Trask's Historical Linguistics

Robert McColl Millar, R L Trask

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317541769
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Trask's Historical Linguistics, Third Edition, is an accessible introduction to historical linguistics – the study of language change over time. This engaging book is illustrated with language examples from all six continents, and covers the fundamental concepts of language change, methods for historical linguistics, linguistic reconstruction, sociolinguistic aspects of language change, language contact, the birth and death of languages, language and prehistory and the issue of very remote relations.

This third edition of the renowned Trask's Historical Linguistics is fully revised and updated and covers the most recent developments in historical linguistics, including:

• more detail on morphological change including cutting-edge discussions of iconization
• coverage of recent developments in sociolinguistic explanations of variation and change
• new case studies focusing on Germanic languages and American and New Zealand English, and updated exercises covering each of the topics within the book
• a brand new companion website featuring material for both professors and students, including discussion questions and further exercises as well as commentaries on the exercises within the book.

Trask's Historical Linguistics is essential reading for all students of language, linguistics and related disciplines.

The accompanying website can be found at www.routledge.com/cw/trask

Chapter 1

The fact of language change

1.1 Chilled

Some years ago I asked a friend whether she had had an enjoyable weekend. She replied that she had been ‘really chilled’. I immediately asked her whether she had been having problems with her central heating. When I saw the look of surprise and amusement on her face, I realized that the age difference between us (I was born in the 1960s, she in the 1970s) had caused me to misunderstand her. To people whose formative years were the late 1980s and early 1990s, chilled means ‘relaxed, peaceful’.

I didn’t know chilled, but I did know chilled out, which had (and has) the same meaning. Because I am a child of punk, this phrase could only be used mordantly, with an affected Californian accent, when telling someone to ‘chill out and be mellow, maaan’ while listening to music that was, to my taste, atrocious hippy drivel; it was certainly part of my active vocabulary, however.

Obviously, sometime in the early 1990s, chilled out had been abbreviated in the speech of the young. I fear that that was further evidence that I was no longer young myself.

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 will see, 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 the study of language change. The first few chapters will discuss the different ways in which languages can and do change, and try to explain why some kinds of changes are more frequent than others. The next couple of chapters are devoted to the consequences of language change: what happens to languages after many generations of accumulated changes? After that, we turn to an examination of the methods that linguists have developed for studying change, both for uncovering changes that occurred long ago and for observing changes that are taking place now. Finally, we will look at certain special cases and at some controversial new ideas that are currently stirring up excited discussion in the field of historical linguistics. Each chapter will end with a case study that will look in greater depth at an issue (or set of issues) raised in that chapter.

1.2 English then and now

The language we now call English was introduced into Britain about 1,500 years ago by invaders from the North Sea coasts of continental Europe. These invaders, commonly known as the Anglo-Saxons, were at first non-literate (except for the rather laborious use of runes) but, within a few centuries of settling in Britannia, they had acquired the use of writing, and they began writing down all sorts of things in their English language: administrative records, historical chronicles, religious texts and literary works. Very many of these texts survive today. Here is a brief passage from the entry for the year 878 in the great historical document called the Anglo-Saxon chronicle:

Her … Ælfred cyning … gefeaht wið ealne here, and hine geflymde, and him æfter rad oð þet geweorc, and þær sæt XIIII niht, and þa sealde se here him gislas and myccle aðas, þet hi of his rice woldon, and him eac geheton þet heora cyng fulwihte onfon wolde, and hi þæt gelaston …

If you have never seen this kind of English before, you may be dumbfounded to be told that it is in fact English, and not Norwegian or Icelandic or something more exotic. But English it most certainly is, even though it is spectacularly different from the English we use now. We call this type of English Old English, and we can’t read it without special study. Nevertheless, the people who spoke this language taught it to their children, who taught it to their children, who taught it to THEIR children, who … until it finally reached us, some 11 centuries later. But it has reached us in a very different state. So what happened?

Well, there was no one thing that happened. Like all languages that are spoken by people, English has been changing throughout its history. Eleven centuries is hardly more than 40 generations, but throughout those 40 generations the language has been changing: a new word here, a new pronunciation there, a new grammatical form somewhere else, and … well, you see the result.

Let’s look again at that passage, this time with a rough translation, or gloss, provided for each word:

Her … Ælfred cyning … gefeaht wið ealne here, and hine
Here Alfred king fought against whole army and it

geflymde, and him æfter rad oð þet geweorc, and þær sæt
put to flight and it after rode to the fortress and there camped

XIIII niht, and þa sealde se here him gislas and myccle
fourteen nights and then gave the army him hostages and great

aðas, þet hi of his rice woldon, and him eac
oaths that they from his kingdom would [go] and him also

geheton þet heora cyng fulwihte onfon wolde, and
promised that their king baptism receive would and

hi þæt gelaston …
they that did

Here is a translation into Modern English:

Here [in this year] King Alfred fought against the whole army, and put it to flight, and rode after it to the fortress, and there he camped for fourteen nights. And then the army gave him hostages and great oaths that they would depart from his kingdom, and they also promised that their king would receive baptism. And they did these things.

With this assistance, let’s see how much of the passage we can recognize as English. First, note that there are three unfamiliar letters in it. These letters were employed by the Anglo-Saxon scribes but later dropped out of use. The two letters thorn (þ) and eth (ð) were used to write the sounds we now spell th, as in think and then, while ash (æ) was used to spell a vowel sound not now found in all varieties of English, but heard in the speech of many North Americans in the word man and, among some older upper and upper middle class southern English people, in the word cat. If you mentally replace these letters with th and with a, you may find that some words look a bit more familiar.

