ENG 4820

History of the English Language

Dr. Michael Getty | Spring 2009
WEEK 2: THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
WHAT STUCK FROM LAST WEEK?
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
ENGLISH IS A LANGUAGE OF INVASIONS
• Germanic tribes invaded Celtic-Roman Britain
in the 5th century CE. Their language formed
the core of what we now call English.
• Scandinavian settlers invaded Britain from the
8th to the 10th centuries. They blended into
the local population and heavily influenced the
language.
• French-speaking descendants of Scandinavians
who had settled in France invaded Britain in
the 11th century, almost completely displacing
the ruling classes of England
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
ENGLISH IS A LANGUAGE OF INVASIONS
• Each wave of invasion touched off a wave of
changes in English grammar and the
importation of vast numbers of words.
• These facts help us understand why English
has undergone such breathtaking changes in
the last 1000 years, making its earlier stages
mostly unrecognizable to untrained modern
eyes.
WHAT SHOULD HAVE STUCK
ABOUT THE COURSE
• Don't count on handouts. Download class notes starting
at 7:00 a.m. on Mondays, and print as you see fit.
• Read Millward as a reference work. Understand the
concepts. Know what's in each chapter and where to
find it.
• Supplemental readings to be made available for
download via myGateway
• Buy the workbook to go with Millward, but you won't be
turning anything in.
• Formal class ends between 7:30 and 7:45, with
informal class until 8:00 and office hours in our
classroom until 8:30.
ABOUT LANGUAGE GROUPS…
• We talked about the interplay between two language
groups:
– Germanic: Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian
– Romance: Latin and French
• What do we mean by language groups?
• Language is a messy, slippery term. At its simplest, it
means the collection of mutually comprehensible habits
of speech that form part of a group’s identity at any
given time.
• Within communities of people who all speak the same
'language,' there can be huge differences in grammar
and word-stock.
• We often use the word 'dialect' to refer to these
divergent segments of a larger speech community.
ABOUT LANGUAGE GROUPS…
• Where you draw the line between dialect and language
is mostly a political and cultural question, not a
scientific one.
• You will find no easier example than present-day
English:
– Northern England: I nearly did a runner when I saw the
courgettes I left on the cooker hood had gone mankey.
• Translation: "I almost ran away when I saw the zuchinni I left
on top of the stove had spoiled.”
– Somewhere in California: And there was this one chick
who was, like, jonesing for nachos and was totally stoked
when I scored her some.
• Translation: "I saw a woman who wanted to eat fried corn
chips and melted cheese and was very enthusiastic when I
obtained some for her.”
ABOUT LANGUAGE GROUPS…
• One language or two?
• One if you focus on our common history and
still overwhelming areas of commonality.
• Two if you focus on this and plenty of other
moments of mutual incomprehensibility.
 ABOUT LANGUAGE GROUPS…
• We find many more clear-cut cases ... such as the Germanic and
Romance languages

• English: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
• German: Alle menschen sind frei und gleich an würde und rechten geboren.
• Swedish: Alla människor är födda fria och lika i värde och rättigheter. 

• French: Tous les êtres humains naissent libres et égaux en dignité et en droits.
• Spanish:  Todos los seres humanos nacen libres e iguales en dignidad y derechos 
• Italian:     Tutti gli esseri umani nascono liberi ed eguali in dignità e diritti. 
Source: UN Declaration of Human Rights (http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/navigate/alpha.htm)

The similarities within each group are easy to notice. Historically, we know
that this is because the languages within each group are descended from a
common ancestor, a single, mutually comprehensible language that over
time broke apart into distinct 'daughter' languages. 
But notice the similarities between English and the Romance group…
MORE NEXT WEEK!
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
What Linguists Study …

• We study what people say, not what anyone else

thinks they should say.
– Human language has been around for at least 100,000 years.
– People have been obsessing about other people's language for
only about the last 2000 years, and mostly for just the last
200 years.
– There is enough complexity in any single human language --
its structure and usage and development over time -- for
whole lifetimes of study.
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
What Linguists Study …
• What people know consciously about their language is
generally less interesting than what they know only
subconsciously.
• Hold a sheet of paper right in front of your lips as you
pronounce the words take and steak.
– You produce a little puff of air after the first sound in take, but not
after the second sound in steak.
– If you are a native speaker, you've been doing this, with virtually
100% accuracy, since about age 5.
• If you had to, could you explain to a non-native English
speaker why these sentences are not okay?
– *Jane has met her boyfriend in 1976.
– *I look forward to meet you tomorrow.
– *I went to the bathroom when you called.

* = ‘Ungrammatical,’ or inconsistent with the system that characterizes a language

 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
What Linguists DO NOT Study …

• How to make aesthetic, artistic, and moral

judgments.
– English is going downhill.
– Certain people are lazy when they talk and/or
write.
– Middle English is more poetic than Old English
• Spelling and punctuation for their own sake
– Matters of conscious convention that relate only
indirectly to what's really going on, most of which
is subconscious
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
What Linguists Study …
• 'Grammar' is the system of rules and
principles that, when plugged into a
language's word-stock, can generate
an infinite number of utterances that
speakers will accept as consistent with
that language.
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
SOUNDS
• The sound system -- phonology -- of a
given language is the set of rules and
principles that describes:
– Which speech sounds occur in that
language
– Which differences between speech sounds
are meaning-bearing
– Which differences between speech sounds
are predictable and therefore not
meaning-bearing
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
SOUNDS
• We use agreed-upon phonetic
symbols to represent speech
sounds based only on their
physical characteristics. This is
always imperfect work, but it frees
us from the limitations of any one
language's alphabet.
• We usually refer to the space
inside the mouth by using a vertical
slice of head -- a saggital cross-
section -- that always faces west

