slides of History of English language about flux of English language. These slides were made on the basis of ''Story of English Language" Book written by "C.L Barbar"

1. The Flux of Language
By
Wajid Hussain Khoso
Sindh University.
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2. • Languages sometimes die out usually because
of the competition from another language (for
example Norn language)
• Some languages, although dead, they have
not died they have changed into something
else (for example Classical Latin & Greek)
• In fact all living languages change
though the rate of change varies from time to
time and from language to language.
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3. Linguistic change in English
• the new English Bible from 1961 versus King
James' Bible from 1611
• Vocabulary
nigh= near / meete= fitting / transgressed
= broke, violated / commandement
= commands, orders
• Grammar
the use of the personal pronoun thou and its
accusative thee , together with the associated
pronoun-determiner thy after thou the verbs
have the inflection -est or -st (gauest, hast).
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4. • Word-order
verb–subject–object (neither transgressed I ... thy
commandement)
verb–subject order (therefore came his father
out)
• Spelling
the use of u and v , which are not used to
distinguish vowel from consonant: v is always
used at the beginning of a word ( vnto ), and u is
always used elsewhere ( serue , out , thou )
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5. John Wycliffe, the first person to translate the entire
Bible into English (around 1384)
Vocabulary
• many words and phrases which sound archaic or
old-fashioned ( forsoth = indeed / wroth = angry)
• words which are quite strange to the modern
reader (neiȝede = approached / clepide = called)
• familiar-looking words with unfamiliar meanings
(symfonye = musical instrument / largely=
liberally).
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6. Grammar
• noun-plural ending -is ( thyngis ‘goods’ , hooris
‘whores’)
• verb-plural endings -en or -n ( weren , ben ), verb
past-tense endings -ide ( clepide , axide ) and past
participles ending -n ( comen , founden)
• Word-order almost no difference - it is very close to
that of present- day English
• Spelling only u occurs in the passage, not v , but in
Wycliffe’s time they tended to be used interchangeably
• the use of I instead of j ( ioye )
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7. a manuscript of the early
11th century
Vocabulary
• great number of unfamiliar words
• some of them died out ( þā = when, then
/ genēalǣthe = approached / swēg = noise)
• some are used in an unfamiliar sense ( æcere
has developed into our acre, but means ‘
field’)
• some are unchanged in meaning but appear
in unfamiliar spelling ( yldra sunu = elder son)
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8. Grammar
• words change their endings according to their
grammatical function in the sentence (the
word for ‘ field’ is æcer, but after the
preposition on it has to add the ending -e ,
and so we have the expression on æcere )
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9. Word-order
• the normal present-day order of S–V–O ( he
heard the noise )
• some have the order V–S–O ( then called he a
servant )
• some clauses have the order S–O–V ( when he
the house approached )
Taken all together, these changes add up to a
major transformation of the language
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10. Mechanisms of Linguistic change
what causes such changes? No single answer to this question
The Pronunciation Large-scale regularities = sound
laws
(e.g. all the [b] consonants in a certain position
may change into [p] consonants)
• When we learn a foreign language, we inevitably
carry over some of our mother tongue speech
habits into it, and so do not speak it exactly like a
native
• In bilingual situations, the second language tends
to be modified. Such modifications may or may
not persist
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11. • Changes may also be due to contact between
speakers of different dialects. In the long term,
this can lead to the creation of a new variety of
the language
• Some changes have often been attributed to
‘fashion’ or the prestige of the incoming feature
• Another possible explanation for changes in
pronunciation is that the imitation of children is
imperfect
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12. The Principle of Ease or Minimization
of Efforts
• We all try to economize energy in our actions,
so we tend to take short cuts in the
movements of our speech organs and omit
sounds if they are not essential for
understanding
• Assimilation is a very common kind of change
Scant was once skamt , but the /m/ has been
changed to /n/ under the influence of the
following /t/
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13. • It is very common for consonants to be lost at the end
of a word
baken changed from /'baː kǝn/ to /'baː kǝ/, and later to /baː k/
• On the other hand, ease of pronunciation can lead to
an extra phoneme being inserted in a word
in Old English, our word thunder was þunor . By normal
development, þunor would have become thunner, but /d/ has
been inserted in the pronunciation
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14. • Sometimes, the ease of pronunciation leads us to reverse the
order of two phonemes in a word (metathesis)
Wasp and burn , which by regular development would have
been waps and brin/bren
• If, through excessive economy of effort, an utterance is not
understood, or is misunderstood, the speaker is obliged to
repeat it thus making more effort
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15. Changes in morphology, syntax, vocabulary
and word-meaning are less puzzling than
changes in pronunciation
• In the realm of vocabulary and meaning , the
influence of general social and cultural change is
obvious. As society changes, there are new things
that need new names
• There is the constant conflict between the principle
of minimum effort and the demands of
communication. Minimization of effort is seen in the
way words are often shortened, as when public
house becomes pub , or television becomes telly
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16. • But if economy of this kind goes too far, some
kind of compensating action may be taken, as
in the 17th century the bird called the pie was
expanded to the magpie
• One way in which the language system
promotes change, especially in grammar , is
through the operation of analogy
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17. The process of change in a language
often leads to Divergent Development
• When a language has diverged into two forms we say that it has
two dialects
• The two dialects may have got so different that they are no longer
mutually intelligible. We should now say that they were two
different languages
• This process has occurred many times in human history, which is
why there are now over six thousand different languages in the
world.
• Many of them belong to some group of related languages, and
some of these groups are very large, constituting what we can
call language families
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18. • The process of divergent development has
produced an enormous number of languages
out of a smaller number of earlier ones
• There are, however, forces that work the other
way, that may even reduce a language family
or branch to a single language again
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19. Convergent Development
• For example, Latin was only one of a number
of related languages, dialects of Italic, which
were spoken in the city-states of ancient Italy
• At one time, some of these Italic languages,
such as Umbrian and Oscan, may have been at
least as widespread and important as Latin
• But as the Romans conquered Italy, their
language was conquered too, and eventually
the other Italic languages died out
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20. Thank you….
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