The Development of the English Language

Gerald Delahunty and James Garvey English Department Colorado State University 1. Introduction Languages resemble each other in various ways. For example, all languages have vowels and consonants. Statements such as this are called absolute language universals; that is, they are statements that are true of all languages. Other kinds of statements are true of particular types of languages. For example, all languages with V(erb) S(ubject) O(bject) order have prepositions, whereas VOS languages, such as Japanese, tend to have postpositions (i.e. words whose functions are similar to those of English prepositions, but which occur at the ends of their phrases). These represent typological statements or implicational universals or implicational tendencies. Why languages exhibit these characteristics is a matter of some controversy, but various hypotheses have been proposed. For example, absolute universal characteristics of language may be due, directly or indirectly, to the ways in which we learn languages. It may be that as we learn a language we infer relatively abstract patterns that apply to sentences and phrases, such as, for example, that the head of the phrase precedes the phrase's other constituents. As both V and P are the heads of their respective phrases, it is easier to learn a language with this characteristic than one in which, say, the verb follows but the preposition precedes the remainder of its phrase. All one has to learn is the rule or pattern: the head precedes everything else in its phrase. If languages were otherwise, children would have to learn the specific orders for various phrases; they would have to learn several rules instead of just one. An alternative explanation is that all languages ultimately are descended from a single original language and the common patterns are survivals from that original language. (See Comrie 1981, Finegan and Besnier 1989 for still other proposals.) Besides the universal and typological similarities we have just mentioned, there are similarities (and differences) due to the fact that groups of languages are all descended from a particular ancestor language (which is not assumed to have been the first human language). Such groups form a language family for which we can draw a family tree. In this chapter we will discuss the family tree of English, and the ways in which English has changed over the period of its existence. We will discuss English as an Indo-European language, a member of a very large language family, whose members are spoken in most areas of the world (MAP). We will also discuss English as most closely related to the languages of the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, specifically to Dutch, Frisian, and German. We will review the history of English, focussing on the periods into which its history is conventionally divided. We will be dealing with English from a diachronic (historical) point of view, in contrast with a synchronic (non-historical) point of view. The major ideas that we would like you to derive from this paper are that languages change, that language change is inevitable, that language change is related to the variation in languages at particular times, and that language change represents neither decay nor progress (see Jean Aitchison 1981 Language Change: Progress or Decay? Fontana Paperbacks). 1.1. Relationship of Diachronic to Synchronic Variation Languages vary synchronically over a number of dimensions, including national, regional, social, and situational. As we will see in this chapter they vary also over time, the diachronic dimension. The synchronic and diachronic are intimately related. Diachronic language change results from the fact that

speakers choose among variants synchronically available to them; they use some variants and avoid others. For example, until the 1940's the most prestigious way to pronounce words such as car and park (i.e. those with post vocalic r) in New York city was without the r: [ka:], [pa:k]. but between the 1940's and the 1960's a striking change began to occur, one which is not yet complete. The prestige pronunciation shifted to one in which the r is pronounced [kar], [park]. In technical terms, the prestige variety of NYC English shifted from being non-rhotic to being rhotic. This does not mean that suddenly everyone in NYC began pronouncing post vocalic rs. The change began when younger members of the upper classes began to pronounce post-vocalic r in their most careful and formal speech. Because of their prestige, older people among the classes immediately beneath them began to imitate them and pronounce these rs in their most careful speech. Over approximately a generation many New Yorkers chose to pronounce r in post-vocalic position. Few pronounced every possible post- vocalic r. More rs were pronounced in formal speech than in informal, and more by the higher classes than by the lower classes. Nonetheless, in about twenty years NYC went from being an almost completely non-rhotic dialect to one in which r pronunciation was an indicator of uppper class status and of formal speech. The initial motivation for the change is unclear. Perhaps it was the fact that during World War II many people from the mid-west immigrated to NYC and took up powerful, prestigious positions there. As the midwestern varieties are rhotic, these people's speech would have provided a model of prestigious people pronouncing post-vocalic r. Others then chose to imitate them, and the sound change was on its way. Words which before were pronounced in one way, were afterwards pronounced in another. In general, we can confidently correlate synchronic variation with geography and aspects of social structure, however we cannot say just how variants actually originate. We can also fairly confidently assert that speakers' choices among variants are based on their sense of the appropriateness of the variant to the situation and on the prestige they derive from choosing that variant (see Giles et al. on accomodation). When we investigate aspects of modern English, we can consult native speakers, do sociolinguistic surveys, and investigate written uses of words or constructions. We can even consult a dictionary or a grammar. When we investigate aspects of earlier stages of the language, we have no access to native speakers' knowledge and may or may not have written records to consult. Certainly, before the 8th. century, we have no written English records. And before the 17th. century, dictionaries are not of much help and there were very few grammars. Moreover, the written records we do have access to tend, for the most part, to be of the more formal styles and thus to give us relatively little information regarding the informal, daily uses of the language. Consequently, our discussion, although expressed fairly authoritatively, should be read as somewhat tentative and speculative. 1.2. Internal vs. External Language History In discussing language history, linguists distinguish between a language's internal and external history. The internal history of a language focusses on the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic changes that occur over the life of a language. External history uncovers those social, cultural, economic, and political events which directly or indirectly influence the language. In general, it is very difficult to discover exactly how an historical event affected a language, so we must be content with fairly crude correlations between historical events and linguistic effects. It is only very rarely that we can observe the birth of a new variant pronunciation or a new word. And we can only make inferences after the fact about why speakers or writers chose one variant in preferance to another. We can, however, make broad statements such as that scientific discoveries and technological developments have resulted in considerable expansion of the English vocabularly, mainly by the introduction of words composed of Latin

and Greek parts, or that the Norman conquest of England after 1066 A.D. resulted in a great many French words being borrowed into English, including beef, mutton, veal, guarantee, warranty. The following chart represents the major external events that affected English, along with the conventional dates assigned to the periods of its development: Old English (449 A.D. - 1100 A.D. approx.) 449 A.D. 597 A.D. 787 A.D. 850 A.D. 878 A.D. Beginning of colonization of England by preliterate Germanic tribes, speaking dialects that developed into (Old) English. Christianization of Germanic England begins. Viking raids begin. Viking invasion and colonization of eastern England begins. Alfred the Great of England defeats the Vikings under Guthrum at the battle of Ethandun. English and Vikings sign the treaty of Wedmore which cedes much of north-eastern England to the Vikings, a territory called the Danelaw. Vikings required to become Christian and to cease their attacks on the remainder of England. William of Normandy defeats the English under King Harold at the battle of Hastings, becomes king of England, and introduces Norman-French into England.

1066 A.D.

Middle English (1100 A.D. - 1500 A.D. approx.) 1204 A.D. 1337 A.D. 1340-1400 1348 A.D. First in a series of Black Death epidemics (the Plague) sweeps England (and much of the rest of Europe). The epidemics kill perhaps as much as 25% of the population making labor scarce and giving English a demographic advantage over French. Caxton sets up the first English printing press in Westminster; first books printed in English appears in same year. Separation of Normandy and England. Norman-French replaced by central French as the prestige variety in both France and England. Hundred Years War between England and France begins, reflecting a growing sense of a separate English identity and competition between the two countries. Chaucer

1476 A.D.

Early Modern English (1500 A.D. - 1800 A.D. approx.) 15th.-16th. C. 1564Shakespeare Renaissance and rebirth of classical learning; massive borrowing of classical words into English

-1616 1607 1619 1620 1755 1762 1776 Founding of Jamestown, Virginia, the first English speaking colony in the Americas, established by English West Country rhotic dialect speakers. First African slaves sold to Jamestown colonists. Pilgrims land at Plymouth, Massachusetts. They are mainly speakers of the non-rhotic East Anglian dialect. Publication of Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. Publication of Robert Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar. American Declaration of Independence.

Modern or Present Day English (PDE) (1800 A.D. - present) 1828 1865 1884-1928 1945 End of World War II; emergence of U.S. as a superpower. Publication of Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language. End of U.S. Civil War and of slavery. Oxford English Dictionary published in twelve volumes.

1.3. Cognates vs. borrowings Consider the fact that all of the following languages include some version of the word television: English television Spanish television Dutch televisie Finnish televisio Indonesian televisi Japanese terebijon French television Italian televisione Hungarian televizio Turkish televizyon Arabic telefizion Swahili televisioni

Besides television, English has telephone, telescope, telemetry, teleology, and telepathy. The element tele was originally a Greek word meaning "far off," which was borrowed into English and many other languages, where it is pronounced as a native word, not as a Greek one. Borrowing is the process of incorporating into one language elements originally belonging to another. Clearly, borrowing requires language contact, that is, conditions in which speakers of, say, English, make contact with speakers (or texts) of some other language. Over its 1500 year history, English has, to varying degrees, come in contact

with all the major languages of the globe, and with many minor ones. Most have contributed some words to English. A number, such as French, Latin, and Greek, have contributed massively. Contrasting with borrowed words are words with similar or identical forms which occur in a number of languages but which are native to each of them. This occurs because the languages are related to each other; they all descend from a single earlier language which included ancestral forms of the words they have in common. For example, the following words for "two" are all very similar to each other because they are all individually descended from the Indo-European word for "two," and not because any of the languages borrowed the form from any other: French deux Portuguese dois Dutch twee Czech dve Spanish dos Rumanian doi Swedish tva Russian dva Italian due German zwei Norwegian to Greek di'o

