Historical Linguistics : A Study of Language Change

1. The Study of Language Change
By
Sk. Shafiqur Rahman
ID- 121 1218 055

2. 1. The Nature of Language Change
And Seaxan þā sige geslōgan.
And Saxons the victory won
‘and the Saxons won the victory.’
þā sendan hī hām ǣ renddracan.
Then sent they home messenger
‘then they sent home a messenger.’
** An eighth-century Old English document, a translation of Bede’s
Latin History of England

3. • The letter þ called ‘thorn’, represented the phoneme /Ɵ/ in Old
English.
• hām (OE) > ‘home’ [ME]
• The suffix –an on the OE indicates past tense. sendan > sent
• Differences in word order.
• S+O+V ……… in the first sentence
• V+S+O……….. In the second sentence

4. And Seaxan þā sige geslōgan.
And Saxons the victory won
‘and the Saxons won the victory.’
þā sendan hī hām ǣ renddracan.
Then sent they home messenger
‘then they sent home a messenger.’
** An eighth-century Old English document, a translation of Bede’s
Latin History of England

5. • Some OE words have disappeared from the use of ME
• ǣ renddracan >Messenger
• sige >Victory
Some OE words changed their meanimg
geslōgan >Won
Geslōgan is the past tense of the word sleān (OE)> slay
(ME)

6. And Seaxan þā sige geslōgan.
And Saxons the victory won
‘and the Saxons won the victory.’
þā sendan hī hām ǣ renddracan.
Then sent they home messenger
‘then they sent home a messenger.’
** An eighth-century Old English document, a translation of Bede’s
Latin History of England

7. The Causes of Language change
a. Language is ‘handed down’ from one generation to the next.
b. Children do not begin language learning with an intact grammar.
c. People construct grammar on the basis of the available data.
Articulatory Simplification
a. Related to the idea of ‘ease of articulation’.
b. The deletion of a consonant in a complex cluster
[fifθs] > [fifs]…………….. ‘fifths’
c. The insertion of a vowel to break up a complex cluster
[æθli:t] > [æθəli:t]………….. ‘athlete’

8. Spelling Pronunciation
 The written form of a word can differ from the way it is pronounced.
 A new pronunciation can arise to reflect more closely the spelling of
the word.
 ‘Often’ was pronounced with a [t] in earlier English.
 In ME it is [ɒfən]
 Since the letter ‘t’ was retained in the spelling, [t] has been
reintroduced into many speakers’ pronunciation.
 In the pronunciation of [s] in words such as ‘assume’ and ‘consume’ ,
sound change resulted in a pronunciation with [ ʃ] like ‘shoe’ [ ʃʊ:].
 Arbitrariness of the relationship between spelling and pronunciation.
 ‘Menzies’ , the Scottish surname , used to be pronounced like [m ɪɳɪs]
or [meɳɪs] is now a days pronounced [menzɪz].

9. Spelling Pronunciation
 Social factors: words of French origin such as human , herb,
humble, humour and hotel , start with a vowel sound and had an
initial ‘silent h’ .
 But most of us now pronounce the initial ‘h’ because dropping
one’s aitches is generally negatively evaluated.

10. Analogy and reanalysis
Analogy
 Analogy reflects the preference of speakers for regular
patterns over irregular ones.
 It happens on the basis of ‘inference’.
 Phonological similarity--- in verb formation,
 sting > stung , swing > swung, bring > brung
 Eg- I’ve brung it into the house.
 Children create forms such as goed by analogy with regular
past tense forms like played.

11. Analogy and reanalysis
Reanalysis
 Reanalysis is common in morphological change.
 Morphological reanalysis------ (root+ affix)
 Hamburger, a type of meat patty deriving its name from the
city of Hamburg in Germany.
 Hamburger > reanalysis (root+ affix) > Ham + burger
 Fish burger, chicken burger, veggie burger, burger (free
morpheme)

12. Language Contact
 Language contact occurs when speakers of one language
frequently interact with the speakers of another language or
dialect.
 Borrowing – language user ( bilingual or multilingual)
 English has borrowed many French words such as – parent,
cousin, animal, soup, colour, major.
 Hypercorrection occurs when a speaker who is attempting
to speak another language or dialect.
 The north of England have the vowel [ʊ] in words like cut,
grumpy, stump where RP and other dialects have [ʌ].

