The subject of the history of the English

  

3. Breaking (fracture) and diphthongization. Some OE vowels changed their quality due to the influence of succeeding or preceding consonants. When a vowel stood after a palatal consonant or when a front vowel stood before a velar consonant there developed short glides between them.

The glides, together with the original vowels, formed diphthongs.

Front vowels: i, e, æ developed into diphthongs before “h, l + consonant”, or “r + consonant". This charige is commonly referred to as OE

Examples:

æ→ea

       prewritten                                                     OE                                         NE

       * ærm                                                           earm                                      arm

       * æll                                                              eall                                        all

Another change – diphthongization –occurred after palatal consonants [k’] spelt “c”, [sk’] spelt “sc”, and [j] spelt “ ” e.g., prewritten scæmu > OE sceamu > NE scame.

 

4. Palatal mutation. In OE a vowel could also change its  quality due to progressive assimilation with vowels and semivowels in the following syllables as the organs of speech accommodated themselves to the pronunciation of the next syllable. The most important and the most frequent type  of this assimilation is i-mutation(or i-umlaut, or palatal mutation), i.e. the fronting and narrowing of vowels brought about by the vowel “i” or semivowel “j” in the following syllable. Practically all vowels except the most close front vowels “e” and “i”  could be palatalized.

    Since the sounds “i” and “j” often appeared in the suffixes and endings, i.e. in final syllables they often disappeared (due to the reduction of the final syllable)

Examples:

O. German dialects	OE	NE
a→e
Goth. sandjan	sendan	Send
ā→æ-
Goth. laisjan	læ-ran	Teach
u→y
Goth. fulljan	fyllan	Fill

 

Changes of Unstressed Vowels in Early Old English

         Reduction of unstressed vowels. Some short vowels had been dropped in final unstressed syllables already in prewritten OE. After long syllables (containing a long vowel) or a short vowel followed by more than one consonant, the vowels "i" and "u" were regularly dropped in the ending:

OE werian > NE wear.

In Early OE the long vowels that stood in unstressed syllables originally had shortened, and thus the opposition of long vowels to short ones was lost: prewritten *namōn > OE name > NE name.

The new short vowels coming from long ones (ō > a: namōn > nama) gradually weakened their qualitative difference so that instead of eight short monophthongs distinguished in stressed position we fmd only five in the unstressed one. The system of phonemes appearing in unstressed syllable: e/i, a, o/u.

Consonants	Noise				Labial	Dental alveolar	Palat-al	Velar	Pharyn-gal
		Plosive		Voiceless	P	l	k’ sk’	k’
				Voiced	B	d	g’	g
		Fricative	Voice -less/ Voiced		f/v	θ/ð s/z	x’ (j)	x γ	H
	Sonorants				m	n, l, r	Ŋ variant of “n”
Semivowels					w		j

Examples:

                         OE                              NE

                         talu                            tale

                         stane

Dat. Sg.            stān                            stone

                         stana

Gen. Pl.            stān                            stone

 

Old English Consonants. Unlike the vowels not all the OE consonant phonemes and their variants were distinguished in OE spelling; in some cases one and the same letter was used to indicate two variants. All the consonants fell into noise consonants and sonorants. The noise consonants were divided into plosives and fricatives. There were voiced and voiceless plosives and fricatives.   

         However the difference between voiced and voiceless plosives was phonemic; the difference between voiced and voiceless fricatives was that between position variants f/v, θ/ð). The opposition of velar and palatal consonants was an important feature of the OE consonant system:[kl- [k'], [g] - [g']. Their contrast was or became phonemic during the OE period. OE consonants could also appear as long or doubled: [pp], [nn], [bb], etc. Practically every short sound had a corresponding long one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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OE CONSONANTS

 

Сhanges of Consonants in Early Old English

         In early Old English consonants underwent different kinds of changes: positional or independent, qualitative or quantitative. The fricatives underwent the greatest number of qualitative alterations in OE. Most consonants in certain positions underwent the greatest number of qualitative changes, they could become longer.

Changes of Fricatives

1. Hardening. In Early OE voiced fricatives (v, ð, r) tended to be hardened to corresponding plosives: v > b, ð > d, γ> g (after nasals and initially).

