1. Check out this link to hear some of my thoughts on this project and its methods. It was an amazing experience and I hope you all get a chance to try a passion project some time.
2. And follow the link to check out my Final Product. I have compiled the biggest points of interest that I found into a website to try to organize things in a useful format for other ESL teachers to use.
3. I have recorded a quick video with some of the ideas and questions. If your just tuning in and looking for something to pique your interest, check out my TEDTALK style video.
And with this, my project draw to its conclusion. I just want to thank you all for coming on this journey with me. I hope you have enjoyed it, learned something new, or at least found it mildly interesting. There are lots of places you can go to further your learning. LangFocus is a great YouTube resource. He explores many great language related topics and I used his material many times through out this project. CrashCourse also has a host of youtube videos that deal with history. They have a few good tidbits of information on languages. If podcasts are your thing, check out this History of English series. If reading is your thing, check out this site on Brittonic. And if none of those options work for you, you can always just Google it yourself and do your own exploration. Have fun with it and best of luck to you!
This week I have decided to look
at some online resources and see what ideas people think that make English difficult
to learn or teach and then look at how these ideas relate to what we have
studied and learned. Some of the issues may have even been explained already. First
I’m going to look a list from Insider titles 11 reasons the English languageis impossible to learn
Contranyms (find a big list here)
are words that are their own opposites, like clip. You can clip things
together, or you can use scissors to clip things apart. The word means both to separate
and hold together. Or bolt, to secure or to flee. Or fast which is quick or
stuck in one place. Some of these contranyms spring from the same origin as the
second item on this list: homographs. These are words that are spelled the
same, even said the same sometimes, but have different meanings. Like bat, or
bow. This duality in the English language comes from… you guessed it… the fact
that English is essentially 4 or 5 languages smashed into one, churned about
and spat out into some cohesive singularity. Sometime one work from one
language sounds like another in a different language, but has a different,
sometimes opposite meaning. This leads to a plethora of homonyms, homographs, contranyms,
and many other dualities in the language that make English difficult to learn. In
some cases, these words were created from the great vowel shift (GVS) when two
words that once sounded different, one of them shifts to sound like the other. For
example, cleave "separate" is from Old English clēofan, while cleave
"adhere" is from Old English clifian, which was pronounced
differently. Yet others come from the ability of English to turn a noun into a
verb. As English is lacking in most inflective forms, changing a noun into a
verb in the present tense is often just a matter of using the noun as a verb
exactly the way it is. officially this is called denominalization. This is most
often the case with verbs for adding/taking away “noun.” For example, dust. You
can dust bread with flour, which is to add flour, or you can dust the furniture,
which is to take away the dust. Both verbs coming from the noun “dust”. In this
way dust is a contranym.
Next, idioms make no sense. Idioms
make any language difficult to learn. Every language has them and they are notoriously
difficult to understand unless you are a native to the language or had the
idiom explained to you a number of times. This is simply an issue of history. Idioms
come from historical situations. This would be something like “fly by the seat
of you pants”. We understand it but who really knows the history of it. It actually
comes from the early days of avionics when a pilot flew with few navigational
aids other than his eyes. He controlled the plane with the sick that came up
from between his legs at “the seat of his pants”. So, it was to fly without
direction or assistance. Every language has these phrases. There was a phase I heard
when learning Portuguese that goes “tira a cavalinho da chuva.” That is “take
your little horse out of the rain.” Take a moment and try to figure out what it
means. If you asked to do something and I said, “take your little horse out of
the rain,” what would you think I was telling you. It’s difficult to figure out,
isn’t it? Until you know the history. In brazil, when the horse was the main
mode of transportation, when someone was visiting someone else, they would
saddle up their horse, and, assuming they were planning on a short visit, they
would leave their horse tied up outside and saddled. If it began to rain, they
might wish to wait out the rain for a dry ride home later. they want to go home
but can’t. they have hope. The host may say, “give up on this idea of going
home, the rain won’t stop. Take your poor little horse out of the rain and stay
here for the night.” Now try to guess what I’m saying. It is often used by
parents when a child is bugging them for something in that “PleasePleasePleasePleasePlease”
way that kids do. A parent may say “take your little horse out of the rain,
stop asking, give up hope, its not going to happen.” This all goes to show that
language has a history and understanding that history is key to learning it. Check
out this cool site that helps find the meaning and history of parses. English is even more prone to using idioms due to the periphrastic structures
we incorporate into our language. Where inflected languages generate meaning by
manipulating a word, English has a habit of using entire phrases to give meaning.
