Файл: lekcii_po_istorii_yazika.doc

LECTURE 1.

INTRODUCTORY.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES

List of principal questions:

1. The aim of the study of the subject

2. Inner and outer history of the language

3. Chief characteristics of the Germanic languages

3.1. Phonetics

3.2. Grammar

3.3. Alphabet

Literature

1. R.V. Reznik, T.C. Sorokina, I.V. Reznik A History of the English language. M., 2003.

2. T.A. Rastorguyeva History of English. M., 1983.

3. А.И. Смирницкий Лекции по истории английского языка. М., 2000.

4. К. Бруннер История английского языка. Т.1 М., 2001.

5. И. Чахоян, Л. Иванова, Т. Беляева. История английского языка. СПб., 1998.

The aim of the study of the subject

It is well known, whether it is English, Russian, Kazakh or any other, is a historical phenomenon. As such it does not stay unchanged for any considerable period of time, or any time at all, but it is constantly changing through out its history.

The changes affect all the spheres of the language: grammar and vocabulary, phonetics and spelling. The changes that any language undergoes are gradual and very slow but pronounced enough if you compare the stages of its development within a century or even half of a century. You can imagine that with the passage of time the difference between different stages of the development of the language grows and you will easily deduce that if you speak of such a language as English the history of which embraces over fifteen centuries you will have to analyze and explain a great number of linguistic data characterizing the language at different stages of its history.

The aims set before a student of the history of the English language are as follows:

1. To speak of the characteristics of the language at the earlier stages of its development;

2. To trace the language from the Old English period up to modern times;

3. To explain the principal features in the development of modern language historically.

To achieve those aims a student will have to known the theoretical basis of the subject and to work with the text to apply the theoretical knowledge to the practical analysis of English texts at different periods of the language development.

The main purpose of studying the history of the language is to account for the present-day stage of the language to enable a student of English to read books and speak the language with understanding and due knowledge of the intricate and complicates “mechanism” they use.

We said that the history of any language is unbroken chain of changes more or less rapid. But though the linguistic tradition is unbroken it is impossible to study the language of over 15 centuries long without subdividing it into smaller periods. Thus history of the English language is generally subdivided conventionally into Old English (5^th – 11^th century), Middle English (11^th – 15^th century) and New English (15^th century – till now).

2. Inner and outer history of the language

We are going to speak about the inner and outer history of the English language. The outer history of the language is the events in the life (history) of the people speaking this language affecting the language, i.e. the history of the people reflected in their language. The inner history of the language is the description of the changes in the language itself, its grammar, phonetics, vocabulary or spelling.

It is well known that the English language belongs to the Germanic subdivision of the Indo-European family of languages. The direct and indirect evidence that we have concerning Old Germanic tribes and dialects is approximately twenty centuries old. We know that at the beginning of AD Germanic tribes occupied vast territories in western, central and northern Europe. The tribes and the dialects they spoke at that time were generally much alike, but the degree of similarity varied. It is common to speak about the East Germanic group of dialects – mainly spoken in central Europe – Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian; North Germanic group of dialects – Old Norwegian, Old Danish, Old Swedish, Old Icelandic; and the West Germanic group of dialects – the dialects of Angels, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and others, originally spoken in Western Europe. The first knowledge of these tribes comes from the Greek and Roman authors which together with archeological data, allows obtaining information on the structure of their society, habits, customs and languages.

The principal East Germanic language is Gothic. At the beginning of our era the Goths lived on a territory from Vistula to the shores of the Black sea. The knowledge of Gothic we have now is almost wholly due to a translation of the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament made by Ulfilas, a missionary who Christianized the Gothic tribes. Except for some runic inscriptions in Scandinavia it is the earliest record of Germanic language we possess. For a time the Goths played a prominent part in European history, making extensive conquests in Italy and Spain. In these districts, however, their language soon gave place to Latin, and even elsewhere it seems not to have maintained a very tenacious existence. Gothic survived longest in the Crimea, where vestiges of it were noted down in the sixteenth century.

