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CONSONANT PHONEMES OF PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

Manner of Articulation

Point of Articulation

Bilabial Labio- dental

Inter-

dental Alveolar

Alveo- palatal Velar

Stops Voiceless p t k

Voiced b d g

Affricates Voiceless ˇc

Voiced Jˇ

Fricatives Voiceless f T s š h*

Voiced v ð z ž

Nasals m n ŋ^y

Lateral l

Retroflex r

Semivowels w j (w)^z

/p/ pill /f/ feel /m/ hum

/b/ bill /v/ veal /n/ Hun

/t/ till /T/ thigh /ŋ/ hung

/d/ dill /ð/ thy /l/ lore

/k/ kill /s/ seal /r/ roar

/g/ gill /z/ zeal /w/ wore

/ˇc/ chill /š/ mesher /j/ yore

/Jˇ/ Jill /ž/ measure

/h/ heel

*The fricative /h/, in modern English only a burst of aspiration preceding a vowel, is actually produced at various points in the mouth, depending on the nature of the following vowel. For the sake of convenience, it is listed here as a velar phoneme.

yThe velar /ŋ/ is not phonemic for many speakers of English, but only an allophone of /n/ that occurs before /k/ and /g/.

If, in your speech, the words finger and singer rhyme, [ŋ] is probably not phonemic for you.

zThe phoneme /w/ actually has a dual articulation; it is bilabial by virtue of the rounding and near closure of the lips and velar by virtue of the raising of the back of the tongue toward the velum.

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Central Front

Unrounded

Back Rounded

High i

I (lax)

u

e e

ε (lax)

⍀

a

(lax) o (lax)c æ

Low

Keyed kid Kade Ked cad cud, curd e

/i/

/I/ /e/

/ε/

/æ/

/ /

⍀

c

/a/cod, card /u/ cooed / / could /o/ code / /cawed Mid

VOWEL PHONEMES OF PRESENT-DAY AMERICAN ENGLISH

c aI

a ^Ω

I

cI

a a_I Ω

buy bough boy

DIPHTHONG PHONEMES OF PRESENT-DAY AMERICAN ENGLISH

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A Biography of the English Language

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C. M. MILLWARD Late, Boston University

MARY HAYES University of Mississippi

A Biography of the English Language

T H I R D E D I T I O N

Australia• Brazil • Japan • Korea • Mexico • Singapore • Spain • United Kingdom • United States

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This an electronic version of the print textbook. Due to electronic rights

restrictions, some third party content may be suppressed. Editorial review has deemed that any suppres ed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. The publisher reserves the

right to remove content from this title at any time if subsequent

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Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 14 13 12 11 10

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The Phonemes of Present-Day American English 28 Consonants 28

Vowels 30 Prosody 32

Essential Concepts 33

References and Suggested Readings 33 3 Writing 35

The Effects of Writing on Speech 36 Why Was Writing Invented? 37 Types of Writing Systems 38

Pictograms and Ideograms 38 Logograms 40

Syllabaries 40 Alphabets 42 Essential Concepts 44

References and Suggested Readings 44

4 Language Families and Indo-European Languages 47 Major Language Families of the World 50

Development of Historical Linguistics in Europe 53 The Outer History of Indo-European 55

The Indo-European Languages 56 Indo-Iranian 56

Tocharian 60 Armenian 60 Anatolian 60 Balto-Slavic 61 Hellenic 61 Albanian 62 Celtic 62 Italic 63 Germanic 63

From Indo-European to Germanic 65 Phonology 65

Graphics 70 Morphology 70 Syntax 72

vi C O N T E N T S

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Lexicon 73 Semantics 74

A Comparison of Germanic Languages 74 Essential Concepts 76

References and Suggested Readings 77 5 Old English 79

Outer History 79

England before the English 79 The Arrival of the English 80 The Christianization of England 82

The Viking Invasions and Their Aftermath 85 Inner History 86

Old English Phonology 87 Consonants 87

Old English Graphics 93 The Futhorc 93 The Latin Alphabet 95 Spelling and Punctuation 95

An Illustration of Old English Graphics 96 Old English Morphology 98

Inflections 98 Nouns 101 Adjectives 103 Pronouns 104 Verbs 106

Uninflected Word Classes 110 Old English Syntax 112

Syntax within Phrases 112 Syntax within Clauses 115 Syntax of Sentences 117 Idioms and Latin Influence 119 Old English Lexicon 119

The Extensive Vocabulary 119 Loanwords 120

C O N T E N T S vii

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Formation of New Words 123 Lost Vocabulary 126

Old English Semantics 129 Semantic Categories 129 Semantic Change 130 Old English Dialects 133 Old English Literature 135

Prose 136 Verse 137

References and Suggested Readings 141 6 Middle English 143

Outer History 143

1066–1204: English in Decline 143 1204–1348: English in the Ascendant 146 1348–1509: English Triumphant 147 Inner History 148

Middle English Phonology 148 Consonants 149

Middle English Graphics 160 The Middle English Alphabet 160 Spelling and Punctuation 162 Handwriting 164

