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 

Week 2 - Latin and it's Influences on English

 

Last week, when I started researching, I found that the old Brittonic languages didn’t really influence English in many ways. This week I looked at what I assumed would be the next historical addition to the English language. Latin. In 55 and 54 BC, Julius Caesar landed in Britain. Eventually he was pushed out and almost 100 years later, romans would once again invade. In 43 AD romans invaded again and between then and the fifth century they would come to conquer most of England, Wales, and parts of southern Scotland where the Hadrian Wall was built. More on this history can be found here. With Roman civilization came the roman language, Latin. I was always interested in roman history and I always assumed that this bringing of Latin to England was the reason why English has so many Latin-based words. I was wrong.

Original picture from here

In the early fifth century, Rome abandoned Britain. While administration was done using Latin, many of the administration was roman and so left with roman occupation. The general population at this time spoke the Britannic language and continued to speak it even throughout roman rule. Unlike other places in Europe in what is now modern-day France, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium, which were some of the earliest conquests outside of the Italian peninsula, Britain was not firmly under roman rule for long. Some words and structures were likely adopted but it wouldn’t be until later in time when Latin would merge with English.

In places like France, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium, which was under Roman rule for longer, Latin was adopted, and a form of vulgar Latin was spoken. This vulgar Latin would merge and develop with local dialects to form the romantic languages Portuguese, French and Spanish. This vulgar Latin gave them some of the key differences from English.

Where Latin had masculine, feminine and neuter forms, vulgar Latin had only the binary system of masculine and feminine. Definite articles were adopted, often by truncating Latin pronouns, these becoming articles such as French le and la, Portuguese o and a, and Spanish el and la. In vulgar Latin there was an increased need for preposition use.

“Loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntactic purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in number, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish donde, "where", from Latin de + unde, or French dès, "since", from de + ex, while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese desde is de + ex + de. Spanish después and Portuguese depois, "after", represent de + ex + post.”    

original text here

Ultimately, all of this is just showing that English is different from the romantic languages and does not really explain much about the inconsistencies and irregularities that are within English. What I found that was of the most use here is the idea of the copula. One of the inconsistencies (or in this case consistencies) that shows up in English is actually different form most other languages is the verb “to be.” In English we have a single verb to be. As you are all reding this in English I assume you know how and where we use the verb in all of its forms. In many other languages there are two verbs for “to be.” There is the state and the existence. Many other languages have a form of the verb for a transitionary or non-permanent state and one for the permanent state. For example, in Portuguese you can say “eu estou feliz” (I am Happy). Happy is not permanent. 10 minutes from now you can be sad. They use the verb estar for this. There is another verb for something permanent. That verb is ser. For example, you could say “eu sou um homen.” (I am a man) in English we use to be for both.    

At this time in history, Latin influences on English happened in the Germanic root on continental Europe. The Germanic tribes were often in close contact with Roman trade. Many words were adopted and used. The majority of the Latin influence came with the church. When Christianity was accepted into England the church brought with it, education in Latin. This is why you can see that many Latin words and uses are for religion or scientific topics like medicine, biology, and chemistry. You can see that depending on what topic you are discussing, more or less Latin-based words will be used. This use of two languages, one for every day use and the other for education lead to a lot of duplicate meaning words. You can find more information on this here and here.

In modern day people are generally of a higher education than back in the fifth century and you can see how the Latin educational language is incorporated into English. Watch this video here or below and you can see how you can speak English with almost no Latin-based words, but it sounds strange and foreign, maybe even a bit archaic.   

There is still some research left to do on Latin influences, but I will look into this more when I get to the conversion of England to Christianity. For now, I will continue forth next week to look at the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England and how the Germanic language influenced English and follow along the history of the English language as you can see below.    

Week 1 - Native Brittonic Language and Its Contributions

 

This week, as per my timeline, I looked at the native language of England and I realised, there is a lot of jargon that goes with linguistics. Al large portion of my time went into the not so simple process of learning some of the jargon I would need to know that goes hand in hand with learning linguistics. Words like lenition, sonority, spirantized, rhotic tap, etc.

Lenition held some of the most surprises that could be useful for understanding the English language. For example, when languages evolve, vegetation and altitude play a role in that evolution. I found this very surprising. It seems that there is a correlation between temperature and language with warmer temperatures being related to more sonorous speech. In simple terms, this is the warmer it is, the more voiced and long sounds there are. However, this relation flips when that warm climate is accompanied by dense vegetation. The theory is that in open terrain, with moisture in the air voiced and long sounds that tend to make the more lyrical languages functions well. In a cold climate, where moisture and heat are a problem, shorter time spent talking means less heat and moisture loss that would lead to the mouth feeling dry and problems like cracked lips. In dense vegetation sound is dampened and so plosives travel better. A plosive is when you block air flow while talking and let it explode out. This is done with English sounds like ‘b’, ‘t’ and ‘p’ (anything that Trudeau might label as speaking moistly). Altitude plays a similar role for similar reasons. At high altitudes where atmosphere is thinner and sound doesn’t carry as well, plosives and hard sounds travel further and better than sonorous ones. For this, many languages that evolved at high altitudes or dense vegetation tend to sound harsher and more forceful with more stops. For example, a lot of the romantic languages have a sonorous sound to them as Latin, Spanish, and French developed in a warm land that was not dense jungle at a relatively low altitude. Languages such as German, Danish, Swedish, and a lot of the east Asian languages developed at high altitudes and/or dense jungle. Some of the harsher sounding African languages were developed in mountainous or jungle regains. However, I kept my focus to European and neighbouring areas that could have influenced English, so I did not look closely at these areas. I would be curious to look at the native languages of south America as the continent is (or was) mostly jungle or mountains but that will have to wait for another time.

