English phonetics diachronic approach. Word-stress. Vowels. Consonants. Vowels(2d lecture)

The Anglo-Saxon Settlement. Little is known of this period with any certainty, but we do know that Germanic invaders came and settled in Britain from the north-western coastline of continental Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. The invaders all spoke a language that was Germanic (related to what emerged as Dutch, Frisian, German and the Scandinavian languages, and to Gothic), but we'll probably never know how different their speech was from that of their continental neighbours. However it is fairly certain that many of the settlers would have spoken in exactly the same way as some of their north European neighbours, and that not all of the settlers would have spoken in the same way.

The reason that we know so little about the linguistic situation in this period is because we do not have much in the way of written records from any of the Germanic languages of north-western Europe until several centuries later. When Old English writings begin to appear in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries there is a good deal of regional variation, but not substantially more than that found in later periods. This was the language that Alfred the Great referred to as ‘English’ in the ninth century.

The Celts were already resident in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, but there are few obvious traces of their language in English today. Some scholars have suggested that the Celtic tongue might have had an underlying influence on the grammatical development of English, particularly in some parts of the country, but this is highly speculative. The number of loanwords known for certain to have entered Old English from this source is very small. Those that survive in modern English include brock(badger), and coomb a type of valley, alongside many place names.

The Scandinavian Settlements. The next invaders were the Norsemen. From the middle of the ninth century large numbers of Norse invaders settled in Britain, particularly in northern and eastern areas, and in the eleventh century the whole of England had a Danish king, Canute. The distinct North Germanic speech of the Norsemen had great influence on English, most obviously seen in the words that English has borrowed from this source. These include some very basic words such as take and even grammatical words such as they. The common Germanic base of the two languages meant that there were still many similarities between Old English and the language of the invaders. Some words, for example give, perhaps show a kind of hybridization with some spellings going back to Old English and others being Norse in origin. However, the resemblances between the two languages are so great that in many cases it is impossible to be sure of the exact ancestry of a particular word or spelling. However, much of the influence of Norse, including the vast majority of the loanwords, does not appear in written English until after the next great historical and cultural upheaval, the Norman Conquest.

3) The Norman Conquest. The centuries after the Norman Conquest witnessed enormous changes in the English language. In the course of what is called the Middle English period, the fairly rich inflectional system of Old English broke down. It was replaced by what is broadly speaking, the same system English has today, which unlike Old English makes very little use of distinctive word endings in the grammar of the language. The vocabulary of English also changed enormously, with tremendous numbers of borrowings from French and Latin, in addition to the Scandinavian loanwords already mentioned, which were slowly starting to appear in the written language. Old English, like German today, showed a tendency to find native equivalents for foreign words and phrases (although both Old English and modern German show plenty of loanwords), whereas Middle English acquired the habit that modern English retains today of readily accommodating foreign words. Trilingualism in English, French, and Latin was common in the worlds of business and the professions, with words crossing over from one language to another with ease. You only have to flick through the etymologies of any English dictionary to get an impression of the huge number of words entering English from French and Latin during the later medieval period. This trend was set to continue into the early modern period with the explosion of interest in the writings of the ancient world.

4) Standardization. The late medieval and early modern periods saw a fairly steady process of standardization in English south of the Scottish border. The written and spoken language of London continued to evolve and gradually began to have a greater influence in the country at large. For most of the Middle English period a dialect was simply what was spoken in a particular area, which would normally be more or less represented in writing - although where and from whom the writer had learnt how to write were also important. It was only when the broadly London standard began to dominate, especially through the new technology of printing, that the other regional varieties of the language began to be seen as different in kind. As the London standard became used more widely, especially in more formal contexts and particularly amongst the more elevated members of society, the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized, as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education. In the same period a series of changes also occurred in English pronunciation (though not uniformly in all dialects), which go under the collective name of the Great Vowel Shift. These were purely linguistic ‘sound changes’ which occur in every language in every period of history. The changes in pronunciation weren’t the result of specific social or historical factors, but social and historical factors would have helped to spread the results of the changes. As a result the so-called ‘pure’ vowel sounds which still characterize many continental languages were lost to English. The phonetic pairings of most long and short vowel sounds were also lost, which gave rise to many of the oddities of English pronunciation, and which now obscure the relationships between many English words and their foreign counterparts.

Colonization and Globalization. During the medieval and early modern periods the influence of English spread throughout the British Isles, and from the early seventeenth century onwards its influence began to be felt throughout the world. The complex processes of exploration, colonization and overseas trade that characterized Britain’s external relations for several centuries led to significant change in English. Words were absorbed from all over the world, often via the languages of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. At the same time, new varieties of English emerged, each with their own nuances of vocabulary and grammar and their own distinct pronunciations. More recently still, English has become a lingua franca, a global language, regularly used and understood by many nations for whom English is not their first language. The eventual effects on the English language of both of these developments can only be guessed at today, but there can be little doubt that they will be as important as anything that has happened to English in the past sixteen hundred years.

