Lectures in history of the English language

Лексияхо аз фанни таърихи забони англиси

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 Contents
Foreword………………………………………………………………………3
Lecture1.What is English? A short history of the origins and development of
English….4
Lecture 2. Modern English. Middle English. Variety of language ……………5
Lecture 3. Brief chronology of English………………………………………..6
Lecture 4. English language is a chief language of comunication ……………7
Lecture 5. Flexibility of function ………...........................................................8
Lecture 6. English Orthography………………………………………………..9
Lecture 7. English background …….................................................................11
Lecture 8. Old English ………………………………………………………..12
Lecture 9. Middle English……………………………………………………..13
Lecture 10.Modern English …………………………………………………...14
Lecture 11. The 20th century English …………………………………………15
Lecture 12. Development of English …………………………………………16
Lecture13.Middle English period …………………………………………18-19
Lecture14.Transfering from Middle English to Modern English …………20-21
Lecture 15. Great vowel shift …………………………………………….22-23
Lecture 16. Modern period of English. Restoration Period ………………24-25
Lecture 17. 19th -- 20th century period ……………………………………26-29
Lecture 18. The 20th century English ……………………………………...30-31
Lecture 19. American English as a variety of the English language spoken in
the United States ………………………………………………………….32-33
Lecture 20. Varieties of English. Australian and New Zealand English. …34-37
Lecture 21. The future of English………………………………………….38-39
Lecture 22. Characteristics of Modern English. Phonology. ……………...40-41
Lecture 23.Characteristics of Modern English. Morphology. Inflection ……..42
Lecture 24. Characteristics of Modern English. Composition …………….43-44
Lecture25. Characteristicsof Modern English. Syntax ………………….45-46
Lecture 26. The Old English Alphabets. Literary sources…………………47-48
Lecture 27. The Old English Noun. ………………………………………….49
Lecture 28. The Old English verb……………………………………………51
Lecture 29. The Old English syntax. …………………………………………53
Lecture 30. The Sound System in Old English …………………………..54-55
Lecture 31. The Middle English Period. General Characteristic. …………56-57
Lecture 32. The Middle English Period. The Alphabet. Literature. ………58-62
Lecture 33. The New English Period. General Characteristic. ……………63-65
Lecture 34. Characteristics Of American English …………………………66-67
Lecture 35. History Of American English. Territorial Expansion and
Urbanization …………………………………………………………………. 68
Reccommended literature ……………………………………………

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 Foreword
History of the English language is one of the essential courses forming the linguistic
background of a specialist in philology. It studies the uplifting and advancement of English,
its structure and peculiarities in the old days, its similarities to other languages of the same
family and its unequalled specific features.
The current issue is a collection of lectures that thoroughly discusses the history of the
English language and the factors influenced it in the course of history. It provides a set of
examples of literary work and introduces their authors that significantly contributed to the
rise
and development of the English language. The collection also gives some information about
the major differences between the British and American English in various respects.
The study of the history of the English language will require the knowledge of related
subjects. It is reccommended mainly to university, college students as well as teachers and
all
learners interested in the English language.

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Lecture № 1.
Plan: What is English? Забони англиси чи аст?
A short history of the origins and development of English I
Маълумоти мухтасар оиди ибтидо ва тараккиети забони англиси

What is English?
A short history of the origins and development of English
The history of the English language really started with the arrival of three Germanic tribes
who invaded Britain during the 5th century AD. These tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the
Jutes, crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany. At that
time
the inhabitants of Britain spoke a Celtic language. But most of the Celtic speakers were
pushed west and north by the invaders - mainly into what is now Wales, Scotland and
Ireland.
The Angles came from Englaland and their language was called Englisc - from which the
words England and English are derived.
Germanic invaders entered Britain on the east and south coasts in the 5th century.

Old English (450-1100 AD)

The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain developed into
what we now call Old English. Old English did not sound or look like English today.
Native English speakers now would have great difficulty understanding Old English.
Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old
English roots. The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old English. Old
English was spoken until around 1100.

Middle English (1100-1500)

In 1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy (part of modern France), invaded
and conquered England. The new conquerors (called the Normans) brought with them a kind
of French, which became the language of the Royal Court, and the ruling and business
classes. For a period there was a kind of linguistic class division, where the lower
classes spoke English and the upper classes spoke French. In the 14th century English
became dominant in Britain again, but with many French words added. This language is
called Middle English. It was the language of the great poet Chaucer (c1340-1400), but it
would still be difficult for native English speakers to understand today.
Part of Beowulf, a poem written in Old English. An example of Middle English by Chaucer.

Questions to lecture 1:
When did start the history of English Language?
Which tribes did invade the Britain in the 5th century AD?
What are the period of Middle English?
Who is William the Conqueror?

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Lecture № 2.
Plan: What is English? Забони англиси чи аст?
A short history of the origins and development of English I
Маълумоти кутох оиди ибтидо ва тараккиети забони англиси

Англисии муосир
Modern English
Early Modern English (1500-1800)
Towards the end of Middle English, a sudden and distinct change in pronunciation (the
Great Vowel Shift) started, with vowels being pronounced shorter and shorter. From the
16th century the British had contact with many people from around the world. This,
and the Renaissance of Classical learning, meant that many new words and phrases
entered the language. The invention of printing also meant that there was now a
common language in print. Books became cheaper and more people learned to read.
Printing also brought standardization to English. Spelling and grammar became fixed,
and the dialect of London, where most publishing houses were, became the standard. In 1604
the first English dictionary was published.
Late Modern English (1800-Present)
The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary.
Late Modern English has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the
Industrial Revolution and technology created a need for new words; secondly, the British
Empire at its height covered one quarter of the earth's surface, and the English language
adopted foreign words from many countries.
Varieties of English
From around 1600, the English colonization of North America resulted in the creation of a
distinct American variety of English. Some English pronunciations and words "froze" when
they reached America. In some ways, American English is more like the English of
Shakespeare than modern British English is. Some expressions that the British call
"Americanisms" are in fact original British expressions that were preserved in the colonies
while lost for a time in Britain (for example trash for rubbish, loan as a verb instead of lend,
and fall for autumn; another example, frame-up, was re-imported into Britain through
Hollywood gangster movies). Spanish also had an influence on American English (and
subsequently British English), with words like canyon, ranch, stampede and vigilante being
examples of Spanish words that entered English through the settlement of the American
West.
French words (through Louisiana) and West African words (through the slave trade) also
influenced American English (and so, to an extent, British English).
The Germanic Family of Languages
English is a member of the Germanic family of languages.
Germanic is a branch of the Indo-European language family.
Questions for lecture 2
What does the varieties of English mean?
What is the difference between American and British English?
When was published the first English dictionary?
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When was the printing started?

Lecture № 3.
Plan: A brief chronology of English
Хронологияи мухтасари забони англиси

A brief chronology of English

55 BC Roman invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar.AD 43
Roman invasion and occupation. Beginning of Roman ruleof Britain.
436 Roman withdrawal from Britain complete.
449 Settlement of Britain by Germanic invaders begins Local inhabitants speak Celtish
450-480 Earliest known Old English inscriptions. 1066
William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, invades and conquers England.
Old English
1150 Earliest surviving manuscripts in Middle English.

1348 English replaces Latin as the language of instruction in most schools.

1362 English replaces French as the language of law. English is
used in Parliament for the first time.
c1388 Chaucer starts writing The Canterbury Tales.
c1400 The Great Vowel Shift begins. Middle English
1476 William Caxton establishes the first English printing press.
1564 Shakespeare is born.
1604 Table Alphabeticall, the first English dictionary, is published.
1607 The first permanent English settlement in the New World
(Jamestown) is established.
1616 Shakespeare dies.
1623 Shakespeare's First Folio is published
1702 The first daily English-language newspaper, The Daily
Courant, is published in London.
1755 Samuel Johnson publishes his English dictionary.
1776 Thomas Jefferson writes the American Declaration of Early Modern English
Independence.
1782 Britain abandons its American colonies.
1828 Webster publishes his American English dictionary
Questions for lecture 3
What did English replace in 1348?
What did Samuel Johnson publish in 1755?
What year English replaces Franch as the language of law?

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Lecture № 4.
Plan: Introduction.
The English Language as a chief medium of communication I

The English Language as a chief medium of communication I

West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to
Frisian, German, and Netherlandic languages. English originated in England and is now
widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States, the United
Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island nations in the
Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines,
and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa.
Origins and basic characteristics
English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most
other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue,
called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have
roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended
from
this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East
(Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faeroese, Norwegian,
Swedish, Danish), and West (German, Netherlandic [Dutch and Flemish], Frisian, English).
Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its
retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the
Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language
most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last
thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical
structure.
Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the
ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian,
Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years, English words
have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found in Sanskrit, Greek,
Latin,
Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The German
and Chinese words for “man” are exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes,
Manne,
Männer, Männern. Chinese has one form: jen. English stands in between, with four forms:
English is the only European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., “the tall man,”
“the tall woman,” compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the
Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and
Modern German, it will be found that English now has only five forms (ride, rides, rode,
riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern German reiten has 16 forms.
In addition to this simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics:
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flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.
Questions for lecture 4
What are West Germanic Languages?
What family of languages does the English language belong to?
Is modern English analytic, why?
Why English is a chief medium of communication?

Lecture № 5.
Plan: Introduction. Мукаддима.
The English Language as a chief medium of communication II

Flexibility of function
Фаолияти озод
Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the loss of
inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in their forms are
now often used as both nouns and verbs. One can speak, for example, of “planning a table”
or
“tabling a plan,” “booking a place” or “placing a book,” “lifting a thumb” or “thumbing a
lift.” In the other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian,
nouns
and verbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun and verb endings. In
English, forms for traditional pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns;
adjectives and adverbs as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs as adjectives. One speaks
in English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix -er to the
placename
and put attributive and noun together as a compound, Frankfurter Buchmesse. In French
one has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire du
Livre de Francfort. In English it is now possible to employ a plural noun as adjunct
(modifier), as in “wages board” and “sports editor”; or even a conjunctional group, as in
“prices and incomes policy” and “parks and gardens committee.”
Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages and the
ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change) or adapts
(with
slight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to denote some new
process. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from
Classical Greek word elements.
English possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately reflect the
pronunciation of words.

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Lecture № 6.
Накша: Мукаддима
The English Language as a chief medium of communication III
Забони англиси хамчун забони аввалиндарачаи муошират

Orthography
The Latin alphabet originally had 20 letters, the present English alphabet minus J, K, V, W,
Y, and Z. The Romans themselves added K for use in abbreviations and Y and Z in words
transcribed from Greek. After its adoption by the English, this 23-letter alphabet developed
W
as a ligatured doubling of U and later J and V as consonantal variants of I and U. The
resultant alphabet of 26 letters has both uppercase, or capital, and lowercase, or small, letters.
(See also alphabet.)
English spelling is based for the most part on that of the 15th century, but pronunciation has
changed considerably since then, especially that of long vowels and diphthongs. The
extensive change in the pronunciation of vowels, known as the Great Vowel Shift, affected
all
of Geoffrey Chaucer's seven long vowels, and for centuries spelling remained untidy. If the
meaning of the message was clear, the spelling of individual words seemed unimportant. In
the 17th century during the English Civil War, compositors adopted fixed spellings for
practical reasons, and in the order-loving 18th century uniformity became more and more
fashionable. Since Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755),
orthography
has remained fairly stable. Numerous tacit changes, such as “music” for “musick” (c. 1880)
and “fantasy” for “phantasy” (c. 1920), have been accepted, but spelling has nevertheless
continued to be in part un phonetic. Attempts have been made at reform. Indeed, every
century has had its reformers since the 13th, when an Augustinian canon named Orm devised
his own method of differentiating short vowels from long by doubling the succeeding
consonants or, when this was not feasible, by marking short vowels with a superimposed
breve mark (˘). William Caxton, who set up his wooden printing press at Westminster in

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1476, was much concerned with spelling problems throughout his working life. Noah
Webster
produced his Spelling Book, in 1783, as a precursor to the first edition (1828) of his
American
Dictionary of the English Language. The 20th century has produced many zealous reformers.
Three systems, supplementary to traditional spelling, are actually in use for different
purposes: (1) the Initial Teaching (Augmented Roman) Alphabet (ITA) of 44 letters used by
educationists in the teaching of children under seven; (2) the Shaw alphabet of 48 letters,
designed in implementation of the will of George Bernard Shaw; and (3) the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), constructed on the basis of one symbol for one individual sound
and
used by many trained linguists. Countless other systems have been worked out from time to
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time, of which R.E. Zachrisson's “Anglic” (1930) and Axel Wijk's Regularized English
(1959) may be the best.
Meanwhile, the great publishing houses continue unperturbed because drastic reform remains
impracticable, undesirable, and unlikely. This is because there is no longer one criterion of
correct pronunciation but several standards throughout the world; regional standards are
themselves not static, but changing with each new generation; and, if spelling were changed
drastically, all the books in English in the world's public and private libraries would become
inaccessible to readers without special study.

Questions to lecture 1:
1. Which family of languages does the English language belong to? What relalationship
does it have with other languages spoken in Europe, Asia etc?
2. What is the most striking feature of the orthography of the English language?
3. What has contributed to the flexibility of the lananguage?

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Lecture № 7.
Plan: Historical background I.
Development of the language
Old English Period
Middle English Period
Modern English Period
20th-Century English
Historical background. Among highlights in the history of the English language, the
following stand out most clearly: the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the
5th and 6th centuries; the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of
England to Latin Christianity; the Viking invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest
of 1066; the Statute of Pleading in 1362 (this required that court proceedings be conducted in
English); the setting up of Caxton's printing press at Westminster in 1476; the full flowering
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of the Renaissance in the 16th century; the publishing of the King James Bible in 1611;the
completion of Johnson's Dictionary of 1755; and the expansion to North America and South
Africa in the 17th century and to India, Australia, and New Zealand in the 18th.
Development of the language Three main stages are usually recognized in the history of the
development of the English language. Old English, known formerly as Anglo-Saxon, dates
from AD449 to 1066 or 1100. Middle English dates from 1066 or 1100 to 1450 or 1500.
Modern English dates from about 1450 or 1500 and is subdivided into Early Modern
English,
from about 1500 to 1660, and Late Modern English, from about 1660 to the present time.

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Lecture № 8.
Plan: Historical background II
Old English Period
Old English Period Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by certain
Germanic peoples (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) of the regions comprising present-day
southern
Denmark and northern Germany who invaded Britain in the 5th century AD; the Jutes were
the first to arrive, in 449, according to tradition. Settling in Britain, the invaders drove the
indigenous Celtic-speaking peoples, notably the Britons, to the north and west. As time went
on, Old English evolved further from the original Continental form, and regional dialects
developed. The four major dialects recognized in Old English are Kentish, originally the
dialect spoken by the Jutes; West Saxon, a branch of the dialect spoken by the Saxons; and
Northumbrian and Mercian, subdivisions of the dialects spoken by the Angles. By the 9th
century, partly through the influence of Alfred, king of the West Saxons and the first ruler of
all England, West Saxon became prevalent in prose literature. A Mercian mixed dialect,
however, was primarily used for the greatest poetry, such as the anonymous 8th-century epic
poem Beowulf and the contemporary elegiac poems.
Old English was an inflected language characterized by strong and weak verbs; a dual
number
for pronouns (for example, a form for “we two” as well as “we”), two different declensions
of
adjectives, four declensions of nouns, and grammatical distinctions of gender. Although rich
in word-building possibilities, Old English was sparse in vocabulary. It borrowed few proper
nouns from the language of the conquered Celts, primarily those such as Aberdeen (“mouth
of
the Dee”) and Inchcape (“island cape”) that describe geographical features. Scholars believe
that ten common nouns in Old English are of Celtic origin; among these are bannock, cart,
down, and mattock. Although other Celtic words not preserved in literature may have been in
use during the Old English period, most Modern English words of Celtic origin, that is, those
derived from Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, or Irish, are comparatively recent borrowings.
The number of Latin words, many of them derived from the Greek that were introduced
during the Old English period has been estimated at 140. Typical of these words are altar,
14
mass, priest, psalm, temple, kitchen, palm, and pear. A few were probably introduced
through
the Celtic; others were brought to Britain by the Germanic invaders, who previously had
come
into contact with Roman culture. By far the largest number of Latin words was introduced as
a result of the spread of Christianity. Such words included not only ecclesiastical terms but
many others of less specialized significance.

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Lecture № 9.
Plan: Historical background III
Middle English Period
At the beginning of the Middle English period, which dates from the Norman Conquest of
1066, the language was still inflectional; at the end of the period the relationship between the
elements of the sentence depended basically on word order. As early as 1200 the three or
four
grammatical case forms of nouns in the singular had been reduced to two, and to denote the
plural the noun ending -es had been adopted.
The declension of the noun was simplified further by dropping the final n from five cases of
the fourth, or weak, declension; by neutralizing all vowel endings to e (sounded like the a in
Modern English sofa), and by extending the masculine, nominative, and accusative plural
ending -as, later neutralized also to -es, to other declensions and other cases. Only one
example of a weak plural ending, oxen, survives in Modern English; kine and brethren are
later formations. Several representatives of the Old English modification of the root vowel in
the plural, such as man, men, and foot, feet, survive also.
With the levelling of inflections, the distinctions of grammatical gender in English were
replaced by those of natural gender. During this period the dual number fell into disuse, and
the dative and accusative of pronouns were reduced to a common form. Furthermore, the
Scandinavian they, them were substituted for the original hie, hem of the third person plural,
and who, which, and that acquired their present relative functions. The conjugation of verbs
was simplified by the omission of endings and by the use of a common form for the singular
and plural of the past tense of strong verbs.

In the early period of Middle English, a number of utilitarian words, such as egg, sky, sister,
window, and get, came into the language from Old Norse. The Normans brought other
additions to the vocabulary. Before 1250 about 900 new words had appeared in English,
mainly words, such as baron, noble, and feast, that the Anglo-Saxon lower classes required in
their dealings with the Norman-French nobility. Eventually the Norman nobility and clergy,
although they had learned English, introduced from the French words pertaining to the
government, the church, the army, and the fashions of the court, in addition to others proper
to
the arts, scholarship, and medicine.
Midland, the dialect of Middle English derived from the Mercian dialect of Old English,
became important during the 14th century, when the counties in which it was spoken
developed into centres of university, economic, and courtly life. East Midland, one of the
subdivisions of Midland, had by that time become the speech of the entire metropolitan area
of the capital, London, and probably had spread south of the Thames River into Kent and
Surrey. The influence of East Midland was strengthened by its use in the government offices
of London, by its literary dissemination in the works of the 14th-century poets Geoffrey
Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, and ultimately by its adoption for printed works by
William Caxton.

