But it is not just the meaning of words that changes over time. Some of the basic features in the structure of English, such as the conventions of word order, also seem to have been rather unstable. We saw earlier that word order plays a crucial role in modem English, as it is the only means of distinguishing the subject which comes before the verb from the object which comes after.
But consider the order of words in iElfric's passage: me ofthingth 'me displeases' for 'it displeases me' , and ic hi worhte 'I them made' for 'I made them'. Clearly, iElfric's idea of which words should go where was different from ours.
Finally, the pronunciation of English words has also erred and strayed over the centuries, but these wanderings are only partially mirrored in the passages above, because of the conservative nature of the writing system.
Only in a few cases, such as the word ic in jElfric's passage, can the changes in pronunciation be glimpsed from the spelling. In the writing system, 'I' has looked the same ever since, but the actual pronunciation of has continued to meander.
During the fifteenth century, there was an upheaval in the pronunciation of many English vowels, which linguists call 'The Great English Vowel Shift'.
Most of the changes in pronunciation, however, are masked by the spelling. For cultural reasons that are extraneous to spoken language itself, the system of spelling we use today has remained pretty much frozen for at least years, even though the pronunciation continued to drift during this time.
So if one compares the King James passage with the modern translation, one could easily fall under the impression that for some reason changes in pronunciation came to an abrupt halt after But this is just an illusion. Take, for instance, the phrase 'flood of waters to destroy all flesh'. The King James translators spelt this phrase precisely as we do or more accurately, we spell it precisely as they did.
But in fact, most of the words in this phrase would have sounded quite different then. The frozen spelling system also conceals changes in pronunciation that occurred even more recently.
When reading Jane Austen or George Eliot, for example, one is tempted to assume that their characters sounded just like actors in BBC costume dramas. The reality was rather different, however. In , the art critic Charles Eastlake reminisced about the speech of 'old fellows' forty years before, those people born around i the generation of Darwin and Disraeli , who would have been in their teens when Jane Austen's novels first appeared. Men of mature age can remember many words which in the conversation of old fellows forty years ago would sound strangely to modern ears.
They were generally much obleeged for a favour. They referred affectionately to their darters; talked ofgoold watches, or of recent visit to Room; mentioned that they had seen the Dook of Wellington in Hyde Park last Toosday and that he was in the habit of rising at sidle o'clock. They would profess themselves to be their hostess's 'umble servants, and to admire her collection of clmayney, especially the vase of Prooshian blue. And it is precisely for this reason that English spelling is so infamously irrational.
Just have a go at reading the following poem out aloud as quickly as you can: I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you, On hiccough, thorough, lough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish perhaps, To learn of less familiar traps? Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird. And dead — it's said like bed, not bead — For goodness sake, don't call it 'deed'. Watch out for meat and great and threat They rhyme with suite and straight and debt : A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, broth in brother. And here is not a match for there Nor dear and fear for bear and pear. And then there's dose and rose and lose — Just look them up — and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward, And font and front, and word and sword, And do and go, and thwart and cart — Come!
I've hardly made a start! From the Manchester Guardian, So really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is — it's only that it renders the speech of the sixteenth century. It is clear, then, that no corner of the English language has remained protected from changes: sounds, meanings and structures all seem to have suffered from a curious inability to stay still.
Alas, the reason is much more prosaic, as there is nothing special about English in this respect — cosi fan tune. When one traces the records of any other language with a sufficiently long history, a similar picture unrolls.
The dramatic changes in languages will prove important, first and foremost because they will provide the major clues for how complex linguistic structures can arise. But as an added bonus, language's perpetual motion also solves another problem: the babble of Babel.
It transpires that languages did not need any divine intervention in order to proliferate, for given half a chance and sufficient time , they multiply quite happily of their own accord. Just imagine two groups living in two neighbouring villages, speaking similar varieties of one language.