Compare these with the words for "two" in some non-Indo-European languages: Arabic itsnayn, Hebrew schnayim (these two are similar to each other because Arabic and Hebrew are related to each other; they belong to the Semitic group in the Afroasiatic family of languages), Japanese ni, Swahili mbili, Hungarian ketto, Finnish kaksi, Turkish iki. Words for concepts such as "two" rarely get borrowed and for this reason and others we can confidently assert that the similarities among the Indo-European languages are due to their familial relationship, to the fact that they are cognates (forms descended from a common ancestor). Historical linguistics aims to discover the familial relations (the so-called "genetic" relationships) among languages and the original forms from which the cognates descended. Clearly, in order to do this accurately we must carefully distinguish between cognates and borrowings. If we fail to make this distinction we are likely to assume that languages are descended from a common ancestor when in fact they are not. 1.5. Systematicity of language change Generally speaking, language change is far from haphazard. This is particularly the case with phonological and syntactic changes in form. When a change occurs it applies in the vast majority of cases in which it could apply, although it may take quite a while for the change to take effect everywhere. For example, there occurred in the transition from late Middle English to early Modern English a series of major changes in the English long vowel system, called the Great Vowel Shift (which we deal with in greater depth later). The Great Vowel Shift affected all late Middle English long vowels, but we will use the change in only one vowel to illustrate how linguistic change is systematic. Middle English long [i:] became the diphthong [ay]. What this statement means is that the pronunciation of all Middle English words in which [i:] occurred changed so that where they had [i:] before, they had [ay] afterwards. For example, the pronoun mine [mayn] used to be pronounced [mi:n]; mice [mays] used to be pronounced [mi:s]; bite [bayt] used to be pronounced [bi:t]. Every late Middle English [i:] was affected in the same way. Late Middle English words containing [i:] did not change randomly. 1.6. Comparison and reconstruction When we study the history of English we can study texts written in various dialects of the language dating from the christianization of England which began in the late 6th. century. Other languages have texts from earlier periods, but most do not, so when we study earlier periods of English and its immediate relatives and ancestors we must do so indirectly. Historical linguists compare cognate forms from various languages

for which they have direct evidence, and on the basis of similarities and differences among the forms and the assumption that language change is systematic, they infer what the ancestor forms must have been like. For example, the words for "two" in the Indo-European languages above are all descended from the form *dwo. We have no direct evidence for this form; it does not occur in any ancient manuscript. It has been reconstructed by comparing the various forms for the word for "two" in the related languages, which are all systematically related to it by various sound changes. The asterisk that precedes the form indicates that it is a reconstruction. Indo-European is a language which we know only indirectly, by reconstruction based on comparisons among its descendant languages, by a method known as the comparative method. (See Lehman 1962, Bynon 1977.) 1.7. The Indo-European (IE) Family of Languages As we mentioned earlier, languages of the Indo-European family are spoken in most areas of the modern world, although primarily by some of its more conspicuous members, particularly English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Portuguese. Map (1) (flat world with IE langs) shows the spread of the family. The IE family of languages contains approximately 150 languages, both living and dead. These are grouped within the family into sets of more closely related languages, including the Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Hellenic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Anatolian groups. These groupings also represent languages intermediate between Indo-European and later languages. Because these intermediate languages were unwritten, we approach them indirecly, just as we approach IE itself. See figure (1) (IE tree.) 1.8. Structure of the Indo-European language In comparison with some of its descendants, Indo-European had a rather simple phonological system. The following charts lay out its consonant and vowel phonemes: CONSONANTS Labial Voiceless stops Voiced stops Aspirated voiced stops Fricative Resonants Laryngeals s mnlryw h hh p b bh Dental t d dh Velar k g gh Labio-Velar Kw gw ghw

VOWELS i/i: u/u:

e/e: a/a:

o/o:

Indo-European had a pitch accent rather than one based on stress. Moreover, unlike Old English and other Germanic languages, which place their accents primarily on the first syllable of a word, IE accent could occur on any syllable, and in fact, might occur on different syllables in related forms of a word. When this occurred the vowel changed as the accent moved. One important effect of the variability of the position of the accent was ablaut, or vowel gradation. IE word roots typically had a basic form with the vowel e. In a morphologically related form of a word, a different syllable might be accented, in which case e became o if it retained some accent, and zero if it retained none. These possibilities are referred to as e-grade, o-grade, and zero-grade, respectively. These grades show up in English in inflectionally and derivationally related words, most notably in the forms of strong (irregular) verbs such as give and gave, but also in sing, derived from the IE e-grade form *sengwh-, sang and song from the o-grade *songwh-, and sung from zero-grade *sngwh. Native and borrowed words can reflect different grades: *pet-ra:-, ancestor of feather, represents e-grade of the IE verb *pet-, to rush or to fly; the pot in hippopotamus derives from the o-grade *pot-, (hippo and potamus are Greek words meaning "horse" and "river" respectively); and the pt of pterodactyl comes from the zerograde *pt- (pteron and dactyl are Greek words meaning "feather" or "wing" and "finger" respectively). (Calvert Watkins Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, American Heritage Dictionary) Indo-European words consisted of a root, various suffixes, and an inflectional ending. For example, the IE word *ker-wo-s consists of the root *ker, meaning "horn," a nomimalizing suffix -wo-, and the nominative singular inflection -s. This is the ancestor of the Latin word cervus, "deer," and of the modern biological term cervidae. Like many of its descendant languages, including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, and Old English, IndoEuropean was a highly inflecting language. By this we mean that the grammatical roles played by nouns were indicated by a large number of case suffixes and that verbs indicated different persons, tenses, moods, and voices by different endings. Indo-European inflections distinguished all of the following grammatical categories: NOUNS and PRONOUNS CASE Nominative Vocative Accusative Genitive Dative Ablative Instrumental VERBS NUMBER Singular Dual Plural GENDER Masculine Feminine Neuter

PERSON

First Second Third

VOICE

Active Passive Middle

MOOD

Indicative Imperative Subjunctive Optative Injunctive

TENSE/ ASPECT

Present Future Imperfect Perfect Aorist Pluperfect

1.9. Who were the Indo-Europeans? Identifying the Indo-Europeans involves two mutually dependent questions. First we must decide just where the IE speakers lived; second we must attempt to decide when the language was spoken. Because IE has been reconstructed on the basis of language rather than archaeology, we have no direct evidence for the culture or homeland of its original speakers. Moreover, the evidence we do have cannot be interpreted uncontroversially. Finally, because languages can skip from one group to another, it can be very dangerous to assume a unique corrrelation between a language and a group of people, as we can see from the fact that English is spoken not only by English people, but so also by Americans, Irish, Australians, New Zealanders, and many others. It would be a grave mistake to assume that all these speakers come originally from England or are originally English. The abusive possibilities inherent in assuming a one-to-one correlation between language and race is evident from the Nazi use of "Aryan" to designate a racial rather than a linguistic category earlier this century. Nonetheless, someone must have spoken IE and it is an exciting challenge to try to discover who those people were, where they lived, and how they lived. Given that archaeological remains are mute and linguistic reconstructions are evidence in which we cannot place full confidence, it is very difficult to try to match the IE language with the peoples and cultures we know of from the archaeological record. On the basis of fairly general criteria and common sense we can eliminate large portions of the world as candidates for the IE homeland. Prior to the European colonial expansions following the discovery of the Americas, the IE languages were spoken only in Western Europe, western Asia, and India, so we can exclude the Americas, Australia, the south Pacific, Africa, and the very Far East. However, even with these eliminations we are left with the enormous territory of Europe, western Asia, and the Middle East. Scholars have attempted to solve the problem by examining the borrowings from IE into other languages and from other languages into IE, by correlating the reconstructed IE words for climate, plants, and animals with the environment at the conjectured time of the Indo-Europeans, and by attempting to reconstruct the culture of the Indo-Europeans and placing it in a context of known cultures. We know for example that the Indo-Europeans had words for winter, cold, snow, summer. From these we can conclude that they lived in an area with marked annual climate changes. They also had words for wolf, beech and pine, but appear not to have had words for ocean, elephant, or camel. From these facts we might conclude that they lived somewhat inland, and not in India.

Much has been made of the fact that IE appears to have had a word for a particular type of salmon (*lakscompare Yiddish/English lox) that lives only in the rivers flowing into the Baltic Sea. If our reconstructed meaning of *laks- were accurate, then we could reasonably conclude that the original IE speakers lived in that area (Thieme 1958). Unfortunately, the words descended from *laks- in the individual IE languages refer to various types of fish, so *laks- may not have referred to the one type of salmon that lives in the Baltic area. In general, we cannot know the exact referent of the reconstructed words with sufficient confidence to be able to use them to pin down exactly where the speakers of IE lived. The Finno-Ugric languages (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian) contain a number of words which appear to have been borrowed from the original IE language, including Finnish onki "fishhook" (compare English angle(r)), orpo "orphan," sisar "sister," and pelto "field" (Claiborne 1983). This suggests that there was sustained contact between speakers of IE and the ancestor of the Finno-Ugric family. As it is fairly certain that the speakers of the original Finno-Ugric language lived in eastern Siberia and the part of eastern Europe adjacent to it, we can reasonably assume that the Indo-Europeans lived close by, probably to their south (Mallory 1989). On the basis of commonalities between IE and middle eastern languages, other scholars have argued that the Indo-Europeans lived in the area comprising the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, that is, in north-eastern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and north-western Iran. This claim is supported by similarities between IE culture and the cultures of various ancient near- eastern societies. For example, the IndoEuropeans shared with the ancient near-easterners the institution of a king who was also a priest (*rek-, compare Indian raj, Irish rR , Latin rex) (Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1985). An alternative approach has been to link the spread of the Indo-European languages to the spread of agriculture. European agriculture may have spread from what is now Turkey, beginning as early as 6500 B.C. (Renfrew 1988, 1989). Recent studies of the distribution of genetic traits appear to support this hypothesis (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1984). Perhaps the current most favored candidate for IE homeland is that of the Kurgan (from the Russian for "mound") people who lived north of the Caspian Sea on the Russian steppes. These people were late Neolithic warriors, who had domesticated horses, and who buried their dead in low mounds. These mounted warriors are thought to have fanned out over Europe and Asia beginning about 4000 B.C. (Gimbutas). The issue has been actively researched since at least the middle of the nineteenth century and many possible homelands have been proposed, but there is still very little concensus. 1.10. When did the Indo-Europeans live? Although there are certainly alternative hypotheses, scholars are generally agreed that the Indo-European language was a unified system (with some dialect variation) sometime between 4500 and 2500 B.C. This conclusion is based on a number of factors. The later date must be earlier than the earliest date for which we have evidence for any of the separate IE languages. There is evidence that Hittite, the earliest separate IE language, was spoken in Anatolia (modern Turkey) around 2000 B.C. The earlier date is a bit trickier to establish, and might even be earlier than 6500 B.C. It is based on the reconstruction and interpretation of words for cultural artifacts which can be dated in the archaelogical record. For example, we can reconstruct words for: cattle (*gwou-) sheep (*owi-) pig (*porko-)

horses (*ekwos) wagon (*wegh-no-) harvest (*kerp-) bronze (*ayos-)

yoke (*yeug-) plow (*are-)(schwa) sickle (*serp-) gold (*ghel-)

wheel (*kwe-kwl-o) corn (*grno-) quern (*gweren-)shw silver (*arg-)

