The History of the English Language

1. PART ONE: Language Change

All languages change over time.  They change because there is no fixed one-to-one correspondence between sound and meaning in human language. But why do certain changes occur and not others?

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1595) we can read the following line said by Juliet:

“O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?”
For contemporary readers, the line is comprehensible, though somewhat strange. We do not use the question word “wherefore” anymore, like we won’t understand the expression “art thou” unless we know that it means “you are.” To understand the sentence, it is might be helpful to know that wherefore at that time meant why, for what reason. However, English still uses a related word, which has survived, and that is therefore (meaning for this reason).This is a change in vocabulary.
There are also grammatical changes. “Thou” is only used now mostly in quotations from the Bible (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill.”), contemporary English only uses the pronoun you. In Modern English¹, however, several kinds of pronouns were used to express “you” depending on case and number.

• 
  Singular nominative case was expressed with “thou” (“Thou art a student”);
  
• 
  plural nominative used “ye” (“Ye are students”);
  
• 
  singular accusative had “thee” (“I teach thee”);
  
• 
  while plural accusative required the form “you” (“I teach you all”).
  

Note that the verb was also used different forms: are and art. The modification of words to express different grammatical categories is called inflection². The inflection of nouns (pronouns and adjectives) is called declension, that of verbs is referred to as conjugation.

Let us see a quotation from the Bible (Matthew 21) in these three languages:

• 
  “unsar”, “úre” and “our”;
  
• 
  “himinam”, “heofonum” and “heaven”;
  
• 
  “namo”, “nama” and “name”;
  
• 
  “manne”, “mann” and “man”;
  
• 
  “sunnuns”, “suna” and “sons”,
  

• 
  “airþai”, “eorþan” and “earth” or
  
• 
  “qimai”, “becume” and “come”
  

• 
  “atta” and “fæder” or
  
• 
  “þiudinassus”, “ríce” and “kingdom.”
  

• 
  Phonetics (pronunciation): fæder, nama, willa
  
• 
  Morphology (the form of words): heofonum, eorþan, gehalgod
  
• 
  Syntax (sentence patterns): Hwi forbead God ēow þaet ge ne æton?
  
• 
  Lexicon (vocabulary): ríce, soþlice
  

It is very important that these changes within a language are always systematic. That is, if a change occurs within one category, it affects all the elements of that category. Compare these Old English (OE) and Mod. E. pairs:

• 
  hām – home ;
  
• 
  lā(ᵹ) – low ;
  
• 
  ᵹāt – goat ;
  
• 
  bāt – boat ;
  
• 
  āc – oak ;
  
• 
  āþ – oath
  
• 
  
  

However, these changes are usually parts of more systematic alterations.

[ba:t]  [b ɔ:t ]  [bo:t]  [boʊt]

9/10^th c. – 13/14^th c. – 16^th c. - now

The change that occurred in the pronunciation of “boat” affected long OE vowels and was part of the so-called Great English Vowel Shift.
So if a change occurs in language (especially in phonetics), that tends to affect all similar words. That is change tends to be systematic.

2. The causes of language change
1. Physiological basis: people always want to ease the pronunciation of words. Whether we admit it or not, we do not like to waste our energy pronouncing every sound. Just pay attention to yourself when you are speaking. If you use an informal register or speak quickly, most sounds tend to “disappear” When the tongue slips from one position to another, it inevitably produces different sounds, which is the basis of assimilation.

Two types of physiologically-based changes exist:

(b) insertion.

• 
  WITH: “with” – pronounced both as [wið] and [wiÞ], the latter influenced by spelling.
  
• 
  FOREHEAD: The standard pronunciation of “forehead” is [‘fᴧrid] but recently the (logical) pronunciation [fɔ’hɛd] is spreading, especially in US English.
  
• 
  CLOTHES: “Clothes” may be pronounced like [cloʊs] and – more recently – as [cloʊðz], which is influenced by the way the word is spelt.
  
• 
  VICTUALS: Extreme example: “victuals” [vitəls], now sometimes [viktualz], in fact, the way it should be pronounced. (On the insertion of “c” and “u” in spelling, see changes in spelling in the Renaissance.)
  

The most well-known example is “hamburger.” Originally, the word referred to a type of food with meat coming from the port of Hamburg. Later, this origin faded, and the part “ham” was thought to have referred to a type of meat, not the place, and thus, other words were created, such as “cheese + burger”, “Burger King”, and so on.

Other examples from OE language: “an adder” (“serpent”, “snake”) was originally nǣddre, but the boundary between the article and noun shifted. The original form remained in German (Natter) and Welsh (neidr), which all go back to Latin natrix.

The same happened in the word “apron” (Old French naperoun, see E. napkin); “umpire” (OF nounpere = ‘non’+ ‘peer’, that is, a third, neutral party).

A similar case is “daffodil” originating from the 1540s, variant of Middle English affodill "asphodel" (c.1400), from Medieval Latin affodillus, from Latin asphodelus, from Greek asphodelos, of unknown origin. The initial d- is perhaps from merging of the article in Dutch de affodil, the Netherlands being a source for bulbs.

A reverse process took place in words like “newt” (“tarajos gőte”), originally OE efata, later an ewt, a newt;

Probably the best example here is the pair “male” – “female.” The word “female” has nothing to do with its “male” counterpart, because it comes from Latin femelle, a diminutive form of femina. The origin of “male” is the Latin word masculus (that changed to masle, mâle, male in OF and was borrowed from there).

A typical phonological sign of French influence in English is the initial [v] sound in words, for OE did not make such a distinction in writing: for instance, “ofer” was pronounced [o:ver], so the sound [v] was just a variant of the letter [f], like in Icelandic today: gefur [gevür], vafinni [vavinni], lófann [laʊvan].

(*Again: the Latin word “caput” has given English the words cattle, capital, capitol, chapter, chief, chef, and captain.)