With the passing of time, their language undergoes constant transformations, but as long as the two communities remain in close contact, their varieties will change in tandem: innovations in one village will soon spread to the other, because of the need to communicate. Now suppose that one of the groups wanders off in search of better land, and loses all contact with the speakers of the other village. The language of the two groups will then start wandering in different directions, because there will be nothing to maintain the changes in tandem.
Eventually, their varieties will have strayed so far apart that they will no longer be mutually intelligible, and so turn into different languages. Incidentally, the decision about when to start calling such varieties different 'languages', rather than 'dialects' of the same language, often involves factors that have little to do with the actual linguistic distance between them. So ultimately, the decision about whether something is a language or a dialect relies on what the speakers themselves consider it to be.
But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages. Linguistic diversity is thus a direct consequence of geographical dispersal and language's propensity to change. The biblical assertion that there was a single primordial language is not, in itself, unlikely, for it is quite possible that there was originally only one language, spoken somewhere in Eastern Africa, perhaps ioo, years ago.
But even if this were the case, the break-up of this language must have had much more prosaic reasons than God's wrath at Babel. When different groups started splitting up, going their own ways and settling across the globe, their languages changed in different ways.
So the huge diversity of languages in the world today simply reflects how long languages have had to change independently of one another. The different periods of separation between languages also explain why some languages are much more closely related than others. English and the Germanic languages are themselves related — more distantly — to many other languages of Europe and Asia.
This ancestral prehistoric tongue, probably spoken around 6, years ago, is called by linguists ProtoIndo-European, because in the first few millennia BC the descendants of its speakers spread over an area stretching all the way from India to Europe see map on pages vi-vii.
So although it may not be immediately apparent to the naked eye, the second group of languages in the list above Polish, Albanian, Punjabi, and Persian are all related to English, albeit somewhat distantly, and are descended from the same forebear.
So to the naked eye, the Persian or Albanian sentences above do not look much more similar to English than the ones from Turkish or Yoruba, which are not descended from Proto-Indo-European. There should be little room left for doubt by now that mutability is not a secret vice of English or any other language in particular, but an epidemic of universal proportions. Nonetheless, the realization that change is a chronic condition that all languages suffer from only sharpens a fundamental question — why?
Why are languages constantly on the move, and why can't they simply pull themselves together and keep still? The first reaction might be that the answer is glaringly obvious. The world around us is changing all the time, and naturally, language has to change with it. Language needs to keep pace with new realities, new technologies and new ideas, from ploughs to laser printers, and from political-correctness to sms-texting, and that is why it always changes.
This line of argument may seem appealing at first, but when one looks at the actual changes close up, the picture becomes far more complicated. Or let's look at the question the other way round, and consider a language not burdened with any mod cons or even with ploughs, for that matter.
Mbabaram was once the language of a small Aboriginal tribe in north-east Queensland, Australia, about fifty miles south-west from Cairns. In the os an anthropologist recorded a list of a few words in Mbabaram, which seemed entirely different not only from all the neighbouring languages of the region, but from all other Aboriginal languages on the Australian continent — it was as if the Mbabaram tribe had somehow been parachuted into the north Australian rainforest from some faraway place, and there was even a theory that the Mbabaram were related to the extinct Tasmanians, thousands of miles to the south.
And it took some ingenuity to recognize that Mbabaram was indeed closely related to the languages of the neighbouring tribes, only that its affiliation had been entirely obscured by sweeping changes in pronunciation that the language had undergone at some stage in its history: whole syllables had been chopped off, and new vowels had sprung up, so that, just as one example, a word originally pronounced gudaga ended up in Mbabaram as dog which by sheer coincidence happens to mean But if a language is supposed to change only in order to keep up with ploughs and laser printers, then why should the language of a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, who have never moved beyond stone age technology, be so unstable?
It appears, then, that our first 'obvious' explanation for why language keeps on changing is not sc convincing after all. The main bulk of changes must stem from entirely different reasons. There is a close runner-up in the list of 'obvious' explanations for why language changes so much, and that is the issue of contact.
