Ling170D | Introduction to Linguistics with Dr.

Getty | Fall 2009

 
Language Variation and Change

Part I
 
From Hudson p. 393: Old English, ca. 1000.  
 
What we now call England has been settled for about 500 years by the descendants of 
Germanic tribal groups living in what we now call the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. 
They were originally invited in the fifth century C.E. by Vortigern, a Celtic‐Roman chieftan, as 
soldiers for hire in his struggle against the Picts, a belligerent tribal group from the north.  
 
They liked Vortigern’s country so much that after they fixed his Pict problem, they invaded it 
themselves. They settled down, converted to Christianity, and modeled their society on a 
remembered Roman model. 
 
 

 
If you stopped someone on the street and read this to them, would they recognize it as 
English?  
 
 
 
 
Late Middle English: 1389 
 
Over three hundred years after England was invaded and colonized by French‐speaking 
aristocrats, along with their clergy and craftspeople, and just after a long period of English‐
French bilingualism and biculturalism is coming to a close in favor of a radically simplified, 
heavily French‐influenced English. 
 
This stage is at the very beginning of a three‐century‐long transformation of the vowel 
inventory of English in what is referred to as the Great Vowel Shift.  

 
 
Early Modern English: 1611 
 
More recognizably modern, showing a more or less final stage of a massive reorganization of 
the inventory of vowel phonemes. The grammar retains archaic features with which modern 
readers, given a cultural attachment to the King James Bible, are still pretty familiar 

 
 
 
How Can This Possibly Be? 
 
How could so much radical change take place over a space of time that is, when held up against the scale of 
human history, still pretty short? How could the language be so fundamentally transformed and still be called 
“English” the whole time?  
 
The Radically Simple Answer: Variation + Interaction + Time 
 
• Variation is constant in language use in all communities and at all times.We vary constantly in our 
pronunciation of various phonemes and which affixes and words we use in particular contexts. 
• We have a genetically endowed but mostly subconscious ability to monitor the statistical prevalence of 
one variant over another in a given setting. 
• Children acquiring their native language(s) are especially sensitive to statistical patterns, and their 
speech tends to reflect and amplify statistical trends in the variation to which they are exposed. 
 
Examples of Ongoing Changes: 
 
• Adverb placement:  
I just hate my hair. I am just tired of my hair. ??I just am tired of my hair. 
 
• Analogical spread of –en affix on irregular verbs:  
I should have taken French. ??I should have boughten milk. 
 
• Northern Cities Shift:  
Raising and diphthongization of /æ/:   had, man,path – con, blog, cough 
Low‐Back Merger (/ɑ/ and /ɔ/):     don vs. dawn, caller vs. collar, tock vs. talk 
 
Simlating Language Change: Eekspeak 
 
You are a speaker of a pretend language, Eekspeak, and you notice that the people in your 
country have different words for a berry everyone likes to eat and make jewelry out of. 
 
• Some call the berry eek, and some call it ook. Still others say ahk or oke, and some really 
weird people, immigrants from a strange land, call it kwid. 
• You will be assigned one of these five variants at random. 
• Get to know your neighbors, learn the names by which they call the berry, and adjust your 
word according to each of the following rules … 
 
Run #1 & #2: 
If you have heard a word that is different from yours in 3 of your last 5 conversations, switch 
to that word! 
 
Royalty #1 & #2 
If you talk to someone wearing a crown, change your word to what they say! 
 
 SOME MORE BACKGROUND
LEXICAL CHANGE
•  Sound change can contribute to the loss of some words (Millward p. 125) and the creation
of new ones.
•  Our words lord and lady started out as ancient compounds, rooted in the ancient art of
breadmaking. Picture semi-nomadic tribes carrying their yeast cultures around with them.

Proto-Germanic (ca. 500 BCE): hlaiba-wardaz ‘loaf guardian’ hlaiba-diga ‘loaf kneader’ **
Pre-Old English (ca. 500 CE): hlaf-ward hlaf-diga
Old English (ca. 800 CE): hlaford hlafdig
Middle English (ca. 1200 CE): laferd lafdy
Early Modern English (ca. 1450): lawerd lady (Original [a] vowel)
Today lord lady

** The root hlaib- was borrowed from one of the non-Indo-European languages the early Germanic tribes
came into contact with. It gave us both loaf, leaven, and lift. The root diga gave us dough.

