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2.2.2. Quantitative change

Among many cases of quantitative changes of vowels in new English one should pay particular attention to the lengthening of the vowel, when it was followed by the consonant [r]. Short vowels followed by the consonant [r] became long after the disappearance of the given consonant at the end of the word or before another consonant:

Middle English New English

[a] > [a:] farm farm

[o] > [o:] hors horse

When the consonant [r] stood after the vowels [e], [i], [u], the resulting vowel was different from the initial vowel not only in quantity but also in quality. Compare:

Her

Fir [ε:]

Fur

or [h] before [t]: might, night, light.

2.3. Consonants

The changes that affected consonants in New English are not numerous. They are as follows.

1. Appearance of a new consonant in the system of English phonemes – [з] and the development of the consonants [dз] and [t∫] from palatal consonants.

Thus Middle English [sj], [zj], [tj], [dj] gave in New English the sounds [∫], [з], [t∫ ], [d∫]. For example:

[sj] > [∫] Asia, ocean

[zj] > [∫] measure, treasure

[tj] > [t∫] nature, culture, century

[d] > [d] soldier

Note should be taken that the above-mentioned change took place in borrowed words, whereas the sounds [t∫], [dз], [∫] which appeared in Middle English developed in native words.

2. Certain consonants disappeared at the end of the word or before another consonant, the most important change of the kind affecting the consonant [r]:

Farm, form, horse, etc.

3. the fricative consonants [s], [θ] and [f] were voiced after unstressed vowels or in words having no sentence stress – the so-called “Verner’s Law in New English”:

possess, observe, exhibition; dogs, cats; the, this, that, there, then, though, etc.

Summary – New English

The changes that affected the vowel and the consonant system in New English were great and numerous.

Vowels – qualitative changes:

1. Difference of vowels in the unstressed position at the end of the word.

2. Changes of all long vowels – the Great Vowel Shift

3. Changes of two short vowels: [a] > [æ] or [o] and [u] > [ ].

Vowels – Quantitative changes:

4. Changes of two diphthongs: [ai] > [ei], [au] > [o:].

5. Lengthening of vowels before [r] – due to the vocalization of consonants.

Consonants:

6. Appearance of the consonant [з] and the consonants [t∫], [dз] in new positions.

7. Disappearance or vocalization of the consonant [r].

8. Voicing of consonants – Verner’s Law in New English.

9. Positional disappearance:

r vocalized at the end of the word: far

w before r write

k before n knight

h before t light

3. Changes in alphabet and spelling in Middle and New English

As we remember, the Old English spelling system was mainly phonetic. Strictly phonetic spelling means that every sound that every sound is represented by only one distinct symbol and no symbol represents more than one sound. However, the 13^th and 14^th centuries witnessed many changes in the English language, including its alphabet and spelling. As a result of these modifications the written form of the word became much closer to what we have nowadays.

In Middle English the former Anglo-Saxon spelling tradition was replaced by that of the Norman scribes reflecting the influence of French and often mixing purely phonetic spelling with French spelling habits and traditions inherited from old English. The scribes substituted the so-called “continental variant” of the Latin alphabet for the old “insular writing”. Some letters came into disuse, replaced by new means of expressing the sounds formerly denoted by them – thus the letter þ (“thorn”) and p (“wen”), being of runic origin, unknown to the Norman scribes, disappeared altogether. Some letters, already existing in Old English but being not very frequent there, expanded their sphere of use – like the letter k. New letters were added – among them j, w, v and z. many diagraphs – combinations of letters to denote one sound, both vowel and consonant – appeared, mostly following the pattern of the French language.

The following letters disappeared:

Þ, ð [ð/θ] replaced by th: þat – that

З [g, j] g зod – god

or y Зear – year

æ [e] e lætan – leten (let)

p [w] w

the following letters were introduced:

g for [g] in god and [d ] in siege

j for [d ] in words of French origin: joy, judge

k for [k] instead of c before front vowels and n:

drincan – drinken, cnawan – knowen.

v for [v] instead of f as a separate phoneme:

lufu – love [luva] until the 17^th century reform v was an allograph of u, the two letters often being interchangeable: over – ouer, love – loue.

q for [k] (followed by u) in quay

or [kw] in cwen – queen to replace Old English cw

z for [z] as a separate phoneme: zel (zeal) although sometimes [z] is still rendered by s: losen (lose), chesen (choose).