On the basis of such reconstructions we can conclude that the Indo-Europeans were a late Neolithic or early Bronze Age people who had a number of domesticated animals, practiced agriculture, probably using an ox-drawn plow, and who transported their goods in wagons. The earlier date depends upon where we assume the Indo-Europeans lived. As agriculture and metallurgy developed in, and spread from, the middle east, the nearer to this area we locate the Indo-Europeans the earlier we can set the date; conversely, the further away from the original center they were, the later the date must be. The uncertainty about where the Indo-Europeans lived accounts for the several thousand years difference between the earliest proposed dates (before 6500 B.C.) and the later one (4500 B.C.). 1.11. What kind of social organization did the Indo-Europeans have? We can reconstruct IE words for father, mother, son, daughter, brother, and sister so it is clear that the Indo-Europeans lived in families. We can also reconstruct words for father-in-law, mother-in-law, brotherin-law, and sister-in-law. These, however, appear to refer only to a woman's in-laws. As there appear to have been no words for a man's in-laws, we suspect that Indo-European families were patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal. Hardly surprising for a warrior society. 1.12. The Germanic languages As time passed, the initially fairly uniform Indo-European language developed considerable dialect variation. The speakers of these dialects dispersed, either as conquering warriors or as advancing farmers bringing newer, more successful technology over great tracts of Europe and Asia, and of course, eventually the Americas and the south Pacific. Depending upon where one believes the Indo-Europeans lived, the speakers of the ancestor of the Germanic languages may not have moved at all, may have moved only a short distance, or may have moved all the way from the Near East to an area that comprises modern Holland, Denmark, and northern Germany by about 500 B.C. By 100 B.C. they had extended their territory to include northern Poland (MAP) (Mallory p.86/7). The sound changes that transformed an IndoEuropean dialect into the language from which English and the other Germanic languages are directly descended (often called Proto-Germanic) had begun by 500 B.C. and were probably complete by about 100 B.C. The Germanic languages belong to three groups, Eastern, Northern, and Western, as displayed on the following charts: Eastern Germanic Gothic Vandalic Burgundian

All three of the eastern Germanic languages are extinct. Of the three, we know most about Gothic because we have substantial remains of a translation of the bible made by Bishop Ulfilas in about 370 A.D. Gothic died out in the Crimea in the sixteenth century.

Northern Germanic Western Icelandic Norwegian Faeroese Western Germanic Low Anglo-Frisian Old Low Franconian Old Saxon Old English Old Frisian Dutch Low German Middle English Frisian Modern English The Germanic languages differ in a number of remarkable ways from IE and consequently from other IE languages. They contain a large number of words for which there are no IE cognates, including: back bless blood body bone book borough brew bride broad broth buy child cliff dear dough drink drive earl east eel fowl game gate gold ground hold island king knead leech lead loaf lore meat north oar rain rat rise sail sea ship silver soul south steer theft tin ware west whale wheat wife womb write While some or all of these words may have been borrowed from the languages with which the Germanic speakers came in contact, they clearly can be interpreted as indicating that the speakers of Proto-Germanic moved from an inland area to one beside the ocean and where they developed the capacity for ocean travel. They seem also to have developed their agricultural skills by adding to their crops and the things made from them. Their trade seems also to have developed, along with their social organization and political arrangements. The Germanic language differed from IE in many ways, but we will examine only three here. First and foremost, the IE phonological system underwent profound transformation in a series of changes called The First Consonant Shift (also called Grimm's and Verner's laws). Second, the "free" pitch accent of IE changed to a stress accent and became fixed on the first syllable of a word. For example, the accent in Greek patJ r, which retained the IE accent position, is on the final syllable, whereas in its English cognate father the accent is on the first syllable. As a result of fixing the accent on the first syllable the last syllable became relatively unstressed and so the Germanic languages began to lose their inflectional endings; High Old High German Middle High German Modern High German Eastern Danish Swedish

Proto-Germanic has fewer endings than IE, Old English fewer than Germanic, and Modern English fewer than Old English. Most spectacular in this loss of IE inflections among the Germanic languages is the reduction of the very elaborate IE tense/aspect system, which contained six categories and hence six sets of inflections. The Germanic languages reduced these to two, present and past. They also changed the semantics of the system from one primarily aspectual to a tense system. The Germanic languages are also distinguished from their IE cognates by their development of what has been dubbed the dental preterite, the -ed of the regular past tense of English. In one particular, however, the Germanic language had a more elaborate inflectional system than IE: it doubled the number of adjectival endings. IE adjectival endings were essentially identical to the nominal inflections, but Germanic added a whole new series called the weak (or definite) adjectival inflections. These were used whenever the noun modified by the adjective was also modified by a demonstrative. The strong (or indefinite) inflections were used otherwise. This double system survived into early Middle English and still exists in Modern German. We will not describe these changes in detail, confining our interest to a brief review of the changes wrought by the first consonant shift and a comparison of the inflectional paradigm of an IE verb with that of a Germanic one. 1.13.1. The First Consonant Shift All of the stop consonants of IE were altered by the changes known as Grimm's law, after the man who formulated it, Jakob Grimm, one of the Brothers Grimm. This means that the sounds in the Germanic languages correspond to quite different sounds in cognate languages. The changes were remarkably systematic, as you can see from the chart below: IE sounds *p *t *k *b *d *g *bh *dh *gh *kw *gw *ghw Gmc. Reflexes F X (h) p t k b d g hw/h kw/k g Gmc. Exs. father three hemp Thorp Ten kin bear do gum what queen Guthrun Exs. Representing IE Lat. pater (paternal) Lat. tres (trefoil) Lat. Cannabis Lat. turba (crowd) Lat. decem (decile) Lat. Genus Skt. Bharami Skt. Dha Gk. khaos (chaos) Lat. quod Gk. gune (cf. gynecology) Skt. ghnanti (they strike)

There are a number of apparent exceptions to the changes proposed in Grimm's law. For example, the change of IE voiceless stops (*p,t,k) to Germanic voiceless fricatives (*f, ,h) did not occur if the stop occurred either after another voiceless stop (eg. Lat. octo, OE eahtu, "eight"), or after s (eg. Lat. scalpo, Eng. scalp). In many other words IE *p,t,k became Gmc. *b,d,g instead of the voiceless fricatives that Grimm predicted. For example, the first d of hundred corresponds to t in Lat. centum. These exceptions affected even related forms of words. The th of the OE verb seothan "to seethe" corresponds to d in the past tense sudon "we, you, they seethed" and the past participle soden "sodden." The 19th. century German linguist Karl Verner postulated that the exceptions to Grimm's law were systematic, and proposed that IE *p,t,k did not become Gmc. *f, ,x (h) as predicted by Grimm if they followed an unaccented syllable. Given where its IE accent was, we expect the Germanic cognate of Greek hepta "seven" to have a b rather than the f predicted by Grimm's law. This is just what we find in Gothic sibun. Verner also noted that in related forms of a number of Germanic words s corresponds to r. For example, the s of English was corresponds to r in were. He postulated that rs which correspond to s derive from IE *s which became Gmc. *r when it did not immediately follow an accented syllable. In other words Verner's law applied to IE *s as well as to IE *p,t,k. English inflections are, generally speaking, derived quite straightforwardly from IE inflections. For example, consider the OE verb beran "to bear, carry" from which modern bear is descended. Beran derives from the IE root *bher- meaning "to carry" or "to bear children." Cognate with beran is the Latin verb ferre "to carry." The following table illustrates the similarities among the endings of the OE and Latin words, as well as the Gmc. and IE reconstructions (Lockwood, Pyles, Prokosch): OE Singular ber-o/u/e bir-s(t) bir-eth Plural ber-ath ber-ath ber-ath *ber-amiz *ber-ithi *ber-anth *bher-omes *bher-ete *bher-onti fer-imus fer-tis fer-unt *ber-o: *ber-izi *ber-ithi *bher-o: *bher-esi *bher-eti fer-o: fer-s fer-t Gmc IE Latin

In very early OE, e in the root of beran was fronted to i in the second and third person singular forms as a result of the influence of the front vowels in the inflections of these two forms. The -ath of the OE plural is derived from the IE third person plural; IE *-onti developed into Germanic -anth which became -ath in the Anglo-Frisian group. The t of the OE second person singular -st is believed to have derived from the th of thu "thou (you sg.)." The second and third person singular endings remained until Shakespearean times, and are used even

today in more traditional translations of the Bible. We illustrate these endings with the King James translation of Psalm 23: 1. 2. 3. 4. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. As we noted earlier, Germanic contains a large number of words for which we can find no cognates in the other IE languages. By about 100 B.C. the Germanic languages had developed trade and military contacts with the Roman Empire, which led to the borrowing of a number of Latin words and their subsequent export to England as the Germanic tribes invaded and conquered the island. The following represent a selection of these borrowings: English Latin butter < butyrum candle < candela chalk < calcem cheese < caseus copper < cuprum kitchen < coquina mile < milia passum (a thousand steps) mint, money < moneta pan < panna pepper < piper plant < planta plum < prunum pound < pondo 2. English With the linguistic changes just discussed, we broach the history of the independent English language. This history begins in approximately 449 A.D. when Germanic speaking people from north-western