Examples: ð  > d

O. German. dialects                         OE                 NE

O. Icel.           faðir                       fæder'            father

2. Voicing and Devoicing. The Common Germanic voiceless fricatives (f, θ, x, s) became voiced between vowels or between vowels, sonorants and voiced consonants. The Common Germanic voiced fricatives (þ and γ) that had not been hardened became voiceless at the beginning or at the end of words or next to voiceless consonants.

Examples:

Goth.	OE	NE
f>v
wulfōs [f]	wulfas	Wolves
s>z
reisan [s]	risan [z]	Rise
γ>χ
baurgs [γ]	buruh, burh [χ]	Borough

 

3. Rhotacism. The Common Germanic [z] underwent the following change: [z]>[   ]  > [r] and became a sonorant. This process is called rhotacism: Goth. maiza [z] > OE mara [r] > NE more.

 

                                                    Splitting of Velar Consonants

         OE palatal consonants appeared as a result of some assimilative consonant changes. In Early OE the consonants [k], [g],  [χ], [γ] were palatalised before a stressed front vowel and sometimes also after a front vowel unless followed by a back vowel. The combination [sk] was palatalized without any positional restrictions. In other positions the consonants remained velar and thus two contrasted sets arose. By the Middle English period the two sets had developed into different sounds: [k], [g]  were preserved, while [k']>[tƒ],  [g'] > [d      ]; [sk'] > [ƒ].

Example: before and after front vowels [k']: OE cild> NE child, [x']: OE niht > NE night; in  other positions [k]: OE cuppa > NE cup, OE bōc > NE book, [x]: OE hlāf  > NE loaf, OE þūhte> NE thought.

Quantitative Changes of Consonants

1. Gemination. In Early Old English most consonants could be lengthened before [j]. This process is called gemination or doubling of consonants as it was shown in spelling by means of doubled letters.

Gemination of consonants before [j] occurred only after a short syllable. Eventually [j] disappeared. Examples: prewritten fuljan > OE fyllan > NE fill, prewritten sætjan > OE settan > NE set.

2. Loss of Consonants. In some conditions consonants and semivowels were  lost. Nasal sonorants were regularly lost before fricative consonants·. In this process the preceding vowel was lengthened.

Examples: Gothic fimf> OE fif > NE five, Goth. kunþa > OB cūðe > NE could.

As shown above “j”  was regularly lost in the suffixes before an unstressed vowel (see examples above).

                Other consonants were commonly weakened and lost in final position in OE. Compare: O.I. dagr and OE dæ   > NE day, Gothic harjis and OE here "army". Some fricative consonants were lost between vowels and before some plosive consonants; as a result the vowels were lengthened or diphthongs were formed, e.g. "fonhan > fōhan > fōan > OE fōn > (NE "catch").

 

Phonetic Changes and Word Structure

         All the Early English vowel and consonant changes had a direct bearing on the development of the morphological structure of the word. From the earlier stages of its history OE inherited vowel alternation in the root-morpheme due to ablaut (vowel gradation). New instances of vowel and consonant interchange resulted from numerous assimilative vowel changes: such as the palatalization of [a] to [æ] and its positional restrictions; breaking and diphthongization after palatal consonants, palatal mutation. The positional hardening of consonants, the voicing and devoicing of fricatives, the palatalization of some velar consonants, the gemination and loss of consonants had led to a number of sound alternations as well.

 

LECTURE 5

 

Old English Grammar

         The main inflected parts of speech in OE, characterized by, certain grammatical categories were: the noun, the pronoun, the adjective and the verb. The following form-building means were employed: a) grammatical endings or suffixes; b) sound alternations in the root-morpheme; c) prefixes and d) suppletive formations.

                                   Nominal Grammatical Categories

       The noun, the adjective, the pronoun (and the numeral) in OE had the grammatical categories of gender, number and case. These categories were independent in the noun and dependent in the adjective and the pronoun (they showed agreement with the corresponding noun).

Gender

        Gender was represented by three groups of nouns: Masculine, Feminine and Neuter.Examples:

                              Masculine  Feminine  Neuter

OE                         widuwe      widowe     wif

NE                         widower     widow      wife

        In OE there were noun-building suffixes which referred nouns to a definite gender. Nouns originally formed with the help of the suffix-an belonged to the Masculine gender. However gender was commonly shown by the forms of agreement of adjectives and pronouns modifying a noun.

Number

        The OE nouns, adjectives and pronouns distinguished two numbers, the Singular and the Plural; the personal pronouns of the first and second person had also forms of the Dual number to denote two objects, e.g.