ENG4820 | Week 7 13
 SOME MORE BACKGROUND
LEXICAL CHANGE
•  Change happens at the periphery of language use (Millward p. 125):
•  Of the 100 most frequently used words in Old English poetry, for instance,
80 are still around. Of the 100 most frequent words in present-day English,
96 were present in Old English. The four that weren’t were imported during
the Norse invasions from the 8th century onwards: are, they, them, their.
•  Sound change can contribute to the loss of some words (Millward p. 125)
and the creation of new ones.

ENG4820 | Week 7 12
 SOME MORE BACKGROUND
LEXICAL CHANGE
•  Sound change can contribute to the loss of some words (Millward p. 125) and the creation
of new ones.
•  Our words lord and lady started out as ancient compounds, rooted in the ancient art of
breadmaking. Picture semi-nomadic tribes carrying their yeast cultures around with them.

Proto-Germanic (ca. 500 BCE): hlaiba-wardaz ‘loaf guardian’ hlaiba-diga ‘loaf kneader’ **
Pre-Old English (ca. 500 CE): hlaf-ward hlaf-diga
Old English (ca. 800 CE): hlaford hlafdig
Middle English (ca. 1200 CE): laferd lafdy
Early Modern English (ca. 1450): lawerd lady (Original [a] vowel)
Today lord lady

** The root hlaib- was borrowed from one of the non-Indo-European languages the early Germanic tribes
came into contact with. It gave us both loaf, leaven, and lift. The root diga gave us dough.

ENG4820 | Week 7 13
 SOME MORE BACKGROUND
LEXICAL CHANGE
In raw numbers, the most powerful forces behind lexical change are (a) cultural change and
(b) differentiation.
CULTURAL CHANGE
•  MORE SO THAN PHONOLOGY OR MORPHOLOGY, WORD CHOICE IS A CONSCIOUSLY ACCESSIBLE PART
OF A LANGUAGE SPEAKER’S BEHAVIOR.
•  Word choice and usage are very supple and efficient tools for defining, declaring, and discerning
membership in culturally defined groups and participation in culturally defined trends, movements,
fads, you name it. Present-day examples: dog
•  During the Old and Middle English periods, Germanic tribal law was gradually displaced by Roman-
inspired common law based on state power and persistent, independent courts of justice. This led to
the death of some core Old English vocabulary: wer-gild ‘compensation for a man’s life,’ mæg-cwalm
‘murder of a relation,’ both concepts that had no reliable equivalent in Roman legal philosophy.
•  Eventually, hundreds of Old English words were displaced by French loans: ϸeod > people (cf.
deutsch, Dutch), wuldor > glory; æðele > noble (re-imported via Yiddish – i.e. German-derived –
family names Edelmann, Edelstein); feorh > spirit.
ENG4820 | Week 7 14
NOTHING WAS EVER THE SAME
For two centuries, French was the language of the upper classes of England,
though the clergy remained more heavily English.
The Normans were also much more advanced than the Saxons in critical areas,
as evidenced by the French loan words that now describe them:
• Warfare (battle, siege, combat, army, defense, treason)
• Building (construction, masonry, castles, buttress, pilar)
• Law (justice, justice, jury, legality, courts, testimony, attorney)
• Government (mayor, officer, judge, council, rule, prince, baron)
• Fashion (embroider, satin, velvet, fur, jewel, adorn)
• Art (paint, color, music, letter, poetry, prose, tragedy, comedy)
• Learning (treatise, logic, music, grammar, substance, manner)

ENG4820 | Week 7 28
 SOME MORE BACKGROUND
LEXICAL CHANGE
The most powerful forces behind lexical change are (a) cultural change and (b) semantic
differentiation.
SEMANTIC (i.e. MEANING) DIFFERENTIATION
• Languages have very few instances of true synonymy – two distinct words with wholly overlapping
usage. Think dinner vs. supper.
• Words are characterized by what are known as ‘semantic fields,’ basically an inventory of different
contexts in which a word may – or may not – be used. Think present-day play:
… to engage in some unspecified amusing activity: Can I go out and play?
… to engage in some known, specific amusing activity: Let’s play Monopoly?
… to repeat a recorded sequence of images or sounds: Play it again, Sam
… to manipulate a muscial instrument: I play the violin.
… as a noun, the act of playing itself: Play is a necessary part of childhood.
… as a noun, a work of drama on a stage: I went to see a play last night.
… metaphorically, to engage in some group activity: Pay-to-play politics
… metaphorically, to use something as if it were a toy: Play on words
… metaphorically, to manipulate a person or a process: They’re playing you like a violin. 15
 SOME MORE BACKGROUND
LEXICAL CHANGE
The semantic field of any given word changes constantly over time, often within a single
generation. Over time, these changes can add up in dramatic ways.
THE STORY OF NICE (Source)