Europe began their conquest of the area we now call England. Traditionally these peoples are said to have included the tribes of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The Angles appear to have come from an area in the north-west German state of Schleswig and gave their name to England, its people, and their language. The Saxons came from the German state of Saxony and gave their name to several English counties, including Essex (east Saxons), Sussex (south Saxons) and Middlesex (middle Saxons), as well as to the kingdom of Wessex (west Saxons) which flourished in the tenth century. The Jutes, if they existed at all as a distinct group, may have hailed from southern Denmark and seem to have disappeared without having bequeathed their name to any place in England. Their name is probably related to the name of their place of origin in Denmark, Jutland, and may also be cognate with Goth. Most likely the groups that invaded England were a mixed bag and almost certainly included people from the area of western Holland called Frisia or Friesland. The land that these Germanic invaders conquered (over a period of several hundred years) was populated by tribes of Celtic speaking people (Britons, or Brythonic tribes) who had been previously conquered, pacified, disarmed, civilized, educated, and eventually Christianized by the Romans. One of these romanised Celts was a war leader named Arthur. Subsequently, as the Roman Empire fell to barbarian attacks, the Brythonic tribes were left to fend for themselves when the Roman legions were recalled for the defense of the more central parts of the empire. To help protect themselves from barbarian attacks, some Celtic chiefs invited Germanic mercenaries to settle in England, offering land in return for protection from further attack. Perhaps predictable, the deal fell through. The Germanic peoples continued to expand into England and pushed the Celts further and further west, into what is now called Wales, a name ironically derived from the Germanic word for foreigners, wealas. The Germanic invaders were pagan and preliterate. They settled in self-contained villages throughout England, thus giving rise to the remarkable variety of dialects still spoken there. They were politically organized into seven kingdoms (the so-called Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy (map)) whose borders fluctuated: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex. The Germanic invasion and conquest of England inaugurated the first of the four conventional periods of the history of English, the Anglo-Saxon or Old English (OE) period. From a linguistic point of view, we can group the varieties of Old English into four major old English dialect areas: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish (MAP). The importance of the dialects fluctuated as the kingdoms with which they were associated waxed or waned. Most of our knowledge of OE derives from manuscript sources written in the West Saxon dialect, in large part due to the efforts of king Alfred the Great in the ninth century, of whom more anon. 3. The Vocabulary of English The English vocabulary, which approaches, if it does not exceed, 1,000,000 words, is by an order of magnitude far larger than the vocabulary of the next largest modern language. We have already discussed a number of ways in which words are created in English, and have introduced what is perhaps the most prolific means by which the vocabulary of English has been augmented, borrowing from other languages. English has borrowed throughout its history from the many languages it has come in contact with. As we noted earlier, even before English split off from the west Germanic languages, these languages borrowed military, commercial, and product terms from Latin. So far as we can tell, the language of the Celts had very little influence on English, perhaps for the reason that the ways of life of the two groups differed so much, the English being farmers, the Celts primarily pastoralists, but more importantly because conquerors generally borrow little from those they conquer. Nonetheless, a few words borrowed from the early Celtic inhabitants, primarily place and natural feature names, have survived into current English:

Avon, from the Celtic word for river; crag, from the Celtic word for a rock (compare modern Irish carraig); the lond of London derives from a Celtic word meaning "wild." Beginning in the late 6th. and early 7th. centuries, missionaries from Rome began the christianization of south east England, and missionaries from Ireland began the process in northern areas. Conversion to Christianity and contact with Christian Europe brought many new words for new concepts and objects, borrowed mostly from Latin and Greek: angel, camel, cancer, cat, chest, cowl, disciple, litany, martyr, mass, monk, pot, provost, purse, school, tiger, trout. By the late 8th. century, England, along with much of the rest of western Europe and the British Isles, was being attacked and invaded by Scandinavian seafarers. By the end of the 9th century, these Vikings had conquered the eastern and northern areas of England, almost half of its territory. The treaty of Wedmore (878 A.D.) between the invaders and Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, ceded the northeastern portion of the country to the Danes in return for peace and a pledge that the Vikings would become Christians. Contact between English and the closely related north Germanic Scandinavian languages resulted in very important changes to the English language. Some of these changes we will deal with in our discussion of morphological development. Here we note that a great many everyday modern English nouns, verbs and adjectives are of Scandinavian origin: awkward, band, bull, call, crawl, die, dirt, egg, flat, get, gift, guess, husting, ill, kid, kneel, leg, nag, race, scab, sister, skin, skirt, sly, sprint, steak, take. More indicative of the close contact between the languages is the fact that a number of our most important grammatical (closed class) words are also of Scandinavian origins, including the pronouns, they, their, them. The earliest stage of the language extends from the first incursions of Germanic invaders in 449 A.D. to around 1100, about two generations after the Norman conquest, which began dramatically in 1066 when William, Duke of Normandy defeated Harold Godwinson, King of England in the battle of Hastings, which is on the south-east coast of England. This victory made William both King of England and duke of Normandy, and thus at least nominally a vassal of the King of France. Normandy is a province of France, which in 912 A.D. was ceded by Charles the Simple, king of France to the Viking Rollo, an ancestor of William. Like the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England and the Vikings who came after them, the Viking conquerors of Normandy spoke an unwritten Germanic language. Within a few generations of their conquest they abandoned this language and took up French. Their French was, however, not the French of Paris, but a variety considerably influenced by their ancestral Scandinavian. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon and Viking invasions of England, William's invasion did not involve a massive migration of people and subsequent colonization. Although numbers of foreign merchants and tradesmen did take up residence in England, the conquest involved primarily the imposition of a Norman upper class and of a rigidly feudal system of land tenure and government. Within a few years of the battle of Hastings, few original English aristocrats remained in possession of their lands, and by 1100 A.D. the vast majority of England's bishops and abbots were Normans. This demographic pattern meant that Norman French was the language of the ruling class and English the language of the ruled. French remained the prestige language in England for nearly 300 years. In that time however, the variety of French accorded greatest prestige changed from Norman French to central French, the language of Paris and the French court. This change was due to the victory of the French over King John of England in 1204. The French took control of Normandy and decreed that thereafter nobles could hold land in either England or France but not in both. As a result of its contact with French, English borrowed a very large number of words. In some cases the same basic word was borrowed twice, first from Norman-French (NF) and later from central French (CF). It is often easy to separate the two borrowings, particularly if the words descend from a Latin word beginning with [k]. This [k] remained as [k] in NF but became [c] in central French:

From NF cattle catch

From CF chattel chase

Similarly many French words had [w] in NF where central French had [gw] or [g]. Again English borrowed both forms: From NF warranty warden wile wage From CF guarantee guardian guile gauge

The various dialects of French remained as major influences on English for several hundred years, even though at no time can it be said that French was the language of the majority of the people of England. In fact, French very quickly became a second language for many people, even those descended from original Norman invaders. The extent of the French influence on English can be inferred not only from the thousands of words borrowed into English at this time, but also from the range of semantic areas that they pertain to: Arts: Church: Education: Fashion: Food: Government: Housing: Legal: Medicine: Military: Society: art, ballad, carol, chapter, color, melody, music, painting, poet, romance, sculpture, story abbot, cardinal, choir, confession, heresy, matins, pray, sermon college, dean, grammar, noun, reason, study, subject, university boot, coat, cotton, dress, fur, ribbon, satin beef, broil, dinner, fry, mutton, onion, pork citizen, country, government, mayor, rule, state, village arch, blanket, cellar, chair, closet, mirror, towel accuse, arson, convict, crime, evidence, judge, jury, pardon, statute cure, disease, drug, plague, poison, powder army, battle, capture, defense, enemy, force, retreat, seargeant, soldier ancestor, aunt, cousin, duke, peasant, princess, uncle

Of some social interest in this regard is the development in English at this time of separate sets of words for animals and the meats derived from them. Hitherto English, like most other IE languages, had used forms analogous to "sheep-meat" or "pig-meat" to refer to meats. During Middle English the French terms for the animals were borrowed and used to refer to their meats:

Animal calf chicken cow sheep swine

Meat veal poultry beef Mutton Pork

French word for the animal veau poulet boeuf mouton porc

Remarkably, in spite of the longevity and intimacy of the contact between English and French, and in spite of the fact that English borrowed not just individual words but also various derivational affixes, the intermixture of the two languages was not as thorough going as that between English and Scandinavian. The majority of the borrowings from French are nouns, verbs and adjectives. This contact seems not to have affected English grammar or inflectional morphology, or such core grammatical elements as pronouns, in the way that Scandinavian did. A few words of Celtic origin entered English through French during the ME period: car, change, mutton. Latin, the language of the church, education, and scholarship during the middle ages, continued to be a source of borrowing and provided apocalypse, divide, limbo, lunatic, purgatory, testament. Greek supplied diaper, squirrel, and cinnamon. International trade brought English in contact with Dutch and other Low German languages, from which came bundle, clock, cork, damp, dowel, luck, pump, splinter, tub, and wriggle. Trade and Crusade contacts with the Middle East led to the borrowing of Arabic words, often indirectly through French or Latin: alkali, azimuth, cipher, ream, saffron. The Middle English period is usually thought of as ending around 1500 A.D. with the beginning of Early Modern English (EME). In 1476 William Caxton set up the first printing press in England, opening his shop in Westminster, just outside London. Printing was partly responsible for the development of a uniform spelling and for the divergence of English spelling, particularly of vowel sounds, from the European values for the symbols. The Renaissance saw the revival of classical learning and the translation into English of myriad classical Latin and Greek authors and the consequent borrowing of a great many Latin and Greek learned terms. Between 1450 and 1700 English borrowed approximately 10,000 words, mostly from Latin, and amounting to about one quarter of the entire Latin vocabulary. From the classical languages during this period were borrowed: appropriate, atmosphere, caustic, chaos, chronology, dexterity, expectation, expensive, mediate, scheme, system, to mention but a few. The Renaissance also brought English into more intimate contact than had hitherto been the case with continental languages such as Italian, from which it borrowed bandit, casino, concert, dado, ghetto, gondola, lava, mafia, malaria, piano, stanza, umbrella, and many others. The Protestant Reformation saw the emergence of English as the primary language of religion in England, and an interest in OE language and literaure. The conquest of large parts of North America brought English into contact with Amerindian languages from which a great many words for unfamiliar animals, plants, and cultural items were borrowed, as well as a great many place names in the US and Canada, including opossum, raccoon, skunk, hominy, squash, moccasin, podunk, toboggan, Chicago, Missisippi. Competition over trade and colonization brought England and Spain into contact, during which English borrowed armada, anchovy, comrade, cannibal, cargo, cask, creole, desperado, guitar, matador, tortilla, vanilla.