The following digraphs appeared:

consonant diagraphs:

ch for sound [t ] cild – child

dg [dЗ] bryc – bridge

gh [χ] riЗt – right

th [ð, þ] þencan – thinken

moðor – mother

sh [∫] scip – ship

ph [f] in words borrowed from Latin:

phonetics

ch [k] in words borrowed from Latin:

chemistry

vowel diagraph – to show the length of the vowel:

ea [e] mete – meat

ee [e] fet – feet

oa [o] fot – foot

ie [e:] feld – field

ou/ow [u:] hus – hous, tun – town

Some changes were made for ease of reading and for a better visual image of the word:

k instead of c boc – book

y i by, my

w u now

In the final position for better visual separation of words better

Besides, y and w were considered more ornamental than I and u at the end of the word, allowing to finish it with an elegant curve.

o instead of u cumen – come

on3unnen – begonne

sunu – sone

lufu – love

munuc – monk

Close to letters consisting only vertical strokes, such as u/v, n, m

The New English period witnessed the establishment of the literary norm presupposing a stable system of spelling. However, the spelling finally fixed in the norm was influenced by many factors, objective and subjective in character, preserving separate elements of different epochs and showing traces of attempts to improve or rationalized it.

In New English with the revival of learning in the 16^th century a new principal of spelling was introduced, later to be called etymological. It was believed that, whatever the pronunciation, the spelling should represent to the eye the form from which the word was derived, especially in words of Latin or Greek origin. Thus, the word dett borrowed from French dette was respelled as debt, for it could be traced to Latin debitum, dout borrowed from French douter – as doubt from Latin dubitare.

However, the level of learning at that age was far from perfect, and many of the so-called etymological spellings were wrong. Here it is possible to mention such words as:

ME ake (from OE acan) result as ache from a wrongfully supposed connection with Greek achos;

ME tonge (from OE tunge) respelt as tongue on analogy with French langue, Latin lingua;

ME iland (from OE igland) respelt as island from a wrongfully supposed connection with French isle, Latin insula;

ME scool borrowed in OE from Latin and always written with sc- (OE scool) respelt as school, because in Latin the sound [k] in words of Greek origin was rendered as ch;

ME delit borrowed from French delit came to be spelt with the mute diagraph –gh- on analogy with light – delight, etc.

At the same time, the major phonetic changes of the period and first of all, the Great Vowel Shift, found practically no corresponding changes in spelling. This resulted in the present day system where one sound can be denoted in several ways, for instance:

LECTURE 7

CHANGES IN THE NOMINAL SYSTEM IN MIDDLE ENGLISH AND NEW ENGLISH

List of principal questions:

1. General survey of grammar changes in Middle and New English.

2. The noun

   0. Middle English

      0. Morphological classification

      1. Grammatical categories

   1. New English

      0. Morphological classification

      1. Origin of irregular noun forms

      2. Grammatical categories

3. the adjective

4. The pronoun

5. The article

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.

6. А.И. Смирницкий Древнеанглийский язык. М., 1955.

1. General survey of grammar changes in Middle English and New English

The grammar system of the language in middle and new English periods underwent radical changes. As we remember, the principal means of expressing grammatical relations in Old English were the following:

• suffixation

• vowel interchange

• use of suppletive forms,

all these means being synthetic.

In middle and New English many grammatical notions formerly expressed synthetically either disappeared from the grammar system of the language or came to be expressed by analytical means. There developed the use of analytical forms consisting of a form word and notional word, and also word order, special use of prepositions, etc. – analytical means.

In Middle and New English we observe the process of the gradual loss of declension by many parts of speech, formerly declined. Thus in Middle English there declinable parts of speech: the noun, the pronoun and the adjective, against five existing in Old English (the above plus the infinitive and the participle). In New English the noun and the pronoun (mainly personal) are only parts of speech that are declined.