A few words are easy, especially the little grammatical ones: her is ‘here’, and is ‘and’, æfter is ‘after’, þær is ‘there’, his is ‘his’, þæt is ‘that’, and him is ‘him’ – at least sometimes! Only slightly harder are cyning and its contracted form cyng ‘king’, rad ‘rode’, niht ‘nights’ and wolde, woldon ‘would’. And you have probably spotted that sæt is just our word ‘sat’. Barely recognizable is aðas ‘oaths’, but, if you ignore the prefix ge-, you can see that gefeaht is the same word as our ‘fought’. You may be startled to learn that the mysterious-looking ealne is just our word ‘all’ with a grammatical ending attached. Finally, that word wið is just our word ‘with’, but note that the word meant ‘against’ in Old English. The Old English word for ‘with’ was mid, which has completely disappeared except in the compound ‘midwife’ (literally, ‘with-woman’); its job has been taken over by wið, which in turn has handed over its original meaning to yet another word, against, except in the ambiguous phrase he fought with his brother and in the verb withstand, which has a similar meaning to ‘stand against’.

The rest of the passage, however, is very probably so much Martian as far as you’re concerned. Part of the reason for that is that many of the other words in the passage have completely disappeared from the language and been replaced by other words that did not exist in Old English. The words used for ‘army’, ‘kingdom’, ‘put to flight’, ‘fortress’, ‘baptism’ and even ‘they’ have all disappeared in this way. The word eac ‘also’ has vanished too, but a trace of it remains in the name of what used to be an eke-name but is now a nickname.

A further source of strangeness is the unfamiliar word order: the passage has ‘and it put to flight’ instead of ‘and put it to flight’, ‘it after rode’ instead of ‘rode after it’, ‘then gave the army him hostages’ instead of ‘then the army gave him hostages’ and ‘promised that their king baptism receive would’ instead of ‘promised that their king would receive baptism’, among other curiosities. (If you have learned Modern German or Dutch, some of these odd orders may look suspiciously familiar, for a reason to be explained in Chapters 7 and 8.)

Little words are sometimes unrecognizable: the passage has him or hine where modern English would have ‘it’; the word for ‘the’ turns up as þæt or se; of is used for ‘from’. In one case (the phrase meaning ‘fought against the whole army’) the word for ‘the’ is missing altogether: clearly the rules for using this word were different in Old English. Other words have mysterious endings: ‘would’ is variously wolde or woldon, and the other verbs show these same endings; the words mycel ‘great’ and ric ‘kingdom’ appear as myccle and rice; eall ‘all’ appears as ealne. On the other hand, the word niht ‘nights’ has no ending at all. Finally, although this is not so easy to see from a written text, the pronunciation of English has changed drastically. All the <h>s in words like gefeahte ‘fought’, niht ‘nights’ and fulwihte ‘baptism’ were actually pronounced with a velar fricative, the sound found in Scottish loch and German ach, and niht was pronounced with the vowel of hit. Indeed, the Old English niht sounded just about the same as modern German nicht ‘not’, as it still does for many Scots-speakers, including me. Almost all the vowel sounds were different from what you would guess from knowing modern English.

In short, then, English has changed overwhelmingly in the space of 40 generations or so. Since we are lucky enough to possess substantial written records in English from almost all periods since the English learned to write, we can see the changes appearing in our texts century by century and sometimes even decade by decade.

By the late Middle Ages, English had already undergone about five centuries of change from the time of the passage we’ve just examined, and it was beginning to look quite a bit more like modern English. Here is a passage from Chaucer’s Treatise of the astrolabe (an astrolabe was an instrument employed to measure relative distances in the heavens), written in the late fourteenth century for his son Louis. Remember that, although Chaucer was a writer of consummate skill, this is an example of something approaching scientific prose:

Lyte Lowys my sone, I aperceyve wel by certeyne evidences thyn abilite to lerne sciences touching nombres and proportions; and as wel consider I thy besy praier in special to lerne the tretys of the Astrelabie. Than for as mochel as a philosofre saith, ‘he wrappith him in his frend, that condescendith to the rightfulle praiers of his frend,’ therefore have I yeven the a suffisant Astrolabie as for oure orizonte, compowned after the latitude of Oxenforde; upon which, by mediacioun of this litel tretys, I purpose to teche the a certain nombre of conclusions aperteynyng to the same instrument.

This is much easier to understand than the Old English passage, but still very strange; we call the English of this period Middle English (actually late Middle English; but although much interesting change took place in the two to three hundred years before this work was written, it need not concern us here). You can probably cope with such unfamiliar spellings as nombres, tretys, mediacioun, litel and teche, but you might have been troubled by besy for ‘busy’, mochel for ‘much’ or orizonte for ‘horizon’. Although the grammar of the passage appears very similar to our own, there is good reason to suspect, for instance, that word final <-e> was pronounced by Londoners of the time, and at least normally had a grammatical function. For example, the <-e> in certeyne was probably employed to mark the adjective for plurality (since evidences is plural). There are few words in this passage that are entirely opaque to us (although the meanings may escape us primarily because very few of us are historians of science concerned with pre-Copernican astronomy). Occasionally we find words like yeven, which context would tell us was equivalent to Modern English given. Common sense would also suggest that the words are related to each other. On this occasion common sense is correct, since yeven is the native English form that at the time was gradually being replaced by the equivalent form borrowed during the Viking period from its close relative Norse.

Other words in the passage that survive today appear to have a different meaning. Condescendith, for instance, does not mean the same as today’s condescends. Today, the word generally has negative connotations, being associated with being talked down to by someone who assumes social – and probably intellectual – superiority. If we consult the Oxford English Dictionary, however, we discover t...