Nadelyn Pichardo Perkins Ling 100 800 4 11 13 History of the English Language Roman Empire ancestors of the English people Northern Germanic tribes Romans tried to conquer did not succeed Germanic peoples are barbarians winners write the history Tribes spread throughout Europe went to British Isles Angles Saxons Jutes encountered Celtic people languages Some influence in English from Celtic languages not much Roman conquest of southern Britain 44 BC BCE some influence from Latin not much First written version of English runic alphabet based on axe writing With influence from the continent eventually the Roman alphabet was adopted gradual shift kept a couple of runes until just before Shakespeare 800 AD CE written version Beowulf War tribal structure supernatural weirdness SVO lots more morphology than we currently have cases different set of pronouns N Adj Adj N overlaps much better with German even modern German clearly a Germanic language 900 1100 AD CE Scandinavian empire building Vikings Adopted Scandinavian pronouns some vocabulary sk sky skirt ski 1066 AD CE Norman conquest Normans speaking Middle French Romance language descendant of Latin descendants of northern Germanic tribes Almost a complete overlap of patterns from Romance Germanic Romance Construction of the building Surgeon general osculate poultry Steak beef veal poultry caviar copulate defecate urinate Germanic Building s construction General surgeon kiss Chicken hen rooster chick Cattle cow bull calf Duck drake duckling Sheep ram eggs fuck Shit crap piss Sociolinguistic s power relations Cat s dish dish of the cat Preference for keeping Germanic constructions with Germanic vocabulary and Romance constructions with Romance vocabulary Hemisphere semicircle keep Greek with Greek and Latin with Latin Roman Empire had been standard of civilization power Latin remained scholarly power language throughout middle ages more borrowings from Latin mostly religious candle vestments pope bishop priest Standardization started primarily with the importation of a printing press William Caxton late 1400s spell write so that everyone can read Prescriptivism don t split infinitives rule for Latin don t end sentences with prepositions Latin don t use double negatives Aristotelian philosophy Grk rule they is only plural Latin rule They gender neutral singular or plural If a student wants to improve their his her grade they s he have to come to office hours British Empire contact with lots of languages borrowings pajamas kudus Language Reconstruction best guess Pronunciation poetry helps What s supposed to rhyme with what eth es Rhythm iambic pentameter apostrophes syllable structure stressed unstressed distinctions Proto Indo European hypothesized language that is the ancestor of all Indo European languages Reconstruct comparatively 1 Eliminate borrowings tsunami 2 Find cognates hound Hund 3 4 Find patterns in sound correspondences write phonological rules 5 Make sure we have regularity because irregularity suggests a problem in the Identify sound correspondences reconstructions dog Hound Hund chen chien perro can canis kion svan PIE voiceless something place everywhere fricative stop Cat Katze matz chet gato felino felis gale kwh PIE gwh Milk Milch domel le leche lactis PIE voiced something alveolar something oral something more data Philology 1800s Ferdinand de Saussure Internal reconstruction only one language Milk cow construction mom dad kid child osculation tsunami hari kari Dog hound Hund sobaka perro canus chien PIE voiceless stop fricative aspiration many places of articulation Cat Katze koshka gato felis chet kwh PIE kwh Milk Milch moloko leche lact lait PIE voiced something need more data