13
Lecture № 10.
Plan: Historical background IV
Modern English Period
In the early part of the Modern English period the vocabulary was enlarged by the
widespread
use of one part of speech for another and by increased borrowings from other languages. The
revival of interest in Latin and Greek during the Renaissance brought new words into English
from those languages. Other words were introduced by English travellers and merchants after
their return from journeys on the Continent. From Italian came cameo, stanza, and violin;
from Spanish and Portuguese, alligator, peccadillo, and sombrero. During its development,
Modern English borrowed words from more than 50 different languages.
In the late 17th century and during the 18th century, certain important grammatical changes
occurred. The formal rules of English grammar were established during that period. The

pronoun its came into use, replacing the genitive form his, which was the only form used by
the translators of the King James Bible (1611). The progressive tenses developed from the
use
of the participle as a noun proceeded by the preposition on; the preposition gradually
weakened to a and finally disappeared. Thereafter only the simple ing form of the verb
remained in use. After the 18th century this process of development culminated in the
creation
of the progressive passive form, for example, “The job is being done.”
The most important development begun during this period and continued without
interruption
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries concerned vocabulary. As a result of colonial
expansion, notably in North America but also in other areas of the world, many new words
entered the English language. From the indigenous peoples of North America, the words
raccoon and wigwam were borrowed; from Peru, llama and quinine; from the West Indies,
barbecue and cannibal; from Africa, chimpanzee and zebra; from India, bandanna, curry, and
punch; and from Australia, kangaroo and boomerang. In addition, thousands of scientific
terms were developed to denote new concepts, discoveries, and inventions. Many of these
terms, such as neutron, penicillin, and supersonic, were formed from Greek and Latin roots;
others were borrowed from modern languages, as with blitzkrieg from German and sputnik
from Russian.

14
Lecture № 11.
Plan: Historical background V.
20th-Century English
In Great Britain at present the speech of educated persons is known as Received Standard
English. A class dialect rather than a regional dialect, it is based on the type of speech
cultivated at such schools as Eton and Harrow and at such of the older universities as Oxford
and Cambridge. Many English people who speak regional dialects in their childhood acquire
Received Standard English while attending school and university. Its influence has become
even stronger in recent years because of its use by such public media as the British
Broadcasting Corp.
Widely differing regional and local dialects are still employed in the various counties of
Great
Britain. Other important regional dialects have developed also; for example, the English
language in Ireland has retained certain individual peculiarities of pronunciation, such as the
pronunciation of lave for leave and fluther for flutter; certain syntactical peculiarities, such as
the use of after following forms of the verb be; and certain differences in vocabulary,
including the use of archaic words such as adown (for down) and Celtic borrowings such as
banshee. The Lowland Scottish dialect, sometimes called Lallans, first made known
throughout the English-speaking world by the songs of the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert
17
Burns, contains differences in pronunciation also, such as neebour (“neighbor”) and guid
(“good”), and words of Scandinavian origin peculiar to the dialect, such as braw and bairn.
The English spoken in Australia, with its marked diphthongization of vowels, also makes use
of special words, retained from English regional dialect usages, or taken over from
indigenous
Australian terms.
Questions to lecture 2:
1. What are the three main stages recognized in the history of the development of the
English language.
2. Who were the first Germanic tribes settled in Britain in 449? What are the four
major
dialects used during the Old English period?
3. What are the main grammatical changes of the Middle English period?
4. What is the role of Latin and Greek during the Renissance? What caused the
increased borrowings from other languages?
5. What is the speech of the educated people in the 20th century England? What is it
based on?

15
Lectue № 12.
Plan: Development of the language.
Old English period.
Old English as a variant of West Germanic
The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons lived in Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, respectively,
before settling in Britain. According to the Venerable Bede, the first historian of the English
people, the first Jutes, Hengist and Horsa, landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle of Thanet in 449;
and
the Jutes later settled in Kent, southern Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons
occupied the rest of England south of the Thames, as well as modern Middlesex and Essex.
The Angles eventually took the remainder of England as far north as the Firth of Forth,
including the future Edinburgh and the Scottish Lowlands. In both Latin and Common
Germanic the Angles' name was Angli, later mutated in Old English to Engle (nominative)

and Engla (genitive). “Engla land” designated the home of all three tribes collectively, and
both King Alfred (known as Alfred the Great) and Abbot Aelfric, author and grammarian,
subsequently referred to their speech as Englisc. Nevertheless, all the evidence indicates that
Jutes, Angles, and Saxons retained their distinctive dialects.
The River Humber was an important boundary, and the Anglian-speaking region developed
two speech groups: to the north of the river, Northumbrian, and, to the south, Southumbrian,
or Mercian. There were thus four dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish
(see Figure 13). In the 8th century, Northumbrian led in literature and culture, but that
leadership was destroyed by the Viking invaders, who sacked Lindisfarne, an island near the
Northumbrian mainland, in 793. They landed in strength in 865. The first raiders were
Danes,
but they were later joined by Norwegians from Ireland and the Western Isles who settled in
modern Cumberland, Westmorland, northwest Yorkshire, Lancashire, north Cheshire, and
the
Isle of Man. In the 9th century, as a result of the Norwegian invasions, cultural leadership
passed from Northumbria to Wessex. During King Alfred's reign, in the last three decades of
the 9th century, Winchester became the chief centre of learning. There the Parker Chronicle
(a
manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) was written; there the Latin works of the priest
and
historian Paulus Orosius, St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and the Venerable Bede were
translated;
and there the native poetry of Northumbria and Mercia was transcribed into the West Saxon
dialect. This resulted in West Saxon's becoming “standard Old English”; and later, when
Aelfric (c. 955–c. 1010) wrote his lucid and mature prose at Winchester, Cerne Abbas, and
Eynsham, the hegemony of Wessex was strengthened.
In standard Old English, adjectives were inflected as well as nouns, pronouns, and verbs.
Nouns were inflected for four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) in singular
and plural. Five nouns of first kinship—faeder, mōdor, brōthor, sweostor, and dohtor
(“father,” “mother,” “brother,” “sister,” and “daughter,” respectively)—had their own set of
inflections. There were 25 nouns such as mon, men (“man,” “men”) with mutated, or
umlauted, stems. Adjectives had strong and weak declensions, the strong showing a mixture
16
of noun and pronoun endings and the weak following the pattern of weak nouns. Personal,
possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite, and relative pronouns had full
inflections.
The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons still had distinctive dual forms:
There were two demonstratives: sē, sēo, thaet, meaning “that,” and thes, thēos, this, meaning
“this,” but no articles, the definite article being expressed by use of the demonstrative for
“that” or not expressed at all. Thus, “the good man” was sē gōda mon or plain gōd mon. The

function of the indefinite article was performed by the numeral ān “one” in ān mon “a man,”
by the adjective–pronoun sum in sum mon “a (certain) man,” or not expressed, as in thū eart
gōd mon “you are a good man.”
Verbs had two tenses only (present–future and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive,
and
imperative), two numbers (singular and plural), and three persons (1st, 2nd, and 3rd). There
were two classes of verb stems. (A verb stem is that part of a verb to which inflectional
changes—changes indicating tense, mood, number, etc.—are added.) One type of verb stem,
called vocalic because an internal vowel shows variations, is exemplified by the verb for
“sing”: singan, singth, sang, sungon,gesungen. The word for “deem” is an example of the
other, called consonantal: dēman, dēmth, dēmde, dēmdon, gedēmed. Such verbs are called
strong and weak, respectively.
All new verbs, whether derived from existing verbs or from nouns, belonged to the
consonantal type. Some verbs of great frequency (antecedents of the modern words “be,”
“shall,” “will,” “do,” “go,” “can,” “may,” and so on) had their own peculiar patterns of
inflections.
Grammatical gender persisted throughout the Old English period. Just as Germans now say
der Fuss, die Hand, and das Auge (masculine, feminine, and neuter terms for “the foot,” “the
hand,” and “the eye”), so, for these same structures, Aelfric saidsē fōt, sēo hond, and thaet
ēaāe, also masculine, feminine, and neuter. The three words for “woman,” wīfmon, cwene,
and wīf, were masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively. Hors “horse,” seēap “sheep,”
and
maeāden “maiden” were all neuter. Eorthe “earth” was feminine, but lond “land” was neuter.
Sunne “sun” was feminine, but mōna “moon” was masculine. This simplification of
grammatical gender resulted from the fact that the gender of Old English substantives was
not
always indicated by the ending but rather by the terminations of the adjectives and
demonstrative pronouns used with the substantives. When these endings were lost, all
outward marks of gender disappeared with them. Thus, the weakening of inflections and loss
of gender occurred together. In the North, where inflections weakened earlier, the marks of
gender likewise disappeared first. They survived in the South as late as the 14th century.
Because of the greater use of inflections in Old English, word order was freer than today.
The sequence of subject, verb, and complement was normal, but when there were outer and
inner complements the second was put in the dative case after to: Sē biscop hālgode Ēadrēd
tō
cyninge “The bishop consecrated Edred king.” After an introductory adverb or adverbial
phrase the verb generally took second place as in modern German: Nū bydde ie ān thing
20
17
“Now I ask [literally, “ask I”] one thing”; Thȳ ilcan gēare gesette Aelfrēd cyning
Lundenburg
“In that same year Alfred the king occupied London.” Impersonal verbs had no subject
expressed. Infinitives constructed with auxiliary verbs were placed at the ends of clauses or
sentences: Hīe ne dorston forth bī thære ēa siglan “They dared not sail beyond that river”
(siglan is the infinitive); Ie wolde thās lytlan bōc āwendan “I wanted to translate this little
book” (āwendan is the infinitive). The verb usually came last in a dependent clause—e.g.,
āwrītan wile in gif hwā thās bōc āwrītan wile (gerihte hē hīe be thære bysene) “If anyone
wants to copy this book (let him correct his copy by the original).” Prepositions (or
postpositions) frequently followed their objects. Negation was often repeated for emphasis.
Questions to lecture 3:
1. Where did the first tibes settle on the island? What happend to the native Celts?
2. What are the major grammatical features of ’Standard’ Old English?
3. Why was the word order freer in Old English sentences than later?

18
Lecture № 13.
Plan: Middle English Period I.
The leveling of inflections.
The influence of East Midland.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Middle English
One result of the Norman Conquest of 1066 was to place all four Old English dialects more
or
less on a level. West Saxon lost its supremacy and the centre of culture and learning
gradually
shifted from Winchester to London. The old Northumbrian dialect became divided into
Scottish and Northern, although little is known of either of these divisions before the end of
the 13th century (Figure 14). The old Mercian dialect was split into East and West Midland.
West Saxon became slightly diminished in area and was more appropriately named the South
Western dialect. The Kentish dialect was considerably extended and was called South
Eastern
accordingly. All five Middle English dialects (Northern, West Midland, East Midland, South

Western, and South Eastern) went their own ways and developed their own characteristics.
The so-called Katherine Group of writings (1180–1210), associated with Hereford, a town
not
far from the Welsh border, adhered most closely to native traditions, and there is something
to
be said for regarding this West Midland dialect, least disturbed by French and Scandinavian
intrusions, as a kind of Standard English in the High Middle Ages.
Another outcome of the Norman Conquest was to change the writing of English from the
clear and easily readable insular hand of Irish origin to the delicate Carolingian script then in
use on the Continent. With the change in appearance came a change in spelling. Norman
scribes wrote Old English y as u, ȳ as ui, ū as ou (ow when final). Thus, mycel (“much”)
appeared as muchel, fȳr (“fire”) as fuir, hūs (“house”) as hous, and hū (“how”) as how. For
the sake of clarity (i.e., legibility) u was often written o before and after m, n, u, v, and w;
and
i was sometimes written y before and after m and n. So sunu (“son”) appeared as sone and
him (“him”) as hym. Old English cw was changed to qu; hw to wh, qu, or quh; e to ch or tch;
se to sh; -eā- to -gg-; and -ht to ght. So Old English cwēn appeared as queen; hwaet as what,
quat, or quhat; dīe as ditch; seip as ship; secge as segge; and miht as might.
For the first century after the Conquest, most loanwords came from Normandy and Picardy,
but with the extension south to the Pyrenees of the Angevin empire of Henry II (reigned
1154–89), other dialects, especially Central French, or Francien, contributed to the speech of
the aristocracy. As a result, Modern English acquired the forms canal, catch, leal, real,
reward,
wage, warden, and warrant from Norman French side by side with the corresponding forms
channel, chase, loyal, royal, regard, gage, guardian, and guarantee, from Francien. King John
lost Normandy in 1204. With the increasing power of the Capetian kings of Paris, Francien
gradually predominated. Meanwhile, Latin stood intact as the language of learning. For three
centuries, therefore, the literature of England was trilingual. Ancrene Riwle, for instance, a
19
guide or rule (riwle) of rare quality for recluses or anchorites (ancren), was disseminated in
all
three languages.
The sounds of the native speech changed slowly. Even in late Old English short vowels had
been lengthened before ld, rd, mb, and nd, and long vowels had been shortened before all
other consonant groups and before double consonants. In early Middle English short vowels
of whatever origin were lengthened in the open stressed syllables of disyllabic words. An
open syllable is one ending in a vowel. Both syllables in Old English nama “name,” mete
“meat, food,” nosu “nose,” wicu “week,” and duru “door” were short, and the first syllables,
being stressed, were lengthened to nāme, mēte, nōse, wēke, and dōre in the 13th and 14th

centuries. A similar change occurred in 4th-century Latin, in 13th-century German, and at

different times in other languages. The popular notion has arisen that final mute -e in English
makes a preceding vowel long; in fact, it is the lengthening of the vowel that has caused e to
be lost in pronunciation. On the other hand, Old English long vowels were shortened in the
first syllables of trisyllabic words, even when those syllables were open; e.g., hāligdaeg
“holy
day,” ærende “message, errand,” crīstendōm “Christianity,” and sūtherne “southern,” became
hǒliday (Northern hăliday), ěrrende, chrǐstendom, and sǔtherne. This principle still operates
in
current English. Compare, for example, trisyllabic derivatives such as the words chastity,
criminal, fabulous, gradual, gravity, linear, national, ominous, sanity, and tabulate with the
simple nouns and adjectives chaste, crime, fable, grade, grave, line, nation, omen, sane, and
table.
There were significant variations in verb inflections in the Northern, Midland, and
Southern
dialects (see table). The Northern infinitive was already one syllable (sing rather than the Old
English singan), whereas the past participle -en inflection of Old English was strictly kept.
These apparently contradictory features can be attributed entirely to Scandinavian, in which
the final -n of the infinitive was lost early in singa, and the final -n of the past participle was
doubled in sunginn. The Northern unmutated present participle in -and was also of
Scandinavian origin. Old English mutated -ende (German -end) in the present participle had
already become -inde in late West Saxon (Southern in the table), and it was this Southern -
inde that blended with the -ing suffix (German -ung) of nouns of action that had already
become near-gerunds in such compound nouns as athswering “oath swearing” and
writingfether “writing feather, pen.” This blending of present participle and gerund was
further helped by the fact that Anglo-Norman and French -ant was itself a coalescence of
Latin present participles in -antem, -entem, and Latin gerunds in -andum, -endum. The
Northern second person singular singis was inherited unchanged from Common Germanic.
The final t sound in Midland -est and Southern -st was excrescent, comparable with the final
t
in modern “amidst” and “amongst” from older amiddes and amonges. The Northern third
person singular singis had a quite different origin. Like the singis of the plural, it resulted
almost casually from an inadvertent retractionof the tongue in enunciation from an
interdental
-th sound to postdental -s. Today the form “singeth” survives as a poetic archaism.
20
Shakespeare used both -eth and -s endings (“It [mercy] blesseth him that gives and him that
takes,” The Merchant of Venice). The Midland present plural inflection -en was taken from
23
the subjunctive. The past participle prefix y- developed from the Old English perfective
prefix
ge-.
Chaucer, who was born and died in London, spoke a dialect that was basically East
Midland.
Compared with his contemporaries, he was remarkably modern in his use of language. He
was in his early 20s when the Statute of Pleading (1362) was passed, by the terms of which
all
court proceedings were henceforth to be conducted in English, though “enrolled in Latin.”
Chaucer himself used four languages; he read Latin (Classical and Medieval) and spoke
French and Italian on his travels. For his own literary work he deliberately chose English.

21
Lecture № 14.
Plan: Middle English Period II.
Transition from Middle English to Early Modern English.
The death of Chaucer at the close of the century (1400) marked the beginning of the period
of
transition from Middle English to the Early Modern English stage. The Early Modern
English
period is regarded by many scholars as beginning in about 1500and terminating with the
return of the monarchy (John Dryden's Astraea Redux) in 1660. The 15th century witnessed
three outstanding developments: the rise of London English, the invention of printing, and
the
spread of the new learning.
When Caxton started printing at Westminster in the late summer of 1476, he was painfully
aware of the uncertain state of the English language. In his prologues and epilogues to his
translations he made some revealing observations on the problems that he had encountered as
translator and editor. At this time, sentence structures were being gradually modified, but
many remained untidy. For the first time, nonprofessional scribes, including women, were
writing at length.
The revival of classical learning was one aspect of that Renaissance, or spiritual rebirth, that
arose in Italy and spread to France and England. It evoked a new interest in Greek on the part
of learned men such as William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, Sir Thomas More and
Desiderius Erasmus. John Colet, dean of St. Paul's in the first quarter of the 16th century,
startledhis congregation by expounding the Pauline Epistles of the New Testament as living
letters. The deans who had preceded him had known no Greek, because they had found in
Latin all that they required. Only a few medieval churchmen, such as Robert Grosseteste,
bishop of Lincoln, and the Franciscan Roger Bacon could read Greek with ease. The names
of
the seven liberal arts of the medieval curricula (the trivium and the quadrivium), it is true,
were all Greek—grammar, logic, and rhetoric; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—
but they had come into English by way of French.

Renaissance scholars adopted a liberal attitude to language. They borrowed Latin words
through French, or Latin words direct; Greek words through Latin, or Greek words direct.
Latin was no longer limited to Church Latin: it embraced all Classical Latin. For a time the
whole Latin lexicon became potentially English. Some words, such as consolation and
infidel,
could have come from either French or Latin. Others, such as the terms abacus, arbitrator,
explicit, finis, gratis, imprimis, item, memento, memorandum, neuter, simile, and videlicet,
were taken straight from Latin. Words that had already entered the language through French
were now borrowed again, so that doublets arose: benison and benediction; blame and
blaspheme; chance and cadence; count and compute; dainty and dignity; frail and fragile;
poor
and pauper; purvey and provide; ray and radius; sever and separate; strait and strict; sure and
secure. The Latin adjectives for “kingly” and “lawful” have even given rise to triplets; in the
forms real, royal, and regal and leal, loyal, and legal, they were imported first from Anglo-
Norman, then from Old French, and last from Latin direct.
22
After the dawn of the 16th century, English prose moved swiftly toward modernity. In 1525
Lord Berners completed his translation of Jean Froissart's Chronicle, and William Tyndale
translated the New Testament. One-third of the King James Bible(1611), it has been
computed, is worded exactly as Tyndale left it; and between 1525 and 1611 lay the Tudor
Golden Age, with its culmination in Shakespeare. Too many writers, to be sure, used
“inkhorn
terms,” newly-coined, ephemeral words, and too many vacillated between Latin and English.
Sir Thomas More actually wrote his Utopia in Latin. It was translated into French during his
lifetime but not into English until 1551, some years after his death. Francis Bacon published
De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, an
expansion of his earlier Advancement of Learning) in Latin in 1623. William Harvey
announced his epoch-making discovery of the circulation of the blood in his Latin De Motu
Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (1628; On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals).
John Milton composed polemical treatises in the language of Cicero. As Oliver Cromwell's
secretary, he corresponded in Latin with foreign states. His younger contemporary Sir Isaac
Newton lived long enough to bridge the gap. He wrote his Principia (1687) in Latin but his
Opticks (1704) in English.
Questions to lecture 4:
1. What is the main outcome of the Norman Conquest in the writing system?
2. What is the result of the Statute of Pleading in 1362?
3. What are the main consequences of the Transition from Middle English to Early
Modern English?