Ca. 500CE Latin nescius ‘foolish, stupid’ (from ne ‘not’ and scire ‘know’ i.e. science)
Ca. 1250 Norman French nice ‘foolish, stupid’ (pronounced [nis], not [najs])
Ca. 1350 English ‘fussy, fastidious’ (narrowing)
Ca. 1450 ‘dainty, delicate’ (amelioration ‘making better’)

At this point, different contextual meanings start piling on…

Ca. 1550 ‘precise, careful’ (narrowing ‘A nice distinction’)
Ca. 1750 ‘agreeable, delightful’ (amelioration?)
Ca. 1850 ‘kind, thoughtful’ (narrowing)
Ca. 1950 ‘agreeable, but not extraordinary’ (pejoration ‘making worse’)

ENG4820 | Week 7 16
NOTHING WAS EVER THE SAME
Norman French loan words often totally displaced their Anglo-Saxon
counterparts, but perhaps just as often, they fell into complementary sets. We
now have many dozens of word consisting of a polite, refined French loan and
a simple, direct, even rude Anglo-Saxon native:
French Loan Anglo-Saxon Native French Loan Anglo-Saxon Native
amusing funny just right
battle, combat fight labor work
courageous bold-hearted nourish feed
deceive lie odor smell
faith belief power might
finish end respond answer
generous giving spirit ghost
inquire ask spouse husband/wife
intelligent smart strange weird
ENG4820 | Week 7 29
How Language Change Works

Take the example of the simple past and past participle forms of irregular verbs. Over time,

Older, conservative Innovative form

form
Stage 1: Form A help ~ halp ~ holpen
Stage 2: Form B first appears help ~ halp ~ holpen help ~ helped ~ holpen
Stage 3a: Form B extends to the rest of its
paradigm
Stage 3b: Form A and Form B ‘compete,’
possibly for centuries, possibly without a
help ~ halp/helped ~ holpen/helped
‘winner.’ Forms can be (a) in free variation
with one another or (b) become linked with a
certain region, town, socioeconomic class,
ethnic group, a particular style of speech, etc.
Stage 4 (Sometimes!): Form B takes over help ~ helped ~ helped

Each word has its own history. Compare the development of step (stop), ache (oche), help (halp), and
grow (grew, now with growed in some dialects):

1200 | 1300 | 1400 | 1500 | 1600 | 1700 | 1800 | 1900 | 2000

step <------>

ache <------------>

help <---------------->

grow <-------------?

(Source)
A team of scientists (Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, and
colleagues in Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics) have
claimed that English verbs are regularizing over time in a mathematically precise way: inversely
proportional to the square root of their usage frequency. In other words, a verb used one hundred times
less frequently than some other verb will become regular ten times as fast.

ENG4820 | Week 8 Lecture Notes Spring 2009 Page 9 of 13

ƒ In a standard printed dialect, commercial and political forces can be as powerful, if not even 
more powerful, than the purely linguistic and population‐driven factors that influence 
language outside of written culture: 
o The political and bureaucratic elites of London crave uniformity and predictability, and 
their increasing sophistication fuels an insatiable demand for documentation, publication, 
and archiving of laws, procedures, and processes.  
o These needs had already led, in the decades leading up to the popularization of the printing 
press, to the development of a standardized dialect in the Royal Chancery, the 
recordkeeping hub of Parliament and the royal court. 
o The dialect choices made by the chancery scribes fed into the language of the early printing 
industry. Some examples we still use every day (Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia, p. 41): 
 
Chancery Standard:  Other dialect forms: 
 
such  sich, sych, seche, swiche 
not  nat 
but  bot 
gaf (‘gave’)  yaf 
through  thurh 
 
ƒ Book printers need to make money, and in a dialect landscape as diverse as that of England in 
the 15th and 16th centuries, this means that London, as the commercial and political center of 
the country, becomes both a melting pot and a hub.  
o The printers blend together the many dialect influences present in London, avoiding 
anything too particular to any one dialect.  
o Their activity becomes a channel through which this blended dialect is broadcast to 
surrounding areas. 
o The commercial and geographic landscape of England – with its one throbbing center, 
London – made it very different from other European societies such as Germany, Italy, or 
Spain, which had multiple centers of influence (for instance, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich 
in Germany).  
 
V  THE BIG CHANGES 
 
V.A  The Great Vowel Shift, Whatever That Was 
 
ƒ Around 1350, some people start pronouncing the word tide without the final <e>, so [thid]. 
ƒ Around 1450, no one pronounces the final <e> any more, but people are starting to pronounce 
the vowel as if it's a diphthong: [thIjd] 
 
Think back to the Eekspeak Game, only this time you’re a child born in London around 1450… 
 
ƒ You use your genetically endowed ability to statistically model the speech you hear around 
you, and you notice that about three quarters of the time, you hear [thid], otherwise sometimes 
[thIjd].  
 