Middle English Morphology 164 Loss of Inflectional Endings 164 Nouns 166

Adjectives 167 Pronouns 169 Verbs 173

Uninflected Word Classes 178 Middle English Syntax 180

Syntax within Phrases 180 Syntax within Clauses 186 Syntax of Sentences 188

viii C O N T E N T S

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Syntax of Poetry 189 Middle English Lexicon 191

Loanwords 192

Middle English Semantics 204 Narrowing and Generalization 204 Amelioration and Pejoration 205 Strengthening and Weakening 205 Abstraction and Concretization 206 Shift in Connotation 206

Shift in Denotation 206 Middle English Dialects 208 Middle English Literature 212

Prose 214 Secular Verse 215

Religious and Didactic Verse 216 Drama 216

References and Suggested Readings 218 7 Early Modern English 219

Outer History 219

Cultural, Political, and Technological Influences 219 The Introduction of Printing (Late 15th Century) 219 The English Renaissance (Late 15th to 16th Centuries) 220 The Protestant Reformation (16th Century) 221

Rising Nationalism (Late 16th Century) 221

Changes in the Economic System (16th to 17th Centuries) 221 Exploration and Colonization (17th to 19th Centuries) 222 The Industrial Revolution (Late 18th Century) 222 The American Revolution (Late 18th Century) 223 English Comes of Age 224

The Debate over Vocabulary 225 The Spelling Reformers 228 The Dictionary Makers 231

The Movement for an English Academy 236

C O N T E N T S ix

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The Emergence of Grammar 238 Varieties of English 242 Inner History 244

Early Modern English Phonology 244 Consonants 245

Early Modern English Graphics 255 Spelling and Punctuation 257 Early Modern English Morphology 258

Nouns 259 Adjectives 260 Pronouns 261 Verbs 264

Uninflected Word Classes 268 Early Modern English Syntax 270

Syntax within Phrases 271 Syntax within Clauses 274 Syntax of Sentences 275 Early Modern English Lexicon 277

Loanwords 277

Early Modern English Semantics 287 Generalization and Narrowing 287 Amelioration and Pejoration 288 Strengthening and Weakening 289 Abstraction and Concretization 289 Shift in Denotation 290

Shift in Connotation 290 Early Modern English Dialects 291 Essential Concepts 292

References and Suggested Readings 292 8 Present-Day English 295

Outer History 295

English Comes into Its Own 295

x C O N T E N T S

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The Question of Vocabulary 296 The Question of Spelling Reform 296 Dictionary-Making 300

The Question of a National Academy 302 Approaches to Grammar 304

Future and Imaginary Englishes 306 Inner History 309

Present-Day English Phonology 309 Consonants 310

Present-Day English Graphics 312 Present-Day English Morphology 313

Nouns 313 Adjectives 314 Pronouns 314 Verbs 316

Uninflected Word Classes 317 Present-Day English Syntax 319

Syntax within Phrases 319 Syntax within Clauses 321 Syntax of Sentences 321 Present-Day English Lexicon 323

Loanwords 324

Present-Day English Semantics 336 Essential Concepts 338

References and Suggested Readings 339 9 English Around the World 341 English Is a Native Language 346

Linguistic Variation 345 The United States 347

General American 350

Regional Variation in the United States 352 A. Eastern New England 354

C O N T E N T S xi

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B. New York City 354 C. Middle Atlantic 355 D. Western Pennsylvania 355 E. Upper South 356

F. South 356 G. Inland North 357 H. Northwest 357 I. Southwest 358

African American Vernacular English 358 Canada 362

Newfoundland 364 England 367

Standard British English 367 Regional Variation in England 373 Scotland 376

Wales 379 Ireland 381

Northern Ireland 382 Southern Ireland 383 Australia 385

New Zealand 388 South Africa 390

Western Atlantic English 392 English as a Nonnative Language 393

English in Asia 394 India 394 Singapore 397 The Philippines 399 English in Africa 400

West African in General 401 Nigeria 402

Liberia 403 Cameroon 404

English-Based Pidgins and Creoles 405 References and Suggested Readings 406

xii C O N T E N T S

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Appendix A Grammar Review: Morphology and Syntax 409 Appendix B Significant Events in the Biography of English 425 Appendix C Parallel Texts of Boethius 429

Glossary 439 Bibliography 455 Index 463

C O N T E N T S xiii

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Preface

W

hen Michael Rosenberg, the publisher at Cengage Learning, asked me to revise Celia M. Millward’s Biography of the English Language, I could not have been more delighted. I have tried to retain Millward’s tone and purpose, keeping the book accessible enough for a beginner yet with enough challenging material to be useful in a graduate class.

Millward’s three themes remain evident throughout: (1) languages and language change are systematic, (2) the inner history of a language is profoundly affected by its outer history of political and cultural events, and (3) the English of the past has left its traces on present-day English. Those of you familiar with the book will recognize its balance in treating the language’s outer and inner history, its helpful introductory chapters that familiarize students with the basics of linguistics, its comprehensive study of the language from its Indo-European roots to present-day use that is intelligible to students with no linguistics background.

The text has been updated to be of greater interest and relevance to the technologically savvy twenty-first-century student.

■ Information has been added about how English has changed with the advent of the Internet and text-messaging and what these technological changes will mean for the future of the language.

