Download ENGLISH LANGUAGE – 2° YEAR A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH

ENGLISH LANGUAGE – 2° YEAR
A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE
Annalisa Federici, Ph.D.
Textbook: J. Culpeper, History of English,
Routledge 1997.
(unit 3)
SPELLINGS AND SPEECH SOUNDS
• English spelling used to represent speech sounds in a relatively
simple way, but it has become less PHONEMIC over the centuries
(cf. Italian basta – graphemes represent phonemes – and English
enough – the spelling does not represent the sound unit that make
up the spoken word in a straightforward way).
• Today English spelling is not always PHONEMIC, that is to say there
is no simple one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and
the graphemes representing them (N.B.: phoneme = the smallest
unit of speech which is perceived to be a single distinctive sound in
a language; grapheme = the smallest unit of a writing system).
• In OE almost each letter of the spelling corresponded to a phoneme
of the spoken word: in twa (“two”) and lang (“long”) both w and g
were pronounced.
SPELLINGS AND SPEECH SOUNDS
Why has the spelling system become less phonemic?
1. English adopted the Roman alphabet:
•
Today we have over 40 phonemes in English, but only 26 letters to
represent them (in particular: about 20 vowel sounds, but only 5 vowel
letters); even in OE, in addition to Latin consonant letters, the Runic
“thorn” þ and the Gaelic “eth” ð were used interchangeably for the
phonemes /ð/ and // that we now represent with th; in addition to Latin
vowel letters, the letter “ash” æ was used for the phoneme /æ/ that we
now represent as a.
•
Some OE phonemes were represented by pairs of letters (digraphs): sc
represented the first phoneme // in OE scep (“sheep”), and cg
represented the last phoneme // in OE ecg (“edge”).
•
In both OE and ME there were no strict rules for spelling: the writer’s
spelling tended to reflect the variety they spoke.
SPELLINGS AND SPEECH SOUNDS
Exercise: given that spelling used to represent much
more closely the pronunciation of words, what can
you infer about the changes in the pronunciation of
the following words?
• Two, sword, answer
• Walk, half, folk
• Wreck, write, wring
• Gnat, gnarl, gnaw
• Knee, know, knight
SPELLINGS AND SPEECH SOUNDS
2. New spellings were introduced by Middle English
scribes, particularly Norman scribes who adapted
spelling to French conventions. They introduced
digraphs such as:
• sh for sc in words like OE scip (“ship”)
• qu for cw in words like OE cwen (“queen”)
• gh for h in words like OE riht (“right”)
• ch for c in words like OE cin (“chin”)
• wh for hw in words like OE hwæt (“what”)
• c for s in words like OE is (“ice”)
• ou for u in words like OE wund (“wound”)
SPELLINGS AND SPEECH SOUNDS
3.
•
•
•
•
•
The advent of printing (1476): a step towards standardisation of
spellings.
Printing was cheaper if one set of spelling conventions reflecting
one dialect was chosen
Printing promoted a standard in spelling
Early printers did not entirely agree on a standard spelling, nor
were they consistent in applying it
Printers, mostly Dutch, introduced new spellings of Dutch
influence (e.g. adding an h to OE gast = ghost, because of the
Flemish word gheest)
Dutch printers used continental characters and non-Latin letters
were transformed (they used y for þ, as in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe);
they also added a superfluous e or doubled consonants to match
the lenght of lines in a text.
SPELLINGS AND SPEECH SOUNDS
4. Sixteenth century: etymological respellings due to the
influence of Greek and Latin (words were respelled by
adding silent letters to make them look more like the
originals):
• ME langage became language (from Latin lingua)
• ME dette became debt (from Latin debitum)
• ME receite became receipt (from Latin receptum)
• ME samon became salmon (from Latin salmo)
5. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many words
entered English from French (grotesque, colonel), Latin
(necessary, relaxation), Greek (chaos, pneumonia), Italian
(piazza, piano), Spanish (canoe, tobacco), bringing in the
spelling conventions of those languages.
SPELLINGS AND SPEECH SOUNDS
6. Though variation in spelling was criticised, and dictionaries
(e.g. Dr Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language)
began to be consulted for an authoritative spelling, changes
in pronunciation were occurring because of the GREAT
VOWEL SHIFT:
• The GVS affected the pronunciation of long vowels and is the
main reason why words such as make, sweet and ride were
(and are) no longer pronounced as they were spelt.
• During the GVS vowels articulated at the front of the mouth
were raised and fronted, and vowels articulated at the back
were raised and backed. The highest vowels, which couldn’t
be raised any further, became diphthongs.
PHONETICS AND SOUND CHANGE
PHONETICS AND SOUND CHANGE
PHONETICS AND
SOUND CHANGE
•All Middle English short vowels
in accented syllables remained
stable in Modern English, while
long vowels underwent a
process of extensive alteration
known as GVS, which mainly
consisted in raising long vowels.
•The GVS is responsible for
many of the irregularities of the
English spelling system: spelling
had become fixed before the
shift, and therefore did not
change when the quality of long
vowels changed. Consequently,
our vowel symbols no longer
correspond to the sound they
once represented.
•This is the reason why we have
such pairs as serene/serenity,
profound/profundity,
divine/divinity.