Old English Phonology

Август 20, 2022

Содержание

2. Lecture 2. Plan The Main Historic Events of the Period. Old English Alphabet and Pronunciation. English
3. 1. The Main Historic Events of the Period.
4. British History Timeline The Celtic Period (the 5th century BC – 43 AD); Roman Britain (43
5. Celtic People The Celts immigrated to England in the 5th century B.C. and drove out the
6. The Romans In 43 A.D., an army of 40,000 Roman soldiers invaded Celtic Britain and made
7. The Main Historic Figures Julius Caesar (100BC - 44BC) Caesar was a politician and general of
8. The End of Roman Rule 410 A.D. The Romans started pulling soldiers from Britain in 410
9. The Jutes Come to Britain Vortigern (Вортигерн), a Celtic chieftain, asked the Jutes, a Germanic tribe,
10. The start of the Germanic Tribes’ Invasion The Germanic Angle and Saxon tribes also invaded Britain.
11. Jute, Angle, and Saxon Invasion
12. The 7 kingdoms formed by the newcomers were the following: Jutes – the kingdom of Kent;
13. The Scandinavian Invasion Around 878 AD Danes and Norsemen, also called Vikings, invaded the country and
14. The Introduction of Christianity The arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the introduction of Christianity
15. Alfred the Great (849 AD - 899 AD) King of the southern Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex
16. The Dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians Northumbrian (нортумбрийский); Mercian (мерсийский); Kentish (кентийский); West-Saxon
17. The Available Texts Kentish (кентийский): The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Latin: Historia ecclesiastica gentis
18. The Available Texts Mercian (мерсийский): Six Mercian hymns are included in the Anglo-Saxon glosses to the
19. 2. Old English Alphabet and Pronunciation.
20. The Runes The runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic
21. They were of specific shape, designed to be cut on the wooden sticks, and only few
23. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/write-your-name-in-runes.html
24. So the letters of the Old English alphabet were as follows, and they denoted the following
25. 9. h [h] hām (home), him (him), huntoð (hunting) 10. i [ɪ] hit (it), him (him),
26. 3. English Sounds as Compared with the Sounds in Other Indo-European Languages. Grimm’s Law. Verner’s Law.
27. The language of the period bears a lot of traces in common with other inflected Indo-European
28. A considerable number of words of the language had parallels in other known Indo-European languages (brōðor
29. By carefully studying present-day English words and comparing them with the words of our language we
30. Grimm’s Law Jaсob Ludwig Grimm (1785-1863), a German philologist and a folklorist (generally known together with
31. Verner’s Law Another exception was formulated by a Danish linguist Karl Adolph Verner (1846— 96) in
32. 4. The System of Vowels in Old English.
33. The System of Vowels in Old English
34. The System of Vowels in Old English
35. Assimilative changes are the changes that occurred in the language in specific surroundings – the sound
36. The Changes in Vowels Fracture/breaking (преломление). Diphthongization of short vowels ‘a’, ‘æ’, ‘e’ before the clusters:
37. The Changes in Vowels
38. The Changes in Vowels
39. The Changes in Vowels 3) Diphthongization after palatal consonants. Vowels under the influence of the initial
40. The Changes in Vowels 4) Back / Velar Mutation. Phonetic change caused by a back vowel
41. The Changes in Vowels 6) Contraction. If, after a consonant had dropped, two vowels met inside
42. 5. Changes in Consonants.
43. The System of Consonants in Old English The Old English system of consonants phonemes have changed
44. The System of Consonants in Old English
47. 1. Voicing of fricatives in intervocalic position f > v ofer (over) hlāf – hlāfas (loaf
48. 2. Palatalization of the sounds k’, sk’ and kg’ (marked as c, sc and cʓ) developed
49. 3. Assimilation before t. The sound t when it was preceded by a number of consonants
50. 4. Loss of consonants in certain positions Besides h that was lost in intervocal position, the
51. 5. Metathesis of r In several OE words the following change of the position of consonants
52. 6. West Germanic gemination of consonants In the process of palatal mutation, when j was lost
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Lecture 2. Plan
The Main Historic Events of the Period.
Old English Alphabet

and Pronunciation.
English sounds as compared with the sounds in other Indo-European Languages. Grimm’s Law.
The System of Vowels in Old English.
Changes in Consonants.

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1. The Main Historic Events of the Period.

