Scandinavian borrowings in ME

The Scandinavian invasion and the subsequent settlement of the Scandinavians on the territory of England, the constant contacts and intermixture of the English and the Scandinavians brought about many changes in different spheres of the English language: wordstock, grammar and phonetics. The relative ease of the mutual penetration of the languages was conditioned by the circumstances o\' the Anglo-Scandinavian contacts.

Due to contacts between the Scandinavians and the English-speaking people many words were borrowed from the Scandinavian language, for example:

Nouns: law, fellow, sky, skirt, skill, Adjectives: big, week, wrong, ugly, twin

Verbs: call, cast, take, happen, Pronouns: they, them, their The conditions and the consequences of various borrowings were different.

1. Sometimes the English language borrowed a word for which it had no synonym. These words were simply added to the vocabulary. Examples: law, fellow

2.The English synonym was ousted by the borrowing. Scandinavian taken(to take) and callen(to call) ousted the English synonyms nitnanand clypian,respectively.

3. Both the words, the English and the corresponding Scandinavian, are preserved, but they became different in meaning. Compare Modern English native words and Scandinavian borrowings:

heaven . sky

4. Sometimes a borrowed word and an English word are etymological doublets, as words originating from the same source in Common Germanic.

shirt skirt

5. Sometimes an English word and its Scandinavian doublet were the same in meaning but slightly different phonetically, and the phonetic form of the Scandinavian borrowing is preserved in the English language, having ousted the English counterpart. For example, Modern English to give, to getcome from the Scandinavian gefa,geta, which ousted the English 3iefanand 3ietan. respectively. Similar Modern English words: gift, forget, guild, gate, again.

6. There may be a shift of meaning. Thus, the word dreamoriginally meant "joy, pleasure"; under the influence of the related Scandinavian word it developed its modern meaning.

Indo-European, Common Germanic and Classical Old English phonemic systems compared

Indo-European:

The traditional reconstruction (supported by Brugmann, ) promotes ten Indo-European vowels (5 long and 5 short) plus 'schwa', syllabic sonants (again long and short) and 2 semivowels, three sets of Indo-European stops (voiced, voiced aspirated, voiceless) plus palatal and labiovelar consonants. According to "traditionalists", there was only one spirant in Indo-European: *s. Antoine Meillet noted five main peculiarities of the Indo-European phonetic system:

1. A rich system of stops
2. Lack of spirants
3. Frequent *s and absence of its voiced counterpart *z (*z could appear only as an allophone of *s in certain positions)
4. Poor vocalism (for only *e, *o and rare *a can be considered as pure vowels, while *i, *u are partly sonants)
5. A complex system of sonants

Here is the traditional sight in charts:

Vowels

Vowel diphthongs

Ai, ei, oi, au, eu, ou

Syllabic sonants

r, l, n, m, r', l', n', m'

Consonants

Common Germanic:

Consonants

The table below^[11] lists the consonantal phonemes of Proto-Germanic classified by reconstructed pronunciation. If two phonemes appear in the same box, the first of each pair is voiceless, the second is voiced. Phones written in parentheses represent allophones and are not independent phonemes. For descriptions of the sounds and definitions of the terms, follow the links on the headings.^[26]

Notes:

1. [ŋ] was an allophone of /n/ before velar obstruents.

2. [ŋʷ] was an allophone of /n/ before labial-velar obstruents.

3. [β], [ð] and [ɣ] were allophones of /b/, /d/ and /ɡ/ in certain positions (see below).

4. The phoneme written as f was certainly still realised as a bilabial fricative (/ɸ/) in Proto-Germanic. This can be deduced from the fact that in Gothic, word-final b devoices to f, and also from Old Norse spellings such as aptr [ɑɸtr], where the letter p rather than the more usual f was used to denote the bilabial realisation before /t/.

Vowels

Proto-Germanic had four short vowels^[34] five or six long vowels, and at least one "overlong" or "trimoric" vowel. The exact phonetic quality of the vowels is uncertain. All vowels could also be nasalized when word-final.

