The history of the english language 2nd edition course guidebook

Introduction to the Study of Language Lecture 1 When we come to the study of the history of English, we see many debates today that are at work in the past. These debates have a history and they have a context. Those debates bequeath to us not just larger arguments about language, but the very literary texts we read. T he purpose of this course is to trace the development of the English language from its earliest forms to the present. To do so, we need a working notion of what language is and how it changeswe need to know the subject of our study. We also need to develop certain tools for studying that subjectwe need a method. And we need to know what questions to ask about the English language, both in its historical forms and in its current usageswe need a point of view. In this lecture, we will defer for the moment the larger questions of subject and method and concentrate on point of view. Many of us are interested in the history of language because it may help us answer questions we have about language and society today. Questions about the standardization of English, about English as an official language, and about the relationships among spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and style are all ones we may have asked since grade school. This lecture surveys the content and approaches of the course as a whole by framing these questions historically. It anticipates many of the issues we will explore in detail in later lectures. It also provides a set of reference points for recognizing that, even in the welter of technical detail sometimes necessary to the historical study of English, issues of language and behavior vital to our lives are always behind this study. What is English? Where did it come from? Where is it going? In these lectures, we will look at some of the ways in which the English language developed from Old to Middle to Modern English and how the study of language in the 19th21st centuries has affected the ways in which we think of ourselves as speakers of the language. Among the many questions we must ask in this study is, Precisely what is the English language? Lets begin 3 Lecture 1: Introduction to the Study of Language by looking at some passages from different periods in English. The first selection we hear is in the Northumbrian dialect of Old English, the poetry of Caedmon, from about the year 680. The second selection is the famous opening lines from Chaucers Canterbury Tales, written in Middle English at the end of the 14th century. Finally, we hear Hamlets famous soliloquy, written by Shakespeare in the late 16th century. In this course, we will not simply trace how the language changed from Old to Middle to Modern English, but we will explore methods for the study of language. We will also look at problems that motivate the historical study of English, as well as texts and contexts that may help us understand the origins of English, its literary and cultural artifacts, and the future of the language. Many debates in the study of English today have also been at work in the past. The first of these is, Should there be a standard English? As early as the 10th century, teachers in the church schools of Anglo-Saxon England argued about this same issue. Some claimed that rules should be established for spelling, pronunciation, dialect, and usage. In the later medieval period, from the 13th to the 15th centuries, questions arose about what constituted a standard. Should it be the speech of London or another region? Should it include French words? In the 16th and 17th centuries, pedagogues and pedants debated whether a standard should be grounded in university education. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these debates were played out in the courts, schools, and official loci of royal administration. American English also invites us to ask questions about a standard: Should we use a regional standard as a model, or should we take standards from learning and education? Questions about standards lead us to another central question of this course: Should the study of language be prescriptive or descriptive? A dictionary ostensibly records certain aspects of a language, such as spelling, meaning, pronunciation, and usage. But by recording such descriptions of words, we are also codifying them, and thus, the descriptions become prescriptions. In other words, they become statements of how we should speak and write rather than information about how we actually do speak and write. From the Anglo-Saxon period to the present, people have asked whether or not language behavior should be prescribed. When we look at the history of dictionaries, we are looking at the ways in which particular authors, editors, and scholars adjudicate between the need to describe a language as they 4 perceive it and their positions as regulators or legislators of a language. As we will see in later lectures, the dictionary of Samuel Johnson (1755) became, in many ways, the fulcrum on which previous and subsequent lexicons have balanced. Very often, what dictionaries or other authorities prescribe are not just habits of pronunciation or forms of spelling but categories of grammar. Many people wonder why English grammar is seemingly so simple. Modern European languages have grammatical gender, case endings, and so on. Why did English move from a highly inflected language in Old English to a relatively uninflected language in Modern English? The answer to this question dovetails with other narratives about pronunciation and spelling. Grammar and case endings reflect the ways in which people at one time spelled and pronounced words. Later in the course, well Anyone who comes see that habits of pronunciation and spelling to English as a child may have changed grammar; in other words, in school or as an people stopped pronouncing case endings adult who speaks or stopped spelling words as they were spoken, and started spelling them according another language is to convention. invariably confronted by the strangeness of Anyone who comes to English as a child in its spelling. school or as an adult who speaks another language is invariably confronted by the strangeness of its spelling. English has many silent letters and clusters of consonants or vowels that seem to be mutable, giving us different sounds in different contexts. Why is that the case? English spelling has remained historical and etymological. In other words, English, by and large, preserves older forms of the language by using conservative spelling. The result is such words as knight, knee, knife, marriage, and enough. We will also see how pedagogues in the 17th and 18th centuries sought to regulate and control spelling by what they imagined to be etymologyrespelling words as if they were Latin words. Examples include debt and doubt. The history of English shows a gradual separation between spelling and speech. 