THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Text 29
Such pronunciation changes are a regular feature of language. Sometimes they occur with the speed of centuries, sometimes with seemingly hell-for-leather haste. They appear from time to time in all languages for reasons that no one really understands. German had one not long after the departure of the Angles and Saxons to Britain, which resulted in the division of German into High and Low varieties. (High German refers not, as is commonly supposed, to the part of the country at the top of the map, but rather to the area at the bottom around Bavaria because the land there is more elevated.) In the German shift, northern speakers came to place s's where before they had put t's, and to put f's where previously they had employed p's. These changes were of course too late to affect English, and thus explain the differences in many modern English and German words, such as water and wasser and open and offen. Such changes are by no means unique to English or even the Germanic languages. Latin underwent a prolonged series of changes. In the fourth century, to take one example, the Latin centum (hundred) began to be pronounced in various ways - a fact reflected in the modern French cent, "sahnt," Spanish ciento, "thiento," and Italian cento, "chento." By such means did the Romance languages grow.
In England the Great Vowel Shift, as it is generally and somewhat misleadingly called, happened later, roughly around the time of Chaucer. Textbook discussions of the shift can sometimes leave us with the impression that people pronounced their vowels in one way up to a certain date and then suddenly, as if on a whim, began pronouncing them in an altogether different way. But of course it was never as simple as that. Many of the pronunciation changes reflected changes that had begun centuries before in the time of King Alfred and some of them are not complete to this day. (Shove and move may one day be pronounced in the same way; it would make sense.) So, although it is true to say that these constituted some of the most sudden and dramatic changes English had ever undergone, we should not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about a period that spanned, even at its most rapid, a couple of generations. When Chaucer died in 1400, people still pronounced the e on the end of words. One hundred years later not only had it become silent, but scholars were evidently unaware that it ever had been pronounced. In short, changes that seem historically to have been almost breathtakingly sudden will often have gone unnoticed by those who lived through them.
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No one knows why this vowel shift happened. As Charlton Laird has succinctly put it: "For some reason, Englishmen started shoving tense vowels forward in their mouths. Then they stopped. And they have remained stopped. Nobody knows why they started or why they stopped." For whatever reasons, in a relatively short period the long vowel sounds of English (or tense vowels as Laird called them) changed their values in a fundamental and seemingly systematic way, each of them moving forward and upward in the mouth. There was evidently a chain reaction in which each shifting vowel pushed the next one forward: The "o" sound of spot became the "a" sound of spat, while spat became speet, speet became spate, and so on. The "aw" sound of law became the "oh" sound of close, which in turn became the" oo" sound of food. Chaucer's lyf, pronounced "leef," became Shakespeare's life, pronounced "lafe," became our life. Not all vowels were affected. The short e of bed and the short i of sit, for instance, were unmoved, so that we pronounce those words today just as the Venerable Bede said them 1,200 years ago.
There were other changes as well - most notably the loss of the Old English sound χ, which, in technical terms, was a voiceless palatal fricative - or to you and me the throat-clearing sound of the ch in the Scottish loch or the German ach. The loss of this sound from English meant that others rushed to fill the vacuum, as in the Old English word burχ (place) which became variously burgh as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and bury as in Canterbury.
Before the shift house was pronounced "hoose" (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced "mood," and home rhymed with "gloom," which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes- in domestic.) But as with most things, shifting vowel sounds were somewhat hit or miss, often because regional variations disrupted the pattern. This is most notably demonstrated with the "oo" sound. In Chaucer's day in London, all double o words were pronounced to rhyme with the modern word food. But once the pattern was broken, all kinds of other variations took hold, giving us such anomalies as blood, stood, good, flood, and so on. Most of these words were pronounced in different ways by different people from different places until they gradually settled into their modern forms, although some have never truly settled, such as roof and poof, which some people rhyme with goof and others pronounce with the sound in foot.
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Text 30
Since obviously there is no one around who heard English as it was spoken in the time of Chaucer and Caxton, how do we know all this? The answer is that for the most part we cannot know for sure. Most of it is based on supposition. But scholars can get a good idea of what English must have sounded like by looking at the rhymes and rhythms of historic verse and by examining the way words were spelled in letters and other snatches of informal writing. In this respect we owe a huge debt to bad spellers. It is from misspellings in letters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that we can be pretty certain that boiled was pronounced byled, that join was gine, that merchant was marchant, and so on. From the misspellings of Queen Elizabeth we know that work was once pronounced "wark," person was "parson," heard was "hard," and defer was "defar," at least at court. … In the same period, short vowels were often used interchangeably, so that not was sometimes written nat and when sometimes appeared as whan. Relics of this variability include strap and strop, taffy and toffy, God and gad.
