Is the English Language Changing?

U3A Linguistics Group

Is English Changing?

• English, like all other languages is constantly changing to match the needs of its users.

• The change is so slow that from year to year we hardly notice it, except to grumble every so often about the ‘poor English’ being used by the younger generation!

Wasn’t English more elegant in the old days?

People tend to think that older forms of languages are more elegant, logical, or ‘correct’ than current forms, but it's just not true. The fact that language is always changing doesn't mean it's getting worse; it's just becoming different.

Why does language change?

• New technologies new products, new experiences, new professions

• Emigration• Colonisation• Invasion• Immigration• Mistakes• Fashion

New technologies

Consider texting: originally it was called text messaging, because it allowed one person to send another text rather than voice messages by phone. As that became more common, people began using the shorter form text to refer to both the message and the process, as in I just got a text or I'll text Sylvia right now.Also true of facsimile to fax.

Obtaining new words...

• Borrow from other languages• Shortening longer words e.g. gym, bus, taxi• Combining words, e.g. Breakfast, brunch• Borrow from proper names e.g Levis,

fahrenheit• Move letters from e.g a norange, a brid• Incorrect back-formation, e.g. Pease to pea

Old English / Anglo Saxon

• In the 5th century AD, settlers from west Germany crossed over to Britain.

• These tribes were called Saxons, Jutes and Angles, and set up kingdoms called ‘East Anglia’, ‘West Saxon’, ‘East Saxon’ etc.

• They spoke a dialect of the Germanic language and this slowly evolved into the English we speak today.

English is changed Germanic

Changed?Old English was a very complex language, at least in comparison with modern English. Nouns had three genders (male, female and neuter) and could be inflected for up to five cases. There were seven classes of “strong” verbs and three of “weak” verbs, and their endings changed for number, tense, mood and person. Adjectives could have up to eleven forms. Even definite articles had three genders and five case forms as a singular and four as a plural. Word order was much freer than today, the sense being carried by the inflections

Danelaw

• Danish / Viking invaders started arriving in north east England in the 8th century.

• Parts of their Scandinavian languages (Germanic languages too) , including words describing family and animals, spread through northern England.

• These words were integrated into Old English.

Loss of word endings.....

In grammar, inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and mood. The inflection of verbs is also called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns as declension.

Loss of verb inflexions

Who is biting who?Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) was, compared to Modern English, a heavily inflected language. That is, the function of a word in a sentence was indicated by the endings: Se hund biteÞ Þone ealdan mann (the dog bites the old man) means exactly the same as Þone ealdan mann biteÞ se hunda (The "Þ" stands for "th.") In Modern English the position of the words determines their meaning; "The old man bites the dog" differs considerably from "The dog bites the old man." In Old English the -ne on Þone and -an on ealdan indicate that "mann" is the object of the action, no matter in what order they appear, and the forms of Se and hund indicate that the "hund" does the biting.

Pesky vowelsIn late Old English times word order was becoming dominant and in the following years the grammatical endings became less important. For whatever reason a regular change took place: Final unstressed vowels moved first to schwah (the sound in the middle of "telephone") and then to zero, when they became silent. The ending of the word "tale," for example moves through these stages. from the sound "oo" to schawh to silence:

Old English: talu > Middle English tale > Modern English "tale"

Pesky vowelsVowels within inflected endings (such as -ode and -as) moved the same way:Old Eng.: lufode > Mid. Eng. lovede > Mod. Eng. "loved" Old Eng.: stanas > Mid. Eng. stones > Mod. Eng. "stones“

A final -n slowed the process somewhat, and so -an survives from Old English in Middle English as both -en and -e:Old Eng. bringan > Mid. Eng. bringen, bringe Mod. Engl. bring

Beowulf Prologue7th century onwards

Then the Normans Landed!

• Anglo Saxons defeated.• Current French became the language of the

court, religion, administration and the nobility.• Latin was the language of the Church

sacraments and learned works.• Old English became the language of the

underclasses. • For a few centuries!

