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History of the English Language

You are to choose at least 20 language and/or speech phenomena of modern English and consider them by using the diachronic approach to the language, i.e. their origin and historic development, historic reasons which affect their development.

The chosen phenomena are to be analyzed at lexical, phonetical, grammatical (morphological and syntactical, if possible) levels of the language structure.

Consider the following extract as a sample of the analysis.

e.g.

Celebrities wish lonely Canada boy happy birthday

4 November 2019

BBC News

Jason Foster spoke of his "hurt" on Sunday after son Kade Foster's friends did not make it to his party. Thousands responded after the dad posted: "I'm asking my Twitter friends to show him some love today." Well-wishers included comic Ben Stiller, PM Justin Trudeau and ice hockey stars. […] The father, from Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, said the overwhelming response means his son "will never forget this day."

1.    The verb spoke is past participle of Modern English irregular verb speak. Sprecan (or its variant specan) is Old English strong verb of class V. It was inherited by Old English along with Old High German, Old Frisian and other Old Germanic languages from their common ancestor – Proto-Germanic *sprekanan. As a strong verb it employed vowel gradation (IE ablaut). The vowel gradation in V class strong verbs was short /æ/ for Past singular form and long /æ/ for Past plural form. Thus, the four basic forms of the OE verb are sprecan – spræc – spræcon – sprecen. The /r/ gradually disappeared from the verb starting with the Late West Saxon period and had dropped out of use by the mid-12th century. Endings for plural forms dropped out in the Middle English period thus resulting in the common form for Past tense /spæk/ with long vowel, which later changed into long /a:/. In Early Middle English the long /a:/ was narrowed to long /o:/, giving rise to /spo:k/. Between the 14th and the 18th centuries /o:/ changed into diphthong /ou/ under the Great Vowel Shift, thus, resulting in modern English form spoke.     

2.    His is Modern English possessive pronoun. In Old English the group of possessive pronouns was not fully developed and is not distinctly separated from one of the four main classes, that of personal pronouns. In OE to indicate possession, the Genitive case forms of personal pronouns were used. The third person singular masculine pronoun he had the form his in the Genitive case. This form had two main applications: (1) like other oblique cases of noun-pronouns it could be an object; (2) more often it was used as an attribute or a noun determiner, like a modern possessive pronoun. In the Middle English period the Old English Genitive case of personal pronouns split from the other forms and turned into a new class of pronouns – possessive.      

3.    Son is modern English noun which stemmed from Old English noun sunu of the Germanic origin *sunus with the Indo-European root. In Early New English short /u/ sound lost its labial character and became short /^/ (the process is called delabialisation). The changes in spelling had happened earlier – in Middle English: letter o was employed not only for /o/ sound, but also to indicate short /u/ alongside the letter u. It occurred when u stood close to n, m, or v, for they were all made up of down strokes and were hard to distinguish in a hand-written text. That is how sun(u) became to be spelt son.

These are only a few examples of how diachronic analysis of modern English language units can be carried out. From this extract one can also pick out many other language and speech phenomena to be historically interpreted, e.g. the use of negative form did not make with the demonstration of how grammatical forms of negation developed from OE through ME to New English; the French origin of the verb respond and the corresponding noun response with the relative extra-linguistic factors leading to its borrowing; explanation of the appearance of the analytical Continuous form I’m asking and Future form will forget; etc.

What you are expected to do is to show your ability to understand the historical reasons for the present-day states in the phonetics, lexis, morphology, syntax of the English language.