By Camilo Saavedra

Language history and change

XIX century linguists came up with the idea of the existence of a proto-Indo-european family of languages

Languages from different geographical areas have some common features, they are all related.

A common ancestorA proto-language, a kind of “Great-grandmother” of modern languages

Comparative reconstruction

A way of finding similarities in different languages (and this way find out their relation to an ancestor), were/are used cognates

Cognates are a similar word in one language and another in form or pronounciation

Comparative Reconstruction is a process in wich cognates are compared in order to find similarities

Cognates example

PrinciplesIn comparative reconstruction there are

two important principles:The majority principle: when comparing

cognate sets, the ones more similar demonstrate the less that those languages have changed from the proto-language

The natural development principle: are a series of rules in language change (or evolution) that show the antiquity of that language in relation to the proto-language.

This shows that the more the word respects these rules, the more similar it is towards the proto-language.

English language change

English language history is divided into three main periods:

Old English (VII-XI)

Middle English (XI-XV)

Modern English (XV-present days)

Old EnglishGermanic tribes (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) invaded the British Isles in the V century.

Words belonging to this period: mann (man), drincan (drink), etan (eat)

Then, another northern-european tribe arrived, The Vikings. They brought the Old Norse, words like: give, leg, skin.

Anglo-saxon invasion

Viking invasion

Middle EnglishNormans arrival to the British Isles in 1066. William “The Conqueror” (a norman) was crowned King of England.

French relevance during this period, although English never ceased being spoken (by the lower class)

Words like: defense, court, faith, army.

Norman invasion

From 1400 to 1600 English started changing in form, structure and pronounciation becoming Modern English (more specifically, early modern English)

Pronounciation changeNot only some sounds changed, but

also some others disappeared. i.e. the voiceless velar fricative /x/ wich in old english pronounciation of nicht as [nixt], but is absent in the present-day form of night [nayt]

Metathesis: is a reversal in two adjoining sounds, had changed the pronounciation of some words

Metathesis example

ProthesisThat is the addition of a sound to the beginning of a word

Syntactic changes

In the transition from old english to modern english, we can find several differences in the order of the sentence, i.e.

Lexical changesA lot of borrowed words have been

added to the english language along its evolution, from latin, greek and other languages.

New words have been created

Some other words have ceased to be used

In terms of meaning, there are two processes: Broadening and Narrowing.

BroadeningA word that previously had only one meaning, now it has some others, for example:

In old english the word “dogca” was used to refer to any breed of dogs, but now, its evolution “dog” is used to refer to any breed.

NarrowingIs the reverse process, a word that before had several different meanings or uses, now it has only one, for example:

The old english word “mete” refered to any kind of food, now it refers only to a specific breed, “meat”

It’s worth mentioning that this process of change in the language was not from one day to another, on the contrary a language changes gradually, it takes time and requires some factors to make it possible.

Another important point to conclude is that language is in a continuous process of evolution, it’s always changing.