Trade and technical contacts led to English borrowing brandy, cookie, cruise, easel, gin, smuggle, snow from Dutch; cobalt, hamburger, iceberg, lager, lobby, plunder, sauerkraut, shale, waltz, zinc from German; mammoth, polka, steppe, tundra from various Slavic languages; and alcohol, algebra, arsenal, assassin, monsoon, sherbert, zero from Arabic. Modern English has continued throughout the last two hundred years to borrow from the modern and ancient languages of the world: Greek French Italian Spanish German Dutch Yiddish Hungarian Czech Russian Japanese Chinese Hindi Eskimo Hawaiian Tagalog borscht bonsai gung-ho chutney anorak aloha boondocks Clone consomme confetti bonanza gestalt boss bagel goulash hormone garage zucchini taco kindergarten tamale semester

apartheid (from afrikaans) schlock paprika polka pogrom karate kowtow pajamas igloo ukelele robot vodka tempura

But perhaps more important than borrowing entire words directly from other languages has been the process of creating technical words out of classical elements. For example, telephone never existed as a classical Greek word, though it is created out of two Greek words: tele "far" and phone "sound." Other such coinages from classical sources include xerox and xeriscape based on the Greek root xeros "dry", and television from Greek tele and Latin visio "see," and oncology from Greek onkos "mass" and logos "word". Related creations include oncogene, oncology, oncologist. Other words recently created from borrowed classical elements include hepadnavirus, interferon, polypeptide, retrovirus. These borrowings and coinages from borrowed elements have generally been added to the technical vocabulary of the language. They reflect the development over the past two centuries of the various sciences, technologies, and industries. Besides borrowing words, modern English has continued to create new words in ways which it has always used. Many of our new words are compounds such as acid rain, airhead, frat house. Others are entirely invented: zipper. Many are derived by the addition of prefixes and suffixes (many of which were borrowed

from the classical languages): prenatal, transformer, paranormal. Others are derived by zero derivation (conversion): from the adjective gay is derived the noun gay; from the adjective total is derived the verb to total; from the noun eyeball is derived the verb to eyeball. Other words are created by various types of abbreviation: deli from delicatessen, NATO from North Atlantic Treaty Organization, stagflation from stagnation+inflation. From this discussion it should be clear that the modern English vocabulary comprises some elements that descend to us all the way from Indo-European, others that come from Germanic, and still others that come from Old English. These we can view as the native vocabulary of English. Besides its native vocabulary English includes words borrowed at various times from languages with which English came in contact. To the non-specialist many of these borrowings are indistinguishable from the native elements, and are used in ordinary, informal contexts. These include, as we have seen, such central elements of the vocabulary as the plurals of the third person pronoun. Much else that was borrowed constitutes our learned, technical, and formal vocabulary, which we use primarily in written texts. We can represent this complex vocabulary in the following chart, adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary: scientific Literary foreign

Common

technical

Colloquial

dialectal

Slang 4. Morphology Over its history English has tended to reduce its inflectional morphology. Modern English retains only a few inflectional morphemes, and only nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives are inflected. In contrast, each of these parts of speech had a larger number of inflections in OE, although the range of grammatical categories represented by the inflections is not substantially less than in OE. Thus nouns (see box 1) and pronouns (see box 2) are inflected for number and case in both OE and ModE, although the number of cases is reduced: Box 1. Nouns ModE SG N hound G hound's A D Pl hounds hounds' ME SG hund hundes PL hundes hundes OE SG hund hundes hund hunde PL Hundas Hunda hundas hundum

Box 2. Pronouns. First Person PDE SG NI A me G my, mine D Second Person PDE SG N you A you G your D Third Person PDE SG M N he A him G his OE SG M N he A hine G his D him F heo hie hiere hiere N hit hit his him hie hie hiera him PL F she her her N it it its they them their PL ME SG M he him his F he, sche hire hir, her N hit, it hit, it his he, thei hem, them here, thair PL PL you you your ME SG thu, thou the(e) thin(e) PL ye you your OE SG thu the, thec thin the DUAL git inc incer inc PL ge ow,eowic eower eow PL we us our ME SG ich, I mev mine, mi PL we us ure, our OE SG ic me, mec min me DUAL wit unc uncer unc PL We Us Ure us

Verbs are inflected for person, tense, and number in both OE and ModE (see box 3): Box 3. Verbs (Strong) Present Tense ModE SG 1 2 3 drive drive drives PL drive drive drive ME SG drife drifest drifeth PL drifeth drifeth drifeth OE SG drife drist drifdh PL drifadh drifadh drifadh

Past Tense ModE SG 1 2 3 drove drove drove PL drove drove drove ME SG drof drof drof PL drof drof drof OE SG draf drife draf PL drifon drifon drifon

(Weak) Present Tense ModE SG 1 2 3 love love loves PL love love love ME SG love lovest loveth/s PL love(n/s) love(n/s) love(n/s) OE SG lufie lufast lufath PL lufiath lufiath lufiath

Past Tense ModE SG 1 2 3 loved loved loved PL loved loved loved ME SG loved(e) lovest loved(e) PL loved(en) loved(en) loved(en) OE SG lufode lufodest lufode PL lufodon lufodon lufodon

The definite article, which is invariable in ME and ModE, was inflected for number, gender and case in OE (see box 4): Box 4. Definite Article. PDE ME Masc the the N se A thone G thaes D thaem I thy, thon Fem seo tha thaere thaere thy, thon OE (also = demonstrative) Neut thaet thaet thaes thaem thaere PL Tha Tha Thara Thaem thaere

OE adjectives, besides being inflected for comparative and superlative, were inflected also for number, gender and case. In fact, just as in modern German, there are two paradigms of OE adjective inflection, a strong (or indefinite) and a weak (or definite). The strong pattern was used when no article or demonstrative coocurred with the adjective and noun (eg. OE blinda cyning "a blind king); the weak occurred otherwise (eg. OE se blind cyning "the blind king") (see box 5): Box 5. Adjectives ModE OE blind Singular Strong M N A G D I Plural Strong M NA blinde F blinde N blinde Weak M blindan F blindan N blindan blind blindne blindes blindum blinde F blind blinde blindre blindre blinder Sg. Pl. N blind blind blindes blindum blinde ME Strong blind Weak blinde

blind Weak blinde M blinda blindan blindan blindan blindan F blinde blindan blindan blindan blindan N blinde blinde blindan blindan blindan

G I

blindra blindum

blindra blindum

blindra blindum

blindra blindum

blindra blindum

blindra blindum

The Germanic and Indo-European ancestors of English were even richer in inflections than OE, as we noted earlier in this paper. So the English loss of inflections is a process that began before English became a separate language. It continued through OE and into ME, encouraged by contact with the Scandinavian languages, and also by the fact that English, unlike its IE ancestor, tended to stress the first syllable of words and to destress later syllables. Destressing final syllables tended to reduce the vowel of inflections to [schwa] (and eventually to zero) and thus make many indistinguishable. By the end of the ME period, English was pretty much down to just the inflections which remain today in Standard English. Some varieties of English have eliminated even the last remaining person and number inflection in the present tense verb paradigm {-s}. We deal with these phonological processes in the next section. 5. Phonological Change To many people, the English spelling system appears quite idiosyncratic and unprincipled, which makes it difficult to learn. The correlations between graphic symbol and sound are not unique and are more varied than their counterparts in other European languages. This apparent lack of systematicity is due to two factors. First, the language has changed considerably since the spelling system began to be fixed. Second, people are simply unwilling to give up a spelling system which has such a long history, is associated with important traditional values, and which took them a great deal of time and effort to learn. If the spelling system were changed, particularly if it were changed to a more "phonetic" system, by which people generally mean one that approximates to one graphic symbol per phoneme, the "look" of English on the page would be dramatically altered, making it seem like a completely different language (assuming that we could solve the problem of choosing which variety of English to represent by the "phonetic" spelling). In this section we examine some of the sound changes that occurred in the history of the language. We will examine four major changes, and mention a couple of interesting minor ones. First, the change in stress placement in words; second, the reduction of final vowels, particularly those of inflections, to [schwa], and the elimination of [m] in certain inflections; third, early OE i-mutation, and fourth the massive reorganization of the vowel system called the Great Vowel Shift (GVS), which more than any other factor caused the apparent chaos in English spelling. As we have seen, IE allowed any syllable in a word to be the most prominent one. The Germanic languages made two changes to this system: they changed the nature of the prominence from pitch (i.e. tone) to stress (i.e. loudness) and initially confined the most highly stressed syllable to the root of a word and later to the first syllable (except in the case of a few prefixes). As a consequence, other syllables, particularly final syllables, which were often inflectional, were weakly stressed and their vowels in many cases reduced to [schwa]. For example, Indo-European *pat'er is stressed on its final syllable, whereas its English descendant, 'father, is stressed on its first syllable. Note that the final vowel of father is [schwa]. OE used the syllables listed in Table X as inflectional endings on nouns. SG Nom: e,u,a Acc: e,u,a,an Gen: es,e,an,a PL as,e,u,a,an,ru as,e,u,a,an,ru a,ena,ra