It is easy to imagine that languages change only because their speakers come into contact with speakers of other languages or dialects, and start borrowing words and expressions from one another. This line of argument seems especially tempting in the case of English, since although English is a Germanic language, about half of its vocabulary is not of Germanic origin but borrowed from various other languages, mostly Norman French and Latin.
But while contact, 'keeping up with the Joneses', so to speak, is undoubtedly the source of a great many changes, and thus a much better explanation than 'keeping up with laser printers', it still cannot be held responsible for the sweeping changes in absolutely all languages, even those whose speakers have had hardly any exposure to other languages.
Finally, a third 'obvious' explanation for why language should change so much is that people are progressive creatures who value novelty and improvement and thus set about trying to renovate and improve language. But this idea is a complete non-starter.
As we'll see in the next chapter, when people bother to think about changes, they generally portray them as a great danger to language as well as to society, if not the whole of civilization and condemn them as slack, slovenly or just plain wrong.
If anything, the weight of censure and authority conspires to prevent language from changing. And yet, it does move! All the obvious explanations, therefore, fall short of accounting for the sheer scale of the changes. It seems that languages need neither nudging from the Joneses nor the gadgetry of ploughs in order to be transformed, for they keep changing, even without the slightest provocation, and even in spite of people's best intentions.
But if all these external reasons fail to explain the changes, then there must be something in language itself which makes it so unsteady. The conundrum of change has been one of the enduring puzzles in the study of language, and it preoccupied linguists throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.
But only in the last few decades have linguists finally managed to make significant progress in cracking it. Like any respectable whodunit, the mystery of change turned out to have three main elements: a suspect — who is really behind the changes?
Tracking down the suspect may at first seem a rather difficult mission, since it's quite hard to think of anyone who is really trying to change language. Are you? But the identification turns out to be fairly straightforward, since although no one in particular is changing language, it is in fact all of us who bring about the changes, even if we never wish to.
There are a great number of things that people bring about without ever intending to. Just think of traffic jams. Nobody has ever set out on their daily commute with the express purpose of creating one, and yet each driver contributes to the congestion by adding one more car to an overcrowded road.
But unintended changes don't always have to be harmful. Imagine two public buildings with an overgrown field lying directly between them. The only road connecting the buildings winds its way lengthily around the field, so people who have to walk from one building to the other start crossing the field as a short-cut.
The first person to do so tries to make his way through the long grass, and people who come afterwards find the track which the first person has made the most inviting way through, because some grass and bracken have already been trodden down. As more and more people cross the field, more and more vegetation is trampled, so that eventually the track turns into a nice clear footpath. The point is that no one in particular created this footpath, and no one in particular even intended to. The path did not emerge from some project of landscape design, but from the accumulated spontaneous actions of the short-cutters, who were each following their own selfish motives in taking the easiest and quickest route.
These actions must stem from entirely selfish motives, not from any conscious design to transform language. But what could these motives be? This is a rather more involved question, and doing justice to it will occupy us in the next few chapters. But in essence, the motives for change can be encapsulated in the triad economy, expressiveness and analogy. Economy refers to the tendency to save effort, and is behind the shortcuts speakers often take in pronunciation.
As we shall see in the following chapter, when these short-cuts accumulate, they can create new sounds, just like the new footpath cutting through the field. Expressiveness relates to speakers' attempts to achieve greater effect for their utterances and extend their range of meaning. One area where we are particularly expressive is in saying 'no'. A plain 'no' is often deemed too weak to convey the depth of our unenthusiasm, so to make sure the right effect is achieved, we beef up 'no' to 'not at all', 'not a bit', 'no way', 'by no means', 'not in a million years', and so on.
