Historical Linguistics, Indo-European and the History of English
CLAS/LING 1010
January 25-30, 2012
I. The Main Idea • Noam Chomsky says that language is a biologically based ability.
• It is the ability to create an infinite number of sentences from a finite number of words
and a finite number of rules for combining those words.
• We do not simply memorize sentences and output them mechanically.
• Instead, we can create new sentences to express our novel thoughts.
• But language does not merely exist in the head; it also exists in time and space.
• Now we will examine the history of a language family, Indo-European, its subfamilies
(like Germanic) and its daughter language English.
II. Indo-European and Historical-Comparative Linguistics
A. There is a great deal of linguistic diversity in the world, although it is declining.
• There are about 6900 languages spoken in the world today.
• English has the third-largest number of speakers.
• There are 94 major language families.
• The Indo-European language family is the most widely spoken family in the world, with
2.7 billion native speakers (Sino-Tibetan is second).
• About 350 languages (5%) are spoken by 94% of the world’s population.
• The remaining 95% of the languages face extinction by the end of this century.
B. Why do languages exhibit similarities?
• Language universals. All languages have consonants and vowels. All languages have
ways of indicating the difference between a question and a statement.
• Language contact. When language communities are in close contact, they tend to
borrow words and expressions from one another. French has borrowed weekend, nonstop,
snack from English.
• Genetic affiliation. Two languages may represent distinct dialects of a given ‘source’
language—dialects that have diverged to the extent that they are no longer mutually
intelligible.
C. The most well studied language family is Indo-European.
• In 1786, Sir William Jones observes that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin must be “sprung from
some common source”.
• August Schleicher, a 19th century German linguist, suggests a genetic metaphor for
understanding relationships within the Indo-European ‘family’.
D. What languages are in the family?
• Germanic (Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia)
• Baltic (Lithuania and Latvia)
• Slavic (Poland, Bulgaria, Russia)
• Celtic (Ireland, Wales, France, Brittany)
• Italic-Romance (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Romania)
• Hellenic (Greece)
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• Albanian
• Armenian
• Indo-Iranian (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh)
E. What is the geographic extent of the Indo-European languages?
• They are distributed from the Ireland at the far western end to Assam at the far eastern
end.
• Not all European languages are Indo-European!
F. What is Proto-Indo-European (PIE)?
• PIE is a hypothetical, reconstructed Neolithic language.
• It represents the mother language for all Indo-European languages.
• No written records of PIE exist.
• Our oldest written records of an Indo-European language come from Mycenaean, an
older dialect of Greek, written in a script called Linear B, ca. 1000 BC.
• PIE was probably spoken around 3500 BC.
G. Evidence for genetic affiliation among Indo-European languages comes from the
comparative method
• Examine cognate words (words that mean roughly the same thing and that sound fairly
similar).
• Establish sound correspondences.
• Attempt to describe sounds changes in terms of what happened in the daughter languages.
• Sometimes languages are conservative relative to PIE and sometimes languages are
innovative relative to PIE.
• Examples of the comparative method (consonant correspondences):
PIE Sanskrit Greek Latin Germanic
*septm
‘seven’
sapta
hepta septem sibun (Gothic)
*ped
‘foot’
pad- pod- ped- fot (Old English)
*bher
‘carry’
bhar-
pher- fer- bear (English)
*kwel(kwl)
‘revolve’
chakra
‘wheel’
kuklos
‘wheel’
inquilinus
‘dweller’
hweol (Old English)
‘wheel’
*dheigh
‘to mold (from
mud)’
dhehi
‘wall, dam’
theikhos
‘wall’
figura
‘statue’
dig (English)
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H. Where was PIE spoken?
• Linguists and anthropologists have argued for two distinct homelands.
o A homeland north and east of the Black Sea, on the Pontic-Caspian plain.
o A homeland south of the Black Sea, in modern Turkey.
I. How did PIE spread across Europe and South Asia?
• The Agricultural model o Farmers migrate from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) around 6500 BCE.
o Agriculture supports high population densities, and so there was a wave of
advance of farmers through Europe and South Asia.
o These farmers typically assimilated hunter-gatherer communities and their
languages.
o Evidence: early agricultural sites in Turkey date
from 7500 BCE, prototypes of sheep and goats,
and wheat and barley, existed in their wild state
only in Turkey.