■ New tables, maps, and figures clarify points of grammar and illustrate the lessons in the text.

■ Marginal keys to exercises in the workbook (e.g., W 3.6 ) allow instructors to assign exercises to reinforce or augment particular lessons in the text.

■ Each chapter ends with a list of“Essential Concepts” so students can ensure that they have grasped the most important lessons.

■ A new appendix offers a grammar review to facilitate students’ comprehen- sion of morphology and syntax.

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■ A new appendix contains a timeline of significant events in the history of the English language.

■ One passage from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy appears in several versions with commentaries. They now appear together in an appendix so that the changes in English over the centuries are more evident by comparison of the original Latin with glosses and Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Present-Day English translations.

■ The bibliography has been updated to include the latest sources on both broad themes and finer points.

■ The glossary includes new terms and their definitions.

■ The IPA chart appears on the inside covers for easy reference.

■ On a somewhat lighter note, some vignettes have been replaced by discussions of word origins that will appeal to students.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

I’d like to thank the following people for their assistance with the third edition:

Adetayo Alabi, Allison Burkette, Ivo Kamps, Ann Fisher-Wirth, J. R. Hall, Gregory Heyworth, Robert Kennedy, Charlie Mock, Christopher Sapp, Blake Shedd, and Jonathan Wilcox.

We are also indebted to the many reviewers of previous editions and to the following colleagues for their valuable input in shaping this third edition:

Christina M. Heckman, Augusta State University; Nancy Spaeder, Columbia College; and Deborah VanderBilt, St. John Fisher College.

I perhaps owe my greatest debt to my development editor, Joan Flaherty, who was particularly helpful in pointing out where the book needed to be updated for the twenty-first-century student. I appreciated her wisdom and insight.

Mary Hayes

xvi P R E F A C E

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1 Introduction

Language is not only a construct, a shelter, an edifice, an abode, but the soul of humanity—container of infinity.

—WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

E

veryone knows intuitively what language is, but it is notoriously difficult to define. Rather than become entangled in an unresolvable argument, we will define language for our purposes as a systematic and conventional means of human communication by way of vocal sounds; it may include written symbols corresponding in some way to these vocal sounds. A single language, such as English or Hungarian, is a specific, established example of such a communication system used by the members of a particular community.

F E A T U R E S C O M M O N T O A L L L A N G U A G E S All Languages Are Systematic

All languages are systems, or, more precisely, series of interrelated systems gov- erned by rules. Languages are highly structured; they consist of patterns that recur in various combinations and rules that apply to produce these patterns.

A simple English example is the systematic alternation between a and an pro- duced by the rule that an is used before words beginning with a vowel sound, and a is used otherwise. Much more complex rules account for the grammatical- ity of such verb phrases as might have been picking and will have been picking and the ungrammaticality of*might will been picking or *might been have picking.¹

1. An asterisk (*) before a word, phrase, or other linguistic form means that it is either ungrammatical or a hypothetical, assumed to have existed but not actually recorded.

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A moment’s reflection will reveal that if languages were not highly systematic and ruled, we could never learn them and use them. Speakers learn the rules of their language(s) as children and then apply them automatically for the rest of their lives. No native speaker of English, for example, has to stop in the middle of a sentence and think about how to pronounce the plurals of rate, race, or raid.

Even though the plurals of all three of these words are pronounced differently, we learned at a very young age that the different forms are predictable and how to predict them. Mistakes in usage occur in areas of language that lack systems or are exceptions to the rules. Children who say“My foots are dirty” are demon- strating not that they do not know the rules of English, but rather that they know the rules well; they just have not mastered the exceptions.

The interrelated systems of a language include phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and semantics. Languages that have a written representation (and not all languages do) also have a system of graphics. All languages have the same set of systems (with the possible exception of graphics), but the components of the systems and the interrelationships among the systems differ from language to language. Both German and Turkish have phonological systems, but the sounds that make up these systems differ from each other and from English sounds.

Phonologyis the sounds of a language and the study of these sounds. The study of the sounds of speech taken simply as sounds and not necessarily as members of a system is called phonetics. The study of the sounds of a given language as significantly contrastive members of a system is called phonemics, and the mem- bers of the system are called phonemes. The distinction between phonetics and phonemics is important. For example, the English pronunciation of p in the word pan is accompanied by a strong puff of air called aspiration, whereas the p in the word span has no such strong aspiration. The two kinds of p are different phones, but not different phonemes; that is, the strong aspiration occurs only when p is at the beginning of the syllable and not when p follows s. Therefore the two varieties of p are not used to distinguish two different words, and the difference between them is not phonemic. On the other hand, the initial sounds in the words pan and tan serve to distinguish these two words; the p and the t contrast significantly and are classified as separate phonemes. Phonology is discussed in much greater detail in Chapter 2; for the moment, it is sufficient to note that phonemes are building blocks of language but have no meaning in and of themselves.

Morphologyis the arrangement and relationships of the smallest meaningful units in a language. These minimum units of meaning are called morphemes.

Although at first thought the word may seem to be the basic unit of meaning, words like fireproof and snowplow clearly consist of more than one meaningful element. Somewhat less obviously, the word joyous consists of a base word joy and a suffix morpheme -ous, which means something like “an adjective made from a noun” and appears on many other words, such as poisonous, grievous, and thunderous. The word unsightly consists of three morphemes: un-, sight, and -ly.

