The history of English - Курс лекций

OE macian, land, NE make, land). Table 1 Splitting of [a] and [a:] in Early Old English Change illustrated Examples PG OE other OG languages OE NE a ? Gt ?ata O Icel dagr ??t d?g that day a o Gt mann(a) mon man O Icel land land land a Gt magan magan may Gt dagos dagas days ?: a: o: OHGdar OHG slafen OHG mano ??r sl?pan mona there sleep moon OI cel mana?r mona? month Development of Diphthongs The PG diphthongs (or sequences of monophthongs) [ei, ai, iu, eu, au] - uderwent regular independent changes in Early OE; they took place in all phonetic conditions irrespective of environment. The diphthongs with i-glide were monophthongised into [i:] and [a:], respectively; the diphthongs in u-glide were reflected_a&_long__diphthongs [io:], [eo:] and [au] >[ea:]. If the sounds in PG were not diphthongs but sequences of two separate phonemes, the changes should be defined as phonologisation of vowel sequences. This will mean that these changes increased the number of vowel phonemes in the language. Moreover, they introduced new distinctive features into the vowel system by setting up vowels with diphthongal glides; henceforth, monophthongs were opposed to diphthongs. All the changes described above were interconnected. Their independence has been interpreted in different ways. The changes may have started with the fronting of [a] (that is the change of [a] to [?]), which caused a similar development in the long vowels: [a:]>[?:], and could also bring about the fronting of [a] in the biphonemic vowel sequence [a u], which became [?a:], or more precisely [?: :], with the second element weakened. The diphthongs [ie, ie:] (which could also appear from diphthongisation after palatal consonants) were largely due to palatal mutation and became phonemic in the same way, though soon they were confused with [y, y:]. (Traces of palatal mutation are preserved in many modern words and forms, e.g. mouse - mice, foot-feet, tale - tell, blood- bleed; despite later phonetic changes, the original cause of the inner change is t-umlaut or palatal mutation.) The dating, mechanism and causes of palatal mutation have been a matter of research and discussion over the last hundred years. Palatal mutation in OE had already been completed by the time of the earliest written records; it must have taken place during the 7th c., though later than all the Early OE changes described above. This relative dating is confirmed by the fact that vowels resulting from other changes could be subjected to palatal mutation, e. g. OE ieldra (NE elder) had developed from *ealdira by palatal mutation which occurred when the diphthong [ea] had already been formed from [?] by breaking (in its turn [?] was the result of the fronting of Germanic [a]). The successive stages of the change can be shown as follows: fronting - breaking - palatal mutation [a] > [?] > [ea] > [ie] The generally accepted phonetic explanation of palatal mutation is that the sounds [i] or [j] palatalised the preceding consonant, and that this consonant, in its turn, fronted and raised the root-vowel. This mechanistic theory is based on the assumed workings of the speech organs.. An alternative explanation, sometimes called psychological or mentalistic, is that the speaker unconsciously anticipates the [i] and [j] in pronouncing the root-syllable - and through anticipation adds an. i-glide to the root-vowel. The process is thus subdivided into several stages, e.g. *domjan >*doimjan >*doemjan >*deman (NE deem). It has been found that some OE spellings appear to support both these theories, e.g. OE secgan has a palatalised consonant [gg‘] shown by the digraph cg; Coinwulf, a name in BEOWULF, occurring beside another spelling Cenwulf, shows the stage [oi:] in the transition from PG [o:] to OE [oe:], and [e:]: OE cen bold. The diphthongoids resulting from palatal mutation developed in conformity with the general tendency of the vowel system: in Early OE diphthongal glides were used as relevant phonemic distinctive features. In later OE the diphthongs showed the first signs of contraction (or monophthongisation) as other distinctive features began to predominate: labialisation and vowel length. Weak and Strong Declension As in other OG languages, most adjectives in OE could be declined in two ways: according to the weak and to the strong declension. The formal differences between the declensions, as well as their origin, were similar to those of the noun declensions. The strong and weak declensions arose due to the use of several stem-forming suffixes in PG: vocalic a-, o-, u- and i- and consonantal n-. Accordingly, there developed sets of endings of the strong declension mainly coinciding with the endings of a-stems of nouns for adjectives in the Masc. and Neut. and of o-stems - in the Fem., with some differences between long-and short-stemmed adjectives, variants with j- and w-, monosyllabic and polysyllabic adjectives and some remnants of other stems. Some endings in