Rhymes too tell us much. We know from Shakespeare's rhymes that knees, grease, grass, and grace all rhymed (at least more or less) and that clean rhymed with lane. (The modern pronunciation was evidently in use but considered substandard.) Shakespeare also made puns suggesting a similar pronunciation between food and ford and between reason and raising. The k in words like knight and knave was still sounded in Shakespeare's day, while words like sea and see were still pronounced slightly differently - sea being something roughly halfway between see and say - as were other pairs involving ee and ea spellings, such as peek and peak, seek and speak, and so on. All of this is of particular interest to us because it was in this period that America began to be colonized, so it was from this stock of pronunciations that American English grew. For this reason, it has been said that Shakespeare probably sounded more American than English. Well, perhaps. But in fact if he and his compatriots sounded like anything modern at all it was more probably Irish, though even here there are so many exceptions as to make such suggestions dubious.
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For example, the Elizabethans, unlike modern English speakers, continued to pronounce many er words as ar ones, rhyming serve with carve and convert with depart. In England, some of these pronunciations survive, particularly in proper nouns, such as Derby, Berkeley, and Berkshire, though there are many exceptions and inconsistencies, as with the town of Berkamsted, Hertfordshire, in which the first word is pronounced "birk-," but the second is pronounced "hart-." It also survives in a very few everyday words in Britain, notably derby, clerk, and - with an obviously modified spelling - heart, though not in jerk, kerb (the English spelling of curb), nerve, serve, herd, heard, or almost any others of the type. In America, it has been even more consistently abandoned and survives only in heart. But the change is more recent than you might suppose. Well into the nineteenth century, Noah Webster was still castigating those who would say marcy for mercy and marchant for merchant. And then of course there's that favorite word of Yosemite Sam's, varmint, which is simply a variant of vermin. In both Britain and America the problem was sometimes resolved by changing the spelling: Thus Hertford, Connecticut, became Hartford, while in Britain Barclay and Carr became acceptable variants for Berkeley and Kerr. In at least three instances this problem between "er" and "ar" pronunciation has left us with modern doublets: person and parson, university and varsity, and perilous and parlous.
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It is probable, though less certain, that words such as herd, birth, hurt, and worse, which all today carry an identical "er" sound - which, entirely incidentally, is a sound that appears to be unique to English - had slightly different pronunciations up to Shakespeare's day and perhaps beyond. All of these pronunciation changes have continued up until fairly recent times. As late as the fourth decade of the eighteenth century Alexander Pope was rhyming obey with tea, ear with repair, give with believe, join with devine, and many others that jar against modern ears. The poet William Cowper, who died in 1800, was still able to rhyme way with sea. July was widely pronounced "Julie" until about the same time. Gold was pronounced "gould" until well into the nineteenth century (hence the family name) and merchant was still often "marchant" long after Webster's death.
Text 31
It appears that the earth's languages may be more closely related than once thought. The links between languages – between, say, German bruder, English brother, Gaelic bhrathair, Sanskrit bhrata, and Persian biradar –seem self-evident to us today but it hasn't always been so. The science of historical linguistics, like so much else, owes its beginnings to the work of an amateur enthusiast, in this case an Englishman named Sir William Jones.
Everything we know – or, to be more precise, think we know – is based on conjecture, on finding common strands in modern-day languages and tracing these strands to a hypothetical mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European, which may never even have existed. The lack of documentary evidence isn't too surprising when you bear in mind that we are going back an awfully long time. The early Indo-Europeans were Neolithic – that is, late Stone Age – people who can be dated back to about 7000 B.C. The descended languages of Indo-European almost always show some kind of kinship in their names for primary family relationships, such as mother and father; for parts of the body, such as eye, foot, heart, and ear; for common animals, such as goat and ox; and for natural elements, such as snow, thunder, and fire. We can deduce something about how these people lived from these cognates. They had a common word for snow and cold, so the climate obviously was not tropical, and yet they appear to have had no common word for sea. Those tribes that reached the sea each came up with words of their own, so presumably they began their migration from a point well inland. Among the other words held in common are oak, beech, birch, willow, bear, wolf, deer, rabbit, sheep, goat, pig, and dog. They had no common word for horse or window. By studying the known range of certain flora and fauna, linguists have placed their original homeland in various places: the Russian steppes, Scandinavia, central Europe, the Danube valley, Asia Minor – indeed, almost everywhere.
