant to German only (not Germanic languages as a whole) which is the so-called Second Sound Shift (or High German Shift). It affects only German and is relevant to the distinction between cases like English "pepper" vs German "pfeffer", where we have /f/ instead of /p/ or vice versa.

Divisione storica dell'inglese

How the history of English is usually divided? Here we have a usual classification:

• Old English (450 –1150);
• Middle English (1150 –1500);
• Early Modern English (1500 –1650/1700);
• Late Modern English (1650/1700 –1900);
• Present Day English 1900 –).

We could characterize the history of the language independently of external factors as a change from "a synthetic language" to an "analytic language". OE was more a synthetic language than present-day English (PDE). It means that in OE word order was much freer than in present-day English and one of the reasons was because it had a system of (4) cases. OE relied on cases much more than PDE, where we only have some reminiscents in the pronominal system, differences like he vs him, she vs her, they vs them, we vs us. But in PDE prepositions are more important than in OE. For example, we use a lot of periphrastic constructions like "going to", the progressive in general… So, we use prepositions and periphrastic constructions much more; this is what we mean for synthetic vs analytic. The synthetic language relies on a more elaborate system of cases; analytic language relies on word order, preposition, and periphrastic constructions.

This periodization goes back to an idea by a famous 19th-century British linguist, Henry Sweet, who divided the history of English into three periods (OE, Middle English, and Modern English). His distinction in the three periods didn't have anything to do with external criteria like looking at language content, but he just concentrated on internal criteria. The fact that: move from OE to PDE we see a decrease in inflectional endings. Cases are progressively lost.

If instead, we look at the external district of the language, in this specific case (period from OE to Middle English), there are certain events which are of great importance for the history of OE.

Eventi storici principali

The major historical events:

• The most important event of all is the so-called Germanic conquest, traditionally dated back to 449 although it is a bit of an idealization.
• The importance of religion (this is related to the influence of Latin upon OE) having to do with the Christianization of Britain which starts roughly in the second half of the 6th century; later on, in the second half of the 10th century, we have the so-called Benedictine Reform, which again is important linguistically.
• Another crucial event has to do with the influence of Norse upon OE (language contact) and this is related to the raids by the Vikings and the conquest of England by them. The Vikings' raids traditionally start in 787.
• The last historical event that deals with OE is the Norman conquest of 1066, which is traditionally seen as the key event for the change from OE to Middle English.

La conquista germanica

Before we deal with the Germanic conquest, we know that there were already people living in Britain and these people are usually described as the Celts. The Romans tried to conquer the British Isles inhabited by the Celts first with Caesar (55 and 54 BC - not very successful) and with Claudius (43 AD, the real conquest of Britain by the Romans took place with him). The Romans occupied the British Isles for about 400 years, during which the British Isles were under Roman troops, ending in 410 AD when the troops stationed in England were withdrawn (this has to do with internal problems of the Roman Empire).

During this time, there was a coexistence of languages because the Romans brought with them their language, Latin, which necessarily coexisted with Celtic. So, before the Germanic tribes arrived, we had two languages: Latin and Celtic. Incidentally, what the Romans always liked to do is build roads (very useful) and there are a lot of roads that are still in use nowadays in Britain, which go back to Roman times.

We said that Britain was originally inhabited by the Celts, the Romans arrived, and therefore there was a mix of two languages: Latin and Celtic. Later on, the Germanic tribes arrived. What did they do when they arrived in Britain? The traditional theory or "story" was called:

Wipeout theory (Wipeout destruction)

The idea is that when the Germanic tribes arrived, they killed most of the Celts. The ones who survived did so because they fled to the most mountainous regions of the country (north Scotland or the South West, Wales, which are less accessible than other areas of the country); some of them crossed the channel and fled to what is now Brittany. The idea is that most of the population was killed by the Germanic tribes.

These theories about what the Germanic tribes did have been challenged recently in a variety of studies based on genetic evidence. There are two problems:

• Who were the Celts and where did they come from?
• What did the Germanic tribes do to them - is it true they killed most of the Celts?

