Farewell

And now, to dot all my Is and cross all my tees:

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! 

Week 8 - Going Through the List

 

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 

original picture from here

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.

original picture found here

               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!

Week 7 - The Great Vowel Shift

 

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 15^th and 18^th 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.   

Week 6 - See You Next Week!

 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!

Week 5 - French Influences on English

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

Original image found here

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!

Week 4 - North Germanic Influences

            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 the Danelaw. 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.

Original photo from 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(2^nd) 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 site to 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, 3^rd 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.

Original photo from here

               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.

Week 3 - Germanic Base

 

    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. 

Original picture and article can be found here

    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 5^th 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