The Development of Consonant System in Middle English and New English

English consonants proved to be more stable than vowels. Nevertheless, new sets of consonants started to appear.

Sibilants and Affricates

Sibilants – a type of fricatives, narrower and sharper than all other fricatives ([f, v, q, ð, h]) – [s, z, ∫, ζ].

Affricates – sounds consisting of a plosive immediately followed by a fricative – [t∫, dζ].

In OE there were only 2 sibilants – [s, z]. [∫] appeared in ME and [ζ] – in NE.

Affricates [t∫, dζ] appeared both in ME and in NE.

Middle English

New consonants developed from palatal plosives [k’], [g’]and the cluster [sk’]:

New English

Palatalisation –as a result of reduction of unstressed vowels several consonants merged into one:

There were some exceptions though, e.g. mature, duty, due, suit, statue, tune, etc.

Fricatives

Voicing –occurredin the 16^th c. (NE) to fricatives:

· in functional words and auxiliaries that are never stressed;

· when preceded by an unstressed and followed by a stressed vowel.

Loss of Some Consonants

In NE some consonants were vocalised or gave birth to diphthongs and triphthongs.

· [r]was vocalised at the end of the word in the 16^th -17^th c. (see Lecture 11);

· [j]disappeared as a result of palatalisation (see palatalisation in Lecture 12); [j] remained only initially (e.g. year, yard, etc.);

· [х, х’] were lost (e.g. ME taughte [‘tauхtə] – NE taught [to:t], ME night [niх’t] – NE night [neit]

· [kn] à [n](e.g. ME know [knou] – NE know [nou]);

· [gn] à [n](e.g. ME gnat [gnat] – NE gnat [næt]);

H/w:1. Ex. 10-14, 17 on p. 219 in “История английского языка” by Т.А. Расторгуева (copies).

Lecture 13

Historical Background of Modern English Spelling

OE Spelling

· based on phonetic principle;

· employed Latin characters;

· one letter = one sound;

Exceptions: ζ, f, s, ð(1 letter = 2 or more sounds).

ME Spelling

· based on conventional principle;

· more ambiguous and less stable (printing was not introduced yet and the manuscripts contained numerous variants of spelling – practically each scribe had its own way to spell the words);

· digraphs (2 letters = 1 sound) appear + 1 letter = several sounds, several letters/combinations of letters = 1 sound (these were the deviations from phonetic principle):

NE Spelling

· based on conventional principle was preserved;

· new digraphs appeared (indicated borrowings from other languages) – ph, ps, ch;

· spelling became fixed.

There reasons for such stabilisation were as follows:

· Introduction of Printing (1475) (see Lecture 9) à one obligatory standard!

· Normalisation of the language (17^th – 18^th c.) (see Lecture 9)à one obligatory standard!

ModE Spelling

Modern English spelling reflects pronunciation of the 14^th – 15^th c.

See also Table 12 on p. 216-218 in “История английского языка” by Т.А. Расторгуева.

Lecture 14

Old English Morphology

Old English was a synthetic language, i.e. there were a lot of inflections.

Parts of Speech

In OE 9 parts of speech had already been distinguished:

Below all notional parts of speech will be discussed, their categories described and the meanings of these categories stated as related to the Old English Period

Noun

Number –Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl).

Gender –Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N).

Case –Nominative (Nom) (agent), Genitive (Gen) (attribute), Dative (Dat) (instrument, indirect/prepositional object), Accusative (Acc) (recipient, direct/prepositionless object).

System of Declensions

Prior to reading this point, see PG word-structure, Lecture 4.

In OE there were 25 declensions of nouns. All nouns were grouped into declensions according to:

· stem-suffix;

· Gender.

We will mention only the most numerous declensions/stems here:

These stems will be discussed more precisely in Lecture 15.

Adjectives

Number –Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl).

Gender –Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N).

Case –Nominative (Nom), Genitive (Gen), Dative (Dat), Accusative (Acc) + Instrumental(Instr).

Instrumental Case was used to express instrumental meaning but only in the adjective while the noun stood in Dative Case:

by/with + Adjective (Instr) + Noun (Dat)

Degrees of Comparison –positive, comparative, superlative.

Determination (Definiteness/Indefiniteness) –today this category has to do with the Article but in OE there were no articles and definiteness/indefiniteness was expressed with the help of inflections of the Adjective, i.e. the inflections of the Adjective helped to determine whether a noun was definite or indefinite.

In OE there existed the weak and strong declensions of the Adjective. They will be discussed more precisely in Lecture 16.

Pronoun

Classification:

1. Personal (Noun-Pronouns (had some categories of the Noun and resembled the Noun in syntactic function)).

They had the following categories:

· Person –1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd;

· Number – Singular (Sg), Plural (Pl) + Dual(1^st, 2^nd pers. (we both, you both) when only two persons were meant);

· Gender – Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N) – only in 3^rd person!;

· Case –Nominative (Nom), Genitive (Gen), Dative (Dat), Accusative (Acc).

2. Demonstrative(Adjective-Pronouns (had some categories of the Adjective and resembled the Adjective in syntactic function)).

They had the following categories:

· Number – Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl);

· Gender – Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N);

· Case –Nominative (Nom), Genitive (Gen), Dative (Dat), Accusative (Acc) +

Instrumental(Instr).

3. Interrogative –unchangeable.

4. Indefinite –unchangeable.

Personal and Demonstrative Pronouns will be discussed more precisely in Lecture 17.

Numeral

Classification:

1. Cardinal –ān (one), twēζen (two), þrēō (three) – had the categories of Gender and Case. All the other cardinal numerals were unchangeable.

2. Ordinal –were unchangeable.

Verbs

Classification:

Finite

They had the following categories:

· Tense –Present and Past (NB no Future! – future actions were expressed by the Present Tense forms);

· Mood –Indicative, Imperative, Superlative;

· Person –1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd;

· Number – Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl);

· Conjugation – strong and weak.

2. Non-finite:

v Infinitiveresembled the Noun and had the category of:

· Case –Nominative (Nom) and Dative (Dat)

e.g. Nom beran (uninflected) – Dat to berenne (inflected, indicated direction or purpose);

v Participles 1, 2resembledthe Verb, the Noun and the Adjective and had the following categories:

· Tense –Present (Participle 1) and Past (Participle 2);

· Number – Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl);

· Gender – Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N);

· Case –Nominative (Nom), Genitive (Gen), Dative (Dat), Accusative (Acc);

· Voice –Active (Part. 1, 2) and Passive (Part 2).

Finite and Non-finite Verbs will be discussed more precisely in Lecture 18.

Preterite-Present Verbs

There were 12 of these verbs and most of them later turned into Modal Verbs. They will be discussed more precisely in Lecture 18.

Anomalous Verbs

They were irregular verbs that combined the features of the weak and strong verbs. There were 4 of them – willan (will), bēon (to be), ζān (to go), dōn (to do). They will be discussed more precisely in Lecture 18.

Lecture 15

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