LANGUAGE CHANGE

Sources of language change

From the time immemorial, people have been concerned about language
change and that languages become different as they change. The main
sources available for language change are as follow.

Analogy and borrowing

A type of language change in which some forms are changed merely to make
them more look like other forms. Speakers sometimes react to the presence
of irregularities in their language by eliminating them and making the
irregular forms regular. In other words, a kind of change that can be brought
of as ‘economy of memory’ result in a reduction of the number
Let say the paradigm jump, jumps, jumping and jumped, we can construct
such proportional equations as following: Jump: jumps =help: x; jump:
jumped = help : y; etc. And we can solve these equations, assigning to the
unknown quantities (x,y,etc.) their appropriate values (helps, helped, etc.).
Analogists are of the view that the relation between form and meaning is
governed by the principle of proportional regularity.
English language has the majority of regular verbs, which are conveniently
referred to as weak verbs. None regular verbs are then referred as strong
verbs.
The majority of the verbs referred to as weak forms can be constituted by
adding suffixes, for examples; Jump-s, jump-ed, work-s, work-ed; while the
strong verbs show a difference of one kind or another in the vowels of
corresponding present tense and past tense stems, and usually lack the past
tense suffix characteristic of the weak verbs. The strong verbs fall into
several subclasses according to the nature of the vowel alternation which
distinguishes their present-tense forms from past tense forms. And they are
commonly regarded as irregular verbs. They are certainly less regular than
the weak verbs and have been on the increase for centuries. This has been
the synchronically productive rule. The rule of constructing past tense form
of the new verb is evident partly from the process of language acquisition by
a child and partly from the adult speaker’s ability when he applies this rule to
every verb he meets. Children apply this rule while acquiring the language
not only to a large number of correct forms but also to incorrect form by
adding suffixation as ‘rided’ or ‘‘goed’.
There few instances of weak verb having been made into strong verbs by the
force of analogy in the history of English. For example dived---dove in some
of the American dialects. However analogy has done the reverse job by
increasing the number of weak forms at the expense of strong ones.
It is worth observing that verbs of English and German show the same
phenomenon of vowel alternation is a piece of evidence that these two
language are genetically related: E. begin-s, began, begun : G. begin-t,
begann, begonn-en; E. bring-s, brought: G. bring-t, brach-te, ge-brach-t: E.
find-s, found: G. find-et, fand, ge-fund-en, etc.
Analogy has operated independently in both English and German, for
several years to reduce the incident of vowel-alternation: for example, help
is weak in English as help, helped, whereas the related verb ‘hilfen in
German is strong (hilf-t, half, ge-holf-en).

Borrowing
Borrowing words from other languages is another important source of new
words. Borrowing occurs when one language adds to its own lexicon a word
or morpheme from another language, often altering its pronunciation to fit
the phonological rules of the borrowing language. Most languages are
borrowers, so the lexicon can be divided into native and non-native words or
loan words. A native word is one whose history or etymology can be traced
back to earliest known stages of the language.
A language may borrow a word directly or indirectly. A direct borrowing
means that the borrowed item is a native word in the language from which it
is borrowed. Feast was borrowed directly from French and can be traced
back to Latin festum. On other hand, the word algebra was borrowed from
Spanish, which in turn had borrowed it from Arabic. Thus algebra was
indirectly borrowed from Arabic.
English has borrowed extensively. Of the 20,000 or so words in common use,
about three fifth are borrowed.
English has extensively borrowed words from French language after Norman
Conquest in 1066. French remained the language of all affairs of state and
for most commercial, social, and cultural matters for three centuries. During
these three centuries, vast numbers of French words entered English, of
which the following are representatives:
Government, crown, prince, estate, parliament, nation, jury, judge, crime,
sue, attorney, saint, miracle, charity, court, virgin, value,
pray, mercy, religion, etc.
Until the Norman Conquest, Englishman would say, he ate ox, sheep, pig.
They learnt their names from Norman, beef, pork, mutton, etc.
The pronouns, they, their, and them were borrowed from the Scandinavian
language.
Clan, slogan and whisky are the words borrowed from Welsh, Scots Gaelic, or
Irish.
Dutch was a source of borrowed words, too, many of which are related to
shipping: buoy, freight, leak, pump, yacht.
From Italian many musical terms were borrowed like: opera, piano, balcony,
etc.
Words having to do with mathematics and chemistry were borrowed
indirectly from the Arabic language as: alcohol, algebra, cipher and zero, etc.
From Greek came dram, comedy, tragedy, scene, botany, zoology, and
atomic, etc.
Latin loans are numerous. They include: bonus, scientific, exit, describe, etc.
And many more were borrowed from other languages from the world
languages.
Sound change had also great effect on English language. In old English [sk]
changed into [ ] in modern English (shirt, ship, shed, etc.) though there are
some exception of [sk] like (skill, skirt, sky, etc.) Such words were borrowed
from one or other of the Scandinavian dialects.
Loan translation are compound words or expression whose parts are
translated directly into the borrowing language. Marriage of convenience is a
loan-translation borrowed from French mariage de convenance.