23
Lecture № 15.
Plan: The Great Vowel Shift.
Although the population of London in 1400 was only about 40,000, it was by far the largest
city in England. York came second, followed by Bristol, Coventry, Plymouth, and Norwich.
The Midlands and East Anglia, the most densely populated parts of England, supplied
London
with streams of young immigrants. The speech of the capital was mixed, and it was
changing.
The seven long vowels of Chaucer's speech had already begun to shift.
The Great Vowel Shift.
What Was It?
The Great Vowel Shift was a gradual process which began in Chaucer's time (early 15th
Century) and was continuing through the time of Shakespeare (early 17th Century). Speakers
of English gradually changed the parts of their mouth used to articulate the long vowels.
Simply put, the articulation point moved upward in the mouth. The vowels, which began
being pronounced at the top, could not be moved farther up (without poking into the nose);
they became diphthongs1. The upshot has been that the Anglo-Saxons lived (like the Scottish
still do) in a 'hoose', and the English live in a 'house'; the Anglo-Saxons (like the Scottish)
milked a 'coo', and the English milk a 'cow'; an Anglo-Saxon had a 'gode' day and the
English
have a 'good' one; an Anglo-Saxon had 'feef' fingers on each hand and the English have 'five';
they wore 'boats' on their 'fate' while the English wear 'boots' on our 'feet'. The Great Vowel
Shift is still continuing today in regional dialects; many speakers are now trying to move the
topmost articulation points farther up, producing new diphthongs.
Why Was It?
There are theories for why the Great Vowel Shift has occurred, but none are likely ever be
testable without a time machine. Two models of the pattern of vowel change are the 'pull
26
theory' in which the upper vowels moved first and 'pulled' the lower ones along, and the
'push
theory' in which the lower vowels moved forward and up, pushing the others ahead. Neither
theory gives us an answer to why the shift happened, and the actual shifting was so
complicated by regional variation that it will be difficult to ever sort out more than a general
pattern of shifting. The regional variation of the shift has lead to a multitude of vowel
pronunciations which are neither standard English nor standard Continental such as this
anecdote:
Boy in North-East England is sitting by a river, crying. Passer by asks what's up.
Boy says 'Me mate fell in the water'.
'Oh - that's terrible, how did it happen?'.
'Fell right out of my sandwich, into the water!'
Or the Cockney woman who, when trying to buy a cut loaf of bread was asked by the
puzzled
baker 'Is it a bread especially for cats?' Both of these examples are vowels that have shifted
beyond the strict definition of the Great Vowel Shift. This is a demonstration that the English
language is still evolving in wonderful (and confusing) ways. In addition, the reconstruction
of the sounds is based on texts, which are rarely a perfect means of recording sound. The
24
printing press further complicated this problem, as it tended to fix spelling in the 15th and
16th Centuries, before the sounds of speech had finished shifting (if they ever did finish).
Today, we speak with 21st Century pronunciation, but we write our words in a 15th Century
form.
Since the Great Vowel Shift did not occur in other languages or in some regional dialects of
English (see, the Scottish 'house' and 'cow', above), it is the Standard English speakers and
not
the speakers of other languages, who have the wacky vowels.
· The transition from Middle English to Modern English was marked by a major change
in the pronunciation of vowels during the 15th and 16th centuries. This change, termed
the Great Vowel Shift by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, consisted of a shift in the
articulation of vowels with respect to the positions assumed by the tongue and the lips.
The Great Vowel Shift changed the pronunciation of 18 of the 20 distinctive vowels
and diphthongs of Middle English. Spelling, however, remained unchanged and was
preserved from then on as a result of the advent of printing in England about 1475,
during the shift. (In general, Middle English orthography was much more phonetic
27
than Modern English; all consonants, for example, were pronounced, whereas now
letters such as the l preserved in walking are silent).
The principal changes (with the vowels shown in IPA) are roughly as follows.However,
exceptions occur, the transitions were not always complete, and there were sometimes
accompanying changes in orthography:
· Middle English [aȳ] (ā) fronted to [æȳ] and then raised to [ȳȳ], [eȳ] and in many
dialects diphthongised in Modern English to [eȳ] (as in make). Since Old
English ā had mutated to [ȳȳ] in Middle English, Old English ā does not correspond
to the Modern English diphthong [eȳ].
· Middle English [ȳȳ] raised to [eȳ] and then to modern English [iȳ] (as in beak).
· Middle English [eȳ] raised to Modern English [iȳ] (as in feet).
· Middle English [iȳ] diphthongised to [ȳi], which was most likely followed
by [əȳ] and finally Modern English [aȳ] (as in mice).
· Middle English [ȳȳ] raised to [oȳ], and in the eighteenth century this became
Modern English [oȳ] or[əȳ] (as in boat).
· Middle English [oȳ] raised to Modern English [uȳ] (as in boot).
· Middle English [uȳ] was diphthongised in most environments to [ȳu], and this was
followed by [əȳ], and then Modern English [aȳ] (as in mouse) in the eighteenth
century. Before labial consonants, this shift did not occur, and [uȳ] remains as
in soup).
Questions:
1. What is the outcome of the population increase in London in the 13th century?
2. How did the Great Vowel Shift change the pronunciation?
3. What is the name of the linguist who termed the change the Great Vowel Shift?

25
Lecture № 16.
Plan:Modern English Period.
The widespread use of one part of speech for another.
The increased borrowings from other languages.
Important grammatical changes.
Restoration period.
With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, men again looked to France. John Dryden
admired the Académie Française and greatly deplored that the English had “not so much as a
tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a manner barbarous” as
compared with elegant French. After the passionate controversies of the Civil War, this was
an age of cool scientific nationalism. In 1662 the Royal Society of London for the Promotion
of Natural Knowledge received its charter. Its first members, much concerned with language,
appointed a committee of 22 “to improve the English tongue particularly for philosophic
purposes.” It included Dryden, the diarist John Evelyn, Bishop Thomas Sprat, and the poet
Edmund Waller. Sprat pleaded for “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive
expressions; clear senses, a native easiness; bringing all things as near the mathematical
plainness” as possible. The committee, however, achieved no tangible result, and failed in its
attempt to found an authoritative arbiter over the English tongue. A second attempt was
made
in 1712, when Jonathan Swift addressed an open letter to Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, then
Lord Treasurer, making “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining [fixing] the
English Tongue.” This letter received some popular support, but its aims were frustrated by a
turn in political fortunes. Queen Anne died in 1714. The Earl of Oxford and his fellow
Tories,
including Swift, lost power. No organized attempt to found a language academy on French
lines has ever been made since.
With Dryden and Swift the English language reached its full maturity. Their failure to found
an academy was partly counterbalanced by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary (published in
1755) and by Robert Lowth in his Grammar (published in 1761).
Age of Johnson. In the making of his Dictionary, Johnson took the best conversation of
contemporary London and the normal usage of reputable writers after Sir Philip Sidney
(1554–86) as his criteria. He exemplified the meanings of words by illustrative quotations.
Johnson admitted that “he had flattered himself for a while” with “the prospect of fixing our
29
language” but that thereby “he had indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience
could justify.” The two-folio work of 1755 was followed in 1756 by a shortened, one-volume
version that was widely used far into the 20th century. Revised and enlarged editions of the
unabbreviated version were made by Archdeacon Henry John Todd in 1818 and by Robert
Gordon Latham in 1866.
It was unfortunate that Joseph Priestley, Robert Lowth, James Buchanan, and other
18thcentury
grammarians (Priestley was perhaps better known as a scientist and theologian) took a
narrower view than Johnson on linguistic growth and development. They spent too much
time
26
condemning such current “improprieties” as “I had rather not,” “you better go,” “between
you
and I,” “it is me,” “who is this for?”, “between fourwalls,” “a third alternative,” “the largest
of
the two,” “more perfect,” and “quite unique.” Without explanatory comment they banned
“you was” outright, although it was in widespread use among educated people (on that
ground
it was later defended by Noah Webster). “You was” had, in fact, taken the place of both
“thou
wast” and “thou wert” as a useful singular equivalent of the accepted plural “you were.”
As the century wore on, grammarians became more numerous and aggressive. They set
themselves up as arbiters of correct usage. They compiled manuals that were not only
descriptive (stating what people do say) and prescriptive (stating what they should say) but
also proscriptive (stating what they should not say). They regarded Latin as a language
superior to English and claimed that Latin embodied universally valid canons of logic. This
view was well maintained by Lindley Murray, a native of Pennsylvania who settled in
England in the very year (1784) of Johnson's death. Murray's English Grammar appeared in
1795, became immensely popular, and went into numerous editions. It was followed by an
English Reader (1799) and an English Spelling Book (1804), long favourite textbooks in
both
Old and New England.

27
Lecture № 17.
Plan:Modern English Period II

Historical background. 19th and 20th centuries.

In 1857 Richard Chenevix Trench, dean of St. Paul's, lectured to the Philological Society on
the theme, “On some Deficiencies in our
English Dictionaries.” His proposals for a new dictionary were implemented in 1859, when
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's grandnephew, Herbert Coleridge, set to work as first editor. He
was succeeded by a lawyer named Frederick James Furnivall, who in 1864 founded the Early
English Text Society with a view to making all the earlier literature available to historical
lexicographers in competent editions. Furnivall was subsequently succeeded as editor by
James A.H. Murray, who published the first fascicle of A New English Dictionary on
Historical Principles in 1884. Later Murray was joined successively by three editors: Henry
30
Bradley, William Alexander Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions. Aside from its
Supplements,
the dictionary itself fills 12 volumes, has over 15,000 pages, and contains 414,825 words,
illustrated by 1,827,306 citations. It is a dictionary of the British Commonwealth and the
United States, a fact symbolized by the presentation of first copies in the spring of 1928 to
King George V and Pres. Calvin Coolidge. It exhibits the histories and meanings of all words
known to have been in use since 1150. From 1150 to 1500 all five Middle English dialects,
as
has been seen, were of equal status. They are therefore all included. After1500, however,
dialectal expressions are not admitted, nor are scientific and technical terms not in general
use. Otherwise, the written vocabulary is comprehensive. A revised edition of this dictionary,
known as The Oxford English Dictionary, was published in 1933.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Modern English is approximately half Germanic (Old English and
Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French and Latin), with copious and increasing
importations from Greek in science and technology and with considerable borrowings from
Dutch, Low German, Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, and many other languages. Names of
basic concepts and things come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon: heaven and earth, love
and
hate, life and death, beginning and end, day and night, month and year, heat and cold, way
and path, meadow and stream. Cardinal numerals come from Old English, as do all the
ordinal numerals except “second” (Old English other, which still retains its older meaning in
“every other day”). “Second” comes from Latin secundus “following,” through French
second, related to Latin sequi “to follow,” as in English “sequence.” From Old English come
all the personal pronouns (except “they,” “their,” and “them,” which are from Scandinavian),
the auxiliary verbs (except the marginal “used,” which is from French), most simple
prepositions, and all conjunctions.
28
Numerous nouns would be identical whether they came from Old English or Scandinavian:
father, mother, brother (but not sister); man, wife; ground, land, tree, grass; summer, winter;
cliff, dale. Many verbs would also be identical, especially monosyllabic verbs—bring, come,
get, hear, meet, see, set, sit, spin, stand, think. The same is true of the adjectives full and
wise;
the colour names gray, green, and white; the disjunctive possessives mine and thine (but not
ours and yours); the terms north and west (but not south and east); and the prepositions over
and under. Just a few English and Scandinavian doublets coexist in current speech: no and
nay, yea and ay, from and fro, rear (i.e., to bring up) and raise, shirt and skirt (both related to
the adjective short), less and loose. From Scandinavian, “law” was borrowed early, whence
31
“bylaw,” meaning “village law,” and “outlaw,” meaning “man outside the law.” “Husband”
(hus-bondi) meant “householder,” whether single or married, whereas “fellow” (fe-lagi)
meant one who “lays fee” or shares property with another, and so “partner, shareholder.”
From Scandinavian come the common nouns axle (tree), band, birth, bloom, crook, dirt, egg,
gait, gap, girth, knife, loan, race, rift, root, score, seat, skill, sky, snare, thrift, and window;
the
adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, rotten, rugged, sly, tight, ugly, weak, and wrong;
and many verbs, including call, cast, clasp, clip, crave, die, droop, drown, flit, gape, gasp,
glitter, life, rake, rid, scare, scowl, skulk, snub, sprint, thrive, thrust, and want.
The debt of the English language to French is large. The terms president, representative,
legislature, congress, constitution, and parliament are all French. So, too, are duke, marquis,
viscount, and baron; but king, queen, lord, lady, earl, and knight are English. City, village,
court, palace, manor, mansion, residence, and domicile are French; but town, borough, hall,
house, bower, room, and home are English. Comparison between English and French
synonyms shows that the former are more human and concrete, the latter more intellectual
and
abstract; e.g., the terms freedom and liberty, friendship and amity, hatred and enmity, love
and affection, likelihood and probability, truth and veracity, lying and mendacity. The
superiority of French cooking is duly recognized by the adoption of such culinary terms as
boil, broil, fry, grill, roast, souse, and toast. “Breakfast” is English, but “dinner” and “supper”
are French. “Hunt” is English, but “chase,” “quarry,” “scent,” and “track” are French.
Craftsmen bear names of English origin: baker, builder, fisher (man), hedger, miller,
shepherd, shoemaker, wainwright, and weaver, or webber. Names of skilled artisans,
however, are French: carpenter, draper, haberdasher, joiner, mason, painter, plumber, and
tailor. Many terms relating to dress and fashion, cuisine and viniculture, politics and
diplomacy, drama and literature, art and ballet come from French.
In the spheres of science and technology many terms come from Classical Greek through
French or directly from Greek. Pioneers in research and development now regard Greek as a
kind of inexhaustible quarry from which they can draw linguistic material at will. By
prefixing the Greek adverb tēle “far away, distant” to the existing compound photography,
“light writing,” they create the precise term “telephotography” to denote the photographing
of
distant objects by means of a special lens. By inserting the prefix micro- “small” into this
same compound, they make the new term “photomicrography,” denoting the electronic
photographing of bacteria and viruses. Such neo-Hellenic derivatives would probably have
29
32
been unintelligible to Plato and Aristotle. Many Greek compounds and derivatives have
Latin
equivalents with slight or considerable differentiations in meaning (see table).
At first sight it might appear that some of these equivalents, such as “metamorphosis” and
“transformation,” are sufficiently synonymous to make one or the other redundant. In fact,
however, “metamorphosis” is more technical and therefore more restricted than
“transformation.” In mythology it signifies a magical shape changing; in nature it denotes a
postembryonic development such as that of a tadpole into a frog, a cocoon into a silkworm,
or
a chrysalis into a butterfly. Transformation, on the other hand, means any kind of change
from
one state to another.
Ever since the 12th century, when merchants from the Netherlands made homes in East
Anglia, Dutch words have infiltrated into Midland speech. For centuries a form of Low
German was used by seafaring men in North Sea ports. Old nautical terms still in use include
buoy, deck, dock, freebooter, hoist, leak, pump, skipper, and yacht. The Dutch in New
Amsterdam (later New York) and adjacent settlements gave the words boss, cookie, dope,
snoop, and waffle to American speech. The Dutch in Cape Province gave the terms
apartheid,
commandeer, commando, spoor, and trek to South African speech.
The contribution of High German has been on a different level. In the 18th and 19th centuries
it lay in technicalities of geology and mineralogy and in abstractions relating to literature,
philosophy, and psychology. In the 20th century this contribution has sometimes been
indirect. “Unclear” and “meaningful” echoed German unklar and bedeutungsvoll, or sinnvoll.
“Ring road” (a British term applied to roads encircling cities or parts of cities) translated
Ringstrasse; “round trip,” Rundfahrt; and “the turn of the century,” die Jahrhundertwende.
The terms “classless society,” “inferiority complex,” and “wishful thinking” echoed die
klassenlöse Gesellschaft, der Minderwertigkeitskomplex, and das Wunschdenken.
Along with the rest of the Western world, English has accepted Italian as the language of
music. The names of voices, parts, performers, instruments, forms of composition, and
technical directions are all Italian. Many of the latter—allegro, andante, cantabile, crescendo,
diminuendo, legato, maestoso, obbligato, pizzicato, staccato, and vibrato—are also used
metaphorically. In architecture, the terms belvedere, corridor, cupola, grotto, pedestal,
pergola, piazza, pilaster, and rotunda are accepted; in literature, burlesque, canto,
extravaganza, stanza, and many more are used.
33
From Spanish, English has acquired the words armada, cannibal, cigar, galleon, guerrilla,
matador, mosquito, quadroon, tornado, and vanilla, some of these loanwords going back to
the 16th century, when sea dogs encountered hidalgos on the high seas. Many names of
animals and plants have entered English from indigenous languages through Spanish:
“potato” through Spanish patata from Taino batata, and “tomato” through Spanish tomate
from Nahuatl tomatl. Other words have entered from Latin America by way of Texas, New
Mexico, Arizona, and California; e.g., such words as canyon, cigar, estancia, lasso, mustang,
pueblo, and rodeo. Some have gathered new connotations: bonanza, originally denoting
“goodness,” came through miners' slang to mean “spectacular windfall, prosperity”; mañana,
30
“tomorrow,” acquired an undertone of mysterious unpredictability.
From Arabic through European Spanish, through French from Spanish, through Latin, or
occasionally through Greek, English has obtained the terms alchemy, alcohol, alembic,
algebra, alkali, almanac, arsenal, assassin, attar, azimuth, cipher, elixir, mosque, nadir,
naphtha, sugar, syrup, zenith, and zero. From Egyptian Arabic, English has recently
borrowed
the term loofah(also spelled luffa). From Hebrew, directly or by way of Vulgate Latin, come
the terms amen, cherub, hallelujah, manna, messiah, pharisee, rabbi, sabbath, and seraph;
jubilee, leviathan, and shibboleth; and, more recently, kosher, and kibbutz.
English has freely adopted and adapted words from many other languages, acquiring them
sometimes directly and sometimes by devious routes. Each word has its own history. The
following lists indicate the origins of a number of English words: Welsh—flannel, coracle,
cromlech, penguin, eisteddfod; Cornish—gull, brill, dolmen; Gaelic and Irish—shamrock,
brogue, leprechaun, ogham, Tory, galore, blarney, hooligan, clan, claymore, bog, plaid,
slogan, sporran, cairn, whisky, pibroch; Breton—menhir; Norwegian—ski, ombudsman;
Finnish—sauna; Russian—kvass, ruble, tsar, verst, mammoth, ukase, astrakhan, vodka,
samovar, tundra (from Sami), troika, pogrom, duma, soviet, bolshevik, intelligentsia (from
Latin through Polish), borscht, balalaika, sputnik, soyuz, salyut, lunokhod; Polish—mazurka;
Czech—robot; Hungarian—goulash, paprika; Portuguese—marmalade, flamingo, molasses,
veranda, port (wine), dodo; Basque—bizarre; Turkish—janissary, turban, coffee, kiosk,
caviar, pasha, odalisque, fez, bosh; Hindi—nabob, guru, sahib, maharajah, mahatma, pundit,
punch (drink), juggernaut, cushy, jungle, thug, cheetah, shampoo, chit, dungaree, pucka,
gymkhana, mantra, loot, pajamas, dinghy, polo; Persian—paradise, divan, purdah, lilac,
bazaar, shah, caravan, chess, salamander, taffeta, shawl, khaki; Tamil—pariah, curry,
catamaran, mulligatawny; Chinese—tea (Amoy), sampan; Japanese—shogun, kimono,
34
mikado, tycoon, hara-kiri, gobang, judo, jujitsu, bushido, samurai, banzai, tsunami, satsuma,
No (the dance drama), karate, Kabuki; Malay—ketchup, sago, bamboo, junk, amuck,
orangutan, compound (fenced area), raffia; Polynesian—taboo, tattoo; Hawaiian—ukulele;
African languages—chimpanzee, goober, mumbo jumbo, voodoo; Inuit—kayak, igloo,
anorak; Yupik—mukluk; Algonquian—totem; Nahuatl—mescal; languages of the
Caribbean—hammock, hurricane, tobacco, maize, iguana; Aboriginal Australian—kangaroo,
corroboree, wallaby, wombat, boomerang, paramatta, budgerigar.
Questions to lecture 6:
1. What are the attempts made by the Royal Society of London and later Jonathan
Swift
to found an authoritative arbiter over the English tongue?
2. What did Johnson base his dictionary on? How did his contemporary fellows react
on
the dictionary?
3. How did the incresed borrowings take place during this period?

