A history of the english language (стр. 5 из 8)

The letter was retained; but, although it was still called ‘thorn’ in the 14th century, it seems in Geoffrey Chaucer’s time to have been regarded as a mere compendium for th, which generally took its place except initially. It may be noted that Thomas Usk, in the acrostic sentence of his Testament of Love (1387) spells in ‘thine’ with the four letters THIN. The adoption of a number of French words like ioie ‘joy’, in which i was pronounced like the modern English j, introduced the consonantal use of this letter into English orthography.

The Old English initial combination hl survived (written lh) in some dialects down to the 14th century; but hr was very early reduced to r. For the Old English hw, Middle English writers substituted wh, though the h was, at first, often omitted in this combination, as in other positions, by scribes of French education. The northern spelling qua, quilk for Wha, whilk ‘who’, ‘which’ arose from a dialectal pronunciation of qu as wh, which still survives locally in a few words.

From the 12th century onwards, the letter y, when used as a vowel, was treated as a mere alternative form of i.

The Ormulum is written in a peculiar phonetic spelling devised by the author himself. This is based, to a considerable extent, on native tradition, though the handwriting is of the continental type. There are, however, some of the new features. Orm uses ch and sh as we do now, and retains the Old English form of

for the two sounds which the French letter had not. A device peculiar to himself is the appropriation of different shapes of the letter g to the two sounds in god ‘good’ and egge ‘edge’.

But the most noteworthy characteristic of his orthography is the method of indicating the quantity of the vowels. The shortness of a vowel, in a syllable ending with a consonant, is shown by doubling the following consonant, as in Crisstenndom. When the short vowel ended a syllable in the middle of a word, Orm indicated a long vowel by one, two, or even three acute accents over the letter. This elaborate and cumbrous system found no imitators, but, as preserved in the author’s autograph Manuscript, it is one of the most important aids that we possess for ascertaining the English pronunciation of the time [2; 11; 20; 28; 54].

2.2.2 Middle English pronunciation

Several sounds altered during the early Middle English period. Some took on a different value; some disappeared altogether. In particular, there was a restructuring of the Old English vowel system. The original diphthongs became pure vowels, and new diphthongs emerged. Some of the new units arose when certain consonants at the end of a syllable came to be pronounced in a vowel-like manner an example is wei ‘way’, from Old Engliss weg. French loan words also introduced new diphthongs, in the form of [oi] and [ui] – unusual sounds for English, and the ancestors of modern [ɔi] in joy, point, etc.

Several of the pure vowels also changed their values. For example, in most parts of the country (except the north), Old English [a:] came to be articulated higher at the back of the mouth, as is shown by such spelling changes as ban becoming bon ‘bone’ or swa becoming so. Northern speech followed its own course in several other areas too; for example, several of the new diphthongs were far more evident in the south, being replaced by pure vowels in the north (light vs licht).

An interesting change happened to [h]. This sound appeared before a consonant at the beginning of many Old English words, such as hring ‘ring’ and hnecca ‘neck’. It was lost early on in the Middle English period – the first sign of the process of ‘aitch-dropping’ which is still with us today. The loss of h before a vowel began some time later, producing variations in usage which continued into the 16th century. Middle English manuscripts show many examples of an h absent where it should be present (adde for had, eld for held) or present where it should be absent (ham for am, his for is). The influence of spelling (and doubtless the prescriptive tradition in schools) led to the h-forms being later restored in many words in Received Pronunciation (though not in such Romance loans like honour), and thus to the present-day situation where the use of [h] in socially diagnostic [20; 28].

In a few cases, new contrastive units emerged. The [v] sound became much more important, because of its use in French loan words, and began to distinguish pairs of words, as it does today f (feel vs veal). Although both [f] and [v] sounds are found in Old English, the language did not use them to differentiate words. Similarly, French influence caused [s] and [z] to become contrastive (zeal vs seal). And the ng sound [ ŋ] at the end of a word also began to distinguish meanings at this time thing vs thin. In Old English, this sound had always been followed by a [g] – cyning ‘king’, for example, was kyniŋg. However, the [g] died away at the end of the Old English period, leaving [ŋ] as the sole distinguishing unit.

