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ENG 4820
History of the English Language
Dr. Michael Getty | Summer 2010
WEEK 2:
OLD ENGLISH
Proto-Indo-European 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
don t know who these people were
were, as their language died out well
before the invention of writing, but the Germanic tribes settled among them,
intermarried, and borrowed vast numbers of their words, which now form a
big part of the core vocabulary of the Germanic languages.
• house, leg, hand, shoulder, bone, sick, all, boat, ship, sail, net, oar, shoe,
lamb, sheep, seal, sturgeon, herring
• They weren’t the Finns, because our words Finn and Finnish bear no
resemblance to what the Finns call their country, Suomi, or their language
Suomalainen.
• We know these are non-Indo-European words because they have no
cognates (i.e. similar-sounding counterparts) in other Indo-European
languages. Compare English to Latin:
• house – domus hand – manus
• ship – navis bone – ossus
• lamb – agnus sick - male
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Source
5
Cædmon’s Hymn
What We’re Looking At …
•How to pronounce Old English
•Variation in Old English:
West Saxon
S vs. Northumbrian
•Semantic change
Source
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Cædmon’s Hymn
Northumbrian West Saxon
Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes ward Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard
Metudes maecti end his modgidanc Meotodes meahte ond his modgeþanc
uerc wuldurfadur swe he wundra gihwaes weorc wuldorfæder swa he wundra gehwæs
eci dryctin, or anstelidæ ece drihten or onstealde
He ærist scop ælda barnum He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum
heben til hrofe haleg scepen heofen to hrofe halig scyppend
þa middungeard moncynnæs ward þa middangeard moncynnes weard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ ece drihten æfter teode
firum foldu Frea allmectig firum foldan Frea ælmihtig
Cædmon’s Hymn
HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH
•When a language is first written down in an alphabetic
system like the Roman alphabet
alphabet, it tends to go through a kind
of golden period during which the correspondence between
written symbols and phonemes is almost one-to-one
•This was true for the first few centuries of English writing,
until the point at which writing became centralized and
conventionalized in the later Middle Ages. At that point, the
phoneme-to-written-symbol
p y relationship
p started becomingg
much looser.
Source
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Cædmon’s Hymn
HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH
Vowels before the Great Vowel Shift (started in the 14th century CE):
æ low front vowel,, as in cat
a low central vowel, as in father
e in stressed syllables, a mid front vowel as in hay minus the
final gliding-off sound
in unstressed syllables, a very short mid central vowel as in
even
i a high front unrounded vowel, like in mini.
y a high front rounded vowel, found today in only a few dialects.
S th
Say the /i/ sound
d and
d round
d your lilips
u a high back rounded vowel, like in soon.
o a mid back rounded vowel, like in lone.
Source
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Cædmon’s Hymn
HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH
Consonants
Source
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Cædmon’s Hymn
HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH
Consonants
Consonants were pronounced more or less as they still are, except:
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Cædmon’s Hymn
HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH
Consonants
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Cædmon’s Hymn
HOW TO PRONOUNCE OLD ENGLISH
Consonants
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