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Course Outline

Introduction

We will start by investigating language families and looking at some evidence from cognate languages.  Examples can be found in books such as Millward, Pyles and Algeo and Baugh and Cable. (Full references are in the Course Outline above) These three books are probably the best known and most widely known handbooks for our subject.  If you are 'gravelled' by such things as Grimms and Verner's Law or the Great Vowel Shift these books will give you the answers.  Millward has a friendly format, Pyles and Algeo are especially good on the early stages of the language, and Baugh and Cable is excellent on - well, everything, but - especially the Early Modern period and later.  Baugh and Cable is also particularly useful for its references. 

For lists of words descended from Proto Indo European, and a good discussion concerning reconstruction, see Kathleen Hubbard's site on http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/PIE.html):

Germanic

Grimm's Law (also known as the First Sound Shift)

A series of changes that took place in  the Germanic branch of IE, with the following outcomes:   

Examples:

IE bhrater  Gmc brother  (cf non Germanic Latin frater)

IE abel-   Gmc apple       (cf non Gmc Russian jabloko)

IE kerd-  Gmc heart         (cf non Gmc Latin cord-)

Verner's Law

Not all Gmc words showed the outcomes expected of Grimm's Law, and these 'exceptions' were explained in 1877 by a law discovered by Karl Verner.  This law provides a further step, after Grimm's law, taken by the unvoiced labiodental, interdental and velar fricative sounds (sorry, not all symbols available here) in the context of voiced sounds and a preceeding unaccented vowel 

Examples

IE p*ter   -  Grimm's Law changes it to unvoiced th  - Verner's Law changes it to the voiced sound  (later, and after more changes, seen in Eng. father).  [Here * stands for the ash symbol]

Further examples are hard to find because subsequent changes have largely disguised Verner's Law in modern languages.

Old English (OE)

When the Romans invaded England, the British Isles were inhabited by a Celtic people known as the Britons.  Surviving Celtic languages include Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Irish and Breton (spoken on the West coast of France)

When the Romans left to defend their territories elsewhere, Angles, Saxons, Jutes moved in.  In fact some of them had started before the Romans moved out. See Freeborn pages 12-20 for paragraphs about these early times and how the Saxons, Angles and Jutes came to Britain.  They brought their West Germanic dialects with them.  They are the origins of the English language.

 You can find good links to Anglo Saxon sites on the:

HEL Website

Monks, Literacy and Vikings

 It is frequently said that the English language was only written once Christianity (and monks) came to the country, and in terms of the  subsequent, long-term history of the written language this can be taken as true.  One should not, however, forget that the Romans were a literate people and that many of the more successful Britons (pre-Anglo Saxon natives of England) must have been able to read and write during the 400 years of the Roman occupation, so there was writing in England before there was English writing.  Furthermore,  at least some of the invading Angles, Saxons and Jutes should have known of  the well established practice of runic writing in their homelands (the earliest runic inscriptions found on the continent date from 200AD), although the number of writers may have been small. Runic writings in England date from 400AD, more than a century before the conversion of AS tribes to Christianity.

The best book on Runes that I have come across is *Runes* by R. I Page. London: British Museum Publications, 1987.  The same work may be found as a section in the book *Reading the Past*, also a British Museum Publication.  Many web sites that claim to be about runes are in fact about "fluffy-minded" occult claims, put in their proper place by Page and other scholars who put this sort of thing down as simply   nonsensical.

The Anglo Saxons brought the English language to Britain from around the year 440; Christian missionaries brought writing and also Latin, from 595;  the vikings brought . . . violence and terror. (Don't be taken in by those 'trading posts and peaceful relations' arguments). And then they settled down and let their language (Old Norse) merge with and influence Old English. 

To the many English words with Old Norse roots that we will look at in class, you may like to add the following (from Bryson p45): Freckle, Leg, Skull, Meek , Rotten, Clasp, Crawl, Dazzle, Scream , Trust, Lift, Take,  Husband, Sky.

ASSIGNMENTS

1:  You will each be given  4 words. Using the OED you should look up the history of these words: where they came from origianally (tracing their 'journeys' to Present Day English) and what their previous meanings were. The assignments are to be handed in to me after the presentations. 

2:  Text 91 (Text 62 in old ed):  Write an acceptable MnE version of this texts, make two lists, one of the differences between the language of the text and Present day English, the other of the similarities. Don’t forget to look at Syntax, Morphology, Vocabulary and Spelling. In class we will discuss this task and the characteristics of the language which you found notable or interesting.