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British History Timeline
The Celtic Period
(the 5th century BC – 43

AD);
Roman Britain (43 AD – 410);
The Germanic Tribe Invasion (started in 449);
The Scandinavian Period (the end of the 8th century – 1042)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/timelines/british/index_embed.shtml

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Celtic People
The Celts immigrated to England in the 5th century B.C.

and drove out the Stonehenge people.
Since the Celts wandered over areas from Spain to Russia and Britain, the Celtic language was spoken over a vast area of the European continent.
The Celtic language survives today in the language spoken by the Scotch Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, and Breton.

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The Romans
In 43 A.D., an army of 40,000 Roman soldiers invaded

Celtic Britain and made it part of the Roman Empire.
In the 400 years the Romans ruled Britain, they introduced Christianity, Latin, built roads, established Roman laws, and protected the Celts from the fierce Picts and Scots on the north side of Hadrian’s Wall.

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The Main Historic Figures
Julius Caesar (100BC - 44BC)
Caesar was a politician

and general of the late Roman republic, who greatly extended the Roman empire before seizing power and making himself dictator of Rome, paving the way for the imperial system. He made two expeditions to Britain, in 55 BC and 54 BC.
Claudius (10 BC - 54 AD)
Claudius I was the emperor who added Britain to the Roman Empire.

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The End of Roman Rule 410 A.D.
The Romans started pulling soldiers

from Britain in 410 A.D. after 400 years of Roman rule.
Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, was under attacks from barbaric tribes.
The Celts were left without the protection of the Roman army and with no weapons to defend themselves.

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The Jutes Come to Britain
Vortigern (Вортигерн), a Celtic chieftain, asked

the Jutes, a Germanic tribe, to come to Britain and fight the Picts and Scots.
In return, Vortigern promised that Jutes could have the isle of Thanet.
The Jutes defeated the Picts and Scots, but when they finished fighting, the Jutes stayed in Kent.

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The start of the Germanic Tribes’ Invasion
The Germanic Angle and Saxon

tribes also invaded Britain.
The Celts, renamed Wealas (foreigners), were driven west by them, settled in Wales.
Some Celts fled across the English channel and settled in Brittany where a form of the Celtic language can be heard today.
The present day heir to the English throne, Prince Charles, is titled the Prince of Wales. Welsh is a form of the Celtic language.

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Jute, Angle, and Saxon Invasion

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The 7 kingdoms formed by the newcomers were the following:
Jutes –

the kingdom of Kent;
Saxons – Essex, Wessex and Sussex;
Angles – East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia.
These 7 principal concurrent (/kənˈkʌrənt/ - одновременный) Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 7th – 8th centuries are known under the general name – Heptarchy (/ˈhɛptɑːki/ - гептархия, семивластие).
Some documents of literature as well as the remains of material culture of the later period were ruthlessly destroyed during the raids of the Scandinavians.

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The Scandinavian Invasion
Around 878 AD Danes and Norsemen, also called Vikings,

invaded the country and English got many Norse words into the language, particularly in the north of England.
The Vikings, being Scandinavian, spoke a language (Old Norse) which, in origin at least, was just as Germanic as Old English.

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The Introduction of Christianity
The arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and

the introduction of Christianity into Saxon England brought more Latin words into the English language.
England received the Latin alphabet and educated people. It brought monasteries with their schools and chronicles.
Now the English history was written by the Englishmen themselves, in their own language.
Now translation as a kind of intellectual activity came into the life of Englishmen.

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Alfred the Great (849 AD - 899 AD)
King of the southern

Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex and one of the outstanding figures of English history, as much for his social and educational reforms as for his military successes against the Danes. He is the only English monarch known as ‘the Great’.
In 886 AD, Alfred negotiated a treaty with the Danes. England was divided, with the north and the east (between the Rivers Thames and Tees) declared to be Danish territory - later known as the 'Danelaw‘ (“Данелаг” – область датского закона). Alfred therefore gained control of areas of West Mercia and Kent which had been beyond the boundaries of Wessex.
Alfred had a strong belief in the importance of education and learnt Latin in his late thirties. He then arranged, and himself took part in, the translation of books from Latin to Anglo-Saxon.

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The Dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians
Northumbrian (нортумбрийский);
Mercian (мерсийский);
Kentish

(кентийский);
West-Saxon (уэссекский).