Zulfiqar Ali
City University, Peshawar

THE CAUSES OF LANGUAGE CHANGE

Why languages change in the course of time? There is no certain

answer to it. Theories have been put forward but nothing has been
discovered out of this fact. Language changes do not happen suddenly.
Speakers of English did not wake up one morning and decided to use the
word beef for ‘ox meat,’ nor do all the children of one particular generation
grow up to adopt a new word. Changes are more gradual, particularly
changes in the phonological and syntactic system. Changes often occur
between sound change on the one hand and grammatical and lexical
changes on other and between internal and external factors.
A basic cause of change is the way children acquire the language. No one
teaches a child the rules of the grammar. Each child constructs a personal
grammar alone, generalizing rules from the linguistic input received. The
child’s language develops in stages until it approximates the adult grammar.
The rules children acquire can not be said as exact as adults’. Children
sometime receive diverse input. Certain rules may be simplified or over
generalized, and vocabularies may show small differences that accumulate
over several generations. The children may learn from their elders
sometimes ‘it’s I’ and at other time times ‘it’s me’. When the child is grown
up, he may use only ‘me’. In such cases, the grammar will have changed.
Chaucer wrote about two centuries before Shakespeare, and his English is
far more difficult to understand: scholars call the English of this period
MIDDLE ENGLISH. Part of the problem, of course, is the strange spelling of
the time (strange to us, that is). You can probably recognize curteisye as
‘courtesy’, vileynye as ‘villainy’, reherce as ‘rehearse’, ellis as ‘else’ and
vntrewe as ‘untrue’, but you might have been defeated by euerich for ‘every’
and rudelich for ‘rudely’. But, even with the spellings cleared up, you would
still find great difficulty in making sense of this passage. For one thing, some
of Chaucer’s words have changed their meanings since he used them: when
Chaucer wrote ‘villainy’, he meant merely ‘incivility’, ‘lack of good breeding’;
when he wrote ‘cheer’, he meant ‘state of mind’; when he wrote ‘rehearse’
he meant ‘repeat’. For another, some of his words have disappeared from
the language: the word arette, for example, meant ‘consider’, ‘reckon’, and
its strangely formed negative narette, which occurs in this passage,
therefore meant ‘not to consider’. This word had completely dropped out of
use by about 1650.

Haplology: The lose of one or

In linguistics, hypercorrection is defined as usage of pronunciation or

linguistic rule that many informed users of a language consider incorrect, but
that the speaker or writer uses through misunderstanding of prescriptive
rules, often combined with a desire to seem formal or educated. For
example, Jack Lynch, assistant professor of English at Rutgers University,
says that correction of "me and you" to "you and I" as subject leads people
to "internalize the rule that 'you and I' is somehow more proper, and they
end up using it in places where they shouldn't – such as 'he gave it to you
and I' when it should be 'he gave it to you and me.'"

Linguistic hypercorrection: Hypercorrection an attempt to achieve formality

even in constructions in which whom is used as subject. For instance, many
might be tempted to use whom in She’s the person whom I believe is in
charge, even though technically whom is replacing a subject form, not an
object form: I believe that she [not her] is in charge. Over time, however,
the choice between who and whom will stop being an issue altogether:
whom will die out of English, resulting in the passing on of Who do you trust?
as a type of normal rather than altered replication. This process, Croft
argues, parallels the transmission of human genomes.

An example of this is the analogical extension of the word which occurs

when a real or imagined grammatical or phonetical rule is applied in a
mistaken or non-standard context, so that a desire to be "correct" leads to
an incorrect result: Faced with enough exceptions to a rule, the speaker
might mistake the exception for the general rule, applying it to situations
where it never was meant to occur. For example, a person might be told that
the past tense of "to take" is "took", not "taked", and the past tense of "to
shake" is "shook", not "shaked". He might therefore assume that all verbs
ending in "-ake" have "-ook" for their past form and apply this to regular
verbs where "-aked" would be the correct ending. He would end up saying
that he "took the flour and book (rather than baked) a cake with it". A real
life example which gathered wide usage in the 20th century is to say "dove"
instead of the formerly standard "dived", emulating "drove" in relation to
"drive".

Phonetic drift: A possibility of occurring a word gradually and may interact to

produce the same kind of end-result: something usually regarded as a
regular sound.
 Internal reconstruction: It is the method of comparative method. This is
based on the conviction that synchronically observable partial regularities
and asymmetries can be explained with reference to what were fully regular,
productive processes at an earlier period of time. For example, even if we
had no comparative evidence to go on and no records of earlier stages in the
development of English, we might infer that the partial regularities evident in
the English strong verb (drive: drove: driven, ride: rode: ridden; sing: sang :
sung, ring: rang: rung; etc.) were the relics, as it were, of an earlier more
fully regular system of verb-inflection. Internal reconstruction is now a
recognized part of the methodology of historical linguistics and it has proved
its worth on several occasions.