Note that morphemes are not identical to syllables: the form don’t has one syllable but two morphemes, do and not. Conversely, the word Wisconsin has three syllables but is a single morpheme.

W 1.3 and W 1.4

W 1.5 and W 1.7

2 C H A P T E R 1

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It is often useful to distinguish between free and bound morphemes. Free morphemes can be used alone as independent words—for example, take, for, each, the, panda. Bound morphemes form words only when attached to at least one other morpheme; re-, un-, -ing, -ful, and -tion are all bound morphemes.

The most familiar bound morphemes are affixes (that is, prefixes and suffixes), but even bases (forms to which affixes are attached) can be bound. An example of a bound base is the -cept of such words as except, accept, deceptive, and reception.

As noted, affixes may be either prefixes or suffixes. (Some languages also have infixes, which appear inside a word.) Another classification of affixes distin- guishes inflectional and derivational affixes. An inflectional affix indicates a grammatical feature such as number or tense. For instance, the -s used to form plurals and the -ed used to indicate past tense are inflectional affixes. Present-Day English has few inflectional affixes; Old English had many more.

Derivational affixes may be either prefixes or suffixes. In English, most derivational prefixes simply change the meaning of the word to which they are at- tached (uniform, transplant, microwave, unbelievable, desensitize), though some change the part of speech; for example the prefix em- changes the noun power to a verb, and the prefix a- changes the verb float to an adjective. Derivational suffixes normally change the part-of-speech category and may also change the meaning of the word to which they are attached. For example, the derivational suffix -ive in generative changes the verb generate to an adjective; the suffix -ness in coolness changes the adjective cool to a noun. In joyless, the suffix -less not only changes the noun to an adjective but also changes the meaning of the resulting word to the opposite.

The same morpheme sometimes has different forms, depending on its envi- ronment. For example, the past-tense morpheme -ed is pronounced like t in stopped and laughed; like d in stabbed and raised; and like ed in wanted and braided.

Each of these variants is called an allomorph of the past-tense morpheme. The words attentive, contend, extension, and intense all contain different allomorphs of a single bound morpheme going back to Latin tendere“to stretch.”

Another distinction can be made between lexical and function morphemes and words. Lexical morphemes (usually nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs) are content words, words with referents in the real world. Examples are radio, nasty and swim. Function words or morphemes (usually conjunctions, pronouns, de- monstratives, articles, and prepositions) signal relationships within the language itself; examples are but, oneself, these, a, of, and than. In practice, many morphemes or words have both lexical and functional aspects. For instance, in is primarily a function word in we are in love but also has a real-world spatial meaning of

“within” in there’s a spider in the sink.

Syntax is the arrangement of words into phrases, clauses, and sentences;

loosely speaking, it is word order. A simple example like the difference between I had stolen my car and I had my car stolen illustrates how crucial syntax is in English. English speakers have more options with respect to syntax than they do with respect to phonology or morphology. That is, they cannot expect to be understood if they refer to a canine mammal as a god instead of a dog; but they do have the option of saying either I like dogs or Dogs I like. This freedom is limited, however, they cannot say*Like dogs I or *Like I dogs. We will see that

W 1.6 and W 1.7 I N T R O D U C T I O N 3

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the word order of the major elements of English sentences has become, with a few exceptions, more rigid over time but that many basic patterns of modern English syntax were already established by Old English times.

The lexicon of a language is the list of all the morphemes in the language.

In linguistic terminology, a lexicon differs from vocabulary or a dictionary of a language in that it includes not only independent words but also morphemes that do not appear as independent words, including affixes such as -ed, -s, mis-, and poly- and bound forms like the -clude of include, exclude, and preclude, which appear only as parts of words and never as independent words. The lexicon of a language is much less obviously structured and predictable than are its phonology, morphology, and syntax. It is also much more susceptible to outside influences.

One of the most remarkable features of English today is the great size and diversity of origin of its lexicon. The following chapters discuss how and when this great change in the English lexicon took place.

Semanticsis the study of meanings or all the meanings expressed by a language. It is the relationship between language and the real world, between the sounds we make and what we are talking about. Like all other aspects of language, meanings change over time. There are a number of ways to classify types of semantic change, none of them totally satisfactory. In this book, we identify the following kinds of change:

■ generalization and narrowing

■ amelioration and pejoration

■ strengthening and weakening

■ abstraction and concretization

■ shift in denotation

■ shift in connotation

Generalization and Narrowing Generalization is extension of meaning to cover wider semantic areas. For example, the Indo-European root bhares- meant

“barley” (and is in fact the ancestor of the English word barley). But the Latin descendant of this root, far, could be used to mean cereal grain of various types and thus is the source of our word farina, a fine meal prepared from any cereal grain. Narrowing, a more common type of change in English than generalization, is a restriction in the range of meaning(s) of a word. An example of narrowing would be the English word mead, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented honey. Its origin is the Indo-European root medhu-, which referred to both honey and mead; because English has the word honey to refer to the unfer- mented fluid, the meaning of mead can be narrowed to refer only to the fermented product.