13. Language Contact
 In present-day English there is no way of distinguishing
between words that belong to the cut /kʌt/ class, which
underwent the change of /ʊ/ to /ʌ/ from words in the put
/pʊt/ class that evade the change.
 the result is the hypercorrect pronunciation of a word like-
butcher as [bʌtʃə] , rubella [rʊbelə] as [rʌbelə].

14. 2. Sound Change
Assimilation
 Assimilation- the effect of increasing the efficiency of
articulation through a simplification of articulatory
movements.
 Partial assimilation involving place or manner of
articulation is a very common change which, over time,
can result in total assimilation.

15.  Table 8.4 shows the place of articulation of the nasal
assimilated consonant.
 The first of table 8.5 shows voicing assimilation and the
second shows the assimilation of nasality.
 In Table 8.6,a stop assimilates totally to a following stop .

16. Dissimilation
 Dissimilation, the process whereby one segment is made
less like another segment.
 This type of change typically occurs when it would be
difficult to articulate two similar sounds on close
proximity.

17.  Avoiding two consecutive nasal consonants
 Anma ‘soul’ (Late Latin Word) > alma ( Spanish)
 Avoiding two instances of [r] in neighboring syllables
 Arbor ‘tree’ (Latin word) > arbol (spanish) > alboro
(Italian) > arbre (French)
 By contrast, dissimilation did not occur in French where
arbre has retained both instances of [r].

18. Epenthesis
 Epenthesis involves the insertion of a consonant or
vowel into a particular environment.
 Table 8.10 shows epenthesis in Old English

19.  Vowel epenthesis serves to break up a sequence of sounds
which would otherwise be difficult to pronounce or even
inconsistent with the phonetic pattern of the language
( Table8.12)
 Some English speakers avoid [ɵ] clusters by inserting an
epenthetic [ə] in their pronunciation of words such as
athlete as ath[ə]lete .
 Table 8.12 shows examples of epenthesis

20. Metathesis
 Metathesis involves a change in the relative positioning
of segments. This change can affect adjacent segments or
segments at a distance.
 Table 8.13 shows metathesis of adjacent segments

21.  Metathesis at a distance is found in the change from Latin
miraculum ‘miracle’ to Spanish milagro, in which [r] and
[l] have changed places although they were not adjacent.

22. Weakening and deletion
 Verb deletion involves a word –final vowel (apocope) or a
word-initial vowel (syncopy).
 A vowel in an unstressed syllable is particularly susceptible
to deletion, especially when a nearby neighboring syllable
is stressed.
 The effects of syncopy are also apparent in the loss of the
middle vowel in Modern English words such as vegetable ,
interest, and family, which are frequently pronounced as
[védʒtəbl], [íntrest], and [fæmlɪ].

23.  Table 8.15 shows vowel reduction with subsequent deletion
(syncopy and apocope) occurred in Middle English and
Early Modern English.

24.  Consonant deletion is also a very common sound change.
For example , the word-initial cluster [kn] was found in
Old and Middle English, as the spelling of such words as
Knight, Knit, Knot and Knee implies, but the [k] was
subsequently lost giving us our modern pronunciation.

25. Auditory-base change
 Substitution involves the replacement of one segment with
another similar sounding segment.
 A common type of substitution involves [f] replacing either
[x] or [ɵ].

26. Phonological Change
 In a phonological split, allophones of the same phoneme
come to contrast with each other due to the loss of the
conditioning environment.
 [ɳ] was simply the allophone of /n/.
 The loss of the final [g] in words created minimal pairs
such as sin /sɪn/ and sing /sɪɳ/.

27. Phonological Change
 In a phonological merger, two or more phonemes collapse
into a single one.
 The phonemes /ɵ/ and /f/ have merged into one (/f/) and
words such as thin and fin have the same phonological
form (/fɪn/). Similarly, /v/ and /δ/ have merged ( for
example, /smu:v/ for smooth.)

28. Phonological Change
 A phonological shift is a change in which a series of
phonemes is systematically modified so that their
organization with respect to each other is altered.

29. Thank U