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1、Chapter 8 Historical Linguistics: Language Through Time8.1 What is historical linguistics?It is an indisputable fact that all languages have been constantly changing through time. Essentially, modern linguistics has centered around two dimensions to deal with language change: the synchronic dimensio
2、n and the diachronic dimension. The synchronic dimension has dominantly been applied to describe and explain differences or variations within one language in different places and among different groups at the same time. The synchronic dimension is usually the topic of sociolinguistics, which will be
3、 discussed in Chapter 10. This chapter will focus on the diachronic dimension of language change. Those who study language from this latter point of view are working in the field of historical linguistics (Poole, 2000: 123). To put it more specifically, historical linguistics is the study of the dev
4、elopments in languages in the course of time, of the ways in which languages change from period to period, and of the causes and results of such changes, both outside the languages and within them (Robins, 2000: 5). 8.2 When language changes Although language change does not take place overnight, ce
5、rtain changes are noticeable because they usually conflate with a certain historical period or major social changes caused by wars, invasions and other upheavals. The development of the English language is a case in point. Generally speaking, the historical development of English is divided into thr
6、ee major periods: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Modern English (ModE). 500 (the time when Germanic tribes invaded Britain)Old English 1100 (the time after the Norman Conquest in 1066) Middle English 1500 (the beginning of Renaissance and the first printing press set up in 1476 in Englan
7、d) Modern English the present In about the year 449 AD, the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes from northern Europe invaded Britain and became the founders of the English nation. Their language, with the Germanic language as the source, is called, the name derived from the first tribe, the
8、Angles. It had a vocabulary inherited almost entirely from Germanic or formed by compounding or derivation from Germanic elements (Dension, 1993: 9). From this early variety of Englisc, many of the most basic terms in the English language came into being: mann (“man”), cild (“child”), mete (“food”),
9、 etan (“eat”), drincan (“drink”) and feohtan (“fight”). From the sixth to the eighth centuries AD, the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, and a number of terms, mainly to do with religion, philosophy and medicine, were borrowed into English from Latin, the language of religion. The origins
10、 of the modern words angel, bishop, candle, church, martyr, priest and school all date from that period. From the eighth century to the tenth century, the Vikings from northern Europe invaded England and brought words such as give, law, leg, skin, sky, take and they from their language, Old Norse (Y
11、ule, 2000: 218). In the year of 1066 AD, the Norman French conquered the whole of England, bringing French speakers into the ruling class and then pushing French to the position as the “prestige language” for the next two hundred years. This language was used by the nobility, the government, the law
12、 and civilized behavior, providing the source of such modern terms as army, court, defense, prison and tax (Yule, 2000: 219). Yet the language of the peasants remained English.By the end of the ME period, when English had once again become the first language of all classes, the bulk of OE lexis had
13、become obsolete, and some ten thousand French words had been incorporated into English, maybe 75% surviving into ModE (Baugh & Cable, 2001:174). During the early ModE period, which coincided with the Renaissance period, English borrowed enormous lexical resources from the classical languages of Lati
14、n and Greek. And, later on as the British Empire expanded, the range of lexical influence widened to ever more exotic source languages (Dension, 1993: 13). The types of borrowed words noted above are examples of external changes in English, and the internal changes overlap with the historical period
15、s described above. According to Fennell (2005: 2), the year 500 AD marks the branching off of English from other Germanic dialects; the year 1100 AD marks the period in which English lost the vast majority of its inflections, signaling the change from a language that relied upon morphological marking of grammatical roles to one that relied on word order to maintain basic grammatical relations; and the year 1500 AD marks the end of major French influence on the language and the time when the use of English was established in all communicative contexts. Thus, those internal change