The last question for today but not the least is distinguishing two approaches. These approaches are synchronic and diachronic. Synchronic approach studies phenomena of a language comparing them with the same in other languages at a particular period. A synchronic approach analyzes a particular something at a given, fixed point in time. Diachronic approach studies the development of a phenomenon through time and periods. A diachronic approach is one that analyzes the evolution of something over time, allowing one to assess how that something changes throughout history. Approach that we are using in a History of English is diachronic. All the units, phenomena of the language we shall observe diachronically.

And now some questions for you to answer.

1) Can you answer now when the English language began?

2) Why do some people in France still speak the Celtic Language of Breton?

3) What alphabet was used in Old English period?

4) Give 2/3-minute talk on each period historical background.

English phonetics diachronic approach. Word-stress. Vowels. Consonants. Vowels(2d lecture)

No one knows exactly how Old English sounded, for no native speakers survive to inform us. Rather, linguists have painstakingly reconstructed the pronunciation of the language from various kinds of evidence: what we know of Latin pronunciation (since the Anglo-Saxons adapted the Latin alphabet to write their own language), comparisons with other Germanic languages and with later stages of English, and the accentuation and quantity of syllables in Old English poetry. We believe that such reconstruction of Old English pronunciation is reasonably accurate; but some aspects of the subject remain controversial, and it is likely that we will never attain certainty about them. The greatest Old English scholar in the world today might very well have difficulty being understood on the streets of King Alfred's Winchester.

Old English had six simple vowels, spelled a, æ, i, o, u and y, and probably a seventh, spelled ie. It also had two diphthongs (two-part vowels), ea and eo. Each of these sounds came in short and long versions. Long vowels are always marked with macrons (e.g. ā) in modern editions for students, and also in some scholarly editions. However, vowels are never so marked in Old English manuscripts. When we speak of vowel length in Old English, we are speaking of duration, that is, how long it takes to pronounce a vowel. This fact can trip up the modern student, for when we speak of "length" in Modern English, we are actually speaking of differences in the quality of a vowel. Vowel length (that is, duration) is significant in Old English because it does make a difference in the meanings of words. For example, Old English is means 'is' while īs means 'ice', ac means 'but' while āc means 'oak', and ġe means 'and' while ġē means 'you' (plural). The significance of length means that the macrons that appear in the texts you will be reading are not there only as guides to pronunciation, but also to help you decide what words mean. If you absent-mindedly read mǣġ 'kinsman' as mæġ 'may', you will never figure out the meaning of the sentence you are reading.

Do you want to know how it was agreed to pronounce the vowels? Let’s find it in the table 1

vowel	pronunciation	how it should sound	OE examples
a	[ɑ]	as in Modern English father	macian 'make', bāt 'boat'
æ	[æ]	as in Modern English cat	Bæc 'back', rǣdan 'read'
e	[e]	as in Modern English help	Helpan 'help', fēdan 'feed'
i	[i]	as in Modern English feet	Sittan 'sit', līf 'life'
o	[o]	as in Modern English boat	God 'God', gōd 'good'
u	[u] never pronounced like [ʌ]	as in Modern English tool	Full 'full', fūl 'foul'
y		like the ü in German über or Füße	Cyning 'king', brȳd 'bride'
ie	appears mainly in early West Saxon, is difficult to interpret.

Most Old English consonants are pronounced as in Modern English, and most of the differences from Modern English are straightforward:

1. Old English scribes wrote the letters þ ("thorn") and ð ("eth") interchangeably to represent [θ] and [ð], the sounds spelled th in Modern English. Examples: þing 'thing', brōðor 'brother'.

2. There are no silent consonants. Old English cniht (which comes to Modern English as knight) actually begins with [k]. Similarly hlāf (Modern English loaf) and hring (ring) begin with [h], gnæt (gnat) with [ɡ], and wrīðan (writhe) with [w]. Some Old English consonant combinations may be difficult to pronounce because they are not in Modern English. If you find this to be so, just do your best.

3. The consonants spelled f, s and þ/ð are pronounced as voiced [v], [z] and [ð] (as in then) when they fall between vowels or other voiced sounds. For example, the f of heofon 'heaven', hæfde 'had' and wulfas 'wolves' is voiced. So are the s of ċēosan 'choose' and the ð of feðer 'feather'.

4. These same consonants were pronounced as unvoiced [f], [s], and [θ] (as in thin) when they came at the beginning or end of a word or adjacent to at least one unvoiced sound. So f is unvoiced in ful 'full', cræft 'craft' and wulf 'wolf'. Similarly s is unvoiced in settan 'set', frost 'frost', and wulfas 'wolves', and þ/ð is unvoiced in þæt 'that' and strengð 'strength'.

5. When written double, consonants must be pronounced double, or held longer. We pronounce consonants long in Modern English phrases like "big gun" and "hat trick," though never within words. In Old English, wile 'he will' must be distinguished from wille 'I will', and freme 'do' (imperative) from fremme 'I do'.

6. This book sometimes prints c with a dot (ċ) and sometimes without. Undotted c is pronounced [k]; dotted ċ is pronounced [ʧ], like the ch in Modern English chin. This letter is never pronounced [s] in Old English. It has a special function in the combination sc (see item 10 below).