• The Mounted Warrior model (the Kurgan
hypothesis) o Horse-loving charioteers from the Russian
steppes entered South Asia and Europe after
3500 BCE, conquering indigenous people.
o Evidence: Sintashta burial sites (south of the
Ural Mountains) dating from 1600 BC contain
chariot-wheel imprints, show similar burial
rituals to those described in the northern Indian
religious text the Rig Veda (1700 BC, ‘praise
knowledge’).
o I-E languages contain cognate words for axel
(*axs), wagon (*wegh), and wheel (*kwel).
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III. The History of English
A. The history of English is divided into three periods, each of which is initiated by a
historical event.
• Old English: starts with Germanic incursions in the 4th century AD
• Middle English: starts with the Norman Conquest in 1066
• Modern English: starts with the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603)
B. Roman Conquest of the British Isles
• Until about 428 AD, the British Isles were
inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages.
• These peoples were subdued multiple times by
the Romans: Julius Caesar (54 BC), Claudius (48
AD), the Antonine emperors Antoninus Pius and
Marcus Aurelius (ca. 180 AD).
• In 122 AD, the emperor Hadrian ordered the
construction of a series of forts, ditches and walls
to secure Romans against raids by a Scottish
tribe called they called the Picts.
• The wall, now called Hadrian’s Wall, is at the
northern extreme of England; it is 73 miles long.
• Latin was spoken in cities, Celtic dialects in the
country.
• Latin influences: duke from dux ‘leader’, -
c(h)ester from castra ‘camp’, as found in
Dorchester, Leicester, -wich from vicus ‘village’,
as in Greenwich, Norwich.
• The names of the city London and of the river
Thames survive from Celtic.
C. Germanic Incursions (OLD ENGLISH, 450-1066).
• The last Romans abandoned the British Isles in 410 AD to fight against a Gothic invasion
in Rome.
• The Romans left behind a somewhat decadent Romano-British culture, Britannia.
• Into this power vacuum came
Northern Germanic invaders.
• They had originally been invited in
as mercenaries by the British-
Roman puppet government.
• They had a short distance to travel:
by modern roadways it’s about 500
miles from Hannover, Germany to
London, UK.
• The Celts were driven to the
northern and western extremes of
the island, where Welsh, Irish and
Scots Gaelic continued to be
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spoken.
• There were three tribes of incoming Germans:
o Jutes (from northern Jutland in modern Denmark)
o Saxons (from modern Lower Saxony)
o Angles (from modern Angeln, in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein)
established kingdoms in England.
• Frisian, spoken in Lower Saxony, the Netherlands and the Frisian Islands, is essentially
the Saxon language.
• The three tribes established kingdoms in Britannia:
o The Saxons establish Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Middlesex (now part of London).
o The Angles establish Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia.
o The Jutes settled in Kent (modern starting point of channel tunnel, location of city
of Canterbury).
• In the 6th century, Arthur, a British chieftain, fought against these Germanic pagans on
behalf of the Christianized Celts.
• In the 7th century, Rome comes back, “not with a sword but
with a cross”.
o Greek enters English via missionaries sent by Pope
Gregory.
o Words include: bishop, angel, apostle, church.
• In the late 8th century, Danish Vikings (< Old Norse ‘bay
explorer’) begin a series of raids on coastal monasteries
including Lindisfarne, eventually founding settlements.
• Alfred the Great of Wessex (871-899 AD) unites the Angles and
Saxons against the Vikings.
o After subduing the Vikings, he makes a treaty with
them.
o Alfred establishes the Danelaw and unites England.
o The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (9th c.) and Beowulf (8
th c.) date from this period.
• Doublets from Old Norse and English survive, including
shirt/skirt, ship/skipper, shin/skin, shatter/scatter.