31
Lecture 18.
Plan: 20th-Century English.
Received Standard English.
Widely differing regional and local dialects
The abbreviation RP (Received Pronunciation) denotes the speech of educated people living
in London and the southeast of England and of other people elsewhere who speak in this
way.
If the qualifier educated be assumed, RP is then a regional (geographical) dialect, as
contrasted with London Cockney, which is a class (social) dialect. RP is not intrinsically
superior to other varieties of English; it is itself only one particular regional dialect that has,
through the accidents of history, achieved more extensive use than others. Although
acquiring
its unique status without the aid of any established authority, it may have been fostered
(elısegít)by the public schools (Winchester, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and so on) and the ancient
universities (Oxford and Cambridge). Other varieties of English are well preserved in spite of
the levelling (különbségeket eltőntetı) influences of film, television, and radio. In the
Northern dialect RP /a:/ (the first vowel sound in “father”) is still pronounced /æ/ (a sound
35
like the a in “fat”) in words such as laugh, fast, and path; this pronunciation has been carried
across the Atlantic into American English.
In the words run, rung, and tongue, the received-standard pronunciation of the vowel is /ȳ/,
like the u in “but”; in the Northern dialect it is /u/, like the oo in “book.” In the words bind,
find, and grind, the received standard pronunciation of the vowel sound is /ai/, like that in
“bide”; in Northern, it is /i/, like the sound in “feet.” The vowel sound in the words go, home,
and know in the Northern dialect is /ȳ:/, approximately the sound in “law” in some American
English dialects. In parts of Northumberland, RP “it” is still pronounced “hit,” as in Old
English. In various Northern dialects the definite article “the” is heard as t, th, or d. In those
dialects in which it becomes both tand th, t is used before consonants and th before vowels.
Thus, one hears “t'book” but “th'apple.” When, however, the definite article is reduced to t
and the following word begins with t or d, as in “t'tail” or “t'dog,” it is replaced by a slight
pause as in the RP articulation of the first t in “hat trick.” The RP /t∫/, the sound of the ch in
“church,” becomes k, as in “thack,” (“thatch, roof”) and “kirk” (“church”). In many Northern
dialects strong verbs retain the old past-tense singular forms band, brak, fand, spak for RP
forms bound, broke, found, and spoke. Strong verbs also retain the past participle inflection -
en as in “comen,” “shutten,” “sitten,” and “getten” or “gotten” for RP “come,” “shut,” “sat,”
and “got.”
In some Midland dialects the diphthongs in “throat” and “stone” have been kept apart,
whereas in RP they have fallen together. In Cheshire, Derby, Stafford, and Warwick, RP
“singing” is pronounced with a g sounded after the velar nasal sound (as in RP “finger”). In
Norfolk one hears “skellington” and “solintary” for “skeleton” and “solitary,” showing an
intrusive n just as does “messenger” in RP from French messager, “passenger” from French
passager, and “nightingale” from Old English nihtegala. Other East Anglian words show

32
consonantal metathesis (switch position-áttétel), as in “singify,” and substitution of one
liquid
or nasal for another, as in “chimbly” for “chimney,” and “synnable” for “syllable.” “Hantle”
for “handful” shows syncope (disappearance-szó megrövidítése) of an unstressed vowel,
partial assimilation-hasonulás of d to t before voiceless f, and subsequent loss of fin a triple
consonant group.
In South Western dialects, initial f and s are often voiced, becoming v and z. Two words with
initial v have found their way into RP: “vat”-(dézsa) from “fat” and “vixen” from “fixen”
(female fox).Another South Western feature is the development of a d between l or n and r,
as
in “parlder” for “parlour” and “carnder” for “corner.” The bilabial semivowel w has
36
developed before o in“wold” for “old,” and in “wom” for “home,” illustrating a similar
development in RP by which Old English ān has become “one,” and Old English hāl has
come to be spelled “whole,” as compared with Northern hale. In South Western dialects
“yat”
comes from the old singular geat, whereas RP “gate” comes from the plural gatu. Likewise,
“clee” comes from the old nominative clea, whereas RP “claw-karom” comes from the
oblique cases. The verbs keel and kemb have developed regularly from Old English cēlan “to
make cool” and kemban “to use a comb,” whereas the corresponding RP verbs cool and
comb
come from the adjective and the noun, respectively.
In Wales, people often speak a clear and measured form of English with a musical intonation
inherited from ancestral Celtic. They tend to aspirate both plosives (stops) and fricative
consonants very forcibly; thus, “true” is pronounced with an audible puff of breath after the
initial t.
Lowland Scottish was once a part of Northern English, but two dialects began to
divergeszétágazik
in the 14th century. Today Lowland Scots trill their r's, shorten vowels, and
simplify diphthongs. A few Scottish words, such as bairn, brae, canny, dour, and pawky,
have
made their way into RP. Lowland Scottish is not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic
language still spoken by about 90,700 people (almost all bilingual) mostly in the Highlands
and the Western Isles. Thanks to Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, many Scottish Gaelic
words have been preserved in English literature.
Northern Ireland has dialects related in part to Lowland Scottish and in part to the southern
Irish dialect of English. Irish pronunciation is conservative and is clearer and more easily
intelligible-érthetı than many other dialects. The influence of the Irish language on the
speech
of Dublin is most evident in the syntax of drama and in the survival of such picturesque
expressions as “We are after finishing,” “It's sorry you will be,” and “James do be cutting
corn every day.”
Questions to lecture 7:
1. What are the major differences between RP and the Northen Dialect spoken in the
north of England?
2. What are the main peculiarities of the Lowland Scottish Dialect?
33
3. What are the chief features of the Welsh and the Irish accents?

Lecture № 19.
Plan: American English as a variety of the English language spoken in the United
States.
Characteristics of American English, pronunciation, words, spelling, grammar.
American lexicographer Noah Webster.
The History of American English.
Modern variation and influence of American English.
Canadian English.
American and Canadian English.
The dialect regions of the United States are most clearly marked along the Atlantic littoral,
where the earlier settlements were made. Three dialects can be defined: Northern, Midland,
and Southern. Each has its sub dialects.
The Northern dialect is spoken in New England. Its six chief sub dialects comprise
northeastern
New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and eastern Vermont), south-eastern New
England (eastern Massachusetts, eastern Connecticut, and Rhode Island), south-western New
England (western Massachusetts and western Connecticut), the inland north (western
Vermont and upstate New York), the Hudson Valley, and metropolitan New York.
The Midland dialect is spoken in the coastal region from Point Pleasant, in New Jersey, to
Dover, in Delaware. Its seven major sub dialects comprise the Delaware Valley, the
Susquehanna Valley, the Upper Ohio Valley, northern West Virginia, the Upper Potomac
and
Shenandoah, southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, western Carolina, and eastern
Tennessee.
The Southern dialect area covers the coastal region from Delaware to South Carolina. Its five
chief subdialects comprise the Delmarva Peninsula, the Virginia Piedmont, north-eastern
North Carolina (Albemarle Sound and Neuse Valley), Cape Fear and Pee Dee valleys, and
the
South Carolina Low Country, around Charleston.
38
These boundaries, based on those of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada,
are
highly tentative. To some extent these regions preserve the traditional speech of south-
eastern
and southern England, where most of the early colonists were born. The first settlers who
came to Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620) soon learned to adapt old words to new
uses, but they were content to borrow names from the local Indian languages for unknown
trees, such as hickory and persimmon, and for unfamiliar animals, such as raccoons and
woodchucks. Later they took words from foreign settlers: “chowder” and “prairie” from the
French, “scow” and “sleigh” from the Dutch. They made new compounds, such as
“backwoods” and “bullfrog,” and gave new meanings to such words as “lumber” (which in
British English denotes disused furniture, or junk) and “corn” (which in British English
34
signifies any grain, especially wheat).
Historical background. Before the Declaration of Independence (1776), two-thirds of the
immigrants had come from England, but after that date they arrived in large numbers from
Ireland. The potato famine of 1845 drove 1,500,000 Irish to seek homes in the New World,
and the European revolutions of 1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and
the Middle West. After the close of the American Civil War, millions of Scandinavians,
Slavs, and Italians crossed the ocean and eventually settled mostly in the North Central and
Upper Midwest states. In some areas of South Carolina and Georgia the American Negroes
who had been imported to work the rice and cotton plantations developed a contact language
called Gullah, or Geechee, that made use of many structural and lexical features of their
native languages. This remarkable variety of English is comparable to such “contact
languages” as Sranan (Taki-Taki) and Melanesian Pidgin. The speech of the Atlantic
Seaboard shows far greater differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary than that
of any area in the North Central States, the Upper Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, or the
Pacific Coast. Today, urbanization, quick transport, and television have tended to level out
some dialectal differences in the United States.
The boundary with Canada nowhere corresponds to any boundary between dialects, and the
influence of United States English is strong, being felt least in the Maritime Provinces and
Newfoundland. Nevertheless, in spite of the effect of this proximity to the United States,
British influences are still potent in some of the larger cities; Scottish influences are well
sustained in Ontario. Canada remains bilingual. One-fourth of its people, living mostly in the
province of Quebec, have French as their mother tongue. Those provinces in which French is
39
spoken as a mother tongue by 10 percent or more of the population are described as “federal
bilingual districts” in the Official Languages Bill of 1968.
Questions to lecture 8:
1. How many dialects exist in the USA? What are their major peculiarities?
2. Are there any significant characteristic features of Canadian English?
3. What are the most common modern variations of American English?

35
Lecture № 20.
Plan: Varieties of English. Australian and New Zealand English.
The English of India–Pakistan.
African English.
Creoles and Pidgins.
Australian and New Zealand English.
Unlike Canada, Australia has few speakers of European languages other than English within
its borders. There are still many Aboriginal languages, though they are spoken by only a few
hundred speakers each and their continued existence is threatened. More than 80 percent of
the population is British. By the mid-20th century, with rapid decline of its Aboriginal
tongues, English was without rivals in Australia.
During colonial times the new settlers had to find names for a fauna and flora (e.g., banksia,
iron bark, whee whee) different from anything previously known to them: trees that shed
bark
instead of leaves and cherries with external stones. The words brush, bush, creek, paddock,
and scrub acquired wider senses, whereas the terms brook, dale, field, forest, and meadow
were seldom used. A creek leading out of a river and entering it again downstream was called
an anastomizing branch (a term from anatomy), or an anabranch, whereas a creek coming to
a
dead end was called by its native name, a billabong. The giant kingfisher with its raucous
bray
was long referred to as a laughing jackass, later as a bushman's clock, but now it is a
40
kookaburra. Cattle so intractable that only roping could control them were said to be ropable,
a term now used as a synonym for „angry” or “extremely annoyed.”
A deadbeat was a penniless “sundowner” at the very end of his tether, and a no-hoper was an
incompetent fellow, hopeless and helpless. An offsider (strictly, the offside driver of a
bullock
team) was any assistant or partner. A rouseabout was first an odd-job man on a sheep station
and then any kind of handyman. He was, in fact, the “down-under” counterpart of the wharf
labourer, or roustabout, on the Mississippi River. Both words originated in Cornwall, and
many other terms, now exclusively Australian, came ultimately from British dialects.
“Dinkum,” for instance, meaning “true, authentic, genuine,” echoed the “fair dinkum,” or fair
deal, of Lincolnshire dialect. “Fossicking” about for surface gold, and then rummaging about
in general, perpetuated the term fossick (“to elicit information, ferret out the facts”) from the
Cornish dialect of English. To “barrack,” or jeer noisily, recalled Irish “barrack” (“to brag,
boast”), whereas “skerrick” in the phrase “not a skerrick left” was obviously identical with
the
“skerrick” meaning “small fragment, particle,”still heard in English dialects from
Westmorland to Hampshire.
36
Some Australian English terms came from Aboriginal speech: the words boomerang,
corroboree (warlike dance and then any large and noisy gathering), dingo (reddish-brown
wild
dog), galah (cockatoo), gunyah (bush hut), kangaroo, karri (dark-red eucalyptus tree), nonda
(rosaceous tree yielding edible fruit), wallaby (small marsupial), and wallaroo (large rock
kangaroo). Australian English has slower rhythms and flatter intonations than RP. Although
there is remarkably little regional variation throughout the entire continent, there is
significant
social variation. The neutral vowel /ə/ (as the a in “sofa”) is frequently used, as in London
Cockney: “arches” and “archers” are both pronounced [a:t∫əz], and the pronunciations of RP
“day” and “go” are, respectively, [dəi] and [gəu].
Although New Zealand lies over 1,000 miles away, much of the English spoken there is
similar to that of Australia. The blanket term Austral English is sometimes used to cover the
language of the whole of Australasia, or Southern Asia, but this term is far from popular with
New Zealanders because it makes no reference to New Zealand and gives all the prominence,
so they feel, to Australia. Between North and South Islands there are observable differences.
For one thing, Maori, which is still a living language (related to Tahitian, Hawaiian, and the
other Austronesian [Malayo-Polynesian] languages), has a greater number of speakers and
more influence in North Island.

The English of India–Pakistan. In 1950 India became a federal republic within the
Commonwealth of Nations, and Hindi was declared the first national language. English, it
was stated, would “continue to be used for all official purposes until 1965.” In 1967,
however,
by the terms of the English Language Amendment Bill, English was proclaimed “an
alternative official or associate language with Hindi until such time as all non-Hindi states
had
agreed to its being dropped.” English is therefore acknowledged to be indispensable. It is the
only practicable means of day-to-day communication between the central government at
New
Delhi and states with non-Hindi speaking populations, especially with the Deccan, or
“South,”
where millions speak Dravidian (non-Indo-European) languages—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada,
and Malayalam. English is widely used in business, and, although its use as a medium in
higher education is decreasing, it remains the principal language of scientific research.
In 1956 Pakistan became an autonomous republic comprising two states, East and West.
Bengali and Urdu were made the national languages of East and West Pakistan, respectively,
but English was adopted as a third official language and functioned as the medium of
interstate communication. (In 1971East Pakistan broke away from its western partner and
became the independent state of Bangladesh.)
African English. Africa is the most multilingual area in the world, if people are measured
against languages. Upon a large number of indigenous languages rests a slowly changing
superstructure of world languages (Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese). The problems
of
language are everywhere linked with political, social, economic, and educational factors.

37
The Republic of South Africa, the oldest British settlement in the continent, resembles
Canada
in having two recognized European languages within its borders: English and Afrikaans, or
Cape Dutch. Both British and Dutch traders followed in the wake of 15th-century Portuguese
explorers and have lived in widely varying war-and-peace relationships ever since. Although
the Union of South Africa, comprising Cape Province, Transvaal, Natal, and Orange Free
State, was for more than a half century (1910–61) a member of the British Empire and
Commonwealth, its four prime ministers (Botha, Smuts, Hertzog, and Malan) were all
Dutchmen. In the early 1980s Afrikaners outnumbered British by three to two. The Afrikaans
language began to diverge seriously from European Dutch in the late 18th century and has
gradually come to be recognized as a separate language. Although the English spoken in
South Africa differs in some respects from standard British English, its speakers do not
regard
the language as a separate one. They have naturally come to use many Afrikanerisms, such as
kloof, kopje, krans, veld, and vlei, to denote features of the landscape and occasionally
42
employ African names to designate local animals and plants. The words trek and commando,
notorious in South African history, have acquired almost worldwide currency.
Elsewhere in Africa, English helps to answer the needs of wider communication. It functions
as an official language of administration in Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland and in
Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malaŵi, Uganda, and Kenya. It is the language of instruction at
Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; at the University of Nairobi, Kenya; and at the
University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania.
The West African states of The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria, independent
members of the Commonwealth, have English as their official language. They are all
multilingual. The official language of Liberia is also English, although its tribal communities
constitute four different linguistic groups. Its leading citizens regard themselves as Americo-
Liberians, being descendants of those freed blacks whose first contingents arrived in West
Africa in 1822. South of the Sahara indigenous languages are extending their domains and
are
competing healthily and vigorously with French and English.
Pidgin. Pidgin, language based on another language, but with a sharply curtailed vocabulary
(often 700 to 2000 words) and grammar; native to none of its speakers; and used as a lingua
franca, or a language used as a means of communication between peoples with different
native languages. Pidgins develop when people who speak different languages are brought
together and forced to develop a means of communication without having sufficient time to
learn each other's native languages. A pidgin usually derives its vocabulary from one
principal
language, but its grammar will either reflect the structures of each speaker's native tongue, or
it will evolve a distinct grammar. Among languages that have given rise to pidgins are
English, French, Spanish, Italian, Zulu, and Chinook. In a pidgin, words may change
meaning—for example, the English word belong becomes blong (“is”) in Chinese Pidgin and
bilong (“of”) in Tok Pisin, spoken in Papua New Guinea. Many concepts are expressed by
phrases—for example, lait bilong klaut (“lightning,” literally “light of cloud”) in Tok Pisin.
Borrowings from other languages may be added—Tok Pisin, for instance, has two forms of