ENG4820 | Week 10 Lecture Notes Spring 2009 Page 9 of 14

 o How do you construct your abstract mental representation of this word?  
Is it /tid/ or /tIjd/? 
o Definitely /tid/, with a rule thrown in to realize the vowel as /Ij/ every once in a while. 
 
ƒ If you're a child born in the same place in 1475, you hear [thid] roughly half the time, [thIjd] the 
other half. What abstract mental representation do you construct? Flip a coin, and throw in a 
rule to get you the other variant.  
ƒ Now it's 1500, and you're hearing [thIjd] about 75% of the time. Your abstract mental 
representation will be /tIjd/, with a rule thrown in to realize the vowel as /i/ every now and 
then. 
ƒ By 1555, only old people say [thid]. The Great Vowel Shift has begun.  
 
 

In language after language, vowel inventories tend 
to remain symmetrical. If a phoneme shifts out of 
its place in the inventory, a neighboring phoneme 
tends to shift in to replace it, creating another gap 
which is then filled by a third shift … 

 
 
This view only makes sense from a distance of three hundred years and with decades of 
academic research. To the people on the ground at the time, it would simply have seemed 
that there were many different pronunciations in play. The  major shifts start happening 
around the time that people are starting to think and write about what a standard English 
should look and sound like, but this massive reorganization of the English phoneme 
inventory mostly escapes their attention.   

ENG4820 | Week 10 Lecture Notes Spring 2009 Page 10 of 14

V.B  Grammatical Verbs 
 
The mental ‘lexicon’ of a speaker of English (or any language) has three main compartments in it.  
 
• An exclamatory compartment, used only for storing words like Ouch! Shit! Woah! 
• A purely lexical compartment with words for objects, people, characteristics, ideas, etc: car, 
brother, Snoopy, good, love, perplexing. 
• There’s another compartment with words used in grammar: the, of, it, a, you, not, the ‘little 
words’ we indicate when we play charades.  
 
We know of these compartments because some people with brain injuries lose access to one 
compartment but not the other two, or two compartments but not the other one. 
 
All languages have grammatical words of one kind or another, but English is unlike many 
languages – even many Indo‐European cousins – in that it has a specialized set of verbs that 
function as grammatical words: be, can, could, have, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would and 
for some older speakers dare. These are often called helping verbs or auxiliary verbs (from Latin 
auxilia ‘help’). 
 
We know these verbs belong to a separate class, distinct from purely lexical verbs like drive, tell, 
eat, or recommend. We know this because they behave in very distinct ways. 
 
The differences are scalar and developed over more than a thousand years from Old to Early 
Modern English 
 
(1) Order with respect to adverbs:  
 
Grammatical verbs don’t generally appear after adverbs, though this tendency has been 
fading fast even within my adult life. 
 
a. I usually take the bus to work. 
  b. ? I usually can take the bus to work. 
  c. √ I can usually take the bus to work. 
  d. * I take usually the bus to work. 
 
(2) Sentence‐Initial Inversion 
 
a. * Take you the bus to work? 
  b. Can you take the bus to work? 
 
(3) Phonological reduction: 
 
a.  I can [khæn] / *[kən] vegetables for a living. 
  b.  I can *[khæn] / [kən] take the bus to work. (Non‐emphatic) 
 
 
 

ENG4820 | Week 10 Lecture Notes Spring 2009 Page 11 of 14

 
(4) Regular affixes don’t appear 
 
a. Tom can take the bus to work. 
  b. *Tom cans take the bus to work. 
 
 (5)  Loss of independent meanings: OE ancestors of ME and ModE auxiliaries 
 
  Old English  Today 
  beon/wesan 'to be, exist'   be 
habban 'to have'  have 
magan ‘to be effective, to prevail’  may 
onginnan 'to attempt, endeavor'  (be)gin 
sculan ‘to owe’  shall 
willan ‘to want, desire’  will 
 
V.C  Grammatical Verbs and Modality 
 
‘Modality’ is a relatively abstract notion that addresses a speaker’s attitude about what they are 
saying – in other words, whether the proposition they are making with their words is obligatory, 
necessary, or permitted by ability or rule.  
 
