Nov 19 Notes - Lecture Notes PDF
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These lecture notes cover the history of English, specifically the period before Old English, and delve into the immigrant origins. The notes explain the Celtic influence on the language and touch upon the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. They contain information on early inhabitants, settlement, and language development in Britain.
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11/19/2024 Announcements: - No quiz today - Hannon Travel Scholarships are available! Check them out at the arts and science department of English scholarships channel on Paws - These are available to students in English, Home Economics and Nut...
11/19/2024 Announcements: - No quiz today - Hannon Travel Scholarships are available! Check them out at the arts and science department of English scholarships channel on Paws - These are available to students in English, Home Economics and Nutrition, and Theology in the graduating year of their program - Need to submit a proposal of your dream trip - Deadline dec 15 - Quiz 7 next week on material from previous two classes (everything since quiz 6) - We have two more class times after this for the remaining material, and December 3rd we will be doing a final exam review Today: - Beginnings of English, language families, proto-languages _______ English Before Old English England before the English: English for its entire history has been an immigrant language - Before the 5th century BC: paleolithic and neolithic peoples (non-indo-european) - People we don’t know much about - Barrow (looks like a mound of dirt with a hole in it) and stone circle ↓, New York Moors - hese tell us that there was a people group here that liked moving big rocks T around — we don’t know anything about their language because they didn’t leave any written text - Celtic speaking Britons,5th century BC onwards - (by Britons we mean the people living in the geographical region) - eltic is the ancestry of modern welsh, irish gaelic and scottish gaelic, and C Britons Bunch of people living on the isle of Britainspeaking Celtic ○ Left several more artifacts: - Battersea shield facing 350-50 BC - AD 43: Emperor Claudius invades and subjugates Britain - Britain becomes a colony of the Roman empire - Roman road, North York Moors → ritain was a colony of the Roman empire for B almost 400 years - Long time ll over the area now called England we see A evidence of that roman occupation (roads, spas, - Felmingham Hall Hoard, 2nd-3rd century AD, Norfolk - Hoards are all over the place in Europe, because burying them was the logical thing to do to secure your valuables - Archaeologists say that this hoard in particular was a mix of British/Celtic things and roman things - Wheely-thing →associated with a British deity - Little person saluting is a roman lares (household god) - Female and male heads are roman gods - Lil’ birds are to do with a British/Celtic religious system - In this hoard alone we see a great mix of influences is just a single household - Cultures influenced and blended with eachother Anglo Saxon Settlement - By AD 410, the Roman Empire withdraws military support from Britain (withdraws to support back in Rome when attacked) - Meant that suddenly the romans basically disappeared after almost 4 centuries - Some romans may have stayed and just assimilated into British culture After the romans leave, the people left are British Celtic speakers → return to their own system in the absence of roman rule There are various accounts about what happened during this time - A lot of them claim that there were some British rulers who were under threat (by other rulers) and in order to defend themselves they hired germanic mercenaries from northern europe - Mercenaries spoke germanic language - Keep in mind that at this point Germanic people were essentially taking over the rest of Europe - Warrior culture - Moral of the story: never trust a germanic mercenary - They manipulate you, kill you, and take over your kingdom - Germanic peoples (Anglo-Saxons) begin settling in Britain from the 5th century onwards What language did they speak? anguage family progression: L Proto-Germanic - East Germanic (> Gothic) - North Germanic (> Old Norse) - West Germanic - High13 West Germanic (Old High German) - Low West Germanic - Old Saxon (>Low German) - Old Low Frankish (>Dutch) - Old Frisian (>modern Frisian) - Old English(>Modern English) - The closest historical relative of modern English today is Frisian - ot a ton of the earliest speakers of low west germanic were literate - didn’t leave much N written record behind English Celtic Contact - English and Celtic languages have been in contact for about 1600 years (really long contact! So why is there so little influence of Celtic on English?) - There are very few Celtic loanwords into old English - Bannock,perhapsbin, crag, dun - Some placenames (river avon) - Some personal names (cædmon) 13 Note that high and low refers to the elevation of the land the speakers lived on →higher up inland = high, lower, closer to the coast = low - That's weird -why might that be? Possible that the influence preceded written records Possible that the English were dominant in the power hierarchy ○ Anglo-saxons were the high prestige speech community & Celtic speaking Brits were low prestige ○ The