HEL UNIT 3

Changes

Languages are always changing: today:

How? and to a lesser extent, why?

The WHY is very uncertain, especially since many causes seem to have no functional value.

We cannot say that languages are always improving or degrading.

CAUSES of language change:

Many changes can be explained with reference to more than one of these

INTERNAL:

languages change all by themselves:

Subconscious

Harmony / euphony: make it sound nice

Ease of articulation:

least effort in articulating sounds:

All organisms natural desire to preserve energy.

Vowels become schwa.

kilometer

Consonants are simplified

Sounds are always affecting each other.

Clothes

Street

February (Wednesday?)

Drawer

Truck

Efficiency / transparency:

the seeming desire to :

· simplify grammar

· reduce redundancy

· remove irregularity

this is never, ever achieved 100%

non -s plurals

“irregular” verbs

Conscious changes:

ANALOGY:

Make things like each other, to reduce irregularities (usually)

how children learn:

“Teached”

(“regularize” an “irregular” verb; this has happened throughout the history of English)

Sometimes the other way around:

dived / dove

“brang”

Spelling pronunciation:

Pronouncing a word how it is spelled, instead of how it has been pronounced historically

derived from a misunderstanding of the relationship between writing and speaking

often, almond, comptroller

(Wednesday?)

cupboard, boatswain, forehead (rhymes with horrid?)

the historical spelling can be erroneous

cf. island, comptroller

Hypercorrection:

In seeking to avoid a perceived error, creating a new error

Pronunciation:

“don’t flap your -t-s”!

voter, letter, matter > cheddar

“don’t drop your “-gs”

Running, walking >kitchen-g, chicken-g

“don’t drop your -r’s” (east coast only)

Cuba-r, tuba-r

Grammatical:

“don’t say ‘me’ say ‘I’”

between you and I

even Obama says it (even Shakespeare says it)

Over-use of adverbs

Stick an –ly on everything

EXTERNAL Sources of Language Change:

Language contact

Less significant than internal causes

Confused popular view:

“they’re ruining the language”:

whoever they are, they are probably having a minimal effect

Greatest external influence seen in vocabulary:

Consider Spanish; historically, French and Latin

Loan words:

“quickly anglicized”: is this true?

Latin words: syllabi? octopus?

Spanish words; Italian words

“prestigious” non-anglicized pronunciation

Loanwords have been coming in since before English was actually even a language

Mechanisms of Phonological Change

First off: how do we know what languages used to sound like?

Very difficult business, based on a couple centuries of work

It is, in fact, a very complicated science

· How do we know about planets?

· How do we know about the layers of the earth?

· How do we know about atoms?

Some of the more understandable ones:

o Rhymes

o onomatopoeia

§ (warning: animals don’t all sound the same in all languages)

o related languages

o hypotheses based on modern languages

o Great Vowel Shift

§ look at all the European languages--why is English different?

Most important linguistic punctuations:

> “becomes” / < “derived from”

oxen > *oxes

chicken < cicen

Sound Changes:

Quite regular: previously talked of as LAWS

Unconditioned change:

every instance of a given sound changes, regardless of its phonological environment:

sound shift

o First sound shift (“Grimm’s Law”)

§ /p/ > /f/, etc.

o Great Vowel Shift

Conditioned changes:

depends on a given sounds phonetic environment

changes which tend to only affect individual lexical items, rather than the whole sound system:

Assimilation: sounds become like neighboring sound.

A type of Ease of articulation

Think about Hus band (unvoiced > voiced)

Con + plete >

Con + late >

In + put >

Regressive assimilation /anticipation:

The sound to the “left” assimilates to the sound on the “right”

IN- (= “not”) +

i[m]partial, i[m]mature, i[m]balance (bilabials)

i[n]dependent everywhere else

i[ŋ]considerate, i[ŋ]convenient, i[ŋ]gratitude (velars)

Progressive assimilation:

the sound on the right assimilated to the sound on the left

why some –ed’s are pronounced /t/

Rushed, missed, kicked: ends in voiceless sound

cf. rubbed, jammed: ends in voiced sound

why some “s” are pronounced /z/

/s/ kicks, jumps (unvoiced)

/z/ rubs, jams; families (voiced)

Dissimilation:

sounds become unlike neighboring sounds, for clarity:

Pilgrim ( < perergrinus)

purple (< purpur)

diphthong

Addition of a sound (intrusion)

Prince (prints)

sense (cents)

dense (dents)

mince (mints)

are these MISpronunciations?

warm(p)th

leng(k)th

bo(l)th

wa(r)sh

excrescent (additional sound at end)

soun > sound

vermin > varmint

across > acrosst

saw > sawl

demon > “demand”

additional syllable

Ath(e)lete

chim(e)ney

fil(e)m

“old Norris”

Loss of a sound:

Memory

Barbara

Theresa

Veteran

castle

caulk

handsome

What would it be called if we pronounced these?