      Example                Modality 
  a. Passengers must remain seated at all times.      OBLIGATION 
  b. Drivers should exercise extreme caution when driving at night.  NECESSITY 
  c. Customers can choose from many exciting options.    ABILITY 
  d. The defendant may approach          PERMISSION 
 
These are examples of what we call root modality, in other words something basic to the root 
meanings of the underlined verbs. 
 
What develops in the course of the late Middle English period and into the modern era is another 
layer of modality, called extrinsic or epistemic modality. It encompasses more slippery notions 
such as probability, believability, desirability, or reality. 
 
    Example                 
  a. You must be joking.             
  b. Roger should be home any minute now. 
  c. Tequila can really give you a rotten hangover. 
  d. Roger may have colon cancer.  
   

ENG4820 | Week 10 Lecture Notes Spring 2009 Page 12 of 14

V.D. The Rise of the Auxiliary Verb: Do­Support in Questions and Negation 
 
Today’s English makes use of the grammatical verb do in sentences formed around negation, 
questions, or negative commands. We call this do­support. Take all the following variations on I 
speak French. 
 
I don’t speak French    Negative declarative (Neg. decl.) 
Don’t I speak French?  Negative question (Neg. quest.) 
Do I speak French?    Affirmative question (Aff. quest.) 
What do I speak?    Affirmative question (Aff. quest.) 
Don’t speak French!    Negative imperative (Neg. imp.) 
 
(We also have an optional structure with do that we use to express emphasis or to contradict a negative:
I do speak French.)

The obligatory use of do has only been obligatory for about the last three hundred years. That’s recent
enough for us to have live cultural memories of the time before (setting Jedi Master Yoda aside for the
moment): What say you? How goes it? Fear not. They know not what they do.

The rise of do­support from the late medieval to the early modern era was gradual and, from the 
point of view of someone on the ground at the time, maybe even messy. 
 
(9)  a. Negative declaratives (Neg.decl.) 
 
with do‐support:   Christ dyd not praye for Iames and Iohan & for the other 
without:     What is that, I praie you, for I knowe not myne owne religion? 
 
  b. Negative questions (Neg.quest.) 
 
with do‐support:  Why do we not spede vs hastely to come vnto that rest...? 
without:    O mercyfull lorde ... why shewed thou not vengeaunce ...? 
 
c. Affirmative questions (Aff.quest.) 
 
with do‐support:  How do they spende the afternoone, I pray you? 
without:    What meaneth hee by winkyng like a Goose in the raine ...? 
 
d. Negative imperatives (Neg.Imp.) 
 
with do‐support:  Loke ye, do not lye; and thow do lye, I shal it knowe wele 
without:    Doute ye nat ye shall have al youre wylle 
 
The do­support pattern propagates through the language at a different pace in each of these 
environments, eventually taking over by the 18th century, though not completely in the negative 
declarative. 

ENG4820 | Week 10 Lecture Notes Spring 2009 Page 13 of 14

 1.000

0.900

0.800

0.700
Aff.decl.
0.600 Neg.decl
Neg.quest.
0.500 Aff.Quest
Neg.Imp.
0.400

0.300

0.200

0.100

0.000

1710
1390-1400

1400-1425

1425-1475

1475-1500

1500-1525

1525-1535

1535-1550

1550-1575

1575-1600

1600-1625

1625-1650

1650-1700
Years

TABLE 1 | DATA QUOTED FROM ELLEGÅRD [1953] BY OGURA [1993: 54])

 
 
 
 
 
 
>> WEEK 11:    “THE DISCOVERY OF GRAMMAR” 
      SHAKESPEARE! 
      AMERICA! 

ENG4820 | Week 10 Lecture Notes Spring 2009 Page 14 of 14

ENG4820 | History of the English Language 
 
Week 10: Middle English to Early Modern English 
 
 
I  From Last Time:  
 
13th and 14th centuries C.E. 
 
• As the use of French in England dminishes, English comes in from the cold and takes center 
stage after two centuries of varying degrees of marginalization.  
• The thousands of words imported into English from French are gradually being nativized. 
Think  natURE > NAture, praiseth, odorless, mileage  
• The Middle English period was one of highly fluid variation across time and space in very 
basic elements of usage: pronunciation, pronouns, morphemes, words. 
• More specifically … 
 
IA.   The pronouns:  
 
Our pronouns they, them, and their – the third‐person plural – started out as Scandinavian loans in 
the 8th to the 10th centuries. They made their way into English dialects from the north and co‐
existed its Anglo‐Saxon counterpart, hi/hy, hem, and hir/hyr, for most of the Middle Ages. Take a 
look at this map, which shows all the forms corresponding to they in Middle English documents 
 

 
Source: Seth Lerer, Inventing English. A Portable History of the Language. New York: Columbia 
University Press. 2007: 98] 
 
They takes over first, appearing in London speech by the 14th century. Them and their don’t take 
over until the 15th century.  
   