For example, in Portuguese sera is the future form of be. In English, we say a
whole phrase “Is going to be.” This familiarity with using phrases for single
meaning makes English very suitable to incorporation of idioms.
The article
mentions the I before E except after C… rule. Merriam webster made a fun jingle
to show just how good of a rule this is.
I before e,
except after c
Or when sounded
as 'a' as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'
Unless the 'c'
is part of a 'sh' sound as in 'glacier'
Or it appears
in comparatives and superlatives like 'fancier'
And also except
when the vowels are sounded as 'e' as in 'seize'
Or 'i' as in
'height'
Or also in
'-ing' inflections ending in '-e' as in 'cueing'
Or in compound
words as in 'albeit'
Or occasionally
in technical words with strong etymological links to their parent languages as
in 'cuneiform'
Or in other
numerous and random exceptions such as 'science', 'forfeit', and 'weird.'"
You can see in
this jingle, just how many of these exception words are loan words like glacier
and seize from French, and Latin or French based words (cue) that have had the Germanic
-er, comparative form added. Loan words and mixed forms from so many languages
has muddied this rule to point where it can hardly be considered a rule.
Straight from the article, “"Though,"
"through," "thorough," "thought,"
"tough," and "trough" all mean different things and are
pronounced differently. Six letters, apparently infinite combinations.” This
one I am not going to disassemble as thoroughly… see what I did there? All
these words are Germanic but remember, OU was one of the sounds greatly affected
by the GVS and very unevenly. Let’s look at the old English version of these
and you may see how different words became more similar through the
effects of the GSV. Ha, did it again. In the same order as presented above
thēah, thurh,
thuruh, thōht,
tōh, trog.
You can see
that while similar they are distinctly different. that would be the GVS hard at
work coupled with a bit of laziness in English speakers leading to dropped consonant
sounds at the ends of words.
The article mentions that words
can change meaning depending on which syllable is stressed. You see this with
items like ADDress and addRESS. Putting the emphasis on the second syllable makes
it a verb instead of a noun. This is actually very similar to a lot of other
languages. However, in many other languages, there are indicators within the
language that help with this pronunciation. For example, in Portuguese, the
word medico means to medicate and médico means doctor. In this case they are
pronounced the same, but the emphasis is placed on a different syllable,
indicated by the accent (meDIco and MEdico).
The article mentioned irregular plurals
such as oxen and children, which I addressed in my post about Scandinavian influences.
It also mentioned silent letter like silent K (knight) and silent
P(pterodactyl). This I addressed in my last post. In Germanic and Latin languages
these sounds are still pronounced. If you can recognize the language, they come
from you can start to understand why they are there. Last the list mentions the
case of pronunciation such as "mischievous" is often pronounced
"miss-chee-vee-us," but the correct way is "miss-chiv-us." This
is not totally accurate and is simply a case of different accents. When learning
English if you pronounce it either of the ways, people will understand and likely
wont think anything of it.
That concludes
this list. I really wanted to go through more lists, but I spent far too long
on this one already and my schedule right now does not afford me much allowance.
To be honest, a quick scan of other lists shoes that most of them talk about
the same issues. The majority of big issues I have addressed here and in some
other posts. I look forward to pulling all of this together into one nice a succinct
piece of work in the weeks to come. I hope you enjoy the conclusion!
This week I
looked at something that wasn’t in my original plan. The great Vowel Shift
(GVS). A couple times in my research I came across this phrase and I began to
wonder what it was. The GVS, simply put was a phenomenon that occurred between
the 15th and 18th century. Many other languages have undergone
vowel shifts, but what made the GVS so unique was the scale that it affected
the language and the apparent lack of reason. Where other languages shift one
or two vowels over time to change the language, the GVS comprised a shift in
almost every single long vowel sound to a more forward on the palate. To get an
idea of what that means, you can take a look at this video. Its rather dry in
terms of cinematic value but what it lacks in excitement and action, it makes
up for in education and understanding.