Dat: e,an,a, Table X: Noun Inflections in OE

um,rum

By Late OE, the three vowels that occurred in the OE inflections, e, u, and a, had all changed to [schwa]. This was written in ME as <e>. Moreover, m in the OE endings um and rum had changed to n, and later still disappeared entirely. Table Y lays these changes out. um > [ n] > [schwa], spelled <e> in ME, > 0 in ModE an e u > [schwa], spelled <e> in ME, > 0 in ModE a as > [schwa s], spelled <es> in ME, > [s/z/ z] in ModE es Table Y As a result of these changes ME ended up with only two nominal inflections e and es, pronounced with [schwa]. Clearly, by late OE and early ME the inflections could no longer communicate the grammatical information which they had earlier conveyed, and other means of communicating it had to be found. In fact, the means were already to hand by the OE period. While OE allowed a greater freedom in word order than ModE does, its primary order was SVO, the same as ModE. As the inflections became indistinguishable from each other, word order assumed part of the burden of communicating grammatical relations in sentences. The other part was assumed by the developing prepositional system. While the regular way of indicating the plural of ModE nouns is to add the inflection {-s}, there is a large number of irregualr plurals in which the vowel of the root is altered, for example mouse, mice. This irregularity is due to a change that occurred in the very early OE period, called i-mutation. As we mentioned in connection with the root vowel of the OE verb beran, early in OE the presence of [i] or [j] in one syllable caused a low or mid vowel in an earlier syllable to be either fronted or raised. Thus e of Gmc. *berizi became i in OE birst when e in the root assimilated to i in the inflection. This process was responsible for the irregular plurals in words such as mouse, mice (from Gmc. *mu:siz), foot, feet (from Gmc. *fo:ti), tooth, teeth (Gmc. *to:thi), man, men (Gmc. *manni). Related forms of other words were also similarly affected: whole-heal, doom-deem, older-elder, gold-gilt.

The massive rearrangement of the ME long vowels called the Great Vowel Shift (GVS) occurred in the transition between ME and PDE. It was underway by 1500, by which time printing had been introduced into England. We can assume the following vowel system for Middle English: i/i: e/e: E/E: a/a: Because it was primarily the the long vowels that were affected, one of the effects of the GVS was to set up two (or more) distinct pronunciations for particular letters. For example, the letter <i> is pronounced as [ai] in high, but as [I] in hit. Similar doublets can be found for all vowel symbols. We represent the changes effected by GVS in the following table: [i:] --> [ay] ride [ri:d] --> [rayd] "ride" [e:] --> [i:] fet [fe:t] --> [fi:t] "feet" [E:] --> [e:] great [grE:t] --> [gre:t] "great" [E:] --> [e:] --> [i:] dreem [drE:m] --> [dre:m] --> [dri:m] "dream" [a:] --> [e:] blamen [blam n] --> [ble:m] "blame" [u:] --> [aw] hous [hu:s] --> [haws] "house" [o:] --> [u:] bote [bo:t] --> [bu:t] "boot" [O:] --> [o:] ham [hO:m] --> [ho:m] "home" Table Z: Great Vowel Shift Changes Finally, ModE spelling reflects a number of minor Early Modern English sound changes. During the late seventeenth century [k] before [n] in word such as knight and knife, and [g] before [n] in words like gnat and gnaw became silent. These sequences had been pronounced as [kn] and [gn] respectively. In early modern English too, the [g] of <ng> became silent in words such as sing, which had been pronounced [sINg]; this became modern [sIN]. At approximately the same time, the [l] in words such as calm, folk, half, palm,and talk became silent. This [l] appears to be making a comeback. Many American English speakers pronounce at least some of these words with [l]. 6. Syntax Modern English has a fairly strict word order and uses many prepositions to indicate grammatical relations. Thus typically, in indicative sentences, subjects precede verbs, which precede indirect objects, which precede direct objects, which precede prepositional phrases. Questions are derived by placing an auxiliary before the subject. In noun phrases, articles precede adjectives, which precede head nouns. schwa O/O: u/u: o/o:

OE in contrast had somewhat freer word order patterns, particularly in poetry. Nevertheless, the ModE patterns were discernible even in OE, as the examples below demonstrate. In these examples, we give an OE example on the first line, a literal translation on the second line, and where the literal and idiomatic translation differ, an idiomatic translation on the third line. We begin with the order of elements in noun phrases. Articles and demonstratives typically preceded their head nouns: (1) se mann the man Adjectives typically occurred before the noun they modified and after any articles: (2) se goda mann the good man But adjectives could, on occasion, follow their head nouns: (3) wadu weallendu waters surging waters surging Genitives also typically preceded their heads: (4) hira land their land But they could follow them: (5) Faeder ure Father our our Father In prepositional phrases, OE prepositions typically preceded their objects, just as in ModE: (6) on his agnum lande in his own country Occasionally, particularly when the object is a pronoun and the preposition has more than one syllable, the preposition may follow its object:

(7)

him beforan (Q+W:90) him before before him

OE clausal syntax is quite comparable to ModE. Subject-Verb-Object/Complement was the most typical order of grammatical relations: (8) Se waes god man (AHE:11) He as good man He was a good man (9) hi haefdon ut amaerde ond tosencte tha bigengan thysses ealondes (AHE:11) they had out driven and expelled the inhabitants this island they had driven out and expelled the inhabitants of this However, a number of factors required that the subject be preceded by either the main verb of the clause or by an auxiliary. Yes/No questions triggered VSO order: (10) Eart thu se Beowulf se the ...? (Q+W:93) are you the Beowulf he that Are you the Beowulf who ...? So did wh-questions: (11) Hwaet sagest thu? (Q+W:93) what say you? What do you say? And imperatives: (12) Ne sleh thu, Abraham, thin agen bearn. (BEL:95) not slay you, Abraham, your own son Abraham, do not slay your own son And certain adverbial expressions, particularly negative ones, when they appeared at the beginning of the sentence: (13) Tha waes se haeland gelaed fram Gaste on westen (AHE:202)

then was the Saviour led from Spirit into desert The Saviour was then led by the Spirit into a desert (14) Ne mihte he gehealdan heardne mece (Q+W:92) not could he hold grim sword He could not hold the grim sword The typical order within the verb phrase was V+Complement and V+Object, as (8) and (15) illustrate: (15) tha ricostan men drincath myran meolc (Q+W:93) the most powerful men drink mare's milk However, the object could precede its verb, particularly when it was a pronoun: (16) tha burgware hie gefliemdon (Q+W:94) the townsfolk them routed the townsfolk routed them The orders OVS and OSV also occasionally occurred: (17) fela spella him saedon tha Beormas (BEL:96) many stories him told the Karelians The Karelians told him many stories (18) beot he gelaeste (BEL:96) vow he fulfilled He fulfilled a vow The syntax of Middle English is less free than that of OE and a little more free than that of ModE. As in OE and ModE the typical order in noun phrases was article, adjective and head noun: (19) the tendre croppes the tender shoots although occasionally, especially in poetry, the adjective could occur after the noun: (20) shoures soote showers sweet

sweet showers Genitives preceded the nouns they modified: (21) his halve cours his half course

(22)

the Knightes Tale the knight's tale

The of-genitive developed in ME: (23) the droghte of March the drought of March Prepositions preceded their objects, as in both OE and ModE: (24) to the rote to the root But could follow a pronominal object: (25) him to him to to him The order of elements in clauses was most commonly SVO/C: (26) he loved chivalrie he loved chivalry (27) tel me boldely tell me boldly But CSV could occur: (27) A Knight ther was a knight there was

there was a knight A number of ModE constructions require that an auxiliary be moved to the left of the subject. In ME these constructions allowed either an auxiliary or a main verb to be moved, just as in OE or modern German. These constructions include yes/no questions: (28) Wiltow thanne go thy wey? will you then go your way? (29) Se ye nat, Lord, how mankynde it destroyeth? see you not, Lord, how mankind it destroys Do you not see, Lord, how it destroys mankind? (Note the OSV order in the subordinate clause in (29).) and Wh-questions: (30) what have I do? what have I done? (31) who studieth now? who studies now? But in ME if the sentence began with an adverbial phrase, a verb or auxiliary could be moved to the left of the subject: (32) thereto hadde he riden thereto had he ridden he had ridden there OE allowed subjectless sentences when there was no content to be put in the subject. In this respect OE was like modern Italian and Spanish. In contrast, ModE requires that sentences have subjects. This expectation developed in ME and consequently, in cases in which the subject has no content, dummy or expletive subjects were inserted: (33) Ther was also a Nonne, there was also a nun (34) it is nat honest, it may not avaunce it is not seemly, it may not advance it is not seemly, it may not help

for to deelen with no swich poraille for to deal with no such poor people to deal with such poor people ME retains characteristics of OE negation, but develops characteristics which it shares with ModE. The negative particle ne precedes the verb: (35) Ne wolde he that she were love ne wyf not wished he that she were love nor wife he wished that she would be neither love nor wife And like OE and many non-standard varieties of ModE, ME allowed multiple negation: (36) He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde he never yet no villany not said he never yet said anything bad in al his lyf unto no maner wight in all his life unto no kind of creature in all his life to any kind of creature But the ModE development in which the negation follows the auxiliary was also available: (37) He may nat wepe he may not weep As was the option of placing the negation after the main verb of a clause: (38) He sette nat his benefyce to hyre he set not his benefice to hire he did not hire out his benefice This latter characteristic lasted into the nineteenth century, as the following example from Pride and Prejudice shows: (39) which I hesitated not in giving, of your sister's indifference.

which I hesitated not in giving, of your sister's indifference.