ENG4820 | Week 10 Lecture Notes Spring 2009 Page 1 of 14
The Old English first‐person pronoun ic (pronounced like ‘itch’) becomes I (pronounced with a 
high front tense vowel [i])  
 
Beginning in the 13th century, the 2nd person plural pronoun ʒe (and its object form ʒou) begins to 
fill in as a polite form of the 2nd person singular, which was normally thou).  
 
This is modeled on French vous, which is used instead of singular tu for polite or formal address. 
By the 16th century, the distinction between the subject and object forms has been flattened out in 
favor of ʒou, written as you after the demise of the letter <ʒ> in the later Middle Ages 
 
IB.  Continuing Erosion in Unstressed Syllables 
 
From the Peterborough Chronicle, a prose history of England maintained at the Peterborough 
Abbey and one of the only prose histories recorded in English between the Norman conquest and 
the re‐establishment of English centuries later. 
 
Watch how the shape of the phrase meaning ‘on this year’ (Source: Lerer p. 40): 
 
1083:  on þisum ʒeare 
1117:  on þison ʒeare 
1135:  on þis ʒeare 
1154:  on þis ʒear 
 
IC.  The Fate of Double Negation 
 
Along with the ax/ask variation we read from Caxton’s ‘Egg Story’ in Week 8, the Middle English 
period shows another point of variation that is still alive in today’s English but with a very 
different social valence: double negatives: 
 
From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  
 
He never yet no villainy ne said / In all his life 
Well could she carry a morsel, and well keep, / that no droppe ne fell upon her breast. 
And yet ne grieveth me nothing so sore 
 
What we see here is a few steps before our system of negating with not. But the doubling pattern 
persisted throughout the Middle Ages, typically as a more intense form than with only single 
negation. In the modern era, double negation became associated with the speech of marginalized 
populations. 
 
This is in stark contrast to languages like French, Russian, Polish, and Czech, where double 
negation became the standard. Here’s Russian: 
 
Ya nichyevo  ni     panimayu 
I    nothing    not  understand 
‘I understand nothing’ 
 
ENG4820 | Week 10 Lecture Notes Spring 2009 Page 2 of 14
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
• Assemble a list of words in languages you’re interested in
• Preferably very common words: family,
family nature,
nature agriculture
• Determine, based on phonological similarity, which words
are transparently
p y similar to each other: cognates
g
• WARNING:
– Some words may have been displaced by foreign loans
over time
ti
– Some unrelated languages may have borrowed Indo-
European words

ENG4820 | Week 5 17
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 6

• These forms are spelled, not transcribed

• Accent and vowel length marks
• Sanskrit bh – an aspirated voiced stop. Say ‘rib hut’ and
gradually take of the sounds leading up to b.
b
ENG4820 | Week 5 18
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

• You can start to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European form just on

the visible commonalities. The word for ‘mother’ was probably
*mater or *matar.
• As if things weren’t confusing enough, we’re now using the asterisk for a different purpose than last week.
Now it’s signifying that this is a reconstructed form, one that we can support but that isn’t actually attested.
• What to make of the four different sounds at the beginning of
‘brother’?
J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 5

ENG4820 | Week 5 19
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The

Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-
European and the Proto-Indo-
European World. Oxford University
Press 2006: 6

• Change tends to reduce complexity over time. A form that seems more
complex than its cousins is probably closer to the original
• Voiced, aspirated stops are complex and relatively more difficult to
pronounce than
h unaspirated
d or voiceless
l stops.
• They required fine manipulation of the airstream, the vocal chords, and
the oral articulators.
• It makes more sense that a language should have them and then lose
them
h than
h spontaneouslyl acquire
i them.
h

ENG4820 | Week 5 20
 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
Once you think you’ve found a relationship, probe a little further.
Look for grammatical similarities.

• Proto-Indo-European was a heavily inflected language, as was Old English.

• Rich,
Ri h overtt morphology
h l matching
t hi th
the grammatical
ti l ffeatures
t off words
d within
ithi
phrases.
• Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin speakers had little use for pronouns like I, he, she…
J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press 2006: 6

ENG4820 | Week 5 21
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic

• The Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops {bh, dh, gh} are lost in
all of the daughter languages outside India.