You can see
that the diagram indicates where sounds are made, being high or low in the
mouth and forward (left) and in the back (right), with diphthongs being shown
in the middle as they slide between different sounds. The GVS shifted the
entire set up and forward. It started with the highest vowels shifting to be diphthongs.
This opened up space for the rest to shift. Its unclear whether this was a push
shift or a pull shift. Pull shift being that the diphthongization (I don’t think
that’s actually a word but I’m going to use it) of the upper two monophthong
vowels left a vacuum that the other vowels shifted up to take. A push being that
the other vowels shifting up happened simultaneously and pushed the upper vowels
out to be diphthongs. This shift changes entirely the way English was
pronounced such that Chaucer, being from just before the GVS and Shakespeare,
being from after, while speaking the same language with almost the same syntax,
would have been neigh unintelligible to each other.
You can see
here a nice concise summary of the effects of the GVS. Describing the sounds of a vowel
through writing is a difficult thing to do. Inherently, the sounds a vowel makes
are a personal interpretation affected by your own experiences, dialect, mother
language, etc. It is, therefore, neigh impossible to explain in writing the
effects of how the GVS affected the language. It easiest for you to hear. Check
out the video below as Simon Roper
goes through a few phrases and demonstrates the way a shift can happen over generations.
The
reasons for the GVS is not known but primary ideas on the subject indicate that
it may have been caused by a number of factors. First would be that, when the Norman
ruling class (which speak French remember) lost their holding in France, the
noble men had to rely on their English holdings more. This caused them to incorporate
English more into their language repertoire. As the affluent upper class began
speaking accented English, the lower class emulated them for prestige cause a
vowel shift. Another idea is that the plague, black death, which was rampant during
this time, caused the mass migration from rural areas to urban centers. This
was a time when most people worlds consisted of the area they could walk to in
a day, or ride to if they were fortunate enough to have a horse. This means
that regional dialects often formed. When all these dialects collected into
urban centers there was mass melding of languages causing the vowel shift and a
plethora of accents in cities like London. Last, is the idea that the hundred
years war which was actually more than 100 years, caused a great deal of
resentment towards the French. As tensions and resentment grew, a distancing
from France, French and all things related occurred. In this case the vowel
shift occurred as a conscious or partially subconscious need to separate. The history
guy explains this part of the GVS very well in this video.
Now, I know you may be asking, “How
does this make English difficult to learn? It’s just pronunciation.” Well, it wouldn’t
be a problem, except that the shift happened over such a long time and in a
variety of different locations separately, that shifts were not adopted uniformly
leading to pronunciation not being uniform with spelling. English is unlike
some other languages for that. Take Spanish and Portuguese for example. The languages
are really easy to read because spelling and pronunciation coincide with each other
(I’m only going off what I have heard about Spanish here because I don’t
actually speak the language, but Portuguese I can say this with some certainty.)
English is not so. Look at the diphthong “EA” for example.
EA was
pronounced “e” like in met. (meat was said like met). A small shift makes it become
eh as in “Canadian eh?” now meat would be said like Mate. Another shift and it
became the long vowel sound meat as it is today. However, some words got stuck
along the way so words like steak, while maintaining the same diphthong remained
with the eh sound. This is just one of many examples. Read (the past form) is
an example of a word where the vowel sound didn’t shift. This fills English with
a whole host of words that have similar spelling with different pronunciation.
We know shifts
have happened in other languages so you may wonder why English has so many
inconsistencies and other languages don’t. when other languages have had these
vowel shifts, they are often accompanied by an updated standardization of writing.
So, as a very astute observer noted in a conversation forum on English Language
& Usage “what made the pronunciation stray so far from spelling in English was not the
Great Vowel Shift; it was the absence of the accompanying Great Spelling
Update.” This creates a very confusing disparity for many English language
learners. Sadly, there is no easy way to overcome this but to practice. In some
cases, recognizing if a word is a loanword from another language will help with
recognizing the pronunciation but not always, as loan words acquired before the
vowel shift will often have shifted vowels and loan words picked up after will not.