Influences on lenition may be important later but I won’t know until I do more research. For now, I stuck to the native languages to Britain, England, and the area, as this is the birthplace of English. Three languages broke off from the parent native language and dominated the area that would become England. These became Brittonic which covered the majority of England, Welsh which was spoken in what is now wales, and Cornish which was spoken in the southern most part of England, what is now Cornwall and Devonshire. Welsh is the only surviving language spoken today and probably gives the greatest clues as to how old Brittonic sounded and was structured. It was similar to the old Irish and Goidelic dialects and featured periphrastic forms, inflected prepositions, VSO typology, and dependent and independent verb forms. Some of these forms are reflected in English and some are not.

Periphrastic forms seem to be adopted into English but not regularly. This is one of the features of the language that makes English hard for English language learners. The simplified explanation of what periphrastic form is would be the use of multiple words to make one meaning. I say this was not regularly incorporated into English as you can see both being used. For example, I can use the inflected form lovelier, or I can use the periphrastic form more lovely. It can also be seen with verbs such as converse. You can use the full verb, to converse, or you can use the periphrastic light verb alternative to have a conversation. This is inconsistent through the language and can be done using verbs like give, take, and have.

Inflected prepositions are contractions of prepositions and personal pronouns. It would be the equivalent of saying ‘toyou’ as one word (probably changed to sound better together and make it more distinctive) instead of ‘to you’. Another real example of this could be the Portuguese form comigo which springs from the contraction of Latin ‘cum’ (with), and ‘me’ (me). In Latin this would be mecum, but the principle applies.  This does not seem to be incorporated into English as you can see, we do not combine our pronouns with prepositions. I’m not sure yet where this comes from.

VSO typology was also a part of the language that was not carried forward. This is verb-subject-object order. Speaking like this is understandable in English and is, in technicality, grammatically correct… but it makes you sound like Yoda. This is the sentence structure that looks like "eats john, the food”. It is awkward and is almost never used in common English.

Tag questions are one of the few contributions from old Britannic than I remember students having issues with when I was a teaching English in brazil. A tag question is the shortened question form the takes the form, aren't I?, isn't he?, won’t we?, haven’t they, would you?. This is in contrast to German (nicht wahr?), French (n'est-ce pas?), and Portuguese (Nao e?), all of which are constant and can be used with almost any preceding statement. This varying form used in English is almost identical to welsh, the nearest surviving relative language to old Brittonic.  

There are many structures and forms that I could talk about here and many more that I don’t know or understand enough about to explain them. after much research into the Brittonic language, I found that many scholars agree that Brittonic did not contribute much to modern English as it is today. Contribution largely seems limited to toponyms such a geographical words and a few lexical constructs. The silent b at the end of words such as bomb and comb seem to have its roots in old Brittonic. Periphrastic forms and question tags seem the most likely contribution from Brittonic that could cause English learners’ difficulties.

In conclusion, after much research into the native languages of England, I am forced to conclude that the Brittonic languages of the native played very small role in the development of the English language. From here, and for next week, I would like to look into the invasion of Latin into Brittonic territory and the effects of Latin on the language, which I am thinking will be vast. Hope to see you next week!  

Looking at this tree we are currently on the trunk of the tree where the Celtic languages split from the trunk. 

Welcome

Welcome all to my Genius Hour Blog.

I have never done one of these before so I invite you to join me on this adventure! Back in 2014 I met a wonderful Brazilian girl. It was the typical story. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy follows girl back to her country... boy needs money to live.

My dream had always been to teach and I had been planning to head out of country to teach English. Having a fiancé from another country was convenient for my plans. I set about securing a job in Brazil teaching English and learned Portuguese at the same time. It was during this time that I really became interested in languages. As a Canadian from Ontario I was required to study French from kindergarten to grade 9 but at those ages I wasn’t really interested. I wish I had been. Teaching English and learning a second language, I really started to notice that were things I could do with Portuguese that I couldn’t do with English and vice versa.

I learned so much and thought so much about English in my three years of teaching it. You don’t often think about you first language, you typically just use it. It was a challenge when a student would ask me about irregularities in English. Like “why is the plural of plant, plants but the plural of fungus is fungi?” or “Why are there one dog, two dogs, but one moose, two moose?” English is so full of irregularities and inconsistencies that make it incredibly difficult to learn. Portuguese may have a lot to remember to use it but at least it is all structured. English by contrast seems to be like a house built by a half dozen different engineers and contractors that could agree on anything and just did their own thing. Its haphazard and seems to be rather unwieldly from a learners standpoint.

For many years have have wondered, “why is English so full of the irregularities and inconsistencies that make it so hard to learn?” and “would knowing about these help teachers teach and learners learn?” these are questions that I would like to answer. I will start with the first one for now:

Why is English so full of the irregularities and inconsistencies that make it so hard to teach and learn?

I will start by breaking the problem down into smaller questions. Where did modern English come from? What influenced it? What forced the changes? How is English different from other languages? What can you do with it? What can’t you do with it?

At the end of all of this I would like to identify what it is about English that makes it so hard to learn and maybe help ESL teachers around the world to better understand what it is they are teaching. Perhaps if students understand the development of the language, it can help them to understand how to use it more efficiently and fluently.