• bh > L
Latin
i f Greekk ph
G h>f Germanic
G i b
• dh > Latin f Greek θ Germanic d
• gh > Latin h Greek x Germanic g

ENG4820 | Week 5 22
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic

• bh > Latin f Greek ph > f Germanic b

• dh > Latin f Greek θ Germanic d
• gh > Latin h
g Greek x Germanic g

No one knows why Proto-Germanic didn't go in a direction like Latin and Greek.
Whatever the reason, the change created a big problem for the speakers of the time.

ENG4820 | Week 5 23
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• /bh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/
• /dh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/
• /gh/ Æ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic /g/

• No one knows why Proto-Germanic didn't go in a direction like Latin

and Greek.
Greek Whatever the reason
reason, the change created a big problem
for the speakers of the time.
• The difference between {bh,dh,gh} and {b,d,g} was meaning-
bearing, and in a big way: many morphemes differed from each
other only in whether the aspirated or unaspirated voiced stop was
present.

• **ghel- 'shine, bright' **gel- 'cold, freeze‘

f ‘
• *dher- 'hold firmly, support' *der- 'split, peel' (source)

ENG4820 | Week 5 24
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• /bh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/
• /dh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/
• /gh/ Æ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic /g/

• So what happens? As the original voiced aspirated stops {bh,dh,gh}

lose their aspiration
aspiration, the original unaspirated voiced stops {b
{b,d,g}
d g}
shift to voiceless {p,t,k}.
• But that only changed the problem instead of solving. The difference
between voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops was also meaning-
meaning
bearing:

• *gel- 'cold, freeze‘ *kel 'cover, hide‘

• *der- 'split, peel' *ter- 'rub, turn, twist' (source)

ENG4820 | Week 5 25
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• /bh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /ph/ Germanic /b/
• /dh / Æ Latin /f / Greek /θ/ Germanic /d/
• /gh/ Æ Latin /h/ Greek /x/ Germanic /g/

• But the language already had those consonants, so all the original
stops {p
{p,t,k}
t k} shifted to their fricative counterparts {f
{f,θ,x/h}
θ x/h} (source)

• So it’s another game of musical chairs

Labial Alveolar Velar

voiced, aspirated stop

voiced, unaspirated stop

voiceless, unaspirated stop

Voiceless fricative

ENG4820 | Week 5 26
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic

Proto-Indo-
Proto Indo Proto-
Proto Original Meaning Eventually … Compare
Compare…
European Germanic
*ghel- *gel- ‘shine, bright’ yellow Greek chloros > chloroform
*gel- *kel- ‘freeze, cold’ cool, chill via Latin congeal, gelato
*kel- *hel- ‘cover, hide’ hell via Latin conceal
*dher- *der- ‘hold firm, support’ not attested in Latin firm, Greek throne, Sanskrit dharma
English
*der *ter- ‘split, peel’ tear (i.e. rip) via Greek dermatologist, epidermis
*ter *θer ‘rub, turn, twist’ thread, thresh Latin turn, Greek torus

ENG4820 | Week 5 27
 Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic

• This explains why English, once it acquired its taste for Latin and Greek
loan words, in many cases has two copies of the same word.

foot podiatrist, pedestrian,

podiatrist pedal etc.
pedestrian pedal, etc
father paternity, paternal
three triad, trimester, triple, etc.
tooth dental, dentist
heart cardiologist etc.
cardio cardiologist,
cardio, etc
kin gene, geneology (originally pronounced as /g/)
knee genuflect
queen gynecology, misogyny (from Greek gyné, ‘woman)
night ([nIxt]) nocturnal
ENG4820 | Week 5 28
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• Anatomically (skeletal structure) and behaviorally (art, tools, fire) modern
humans were first present in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
• About 80 thousand years ago, during a time of dramatic climate change, a
group or groups left Africa via what we now call the Red Sea and
colonized areas straddling the equator. (source)
• When people tried moving into more northern latitudes, they ran into two
problems …
– Vitamin D deficiency
– Ice

ENG4820 | Week 5 10
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• We humans need Vitamin D (cholecalciferol) in order to absorb calcium
from our food. It also plays a crucial biochemical role in our immune and
neurological systems. With too little vitamin D, we're at severe risk for
bone disease, heart disease, cancer, and depression. (source)
• We can get Vitamin D from meat and dairy products, but our most
reliable source of Vitamin D is our skins. Skin cells close to the surface
take a form of cholesterol from our blood, which, when exposed to
ultraviolet light from the sun, becomes Vitamin D. (source)
• Too much ultraviolet light can cause skin cancer, though, but melanin, a
dark pigment that absorbs ultraviolet light, can reduce that risk.