Hey guys. This week I was planning to do some research into "The Great Vowel Shift". However, due to my work load and an unfortunate trip to the hospital, I have decided to postpone the investigation until next week. I hope to see you all there!
This week I
looked at the influences of French on the development of English. By the eleventh century England had developed
many languages from the proto-European language, faced invasion from the Scots,
the Picts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Scandinavians, and converted
from a collection of polytheistic religions to the roman catholic religion,
each leaving it’s mark on the English language. In 1066 they faced yet another
invasion. William the conquer came to England from Normandy and, after killing
the Norwegian and Danish contenders to the throne from the north, he instituted,
like many conquers before him, his language (a dialect of French) as the
language of the courts. That is to say, law, administration, and high society. Latin
remained the language of church, religion, and education. This is the reason we
have two different words for animals and animal meat. A butcher was low caste
and often spoke English. They used words like cow, swine, deer, and such animal
names. When selling to the upper class they were called beef, pork, and venison,
all derived from the French words for the animal. Likewise, a peasant lived in
a house, while a lord lived in a mansion. There was a very confusing and
involved story to the invasion that led to the battle of hasting, one I’m not
sure I entirely understand. For my objectives though I don’t have to, but if
your interested check out this 10 minute history lesson.
Other than including
a bunch of loan words from French which lead to a plethora of synonyms in English,
French affected English in a host of other ways. Most notably was the addition
of affixes such as -ment, and -able. These French affixes we added to native
old English words (hinder to hinderance). Some loan words kept their French affixes
while native words did not, creating some confusion. Some examples here are words
like refugee, payee, and devotee, all using the -ee affix. This was not
uniformly adopted throughout the language, generating just one more of those inconsistencies
that English is famous for. To compound the confusion, native affixes were
applied to French loan words. For example, the word covet is of French origin,
yet the past form is coveted, -ed being a Germanic affix. Loan words muddy the
linguistic waters of English and this can be seen in words like choose, which
is of native English origins. The related noun ‘choice’ is of French origin. This
inconsistent adoption of forms makes English very unique and inconsistent. There
are even cases of loan words supplanting native words. Often in this case, the
native word and the French word meaning deviate to form two similar but
different words. For example, colour is a French based word. Hue was the Germanic
equivalent and the two were used interchangeably until the 1600’s when hue took
to describing specific quality, shade, tinge, or tint of colour. Isabel Roth
does a good job of explaining some of this in her article Explore theinfluence of French on English
French also
changed the way things were written. Scribes began to use c to represent both “s”
and “k” sounds, and the “u” sound was often represented as a “o”. this is why
words like son sounds like sun. something I found interesting was that is more
on topic with writing than with French, the cursive writing of this time both
in English and French, also changed the way words were spelled. Where a u was
not well discernible from two e’s or maybe part of an “m” or any host of other
letters, u was often changed to an “o” in writing. For this reason, we have
words like “Love” where the o makes an “uh” sound. just check out this picture of the word minimum and you will see a perfect example of why o was used instead of u. try to find the "u". you can do it but its hard
Conjugation of
verbs began to use the weak conjugation for past adding the -ed or -t as in
loved or spent. Most strong conjugations from old English faded to favor the
weaker forms due to French influence. However, a few of the old strong
conjugations survived, such as shake, shook, shaken and sink sank, sunk. Find out
more here.
Starting in
1204, an English French rivalry kicked off and over the next hundred and fifty
years and by the time of Chaucer in 1343, English was the official language of England,
but it was no longer recognizable as the English of olde (we’ll add the e to
give that extra olde tyme feel). The melding of old English and Norman French had
been so complete that it didn’t even seem to be a mixed language. It is a mixed
language and as a language made from mixing 5 different languages (Brittonic, Anglo-Saxon,
Scandinavian, Latin, and French) it is chalked full of synonyms with a rich
vocabulary capable of expressing the finest nuances of meaning.
While looking
at the topic of French influence I came across an idea that I have heard before
but never understood. That is “The Great Vowel Shift”. I’m not sure what it is
but I think it may have something to do with the disparity between
pronunciation and spelling. I think I will look into this next week. I hope you
will join me for the adventure. Until nest time!