North Germanic is found in Scandinavia and Denmark. Runic inscriptions from the third century preserve our earliest traces of the language. In its earlier form the common Scandinavian language is conveniently spoken of as Old Norse. From about the eleventh century on, dialectal differences become noticeable. The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: an eastern group including Swedish and Danish and a western group including Norwegian and Icelandic. Of the early Scandinavian languages Old Icelandic is much the most important. Iceland was colonilized by settlers from Norway about A.D. 874 and preserved a body of early heroic literature unsurpassed among the Germanic peoples. Among the more important monuments are the Elder or Poetic Edda, a collection of poems that probably date from the tenth or eleventh century, the Younger or Prose Edda compiled by Snorri Sturluson (1178 – 1241), and about forty sagas, or prose epics, in which the lives and exploits of various traditional figures are related.

West Germanic is of chief interest to us as the group to which English belongs. It is subdivided into two branches, High and Low German, by the operation of a Second (or High German) Sound Shift analogues to that described below as Grimm’s Law. This change, by which West Germanic p, t, k, d, etc. were changed into other sounds, occurred about A.D. 600 in the southern or mountainous part of Germanic area, but did not take place in the lowlands to the north. Accordingly in early times we distinguish as Low German tongues Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English. The last two are closely related and constitute a special or Anglo-Frisian subgroup. Old Saxon has become the essential constituent of modern Low German or Plattdeutsch; Old Low Franconian, with some mixture of Frisian and Saxon elements, is the basis of modern Dutch in Nederland and Flemish in northern Belgium; and Frisian survived in the Dutch province of Friesland, in a small part of Schleswig, in the islands along the coast, etc. High German comprises a number of dialects and is divided chronically into Old High German (before 1100), Middle High German (1100 – 1500), and Modern High German (since 1500). High German, especially as spoken in the midlands and used in the imperial chancery, was popularized by Luther’s translation of the Bible into it (1522 – 1532), and since the sixteenth century has gradually established itself as the literary language of Germany.

3. Chief characteristics of the Germanic languages

The barbarian tribes – Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Frisians, Teutons, Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Scandinavians – lived on the fringes of the Roman Empire. All these spoke Germanic languages, which had distinctive characteristics of structure and pronunciation which are reflected in its descendents.

3.1. Phonetics

One of the most important common features of all Germanic languages is its strong dynamic stress falling on the first root syllable. The fixed stress emphasized the syllable bearing the most important semantic element and to a certain degree later contributed to the reduction of unstressed syllables, changing the grammatical system of the languages.

The most important feature of the system of Germanic vowels is the so-called Ablaut, or gradation, which is spontaneous, positionally independent alteration of vowels inhabited by the Germanic languages from the Common Indo-European period. This ancient phenomenon consisted in alteration of vowels in the root, suffix or ending depending on the grammatical form or meaning of the word.

There are two types of Ablaut: quantitative and qualitative. The qualitative Ablaut is the alteration of different vowels, mainly the vowels [e]/ [a] or [e]/ [o]

Old Icelandic bera (to give birth) – barn (baby)

Old High German stelan (to steal) – stal (stole)

Cf.: Russian бреду (I stroll, I wade) – брод (ford, wade)

Latin tego (to cover, to close) – toga (clothes)

Qualitative Ablaut means the change in length of qualitatively one and the same vowel: normal lengthened and reduced. A classic example of the Indo-European Ablaut is the declension of the Greek word “pater” (father):

[e:] [e] [-]

patēr patěr patros

(nominative case, (vocative case, (genitive case,

Lengthed stage) normal stage) reduced stage)

Ablaut in Germanic languages is a further development of Indo-European alterations. Here we often find cases with both the quantitative and qualitative ablaut. It should be also mentioned that in the zero stage before sonorants an extra-short vowel [u] was added:

Quantitative ablaut

Goth qiman (to come) – qums (the arrival)

Qualitative ablaut

OHG stelan (to steal) – stal (stole)

Quantitative + qualitative ablaut

OE fīndan (to find) – fand (found, past tense) – fundan (past participle)

Ablaut as a kind of an internal flexion functioned in Old Germanic languages both in form- and word-building, but it was the most extensive and systematic in the conjugation of strong verbs.