Resurgence of English

• Over time English became more widely used by the educated upper classes and by 1425 English was used universally again in speech and writing.

• However, it had changed completely since the Old English period and became known as Middle English.

Features of Middle English

heavily

influenced by

Middle English

especially legal, religious and administrative terms such as justice, jury, govern and sovereign.

French lexis

became much simpler, reflecting the way the two languages had to co-exist

inflections disappeared (all plurals ended -en, -es or -s.

grammar

Go to the ‘Ages of English’ interactive timeline at listen to Old and Middle English texts.

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Features of Middle English

pronunciation was changing with vowels becoming shorter, e.g. leef became life and teem became time.

known as the Great Vowel Shift

an estimated 85% of Old English words fell out of use after the Viking and Norman invasions

no standardised system of spelling

pronunciation

thousands of Latin words, found in French, replaced Old English terms

Latin words

Middle English

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Ayenbite of Inwit 1340AD• Nou ich wille þet ye ywite hou hit is ywent

þet þis boc is ywrite mid Engliss of Kent.Þis boc is ymad vor lewede menVor vader and vor moder and vor oþer kenham vor to berȝe vram alle manyere zenþet ine hare inwytte ne bleve no voul wen.'Huo ase god' in his name yzed,Þet þis boc made god him yeve þet bread,Of angles of hevene, and þerto his red,And ondervonge his zaule huanne þet he is dyad. Amen.

Kentish dialect

Mandeville’s Travels 1370ADIn þat lond ben trees þat beren wolle, as þogh it were of scheep; whereof men maken clothes, and all þing þat may ben made of wolle. In þat contree ben many ipotaynes, þat dwellen som tyme in the water, and somtyme on the lond: and þei ben half man and half hors, as I haue seyd before; and þei eten men, whan þei may take hem. And þere ben ryueres and watres þat ben fulle byttere, þree sithes more þan is the water of the see. In þat contré ben many griffounes, more plentee þan in ony other contree. Sum men seyn þat þei han the body vpward as an egle, and benethe as a lyoun: and treuly þei seyn soth þat þei ben of þat schapp. But o griffoun hath the body more gret, and is more strong, þanne eight lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this half; and more gret and strongere þan an hundred egles, suche as we han amonges vs. For o griffoun þere wil bere fleynge to his nest a gret hors, 3if he may fynde him at the poynt, or two oxen 3oked togidere, as þei gon at the plowgh.

Word OrderWord order also changes, though this process is much slower. Old English word order was much more 'free' than that of Modern English, and even comparing the Early Modern English of the King James Bible with today's English shows differences in word order. For example, the King James Bible translates Matthew 6:28 as "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not." In a more recent translation, the last phrase is translated as "they do not toil,” because English no longer places not after the verb in a sentence.

Changing soundsThe sounds of a language change over time, too. From C15 onwards, English began to undergo a major change in the way its vowels were pronounced. Before that, geese would have rhymed with today's pronunciation of face, while mice would have rhymed with today's peace. However, a 'Great Vowel Shift' began to occur, during which the ay sound (as in pay) changed to ee (as in fee) in all the words containing it, while the ee sound changed to i (as in pie). Overall, seven different vowel sounds were affected. If you've ever wondered why most other European languages spell the sound ay with an ‘e’ (as in fiancé), and the sound ee with an ‘i’ (as in aria), it's because those languages didn't undergo the Great Vowel Shift, only English did.

The Great Vowel Shift (15C to 17C)

Features of Early Modern English

brought words from African, Asian and New World languages

world exploration

a huge number of Latin, French and Greek words entered the English language: words were needed for new concepts like psychology

European Renaissance

coined around 1700 new words, such as courtship, excitement and outbreak

Shakespeare

Early Modern English

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Influences of Latin

• More than half of our modern English vocabulary is Latinate (of Latin origin), e.g. colossal, dignified, emotion, history, ambiguous, immense opponent, ultimatum, vacuum, nation, exaggerate.

• Most of our prefixes and suffixes come from Latin, e.g. anti-, post-, pre-, -al, -ate, -ic.