English as an Indo-European language

Main ideas:

Theory:

Linguistic reconstruction

Comparative method

Language universals

Content:

Vocabulary: takes a lot to change ‘core’ vocabulary

reconstruction of meaning more tricky

ablaut

Morphology: grammatical gender

origins of strong verb vowel alternation

‘primitive’ language with lots of inflections

Syntax: OV word order

Phonology: Lots of ‘stops’ (no ‘th’)

Accent

-based on pitch rather than loudness

-could occur on any syllable

English as an Indo-European language

Scholars had observed resemblances among languages (e.g. Latin and Greek, which got formally studied a lot) before the 18^th century but it was at the end of the C18th (and as a by-product of colonialism) that relationships among languages began to be studied systematically:

-British in India now had access to Sanskrit

-and could observe similarities among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek

In a lecture in 1786, published in 1788, Sir William Jones

• felt that Sanskrit was “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin” and “bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident”

• contended that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek stemmed from a “common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists”
• surmised that Germanic and Celtic derive from the same source ‘though blended with a very different idiom”
• for family tree, see Problems p. 73
• for Latin, Greek, Sanskrit cognates, see Problems 78 (4.10)

Overhead/handout (see Problems 4.10, p. 78)

§ examples of cognates:

o words that share an ancestor/source

o have similar structure and meaning

§ words for body parts and basic human relationships tend to stay in a language

o –it takes a lot to change core vocabulary

§ if you look at the different columns, what patterns do you notice?

o /f/ in Germanic tends to correspond to /p/ in other languages

o /h/ in Germanic tends to correspond to /k/ or /s/ in other languages

§ [-most phonetically credible development is for an original /k/ to have become /h/ or /s/]

This common ancestor didn’t survive in writing and no longer existed

• had to be reconstructed hypothetically from surviving evidence

• modern languages
• dead written languages
• compare all of the different forms and reconstruct their most likely ancestor
• overhead/handout: paradigm for ‘to be’, present tense first person singular

Let’s use cognates forms of the first person singular of the verb be to demonstrate basic principles of what’s called the comparative method

• find patterned consistent relationships that can’t be due to chance
• find the most credible explanation for differences
• all of them have an /m/
• -ancestor must have /m/
• Sanskrit and Latin both have an /s/
• ancestor must have
• more likely than /s/ appearing independently in two
• Sanskrit and Greek both have a final vowel
• Sanskrit and Greek and OE both have an initial vowel
• ancestor must have had too

I won’t go into the details of how we know what vowel is present, but the reconstructed form consists of a root meaning ‘be’ and a suffix relating to first person

*es-me ‘I am’

Estimates about date range wildly:

• Renfrew c6000 BC
• Millward c5000-3000 BC
• McArthur c3000-2000 BC
• -migrations must have started by c3000 BC
• 2000 BC: Greece
• 1500 BC: Indian subcontinent

And location

-northern part of eastern Europe?

-a lot farther south—eastern Turkey? (Renfrew)

Reconstruction of the meaning of words is trickier

• old words can be used in new ways
• e.g. British robin in Nam refers to completely different species
• similarity: red breast
• so, the word beech ‘kind of tree’ goes back to IE (related to book)
• but English beech refers to a different species than cognate forms
• Greek and Latin cognates of BEECH designate a kind of oak found in the Mediterranean lands
• still, looking at the words that are common to most IE languages helps scholars locate the area where it was originally spoken
• “from the absence of a general word for ‘sea’ we may deduce that the IE were originally an inland people”

IE words seem to have had a fairly predictable structure

o root which we can now look up in IE dictionary

o e.g. *prek- ‘to ask’

o suffix that determined the part of speech of a word

o e.g. adjective *prok-o-

o e.g. verb *prk-sko-

o inflection added to the stem (root + suffix) conveying grammatical information

Notice that the root in these examples changes

o form with e: *prek-

o form with o: *prok-

o form without a vowel: *prk-

o also forms with the e or o lengthened

o called e, o, zero, and lengthened grade

o ablaut or apophony: changes in the vowel of roots incidate morphological categories like tense, number, even part of speech

§ characteristic of IE word roots. Other ex:

· e: Latin ped-; o: Gk podiatrist; lengthened: foot

§ one of the phenomena obscuring relations among cognates

Ablaut also reflected in PDE strong verb morphology

-sing, sang, sung

-sing from e-grade *seng^wh-

-sang from o-grade *song^wh-

-sung from zero-grade form *sng^wh-

-but IE wasn’t that tidy: there wasn’t a one-to-one correspondence between the grade and the grammatical function

Morphology

Despite stereotypes of ‘primitive languages’ as consisting of grunting monosyllables, IE very highly inflected!

-page 85 of Problems 4.12 has some verbs!

Word inflections (generally suffixes) indicated various grammatical functions

• grammatical gender:
• arbitrary: doesn’t correspond to biological gender
• usual example is taken from modern German: words for knife, fork and spoon neuter (das Messer), feminine (die Gabel) and masculine (der Löffel) respectively
• tend to be marked not by the form of the noun but by the forms of the pronoun or adjective that modifies it
• number
• nouns and verbs marked not only singular and plural, but also ‘dual’, for objects occurring in pairs
• case
• noun endings that show their function in a sentence
• e.g. PDE pronouns change shape for subject (“I have fleas”) and object (“They bite me”)
• nouns don’t
• IE nouns had endings for not only subject and object but all sorts of other categories: vocative (if you’re addressing it), instrumental (if you’re doing something with it), etc
• overhead: word for wolf

Syntax

It’s harder to reconstruct word order than word forms

Most PDE descendants of IE have “VO” order: I ATE the CAKE

-but it’s been postulated that IE had “OV” order

-mostly from earlier stages of IE languages

-C5th Gmc runic inscriptions: OV ‘the horn I made’

-Latin: beginning of the Aeneid: “the weapons and the man I sing”

-subordinate clauses in OE

If a language has VO order, it’s likely to have other word-order patterns:

-e.g. preposition + object: to him

-one of the language universals postulated by Joseph Greenberg in 1963

-in OE you can write “Harold HIM WITH fought”

-in PDE there are still apparent relics like here-in

-usually if the object is ‘light’, a pronoun

-so if earlier forms of IE languages have OV and other word order patterns connected with OV languages, IE must have too

Phonology

IE’s word stress was different from PDE

Based on pitch

§ PDE: combiation of loudness, length, pitch

Freer: could occur on any syllable

§ e.g., word for ‘brother’ had stress on first syllable (BHRAter)

§ e.g. word for ‘father’ had stress on second syllable (p*TER)

One implication: often a difference in stress correlates with difference in sounds

§ cf. modern English catastrophe and catastrophic

§ every vowel changed

IE didn’t have the fricatives <th> or <f>

IE had more phonemic stops

-consonants formed by stopping the air flow

-PDE:

-place of articulation: bilabial, alveolar, velar

-manner of articulation: voiced and voiceless

See Problems 4.9 (p. 76)