Back at it
again! This week I started off looking at the influences of French on English before
I realised that I missed a step. I was assuming that Jutes, Angles and Saxons,
speaking a Germanic language would have the same contributions as the Norse
language and almost skipped them. This would have been terrible as I have since
discovered that the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons spoke west Germanic where the Nordic
and Scandinavians spoke north Germanic. While the two languages are both Germanic
and closely related, they do have some important differences and influenced English
in some big ways.
So, continuing
from the west Germanic invasion, Scandinavian contact with England really began
in 787. During that time there was an overpopulation in Scandinavia (including
modern day Norway Sweden, Finland, and Denmark). They dealt with the
overpopulation by drawing lots. Those selected were cast out. It is likely these
were the people responsible for raiding England costal regions. If you are interested,
you can find out a bit more here.
In 866, after large scale conquest by Ivar the boneless and Guthrum, King Alfred
handed over all the land east of Watling Street (a road running from London to Chester)
to the Danes. This area was then under Danish control and was know as theDanelaw. The Danes brought their culture
and language and continued to rule in north and east England until 1066, with
the Normand invasion. For a short time, in 1017 to 1035, England was actually entirely
under the rule of Danish kings. You can learn more about that here.
Danish culture
was unique in what they brought as they did not force the natives off the land
but assimilated them. The Danes were looking to settle and so the Nordic languages
were not reserved only for the elite but were practiced by the entire citizenry,
which worked side by side with the locals to work the land. Because of this,
the influence of the north Germanic languages on English is unique. Unlike many
other invasions that brought new languages, the language was not only for the
highly educated and elite of society. Because of this many of the loan words
taken from them are basic and used in everyday usage. In fact, even the word
loan is a loan word from Scandinavian! Due to the mutual intelligibility of old
English (being west Germanic) and old Norse (being north Germanic), with Scandinavians
and Saxons inhabiting the same part of England, for communication purposes they
likely chose words that were cognates or very similar within the two languages.
For this reason, when looking at a breakdown of English words (subtracting
French and Latin words, only looking at Germanic rooted words), 50% had
cognates in both old English and old Norse, while 36% were found only in old
English and 14% only in old Norse. The relations are so similar that actually
argue that English may actually be a North Germanic language instead of a West Germanic
language. Langfocus does a very good job of actually cataloguing and explaining
the relation between the two languages. Check out his video and channel.
The similarities between the two languages are so similar that it is not a
problem to read this paragraph with old Nordic words thrown into the mix
[A note on
the letter þ: the Old Norse letter, called thorn, makes the same sound as the
“th” in “thin”.]
Traust me, þó
(though) it may seem oddi at first, we er still very líkligr to use the same
words the Vikings did in our everyday speech. Þeirra (their) language evolved
into the modern-day Scandinavian languages, but þeir (they) also gave English
the gift of hundreds of words.
You can find
this original paragraph here along with some other fun sentences and old Norse cognates.
Some other
aspects of the language that were pulled into the language inconsistently include:
1.The development of the sound sk. You can see
this in words that have the hard K sound such as sky, skin, scrape, and whisk. In
the West Germanic language, the same sounds were palettized to make a softer sh
sound like fish and ship.
2.You can also see Scandinavian influence in the
retention of the hard g and k sound, as in kid, get, give, and egg
3.The Germanic diphthong ai sounding or becoming
like ei as in reindeer. This can cause differing pronunciation for phonemes that
may be spelled the same way.
4.The use of by for towns. This is seen extensively
in England with names like Thornby, Denaby, Aby, Crosby, Earby, Thornaby, Kirby
Cross, Hemsby seen throughout the lands that were once the Danelaw.
Norse was not only included using
loanwords. It also affected the syntax, structure, and grammar. The pronouns
they, their, and them are all Scandinavian. In old English, they were hÄe,
hiera, him. The words both and same, which have pronominal uses are also of Scandinavian
origins. You can see that while some pronouns were adopted, others were not,
making English pronouns a bit messy. And to make the language even messier, English
adopted the present plural form of the verb ‘to be’; Are. So, we have eom
(became am) and is, from the west Germanic language and then replace eart(2nd)
and sind(plural) from old English with are from the north Germanic languages.