influence flowed only from high to low ○ Evidence for this →language namewelshcomes from the old English wordwealas, which means ‘foreigners’ or ‘slaves’ (very insulting term) Possible that they were very unfriendly to each other (avoided contact) Also possible (this theory was initially very popular) that when the Anglo-Saxons came they just massacred all of the Celtic speaking Britons - if you kill everyone you cannot learn their language ○ Issue with this theory: we have no evidence for this (archaeological, no reliable accounts, DNA testing, etc.) ↓ - Archeological and genetic evidence suggests that the British (Celtic speaking) population in England was not replaced but assimilated by the (English speaking) anglo saxons Keep in mind that history is not a board game - it is far more complex - raditional theory: hardly any influence of Celtic on old English because Celtic was T considered socially inferior - ‘C eltic Hypothesis’: (controversial) Celtic influenced English syntax, but not lexicon (e.g.do-support, distribution of forms of the verbbe) - Language shift phenomenon →Celtic speaking Britons switched over to English, but spoke English in a Celtic way—influencing just the syntax Early Old English Originally a dialect of proto germanic - specifically west germanic Developed out of the language of germanic settlers (Anglo-Saxons) in England from 5th century onwards Shares features with north and east germanic languages, especially frisian Was in contact with Celtic but the extent of Celtic influence is unclear No substantial written records until the late 7th century (some runic inscriptions from 5th century onwards) Language Families Types of Relationships English Other Languages Relationship between the words (why are they similar) meow MandarinMiao Both onomatopoeia me Swahili mimi Coincidence lacuna LatinLacúna‘hole’ Borrowing (prestige borrowing from Latin to English) east Frenchest Borrowing (From English to French) wedge Old Englishwecg edgeis the reflex of the old English rootwecg(same W word in the same language, just different forms) three Germandrei ognates14 of each other (both have a common origin in C an earlier proto-language) A Common Source Theory - William Jones 1786 - British Judge and colonial administrator in India in the late 1700’s - Learned some Indian languages and learned to read Sanskrit, also knew Greek and Latin - Was struck by the number of similar words in Sanskrit to Greek and Latin - Proposed that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin all had the same source/ancestor language (what we now call a proto-language) - Proto-indo-european →makes Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin cognate languages Cognates Sanskrit bhratar- pitar- Greek phrater pater Latin frater pater Old Irish bathir ater Gothic brophar fadar German bruder vater Dutch broer vader English brother father COGNATE: a word that has the same etymological root as a word in a related language, but 14 developed independently. OGNATE LANGUAGES: language forms descended from a common protolanguage. For C example, English and Italian are cognate languages because they are both descended from Proto-Indo- European. A Germanic Group The consensus now is that the indo-european language family consists of descendants from proto-indo-european ○ Language family: indo-european ○ Ancestor language: proto-indo-european Gothic, german, dutch and English are so similar because they come from the same branch → of indo-european https://www.ethnologue.com/browse/families/ - There are SO MANY different language families - One dream of some linguists is to reconstruct common ancestors of common ancestors to make their way back to the original language of humanity - Nostratic hypothesis - Proposal of an overarching northern Eurasian language family, still of uncertain validity The linguistic complexity of the world is under threat — lotta languages going extinct these days Geographic distribution of indo-european subfamilies - Map More on this in the subfamilies of Indo-European doc on Canvas Need to know: - A few languages that are not Indo-european - Some languages that are specifically germanic - Some languages that are indo-european, but not germanic How are proto-languages reconstructed? - Sometimes an ancestor language has an extensive written record, but sometimes they do not and we need to reconstruct them - This is the case for proto-germanic & proto-indo-european - So we can docomparative reconstruction15 ognates for Foot C English foot German fuss Dutch voet Swedish fot Icelandic fótur 15 OMPARATIVE RECONSTRUCTION: a method of reconstructing a hypothetical proto-form C of a word (especially in cases where no written evidence of the proto-form exists) by examining the cognates descended from it. →protogermanic reconstruction is *fōt- - The asterisk in this case indicates that it is a reconstructed word with no written evidence for it - The hyphen - means there were likely inflectional endings Process: gather a bunch of cognates & reconstruct words ○ → reconstructions for proto-germanic are actually pretty reliable Reconstruction for proto-indo-european ○ Take a bunch of other indo-european languages and find cognates OED 2nd ed. Oteut - Old Teutonic = proto Germanic - he further back in time you go with reconstructions, the more speculative it is (and T therefore, the less reliable it is)