Amelioration and Pejoration Amelioration, or a change to a more favorable meaning, can be exemplified by the English word croon, borrowed from the Middle Dutch word kronen. In Middle Dutch it meant to groan or lament, but in English it means to hum or sing softly. Pejoration, the opposite of ameliora- tion, is a change to a more negative meaning. For example, the English word fool

W 1.9

4 C H A P T E R 1

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comes from the Latin word follis, which originally meant only“bellows” but came to mean“windbag, airhead,” that is, a fool, a pejoration that passed into English when the word was borrowed. Another example of amelioration can be seen in the word blast. It used to refer only to wind and now can refer to good times. We also see pejoration with the word blast, which can now mean“explosion.”

Strengthening and Weakening Strengthening, or intensification of meaning, is relatively rare. One example is the word drown, from the same root as the words drink and drench. Because of the universal tendency to exaggerate, weak- ening of meaning is much more common than strengthening. Two of the many possible instances of weakening between Old English (OE) and Present-Day English (PDE) are OE sona “immediately”, PDE soon; and OE cwellan “kill, murder”, PDE quell.

Abstraction and Concretization Abstraction occurs when a specific, concrete meaning changes to a more abstract meaning. For instance, OE hæþen once meant simply, “one dwelling on the heath,” but because of the association of heath with wilderness and lack of civilization, the term heathen acquired its pres- ent more abstract meaning of “irreligious, unenlightened, uncivilized.” Another example of abstraction can be seen in the word bedlam, which was originally the name of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London that housed lunatics. Now, it means a situation in disarray or a general state of chaos. Concretization is the reverse process; as an example, one could cite the Indo-European root albho-, which meant “white.” One of its reflexes (more modern versions) is OE ælf, PDE elf, a change in meaning from the abstract quality of whiteness to an instance of something concrete that has this quality.

Shift in Denotation A shift in denotation occurs when the real-world refer- ence of a word changes. For example, OE clud meant “rock, hill,” but its PDE descendant is cloud. Computer and technology terms have caused shifts in deno- tation. The words desktop, mouse, and cell all have different meanings since the technology boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

Shift in Connotation Shifts in connotation are similar to amelioration and pejoration but are not necessarily confined to simply positive vs. negative. Instead, the term refers to the entire set of associations that one makes to a word in addition to its literal sense. For example, in the lofty and dignified OE heroic poem Beowulf, after Beowulf and the dragon have killed each other, Beowulf’s people prepare a solemn and majestic funeral for him. During the preparations, they must dispose of the dragon’s corpse. The poet describes their actions as dracan ec scufun, wyrm ofer weallclif “moreover, they shoved the dragon, the serpent over the cliff.” Scufun is from the verb scufan “thrust, push.” The PDE verb shove still means “to push,” but the verb is no longer used in such dignified contexts; we would scarcely say that after Adam and Eve had been banished from Paradise, the angel shoved the gates shut. Another word in this same line has undergone a

I N T R O D U C T I O N 5

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dramatic shift, involving both narrowing of meaning and, to a lesser extent, a shift in stylistic level. Wyrm, glossed here as “serpent,” is the ancestor of PDE worm. Its PDE meanings, including its use as a contemptuous term for people, date back to earliest OE, but in OE it could also mean“dragon, serpent, snake,”

even in the most elevated contexts.

Graphicsas a linguistic term refers to the systematic representation of lan- guage in writing. A single unit in the system is called a grapheme. A single grapheme may represent a sound (e.g., the English letters d and l ), a syllable, an entire word, or meaning itself with no correspondence to individual words, syllables, or sounds. (See Chapter 3 for a more in-depth discussion of graphics.)

All of these various systems of language—phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, semantics, and even graphics—interact in highly complex ways.

Changes within one subsystem can produce a chain reaction of changes among the other systems. For example, in the history of English, a sound change that entailed the loss of final unstressed syllables of words drastically affected the morphology of English by eliminating most English inflectional endings. This change in the morphology meant that the relationships among words in a sentence could no longer be made clear by inflectional endings alone. Hence word order, or syntax, became much more crucial in distinguishing meaning and also much more rigid. At the same time, prepositions became more important in clarifying relationships among the parts of a sentence. New prepositions were borrowed or formed from other parts of speech, as was the case with except and during, thus adding to the lexicon of the language. Previously existing prepositions were ex- tended in use and meaning, thus creating syntactic and semantic change. For in- stance, the word to, which in Old English was simply a directional preposition or an adverb, took on many additional, primarily grammatical meanings, such as indicating an infinitive (to have, to worry) or even a kind of possession (the words to a song). Ultimately there was even a graphic change that distinguished the preposition from the adverb; the former retained its original spelling to, but an extra letter was added to the adverb too.

Interactions can also take place in the opposite direction. For example, when the grapheme þ (representing /T/ or /ð/, the initial sounds of think and they) was abandoned and replaced by th, some words which were previously spelled with th but pronounced /t/ came to be pronounced /T/. This is what happened to the proper name Arthur, formerly pronounced as if it were spelled Arter. Here a graphic change—the loss of the letter þ—brought about a phonological change, minor though it was.