English is part of the Germanic family, which gradually split into three branches. These were North Germanic, consisting of the Scandinavian languages; West Germanic, consisting principally of English, German, and Dutch (but also Frisian, Flemish, and other related dialects); and East Germanic, whose three component languages, Burgundian, Gothic, and Vandalic, died off one by one. Many other European languages disappeared over time, among them Cornish, Manx, Gaulish, Lydian, Oscan, Umbrian, and two that once dominated Europe, Celtic, and Latin.
Celtic, I must hasten to add, is not dead. Far from it. It is still spoken by half a million people in Europe. But they are scattered over a wide area and its influence is negligible. At its height, in about 400 B.C., Celtic was spoken over a vast area of the continent, a fact reflected in scores of place names from Belgrade to Paris to Dundee, all of which commemorate Celtic tribes. But from that point on, its dominions have been constantly eroded, largely because the Celts were a loose collection of tribes and not a great nation state, so they were easily divided and conquered. Even now the various branches of Celtic are not always mutually comprehensible. Celtic speakers in Scotland, for instance, cannot understand the Celtic speakers of Wales a hundred miles to the south. Today Celtic survives in scattered outposts along the westernmost fringes of Europe – on the bleak Hebridean Islands and coastal areas of Scotland, in shrinking pockets of Galway, Mayo, Kerry, and Donegal in Ireland, in mostly remote areas of Wales, and on the Brittany peninsula of northwest France. Everywhere it is a story of inexorable decline. At the turn of the century Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia had 100,000 Gaelic speakers – most of them driven there by the forced clearances of the Scottish Highlands – but now Gaelic is extinct there as a means of daily discourse.
REFERENCE BOOKS
1. A Dictionary of English Etymology, by Hensleigh Wedgwood. Second edition, thoroughly revised and enlarged; with an introduction of the origin of language. London: Trübner and Co, 1872.
2. Borisova L.M. History and Mystery of the English Words. – М., 1994.
3. Bryson, Bill. Mother Tongue. The English Language. Penguin Books, 1991.
4. Dokulil M. The Prague School’s Theoretical and Methodological Contribution to “Word-Formation”. Prague, 1997.
5. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by Ron AsherVictoria,University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand (with maps). Elsevier Ltd, 2006.
О Г Л А В Л Е Н И Е
Введение …………………………………………………………………………………………… 3
English Lexicology ……………………………………………………...………………………..… 4
Text 1 …………………………………..…………………………………………...………………. 4
Text 2 …………………………………….……………………………………………...…..……….6
Text 3 ……………………………………………………………………………………….………..7
Text 4 ………………………………………………………………………………………………..9
Text 5 ……………….…………………….………………………………………...………....……11
Text 6 ……………………………………………………………………………………...........…..13
Text 7 …………………………………………………………………………...……...…………...14
Text 8………………………………………………..……………………...………………...……..16
Text 9 ………………………………………………….……………………………………………18
Text 10 ……………………………………………………………………...…….……………….. 20
Text 11 ……………………………………………………………………………..………...……..21
Text 12……………………………………………………………………………………..………..23
Text 13……………………………………………………………………………………...……….24
Text 14…………………………………………………..……………………………..………..…..25
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Text 16……………………………………………………………..………………………………. 28
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Text 26 …………………………………………………….……………….………….…..………. 39
Text 27 ……………………………………………………….……………….………..………….. 41
Text 28 …………………………………………………….……………..……………………….. 42
The History of the English Language ………………………………………………………………43
Text 29 ……………………………………………………………………..………………....…… 43
Text 30 …………………………………………………….……………….………….…..………. 46
Text 31……………………………………………………….……………….………..…………... 48
Reference Books …………………………………………………………………………………... 50
Учебное издание
Хрестоматия по теории и практике перевода:
Учебно-методическое пособие для студентов
старших курсов специальности «Иностранный язык». Часть I.
Авторы-составители: Белова Екатерина Евгеньевна
Гаврикова Юлия Александровна
Фитасова Наталья Ивановна
Печатается в авторской редакции
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