5 Lecture 1: Introduction to the Study of Language The topic of speech brings us to another question: Why do we pronounce words as we do? The history of English pronunciation is the history of sound changes. How do we know how Old English or Middle English was pronounced? As well see, a variety of resources are available to us, including spellings, textbooks, poetry, and the work of scholars from the 16th century forward. As we know, English also sounds different in different regions. One theme of this course will be the nature of regional dialects. These existed in the British Isles from the very beginning. Later in the course, well look at how we recover dialect sounds, at the relationship between regional dialects and a national standard, and at the impact of regional dialects on the development of a standard. What happens when contact occurs between different dialects or languages? Speakers of Old English came in contact with the French during the Norman Conquest. That contact irrevocably changed the sound, sense, vocabulary, idiom, and structure of the vernacular. In the 15th18th centuries, explorers from England and elsewhere in Europe came in contact with speakers of other languages. New words were introduced into English, bringing with them changes in the structure and idiom of the language. Such changes could also affect pronunciation. The Great Vowel Shift of the 15th and early 16th centuries, for example, may have resulted from a variety of different dialects coming into contact with each other, from the loss of French as the prestige language in late-medieval England, and from the need to recreate among an educated, literate elite a form of pronunciation that would replace French as a prestige form of language. When we look at languages and contact, we also need to look at translation. Is translation the word-for-word mapping of one language onto another, or is it something else? One of the key texts in the study of translation is the Bible. The translation of the Bible into Old English, Middle English, and Modern English brings us to yet another phenomenonarchaism. This term relates to the circumstances in which a writer would want the language to look and feel old, in which a translation can give us evidence of the history of language embedded in it, and in which a text of a given time reflects the teaching of an earlier time. In the case of the King James Bible in particular, well see the impact this highly formal and archaizing form of English prose had on later 6 writers, especially American writers of the 19th century, such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Joel Chandler Harris. What we see in the history of English is a collection of texts and influences and a story of contacts, but we also see a history of our own speech and the literature we read and remember. One of the arguments of this course is that to understand the history of English is to understand, in many ways, the history of our own culture and society. Whatever we may believe about the relationship between language and mind, language and society constitute a bond of personal expression. Many of the texts that we will look at in this course concern creation, including the creation of the world in Caedmons Hymn, the creation of spring in the opening lines of Chaucer, and the possibility of un-creation in Hamlet. We always create ourselves in language. We will see in this course that attention to the history of the English language through literary texts focuses our attention on the imaginative space of self-creation. Lets embark on this study with a roadmap of the remainder of the course. Well begin with issues of methodhow language is studied and how we define the discipline of historical linguistics. We will look at how sounds are produced in the mouth (articulatory phonetics), how earlier forms of language are reconstructed by scholars (comparative philology), and at the study of language in society (sociolinguistics). We will also delve into the prehistory of English, the period of IndoEuropean, probably 4,000 or 5,000 years in the past. The words of this culture passed into the languages that descended from it, such as the classical languages Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, as well as modern languages, ranging from Hindi and Farsi in the east to Celtic, Germanic, and Romance languages in the west. The study of Indo-European will introduce us to scholars of language, who began to recognize in the 18th and 19th centuries that links existed among living languages. We will also see that the study of Indo-European is a study of society; we can reconstruct, through the study of language, the social environments that gave rise to the Europeans and Western Asians. 7 Lecture 1: Introduction to the Study of Language Out of this Indo-European matrix emerged Germanic-speaking peoples in the north of Europe who developed the languages of Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, and England. Well learn how the Germanic languages spawned English and how the relationship between the Germanic peoples and the Roman imperium gave rise to certain attitudes toward language and culture and to certain words that still survive in English today. Old English will be the next component that we look at, the world of the Anglo-Saxonsof Caedmon, the historian Bede, and Beowulf. In particular, well see how Old English applied the techniques of older Germanic poetry to create a vivid, imaginative framework for the expression of religious and mythological poetry. With the Norman Conquest, well explore the contact between English and French, the rise of Middle English, and the emergence of French as a prestige language. For much of the Middle Ages, the British Isles was a trilingual culture of English, French, and Latin. With trade, commerce, and colonialism, we will see the origins of Modern Englishthe ways in which the sound of English changed and the vocabulary structure altered, and the fact that English became an omnivorous consumer of new words and new cultures. In lectures on America and the Anglophone world, we will see how each culture looks back to the history of its language to invoke and evoke its origins. In the final lectures of this course, well look at the future of English. How will the Internet, e-mail, and text messaging change our language? What is the impact of English-language literature abroad? Is English being debased and corrupted or enlivened and enriched through these influences? As you encounter language in this course, keep in mind that the history of English lives today in our own reading and experience. We must understand the history of English to understand contemporary debates on language and 8