                                                                  NOUN

                                           Singular                                                Plural

OE                                      dæ                                                          dæ   as

NE                                      day                                                          days

 

                                                                        Pronoun

                                             Singular         Plural         Dual               NE

                    

1^st person                               ic                   wē                wit           I, we, we two

2^nd person                              þu                     ē                  it            thou, you, you two

 

Case

        The category of case was represented by four cases in the noun, the noun-pronoun and some cardinal numerals (from 1 to 3): Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative. The Instrumental Case was represented in the adjective and the participle), the adjective-pronouns and the ordinal numerals. Nominative was primarily the case of the subject; the rest of the case forms were used as objects, or adverbial modifiers. The Genitive case was mostly employed when a noun served to modify another noun: e.g. OE þaes  cynin es brōþur - NE that king’s brother.

 

                                                         The Noun

OE nouns were divided into several types of declension, known as "stems". However the stem-suffixes cannot be distinguished in the nouns of written Old English.

        Thus, the names a-stem, ō-stem, etc. merely point to the origin of the different paradigms.

        According to the traditional view, we distinguish, in the first place, between strong declension and weak declension of nouns. The strong declension includes nouns with vocalic stems: a-stems, ō-tems, u-stems and i-stems (ja-and wa-stems, jō-and wō-stems being variants within the two former groups). The weak declension comprises n-stems-only. There are also stems ending in other consonants: r-stems, nd-stems, and "root-stems" which had never had any stem-suffix and whose root was equal to the stem.

       Some stems were confined to one or two genders only: a-stems were only Masculine and Neuter; o-stems were always Feminine. Other stems included nouns of any gender.

        Every declension was characterized by a specific set of case endings. Within the declensions there were further differences between the endings of different genders. Most OE nouns belonged to the s-stems, a-sterns and n-stems. Traces of the paradigms of a-stems, n-stems and root-stems are found in Modem English. Most case-forms were distinguished through the endings; sometimes in addition to or instead of the endings sound alternations were used (e.g. see Dative singular "mēder", "m s"). The plural ending -as (a-stems, Masculine, Nominative and Accusative) and the ending -es (a-stems, Masculine, Genitive Singular), began to be added to nouns, originally belonging to other declensions, already in Old English.

        Of special interest is the group of root-stems which employed a vowel interchange as a regular means of form-building (compare, fōt, Masculine, Singular and fēt, Nominative Plural). The interchange arose due to palatal mutation in the form which had-i-in the ending: the pre-written *fotiz (Nom. pI.) and *foti (Oat. sing.) became *fētiz and *fēti: eventually they were shortened to fēt when the ending was dropped.

        On the whole there were only eight endings employed in the noun paradigms: -a, -e, -u, -as, -es,-wn (and the zero inflection). Some endings were associated with one case form only: -es was the ending of Masculine a-stems in the Genitive Singular. Some endings were alike in all the paradigms: -a and -urn in the Genitive and Dative Plural. In all the declensions the form of the Nominative plural coincided with that of the Accusative Plural; in some paradigms the Nominative and Accusative forms in the Singular were alike too.

        On the whole the system of declensions in OE lacked consistency and precision. This fact played a certain role in the reconstruction of the declension system in later ages.

 

The Pronoun

        There are several types of pronoun in OE: personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative and relative.Personal pronouns. In OE there are besides singular and plural personal pronouns, also dual pronouns for the 1st and 2nd persons. The personal pronouns of the 3rd person distinguished between three genders.

                                 PERSONAL PRONOUNS. Singular.

1st person		2nd person	3rd person
			Masc.	Fem.	Neut.
N.	ic	Þū	hē	hēo	hit
G.	mīn	Þin	his	hire	his
D.	mē	Þē	him	hire	him
A.	mē, mec	þē, þec	hine	hie	hit

                                Dual

	1st  person	2nd person
N.	Wit	it
G.	Uncer	Incer
D.	Unc	Inc
A.	unc,uncit	inc,incit

Plural

	1st  person	2nd person	3rd person
N.	Wē	Ē	hīe, hī, h , hēo
G.	Ūre	Ēower	hiera, hira, hyra, hiora
D.	Ūs	Ēow	him
A.	ūs, ūsic	ēow, ēowic	hē, hī, h ,hēo