The study of Middle English phonology is made increasingly difficult (and fascinating) by the intricate dialect situation. On the one hand, a letter might be given different pronunciations depending on the dialect area in which it appears; an example is the letter y, which for a while represented an unrounded sound quality in the south and a rounded sound quality in the north. On the other hand, a sound might be given different spellings depending on the dialect area in which it appears; an example here is Old English [х], spelled in the middle of words as gh in the south, and as ch in the north (night vs nicht). Finally, we should note the continuing need for analytical caution because spelling was not standardized. Problems of authorial idiosyncrasy and copyist error abound, contributing to both the complex character of the period and the moral fibre of its students [28; 31; 38; 43].

2.3 Changes in Grammar in Middle and Early New English

The changes in English grammar may be described as a general reduction of inflections. Endings of the noun and adjective marking distinctions of number and case and often of gender were so altered in pronunciation as to lose their distinctive form and hence their usefulness. To some extent the same thing is true of the verb. This leveling of inflectional endings was due partly to phonetic changes, partly to the operation of analogy. The phonetic changes were simple but far-reaching. The earliest seems to have been the change of final m to n wherever it occurred, i.e., in the dative plural of nouns and adjectives and in the dative singular (masculine and neuter) of adjectives when inflected according to the strong declension. Thus, mūðum >mūðun, gōdum>gōdun. This n, along with the n of the other inflectional endings, was then dropped (*muðu, *gōdu). At the same time, the vowels a, o, u, e in inflectional endings were obscured to a sound, the so-called “indeterminate vowel”, which came to be written e (less often i,y, u, depending on place and date). As a result, a number of originally distinct endings such as a, u, e, an, um were reduced generally to a uniform e, and such grammatical distinctions as they formerly expressed were no longer conveyed. Traces of these changes have been found in Old English manuscripts as early as the 10th century. By the end of the 12th century they seem to have been generally carried out. The leveling is somewhat obscured in the written language by the tendency of scribes to preserve the traditional spelling, and in some places the final n was retained even in the spoken language, especially as a sign of the plural. The effect of these changes on the inflection of the noun and the adjective, and the further simplification that was brought about by the operation of analogy, may be readily shown [10; 20; 22; 46].

2.3.1 Middle English Noun

A glance at the few examples of common noun declensions in Old English will show how seriously the inflectional endings were disturbed. For example, in the London English of Chaucer in the strong masculine declension the forms muð,mūðe, mūðe, mūð in the singular, and mūða, mūða and mūðum, mūðas in the plural were reduced to three: mūð, mūðes, and mūðe. In such words the e, which was organic in the dative singular and the genitive and dative plural (i.e., stood for an ending in the Old English paradigm), was extended by analogy to the nominative and accusative singular, so that forms like stōne, mūðe appear, and the only distinctive termination is the s of the possessive singular and of the nominative and accusative plural. Because these two cases of the plural were those most frequently used, the s came to be thought of as the sign of the plural and was extended to all plural forms. We get thus an inflection of the noun identical with that which we have today. Other declensions suffered even more, so that in many words like giefu, sunu, the distinctions of case and even of number were completely obliterated.

In early Middle English only two methods of indicating the plural remained fairly distinctive: the s or es from the strong masculine declension and the en (as in oxen) from the weak. And for a time, at least in southern England, it would have been difficult to predict that the -s would become the almost universal sign of the plural that it has become. Until the 13th century the en plural enjoyed great favor in the south, being often added to nouns which had not belonged to the weak declension in Old English. But in the rest of England the s plural (and genitive singular) of the old first declension (masculine) was apparently felt to be so distinctive that it spread rapidly. Its extension took place most quickly in the north. Even in Old English many nouns originally of other declensions had gone over to this declension in the Northumbrian dialect. By 1200 s was the standard plural ending in the north and north Midland areas; other forms were exceptional. Fifty years later it had conquered the rest of the Midlands, and in the course of the 14th century it had definitely been accepted all over England as the normal sign of the plural in English nouns. Its spread may have been helped by the early extension of s throughout the plural in Anglo-Norman, but in general it may be considered as an example of the survival of the fittest in language.