Another phenomenon common for all Germanic languages was the tendency of phonetic assimilation of the root vowel to the vowel of the ending, the so-called Umlaut, or mutation. There were several types of mutation, but the most important one was palatal mutation, or i-Umlaut, when under the influence of the sounds [i] or [j] in the suffix or ending the root vowels became more front and more closed. This process must have taken place in the 5^th – 6^th centuries and can be illustrated by comparing words from the language of the Gothic Bible (4^th century) showing no palatal mutation with corresponding words in other Germanic languages of a later period:

Goth harjis OE here (army)

Goth dōmjan OE dēman (deem)

Goth kuni OE cynn (kin)

Traces of this tendency can be seen both in word-building and form-building as a kind of internal flexion:

OHG gast (guest) – gesti (guests)

man (man) – mennisco (human)

Speaking about Germanic consonants, we should first of all speak of the correspondence between Indo-European and Germanic languages which was presented as a system of interconnected facts by the German linguists Jacob Grimm in 1822. This phenomenon is called the first Consonant Shift, or Grimm’s law.

The table below shows a scheme of Grimm’s law with the examples from Germanic and other Indo-European languages.

However, there are some instances where Grimm’s law seems not to apply. These cases were explained by a Dutch linguist Karl Verner, and the seeming exceptions from Grimm’s law have come to be known as Verner’s law.

Indo-European Germanic

1 Act voiceless stops p t k voiceless fricatives f þ h

Lat. pater O.E. fæder (father)

Lat. tres Goth. þreis (three)

Greek kardia OHG herza (heart)

2 Act voiced stops b d g voiceless stops p t k

Rus. болото O.E. pōl (pool)

Lat. duo Goth. twai (two)

Greek. egon O.Icl. ek (I)

3 Act voiced aspirated stops voiced non-aspirated stops

bh dh gh b d g

Snsk. bhratar O.E. brōþor (brother)

Lat. frater

Snsk. madhu O.E. medu (mead)

Snsk. songha O.Icl. syngva (sing)

Verner’s law explains the changes in the Germanic voiceless fricatives f þ h resulting from the first consonant shift and the voiceless fricatives depending upon the position of the stress in the original Indo-European word, namely:

Indo-European Germanic

p t k s b ð/d g z/r

Gk. hepta Goth. sibun (seven)

Gk. pater OSc. Faðir O.E. fæder

Gk. dekas Goth. Tigus (ten, a dozen)

Snsk. ayas Goth. aiz, OHG ēr (bronze)

According to Verner’s Law, the above change occurred if the consonant in question was found after an unstressed vowel. It is especially evident in the forms of Germanic strong verbs, except the Gothic ones, which allows concluding that at some time the stress in the first two verbal stems fell on the root, and in the last two – on the suffix:

O.E. tēon tēah tuзon toзen (to tug)

OSx. tiohan tōh tugun gitogan

Goth. tiuhan tauh tauhum tauhans

O.E. cēosan cēas curon coren (to choose)

OIcl. kiósa kaus kørom kørenn

Coth. kiusan kaus kusum kusan

3.2. Grammar

One of the main processes in the development of the Germanic morphological system was the change in the word structure. The common Indo-European notional word consisted of the three elements: the root, expressing the lexical meaning, the inflexion or ending, showing the grammatical form, and the so-called stem-forming suffix, a formal indicator of the stem type. However, in the Germanic languages the stem-forming suffix fuses with the ending and is often no longer visible, thus making the word structure a two-element one. Nevertheless, it should be taken into account when explaining the differences in the categorical forms of words originally having different stem-forming suffixes.

It should also be mentioned that Germanic languages belonged to the synthetic type of form-building, which means that they expressed the grammatical meanings by changing the forms of the word itself, not resorting to any auxiliary words.

The Germanic nouns had a well-developed case system with four cases (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative); some languages had elements of the instrumental and vocative cases and two number forms (singular and plural). They also had the category of gender (feminine, masculine and neuter) the means of form-building were the endings added to the root/stem of the noun.

The Germanic adjectives had two types of declension, conventionally called strong and weak. Most adjectives could be declined both in accordance with the strong and weak type. Agreeing with the noun in gender, case and noun, the adjective by its type of declension expressed the idea of definiteness (weak declension) or indefiniteness (strong declension), the meaning which was later to become expressed by a grammatical class of words unknown in the Common Germanic – the article.