7. Semantic change The study of semantic change focuses on the changing meanings of words, and the meanings of many ModE words are quite different from the meanings of their ME or OE ancestors. For example, the OE form of ModE deer, deor, meant "animal," any animal, just like its cognate, the modern German word Tier. Because the earlier form could be used for a broader range of referents than its descendent, its meaning is said to have narrowed or specialized. Other examples of words whose meanings have narrowed are: meat (earlier, food of any sort, now food derived from the flesh of animals; cf. sweetmeats); girl (earlier, young person of either sex, now young female person); starve (earlier, to die, now to die from lack of food); hound (earlier any dog, now a hunting dog; cf. German Hund). Narrowing is not the only way in which word meanings can change. The range of referents of a word can widen, as happened to bird, which originally meant a young bird, and now can refer to birds of any age. Other examples of widening (also called broadening, generalization or extension) include: plant (earlier restricted to shrubs, saplings, and seedlings, now may refer to any vegetable organism); box (earlier a small container made of boxwood, now any container with rigid sides); go (earlier, to walk, now to move along or travel by any means). A third type of semantic change involves a metaphoric change in a word's meaning. For example, translate used to mean literally to carry a burden across something. Its meaning was metaphorically changed so that it now means to reexpress a meaning in a different language. Metaphorical change is often responsible for lexical polysemy, as in foot (of a person, or of a mountain), or brow (of a person, or of a hill), eye (of a person, or of a needle), or as in the metaphorical extension of the meaning of grasp from physical control to mental control. Other types of semantic change are amelioration (semantic improvement) and pejoration (semantic disimprovement). For example, the OE ancestor of ModE pretty, praettig, meant sly or wily, but it ameliorated so that it now means pleasing or attractive. In contrast, the OE ancestor of ModE churl, ceorl, denoted the lowest rank of free people, but now churl means a rude or surly individual. Many words change the level of style to which they are appropriate. For example, Swift, among others, objected to mob and extra. Nowadays we use these words in a wide range of styles and no longer regard them as objectionable; they have improved their stylistic position. Many Latin and French borrowings which were initially borrowed in scholarly contexts, are now used quite informally: genius, history, include, legal. The final type of semantic change with which we deal here is sometimes called semantic shift and involves the shift of the denotation of a word from one referent to a related one. For example, the ModE word bead refers to small round objects made of glass, wood or metal, strung on a necklace or rosary. Its OE and ME ancestors were bedu and bede respectively, which meant prayer. Because medieval Christians counted their prayers (beads) on strings of small spherical objects, the referent of bead shifted from prayers to the spheres used to count them. A similar shift of meaning affected the word hearse. It used to refer to a candle holder used in church services, including funerals. 8. A brief history of the standardization of English Written English, especially its spelling, morphology and syntax are highly standardized. By standardization we mean the attempt to eliminate both synchronic and diachronic variation, especially of the regional, social, and optional types. Standardization involves several processes. First, of course, there must be a felt need for intervention in the language. As societies become more complex and centralized, individuals and governments feel a need for a linguistic variety that will be used and understood

consistently by a majority of the people, and which will act as a unifying force in the state. Second, they (overtly or covertly) select a variety and promote it as the common one. Third, this variety must be accepted by the relevant people. Fourth, if it is accepted, then it can be developed so as to be able to perform as required in all of the domains of life in which such a language is used, including especially the government, administrative, legal, educational, intellectual, and religious domains. Fifth, a means must be created of defining and disseminating this variety; it must be codified. Dictionaries, grammars and manuals of style are produced. Sixth, ways of maintaining the standard must evolve. Education, publishing, and the "complaint" tradition all contribute to the maintenance of standard English. During the late OE period, the West Saxon dialect functioned as a sort of literary standard in England. This was due to a number of factors. First and foremost was the fact that almost all other areas of England had been disrupted by attack and colonization by preliterate Vikings. Alfred the Great rallied Wessex and other areas, and succeeded in defeating the Scandinavians at the battle of Ethandun and imposing on them the treaty of Wedmore. He then set about consolidating his victory by developing a highly centralized administration and encouraging cultural pursuits. He ordered the translation of Latin texts (perhaps even translating some himself) and is credited with the development of OE prose. For about three hundred years after the Norman conquest, French and Latin were the two primary languages of administration, scholarship, and religion in England and consequently there was little call for a standardized English. However, the fourteenth century saw the beginning of the restoration of English as a language of administration, literature, and religion. But by 1476, when Caxton set up England's first printing press, he was dismayed by the range of variation in the language. As a man of business he realized that the more books he sold the more money he would make. He perceived that the linguistic variation that existed in England at the time made speakers from one region incomprehensible to speakers from another. So he chose to print the variety of the South-east Midlands. He justified his choice by claiming that "the men of Mercia, who are from the middle of England and as it were partners with the ends, understand the northern and southern languages better than the northerners and southerners understand each other." As additional justification he pointed out that the kings of England live in the south because the corn land there is better, there are more people, more noble cities, and more profitable harbors. Any businessman of sense would have chosen as Caxton did. But Caxton was not the first to perceive the need for a common variety of English. English commerce had grown and prospered greatly over the previous century. England had become a unified state subject to a monarch who resided in Westminster, just outside London. It had also begun to compete with powerful centralized European kingdoms such as France (with which it was involved at this period in the Hundred Years War). These developments had already fostered the use of specific dialects as modes of wider communication, most particularly the dialect of the South-east Midlands and London. Caxton probably was encouraged in his choice of this dialect because it was the variety native to the wealthy London merchants, many of whom had migrated from the midlands. This was the variety in which they had been carrying out their business correpondence for about a century before Caxton. It had also become the English variety used in official government documents. Nationalistic, commercial, and administrative forces all pointed toward the need for a standard English and toward the choice of the South-east Midlands variety to fulfill that need. One of the effects of the introduction of printing was to reduce the amount of variation in spelling. However this initial fixing of English spelling occurred before the Great Vowel Shift had affected the majority of English long vowels. As a result, once the spelling was fixed, pronunciation and spelling began to drift apart, so that the pronunciations associated with English vowel letters are currently quite varied and quite different from the pronunciations accorded them either in earlier forms of English or in other European languages.

By the end of the sixteenth century, English was the main language of almost all public domains of English life. It was used in religion, education, administration, and scholarship. The English Renaissance brought English scholars into contact with classical texts and languages, from which they borrowed large numbers of words. As a result, English was sufficiently developed to be able to function effectively in all these domains. In spite of its obvious effectiveness in these domains, many people felt that the language required improvement. Some felt that the massive infusions of classical borrowings were inappropriate and recommended a return to a pure English vocabulary. Others felt that they could not rely on their own judgment in choosing appropriate English words and constructions. They had nothing analogous to the grammars and rhetorics of the classical languages to guide them. Many felt that English was subject to such rapid change that their writings would be as inaccessible to subsequent generations as Old English was to them and as Chaucer was becoming. These feelings led in the early eighteenth century to a call for an academy modeled on that of France, which would ascertain (i.e. settle doubtful usage) the language. This proposal was discussed at length and eventually rejected on various grounds, including that it violated the spirit of English freedom and individuality. (A similar debate occurred in the U.S. after the American revolution with identical results.) The task of fixing the language fell to private individuals. Various movements during these centuries contributed to the codification of English. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the orthoepist movement attempted to correct its pronunciation and lexicographers, rhetoricians, and grammarians attempted to fix its spelling, words, morphology, syntax and usage. To complete this chapter we briefly examine the development of the English dictionary and of school grammar (a topic we deal with in chapters (usage) and (history of language study). 8.1. Dictionaries When we consult a modern dictionary, especially a comprehensive one such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or Webster's Third, or the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD), we do so with a number of expectations. From an organizational point of view we expect it to list its entries alphabetically. We expect it to contain any word we enquire about, and to include the names of mythological characters, historical personages, names of the capitols of states and countries, specialized lists of words, such as for example, terms from scriptures, and also such supplementary information as lists of universities and colleges. For each entry we expect the dictionary to tell us authoritatively its part of speech, its etymology, how to spell and pronounce it, what meanings to associated with it, and how to use it appropriately. In many dictionaries, its history, meanings, and uses will be illustrated by carefully chosen quotations from respected texts. While we might think that it is only a matter of common sense that dictionaries should have these characteristics, there is, in fact, nothing natural or inevitable about them. The modern dictionary is the product of a history that dates only from the late eighteenth century. Before that, the individual characteristics that we consider a package developed independently of each other. Even something as apparently sensible as alphabetical ordering was not fully used (though it was known) until 1604. Dictionaries fulfill a need created by particular historical and cultural circumstances. Before the eighteenth century, there was little need for dictionaries with modern characteristics. As we will see, the modern dictionary fulfills a need for authoritative information based on the usages of prestigious users of the language. It is one of the devices we use to codify our standardization of the language. Dictionary making, like much else, began humbly. As Latin became primarily a learned second language for scholars around medieval Europe, the need arose for lists of translations of Latin words into the scholars' native languages. Initially this need was fulfilled by simply writing the translations of Latin words directly above them on manuscripts (interlinear glosses). Eventually partially alphabetized lists of

hard Latin words were compiled and appended to collections of manuscripts (glossaries), to be used by scholars and students. These early dictionaries were bilingual (occasionally trilingual) lists of hard words prepared for educated readers. Early Renaissance dictionaries continued the "hard word" tradition, but instead of concentrating on words found in Latin texts, they provided synonyms for the many unfamiliar terms borrowed into English from various classical languages. Typically they were organized by topic rather than alphabetically. Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall (1604) was a development in the hard word tradition. It represents the first true monolingual English dictionary and was aimed at a new audience - literate women who did not know any French or Latin. Cawdrey's Table listed 2500 "hard usual words" borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, which it defines mostly by providing a symonym in familiar English. Henry Cockeram's The English Dictionary (1623) provided one section on hard words, another on more common words that its readers might wish to translate into more impressive language, and a third listing classical and other literary allusions. Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656) was the first English dictionary to give etymologies and sources for its 11,000 entries. Even at this early stage dictionary makers plagiarized from each other. Blount was so angered at the blatent plagiarism of his work in Edward Phillipps' A New World of Words (1658) that he replied with A New World of Errors. In 1678 Phillipps published A New World of Words or a General English Dictionary, with 20,000 entries including all the words in his original and a great many everyday words. Elisha Cole's An English Dictionary (1676) included older words and dialect forms, and extended the range of technical terms included. John Kersey's A New English Dictionary (1702) included a large protion of the ordinary English vocabulary, both spoken and written, as well as the usual hard words. Between 1721 and 1731 Nathaniel Bailey published a number of editions of An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, which aimed at comprehensiveness in coverage and etymology, and which initiated the practice of indicating the primary stress in each word. In 1730 Bailey and others published Dictionarium Britannicum, which, with 48,000 entries, became the standard reference work until the appearance of Johnson's famous dictionary, for which it appears to have been the basis. All of the elements of the modern dictionary are present in Dr. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), published in two large folio volumes containing 40,000 words. Johnson's contributions to lexicography were three: (1) he recognized that words may have multiple senses, which for the most part he clearly and carefully (if occasionally idiosyncratically) defined; (2) he richly illustrated the meaning and use of each entry with quotations from literary and scholarly works, and (3) he labeled words that he believed his readers should avoid with such terms as "cant", "low", "ludicrous," an advisory practice lexicography has not yet managed to eschew. According to the introduction to his dictionary, Johnson began his project with the intention of fixing the language for all time. As he worked, he realized the inevitability of language change and decided that the best he could do was to "give longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be immortal." In particular, he abandoned the hope of fixing English pronunciation. Nonetheless, even though he did occasionally recognize more than one spelling for a word, his dictionary was instrumental in fixing English spelling, in large measure because of Johnson's own prestige and authority, bolstered considerably by the fact that he