38
the word we: mipela,”I and others but not you” (from mi,”I,” plus plural ending -pela,
derived
from “fellow”); and yumi,”we, including you.” If a pidgin survives for several generations, it
may displace other languages and become the tongue of its region; it is then called a creole,
and its vocabulary is gradually reexpanded. Examples include the French-based Haitian
Creole; Papiamento, based on Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, and spoken in the
Netherlands
Antilles; and the English-based Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone.
Creole (language), language that began as a pidgin but has become the native language of a
community. Creoles and pidgins develop as a means of communication between members of
two mutually unintelligible language communities. Both creoles and pidgins have simple
grammatical structures and limited vocabularies, although the grammar of a Creole is more
complex than that of a pidgin. Moreover, the rules of Creole grammar remain uniform from
speaker to speaker, whereas pidgin grammar varies among speakers. Pidgins have no native
speakers; when a pidgin does acquire native speakers through years of use it is called a
Creole.Creole languages exist throughout the world, although they develop primarily in
isolatedareas, especially islands, in which colonial governments have established economies
based onimmigrant or slave labor. The Creole that develops merges elements of the colonial
language,especially vocabulary, with elements of the language or languages of the laborers,
typicallygrammatical structure. The primary creoles spoken in North America and the
Caribbeaninclude English-based Gullah, French-based Louisiana Creole, English-based
JamaicanCreole, and French-based Haitian Creole. All of these creoles draw upon African
languages.
Linguists have noted similarities in grammatical structure among all Creole languages.
Common features include the use of repeated adjectives and adverbs to indicate intensity and
the use of particles to change verb tense. Scholars suggest differing hypotheses to account for
this uniformity across diverse Creole languages. One theory states that all Creole languages
descend from the same 15th-century Portuguese pidgin, used by Portuguese explorers
throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. When this pidgin came in contact with
the languages of later colonizers, the basic grammar remained while the vocabulary
incorporated new words from such languages as French and English. However, this
hypothesis does not explain why some pidgins and creoles that developed with little or no
contact with European languages still share grammatical features. Other scholars suggest that
the shared grammatical features come from basic linguistic preferences for certain word
order
and for simplified, uninflected forms of verbs and other parts of speech.
One feature that distinguishes a Creole language from English is the use of the anterior tense,
which resembles the past perfect tense in English. The anterior tense uses bin or wen instead
of the suffix -ed, so that hadwalked in English becomes bin walk in Creole. Some common
linguistic characteristics of the various Creole languages include questions and statements
being identified by intonation alone, and patterns in verb conjugation. For example, Krio, the
English-based Creole of Sierra Leone, and Guianese Crйole, the French-based Creole of
Guiana, follow similar patterns of adding verb particles to change tense. In Krio the word
chop for “eat” becomes a chop to indicate “I ate”and a de chop for “I am eating.” In
Guianese
Crйole the word mгze for “eat” becomes mo mгze to mean “I ate” and mo ka mгze to indicate
39
“I am eating.”
Questions to lecture 9:
1. What are the most common characteristic features of Australian and New-Zealand
English?
2. What is the role of English in most African countries?
3. How do Pidgin and Creole evolve? What are the most significant peculiarities of
them?
Lecture № 21.
Plan: The future of English.
Modifications in pronunciation.
The tendency to restore the full qualities of vowels.
Narrowing the gap between pronunciation and spelling.
Advanced technological education, computer programming, machine
translation, and expanding mass media.
The universal scientific language.
The future of English.
Geographically, English is the most widespread language on earth, and it is second only to
Mandarin Chinese in the number of people who speak it. The International
45
Telecommunication Union (ITU) has five official languages: English, French, Spanish,
Russian, and Chinese. The influence of these languages upon one another will inevitably
increase.
It is reasonable to ask if changes in English can be predicted. There will doubtless be
modifications in pronunciation, especially in that of long vowels and diphthongs. In weakly
stressed syllables there is already a discernible tendency, operating effectively through radio
and television, to restore the full qualities of vowels in these syllables. This tendency may
bring British English more into line with American English and may bring them both a little
nearer to Spanish and Italian. Further, it may help to narrow the gap between pronunciation
and spelling. Other factors will also contribute toward the narrowing of this gap: advanced
technological education, computer programming, machine translation, and expanding mass
media. Spelling reformers will arise from time to time to liven up proceedings, but in
general,
traditional orthography may well hold its own against all comers, perhaps with some
regularization. Printing houses, wielding concentrated power through their style directives,
will surely find it in their best interests to agree on uniformity of spelling. Encyclopaedic
dictionaries—computerized, universal, and subject to continuous revision—may not go on
indefinitely recording such variant spellings as “connection” and “connexion,” “judgment”
and “judgement,” “labor” and “labour,” “medieval” and “mediaeval,” “plow” and “plough,”
“realise” and “realize,” “thru” and “through.”
Since Tudor days, aside from the verb endings -est and -eth, inflections have remained stable
because they represent the essential minimum. The abandonment of the forms thou and thee
may encourage the spread of yous and youse in many areas, but it is not necessarily certain
that these forms will win general acceptance. The need for a distinctive plural can be
supplied
in other ways (e.g., the forms “you all, you fellows, you people”). The distinctions between
the words “I” and “me,” “he”and “him,” “she” and “her,” “we” and “us,” “they” and “them”
40
seem to many authors to be too important to be set aside, in spite of a growing tendency to
use
objective forms as emphatic subjective pronouns and to say, for instance, “them and us”
instead of “they and we” in contrasting social classes. Otherwise, these distinctive forms may
remain stable; they are all monosyllabic, they are in daily use, and they can bear the main
stress. Thus they are likely to resist levelling processes.
Considerable changes will continue to be made in the forms and functions of auxiliary verbs,
catenative (linking) verbs, phrasal verbs, and verb phrases. Indeed, the constituents of verbs
and verb groups are being more subtly modified than those of any other word class. By
means
46
of auxiliaries and participles, a highly intricate system of aspects, tenses, and modalities is
gradually evolving.
In syntax the movement toward a stricter word order seems to many to be certain to continue.
The extension of multiple attributives in nominal groups has probably reached its maximum.
It cannot extend further without incurring the risk of ambiguity.
In vocabulary further increases are expected if the present trends continue. Unabbreviated
general dictionaries already contain 500,000 entries, but even larger dictionaries, with
750,000 entries, may be required. Coiners of words probably will not confine themselves to
Greek and Latin in creating new terms; instead they are likely to exercise their inventive
powers in developing an international technical vocabulary that is increasingly shared by
Russian, French, and Spanish and that is slowly emerging as the universal scientific
language.
The influence of the mass media appears likely to result in standardized pronunciation, more
uniform spelling, and eventually a spelling closer to actual pronunciation. Despite the
likelihood of such standardization, a unique feature of the English language remains its
tendency to grow and change. Despite the warnings of linguistic purists, new words are
constantly being coined and usages modified to express new concepts. Its vocabulary is
constantly enriched by linguistic borrowings, particularly by cross-fertilizations from
American English. Because it is capable of infinite possibilities of communication, the
English language has become the chief international language.
Questions to lecture10:
1. What are the most reasonable predictions of the future of English?
2. Are are the speculations of the lingiusts regarding the vocabulary?
3. What languages are expected to be the prevailing ones in the future?

41
Lecture № 22.
Plan: Characteristics of Modern English. Phonology.

British Received Pronunciation (RP), by definition, the usual speech of educated people
living
in London and south-eastern England, is one of the many forms of standard speech. Other
pronunciations, although not standard, are entirely acceptable in their own right on
conversational levels.
The chief differences between British Received Pronunciation, as defined above, and a
variety
of American English, such as Inland Northern (the speech form of western New England and
its derivatives, often popularly referred to as General American), are in the pronunciation of
certain individual vowels and diphthongs. Inland Northern American vowels sometimes have
semi consonantal final glides (i.e., sounds resembling initial w, for example, or initial y).
Aside from the final glides, this American dialect shows four divergences from British
English: (1) the words cod, box, dock, hot, and not are pronounced with a short (or half-long)
low front sound as in British “bard” shortened (the terms front, back, low, and high refer to
the position of the tongue); (2) words such as bud, but, cut, and rung are pronounced with a
central vowel as in the unstressed final syllable of “sofa”; (3) before the fricative sounds s, f,
and θ(the last of these is the th sound in “thin”) the long low back vowel a, as in British
“bath,” is pronounced as a short front vowel a, as in British “bad”; (4) high back vowels
following the alveolar sounds t and d and the nasal sound n in words such as tulips, dew, and
news are pronounced without a glide as in British English; indeed, the words sound like the
British “two lips,” “do,” and “nooze” in “snooze.” (In several American dialects, however,
these glides do occur.)
The 24 consonant sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the fricatives f, v, θ
(as
in “thin”), [eth] (as in “then”), s, z, ∫ (as in “ship”), Ɨ (as in “pleasure”), and h; two
affricatives: t∫ (as in “church”) and dƗ (as the j in “jam”); the nasals m, n, ŋ (the sound that
occurs at the end of words such as “young”); the lateral l; the vibrant or retroflex r; and the
48
semivowels j (often spelled y) and w. These remain fairly stable, but Inland Northern
American differs from British English in two respects: (1) r following vowels is preserved in
words such as “door,” “flower,” and “harmony,” whereas it is lost in British; (2) t between
vowels is voiced, so that “metal” and “matter” sound very much like British “medal” and
“madder,” although the pronunciation of this t is softer and less aspirated, or breathy, than
the
d of British English. Like Russian, English is a strongly stressed language. Four degrees of
stress may be differentiated: primary, secondary, tertiary, and weak, which may be indicated,
42
respectively, by acute (´), circumflex(ˆ), and grave (ı) accent marks and by the breve(˘).
Thus, “Têll mè thĕ trúth” (the whole truth, and nothing but the truth) may be contrasted with
“Têll mé thĕ trûth” (whatever you may tell other people); “bláck bîrd” (any bird black in
colour) may be contrasted with “bláckbìrd” (that particular bird Turdus merula). The verbs
“permít” and “recórd” (henceforth only primary stresses are marked) may be contrasted with
their corresponding nouns “pérmit” and “récord.” A feeling for antepenultimate (third
syllable
from the end) primary stress, revealed in such five-syllable words as equanímity,
longitúdinal,
notoríety, opportúnity, parsimónious, pertinácity, and vegetárian, causes stress to shift when
extra syllables are added, as in “histórical,” a derivative of “hístory” and “theatricálity,” a
derivative of “theátrical.” Vowel qualities are also changed here and in such word groups as
périod, periódical, periodícity; phótograph, photógraphy, photográphical. French stress may
be sustained in many borrowed words; e.g.,bizárre, critíque, duréss, hotél, prestíge, and
techníque.
Pitch, or musical tone, determined by the rate of vibration of the vocal cords, may be level,
falling, rising, or falling–rising. In counting “one,” “two,” “three,” “four,” one naturally gives
level pitch to each of these cardinal numerals. But if a person says “I want two, not one,” he
naturally gives “two” falling pitch and “one” falling–rising. In the question “One?” rising
pitch is used. Word tone is called pitch, and sentence tone is referred to as intonation. The
end-of-sentence cadence is important for meaning, and it therefore varies least. Three main
end-of-sentence intonations can be distinguished: falling, rising, and falling–rising. Falling
intonation is used in completed statements, direct commands, and sometimes in general
questions unanswerable by “yes” or “no”; e.g., “I have nothing to add.” “Keep to the right.”
“Who told you that?” Rising intonation is frequently used in open-ended statements made
with some reservation, in polite requests, and in particular questions answerable by “yes” or
“no”: “I have nothing more to say at the moment.” “Let me know how you get on.” “Are you
sure?” The third type of end-of-sentence intonation, first falling and then rising pitch, is used
49
in sentences that imply concessions or contrasts: “Some people do like them” (but others do
not). “Don't say I didn't warn you” (because that is just what I'm now doing). Intonation is on
the whole less singsong in American than in British English, and there is a narrower range of
pitch. American speech may seem more monotonous but at the same time may sometimes be
clearer and more readily intelligible. Everywhere English is spoken, regional dialects display
distinctive patterns of intonation.

43
Lecture № 23.
Plan: Characteristics of Modern English. Morphology. Inflection
Modern English nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected. Adjectives, adverbs, prepositions,
conjunctions, and interjections are invariable.
Most English nouns have plural inflection in (-e)s, but this form shows variations in
pronunciation in the words cats (with a final s sound), dogs (with a final z sound), and horses
(with a final iz sound), as also in the 3rd person singular present-tense forms of verbs: cuts
(s),jogs (z), and forces (iz). Seven nouns have mutated (umlauted) plurals: man, men;
woman, women; tooth, teeth; foot, feet; goose, geese; mouse, mice; louse, lice. Three have
plurals in -en: ox, oxen; child, children; brother, brethren. Some remain unchanged; e.g.,
deer, sheep, moose, grouse. Five of the seven personal pronouns have distinctive forms for
subject and object. The forms of verbs are not complex. Only the substantive verb (“to be”)
has eight forms: be, am, is, are, was, were, being, been. Strong verbs have five forms: ride,
rides, rode, riding, ridden. Regular or weak verbs customarily have four: walk, walks,
walked, walking. Some that end in a t or d have three forms only: cut, cuts, cutting. Of these
three-form verbs, are in frequent use. In addition to the above inflections, English employs
two other main morphological(structural) processes—affixation and composition—and two
subsidiary ones—backformation and blend.
3. Characteristics of Modern English. Affixation
Affixes, word elements attached to words, may either precede, as prefixes (do, undo; way,
subway), or follow, as suffixes (do, doer; way, wayward). They may be native (overdo,
waywardness), Greek (hyperbole, thesis), or Latin (supersede, pediment). Modern
technologists greatly favour the neo-Hellenic prefixes macro-“long, large,” micro- “small,”
para- “alongside,” poly- “many,” and the Latin mini-, with its antonym maxi-. Greek and
Latin affixes have become so fully acclimatized that they can occur together in one and the
same word, as, indeed, in “ac-climat-ize-d,” just used, consisting of a Latin prefix plus a
Greek stem plus a Greek suffix plus an English inflection. Suffixes are bound more closely
than prefixes to the stems or root elements of words. Consider, for instance, the wide variety
of agent suffixes in the nouns actor, artisan, dotard, engineer, financier, hireling, magistrate,
merchant, scientist, secretary, songster, student, and worker. Suffixes may come to be
attached to stems quite fortuitously, but, once attached, they are likely to be permanent. At
the same time, one suffix can perform many functions. The suffix -er denotes the doer of the
action in the words worker, driver, and hunter; the instrument in chopper, harvester, and
roller; and the dweller in Icelander, Londoner, and Trobriander. It refers to things or actions
associated with the basic concept in the words breather, “pause to take breath”; diner, “dining
car on a train”; and fiver, “five-pound note.” In the terms disclaimer, misnomer, and
rejoinder (all from French) the suffix denotes one single instance of the action expressed by
the verb. Usage may prove capricious. Whereas a writer is a person, a typewriter is a

44
machine. For some time a computer was both, but now, with the invention and extensive use
of electronic apparatus, the word is no longer used of persons.

Lecture № 24.
Plan: Characteristics of Modern English. Composition
Composition, or compounding, is concerned with free forms. Theprimary compounds
“already,” “cloverleaf,” and “gentleman” show the collocation of two free forms. They differ
from word groups or phrases in phonology, stress, or juncture or by a combination of two or
more of these. Thus, “already” differs from “all ready” in stress and juncture, “cloverleaf”
from “clover leaf” in stress, and “gentleman” from “gentle man” in phonology, stress, and
juncture. In describing the structure of compound words it is necessary to take into account
the relation of components to each other and the relation of the whole compound to its
components. These relations diverge widely in, for example, the words cloverleaf,
icebreaker, breakwater, blackbird, peace-loving, and paperback. In “cloverleaf” the first
component noun is attributive and modifies the second, as also in the terms aircraft, beehive,
landmark, lifeline, network, and vineyard. “Icebreaker,” however, is a compound made up of
noun object plus agent noun, itself consisting of verb plus agent suffix, as also in the words
bridge builder, landowner, metalworker, minelayer, and timekeeper. The next type consists
of verb plus object. It is rare in English, Dutch, and German but frequent in French, Spanish,
and Italian.
The English “pastime” may be compared, for example, with French passe-temps, the Spanish
pasatiempo, and the Italian passatempo. From French comes “passport,” meaning “pass (i.e.,
enter) harbour.” From Italian comes “portfolio,” meaning “carry leaf.” Other words of this
type are daredevil, scapegrace, and scarecrow. As for the “blackbird” type, consisting of
attributive adjective plus noun, it occurs frequently, as in the terms bluebell, grandson,
shorthand, and wildfire. The next type, composed of object noun and a present participle, as
in
the terms fact-finding, heart-rending (German herzzerreissend), life-giving (German
lebenspendend), painstaking, and time-consuming, occurs rarely. The last type is seen in
barefoot, bluebeard, hunchback, leatherneck, redbreast, and scatterbrain.
5. Characteristics of Modern English. Back-formations and blends
Back-formations and blends are becoming increasingly popular. Back-formation is the
reverse of affixation, being the analogicalcreation of a new word from an existing word
falsely assumed to be its derivative. For example, the verb “to edit” has been formed from
the noun “editor” on the reverse analogy of the noun “actor” from “to act,” and similarly the
verbs automate, bulldoze, commute, escalate, liaise, loaf, sightsee, and televise are
backformed from the nouns automation, bulldozer, commuter, escalation, liaison, loafer,
sightseer, and television. From the single noun “procession” are backformed two verbs with
different stresses and meanings: procéss, “to walk in procession,” and prócess, “to subject
food (and other material) to a special operation.” Blends fall into two groups: (1)
coalescences, such as “bash” from “bang” and “smash”; and telescoped forms, called
45
portmanteau words, such as “motorcade” from “motor cavalcade.” In the first group are the
words clash, from clack and crash, and geep, offspring of goat and sheep. To the second
group belong dormobiles, or dormitory automobiles, and slurbs, or slum suburbs. A travel
monologue becomes a travelogue and a telegram sent by cable a cablegram. Aviation
electronics becomes avionics; biology electronics, bionics; and nuclear electronics,
nucleonics. In cablese a question mark is a quark; incomputerate a binary unit is a bit. In
astrophysics a quasistellar source of radio energy becomes a quasar, and a pulsating star
becomes a pulsar.
Simple shortenings, such as “ad” for “advertisement,” have risen in status. They are listed in
dictionaries side by side with their full forms. Among such fashionable abbreviations are
exam, gym, lab, lib, op, spec, sub, tech, veg, and vet. Compound shortenings, after the
pattern of Russian agitprop for agitatsiya propaganda, are also becoming fashionable. Initial
syllables are joined as in the words Fortran, for formula (computer) translation; mascon, for
massive (lunar) concentration; and Tacoma, for Tactical Communications Satellite.

