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