But as we shall see later on, the results of this hyperbole can often be self-defeating, since the repetition of emphatic phrases can cause an inflationary process that devalues their currency. The third motive for change, analogy, is shorthand for the mind's craving for order, the instinctive need of speakers to find regularity in language. The effects of analogy are most conspicuous in the errors of young children, as in 'I goed' or 'two foots', which are simply attempts to introduce regularity to areas of the language that happen to be quite disorganized.
Many such 'errors' are corrected as children grow up, but some innovations do catch on. In the past, for example, there were many more irregular plural nouns in English: one bac book , many bec; one hand, two hend; one eye, two eyn; one cow, many kine. So bec was replaced by the 'incorrect' Kokes books during the thirteenth century, eyn was replaced by eyes in the fourteenth century, kine by cows in the sixteenth.
The following chapters will take a much closer look at the different motives for change, and explore their effects on language in much greater depth. Economy and expressiveness will feature first, and the third part of the triad, analogy, will be the subject of Chapter 6. Different forces, powered by different motives, keep pulling and pushing language in different directions, and in such a complex system, these constant thrusts ensure that the whole never stays still.
Having formed an idea of both the suspect and the motives, we are left with the third and trickiest part of the whodunit: how do speakers ever let language get away with it? Why are changes not brought up short and stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world why society should never let the changes through. After all, the primary purpose of language is to allow effvtive communication, a flow of ideas and information between minds.
And since the names we use for things are just arbitrary conventions a spade would be just as good a name for a spoon as a spoon would be for a spade , the only way to achieve coherent communication is if the system of conventions is agreed upon and adhered to by everyone. So if the rules and regulations of language can keep on changing all the time, surely its very purpose is under threat.
English, for instance, has changed almost beyond recognition within less than thirty generations, but how could this mutation have proceeded without causing a breakdown in communication along the way? One only needs to think about the effects of change on other complex systems to grasp the severity of the threat. Just imagine what it would be like to drive, if the Highway Code kept on changing while you were on the road.
There is a story I once heard in Norway about what happened a few decades ago, when the traffic system in neighbouring Sweden underwent a complete reorganization. Originally the Swedes drove on the left, but since all surrounding countries drove on the right, the government decided that Sweden must keep up with the times. The switch-over was set for one day in , and a massive publicity campaign was launched to inform drivers about the impending change.
But as the deadline drew nearer, the government grew nervous, fearing that chaos would ensue on the first few days after the change. So, the story goes, it was hurriedly decided to revise the plans and take a softlysoftly approach.
In the first week, only lorries and buses would drive on the right, and everyone else would still drive on the left.. Evidently, speakers cannot all switch over from one form to another at exactly the same moment, so how is it that fatal crashes don't ensue? If the rules of the communication system are allowed to keep on changing, why are there no serious misunderstandings at the time when the changes are taking place?
How could this change of direction proceed without causing accidents along the way? At first, one might imagine that such a strange flip was only possible because 'repent' is a fairly rare word, used in restricted contexts. Perhaps there were no complete write-offs because the change occurred on some small deserted country lane, but surely such a change of direction would be unthinkable on a busy motorway. It may therefore come as a surprise that several other verbs underwent a similar flip in English, including the verb 'like', which by anyone's standards is not a small country lane.
Suppose one wants to translate into modern English the following fifteenth-century sentence: 'This is my loved son that liketh me. But that would be quite the wrong way round, since what the sentence actually meant was 'this is my beloved son, whom I like'. This older meaning of 'like' was still frequently used by Shakespeare at the turn of the seventeenth century: HOST: The music likes you not?
At some stage, and in broad daylight, the verb 'like' — surely one of the more common and crucial verbs in the English language — flipped from one sense to the other, apparently without creating a whole series of real-life trouser-role comedies about who really likes whom.
