History

410/700 – ca. 1100

• 410: Angles, Saxons & Jutes (+ probably Frisians), speaking varieties of West Germanic languages, conquer the British Isles “Germanic Conquest”

• (449: traditional date according to Bede)

• Ca. 700: earliest written documents in Old English

• From 6th century: Christianization

• Irish missionaries

• Missionaries from Rome

• From 8th – 11th century: Viking raids & Danish settlement

• 793: sacking of Monastery of Lindisfarne

• 878: establishment of the “Danelaw” + Danish king

✓ Mainly Germanic vocabulary with some Latin (cheese, wine, etc.)

✓ 3 types of Latin loanwords:

(1) Continental borrowing (butter, monk, street)

(2) Latin via Celtic (chester, port, torr)

(3) Latin via Christianisation (master, relic, preach, grammar)

✓ Only very few Celtic loanwords survived (from the time before English)

✓ Old Norse loanwords

• Intimate borrowing (=everyday vocabulary, words with sk-, k-, g-; even grammatical words like “they/them/their”; not very many but highly frequent)

• E.g. place names with -by; egg, wrong, fellow, die, take, etc.

✓ Runic alphabet

Inflections:

✓ Word order relatively free (inflections)

➔ Inflecting/ synthetic language

• Full inflections, free word order, transparent word-formation

• Adjectives & nouns inflect in 4 cases, 2 numbers, 3 grammatical genders

Ca. 1100 – ca. 1500

External history

• 1066: Norman Conquest (William the Conqueror, Battle of Hastings) àintroduction of Old French

• 11th – 14th century: trilingual England

• French: ruling class

• Latin: clergy

• English: common people (low variety)

➔ Triglossia

• From mid-14th century: English slowly established in various domains

• 1349: language of education

• 1362: opening of Parliament, literary language

➔ English re-established as a high variety

➔ Conquered language survives

✓ Huge number of borrowings/ loanwords from Old French in the field of

• War/military

• Administration/

• Jurisdiction/ law

• Religion/ church

• Fashion

• Social life

Etc.

+ influence of word formation & stress patterns

➔ Up to 10.000 words were introduced, especially after 12th century

➔ around 75% still in use today, but mostly infrequent words

✓ At the end of Middle English: mixed vocabulary with words from Germanic and Romanic origin

➔ as opposed to the mainly Germanic vocabulary in OE

✓ “dialect age”: no generally accepted standard

Inflections:

✓ Breakdown of inflection caused by weakening of final syllables (=Endsilbenabschwächung)

✓ Around 1200: loss of grammatical gender (-> neutral gender; article “the”)

✓ Less flexibility in word order (less inflections)

✓ Start of the GVS (14.-18.Jhd)

➔ Konsequenz der vielen Entlehnungen des ME: große Offenheit des Englischen für weitere Entlehnungen

➔ Synonymreichtum

➔ Traditionelle Wortbildungsmuster verlieren an Bedeutung: Dissoziation des englischen Wortschatzes

Ca. 1500 – 1700/1800

➔ Shakespeare’s English

✓ London dialect = new standard

✓ Emergence of standardized orthography (necessary due to printing)

✓ Main reason for discrepancy between phonemes & graphemes: Great Vowel Shift (raising & diphthongisation of long ME vowels; 14th-18thcentury)

✓ Learned loanwords from Latin & Greek = “hard words” (Beispiel: “debt” from Latin debitum)

à further mixing of vocabulary

✓ Latin & Greek loanwords = sign of education

✓ French, Spanish, Italian loanwords from arts & humanities

Inflections:

✓ Weakening/ loss of inflections further continues

✓ Word order becomes fixed (necessary due to loss of inflections)

➔ Now a mostly analytic language

ca. 1700 – 1900

✓ 1700: “do”-periphrases (interrogative sentences & sentential negation)

✓ 1800: beginning grammaticalization of progressive aspect & present perfect

➔ Establishing the English tense & aspect system, periphrastic constructions (=mit aux. vbs)

✓ Standard British English (RP) becomes non-rhotic

✓ Emergent standard in the US

✓ Borrowings from languages around the world

 Ca. 1945 - today

• fällt unter die Lautgesetze, d.h. er vollzieht sich regelmäßig. Er ist ein spontaner Lautwandel

• Alle mittelenglischen Langvokale werden gehoben oder diphthongiert = qualitativer Lautwandel, der sich etwa zwischen 1500 und 1700 über verschiedene Zeitstufen vollzog z.B.

  
  

Die beiden geschlossenen Vokale /i:/ und /u:/ diphthongieren, die anderen Vokale werden als Folge davon angehoben und lassen eine Lücke unter sich frei, die dann wieder aufgefüllt wird.