ENG4820 | Week 5 11
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• Close to the equator, high levels of melanin gave the earliest humans the
right balance between vitamin D production and the risk of skin cancer.
• At higher latitudes, though, sunlight is more spread out (diagram), and it
takes more exposure for the skin to produce the same amount of Vitamin
D it would closer to the equator. With their melanin-rich skin, the earliest
human populations couldn't live much further north than what we call the
Tropic of Cancer (image) without the risk of Vitamin D deficiency.
• At the northern extremes of this area, individuals with less melanin in
their skins had slightly more children per generation than their darker-
skinned neighbors, because they were at lower risk for vitamin D
deficiency.
• Over many thousands of generations, the low-melanin adaptation
spread, allowing populations to push further and further north. By about
55,000 years ago, northern-dwelling humans had adapted enough to
settle
ttl allll off what
h t we now callll E
Europe.
ENG4820 | Week 5 12
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• The past 55,000 years have seen dramatic climate changes including
two distinct ice ages, when much of the northern hemisphere was
covered by glaciers.
• The last ice age ended definitively only about 10,000 years ago,
eventually leading to:
– Better climate
– Booming populations
– Invention of agriculture
– D
Development
l t off centrally
t ll managed
d settlement
ttl t areas
• 1000 years is enough time for a language to change to the extent that it
becomes mostly unrecognizable to original speakers.
• M l i l that
Multiply h bby a ffactor off 50 or so, add
dd iin d
dramatic
i population
l i
movements, and you get scenario that can easily lead to thousands of
wildly different languages, many of which show no transparent
relationship to each other
other.
ENG4820 | Week 5 13
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• About 7000 years ago (source), a
culture emerges in what we now call the
Caucasus or possibly northeastern
Turkey.
• An educated guess at the geographic
origin of Indo-European comes from
side-by-side
id b id comparison i off th
the
vocabularies of the daughter languages.
Common, similar-sounding words for
’snow,’ ‘cow,’ and ’salmon,’ along with a
l k off common words
lack d ffor thi
things like
lik
‘lion,’ ‘olive,’ and ‘palm tree’ point
towards farming cultures in temperate,
wooded areas.
• The best educated guesses point
towards what is now called the
Source: Google Maps
Caucasus region, an area
encompassing southeastern Ukraine,
southern Russia, and Georgia.

ENG4820 | Week 5 14
 IN THE BEGINNING…
• Over the next centuries, the descendants of the Indo-Europeans spread
across what we now call Europe and Central and Southern Asia. We now
call this culture Proto-Indo-European, and we know that the languages
that descended from it encompass such far-flung tongues as …
– The Celtic languages: Gaelic, Welsh, Breton
– The Germanic languages: English, German, Danish/Swedish/Norwegian
– The Romance languages
– All the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, etc.),
– Greek, Albanian
– Many of the languages of Central and South Asia
– Farsi/Dari (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan)
– Pashto (Afghanistan)
– Armenian, Abkhaz (Caucasus)
– Dozens of languages of South Asia: Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi,
Gujerati, Sinhalese, Sindhi, but not Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, or Malayalam
ENG4820 | Week 5 15
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• When descendants of the Indo-European tribes who we call
‘Germanic’ settled on the coast of the Baltic Sea from about the 18th
to about the 8th century BCE, they encountered tribal groups that
had been their for millennia.
• We don’t know who these people were, as their language died out
well before the invention of writing, but the Germanic tribes settled
among them,
them intermarried
intermarried, and borrowed vast numbers of their
words, which now form a big part of the core vocabulary of the
Germanic languages.
• They weren
weren’tt the Finns, because our word Finn and Finnish bears
no resemblance to what the Finns call themselves, Suomi and
Suomalainen.
• We know these are non-Indo-European words because only the
Germanic languages have them.
• house, leg, hand, shoulder, bone, sick, all, boat, ship, sail, net,
oar, shoe, hound, lamb, sheep, seal, sturgeon, herring

ENG4820 | Week 5 32
Proto-Indo-European
p to Germanic
• Most of the Latin borrowings into English we talk about are from the
Middle Ages, the language of civil society. But there was a wave of
Latin loans from way before that, dating to contacts between
Romans and Germanic tribal groups between 500 BCE and 500
CE, a period which overlaps with the Christianization of Roman
culture.
• Stop anyone on the street
street, and they’d
they d tell you that these words are
about as English as you can get. In fact, they were borrowed from
Latin before Latin was cool, you might say:
• cheap, cheese, pan, dish, kitchen, cook, cherry, pillow, mile,
tile, beer, street
• After Christianity became associated with Roman power and
institutions, we got:
• church, monk, bishop, nun, and candle, to name a few.

ENG4820 | Week 5 33