Syntaxis
differences can be seen by relative clauses without pronouns. An example of
this is could be “the man (whom) we saw at the library yesterday.” The ‘whom’
is optional, the use of which harkens to the old English form and the absences
of which stems from the north Germanic syntax. In a similar way, the omission
of the conjunction ‘that’ is also Nordic in nature. I.e., I didn’t know (that)
she was married. The use of shall and will to show future tense comes from old Norse
as well as the use of genitive before nouns (Jerry’s car instead of the car of Jerry’s.)
Some
of the changes incorporated from old Norse made the language change from a Synthetic
language with inflection to a highly analytic language. This is really just a
fancy way to say that a lot of information was lost from words. for example, in
some languages the verbs are conjugated to show tense, gender, plural or
singular, and other similar information. This can be seen easily with the Portuguese
verb ‘ser’ (to be) which has 64 different forms (you can check out this siteto see them. It’s in Portuguese
but its pretty self explanatory). Compare this to the English verb ‘to be’
which has 8 forms (be, am, is, are, was, were, being, been) 8 forms for English
is actually a lot because the verb to be is actually irregular. Most verbs only
have 5 forms (the root, 3rd person singular, present participle,
past and past participle). Because of this, word order and preposition become
very important to the English language.
All of this is
discussed in much more detail here and here. I
encourage you to check them out.
As
if the Nordic language hadn’t already made enough of a mess of English, we also
adopted the use of some odd plural forms rather inconsistently from old Norse
like the -en forms. For example, children, oxen, and brethren. English also
adopted the north Germanic syntax of placing verbs before the object. Preposition
stranding is another aspect of old Norse that we took. That is, prepositions at
the end of sentences without the noun that would usually follow. Last is split
infinitives. That is placing negatives adverbs between the ‘to’ and the rood
verb. For example, “to slowly swim” has an adverb between to and swim. Some of
the examples that Langfocus uses in this video can be seen below.
You can see
that old Norse had a huge effect on English that I almost missed. There are
many parts of the language that were inconsistently adopted into English that
can make the language very confusing to a student trying to learn or a teacher
trying to explain. Next week I will be looking at the French influences. I’ll
hope to see you then.
This week I looked at the most
obvious and one of the most influential languages on English. That is, the Anglo-Saxon
language. English is technically classified as a Germanic language. This is
because our grammar structure, pronunciation, and lenition are most heavily
influenced by the Germanic Anglo-Saxon language from which it officially sprung.
In my pervious research into Latin influences I learned that, although Latin
was brought to the British Isles by the Romans, after roman occupation ceased, Latin
mostly died out and a native Brittonic based creole with Latin loan words.
With
the withdrawal of roman protection, Brittonic England was at constant threat
from the scots and Picts from the north. Rumor has it that in the late 5th century, a Celtic
warlord Vortigern invited men from the north Germanic tribes of continental Europe
to settle in the east of England. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes brought with
them the Germanic language with them to the islands, the language that would
become English (check out this site for more information). Even the word
English has its roots in the word Anglo. Germanic is a synthetic language which
is slightly inflected. Inflection is the process of combining prefixes and
suffixes with a base word to match or communicate tense, number, gender, and
other linguistic items of a similar nature. Sentence structure was loosely defined,
and word order was very free. This is something that was carried over into English
that makes it difficult to learn. English has borrowed word order from many
other languages and incorporated them into a structure that was already loosely
defined. This is why rephrasing something in English can be done using almost
the same words as an original sentence just changing the word order and some
inflection. It is difficult to say how the Germanic language influenced English
because it is the base upon which the other was built. Check out this site
where Dr. Vishwanath Bite analyses a segment of Saxon or old English text. It is
readily apparent just how similar the two are. This is the reason why German
and English are so similar. They even sound similar in some cases using words
like ‘und’ and ‘and’. Sentence structure is similar and even, if you listen to
the sounds of the exaggerated accent from Saxony, Germany, you can hear how the
rounded vowels and dropped consonant sounds makes one sound more like the
other. Check out this video here (or see below)where DontTrustTheRabbit tries to explain the accent.
Also, check out my new video here for my genius hour project