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Causes of language changes

Introduction THE SUBJECT OF THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES. GERMANIC LANGUAGES. THE PERIODS IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH

Why learn History of English?

This course is a challenge for those who are curious about the past, who have deep interest in languages and look forward to experiencing new cultures through deciphering and analyzing fascinating and somewhat mysterious messages from the ancestors.

When studying this course, you will enjoy being given a window on the past, an enhanced understanding of language in general and of English in particular. Learning History of English requires a student to gain functional mastery of areas of grammar that either hardly exist in Modern English (for example, the case system), or that exist in Modern English but the fluent speaker never has to think about consciously. If you're planning a career where understanding of correct grammar will be important (e.g. translating, writing or teaching), you will find your understanding enhanced by this course even if you think you have a pretty strong mastery of grammar now. This course also provides good practice in analyzing language data, which is an essential skill for any translator/interpreter.

Causes of language changes

In studying the history of a language we are faced with a number of problems concerning the driving forces or causes of changes in the language. The causes can apparently be of two kinds: external and internal.

· External causes: language is influenced by factors lying outside it, or extralinguistic factors. Such historic events as social changes, wars, conquests, migration, cultural contacts and the like strongly influence a language, especially its vocabulary.

· Internal causes: many changes that occur in the history of language cannot be traced to any extralinguistic causes; the driving power in such cases is within the language itself. Most changes in the phonetic structure of a language, and also in its grammatical structure, are due to internal causes, for example due to the general tendency of language to economy: speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient as possible, they try to exert the least effort in communicating with language (thus making use of abbreviations, simple grammar structures in spoken language). Also, many changes are caused by analogy, when speaker tend to liken similar words and grammatical phenomena.


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 2978


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