2. The noun

2.1. Middle English

1. Morphological classification

In Old English there were three principal types of declensions:

a-stem, n-stem and root-stem declension, and also minor declensions: i-stem, u-stem and others. These types are preserved in Middle English, but the number of nouns belonging to the same declension in Old and Middle English varies. The n-stem declension though preserved as a type has lost many of the nouns belonging to it while the original a-stem declension grows in volumes, acquiring new words from the original a-stem, root-stem declensions, and also different groups of minor declensions and also borrowed words. For example:

Old English Middle English

a-stem singular stān singular stōn

plural stānas plural stōnes

n-stem singular nama singular name

plural namen plural namen

root-stem singular bōc (book) singular book

plural bēc plural bookes

Borrowed singular corage (courage)

plural corages

2. Grammatical categories

There are only two grammatical categories in the declension of nouns against three in Old English: number and case, the category of gender having been lost at the beginning of the Middle English period.

Number

There are two number forms in Middle English: singular and plural. For example:

Old English Middle English

Singular fisc fish

stān stōn

nama name

Plural fiscas fishes

stānas stōnes

naman names

Case

The number of cases in Middle English is reduced as compared to Old English. There are only two cases in Middle English: Common and Genitive, the Old English Nominative, Accusative and Dative case having fused into one case – the Common case at the beginning of Middle English.

For example:

Old English Middle English

Nominative stān nama

Accusative stān naman } → Common case stōn name

Dative stāne naman

Genitive stānes naman → Genitive case stōnes names

Thus we see that the complicated noun paradigm that existed in Old English was greatly simplified in Middle English, which is reflected in the following:

1. reduction of the number of declensions;

2. reduction of the number of grammatical categories;

3. reduction of the number of categorical forms within one of the remaining grammatical categories – the category of case.

2.2. New English

The process of the simplification of the system of noun declension that was manifested in Middle English continued at the beginning of the New English period.

2.2.1. Morphological classification

In Old English we could speak of many types of consonant and vowel declensions, the a-, -n, and root-stem being principal among them. In Middle English we observe only these three declensions: a-stem, n-stem, root-stem. In New English we do not find different declensions, as the overwhelming majority of nouns is declined in accordance with the original a-stem declension masculine, the endings of the plural form –es and the Possessive –s being traced to the endings of the original a-stem declension masculine, i.e.:

Old English Middle English

Nominative & Accusative Common Plural

Plural ending - as ending - es

Genitive Singular

ending - es Genitive Singular

ending -s

of the original n-stem and root-stem declensions we have in New English but isolated forms, generally referred to in modern grammar books as exceptions, or irregular noun forms.

2.2.2. Origin of modern irregular noun forms

All modern irregular noun forms can be subdivided into several groups according to their origin:

1. nouns going back to the original a-stem declension, neuter gender, which had no ending in the nominative and accusative plural even in Old English, such as:

sheep – sheep (OE scēap – scēap)

deer – deer (OE dēor – dēor )

2. some nouns of the n-stem declension preserving their plural form, such as:

ox – oxen (OE oxa – oxan)

c) the original s-stem declension word

child – children (OE cild – cildru)

In Middle English the final vowel was neutralized and the ending –n added on analogy with the nouns of the original n-stem declension. This shows that the power of the n-stem declension was at the time still relatively strong.

d) remnants of the original root-stem declension, such as:

foot – feet (OE fōt – fēt)

tooth – teeth (OE tōð – tēð)

5. “foreign plurals” – words borrowed in early New English from Latin. These words borrowed were borrowed by learned people from scientific books who alone used them, trying to preserve their original form and not attempting to adapt them to their native language. Among such words are:

Datum – data, automaton – automata, axis – axes, etc.

It should be noted that when in the course of further history these words entered the language of the whole people, they tended to add regular plural endings, which gave rise to such doublets as:

molecula – moleculae and moleculas,

formula – formulae and formulas,

antenna – antennae and antennas,

the irregular form being reserved for the scientific style.

2.2.3. Grammatical categories

The category of gender is formal, traditional already in Old English: in Middle English and New English nouns have no category of gender.

The category of number is preserved, manifesting the difference between singular and the plural forms.

The category of case, which underwent reduction first to three and then to two forms, in New English contains the same number of case-forms as in Middle English, but the difference is the number of the nouns used in the Genitive (or Possessive) case – mainly living beings, and the meaning – mainly the quality or the person who possesses something.

The boy’s book

A women’s magazine

A two mile’s walk

Inanimate nouns are not so common

The river’s bank

The razor’s edge

In Modern English, however, we observe a gradual spreading of the ending -s of the Possessive case to nouns denoting things, especially certain geographical notions, such cases as “England’s prime minister” being the norm, especially in political style.