Sources: (Right: Millward p. 23)

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy.html
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
FEELING THE POINTS OF
ARTICULATION

• Labial vs. labiodental:     pot     fought

• Labial vs. alveolar:      pot     tot
• Alveolar vs. interdental:     tot      thought
• Alveolar vs. interdental:     sought     thought
• Alveolar vs. alveopalatal:   sought     shot
• Alveolar vs. velar:      tot     cot
• Alveopalatal vs. velar:     shot     caught
• Front to back:
• pot    thought    fought    tot    shot    caught
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
FEELING THE MANNERS OF
ARTICULATION

Voiced vs. Voiceless

Put your fingers on your throat.
You should feel vibration from
your vocal chords at the beginning
of the second word, not at the
beginning of the first:

pay     bay
few     view
bath     bathe
toe     doe
char jar
coal goal

Source: Millward p. 28
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
FEELING THE MANNERS OF
ARTICULATION

Stop vs. nasal

• Put a finger right under your
nose.
• You should feel warm air on
your finger at the end of the
second word, but not at the
end of the first.

mob mom
mad man
hag hang

Source: Millward p. 28
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
FEELING THE MANNERS OF
ARTICULATION

Nasal vs. lateral

pan pal

Nasal vs. retroflex

nap rap

Nasal vs. lateral vs. retroflex

nap rap lap

Semivowels:
well yell

Source: Millward p. 28
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
VOWELS

• The chart goes according to

where the highest point of your
tongue is as you pronounce
each sound, facing west
• High-Mid-Low Front:
yeah
• Low Central to High Front:
eye
• High Front to High Back ~
Unrounded to Rounded:
you
• High Back to Mid Back to
Low Central ~ Rounded to
Unrounded: wuah!

Source: Millward p. 28
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
PHONES AND PHONEMES

Kal-El, Son of Jor-El, an Alien from the Planet Krypton

“Superman” “Clark Kent”

 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
PHONES AND PHONEMES
• Pronounce the following words, paying close
attention to what goes on inside your mouth as you
hit the sound cued by the letter t:

take ~ steak ~ truck ~ twin ~ water ~ witness

 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS

• Native English speakers pronounce these very different sounds in

their very particular environments with almost 100% accuracy, but
we are almost never aware of it.
• Why? Because the differences are not meaning-bearing. You can
always predict which sound is going to occur based on the sounds
around it.
• What you see at work here is assimilation: making neighboring
sounds more like each other
• Assimilation is all about minimizing the work it takes to get your
mouth from one configuration to the next!
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
MORE THINGS YOU HAD NO IDEA YOU WERE DOING

• Feel where the tip of your tongue is when you say [n] in tent
vs. tenth
• Feel the difference in where your tongue touches the top of
your mouth with the [k] sound in keep vs. coffee
• Feel what your lips are doing when you say the [k] sound in
coo vs. clue
• Feel your vocal chords as you say potato. Is your voice
buzzing during the first syllable?
• Do you notice anything different about the vowel in bid vs.
the vowel in bit?
• Put a finger right under your nose and say the words bad vs.
ban. Feel a difference in warmth?
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS

• Whether you say [t] or [th] in English depends on whether you are
pronouncing it at the beginning of a word or after another sound.
• Each sound is a manifestation of some common, underlying, more
abstract unit. We call this unit a phoneme, and we call its
manifestations allophones.
• Think of Superman and Clark Kent as allophones of a common
phoneme, the alien named Kal-El. You never seem them both in the
same environment, and Superman in particular only comes out
under very specific conditions.
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
• Speakers of other languages are
consciously aware of some differences
we know only subconsciously --
precisely because in their languages,
the differences are meaning-bearing.
• Take Hindi, for example
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
• In Hindi, whether you have a [t] or a
[th] depends on whether you're talking
about a tune or a piece of cloth.
• Each sound is a distinct building block,
as different to Hindi speakers as [t]
and [d] are to us.
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
• On the flip side, English has meaning-bearing differences in
sound -- phonemes -- that other languages do not.
• I once had a roommate, Evis (short for Evripides), who was a
native speaker of Greek.
• One day, he came to my room and said what sounded like
“Michael, come here. I want you to see my new shits.”
• I had already taken linguistics, so I had an idea of what was
going on, but it was nonetheless with some apprehension
that I went into his room.
• There on his bed were some new sheets.
• “Oh,” I said, “You mean new sheets."
• “That’s what I said,” he replied. “Shits.”
• For English speakers, sheets and shits are very different things,
and the distinction between the two words rests on a single
difference in sound: tense vs lax, /i/ vs /І/.
 THE ABSOLUTE BASICS
LOOKING AHEAD
• The inventory of phonemes that characterizes English has
shifted constantly over time.
• In my lifetime, Americans have begun to lose the distinction
between the vowels in don and dawn, a change that is happening
nowhere else outside of North America.
• Historically, the vowel inventory of English was completely
reorganized in a series of overlapping changes that started in
the 13th century and went to different degrees of completion in
different parts of the world.
• The Great Vowel Shift. We will make time for it!
• Another great, much earlier sound shift obscured the
relationship between the Romance and the Germanic languages
… which all descend from a common parent language.