There have been a couple of studies recently that suggest something interesting about their origin. The traditional theory is that they came from Central Europe, but alternative theories say that they originated from Iberia. The genetic study seems to suggest that the majority of the population in the British Isles is of Iberian descent. The idea is that the Celts were probably originally from the Iberian peninsula, but there are two ideas about how they arrived in Britain.

Teorie sull'origine dei Celti

• One theory says basically that the majority of the population in the British Isles derives from hunter-gatherers who moved to (what is now) Britain between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, which is basically the Late-Upper Paleolithic or Mesolithic period. This one, according to one theory, are not originally IE speakers (probably related to Basque). Later on, during the Neolithic period, we have Celtic farmers moving to the British Isles - about 6,000 years ago. According to one of the two theories, it is a smaller group. The Celtic farmers would be the speakers of a Celtic IE language. The idea here is that Celtic spread across the British Isles by a process of cultural diffusion. The majority of the population according to this theory is of non-IE origin; they end up speaking Celtic because this language was brought by a small group of Celtic farmers who moved to the British Isles around 6,000 years ago.
• The other theory says that the majority of the population is of Iberian descent, but the majority of the population derives from these Celtic farmers.

An important point is that apparently there were Germanic speakers living in Britain even before the traditional date of 449 (which is given as the year of the beginning of the Germanic invasion of Britain). One bit of evidence used to claim that there were already Germanic speakers before this traditional date is a passage taken from Caesar's "De Bello Gallico" where he describes his battles against Celtic values in nowadays France. He said:

“The interior of Britain is inhabited by people who claim, on the strength of an oral tradition, to be aboriginal; the coast (of Britain, is inhabited) by Belgic immigrants who came to plunder and make war – nearly all of them retaining the names of the tribes from which they originated – and later settled down to till the soil.”

Caesar tried to invade Britain in 55-54 BC, about 500 years before the traditional date of the beginning of the Germanic invasion of Britain. He seems to suggest that 500 years before that, there were already people of Germanic origin living in the south of present-day England, who probably spoke Germanic, not Celtic. The idea is that there were already speakers of Germanic languages living in Britain much before the traditional date given for the start of the Germanic invasion of Britain.

There seem to be no Celtic inscriptions in England. One possible reason is because this area was inhabited by speakers of the Germanic language. This would explain the lack of Celtic inscriptions in England!

Fonti principali per la conquista germanica

• The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede (originally in Latin Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, 731). Bede is one of the most important scholars of the OE period.
• The other major source for the history of the OE period was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in OE, and created during the reign of King Alfred (the Great). It starts with the birth of Christ up to 1154, which is the year when King Stephen died. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be written even after the Norman conquest (important for the language - it shows the influence from French upon OE).

Tribù germaniche in Britannia

SLIDE 25: A map of what is supposed to be the home of the Germanic tribes that arrived in Britain. They are usually divided into three major groups: the Jutes, the Anglo, and the Saxon. They all come from (present day) North Germany or Denmark. The Jutes, before invading Britain, moved to the area originally occupied by the Saxon.

The tribes that arrived in Britain didn't speak only one Germanic language; they were speakers of different Germanic languages (or dialects). This is important for the history of English because the fact that we have different tribes resulted in different dialects for OE. In OE, we distinguish four major dialects: West Saxon (linguistically the most important of all), Kentish, Mercian (what we call Midlands today), and in the North, we have Northumbrian. Traditionally, Northumbrian and Mercian were brought together in what is called Anglian (we mentioned Scots, it is a variety of English which derives from Northumbrian).

Poteri dominanti

The map shows the most important regions we identify during the OE period politically. What we can see is a progressive shift in terms of political power.

During the 6th/7th century, the most important kingdom was Kent & East Anglia. Kent is very important because it is where the conversion to Roman Christianity started (as we see later on). Historically and linguistically, Kent is also important because its King Æthelberht is linked to the creation of... (testo incompleto)