based his decisions primarily on upper class usage. A private individual had fulfilled one of the tasks of an academy. In the new United States there raged a debate regarding the language such a newly independent country should have. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Noah Webster produced a grammar, a reader, a speller, and a number of dictionaries. Besides being anxious to improve the deficiencies he saw in Johnson's work, he was caught up in the movement to Americanize English and was successful in distinguishing some American spelling patterns from their British counterparts, though not nearly as many as he originally intended. The major major changes he introduced are: British -our -re -dge-que -ll-ce -exion -ise U.S. -or -er -dg-k -l-se -ection -ize Examples neighbour/neighbor theatre/theater judgement/judgment cheque/check travelled/traveled defence/defense inflexion/inflection realise/realize

In 1857, a project began that proved a monument to nineteenth century historical scholarship, the Oxford English Dictionary project. The authors aimed at including every word that appeared in English since 1150, with accurate etymologies, and their various forms and meanings. The OED was published in 12 volumes between 1884 and 1928. Its first supplement appeared in 1933 and later supplements appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. It was made available in a two-volume microprint endition in 1971 and as a result has become very widely known and available. It has been available on CD-ROM since 1992 and online on the internet since March of 2000 (for a substantial fee). While the OED represents the culmination of nearly a century of scholarly work on English and traces the history of its vocabulary back to Middle English, the second edition of the American Heritage Dictionary traces its entries back to their Indo-European roots. It even provides an appendix on IndoEuropean, including an essay on that language, its speakers, and their millieu. As we mentioned above, the expectation that a dictionary will warn it readers about words, especially those to which objection might be taken because they are informal, obscene, or slang, dies hard. However, in 1961 the Merriam Webster Company published Webster's Third New International Dictionary which abandoned the prescriptive practices of previous editions and confined itself to describing the language. The outcry was such that many institutions refused to accept the Third as their guide and continued with the Second edition of 1934. The American Heritage Publishing Company was so concerned at Merriam-Webster's dereliction of its duty to English that it offered to buy the rights to the dictionary and recall all copies of the defective edition. When they were refused, they decided to publish a dictionary of their own, in spite of the fact that they had never published one before. They assembled a 100-member panel which included writers, journalists, and a single linguist. The editors consulted this panel about controversial usages and included their responses in the entries. However, this procedure

failed in its goal to provide consistent guidance. The panel were as divided about those usages as the rest of us, which of course is why the usages are controversial in the first place. 8.2. Grammars Should we write or say It is me or It is I?, Who did you see? or Whom did you see?, Who did you speak to? or To whom did you speak? Do multiple ("double") negatives intensify the negation or "destroy one another." That we continue to be concerned with shibboleths like these is a testament to the power of the late eighteenth century grammarians who set out to codify the grammar of English. In the late eighteenth century people placed great faith in the orderliness and rationality of the universe. If Newton could demonstrate the laws of gravity and Linnaeus could create a system for classifying plants and animals, then surely rational order could be imposed on language. Added to the assumption of orderliness were the results of centuries of scholarship in the classical languages and even considerable knowledge of earlier forms of English, as well as a strong sense of the disorderly energy of English. The temper of the times was ideally suited to the task of regulating the language. Nearly all eighteenth century writers on the topic were agreed that the language was in need of regulation. According to Archbishop Lowth, a clergyman with knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, various modern languages, and old English, "Grammar is very much neglected." He set out to remedy this deficiency by writing A Short Introduction to English Grammar, which appeared in 1762 and went through twentytwo editions in the eighteenth century. Lowth's grammar was imitated by many other authors of English grammars. Indeed many used Lowth's technique of stating a rule, giving examples of its use, and then giving examples of its violation, often culled from well-respected writers. In fact, Lowth's own wording of particular rules crops up in grammar after grammar through the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. The concept of grammar that we have inherited from the eighteenth century is quite different from that which we have presented. According to Lindley Murray, one of Lowth's more successful imitators and author of English Grammar, first published in 1795 and frequently reissued throughout the nineteenth century, "English grammar is the art of speaking and writing the English language with propriety." The definition focuses on language use, rather than on the language system itself. Eighteenth century grammarians were agreed that the language needed regulation. When they disagreed, it was primarily over the criteria to be used in justifying the regulations. There were two positions. The first, represented by Joseph Priestley in his Rudiments of English Grammar (1761), held that current use among certain groups of people was the only guide. The second, and ultimately dominant point of view, appealed to a range of criteria, including logic, linguistic history, clarity, and personal taste. The idea that certain groups of people spoke the best English has a long history. Just who spoke that variety and why changed from one century to another. Caxton, as we saw, preferred the Mercian dialect of London for two reasons: it could be understood by northerners and southerners as well as by the men of "myddle englond," and the language of the north was "sharp slyting frotyng and unschape" (sharp, piercing, chafing, and misshapen). By the early sixteenth century the preferred variety was that used in the royal court. By the seventeenth century the favored variety had shifted to that of the learned and cultivated. By the eighteenth century this had narrowed to the speech of the universities. Unfortunately for us, usage was a criterion preferred by only a minority of the grammarians who codified English. Standardization, as we have noted, is the attempt to suppress variation at all levels of the grammar. In the case of the eighteenth century authors, this usually involved selecting one of a number of variants as the only acceptable or correct one. The selection could be based on a number of criteria. Sometimes logic and mathematics were called on to adjudicate, as in the case of double negatives: Murray, following Lowth

verbatim, claims that "Two negatives, in English, destroy one another, or are equivalent to an affirmative." This is true under certain circumstances in logic and mathematics, but English (like many other languages) has used double, and indeed multiple, negation throughout its history to indicate the force of a speaker's denial. Chaucer and Shakespeare used it, as did most writers until the eighteenth century, and as speakers of non-standard varieties do to this day. Linguistic history was also called into service. For example, because Latin used a preposition which could be translated as from rather than one meaning to with the Latin original for averse, English speakers should use averse from rather than averse to. Notions of clarity were also used to support a choice. Murray held it to be a "capital rule" that the words which are most closely related to each other semantically "should be placed in the sentence as near to each other as possible." From this it follows that He only eats cake is unacceptably vague or ambiguous and that if we mean that the only thing he eats is cake, then we should say He eats only cake. Sometimes authors relied on their own taste. Murray asserts that the practice of separating "the preposition from its noun in order to connect different prepositions with the same noun: as, 'To suppose the zodiac and planets to be efficient of, and antecedent to, themselves.' . . . is always inelegant." He also claimed that placing a preposition before a relative pronoun is more "graceful" than stranding the preposition. However, the amount of justification for a particular choice varied greatly from one writer to another. Some were content merely to assert a rule. What appears to have occurred in the late eighteenth century is that the preferred and dispreferred expressions were in competition among speakers generally, including among the wealthy and educated. Grammarians standardizing the language felt that they had to eliminate all but one variant. Occasionally they felt that they had to justify their choices and so searched for criteria. The choice of criteria allowed certain inferences about the speaker or writer who used a dispreferred form. Because multiple negatives were banned on logical grounds, one who used them could be assumed to be illogical. If a construction was inelegant then its users lacked taste. As a result, the choices and criteria used by the eighteenth century grammarians licensed the negative inferences that are still made about people who use the dispreferred forms. There is no linguistic reason to choose one of these disputed forms over another, so judgements based on them are really social judgements of their users, regardless of whether or not they are expressed as linguistic judgements. If grammar is the art of writing and speaking with propriety, then by definition those who fail to adhere to the canons laid down by the grammarians speak and write improperly. A further motivation for the appearance and popularity of grammars such as Lowth's and Murray's was that the late eighteenth century was a time of considerable upward social mobility. It is well known from modern sociolinguistic studies that upwardly mobile people tend to be "linguistically insecure"; that is, they tend to assume that their speech may not be correct, and that there is a correct form of speech which they can learn and thus pass without comment within the class to which they aspire. Prescriptive grammars fulfilled a need among these upwardly mobile speakers. Anyone who learned the rules that the grammars laid down and who faithfully followed them could expect to be accepted in their new class. Although eighteenth century standardizers set out to regulate and to fix the entire language, they had only mixed success. They succeeded primarily in eliminating some variation from formal written English. They managed to fix English spelling; we tolerate very little spelling variation and a number of attempted reforms since that time have failed. They also managed to ban a number of constructions from written English (some quite useful, such as multiple negation). And they succeeded in convincing English speakers to retain certain morphological contrasts which would probably have disappeared by now (whom

vs. who). Although there is still the widespread belief that some pronunciations are better than others, standard English is pronounced in a number of accents, so they failed to standardize English pronunciation. They also failed to eliminate morphological and syntactic variation from the spoken language. In particular, they failed to eliminate variation that is important for speakers' personal and social identities. Unfortunately, they succeeded in setting up a logic that allows non-standard speakers to be judged illogical, uneducated, even uneducable, on the basis of their speech.