An even more puzzling example concerns the transformation of the verb 'resent'. In , for instance, Isaac Barrow, Newton's teacher and predecessor in Cambridge, wrote in one of his sermons: 'Should we not he monstrously ingratefull if we did not deeply resent such kindness? So somehow, the verb managed to make a U-turn in its meaning, again with no evidence of things going haywire along the way. The meaning of words is not the only area of language where such changes could be expected to throw spanners in the workings of communication, for sweeping transformations in pronunciation should surely be equally obstructive.
Imagine, for instance, a change in sounds that systematically turns every p in its path into an f. Even assuming that there was a thoroughly good motive for such a change let's not worry for now about what that motive might be , can one really imagine that such a transformation would ever be allowed to pass the censors and catch on in English?
Does it seem likely that in fifty years' time, respectable people will start throwing farties, go on ficnics in the fark, and will in all seriousness say things like 'could you flease lass the feas'?
Take a look at the following list of English words, and their counterparts in Danish, Italian and French: The words in each row are clearly 'cognates' they derive from the same root in the prehistoric ancestor of all four languages, Proto-IndoEuropean so any differences in pronunciation between them must stem from sound changes that occurred in the histories of the individual languages.
And while a few other changes are evident, one difference sticks out in particular: wherever Italian and French have a p, English and Danish have anfinstead. The asterisk is a conventional way to mark words that are not attested in actual documents, but reconstructed on the basis of comparisons between the daughter languages. And while Italian and French still retain the initial pristine p, in the history of English and Danish and, in fact, of all the other Germanic languages , the p's have somehow wandered into f s.
As far back as years ago, linguists discovered that a change from p to f must have occurred in Germanic, but for almost a century and a half they could not grasp how such a change could ever get under way. After all, why should this transformation be any more feasible in prehistoric times than in the present day? In an effort to discover how such changes could proceed, linguists tried to scan the historical records for clues.
The Germanic change of p to f lay lost in prehistory, of course, so obviously it could not be observed directly. But even when linguists looked for evidence from sound changes that occurred during the historical period, they found to their chagrin that for some reason the changes could never be observed in progress.
The records never seemed to illuminate the elusive process in between, when the transformations were actually taking place. The linguists of the nineteenth century devised a brilliant theory to explain their way out of this predicament, and to account for why they failed to catch those sound changes in the act. Trying to observe sound changes, they claimed, was like trying to observe a tree growing: the progress of change is so slow that the naked eye can only detect it by comparing the language at two distant points in time.
Speakers started off with a proper p, and then over generations — so the theory ran — the sound inched towards something just a bit closer to an f, and then a little closer still, until, a century or more later, the sound finally reached a real f. In , Leonard Bloomfield, the leading American linguist of the time, summed up this view with confidence: 'The process of linguistic change has never been directly observed,' he assured his readers.
Because the changes happen slowly and imperceptibly, speakers do not get confused by them, and in fact, they don't even notice them, and so no one tries to stop them in their tracks.
As ingenious as the theory was, it had only one slight drawback: it had little foothold in reality. Stall for numerous units until the download is terminate. This muddy report is primed to learn everytime you have. Menu Home. Newer Post Older Post Home.
The Story of Football: For tablet devices Usborne Witches of Norway 1: Nordlichtzauber German Editi Viaggio a Tokyo. Writing Essays in English Language and Linguistics Cahier d'activites. Per le Scuole sup International re Student's book. Per la Scu Per l Running with the Kenyans: Discovering the secrets Conversazioni in Tedesco: La routine quotidiana in Attacking the metaphysics of this articulated language , Artaud specifies that it is to make the language express what Based on 12 papers 10 in English, 2 in German presented at a symposium held in Leiden, Dec.
These are ideal types involving different degrees of the unfolding of form. The language of God, which is crystallized in the name of God and, in the last analysis, Is there a language of actions , a language of words - as - part - ofmovement , of word - as - lie , word - as As the linguistic intention parexcellence, pure language, for Benjamin, marks the contours of the unfolding of He shows how the processes of destruction and creation are continuously in operation, generating new words, new structures, and new meanings.
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