• In English dialects from the former Danelaw (Norfolk,
Yorkshire, Cumbria, Northumberland, we find many
Danish words: family names ending in –son, place
names ending in –by (e.g., Derby, Kirby, Bartleby), dialect expressions like yem for
‘home’, common words nay, skill and sky.
• Unlike Middle English and Modern English, Old English contained case INFLECTIONS,
e.g., þam cyninge meant the king (accusative) while þe cyning meant the king
(nominative).
• Word order is relatively free, but becomes more rigid when case endings disappear in
Middle English.
• Here is a sample of Old English, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Notice the two forms
of the name Horsa. What are they?
o Her Hengest and Horsa fuhton wiþ Wyrtgeorne þam cyninge, and his broþur
Horsan man ofslog; and æfter þam Hengest feng to rice and Æsc his sunu.
“Here Hengest and Horsa fought against Vortigern the king, and his brother Horsa
was slain; and after that Hengest and Æsc his brother took the kingdom.”
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D. The Norman Invasions (MIDDLE ENGLISH, 1066-1600).
• In 1066, the Normans (Vikings from Northern France) conquer the Anglo-Saxons under
Harold Godwinson (Harold II) at the Battle of Hastings.
• The Normans subjugate England under the leadership of William, Duke of Normandy
(Guillaume, William the Conqueror).
• William’s second most famous campaign was a property survey: the Domesday Book
(1086).
• The Norman capital is London.
• Most Anglo-Saxons became bilingual in French and English, but French did not replace
English as the language of the Anglo-Saxons.
o Because English speakers become servants to the French conquerors, they borrow
a many basic French words, resulting in doublets. Pig vs. pork, hut vs. cottage,
clothe vs. dress, cow vs. beef, calf vs. veal, sheep vs. mutton, folk vs. people.
o Norman French provides most of the English terms for government and law:
authority, judge, jury, voir dire, prosecutor, government.
o A puzzle: is a word from Latin via French or directly from Latin? Examples:
solid, distribution, exact, grave.
o Some French words are Latinized: descrive, parfait.
o Anglo-Saxon words survive, referring to basic-level categories (body parts, kin
terms). Anglo-Saxon prefixes and suffixes survive, including those found in
drunken, away, neighborhood, writer, friendship, belie.
• Eventually, the French kings become Anglicized; Henry IV (reigned 1399-1413) was the
first monarch since the Norman conquest to give his coronation speech in English.
• The standard dialect is the East Midlands dialect, the dialect of Chaucer (d. 1400).
• During the Middle English period, the invention of PRINTING in England had a great
effect.
o In 1476, William Caxton set up shop in London.
o He published 96 titles, including The Canterbury Tales.
o He spelled words as he pronounced them.
o His spelling system was adopted as the standard.
o Caxton’s system preserves archaic pronunciations to this day, e.g., knight, eye.
o Caxton’s system preserves some pronunciations that existed before the Great
English Vowel shift (1400-1600). Seven long vowel pronunciations are changed;
two vowels become diphthongs or double vowels:
1. [hus] becomes [hous] (older pronunciation preserved by Caxton’s
spelling)
2. [divin] becomes [divayn] (older pronunciation preserved by Caxton’s
spelling)
3. [swet] becomes [swit] (preserved by Caxton’s spelling)
4. [gos] becomes [gus] (preserved by Caxton’s spelling)
5. [name] becomes [neym] (preserved by Caxton’s spelling)
• The most famous work from this period is Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1343-1400) The
Canterbury Tales.
o It is a series of tales told by various pilgrims on their way from London to
Canterbury to visit the church in which St. Thomas Becket was murdered.
o It is cynical about religious authority and relies on vernacular (rather than high
flown English).
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E. The English Renaissance (MODERN ENGLISH, 1558 to the present).
• During the Renaissance (16th century return to Classical arts and letters) and
Enlightenment (17th century philosophical movement), many words are borrowed directly
from Latin and Greek: revert, critic, fortitude, nemesis, pornography (porne +graphein).
• It is difficult to identify our speech with that of Shakespeare (1564-1616). Constructions
have changed (Saw you not his ghost?), as well as the meanings of words (Deer meant
forest creature, girl meant ‘young person’, dateless meant ‘endless’).
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