46
Lecture № 25.

Plan: Characteristics of Modern English. Syntax

Sentences can be classified as (1) simple, containing one clause and predication: “John
knows
this country”; (2) multiple or compound, containing two or more coordinate clauses: “John
has been here before, and he knows this country”; and (3) complex, containing one or more
main clauses and one or more subordinate clauses: “John, who has been here before, knows
this country” or “Because he has been here before, John knows this country.” Simple,
declarative, affirmative sentences have two main patterns with five subsidiary patterns within
each. Verb and complement together form the predicate. “Complement” is here used to cover
both the complement and the object of traditional grammarians (see table).
In (1) the complement is the direct object of a transitive verb; in (2) it is a predicative
nominal group forming the second component of an equation linked to the first part by the
meaningless copula is; in (3) it is a predicative noun linked with the subject by the
meaningful copula becomes; in (4) it is a predicative adjective; and in (5) it is a predicative
past participle.
In the next table each sentence contains four components: subject, verb, and two
complements, first and second, or inner and outer. In (6) inner and outer complements
consist
of indirect object (without preposition) followed by direct object; in (7) these complements
are direct object and appositive noun; in (8)direct object and predicative adjective; in (9)
direct object and predicative past participle; in (10) direct object and predicative infinitive.
One can seldom change the word order in these 10 sentences without doing something else—
adding or subtracting a word, changing the meaning. There is no better way of appreciating
the importance of word position than by scrutinizing the 10 frames illustrated. If, for
instance, in (6) one reverses inner and outer complements, one adds “to” and says, “John
gives a ring to Mary”; one does not say “John gives a ring Mary.” Some verbs, such as
“explain” and “say,” never omit the preposition “to” before the indirect object: “John's father
explained the details to his son.” “He said many things to him.” If, in (10), the inner and
outer complements are reversed (e.g., “We want to know you”), the meaning is changed as
well as the structure.
Apart from these fundamental rules of word order, the principles governing the positions of
adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions call for brief comment. For attributive adjectives the
rule is simple: single words regularly precede the noun, and word groups follow—e.g., “an
unforgettable experience” but “an experience never to be forgotten.” There is a growing
tendency, however, to abandon this principle, to switch groups to front position, and to say
“a never to be forgotten experience.” In the ordering of multiple epithets, on the other hand,
47
some new principles are seen to be slowly emerging. Attributes denoting permanent qualities
stand nearest their head nouns: “long, white beard,” “six-lane elevated freeway.” The order
in multiple attribution tends to be as follows: determiner; quantifier; adjective of quality;
adjective of size, shape, or texture; adjective of colour or material; noun adjunct (if any);
head noun. Examples include: “that one solid, round, oak dining table,” “these many fine,
large, black race horses,” “those countless memorable, long, bright summer evenings.”
Adverbs are more mobile than adjectives. Nevertheless, some tentative principles seem to be
at work. Adverbs of frequency tend to come immediately after the substantive verb (“You are
often late”), before other verbs (“You never know”), and between auxiliaries and full verbs
(“You can never tell”). In this last instance, however, American differs from British usage.
Most Americans would place the adverb before the auxiliary and say “You never can tell.”
(In the title of his play of that name, first performed in 1899, George Bernard Shaw
avowedly followed American usage.) Adverbs of time usually occur at the beginning or end
of a sentence, seldom in the middle. Particular expressions normally precede more general
ones: “Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon at 4 o'clock in the morning on July 21, 1969.”
An adverb of place or direction follows a verb with which it is semantically bound: “We
arrived home after dark.” Other adverbs normally take end positions in the order of manner,
place, and time: “Senator Smith summed it all up most adroitly [manner] in Congress [place]
last night [time].”
In spite of its etymology (Latin prae-positio “before placing”), a preposition may sometimes
follow the noun it governs, as in “all the world over,” “the clock round,” and “the whole
place through.” “This seems a good place to live in” seems more natural to most speakers
than “This seems a good place in which to live.” “Have you anything to open this can with?”
is now more common than “Have you anything with which to open this can?”
The above are principles rather than rules, and in the end it must be agreed that English
syntax lacks regimentation. Its structural laxity makes English an easy language to speak
badly. It also makes English prone to ambiguity. “When walking snipe always approach up
wind,” a shooting manual directs. The writer intends the reader to understand, “When you are
walking to flush snipe always approach them up against the wind.” “John kept the car in the
garage” can mean either (1) “John retained that car you see in the garage, and sold his other
one” or (2) “John housed the car in the garage, and not elsewhere.” “Flying planes can be
dangerous” is ambiguous because it may mean either (1) “Planes that fly can be dangerous”
or (2) “It is dangerous to fly planes.”
Two ways in which “John gives Mary a ring” can be stated in the passive are: (1) “A ring is
given to Mary by John” and (2) “Mary is given a ring by John.” Concerning this same action,
four types of question can be formulated: (1) “Who gives Mary a ring?” The information
sought is the identity of the giver. (2) “Does John give Mary a ring?” The question may be
answered by “yes” or “no.” (3) “John gives Mary a ring, doesn't he?” Confirmation is sought
of the questioner's belief that John does in fact give Marya ring. (4) “John gives Mary a
ring?”
This form, differing from the declarative statement only by the question mark in writing, or
by
rising intonation in speech, calls, like sentences (2) and (3), for a “yes” or “no” answer but
suggests doubt on the part of the questioner that the action is taking place.

48
Lecture №26
Plan: The Old English Alphabets. Literary sources.
In the writing of the Old English Period we find two alphabets employed: the older (runic)
alphabet in which we have only inscriptions and the Latin alphabet in which we have quite a
number of writings. The runic alphabet: -an inscription on Frank’s Casket (шкатулка). There
is a very old ancient inscription, which is not very easy even to decode. It is made of
whalebone. Ruthwell cross It’s a Christian cross on which we find an inscription in the runic
alphabet. It was found near the place Ruthwell. That’s why it is called Ruthwell cross. The
Latin alphabet: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It registered the most important historical events
from the 9th c. Up to the 12th c. It doesn’t mean that monks didn’t write anything before,
they
did. But before the 9th c. Monks kept the chronicles in different monasteries and in the 9th c.
(on the initiative of King Alfred the Great) they compiled different manuscripts in one and
began to continue registering the events in several main manuscripts. Of course it’s not a
literally creations and the facts are rather monotonous. But it’s a splendid sample of Anglo-
Saxons prose. Besides we have quit a number of private documents (financial documents)
but of course the most important things are literally works. The point is that though A-S.
Tribes are considered to be barbarians; we have splendid samples born of poetry and prose.
Poetry.
All in all we have about 30000 lines. What do we find among them? First of all there are
shorter and longer poems. The longest is “Beowulf” (1/10 of the whole, 30000) It is a
complete poem, an epic poem, a legend of a hero. The meter (размер) of the poem: The old
Germanic and English verse had no rhythm and no meter. The main device which was
employed is alliteration – it’s a repetition of certain sounds. The key sound for alliteration
was the first stressed sound of several sounds at the beginning of the second half-line
Alliteration was the universal device. Whatever we have in the OE verses everything was
alliterated. OE poetry was very rich in metaphors: “sun” = “world candle” etc Though it
(Beowulf) it is a legend in some parts we can rely on it as on historical material because it is
based on some historical events, there are names of real kings, tribes and which is more
important we can draw from it interesting information on their way of life: the descriptions
of the warriors, their weapons the relations between the king and his vassals, of their duties.
Other poems: It is unique that in spite of the fact that it is very old poetry and mostly epic it
is clear that the authors (anonymous) are interested in the readers and the hearers’ reaction.
Even in Beowulf and even more in later poems we find highly pronounced lyrical basis.
Another wonders of the Old English Period are the so-called elegiac poems (of the late Old
English Period). There are referred to as elegiac because they are elegiac in their dominant
hey note. There are four of them: one of them is called “Widsith” (maybe the of the author)
49
in which sufferings of the author, his life are described; author is called “Deor’s Lament” – it
is also a sad elegiac poem in which the author describes the hardlots of different people. The
poem is unique by its strophic form; two more: Wanderer, Sea Farer. Besides we find
fragments of two more epic poems and quite a number of short poems. More than half of
them are religious poems either of devotional or moralistic character. Some of them describe
lives of saints or paraphrase the Bible. And also there is gnomic verse. Some riddles. OE
Poetry was highly accomplished. As far as the main attitudes are concerned we find here a
mixture of pagan and Christian thought.
Prose is a much later achievement than poetry and it is unique that at the time than other
people of Europe only began to compose verse the OE people began to write prose. A-S
Chronicle King Alfred the Great is one of the greatest authors of OE prose (9th c.). He was
king of Wessex. His life wasn’t long but very hard. He had to fight against the Danes (a
Scandinavian Tribe). He is a great enlighter. “At the time when other rules were moral and
intellectual monsters, K. A. Was to enlighten his people”. King Alfred the Great (848-901).
He himself introduced the educational reform, imported learned people, scholars from
Europe to teach at the monasteries (monastery schools) and he himself ventured to write
prose. That’s why he is sometimes referred to as «The Father of E. Prose». His purpose was
to educate his people. That’s why it was on his initiative that the Anglo-Saxon chronicle was
started as a single piece. He himself translated several very important books into the OE
language: from Latin, because before the OE prose developed, there were some writings in
Latin and in order to be able to translate from Latin he learned Latin himself with the role
purpose of translating learned books: «Ecclesiastical history of the E people» written by
Bede the Venerable (Беда Достопочтенный) («Церковная история английского народа»).
In this book we also find poem by Cadmon. Bede describes how Cadmon got the ability of
glorifying God in his dream. («Cadmon’s Hymn») He translated «World History» by Paulus
Orosius - a Spanish monk who wrote «World History» in which there are some interesting
historical and geographical facts. King Alfred inserted some parts describing the Northern
Parts of the world (Scandinavia). So these are episodes written by King Alfred. That’s why
they are precious to us. «Pastoral Care» («Заботы пастыря») by Pope Gregory - he was a
highly educated, intellectual and spiritual man. The book describes what a clergyman should
do for people. So these are the main translations by King Alfred the Great. And we consider
we find that they are much shorter that the originals: he picked out only something which he
considered very important, some parts are adopted and some parts are paraphrased. There
some other prose writers. The most important for the development of writing are Wulfstan
and Alfic. They lived at the end of the OE Period (end X - beginning XI). They were both
clergymen.
Wulfstan was a bishop. Since they were clergymen they mostly wrote homilies (проповеди).
Both Wulfstan and Alfic were brilliant stylists and had their own styles. Both wrote in
alliterated and rhythmic prose. Wulfstan’s style was firrier, more energetic and Alfic’s style
was a bit gentler. He is considered to be one of the greatest stylists of the period. Wulfstan
was also a great statesman; he took an active part in the reforms (in the state and church). As
to Alfic he is interesting for us because he is the author of one of the first grammars
«Colloqui» which was written as an instruction for monastery students, it was written in the
form of a dialogue between the teacher and his pupils. It was desired as an instruction in
good language and it is considered to be one of the first grammars in the history of the
development of the E language.
50
Lecture №27
Plan: The Old English Noun.
The OE noun had the grammatical category of number, case (N, G, D, A.), and the
grammatical gender which depended on the noun . There was no article but there were
words, which could function as those expressing definiteness/indefiniteness: the pronoun se,
seo, (тот) (мн. Число ____Ø_&a). This demonstrative pronoun of functioned as the article.
Up to the 12th century the demonstrative ““had two functions (pronoun, article). How the
noun was declined: The OE noun had nine declensions. The type of declension depended on
the stem building suffix. Accordingly the declensions subdivided: - The a-stem m and n day -
Theo-stem f care - The i-stem all genders deal- The n-stem son. These four types of vowel
declensions are also referred to as the strong declension (Сильное склонение или
спряжение – изменение гласной, слабое – суффикс с согласным). 3 consonant
declensions: The -nt-stem friend The -s-stem child The -r-stem sister + one more: weak
declension – the –en-stem ox – oxen and the root stem declension (man – men, woman –
women) The suffix of a certain stem did not exist in the OE language – the type of stem is
determined through the whole paradigms. ЧТО СОХРАНИЛОСЬ? The regular suffix
– goes back to the old “as” of the a-stem declension masculine. The homonymous forms
(deer - deer) go back to the a-stem declension neutral with the long syllable variant sheep.
They were homonymous already then.-en is the old suffix of the en-stem declension. There
are only three such words in the literal language: ox, child, brother (in dialects there are
many more of them). But only “oxen” belonged to the weak declension. “child” belonged to
the n-stem declension. And the plural was There is also so called foreign plural, but these are
much later borrowings. The suffix of the possessive case’s has developed from the Gen. Case
with the ending –es the a-stem declension masculine.
9. The Old English Adjective.
The adjective in OE agreed with the noun in gender, number and case. It had all the
categories of agreement, besides the adjective had two declensions: the strong and the weak
declension.
The strong declension of the adjective had the case ending similar to those of the
corresponding vowel declension of the noun. Some endings were like those of the
demonstrative pronouns. That is why sometimes the strong is referred to as the pronominal
declension. As to the weak declension it had in oblige cases the suffix with the consonant
“n”.
The type of the adjective declension depended on the indefinites or definiteness of the noun.
10. The Old English pronoun.
There were several groups of pronouns, but they were fewer in number: personal pronoun,

51
demonstrative pronoun, interrogative pronoun, and indefinite pronoun. The personal
pronouns were declined; like the nouns they had four cases: N ic (=I) G min(=mine) D
me(=me)A mec Besides in old times the 1st and the 2nd person had the dual number Ic (я) -
wit (я и ты) – we (мы больше, чем )The idea of possession was expressed by the Gen. Case
of the personal pronouns. As to the demonstrative pronouns there were two groups for “this”
and for “that” is this) - es (these) at (that) - os (those) the (gave us the modern article) There
were interrogative pronouns: hwat-what hwyk-which and so on. The indefinite pronouns:
The group was not so numerous as in the ME language. All these: somebody/thing – were
not words, but word groups. There were “each, much, little” and so on.

Lecture№28
Plan: The Old English verb.
There were finite and non-finite forms. The non-finite forms were the Infinitive and the
Participle (I and II). There was no Gerund. A) The Infinitive in OE was a verbal noun and
belonged to the weak –en-stem declension. Of the four cases the Infinitive employed only
two (N. - , D.- drincenne). The D. Case, which was very frequently used, was often used with
the preposition “to” as an adverbial modifier of purpose and later it came to be used as the
marker of the infinitive (нет с модальными глаголами т.к. Они не могут выражать
цель).b) The Participle was a verbal adjective. Like any adjective – it had the category of
agreement. It agreed with its noun in gender, number and case. As to the formation, P.I was
formed from the present item with the suffix –ende, -ande. As to P.II, its formation depended
on the type of the verb. These were four types of conjugation: two major types and two
minor types. The two major: the strong conjugation & the weak conjugation. A strong verb
had four main forms:-the infinitive - Preterit singular 1st and 3rd person - the 2nd person
singular and all the persons of the plural and the past subjunctive- Participle II There are
seven classes of strong verbs. The gradation was based on: in the first 5 classes the basis was
the ablaut or the “e-o” gradation: “e-o-zero”. Different gradations resulted as an interaction
(взаимодействие).
The vowels of gradation and the phonetic conditions of the root I. Writan - wrat - writon –
writen (i + i (a + i>a) (i + зero) (i + zero) The sixth class featured quantative gradation. «o-o»
(in IE) o + a o + a scacal - scoc (shake) taka - tok (take) The last 7th class featured
reduplication of the root (fall, let) lailait (in the Gothic language) In the OE the two parts
merged into one root. THE WEAK VERBS. The weak verbs had three main forms:- the
infinitive - the Praterite - Participle II. The weak verbs formed three forms by means of a
dental suffix. The suffix of the weak verbs later turned into the standard suffix -ed. In
Germanic languages there were four weak classes, in OE we find three weak classes. In the
1st weak class we find three subclasses: weak verbs with the short root syllable (neriat –
nered - nered). Weak verbs with the long syllable variants (fedan - fedde - fedd). Irregular
verbs (совр. Глаголы, которые имеют чередование гласного + нестандартный «t/d») (to
think - thought - thought, to tell - told - told). Taljan > tellan (везде был jan палатальная
перегласовка tellan (инф) - (Praterite) talde в форме прошедшего времени элемента «j»
не было).All the verbs of the 1st weak class are derivatives with the help of the suffix jan
which caused palatal mutation in the root. However in the Praterite of the 3rd subgroup the
suffix was dropped. That is why there was no palatal mutation in the Praterite. The same is
true of the gradation man-men, that is they went through palatal mutation in the plural
manniз > men The 2nd weak class was the most regular one. It had no exceptions - ode
52
(Prater) – od (P.II) love: luvian - luvode – luvod It served as the basis for the future
development of the standard verbs. The 3rd class was not numerous and it was in the state of
decay. In ME: to have, to live, to say (different models) habban - hэbde - hэbd There are also
two minor types of conjugation. - Preterit-Present Verbs - Suppletive Verbs The Preterit-
Present Verbs were originally strong verbs belonging to certain classes, then for some
semantic reasons their old past came to be used as the present tense form after which a new
Preterit form was formed according to the weak type as the productive. They have given us
modal verbs: dare, must, may, should, shall, can, ought. Cunnan (inf.) - can (present - старое
прошедшее).

Lecture№ 29
Plan: The Old English syntax.
OE was a typically synthetic language: the structure of the sentence, the members of the
sentence were typical of a synthetic lang.The same members of the sentence (Russian and
English). However the word order in the sentence was more grammatically free: it was more
semantic than grammatical thus, for instance, inversion was not obligatory for a question and
on the contrary inversion could occur in a declarative sentence: Wille ic sagen = могу я
сказать.However there were two shirt grammatical rules which are still observed in Modern
German language:a frame construction inversion in sentences beginning with secondary
members (obligatory) THE TYPES OF SENTENCES.In the main, the types and the kinds of
sentences were the same: simple & compound, main clauses & subordinate clauses. But there
were however some peculiarities:2 types of impersonal sentences. The younger type like the
modern with «it» with «hit». 1.an impersonal sentence without the subject: him uhte - ему
подумалось.Another feature: the difference between coordination and subordination was not
60
pronounced (не проявлялось) esp. In epic poems.Of the 5 complexes that we have now, in
OE there was only 2: Acc. With the infinitive, Nom. With the infinitive.MEANS OF
WORDBUILDING AND WORDSTOCK.Like any G. Language OE was rich in means of
wordbuilding. There were 3 of them: affixation, word composition (word compounding) and
sound gradation (it was not productive) AFFIXATION.The noun and the adjective were rich
in suffixes. Sometimes the noun added an element which in OE was a word and later became
a suffix.Had - царство, область - hood, ful and so on. As to the verb, it was rich prefixes.
The
prefixes marked the terminative character of the verb.WORD COMPOSITION.noun + noun:
goldsmith adjective + noun: cwic + seolfor = quicksilver noun + adjective: win + sad
(насыщенный вином) adjective + adjective: wid + cu (широкоизвестный)

53
Lecture№30
Plan: The Sound System in Old English
In OE, as it is now, there were long and short vowels. Short: a, (э), e, i, o, u, y; long: a, (э), e,
i, o, u, y. There was no reduction. The main principle of the orthography was the phonetic
principle. There were some sounds which are not pronounced in the modern language. One
of
the other interesting features is complete parallelism (в староанглийском гласные
образуют
полноценные пары а-а..., тогда как в современном языке этого не наблюдается I не
равно i: т.к. Разница не только в долготе, но и в качестве гласного). OE - modern
English. Общее: - деление на долгие/краткие; - сохранение некоторых звуков. Разница:
- отсутствие параллелизма в современном English; - исчезли некоторые звуки
появились новые. There were also diftongs, both long and short: ea, eo (not a single one is
now preserved). Difference - there were long and shot diftongs (in ME only long diftongs) –
the second element sonorous than the glide in ME. - the second element was broader (now
narrower). Consonants. There were no affricates t , d , besides there were no fricatives.
There was no palatalisation, which is strictly forbidden in the modern language, in some
positions. The sounds s-z, f-v, were not different phonemes, they were positional variants of
the phonemes. There was aspiration. Sound Changes. Vowels: 1)palatalisation of the
Germanic [a] a:>. In all the positions except the position before a nasal dags (Gothic) || ME
day There was no palatalisation before a nasal consonant. Before a nasal consonant ‘a’ was
nasalised and labialised: man 2)breaking (преломление)A monophtong became a diphtong
a>ea; a shot monophtong gave a short diphtong and a long monophtong gave a long
diphtonggothic ahtan || EO eahta > ME eight Breaking occurred before: «rr, r + a consonant,
l,h».No immediate traces of it in the modern language can be seen due to
monophtongazotion. 3)palatal mutation (палатальная перегласовка, Umlaut) By palatal
mutation we mean a change which consisted in the root vowel becoming more front and
more narrow. Palatal mutation is an assimilating change of the root vowel affected by the
sounds «i» or «j» in the following suffix (a repressive assimilation) There are numerous
traces palatal mutation in the ME: the noun with vowel gradation (man-men) in the plural;
adjectives with two sets of forms (old-older or elder) and adverbs; verbs like tell-told, teach-
taught; some worlds building pairs long-length. 4)velar mutation (веллерная, небная
перегласовка) Velar mutation is a change of the root vowel caused by the back vowel in the
suffix (repressive assimilation) There are now immediate traces of it in the ME language.
5)lengthening of stressed vowels in the root Chronologically there were two lengthenings:
the earlier (prehistoric; III – IV c.) And later (IV c. And later). The earlier lengthening
54
occurred due to the loss of a consonant. There were two instances here: - dropping of з [h]
seoзan . OE seon (>to see; sehen in Deutsch) when a nasal was dropped before a fricative
Goth. Fimf || OE fif (german funf) The second lengthening: the root vowel was lengthened
before certain combinations ld, nd and so on : old, cold, kind, wind, table II Consonants
1)The prehistoric process of doubling West Germanic consonants which is typical of the
whole occurred as a by-product of the process of palatal mutation. *satjan > s(э) ttan There
are no immediate traces of it in the Me. 2)rotacism: a certain fricative was voiced according
to Verner’s law and later it developed into “r” was –were sein – war- gewesen