Lots of OE examples

“silent letters”

know, gnaw, through

Metathesis:

Reversal of two sounds:

Wednesday

Sp tronanda > tornado

OE beorht > bright

OE axian > ask

nuclear

chipotle

Other types of changes, which may affect the phonological system in a wider sense

Allophones become phonemes:

As all the voiced and unvoiced fricatives in Modern English

s/z, th/th, f/v

zip/sip

bath/bathe

house/hou[z]e

Vowels change in quality:

raising

fronting

backing

lowering

diphthongization / monophthongization

Vowel change in quantity:

Lengthening and shortening

Consonant changes in manner or place of articulation:

Palatalization :

s > sh “Street”

k > ch

j > dg “jeet?”

for anticipation; like miss you

Rhotacism

s > r

Morphological and Syntactic Change

ANALOGY

Tidying up: removing irregular forms

Knives/lives/wives

Is this just spelling or pronunciation?

How do you pronounce:

Roofs

ANAOLOGY in affixes:

Reduction of all plurals to –s (against a wide variety in OE)

Analogical ending (-s) become regular/productive

Applied to new words and foreign words

but also hypercorrection for some foreign words

“*octopi”; *apparati; “*opi”

Some old forms survive:

Oxen/children/feet/ SHEEP

“they are never used a means for pluralizing new words in the language”

but what of fish-types, and things like deer: caribou?

Words of very high frequency tend to resist analogy, and remain irregular

To be

man/ men

foot/ feet

pronouns

False Analogy:

Children’s mistakes

“I was used to”

children internalize grammar without effort

—they are not parrots

“brang”

Back-formation:

but a productive method of word formation, so beware the “false”

Burgle / babysit / televise

Zipper > (verb?)

Swiffer > (verb?)

False morphological analysis

Cerise > cherry

Pease > pea

Folk-etymology

Kitty/catty corner

island

bridegroom

Spare ribs (G ribbe sper “split”)

Jerky (Quechua charqui, “dried”)

Cole slaw (D kool-sla, “cabbage salad”)

Chaise lounge (F Chaise-longue)

Grammaticalization

· Words with lexical meaning are reduced to grammatical markers, often to compensate for the loss of grammatical inflections

· A word can be grammaticalized and still retain its lexical meaning in other circumstances

Prep. “to” vs. inf. marker “to”

“I am” vs. “I am going”

“have”

“used to”

Auxiliary verbs which have lost all lexical meaning:

will, would, shall, should, (can, could)

Conservative vs. innovative changes:

Conservative:

No change in sum total or grammatical categories and distinctions, just form in which it’s done.

EMod English bringeth > brings

No degradation at all: it’s just different

Innovative:

genuine loss or gain of grammatical distinctions

thou > you

we no longer have a distinct 2^nd person singular pronoun

OE dual pronouns cease to exist

Semantic Change:

Words change their meanings

always have, always will

Dictionaries cannot even keep up with this

Original / etymological meaning:

often imperfect, because can only go back to oldest written records

“earliest attestation”

The etymological fallacy:

Insistence on the sanctity of the etymological meaning:

Earliest attestation: the oldest written occurrence of a word; very important for lexicography, but does not tell us everything.

Decimate

dilapidated

How about virtue?

what does “revision” really mean

companion?

holiday?

Christmas?

Generalization / Specialization

G: mill; barn < bere (barley)-aern; box

S: deer; starve; acorn; cellar

Pejoration / Amelioration

P: knave (boy); churl (man); lewd (lay); boor (farmer); corpse

A: praise (appraise); Earl (eorl); steward; success

Weakening / Strengthening

W: awfully; awesome

S: molest

Euphemisms:

primitive attitude toward language:

Words have strength:

He-who-must-not-be-named

God names

As many ways to do this as all semantic shifts:

often requires renewal:

toilet

“GO” goes all the way to OE: gangstool

Some modern ones:

ethnic cleansing (genocide)

IED

Extraordinary (beyond the ordinary) rendition (legal, “handing over”)

OED DRAFT ADDITIONS DECEMBER 2006

extraordinary, adj., adv., and n.

extraordinary rendition n. the seizure and transportation of a criminal (esp. terrorist) suspect, esp. for covert interrogation in a country considered to have less rigorous regulations for the humane treatment of prisoners; an instance of this.