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The Available Texts
Kentish (кентийский):
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People

(Latin: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum – Церковная история Англов), written by the Venerable Bede in about AD 731, is a history of the Christian Churches in England, and of England generally.
Northumbrian (нортумбрийский):
Caedmon’s Hymn (Песнь Кэдмонда, 7th c.);
Bede’s Death Song (Предсмертная песнь Бэды, 8thc.);
the Runes on the Ruthwell Cross from the Dream of the Rood;
Beowulf (http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/evolvingenglish/accessvers/index.html)

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The Available Texts
Mercian (мерсийский):
Six Mercian hymns are included in the

Anglo-Saxon glosses to the Vespasian Psalter /ˈsɔːltə/ (Веспасианов псалтырь)
West-Saxon (уэссекский):
King Alfred’s Preface to Gregory’s Pastoral Care;
Orosius’s World History (Historia adversus paganos);
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle;
Aelfric’s works – Gospels, Lives of Saints, Latin Grammar, Old Testament, Old Saxon Chronicles;
Wulfstan’s Homilies (поучения, проповеди), one of which Sermo Lupi ad Anglo (The Wulf’s Sermon to the English) is about the fate of the ravaged country after the Scandinavian conquest
(http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/evolvingenglish/accessvers/index.html)

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2. Old English Alphabet and Pronunciation.

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The Runes
The runes are the letters in a set of related

alphabets known as runic alphabets, which were used to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialised purposes thereafter.
They are the symbols that were very vague, that might at the same time denote a sound, a syllable or a whole word.
Runes are the 24 letters (later 16 in Scandinavia and 30 or more in Anglo-Saxon England) of an ancient Germanic alphabet used from the 2d or 3d to the 16th century. Perhaps derived ultimately from the Etruscan alphabet, the runic alphabet was used mainly for charms and inscriptions, on stone, wood, metal, or bone. Each letter had a name, which was itself a meaningful word. The rune , for instance, could stand for either the sound “f” or the fehu, “cattle”, which was the name given to the rune.

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They were of specific shape, designed to be cut on the

wooden sticks, and only few people knew how to make them and how to interpret them.
Runic inscriptions that came down from the oldest settlers on the isles are few, and the language (as it is interpreted) is not what might be called Old English - it was rather an ancient language which might be very close to the languages of other Germanic tribes.
Some English sounds had no counterpart in Latin, so three signs developed from runes were added, plus ligature æ, now well known as a transcription symbol (In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single).
The Latin alphabet was carried throughout medieval Europe by the Roman Catholic church - to the Irish and Merovingians in the 6th century and the Anglo-Saxons and Germans in the 7th. The oldest surviving texts in the English language written with Latin letters date back to 700.

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https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/write-your-name-in-runes.html

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So the letters of the Old English alphabet were as follows,

and they denoted the following sounds
1. a [a] ʒān (go) and (and)
2. æ [æ] ðæt (that)
3. b [b] bān (bone)
4. c [k] caru (care) and [tʃ] before front vowels cild (child)
5. d [d] dēor (deer; in old times animal)
6. e [e] mete (meat; in old times food)
7. f [f] findan (find) and [v] in intervocal position lufu (love)
8. ʒ was one of the remnants of the runic alphabet called joh (yoke), and it had several readings:
[g] ʒān (go)
[j] ʒēar (year)
[ɣ] at the beginning of the word before back vowels and after n and between two back vowels:
sorʒian (sorrow), folʒian (follow), ʒuma (man, human), daʒas (days)
http://www.runetree.co.uk/?articles/2013/06/29/the-anglo-saxon-alphabet-and-pronunciation.html

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9. h [h] hām (home), him (him), huntoð (hunting)
10. i [ɪ]

hit (it), him (him), lim (limb)
11. l [l] lytel (little), līf (life), lufu (love)
12. m [m] man (man), macian (make)
13. n [n] nama (name), nēah (near)
14. o [o] fōn (catch), mōna (moon)
15. p [p] pera (pear)
16. r [r] riht (right), rinʒan (ring), wyrcan (work)
17. s [s] sittan (sit), sinʒan (sing)
18. t [t] trēo (tree), tellan (tell)
19. ð was developed from the rune thorn [θ] ðæt (that), ðirda (third), ðin (thing); [ð] in the intervocal position ōðer (other), brōðor (brother)
20. u [u] wudu (wood)
21. w [w] in original Old English texts it was wynn from the rune meaning joy: winnan (win), weorðan (become)
22. x [ks] oxa (ox)
23. y [u] fyllan (fill), lytel (little)

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3. English Sounds as Compared with the Sounds in Other Indo-European

Languages. Grimm’s Law. Verner’s Law.