PIE ə a o merged into PGmc a; PIE ā ō merged into PGmc ō. At the time of the merger, the vowels probably were [ɑ] and [ɑː], or perhaps [ɒ]and [ɒː]. Their timbres then differentiated by raising (and perhaps rounding) the long vowel to [ɔː]^{[citation needed]}. It is known that the raising ofā to ō can not have occurred earlier than the earliest contact between Proto-Germanic speakers and the Romans. This can be verified by the fact that Latin Rōmānī later emerges in Gothic as Rumoneis (that is, Rūmōnīs). It is explained by Ringe that at the time of borrowing, the vowel matching closest in sound to Latin ā was a Proto-Germanic ā-like vowel (which later became ō). And since Proto-Germanic therefore lacked a mid(-high) back vowel, the closest equivalent of Latin ō was Proto-Germanic ū: Rōmānī > *Rūmānīz > *Rūmōnīz > GothicRumoneis.

A new ā was formed following the shift from ā to ō when intervocalic /j/ was lost in -aja- sequences. It was a rare phoneme, and occurred only in a handful of words, the most notable being the verbs of the third weak class. The agent noun suffix *-ārijaz (Modern English -er) was likely borrowed from Latin around or shortly after this time.

Diphthongs

The following diphthongs are known to have existed in Proto-Germanic:

§ Short: /ɑu/, /ɑi/, /eu/, /iu/

§ Long: /ɔːu/, /ɔːi/, (possibly /ɛːu/, /ɛːi/)

Note the change /e/ > /i/ before /i/ or /j/ in the same or following syllable. This removed /ei/ (which became /iː/) but created /iu/ from earlier/eu/.

Old English:

The phonetic system of Old English preserved in general the Common Germanic structure of sounds. Main phonetic features of Germanic languages - Grimm's Law and Verner's Law - are clearly seen in Old English, as well as many processes which took part among vowels and diphthongs. However, Old English is sometimes moving further in developing the phonetics, and that is why some of its models are a bit hard to trace back to the Common Germanic period. That is why we decided to follow the way suggested by many linguists in description the Old English phonetics: to offer the explanations comparing to the Gothic language, the most ancient of witnessed Germanic tongues and the most archaic of them.

Though Gothic is referred to the East Germanic subgroup of languages, its similar sounds, morphological forms and vocabulary with Old English, Old High German, Old Scandinavian and other ancient Germanic languages are quite frequent. In the early Medieval Age, when both Gothic and Old English were spoken, single languages of the group did not go too far from each other and remained very much alike.

As a whole, Old English phonetics included the majority of sounds typical for all Germanic speech; and only some of its phonemes are unique and require a special acquaintance.

First we will talk about the vowels, which could be either short or long in Old English, just like in Modern English or German. The difference between them is also familiar to Modern English speakers: the distinction between open and close syllables. This distinction is quite Germanic, and obviously did not existed in Proto-Indo-European where vowels could be short and long in every position. In Germanic a long sound in a closed syllable can be seldom met. The table below explains all Old English (OE) vocals compared to those of Gothic and followed by examples (sounds for them will follow later):

Here they are. Some linguists doubt about the last vowel if it ever existed at all - Old English texts never reflect it in writing. But there is a vowel interchange in some kind of words - in closed syllables before nasals - where some texts have a (mann), but some prefer o (monn). Sometimes even the same document shows the two variants. This makes us think there was a vocal sound in this position which was developed already in the Old English time, and did not exist in Gothic or in Common Germanic.

The Gothic language used to have much more diphthongs than Old English. Usually this is the general trend in Indo-European languages - diphthongs turn into simple vowels, and the more developed the language, the less diphthongs it has. The Old English tongue had two original diphthongs, both of which were composed of long vowel components:

éá - equal to Gothic au, found both in nominal and verbal parts of speech: béám, céás (he chose)
éó - equal to Gothic iu:céósan (to choose); in some dialects and varieties of the language it was written like íó, but we are sure this was the same sound in fact.

One of the main phonological and morphological instruments in Common Germanic and practically in all Germanic languages was the Ablaut, the vowel interchange in the root of nouns and verbs. This specific feature, though known in all Indo-European groups as a phonetic means, was of great importance particularly in Germanic, where it was sometimes used instead of verb endings and noun inflections. Interesting, that the same way of "infixation" of different vowels into the root is known in Semitic and other Afroasiatic languages: compare the Arabic language which has kataba (he wrote), kutiba (written), katib (writing), kitab (a writing), 'aktaba (he made smb write) as different forms of the root k-t-b, and the English language which uses sing, sang, sung, song as different forms of the root s-ng. This is the Germanic Ablaut.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 2067