7. The letter g, like c, is sometimes printed with a dot and sometimes without. Dotless g is pronounced [ɡ], as in good, when it comes at the beginning of a word or syllable. Between voiced sounds dotless g is pronounced [ɣ], a voiced velar spirant. This sound became [w] in Middle English, so English no longer has it. Dotted ġ is usually pronounced [j], as in Modern English yes, but when it follows an n it is pronounced [ʤ], as in Modern English angel.

8. The combination cg is pronounced [ʤ], like the dge of Modern English sedge. Examples: hrycg 'ridge, back', brycg 'bridge', ecg 'edge'.

9. Old English h is pronounced [h], as in Modern English, at the beginnings of syllables, but elsewhere it is pronounced approximately like German ch in Nacht or ich --that is, as a velar [x] or palatal [ç] unvoiced spirant (pronounced with the tongue against the velum [soft palate] or, after front vowels, against the hard palate). Examples: nēah 'near', niht 'night', þēah 'though', dweorh 'dwarf'.

10. The combination sc is usually pronounced [ʃ], like Modern English sh: scip 'ship', æsc 'ash (wood)', wȳscan 'wish'. But within a word, if sc occurs before a back vowel (a, o, u), or if it occurs after a back vowel at the end of a word, it is pronounced [sk]: ascian 'ask' (where sc was formerly followed by a back vowel), tūsc 'tusk'. When sc was pronounced [sk] it sometimes underwent metathesis (the sounds got reversed to [ks]) and was written x: axian for ascian, tux for tusc. Sometimes sc is pronounced [ʃ] in one form of a word and [sk] or [ks] in another: fisc 'fish', fiscas/fixas 'fishes'.

The system of writing in OE was changed with the introduction of Christianity. Before that the English used the runes. Then Roman Alphabet was used. There were 23 letters. Interesting fact is æ, ð (developed from the rune), Ʒ pronounced like [g] and [j]. The stress in OE was dynamic, and shifted to the first syllable.

Through history V-s displayed a strong tendency to change. They underwent different kinds of alterations: qualitative and quantitative, dependent and independent. Qualitative changes affect the quality of the sound, e.g. [o>a], quantitative changes make long sounds short or visa versa, e.g. [i>i:]; dependent changes are restricted to certain positions or phonetic conditions, for instance a sound may change under the influence of the neighboring sounds; independent changes take place irrespective of phonetic conditions, they affect a certain sound in all positions.

The system of vowels in OE included 7 long[ā ǣ ē ī ō ū ȳ] and 8 short vowels [a æ e i o u y å] (monophthongs); and 4 short [ea eo ie io] and 4 long [ēa ēo īe īo] difthongs.

Various changes in the OE phonology can be called spontaneous, independent and assimilative, influenced by surrounding sounds.

Spontaneous, independent changes are: Gothic ai corresponds to ā; āū to ēa; īu to ēo (example, dāūð – dēað (dead)). These changes occurred irrespective of whatever sounds surrounded the sounds in question.

Assimilative changes occurred in specific surroundings. Incidentally many of the sounds that appeared in the language as the result of these changes returned to their previous quality in the next period. These changes are:

1) Breaking (fracture) – processs of formation of a short diphthong from a simple short vowel when it is followed by a specific consonant cluster.

e →eo, a→ea, æ→ea

(ahta →eahta (eight), nah→neah (near), erl →eorl (earl) etc.)

2) Palatal mutation – back sound (for example a or o) changes its quality if there is a front sound in the next syllable.

(sandian →sendan (to send) sallian →sellan (to sell)).

That was common for diphthongs too. (ea→ie, eo→ie etc).

The reflexes of OE palatal mutation can be observed in Modern English in such pairs as sale- sell, tale-tell, full-fill. And in plural of nouns – fōt – fēt (foot-feet)

3) Diphthongization after palatal consonants sc [sk], c [k], Ʒ [j].

(ex. a→ea scal→sceal (shall), e→ie Ʒefan→ Ʒiefan (give)).

The words beginning with palatal consonants and with non-palatalized vowel represent other dialects.

4)Back or velar mutation. The formula of mutation here reminds very much that of palatal mutation, but the difference is that the syllable that influenced the preceding vowel contained a back vowel – o or u. Not al the dialects had this mutation. So the essence is that

i ˃io (hira – hiora (their))

e ˃ eo (hefon-heofon (heaven))

a ˃ea (saru-searu (armour))

5) Mutation before H

(a, e preceded H →ea, ie→i/y naht – neaht – niht – nieht – nyht (night))

6) contraction (сжатие) h interfered with the development of sounds. When H was placed between two vowels it was reduced and the following changes of vowels occurred:

A+H+vowel→ēa slahan→ slēan (to slay)

E+H+vowel→ ēo sehen – sēon (to see)

And others. The Old German had no contraction, and H is present in corresponding words – in corresponding present-day German words this consonant is still found in spelling though lost in pronunciation.

The quantitative changes were lengthening of vowels before clusters nd, ld, mb – bindan, cild, climban (bind, child, climb). And further development of the sound system led to diphthongization of long vowels and that explains the exceptions in the rules of reading the sounds in the closed syllables in the present-day English.

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