Lecture№31
Plan: The Middle English Period. General Characteristic.
It was the period of the decay of the old trial system and the intensive development of
feudalism. The feudal system leads to feudal isolation because each of the manors is
selfsustained and produces all that is necessary for him. That’s why we observe here
isolation of different territories. This influenced the situation in the language. If in OE we
deal with trial dialects, in ME in the place of the old tribal dialects we find local dialects. If
we group the local dialects, we find 3 large groups: the South-Western and Kentish group =
the Southern Group the Midland Group the Northern Group Gradually they were developing
in the direction of disintegration; they were becoming more and more unlike. By the
beginning of the Middle English Period we can’t speak about a uniform literary language it
means that
when we speak of the language of the Middle English Period we mean a community of
dialects, but within this community there was a very important process of the London dialect,
becoming more and more important as the main dialect, born for writings and for
communication. Towards the end of the Middle English Period we find that the London
dialect is gradually turning into the basis of the literary language. The main group of the
words in the London dialect belonged to the Southern group (the southwestern part of it),
though of course we find a lot of elements from the Midland group. London was the capital;
the center of culture, trade, navigation and it was the center of printing. The great trend of
that period is great transformation in the English language. The Middle English Period was a
period when the English language was transforming from the synthetic structure in the
analytic structure the English language is now. So, the Middle English Period is the period of
transition. The most important processes: 1)The phonetic process of reduction (in OE there
were no reduced vowels) – unstressed vowels came to be reduced; it was one of the main
reasons for dropping of endings. 2)Leveling on analogy (выравнивание по аналогии) – the
grammatical processes; употребление форм в соответствии с продуктивными
парадигмами. Another very important event of the period was the influence of the French
language, which is connected with the so-called Worman Conquest. It affected the life of the
country, its political and social systems, its economic system and it’ language greatly.
Towards the end of the Middle English Period the English language came to be romanized
by
about 70%. Towards the end of the Old English Period a great part of the E territory
belonged to the Danes, but part of the territory remained English (Alfred the Great). Late in
the 10th century the Dane invasions were renewed under Sweyn (The Danish King), who was
a powerful king and ruled a very powerful Danish Kingdom which united Denmark, Norway
55
and partly Sweden and England. When in 1018 Sweyn died, his son Canute became king and
he was even more powerful ruler than his father. The power of the Danes extended too much
that as historians say for some time it seemed that the future of England was to be connected
with Denmark. It lasted for several decades. In 1035, when Canute died, his sons were
unable
to keep his kingdom together, the King power was weakened and Denmark fell into parts. So
thei was an opportunity for English nobility to have a King of their royal dynasty. In 1042
they proclaimed Edward the Confessor King of England. He was a representative of Godwin
royal line. Edward was not a strong ruler, he was a man of rather a weak character and he
devoted much time to religion, and didn’t devote much time to state affairs. He had several
statesmen who helped him in his state affairs. One of the peculiarities of his biography was
that King Edward had been reared in France. When part of England was under the Danish
law, he was in France.
Lecture №32

Plan: The Middle English Period. The Alphabet. Literature.

As to the alphabet, there were some important changes in the system of spelling and the
alphabet. Some symbols were not used any longer: _ _ _. On the other hand they introduced
some other new symbols: k v and some others. Some symbols changed their sound value: y
[U (умляут) – I]. There was also an important in the very way of spelling certain sounds.
The introduction of digraphs (двухбуквенное обозначение одной фонемы): vowel
digraphs (ee…) and consonant digraphs (sh, ch…).Writings. The number of writings had
considerably increased, esp. Towards the end of the Middle English Period, when parchment
(пергамент) was replaced by paper. If we consider the development of the language and the
development of writings, we should divide the Middle English Period into 2 subperiods:
early and late.
At the beginning of the Middle English Period we find that in literature in writings they
continued the old Anglo-Saxon tradition: they mostly wrote religious poems, tents, gospels
and in the very way they wrote them it was also a continuation of the Anglo-Saxon tradition
–that is poems were written in alliterative form. A typical example of it is the poem, which is
called “Ormullum” - it was a poetic interpretation of the gospel written by Orm. We can’t
say, that this poem is a work of art, but it is a typical example of the continuation of the A.
-S.
Tradition, born in style and form. As to continuation of the A-Saxon tradition in prose, we
find it in chronicles, which were renewed after the break. The chronicle, which covers the
late
period, is referred to as “Petersburg Chronicle”. In the middle of the early Middle English
Period we already come across new trends and developments in literature. English literature
of that period was greatly influenced by French literature. In French literature the main genre
of the time was chivalry romance (рыцарские романы). These were poems, which mostly
described the life of knights. We find a number of romance poems in England in English,
however at the beginning of the development of this genre the poems were written mostly in
French and in Latin (ballads), towards the end of the Middle English Period there appeared
quite a number of them – even some cycles in English. One of the most important poems of
the 1st part of Middle English Period was the poem “But” written by Layoman, it is a poetic
interpretation of another work, which was written in French on the history of England. The
56
original author traces the English Royal life to the times of Эней (Трои). It is one of the most
remarkable poems, however it is not as great as Beowulf or Canterbury tales. In it we see the
process of development of the English poetic language in the making. In it we see different
devices: alliteration and syllabic strictness. Many later plots were derived from this poem.
The
second part of the Middle English Period – Late Middle English Period – is usually referred
to
as medieval noon, flourish. It’s the second part of the 13th century. As far as poetry is
concerned, we should mention Jeffrey Chaucer, John Gower and an anonymous writer,
William Langland (an allegoric poem “Vision of Piers the Ploughman” – “Видение Петра
пахаря”, It’s a great work of art; it is written in alliterative style; it is one of the first works of
art in which the author voices his protest against inequality, exploitation. In medieval
literature we find a new ideaxrial disconnect, which can’t be seen in the Old English Period.

Another important work of that period was a prosaic work – a translation of the Bible, made
be John Wiclif and his followers. He was an outstanding man; he was one of the fathers of
the
Reformation in England. This translation is usually considered to be a work of art, because
the
quality of the translation is such, that makes us think that it is a work of art, a splendid
sample
of medieval literature. J. Chaucer (1340-1380) – a man of genius. He was an outstanding
statesman, a man of great courage, wish, irony; he is of course also a writer of genius. He
wrote several poems. The greatest of which is the famous poem, a real masterpiece – “The
Canterbury tales”. It is a long poem, which is written in iambic pentameter (пяти-строчный
ямб). The language of the poem is quite modern. Originally he wanted to write 32 parts in it,
but he managed to write only 24. In the prologue to the poem he describes a group of
pilgrims
who are on their way to Canterbury. Since there were no cars, they travelled either on foot or
on horse. And in order not to feel very dull on their way, they decided to tell stories of their
life and other lives. This is an encyclopedia of the life of that time. Chaucer described all the
layers of society. Chaucer’s vocabulary is very rich and picturesque. He used words form
different dialects. The situation in the country couldn’t but tell on the linguistic situation in
the country, which was three-lingual at that time. By the 14th century French had lost its
significance and English became the state language. As far as literature is concerned, there
appeared new genres: chivalry romance (ballads, poems and stories about the heroic deeds of
the Knights). The most important change in the system of versification was the complete
change in the poetic form. In OE the main device was alliteration. The Middle English
Period
witnessed the establishment of syllabi-tonic system. The Middle English Period witnessed
the
considerable increase in the number of written documents, letters. The development of
medieval literature culminated in the second half of the 14th century. All the works were
already written in English. And this period is usually referred to as the medieval noon. Here
we find such great works as: Langland’s “Vision of Piers the Ploughman”, John Wyclif’s
translation of the Bible, the anonymous finest chivalry poem “Sir Govern and the green
57
Knights”, Sir Gower’s works, and Chaucer’s works – he wrote pamphlets, he criticized
clergy
and of course he was the author of “The Kent. Tales”.
16. The Middle English Period. The Noun.
In OE there were 9 declensions which depended on the type of stem. During the Middle
English Period the E noun lost its types of declensions so that towards the end of the Middle
English Period (by the 14th century). They didn’t distinguish declensions. 4 case system
66
turned into 2 case system: N. Fissh fisshes (goes back to the -a-stem declension)G. Fisshes
fisshes (goes back to the -a-stem declension) The plural and the genitive of the unified
paradime goes back to the old «-as reduction» of the -a-stem declension. As to the irregular
nouns, they have always been irregular (non-standard). Together with the loss of endings the
E noun lost its category of grammatical gender. The weak -n-stems declension resisted
analogy longer than all the other stems. The development of the noun declension lasted for
about 3 centuries and the -n-stems resisted unification longer than other stems. Now: ox -
oxen (настоящее только это), brother - brethren, child - children and in some dialects: horse
- horsen.
17. The Middle English Period. The Adjective.
The adjective began to lose its markers even earlier than the noun. The process began at the
end of The OLD ENGLISH PERIOD. The development went along the same lines: that is -
the reduction of the endings led to dropping and simplification. The adjective lost the
distinction between the strong and the weak declension. The adjective markers of agreement
with the noun. Towards the end of the Middle English Period we find only some relics of the
old system of declension: in Chaucer’s works - -e goode - the plural of the strong declension,
but it was already occasional. As to the degrees of comparison alongside the old system with
the suffixes er, est there developed a new way - the analytical way with «more, most». The
development was to some extent influenced by the French language. So towards the end of
the Middle English Period we had two parallel ways of the formation of decrees of
comparison. However even at the beginning of the NEP there wasn’t a fixed rule as to which
of the two forms to use. (Shakespeare - most beautifullest).
18. The Middle English Period. The Pronoun
.In OE the groups of pronouns were fewer in number. The system of the personal pronouns
had changed greatly. In the peace of the old 4-case system we find a 2-case system in ME.
The old nominative case has remained up to now except for «you» («зew») in which the old
N. R. Form was replaced by the objective case form. (старая форма «це» - is used in
dialects
and in spoken language) as to u>thou (библия + возвышенный стиль) The modern
objective
case developed from the oblique cases (the D. And the A.); with some of them (I) the D.
Case
became the unified form, with some (it) the unified for was the A. Case.As to the G. Case it
left the case system and gave rise to a new group of possessive pronouns.As to the Dem.
Pronouns like all the other declinable parts of speech they lost their case forms, their forms
of
the gender: they have preserved only the pl./sg. Forms: this - these / that-those. There was the
group of interrogative pronouns. They only changed their pronunciation. Generally they have
58
always be the same. The other groups developed during the Middle English Period. Some of
them developed as compound words.
19. The Middle English Period. The Verb.
NON - FINITE FORMS. The development of the non-finite forms: the infinitive and the
participles may well be described as gradual verbalization. The OE Infinitive was a verbal
noun. During the Middle English Period the Infinitive lost all its noun features except for
some of his syntactic functions. It’s suffix -an was reduced and dropped -an>-en>-e>zero. As
to the particle «to» it was a preposition. With the meaning of purpose (у мод. (после них)
глаголов нет «to»б т.к. Они не выражают значение цели). The same is true of the
participle. The EP lost its nominal morphological characteristic (and the category of
agreement with the noun). Alongside this loss the Infinitive and the P. Began to develop
verbal features and categories. The Gerund is a much later development. FINITE FORMS.
The classes (4 classes in OE) of verbs were in the main preserved. The speakers still
distinguished the classes. But there were certain very important developments. The number
of strong verbs was reduced from 300 in OE to 200 in ME. At the same time some strong
verbs became weak, they lost their vowel gradation and took on the dental suffix: to help, to
climb, to walk and some others. At the same time there was a mixture of classes: strong
verbs
remained strong, but they changed their class, their gradation (4th <>5th - more often): to
speak (5 в 4). As to the weak verbs the 3rd class stop existing: two classes. The suffixes were
-du and -ed. The most regular was the second weak class - it later gave us the standard suffix
-ed for standard or regular verbs. The Middle English Period witnessed the development of
weak verbs which then turned into regular verbs. A great number of verbs joined the class of
regular verbs. The new formations which joined the group of regular verbs were French (and
some other languages). As to the preterit-present verbs they preserved their modal meaning,
but their paradime had changed greatly. Towards the end of the Middle English Period they
lost their infinitive and participles and turned into defective verbs. Some of their old forms
were dropped or gave rise to other words: cunning < can (cunnan); own (owe) < ought
(aзan). As to the suppletives they have always been the same: to be, to go. THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE ANALUTICAL FORMS. In OE there were only 4 grammatical
categories. They are the Tense (Present & Preterit), the Mood, Person and Number. All of
them were synthetic.
But during the Middle English Period some other categories which were mainly analytical
appeared. One of the first to develop was the category of time correlation. In OE there were
many constructions with the verb «to have» in its main meaning +an object +an attribute,
which referred to the object (to have something done). Later this construction developed into
the Perfect Form. We see it when Participle II lost its agreement with the object and when
later the object took the position after the Participle. This process was going in the middle of
the Middle English Period => «to have done something». The Continuous forms developed
inthe same way. From a free form combination to a morphological form. In the beginning it
was
20. The Middle English Period. The Syntax.
In the main the types of the sentences and the number of the sentence remained the same. But
still there were several important changes: In connection with the decay of the synthetic
system the word order in the sentence became much more stable. Inversion (when an
adverbial modifier stood in the beginning of the sentence - like in German) still existed (till
59
the NEP). The inversion in questions established itself in the beginning of the NEP. The
auxiliary «do» became to be used during the Middle English Period towards its end. But in
the
time of Shakespeare it still could be used even in affirmative sentences, whereas by the 16th
or 17th centuries «do» as an auxiliary was used only in negative and interrogative sentences:
it became a strict rule. Maybe it is connected with the word order (the predicate should
follow
the subject even in questions), maybe for some rhythmic reasons. Together with the
development of literature, education and style concposite sentences began to develop. Their
structure became more complicated, the number of subordinate clauses increased together
with the number of conjunctions and special connectives, some of which were bookish and
developed from notional words. The difference between the compound
(сложносочиненные)
complex (сложноподчиненные) sentences became more distinct. As to the type of the
predicate the old impersonal one-member type had gone out of use completely (Him thought.
OE).
21. The Middle English Period. Word-stock.
There was a great rash of the Romane words to the language. For more than two centuries
French was the state language and it affected the English language and vocabulary in all the
spheres of life (everyday language, government, military sphere, art, fashion, meals (except
names of meat of different animals), religion and so on). About 80-85% of OE (originally
Germanic) words were lost completely or ousted by borrowings (take, call) from Danish and
French and later during the Medieval time with the development of such sciences as
medicine,
theology and philosophy when many, mostly bookish, words were borrowed. Sometimes
borrowings co-existed with the original words: begin ȳ start, commence. MEANS OF
WORDBUILDING. The old productive ways of wordbuilding (word composition and
affixation) still remained such, but there appeared some new ones: 1)conversion - it is closely
connected with the loss of endings, when words became to be root words; in ME it is
limitless
and appears to be one of the main devices. 2)shift of stress: present ȳ present - mostly in
70
borrowings. 3)abbreviations: a certain word was shortened; nowadays there are several
variants of shortening words.

Lecture № 33
Plan:The New English Period. General Characteristic.
The NEP begins in the 15th century. So the NEP is the period from the 15th century up to
our time. There are subdivisions here: - early NE, which is the period of the development of
the E nation as a nation from the political point of view and the period of the formation of the
uniform literary language and of the establishing of the literary norm.Unlike the borderline
between the ancient times and the Old English Period, and the borderline between the Old