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The language of the period bears a lot of traces in

common with other inflected Indo-European languages, Ukrainian and Russian including.
Its characteristics:
the nominal parts of speech were declined;
the infinitive of the verb likewise had a distinct infinitival suffix;
the structure of the sentence had a subject, a predicate and secondary parts;
just like in our Slavic languages word order was free;
the nominal parts of speech had cases;
there was agreement between the subject and the predicate;
double negation was not prohibited.

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A considerable number of words of the language had parallels in

other known Indo-European languages (brōðor бpaт; duru двepь). Some of sounds are found in all languages that we know, some are now known as phonetic symbols, and they are specifically English sounds.
But some sounds which are found elsewhere, may not stand in the English words of Indo–European origin in the same places.

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By carefully studying present-day English words and comparing them with the

words of our language we can relate words in the languages:
flame Rus. пламя; Ukr. полум’я.
In the process of its development a great number of words were taken into English from other languages (mainly Latin or Greek):
first – primary; two – double; eight – octopus; eye – binoculars; tooth - dentist
In some others the changes are so significant, that we cannot see common features without knowing the major shifts in sound system:
Gynecology /ˌɡʌɪnɪˈkɒlədʒi/ also gynaecology from French gynécologie, from Greek gynaik- , comb. form of gyne “woman, female”.
Queen before 900; Middle English quene, quen, Old English cwēn woman, queen; cognate with Old Saxon quān, Old Norse kvān, Greek gynḗ woman, Russian zhená, Sanskrit jani wife
https://www.etymonline.com/

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Grimm’s Law
Jaсob Ludwig Grimm (1785-1863), a German philologist and a folklorist

(generally known together with his brother Wilhelm for their Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812-22) studied and systematized these correlations in his Deutsche Grammatik (1819-37).
His conclusions are formulated (called Grimm’s law or the First Consonant shift).
The essence of Grimm’s law is that the quality of some sounds (namely plosives) changed in all Germanic languages while the place of their formation remained unchanged. Thus, voiced aspirated plosives (stops) lost their aspiration and changed into pure voiced plosives, voiced plosives became voiceless plosives and voiceless plosives turned into voiceless fricatives.
There are some exceptions to Grimm’s law: p t k did not change into f θ h, if they were preceded by s (tres - ðreo, but sto - standan).

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Verner’s Law
Another exception was formulated by a Danish linguist Karl Adolph

Verner (1846— 96) in 1877:
if an Indo-European voiceless stop was preceded by an unstressed vowel, the voiceless fricative which developed from it in accordance with Grimm’s law became voiced, and later this voiced fricative became a voiced plosive (stop).
That is: p t k —> b d g.
Greek pater has a Germanic correspondence fadar; fæder because the stress in the word was on the second syllable, and so voiceless plosive was preceded by an unstressed vowel.
Verner’s law explains why some verbs in Old English changed their root consonant in the past tense and in the Participle II - originally, these grammatical forms had the stress on the second syllable. Hence the basic forms of such verbs as sniðan (cut) and weorðan (become) were sniðan — snað - snidon - sniden; weorðan - wearð - wurdon - worden.
So, in present-day English we may find the words and morphemes of common Indo-European origin that differ in sound form from their counterparts in other languages, but Grimm’s law will show their similarity to the words of Indo-European languages.

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4. The System of Vowels in Old English.

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The System of Vowels in Old English

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The System of Vowels in Old English

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Assimilative changes are the changes that occurred in the language in

specific surroundings – the sound might change when it is preceded or followed by some other sound or sound cluster.
TYPES OF ASSIMILATION

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The Changes in Vowels
Fracture/breaking (преломление). Diphthongization of short vowels ‘a’, ‘æ’,

‘e’ before the clusters:
a + r+ cons., ‘l + cons. => ea
æ + h+ cons. => ea
e + h final => eo
2) Palatal Mutation/ i-umlaut (перегласовка). A back sound changes its quality if there is a front sound in the next syllable. A change of vowel caused by partial assimilation to the following vowel: i-mutation – caused by ‘i’, ‘j’ of the following syllable:

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The Changes in Vowels

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The Changes in Vowels

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The Changes in Vowels
3) Diphthongization after palatal consonants. Vowels under the

influence of the initial palatal consonants ‘ʒ’, ‘c’ (before front vowels) and the cluster ‘sc’ (all vowels) are diphthongized. Some linguists doubt that i was pronounced. They think it was just to signify the palatal nature of the preceding sound.