The adjective also had degrees of comparison, the forms of which were in most instances formed with the help of suffixes –iz/ōz and –ist/-ōst, but there were also instances of suppletivism, i.e. use of different roots for different forms – a means common for many Indo-European languages:

Goth leitils – minniza – minnists (little – less – least)

Rus. Хороший – лучше – лучший

The Germanic verbs are divided into two principal groups: strong and weak verbs, depending on the way they formed their past tense forms.

The past tense (or preterit) of strong verbs was formed with the help of Ablaut, quantitative and qualitative. Depending upon the phonetic root structure, the exact manifestation of Ablaut could be somewhat different, and accordingly strong verbs were further subdivided into classes.

Weak verbs expressed pretirite with the help of the dental suffix –d/t. they also had stem-forming suffixes, depending on which they fell into separate classes.

There were also a small group of highly frequent suppletive verbs forming their forms from different roots, the same as in other Indo-European languages:

Goth am (I/am) Rus. есть

was (I / was) был

The Germanic verb had a well-developed system of categories, including the category of person (first, second, third), number (singular and plural), tense (past, present, the latter also used for expressing future actions). Mood (indicative, imperative and optative) and voice (only in gothic – active and mediopassive). The categorical forms employed synthetic means of form-building.

3.3. Alphabet

Although the people of the Germanic tribes were mostly illiterate, some of the Germanic nations had their own mode of writing, with a distinctive alphabet called runic, each letter of which was called a rune. We know that runes were used to record early stages of Gothic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, English, Frisian, Frankish and various tribal tongues of central Germania and they may also have supplied other Germanic languages without leaving any evidence surviving till today. On archeological grounds the earliest runes are dated to the second century AD. The script continued in use in some regions throughout the Middle Ages and into early modern times.

The early runes were not written, but incised – runic script was designed for inscribing, at first on wood, which explains many of its characteristics. Since runes were designed for incising in wood, the letter forms, in their earliest stages, eschew curves, which are hard to cut in such a grainy material. Letters were made up of vertical strokes, cut at right angles to the grain, and of slanting strokes which mingle with the grain and be hard to distinguish, were avoided.

Even the earliest examples of the script show there were variations in some letter forms, so it is not possible to give a standard pattern for the Germanic runic alphabet.

The earliest known runic alphabet had twenty-four letters arranged in a peculiar order, which, from the values of its first letters, is known as the futhark. In early times texts could be written not only from left to right, but from right to left equally well. Some texts could be even being written with alternate lines in opposite directions. Even in left-to-right texts an individual letter could be reversed at whim, and occasionally a letter might be inverted. There was no distinction between capital and lower-case letters.

The Roman equivalents for the Germanic runes given above are only approximate, for the sounds of Early Germanic did not coincide with those of Modern English.

It is unknown where and when runes were invented. The obvious similarities with the Roman alphabet brought early scholars to the belief that the script first appeared among Germanic peoples living close to the Roman Empire, and that the runes were an adaptation of the more prestigious alphabet. Early finds of rune-inscribed objects in Eastern Europe (Pietroassa in Rumania, Dahrmsdorf in central Germany and Kowel in the Ukraine) suggested that runes may have been invented by Goths on the Danube or beside the Vistula. This is further supported by the similarity of occasional runes to letters of one or other of the Greek alphabets. However, continued discovery of early runic texts in various regions of Europe do not allow considering the matter of the origin of runes conclusively proven.

Runes spread over the Germanic world and by 500 AD they are found not only in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England but also in Poland, Russia and Hungary, recording different Germanic languages and being cut, stamped, inlaid or impressed on metal, bone, wood and stone.

Runes were used for many centuries and in many lands, gradually changing in their passage through time and space. In England the script died out, superseded by Roman, somewhere in the eleventh century; in Germany rather soon. In Scandinavia and its colonies, however, runes continued well into the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the later runic inscriptions are of comparatively little interest, for there is plenty of other evidence for the state of the language they record, whereas the early inscriptions are of great importance to the linguist, for they record material for which there is otherwise little or no evidence.