In Language Change , R. L. Trask uses data from English and other languages to introduce the concepts central to language change.
Language Change:
covers the most frequent types of language change and how languages are born and die
uses data-based exercises to show how languages change
looks at other key areas such as attitudes to language change, and the consequences of changing language.
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Every language that people use changes constantly. English, for example, has been changing throughout its history and it is still changing today.
How do you address a woman when you don't know if she's married or not? A man can always be safely addressed as ‘Mr So-and-so’, but, for most of the twentieth century, English provided only the forms ‘Mrs So-and-so’ for a married woman and ‘Miss So-and-so’ for an unmarried one. If you didn't know whether the woman you were addressing was married, you were forced into an embarrassing guess, with every chance of getting it wrong.
But things have changed. A few years ago, a new word appeared in English: Ms, variously pronounced ‘miz’ or ‘muss’. Now you can safely address a woman as ‘Ms So-and-so’ without committing yourself to an awkward guess. If you look in a good recent dictionary, you will find Ms entered there, but, if your dictionary is more than a few years old, you probably won't find it.
What conclusions can we draw? Well, one possible conclusion is that you need a new dictionary. More importantly, though, we can conclude that English has changed in this small respect: a few years ago this word didn't exist, but now it does.
This example is in no way unusual or remarkable: whether we are aware of it or not, English is changing all the time. New words are constantly coming into use, and not only new words, but also new pronunciations and even new grammatical forms. At the same time, old words, old forms and old pronunciations are gradually dropping out of use.
Moreover, this constant change is not some new and alarming development. English, as we shall be demonstrating, has been changing throughout its history in the same sorts of ways, and the same is true of every other living language. One of the fundamental things you need to understand about languages is that they are always changing.
This book is about language change. We shall be looking at some of the ways in which languages change, and we shall also try to understand something about why they change. After that, we shall be looking at some of the consequences of language change, and at the way people react to it when they notice it.
EXERCISE
1.0 You have probably noticed that the English spoken in North America differs in a number of obvious ways from the English spoken in Britain. North American speakers say I've just gotten a letter; British speakers say I've just got a letter. Americans get their hot water from a faucet; British speakers get theirs from a tap. The season after summer is fall on one side of the Atlantic, but autumn on the other. And many words, such as missile and tomato, are pronounced very differently. What do you think is the reason for these differences?
Please don't read any further until you have thought about this question and perhaps discussed it.
Comment
English was introduced to North America from Britain in the seventeenth century. Most famously, the Pilgrim Fathers (and Mothers) sailed from Plymouth to Massachusetts in 1620, taking English with them. What happened? Well, they certainly didn't leave Plymouth saying ‘Pip pip, old chap – must toddle along’, and then arrive in Massachusetts crying ‘Hey, buddy – have a nice day, now’ at the first native Americans they saw. They took with them the same English they had spoken in England. But, as the generations passed, English continued to change on both sides of the Atlantic, just as it had always done in Britain. Unsurprisingly, though, it didn't always change in the same way in both places. The great barrier to communication posed by the Atlantic Ocean ensured that changes taking place on one side did not always reach the other side, and so, with the passage of time, the two varieties of English gradually grew more and more different from each other. As we shall see later, the combination of language change and geographical separation can have far-reaching consequences.
And what about my particular examples? Well, I've just gotten a letter was the form used by almost everybody in Britain in the seventeenth century, and it's still used in North America; in Britain, however, gotten was later replaced by got. The native English word fall has been retained in North America; in Britain, the word autumn, borrowed from French, finally replaced it in the nineteenth century.
On the other hand, British English has retained the native word tap, while American speech eventually settled on faucet, another French loan word. All four of these words were actually in use in seventeenth-century Britain, but the two groups of speakers have made different choices. The seventeenth-century British pronunciation of missile is still used, more or less, in North America, where the word sounds just like missal; in Britain, though, the pronunciation of this word was drastically changed in the nineteenth century under the ...