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The Changes in Vowels
4) Back / Velar Mutation. Phonetic change caused

by a back vowel (u, o, a (sometimes)) of the following syllable, which resulted in the diphthongization of the preceding vowel:
5) Mutation before h. Sounds a and e that preceded h underwent several changes, mutating to diphthongs ea, ie and finally were reduced to i/y. The words with such mutation are not very numerous.

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The Changes in Vowels
6) Contraction. If, after a consonant had dropped,

two vowels met inside a word, they were usually contracted into one long vowel.
7) Lengthening of Vowels (quantitative change). Before ‘nd’, ‘ld, ‘mb’ the vowels are lengthened:
bindan – bīndan; climban – clīmban, cild – cīld (bind, climb, child)
It explains the exception in the rules of reading the sounds in the closed syllables in the present–day English (climb, find, bold, told, comb).
Still, if there was a consonant after this cluster the vowel was not lengthened: cildru (children).
8) Gradation / Ablaut (чередование гласных в морфеме). Alternation of vowels in different grammatical forms: in strong verbs: Infinitive (ʒiban - давать), Past. Sing. (ʒaf), Past Pl. (ʒebum), Second Part. (ʒibans);

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5. Changes in Consonants.

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The System of Consonants in Old English
The Old English system of

consonants phonemes have changed but little in comparison with other Germanic languages.
The system of consonants of the Old English period is presented in the following table (every short consonant in OE had a corresponding long one):

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The System of Consonants in Old English

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1. Voicing of fricatives in intervocalic position
f > v
ofer (over)
hlāf –

hlāfas
(loaf – loaves)
wif – wīfe
(wife – wives)
Ɵ >ð
ōðer (other)
raðe (quickly)

s> z> r
Voiced sibilant z was very unstable in Old English (and other west- Germanic languages) and very soon changed into r (rhotacism)
wesun – weren (now were, but was)
maiza – māra (now more, but most)

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2. Palatalization of the sounds k’, sk’ and kg’ (marked as

c, sc and cʓ) developed in assibilation, that is formation of a sibilant in places before front vowels.

c > [k] > [ʧ] > ch
cild > child
ceosan > choose
hwilc > which
sc [sk] > [ʃ] > sh
sceap > sheep
scip > ship
sceotan > shoot
cʓ [ɡɡ’] > [dʓ] > dɡ
brycʓ > bridge
hrycʓ > ridge
wecʓ > wedge

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3. Assimilation before t.
The sound t when it was preceded by

a number of consonants changed the quality of a preceding sound.

velar + t > ht
sēcan – (sōcte) > sōhte (seek – sought)
brinʓan > brōhte –
(bring – brought)
labial + t > ft
ʓesceapan > ʓeaseaft (creature)
dental + t > ss
witan > wisse (instead of witte-knew)
fn > mn
stefn > stemn (voice)
fm > mm
wifman > wimman (woman)
dð > t
bindð > bint (binds)

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4. Loss of consonants in certain positions
Besides h that was lost

in intervocal position, the sounds n and m were lost before h, entailing the
lengthening of the preceding vowel:

bronhte – brōhte (brought)
fimf – fif (five)
onðer - ōðer (other)
munð – mūð (mouth)
Other examples of similar loss was the loss of ʓ before d and n; the vowel was lengthened, too:
mæʓden – mǣden (maiden)
sæʓde – sæde (said)

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5. Metathesis of r
In several OE words the following change of

the position of consonants takes place:
cons + r + vowel > cons + vowel + r
ðridda – ðirda (third)
brunnan – burnan (burn)
hros – hors (horse)
Metathesis of sounds is observed also with other sounds:
ascian – axian (ask)
wascan – waxan (wash)

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6. West Germanic gemination of consonants
In the process of palatal mutation,
when

j was lost and the preceding vowel was short, the consonant after it was doubled (geminated):
fulian – fyllan (fill)
sætjan – settan (set)
salian – sellan (sell, originally give)
talian – tellan (tell)