3. The adjective

Only two grammatical phenomena that were reflected in the adjectival paradigm in Old English are preserved in Middle English: declension and the category of number.

The difference between the Indefinite (strong) and the Definite (weak) declension is shown by the zero ending for the former and the ending –e for the latter, but only in the singular. The forms of the definite and the indefinite declension in the plural have similar endings.

For instance:

Singular Plural

Indefinite a yong squire

yonge

Definite the yonge sonne

The difference between number forms is manifested only in the Indefinite (strong) declension, where thee is no ending in the singular but the ending -e in the plural.

In New English what remained of the declension in Middle English disappeared completely and now we have the uninflected form for the adjective used for all purposes for which in Old English there existed a complicated adjectival paradigm with the two number-forms, five case-forms, three gender-forms and two declensions.

As we have seen above, all grammatical categories and declensions in Middle and New English disappeared. Contrary to that degrees of comparison of the adjective were not only preserved but also developed in Middle and New English. For example:

Degrees of Comparison

It should be noted, however, that out of three principal means of forming degrees of comparison that existed in old English: suffixation, vowel interchange and suppletive forms, there remained as a productive means only one: suffixation, the rest of the means seen only in isolated forms. At the same time there was formed and developed a new means – analytical, which can be observed in such cases encountered, for instance, in the works of J. Chaucer, as:

Comfortable – more comfortable.

2. The pronoun

In old English all pronouns were declined, and the pronominal paradigm was very complicated. In Middle English the system was greatly simplified and nowadays what remained of the pronominal declension is mainly represented by the declension of the personal pronoun and on a small scale – demonstrative and interrogative (relative).

Case

The four-case system that existed in Old English gave way to a two-case system in Late Middle English and in New English. The development may be illustrated by the following scheme of the pronominal paradigm.

Personal Pronouns

Old English Middle English New English

Nominative Ic → Nominative I → Nominative I

Accusative mec

Dative mē } Objective me → Objective me

Genitive mīn

Possessive Pronouns → mine → mine

Gender

As a grammatical phenomenon gender disappeared already in Middle English, the pronouns he and she referring only animate notions and it – to inanimate.

Number

The three number system that existed in early Old English (singular, dual, plural) was substituted by a two number system already in late Old English.

5. The article

The first elements of the category of the article appeared already in Old English, when the meaning of the demonstrative pronoun was weakened, and it approach the status of an article in such phrases as:

Sē mann (the mann), sēo sǽ (the sea), þæt lond (the land)

However, we may not speak of any category if it is not represented by an opposition of at least two units. Such opposition arose only in Middle English, when the indefinite article an appeared.

The form of the definite article the can be traced back to the old English demonstrative pronoun sē (that, masculine, singular), which in the course of history came to be used on analogy with the forms of the same pronoun having the initial consonant [θ] and began to be used with all nouns, irrespective of their gender or number.

The indefinite article developed from the Old English numeral ān. In Middle English ān split into two words: the definite pronoun an, losing a separate stress and undergoing reduction of its vowel, and the numeral one, remaining stressed as only other notional word. Later the indefinite pronoun an grew into the indefinite article a/an, and together with the definite article the formed a new grammatical category – the category of determination, or the category of article.

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Summary

The system of the declinable parts of speech underwent considerable simplification, at the same time developing new analytical features:

1. Reduction in the number of the declinable parts of speech.

2. Reduction in the number of declensions (whatever is preserved follows the a-stem masculine).

3. Reduction in the number of grammatical categories.

4. Reduction in the number of the categorical forms (the category of number of personal pronouns and case – all nominal parts of speech).

5. Formation of the new class of words – article.

LECTURE 8

CHANGES IN THE VERBAL SYSTEM IN MIDDLE AND NEW ENGLISH

List of principal questions:

1. Non-finite forms (verbals)

2. Morphological classification of verbs in Middle English and New English

2.1. Strong verbs

2.1.1. Classes of strong verbs

2.1.2. Principal forms of the strong verbs

2.2. Weak verbs.

2.2.1. Classes of the weak verbs.

2.3. Origin of modern irregular verbs.

3. Grammatical categories of the English verb.

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.2 М., 2001.

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

6. А.И. Смирницкий Древнеанглийский язык. М., 1955.