One of the consequences of the decay of inflections described above was the elimination of that troublesome feature of language, grammatical gender. The gender of Old English nouns was not often determined by meaning. Sometimes it was in direct contradiction with the meaning. Thus woman (OE wīf-mann) was masculine, because the second element in the compound was masculine; wife and child, like German Weib and Kind, were neuter. Moreover, the gender of nouns in Old English was not so generally indicated by the declension as it is in a language like Latin. Instead it was revealed chiefly by the concord of the strong adjective and the demonstratives. These by their distinctive endings generally showed, at least in the singular, whether a noun was masculine, feminine, or neuter. When the inflections of these gender distinguishing words were reduced to a single ending for the adjective, and the fixed forms of the, this, that, these, and those for the demonstratives, the support for grammatical gender was removed. The weakening of inflections and the confusion and loss of the old gender proceeded in a remarkably parallel course. In the north, where inflections weakened earliest, grammatical gender disappeared first. In the south it lingered longer because there the decay of inflections was slower.

The present method of determining gender was no sudden invention of Middle English times. The recognition of sex that lies at the root of natural gender is shown in Old English by the noticeable tendency to use the personal pronouns in accordance with natural gender, even when such use involves a clear conflict with the grammatical gender of the antecedent. For example, the pronoun it in Etað þisne hlaf (masculine), hit is mīm līchama (Ælfric’s Homilies) is exactly in accordance with modern usage when we say, Eat this bread, it is my body. Such a use of the personal pronouns is clearly indicative of the feeling for natural gender even while grammatical gender was in full force. With the disappearance of grammatical gender sex became the only factor in determining the gender of English nouns [20; 28; 54].

2.3.2 Middle English and Early New English Adjective and Pronoun

In the adjective the leveling of forms had even greater consequences. Partly as a result of the sound-changes already described, partly through the extensive working of analogy, the form of the nominative singular was early extended to all cases of the singular, and that of the nominative plural to all cases of the plural, both in the strong and the weak declensions. The result was that in the weak declension there was no longer any distinction between the singular and the plural: both ended in e as in blinda> blinde and blindan>blinde. This was also true of those adjectives under the strong declension whose singular ended in e .By about 1250 the strong declension had distinctive forms for the singular and plural only in certain monosyllabic adjectives which ended in a consonant in Old English (sing. glad, pl. glade). Under the circumstances the only ending which remained to the adjective was often without distinctive grammatical meaning and its use was not governed by any strong sense of adjectival inflection. Although it is clear that the e ending of the weak and plural forms were available for use in poetry in both the East and West Midlands until the end of the 14th century, it is impossible to know the most usual status of the form in the spoken language. Certainly adjectival inflections other than e, such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s oure aller cok, were archaic survivals by the close of the Middle English period.

The decay of inflections that brought about such a simplification of the noun and the adjective as has just been described made it necessary to depend less upon formal indications of gender, case, and (in adjectives) number, and to rely more upon juxtaposition, word order, and the use of prepositions to make clear the relation of words in a sentence. This is apparent from the corresponding decay of pronominal inflections, where the simplification of forms was due in only a slight measure to the weakening of final syllables that played so large a part in the reduction of endings in the noun and the adjective. The loss was greatest in the demonstratives. Of the numerous forms of sē, sēo, þæt.only the and that survived through Middle English and are used today. A plural tho ‘those’ survived to Elizabethan times. All the other forms indicative of different gender, number, and case disappeared in most dialects early in the Middle English period. The same may be said of the demonstrative þēs, þēos, þis‘this’. Everywhere but in the south the neuter form þis came to be used early in Middle English for all genders and cases of the singular, while the forms of the nominative plural were similarly extended to all cases of the plural, appearing in Modern English as those and these.

In the personal pronoun the losses were not so great. Most of the distinctions that existed in Old English were retained. However the forms of the dative and accusative cases were early combined, generally under that of the dative (him, her, [t]hem). In the neuter the form of the accusative [h]it became the general objective case, partly because it was like the nominative, and partly because the dative him would have been subject to confusion with the corresponding case of the masculine. One other general simplificationis to be noted: the loss of the dual number. A language can get along without a distinctionin pronouns for two persons and more than two: the forms wit, and their oblique cases did not survive beyond the 13th century, and English lost the dual number.