60
English Period and the Middle English Period when there some cataclysms, battles and so
on, the borderline between the Middle English Period and the NEP is not so historically
marked.
There were no cataclysms, nevertheless some very important events and particular events
took place in the country and new conditions came into play.As early as the 13th century
within the feudal system new economic relations began to take shape. The villains were
gradually superseded by copy-holders (пожизненные арендаторы). New industries and
trade began to develop; new crafts appeared and these very new crafts began to be separated
from agriculture. Together with the decay of the feudal system, the development of new
relations within the feudal system, the development of new industries and crafts new social
groups into being: artisans, rich merchants, owners of workshops, money lenders - they were
typical of the capitalist system. It couldn’t but change the situation in the country in all its
spheres. The most crucial periods were the 15th and the 16th centuries. A new mode of
production developed rapidly, new industries sprang into existence. The development of
industry required new resources and new markets. So it was a period of great projects, of
great maritime projects. All this changes influenced the cultural situation in the country:
different regions of the country, which had been isolated before, were brought together
through commerce, transportation, trade. It stimulated the necessity to have greater contacts
and a uniform language.The process of the formation of the uniform language was further
supported by printing. The first printer was William Caxton (the second part of the 15th
century). He founded the first printing house (before that all written matter was written in
hand). Caxton printed his first book in 1476 in the London dialect which strengthened it. At
first glance it may seem that the process of the development of the national language was a
peaceful process, but in reality it was a painful process. Many people, who were more or less
concerned with writing: writers, scholars, had their hands in the development of the
language.
They had heated discussions as to how the language should develop.There were 3 main
groups of opinions: 1)the language can borrow as many words from other languages as
possible => it would enrich the language. 2)strongly against borrowings: English should
remain a monosyllabic language as it was.(Спенсер - Faire Queen - старался показать, что
он приверженец старины). 3)«leave the language as it is and let it develop by itself» (это
не
цитата!).Unification: it was a period of normalization, which achieved not by itself, but
through the activity of many people. As to the spelling, they were trying to work out certain
general fixed rules of spelling, but at the beginning of the NEP the spelling varied from
writer
to writer yet. For example, Sir John Cheke doubled his vowels to mark their length. The first
grammars and the first comprehensive and fundamental dictionaries appeared. Bullocar
«Brief
Grammar for English». New genres sprang into existence during the early NEP: the genre of
newspaper - Still and Edison - they started newspaper in England. Sentimentalism, realistic
novels began to develop. It was then that the novel was born. (рубет 17-18 вв.).
23. The Middle English Period. The Main Sound Changes.
Vowels: 1)The Great Vowel Shift (с большой буквы). It was rather lengthy: 15th century -
part of the 17th century.It affected all the long vowels. All the long vowels tended to become
more high, more narrow and more front. Those that were narrow enough turned into
61
diphthongs.a>ei (это объясняет необычное звучание английского алфавита Aa [ei]) e
(открытый) е (закрытый) i>ai o (открытый) > ou o (закрытый) > u: u>au 2).The
shortening
of «u» (до великого сдвига): a) the earlier (the 15th century); ‘u’ was shorted before the
dental sounds [t, d] e.g.: blood, flood; b) the later (the 18th century); ‘u’ was shortened
before
[k] e.g.: took. 3). The development of the short ‘a’:(in a close syllable) hag – э (before ‘l’)
hall
– o: (preserved by [w] was labialised) what – a before a combination of consonant) ask - a:
4)The development of the long ‘e’: e>e (short) before [d, t] - dental sounds; bread (но в mean
(i: по шифту). 5)Delabialization of the short ‘u’: u>^ blood - bl[^]d 6)The formation of new
diphthongs which have [нетральн] for the glide: [iэ], [ёэ], [uэ]. «a vowel + r» - it’s called
vocalization of ‘r’, but: her [h :/з:] here [hi ]; in ME her = here = [her] => if the vowel was
short, the resulting sound was a long vowel; if the vowel was long, the resulting sound was a
diphthong. Consonants: 1)the development of the sound [h], but there were also [x], [x’] (= в
немецком [ , ]) both the hard and the soft [ ]in the middle of the word were dropped causing
the lengthening of the preceding vowel thought, taught [x] (in ME) light: ME [lixt] > [lit] >
NE [lait] dropped 2)Vocalization of ‘s’ (see vowels) 3)voicing of fricatives (Verner’s law in
72
NE) fricatives [s] and [ ] were voiced, when they were preceded by an unstressed vowel: his
[z], tables [z], game cats [z] (но это слово прошло уже вторичную ассимиляцию), exhibit
[z] ȳ exhibition [s] 4)the development of the combinations [tj, sj, dj, zj] in borrowed words
(mostly French) into fricatives [ , ] and affricates: precision [з], decision [з]. There was no
development when these combinations preceded a stressen vowel tune [‘tju:n]: sugar -
исключение, sure - тоже исключение.
24. The development of Word-stock and means of Word building at the end of the
Middle English Period - at the beginning of the NEP.
The end of the Middle English Period and the beginning of the NEP and further on witnessed
an intensive development of the word-stock. It was connected with the general development
of the country, its political and social development, the development of culture and
education.The end of the Middle English Period witnessed the development of 3 sciences:
theology, medicine and philosophy (many special terms except from Latin and Greek entered
the E language and many of the have become international terms).But a real flourish is
witnessed during the beginning of the new E period and all through the NEP => it’s a period
of European Renaissance which began in Italy and flourished in many other countries.
Together with the Renaissance came great interest in culture, art, classical languages => the
revival of learning and of interest for Latin; later Italian and still later French. In the Old
English Period there were about 30000 words, whereas now we find about 50000 words.
Together with the development of the language there developed new ways of the formation
of
the new words (OE: affixation, sound gradation, word composition): 1)due to the fact that E
has become analytical - conversion developed (many words are root words which may have
diff. Functions) now it’s the main way. 2)change of stress: present - to present. 3)shortening
–
Fridge. There appeared many synonyms: sometimes they borrowed words for the nations for
which they had already words: native – colloquial, to begin - to start - to commence,
62
borrowed – bookish (native) (early borrowed) (bookish) there have appeared many
etymological doublets: they are words which have one and the same origin, but they were
borrowed at the different chronological periods: capital - chapter (a later borrowing) [tш] -
new affricate. There appeared etymological hybrids - many words were formed in which diff.
Parts have diff. Origin: beautiful - beautiful
73

Lecture №34
Plan: Characteristics Of American English
American English, variety of the English language spoken in the United States. Although all
Americans do not speak the same way, their speech has enough in common that American
English can be recognized as a variety of English distinct from British English, Australian
English, and other national varieties. American English has grown up with the country. It
began to diverge from British English during its colonial beginnings and acquired regional
differences and ethnic flavor during the settlement of the continent. Today it influences other
languages and other varieties of English because it is the medium by which the attractions of
American culture—its literature, motion pictures, and television programs—are transmitted
to
the world.
All speakers of English share a common linguistic system and a basic set of words. But
American English differs from British English, Australian English, and other national
varieties in many of its pronunciations, words, spellings, and grammatical constructions.
Words or phrases of American origin, and those used in America but not so much elsewhere,
are called Americanisms.
26. American English Pronunciation. Words. Spelling. Grammar.
In broad terms, Canadian and American speakers tend to sound like one another. They also
tend to sound different from a large group of English speakers who sound more British, such
as those in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. For example, most Canadians and
Americans pronounce an r sound after the vowel in words like barn, car, and farther, while
speakers from the British English group do not. Also, some British English speakers drop h
sounds at the beginning of words, so that he and his are pronounced as if they were spelled
ee
and is. The English spoken in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa sounds more like
British English than American English does because these varieties have had less time to
diverge from British English. The process of separate development began later in these
countries than in North America.
63
Although Canadians and Americans share many speech habits, Canadian speakers of English
sometimes tend more toward British English because of the closer historical association of
Britain with Canada. One prominent difference between American English and Canadian
English is the vowel sound in words like out and house. Americans often say that the
Canadian pronunciation sounds as if the words were spelled oot and hoose.
74
In some cases there are differences between American English and British English in the
rhythm of words. British speakers seem to leave out a syllable in words like secretary, as if it
were spelled secretry, while Americans keep all the syllables. The opposite is true of other
words, such as specialty, which Americans pronounce with three syllables (spe-cial-ty) while
British speakers pronounce it with five syllables (spe-ci-al-i-ty). Vowels and consonants may
also have different pronunciations. British speakers pronounce zebra to rhyme with Debra,
while American speakers make zebra rhyme with Libra. Canadian and British speakers
pronounce the word schedule as if it began with an sh sound, while Americans pronounce it
as
if it began with an sk sound.
The most frequently used words are shared by speakers of different varieties of English.
These words include the most common nouns, the most common verbs, and most function
words (such as pronouns, articles, and prepositions). The different varieties of English do,
however, use different words for many words that are slightly less common—for example,
British crisps for American potato chips, Australian billabong for American pond, and
Canadian chesterfield for American sofa. It is even more common for the same word to exist
with different meanings in different varieties of English. Corn is a general term in Britain,
for
which Americans use grain, while corn in American English is a specific kind of grain. The
word pond in British English usually refers to an artificial body of water, whereas ponds also
occur naturally in North America. British English chemist is the same as American English
drugstore, and in Canada people go to the druggist. Many of the words most easily
recognized as American in origin are associated with aspects of American popular culture,
such as gangster or cowboy.
American English spelling differs from British English spelling largely because of one man,
American lexicographer Noah Webster. In addition to his well-known An American
Dictionary of the English Language (1828), Webster published The American Spelling Book
(1783, with many subsequent editions), which became one of the most widely used
schoolbooks in American history. Webster’s books sought to standardize spelling in the
United States by promoting the use of an American language that intentionally differed from
British English. The development of a specifically American variety of English mirrored the
new country’s separate political development. Webster’s most successful changes were
spellings with or instead of our (honor, labor for the British honour, labour); with er instead
of re (center, theater for the British centre, theatre); with an s instead of a c (defense, license
for the British defence, licence); with a final ck instead of que (check, mask for the British
75
cheque, masque); and without a final k (traffic, public, now also used in British English, for
the older traffick, publick). Later spelling reform created a few other differences, such as
program for British programme. Canadian spelling varies between the British and American
forms, more British in eastern Canada and more American in western Canada.
64
The grammar of educated speakers of English differs little among national varieties. In the
speech of people with less access to education, grammatical variations in regional and social
varieties of American English are very common as normal, systematic occurrences (not as
errors). One major difference between British and American English is that the two attach
different verb forms to nouns that are grammatically singular but plural in sense. In
American
English, the team is…, or the government is… (because they are viewed as single entities),
but
in British English, the team are…, or the government are… (because teams and government
are understood to consist of more than one person). Sometimes function words are used
differently: The British stay in hospital but Americans stay in the hospital.

Lecture №35

Plan: History Of American English. Territorial Expansion and Urbanization

American English shows many influences from the different cultures and languages of the
people who settled in North America. The nature of the influence depends on the time and
the
circumstances of contact between cultures. Colonial Period. The first settlements on the East
Coast of North America in the 17th century were composed mostly of British subjects.
Accounting for about 90 percent of the people, the British vastly outnumbered French and
German settlers. English was therefore the only real candidate for a common American
language. The settlers spoke varieties of English from various parts of England, but in the
creation of American English, these varieties were leveled—that is, their differences largely
disappeared. Michel Guillaume Jean de Crиvecoeur, a French-born writer who published
under the name J. Hector St. John de Crиvecoeur and became famous for his book Letters
from an American Farmer (1782), describes the desire of settlers to “become an American,”
their common ideal to own and work their own farms, without prejudice toward neighbors
whatever their neighbors’ religion or national origin. This shared goal encouraged
development of a shared variety of the language, which came to be enriched by contributions
from many cultures.
As the European settlers came into contact with Native Americans, American English
collected a large stock of Native American place names (Allegheny, Chicago, Mississippi,
Potomac) and Native American names for things not found in Europe or Asia (moose,
76
opossum, squash, moccasin, tomahawk, totem). Sometimes Native American words were
spelled by settlers so that they looked more like English words; woodchuck, for example,
probably comes from the Cree word wuchak. Cultural exchange with Native Americans was
more limited than might be expected, because diseases brought by Spanish explorers and
65
European settlers greatly reduced the Native American population in eastern North America
during early settlement.
In the 18th century people from Ireland and Northern Europe joined the British settlers. By
the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783), there were comparable numbers of British
settlers and settlers from other European countries. Some Europeans formed separate
communities, such as the Pennsylvania Germans, but most mixed with British settlers and
contributed to American English words from their own languages. Examples include
pumpkin, bayou, and bureau from French; cookie, waffle, and boss from Dutch; and pretzel,
pinochle, and phooey from German. Scottish and Irish settlers were already English speakers,
but they influenced American English with features from their own varieties—for example,
pronunciation of r after vowels (while many British English speakers were losing the r after
vowels) and double verb forms like might could.
Africans were imported as slaves throughout the early settlement of North America. By the
American Revolution one-quarter of the American population consisted of African
Americans, and as much as 95 percent of the population living in plantation areas was
African
American. Slaves were not allowed to share in Crиvecoeur’s American ideal, but they
learned
American English from their owners, overseers, and other slaves. Some slaves may have
developed creole languages on plantations. A creole is made of words from different
languages—in this case, English and the African languages spoken by the slaves. It also has
its own grammar. Over time, especially after slavery was abolished, the language of African
Americans came to have fewer creole characteristics. One authentic American plantation
creole remains: Gullah, spoken by African Americans in communities on the Sea Islands off
South Carolina and Georgia. African words in American English include gumbo, okra, and
voodoo.
During the 19th and 20th centuries settlers pushed westward as the United States acquired
control of land from the French, the Spanish, and the Native Americans. Crиvecoeur’s
American ideal of separate farms lasted well into the 20th century, and a shared sense of
purpose maintained social pressure for immigrants to participate in American language and
culture. This period also saw the rise of great cities, first in the East and later in other
regions.
77
Development of industries brought opportunities for immigrants to work in cities instead of
on farms, and the resulting concentration of people in urban areas allowed for maintenance of
immigrant languages in some quarters, while most people still found it best to learn and use
American English for everyday discourse.
At the same time that settlers from other countries were adapting to English, they were
influencing it as well. Settlement of the West and Southwest by northern Europeans meant
contact with the Spanish-speaking settlers who were already there. As a result, American
English adopted many words commonly associated with Spanish, such as enchilada, pueblo,
sombrero, and tortilla, and also many words not usually thought of as Spanish, such as
alfalfa, cockroach, marina, plaza, and ranch. Scandinavians established homesteads in the
upper Midwest and gave American English the words smorgasbord and sauna. Other
European immigrants were drawn primarily to urban areas. Jewish immigrants are
particularly
66
associated with New York City, for example, and provided such words as kosher and kibbitz.
Polish immigrants, strongly associated with Chicago, provided kielbasa and pierogi; Chinese
immigrants, associated with San Francisco or Los Angeles, chow mein and mahjong; Italian
immigrants, associated with many cities, contributed the words spaghetti and pizza. Many
other cultural groups have also had an impact on American English, often more local than
national, as, for example, Cubans in Miami, Florida.

Recommended literature
1. Barber Ch. Linguistic Change in Present-Day English. London, 1964.
2. Baugh A. History of the English Language. New York, 1959.
3. Brook G. History of the English Language. London, 1960.
4. Burlakova V.V. Contribution of English and American Linguists to the Theory of
Phrase. M., 1971.
5. Ilyish B. The Structure of Modern English. M.;L., 1971.
6. Ilysh B. History of the English Language. L., 1973.
7. Jespersen O. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. London, 1954.
8. Jespersen O. Growth and Structure of the English Language. Oxford, 1945; 1958.
9. Jespersen O. Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. London; New York,
1934.
10. Pyles Th. The Origins and Development of the English Language. New York, 1964.
11. Quirk R.S., Wrenn C.L. An Old English Grammar. London, 1958.
12. Rastorguyeva T.A. A History of English. M., 1983.
13. Stevick R.D. English and Its History. The Evolution of Language. Boston, 1968.
14. Strang B.A. A History of English. London, 1970.
15. Wyld H. History of modern Colloquial English. Oxford, 1953. 16. Аракин В.Д.
История английского языка. М., 1985. 17. Арнольд И.В., Дьяконова Н.Я. Три века
английской прозы. Л., 1967 (на английском языке). 18. Ахманова О.С. О
принципах и методах лингвистического исследования. М.,
1966. 19. Бруннер К. История английского языка. М., 1955. Т.1; М., 1956. Т.2.
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20. Зятковская Р.Г. Суффиксальная система современного английского языка.
М.,
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1971. 21. Иванова И.П. и др. Структура английского имени существительного. М.,
1975. 22. Иванова И.П. История английского языка. СПб.: Лань, 1999. 23.
Иванова И.П., Чахоян Л.П. История английского языка. М., 1976. 24. Ильиш Б.А.
История английского языка. М., 1968. 25. Пауль Г. Принципы историии языка
М., 1960. 26. Секирин В.П. Заимствования в английском языке. Киев, 1964. 27.
Смирницкий А.И. Древнеанглийский язык. М., 1955. 28. Смирницкий А.И.
История английского языка. М., 1965. 29. Смирницкий А.И. Морфология
английского языка. М., 1959. 30. Смирницкий А.И. Синтаксис английского
языка. М., 1957. 31. Цвет Л.Я. Основы истории германских языков. Тюмень:
Скорпион, 1998. 32. Шевякова В.Е. Современный английский язык. М., 1980. 33.
Ярцева В.Н. Историческая морфология английского языка. М.; Л., 1960. 34.
Ярцева В.Н. Исторический синтаксис английского языка. М.; Л., 1961. 35.
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Test your knowledge - Self assessment

Module Test on Lectures (1-5)
(Old English/Middle English periods)
1. What are the greatest events that stand out clearly among the highlights in the
history of the English language? Name at least 10 events.
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
10points
2. Write the data of the Old and the Middle English periods
Old English period __________
Middle English period __________
5points
3. Name the four Old English major dialects.
1…………….. 2…………….. 3………….. 4…………….
4points
4. Name the most ancient population on the British Isles.
………………… 2points
5. What words were transferred into the Old English language after the first Roman
colonists left Britain in the 1st century AD? Name at least three words.
a)……………….. b)………………. c)………………
6points
6. Enumerate the four cases Old English nouns were inflected for :
a) ………….. b) ………….. c) …………. d) ………….
8points
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7. Find the odd one out.
One result of the Norman Conquest of 1066 was:
1. to change the writing
2. to place all four Old English dialects more or less on a level
3. the seven long vowels of Chaucer's speech had already begun to shift
4. West Saxon lost its supremacy and the centre of culture and learning gradually shifted
from
Winchester to London
4points
8. Testing the Old and the Middle English Periods
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1. When was the Roman withdrawal from Britain?
a) 449 b) 436 c) 450
2. When does Alfred become King of Wessex?
a) 845 b) 860 c) 871
3. The Venerable Bede publishes ’The Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ in Latin.
a) 731 b) 742 c) 738
4. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain begins
a) 445 b) 449 c) 456
5) Roman invasion of Britain under Julius Caesar
a) 55 BC b) 50 BC c) 68 BC
6)English replaces Latin as the medium of instruction in schools.
a) 1348 b) 1452 c) 1390
7) The Great Vowel Shift begins.
a) c.1450 b) c.1400 c) c. 1300
8) The Black Death kills one third of the British population.
a) 1340-45 b) 1350-55 c) 1349-50
9) Wyclif publishes his English translation of the Bible.
a) 1275 b) 1375 c) 1384
10) Chaucer begins the Canterbury Tales
a) 1392 b) 1388 c) 1360
20points
9. Enumerate the seven kingdoms united by Alfred the Great in 878.
1. …………………….
2. …………………….
3. …………………….
4. …………………….
5. …………………….
6. …………………….
7. …………………….
14points
10. Write about the main characteristics of the Old English period.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
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…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
10points
11. Circle the correct number. How many classes are Old English strong verbs
distinguished
between?.
a) 5 b) 3 c)6 d) 7 e)4 f)8
1point
12. Write about the main characteristics of the Middle English period.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
10points
13. Write the origin of the following words on the lines.
1. attorney, court, butcher, __________________
2. skin, husband, reindeer __________________
3. testament, temporal, apocalypse __________________
4. bard, clan, loch __________________
5. shore, trade, clock __________________
6. wallet, boy, kidney __________________
6points
Module Test on Lectures (6-10)
(Middle English/Modern English periods)
1. Which are the three rich sources of character and adventure the first English
romance
drew from?
a) ………………………………. b) …………………………… c) ………………………….
6points
2. What are the main changes from Old English to Middle English Verbs?
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
5points
3. Who was the first printer stabilized the written language and its spelling and what
were
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the greatest advantages of establishing it?
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
5points
4. What are the main characteristic features of Early Modern English Grammar?
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
10points
5. What are the origins of the following words borrowed from other languages?
1) cigar, mosquito, tornado, cockroach ………………………….
2) participate, accommodate, global, collide ………………………….
3) mango, marmalade, veranda ………………………….
4) carnival, umbrella, piano, opera ………………………….
5) favourite, police, soup, engage ………………………….
10points
6. Testing Modern English Period
1. William Tyndale translates the New Testaments
a) 1500 b) 1510 c) 1525
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2. Shakespeare born
a) 1564 b) 1610 c) 1616
3. Publication of the first daily, English Language Newspaper, the Daily Courant, in
London
a) 1702 b) 1707 c) 1525
4. Noah Webster publishes his dictionary
a) 1818 b) 1820 c) 1828
5) British Broadcasting Corporation founded
a) 1887 b) 1922 c) 1920
10points
7. What is RP? Write about the main features of RP. (Received Pronunciation)
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
10points
8. Describe the main characteristics of American English, Australian and New-
Zealand English
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
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………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
10points
9. How do Pidgin and Creole develop? What are the most widespread areas in the
world the mentioned languages occur?
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
10points
10. What is the future of the English language?
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
10points
11. Two of these works are not Shakespeare’s works. Which are they?
a) Hamlet b) King Lear c) Faerie Queen d) Taming of the Shrew
e) Volpone f) Much Ado about Nothing
4points

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