All Natural Languages Are Conventional and Arbitrary

All natural languages are both conventional and arbitrary. By natural language, we mean a language that is spoken or written by humans for everyday communication. The rules for natural languages come about organically. Natural languages are different from formal languages used in the fields of logic, mathematics, and linguistics, and constructed languages such as Esperanto, a language that comprises many of the world’s languages and is meant to function as a

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mutually intelligible second language. If the conventions are violated, communication fails. To take a simple example, English conventionally categorizes eating utensils as forks, knives, and spoons. A single English speaker cannot whimsically decide to call a fork, a spoon and a knife, a kiuma, a volochka, or a krof. On the other hand, there is no particular reason why a pronged eating implement should have been called a fork in the first place; the French do nicely calling it a fourchette, and German speakers find Gabel quite satisfactory. The relationship between the implement itself and the sounds used to refer to it are purely arbitrary.

All Natural Languages Are Redundant

Natural languages are also highly redundant; that is, the same information is signaled in more than one way. Redundancy may be either external or internal to language. If I make a face and point to food in a dish as I say, “I hate tapioca pudding,” my distorted face signals the same thing as the word hate, and the pointed finger indicates the same thing as the phrase tapioca pudding. The face- making and finger-pointing are examples of external redundancy. Internal re- dundancy can be illustrated by an utterance like He is a man. Here the subject is signaled twice—by its position at the beginning of the sentence before the verb and by its form (he instead of him or his). Singularity is signaled four times:

by he (not they), by is (not are), by a (instead of no article at all), and by man (not men). Masculinity is signaled by both he and man. Third person is signaled by he and is. Animate noun (a noun that refers to people, animals, and living beings) is signaled by he and man. Finally, the fact that this utterance is a state- ment and not a question is indicated both by word order (compare Is he a man?) and by intonation (if the utterance is spoken) or punctuation (if it is written).

Few utterances are as internally redundant as this somewhat unlikely example, but a certain amount of internal redundancy is essential to all language in order to counteract the effects of potential ambiguity.

All Natural Languages Change

Finally, all natural languages change. Because they change, they have histories.

All languages change in different ways, so their histories are different. The history of a given language is the description of how it has changed over time. The history of English is the record of how one dialect of West Germanic has changed over the past fifteen hundred years.

Events in language history are harder to define than most events in political history. Theoretically, a history of the English language could consist solely of statements like the following ones.

■ On October 17,A.D. 784, Ecgfrith, son of Osric, used a dative him instead of an accusative hine as a direct object while speaking to his foster-brother Healfdane.

■ Margery Fitzroy began pronouncing city with the major stress on the first syllable in 1379 after hearing her cousin Joanna, who was from London, pronounce it that way.

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■ On April 1, 1681, the pretentious young clerk Bartholomew Drew, while preparing a treatise on vinegar-making, decided that the English phrase

“by drops” was inelegant and so paraded his learning by coining the adjective stillatitious from the Latin verb stillare.

Even assuming that we could retrieve and document such events, isolated examples of individual behavior like these are not historically significant in and of themselves. “Events” in the history of a language consist not of isolated devia- tions or innovations by single speakers but rather of changes in overall patterns or rules, changes that are adopted by a significant portion of the speakers of that language.

C H A N G E S I N L A N G U A G E What Is Language Change?

Because all language is systematic, the history of any language is the history of change in its systems. By change, we mean a permanent alteration. Slips of the tongue, ad hoc coinages that are not adopted by other users of the language, and

“new” structures that result from one person’s getting his or her syntax tangled in an overly ambitious sentence are not regarded as change. Ephemeral slang that is widely used one year but that has been abandoned five years later occupies a kind of no-man’s-land here; it is indeed part of the history of the language but has no permanent effect. Examples of ephemeral slang include the bee’s knees, the skinny, glad rags, give you a jingle, back in a jiffy, grody, have a cow, and cool out.

Changes in language may be systematic or sporadic. The addition of a vocabulary item to name a new product, for example, may be a sporadic change

Metaphorical Doublets

All language and all languages use metaphors extensively. They may be obvious, like the foot of the bed, or much less obvious, like lighthearted. What is perhaps surpris- ing is that, regardless of the language they speak, people tend to invent the same metaphors over and over. English has many metaphorical“doublets,” pairs of expressions of which one is a colloquial, even slangy, native formation and the other is a more dignified, borrowed term from Latin, but both originating as metaphors using the same semantic associations.

For instance, assail is from Latin assilire‘to jump on’; compare this with the breezier English to jump all over someone. Delirium comes from Latin delirare“to be deranged” and ultimately from de ‘away’ þ lira ‘furrow, track.’ That is, one who is delirious is off the track, off his trolley. The Latin loanword (word borrowed from another language) punctual, from Medieval Latin punctualis“to the point” is completely parallel to English on the dot. Incur (Latin incurrere) has the same meta- phorical origin as run into. The notion of understanding as being a kind of seizing by the mind is reflected in both comprehend (from Latin com‘together’ þ prehendere

‘seize’) and native English grasp.

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that has little impact on the rest of the lexicon. Words like Kleenex, Xerox, and Chapstick, however, have indeed become part of the lexicon.

Even some phonological changes are sporadic. For instance, many speakers of English pronounce the word catch to rhyme with wretch rather than with hatch.

In their dialects an isolated sporadic change has occurred in the distribution of vowels—parallel words such as hatch, batch, match, or scratch have not undergone the change.

Systematic changes, as the term suggests, affect an entire system or subsystem of the language. These changes may be conditioned or unconditioned. A conditioned systematic change is brought about by context or environment, whether linguistic or extralinguistic. For many speakers of English, the short e vowel (as in bet) has, in some words, been replaced by a short i vowel (as in bit). For these speakers, pin and pen, him and hem are homophones (words pronounced the same). This change is conditionedbecause it occurs only in the context of a following m or n; pig and peg, hill and hell, middle and meddle are not pronounced alike by these speakers.

An unconditioned systematic change is one for which no specific condi- tioning factor can be identified. An example is the tendency among many speakers of American English to move the stress of bisyllabic words from the second syllable to the first, as in pólice, défense, and ínsurance. We can speak vaguely of a general historical drift of English to move the stress toward the beginning of the word, but the fact remains that English today is characterized by variable stress placement; indeed, many words are distinguished in pronunciation primarily on the basis of differing stress (such as píckup/pick úp; pérvert/pervért, áttribute/attríbute).

We cannot explain the change from políce to pólice as reflecting a simple underly- ing rule that all words should be stressed on the first syllable.

In simplest terms, all change consists of a loss of something, a gain of something, or both—a substitution of one thing for another. Both loss and gain occur in all the subsystems of natural languages. For example, over the centuries, English has lost the distinction between long and short vowels (phonological loss), between dative and accusative cases (morphological loss), the regular inver- sion of subject and verb after an adverbial (syntactic loss), the verb weorðan (lexi- cal loss), the meaning“to put into” for the verb do (semantic loss), and the letter ð (graphic loss). English has gained the diphthong represented by the spelling oi (phonological gain), a means of making nouns like dropout out of verb þ adverb combinations (morphological gain), a distinction between past perfect (I had painted my room) and past causative (I had my room painted ) (syntactic gain), the word education (lexical gain), the meaning of“helper” for the word hand (seman- tic gain), and the distinction between the letters u and v (graphic gain).

Loss may be absolute, as exemplified by the loss of h before l, r, and n (Old English hlude, hring, hnutu; Present-Day English loud, ring, nut), where the h (aspiration) simply disappeared. Other loss may be the result of a merger of two formerly distinct units, as when Middle English [x], a heavily aspirated h-like sound, collapsed with /f/ in words like tough, rough, and enough. Such a merger is sometimes called fusion.

Similarly, gain may result from the introduction of an entirely new unit;

an example is the addition in Middle English, cited above, of the diphthong

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oi through such French loan words as joy, poison, and joint. Or the gain may result from the split of a single unit into distinct units. For instance, Middle English discret(e) underwent both semantic and graphic splits to become mod- ern English discrete and discreet. Such a split is sometimes called fission.

Losses and gains, especially in phonology, morphology, and syntax, are normally considered irreversible but occasionally are only temporary. For example, several dialects of American English had lost the phoneme /r/ except when it appeared before a vowel but now once again have /r/ in all positions. (Although in some areas of the United States of America, fort and fought still sound alike).

Conversely, the use of do as a marker of the simple indicative (as in Shakespeare’s The cry did knock against my very heart) was added in Early Modern English but has since disappeared.

All changes, whether major or minor, conditioned or unconditioned, disrupt a language, sometimes rather violently. But any living language is self-healing, and the permanent damage resulting from change is usually confined to the feel- ings of the users of the language. Many people deplore the recent introduction of hopefully as a sentence modifier, but the English language as a whole is none the worse for this usage. Similarly, the distinctions in meaning lost through the abandonment of the now nearly extinct subjunctive mood are today made through adverbs, modal auxiliaries, and word-order changes.

Change occurs at different rates and times within the subsystems of a language. A new loan word may be introduced and become widely accepted within a period of a few days, as with the Russian loan sputnik in 1957. In the twenty- first century, electronic and wireless communication has changed the way we sometimes represent words in writing. For example, in SMS language (text messaging), the sentence“I have a question for you” is “?4u.” Changes in phonology, on the other hand, operate much more slowly than isolated changes in lexicon. For any given speaker, a change in a pattern (rule) may be instantaneous, but for the total community of speakers it sometimes takes centuries for comple- tion. The loss of aspiration in such words as which, whip, and white began perhaps as long as a thousand years ago and is still not complete for all dialects.

In sum, for all natural languages, change is both inevitable and constant; only dead languages (languages with no native speakers) do not change. Because change is constant and has always been so, there is no such thing as a“pure” or a“decadent” language or dialect. There are only different languages and dialects, which arose in the first place only because all languages change.

The history of the English language, then, is the record of how its patterns and rules have changed over the centuries. The history of English is not the political history of its speakers, although their political history has affected their language, sometimes dramatically, as was the case with the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Nor is the history of the English language the same as the history of English literature, even though the language is the raw material of the literature. Indeed, the nature of any language influences its literature and imposes certain limitations on it. Compared to other languages, English is difficult to rhyme in because of its stress patterns and the great variety of syllable endings.

However, because of its stress patterns, English, unlike French, lends itself easily

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to alliteration. Any language with a literary tradition and extensive literacy will be affected by that literature. Grammatical structures originating in writing are transferred to the spoken language. Vocabulary items and phrases introduced in literature enter the spoken language. The written tradition tends to give rise to concepts of correctness and to act as a conservative influence on the spoken language.

Why Does Language Change?

Three basic principles govern spoken language development. Articulatory ease refers to the facility with which a particular sound can be made. In general, consonant clusters over the centuries have reduced (such as the /hr/ in Old English) to a single consonant. In the case of /hr/, it reduced to /r/. Auditory distinctiveness means the difference between a sound and other sounds such that it is intelligible from them. Gestural economy means that if a language has a particular sound such as the /t/ in“tie,” it is likely to have other sounds made with the tongue tip, such as“die” and “nigh.” Sounds evolve in particular patterns, a concept that we will pursue in discussions of phonology in later chapters. These principles govern spoken language. Before the dawn of the technological boom of the late twentieth century, most language change took place in the spoken language before it moved into writing, as spoken discourse is widely believed to have primacy over the written.

Electronic means of communication are affecting the way the written language change. For example, widely used abbreviations are becoming standard.

We might say that three principles govern changes in written discourse: universal access to the medium (as almost everyone now owns a computer and/or a cell phone), speed of communication, and a lack of recognized authority. As we see in workbook exercise 7.3, the use of written language by uneducated speakers led to some very consistent patterns in misspelling. Writings on the Internet by people who don’t write for a living makes misspellings (such as signifigant for sig- nificant) almost routine. The speed of exchange is also a factor. Whereas before it would take weeks to send a letter, we expect instantaneous responses to email, thus placing a premium on speed rather than accuracy in grammar and spelling.

There is also no recognized authority governing language in commercial use, over the Internet, and via cell phones. The Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA) are examples of insti- tutions that offer guidelines for writing in the humanities, but there are no such agencies actively policing language used commercially and technologically.

From one point of view, it is strange that human beings speak so many languages and that these languages undergo any changes at all. Other human ac- tivities are identical and unchanging everywhere—all human beings smile, cry, scream in terror, sleep, drink, and walk in essentially the same way. Why should they differ in speech, the one aspect of behavior that is uniquely human? The answer is that, whereas the capacity to learn language is innate, the particular language that anyone uses is learned. That is, the ability to learn languages is universal and unchanging, but the languages themselves are diverse and con- stantly changing.

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Given that learned behavior can and often does change, what are the forces that trigger change? Three principles govern language changes in speaking and writing: least effort, analogy, and imperfect learning.

One explanation for linguistic change is the principle of least effort. Accord- ing to this principle, language changes because speakers are “sloppy,” and they simplify their speech in various ways. Accordingly, abbreviated forms like math for mathematics and plane for airplane arise. Going to becomes gonna because the latter has two fewer phonemes to articulate. Intervocalic t becomes d because, first, voiced sounds require less energy to produce than voiceless sounds, and, second, the speaker does not have to switch from voiced to voiceless and then back to voiced again in a word like little. On the morphological level, speakers use showed instead of shown as the past participle of show so that they will have one less irregular verb form to remember.

The principle of least effort is an adequate explanation for many isolated changes, such as the reduction of God be with you to good-bye, and it probably plays an important role in most systemic changes, such as the loss of inflections in English. However, as an explanation for all linguistic change, it has shortcom- ings. How exactly are“difficulty” and “ease” to be defined? Judging by its rarity among the languages of the world and by how late English-speaking children master it, the phoneme /T/ (the first sound of think) must be difficult to articulate and hence highly susceptible to change. Yet it has survived intact throughout the entire history of English. Further, many changes cannot be explained either by basic communicative need or by a principle of least effort. An example is the development in Middle English of the extremely complex system of definite (the) and indefinite articles (a, an) in English, a system that is the despair of so many foreign learners of the language. Old English got along nicely with no indefinite article at all and with a form of that as both demonstrative and definite article.

Many languages today (e.g., Russian, Chinese, and Japanese) have no articles. The principle of least effort by itself simply cannot explain the rise of articles in English.

Another explanation for language change is analogy. Under analogical change, two things or rules that were once different become identical or at least more alike. The principle of analogy is closely related to the principle of least effort;

analogy is one way of achieving least effort. By analogy, a speaker reasons, usually unconsciously, that if A is like B in several respects, then it must be like B in other respects. If beans is a plural noun naming a kind of vegetable and has the singular form bean, then peas, which also names a kind of vegetable, must also be a plural and must have the singular form pea. (Historically, peas, or pease, was an uncountable singular noun; cf. the nursery rhyme “Pease porridge hot,” which means simply “hot pea soup.”)

Analogy can operate at all levels of a language. On the semantic level, many people use the word livid to mean “bright,” especially bright red, as in anger.

Though historically livid means “pale,” its sound association with vivid has led to analogical semantic change. Even spelling may be affected by analogy. The word delight historically contained no -gh-, but acquired these letters by analogy with such rhyming words as light, fright, sight, and might.

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