Linguistics

-publication of grammars and pronounciation dictionaries

-beginning of the age of prescriptivism

-final stages of the standardization process

-1755 dr. johnson`s  dictionary of the english language

-1762 robert lowth`s short introduction to english grammar

-formal education, prerogative of boys, focus on classical language

-compulsory education in britain after 1870

-rise of literacy rates

-before education of women, early example lady marywortley monagu, sarah fielding, george eliot, marian evans

-literacy spread more rapidly in the states, 1795 lindley murray`s english grammar

-rise of literacy>growth of written english

-demand of novels, journals, magazines and newspapers

-periodicals: the rambler, analytical review

-magazines: the englishwoman`s domestic magazine

-letter to the editors

-newspapers: beginning of the eighteenth century, printed in small numbers but quickly increased, new combinations of texts, headline and illustration

-industrial revolution

-technological developments

-increase in travel

-increase in communication

-geographical moobility

-economic opportunities>social mobility

-socially mobile families (burneys, beetons), adjustments to new linguistic norms

-despite standardization and prescriptivism

-no uniform variety

> not a stable period

1. innovation and resistance, 1660-1800

2. invention and innovation, 1800-1900

3. wars and rumours of wars, 1900-1945

1. a scholarly record of the whole language

2. based on, or derived from, a corpus

3.put emphasis on literary, rather than technical language

4. assumed an authoritarian or normative function

-1747 samuel johnson plan of a dictionary

- innovative and scholarly dictionary before johnson>

-1749 benjamin martins lingua britannica reformata

-more extensive and complex dictionary than any of its predecessors

-each word was defined and illustrated with quotations

-1806 Compendious <dictionary > recording lexical innovations not listed in Johnson

-1828 Dictionary of the English Language > `new dictionary for a new nation`

- 1832 American Dictionary

-regulation of variants resulting from changes in Early Modern English

-innovations of the later modern period

1. Selection of an existing language or variety as the basis of the standard. This is usually that of the most powerful or influential group

2. Codification, involving the reduction of variability within the selected language or variety and the establishments of norms

3. Elaboration, which ensures that the standard can be used for a wide range of functions

4. Implementation, whereby use of the standard is encouraged by making texts available in it, discouraging the use of alternative varieties, and folstering loyalty to, and pridde in the standard

major structural changes completed before the EME period

-nouns the same as in ModE (with two cases, common and possesive)

-tendency off strong verbs to become weak

-word order (SVO) established before EME, but occasional deviations such as the inversion of subject and verb

-consonant system mainly identical with ModE

--introduction of printing to England by William Caxton in 1476

-contributed to the standardisation of English, fostered norms of speeling and punctuation

-renaissanc in England (1580-1650):revival of classical languages, major expansion of English vocabulary, great influx of clasical loan words, inkhorn (foreign or hard) terms

-influx of borrowings from classical languages

-use of borrowings mark of education but also mocked and criticzed as "ynkehorne terms"

-inkhorn term difficult to understand for less educated speakers>first dictionary was a list of hard words>1656 Thomas Blount`s Glossographia

-gradual change (1400-1700)

-affected all along ME vowels

-long vowels raised or diphthongised

-pronouns

-inflectional -s vs. -e(th)

- do support in negative statements

-negation

beginning: 

-spread of london standard across all england

- unstressed infelxional vowels were no longer pronounced

-reduction of case and person endings

-end of first stage of the Great Vowel Shift

End at 1700

-scientific prose no longer written in latin 

-spelling, punctuation and grammar are close to what they are today

-English loses most of the features noticeable different from Modern English

-the main changes of pronounciation that made up the GVS were all completed

-period of great change

-1100: the language looks like a foreign language to modern native speakers of english

-1500: the language looks like present day english

-most writing was in Latin or French

-absence of any recognized literary standard for English

-little to no formal schooling (in English or otherwise)

-huge dialect diversity in ME, geographical differences in pronounciation, vocabulary, inflexion, reflected in written language 

-1066 Battle of Hastings, William the Conquerer, Duke of Normady > Norman Conquest

-Normans became the ruling class

-French became the language of the court and the upper classes, ENglish remained the language of the masss>emergence of a diglossic situation

-loss of Normandy in 1204 by King John to the french

-100 years war 1337-1453-> England and France bitter enemies

-Norman French lost prestige to the french spoken in Paris

-need to communicate with English-speaking people>from end of 13th century, English is increasingly used by the upper classes

-1362: Parliament opened in English-> English is language of court

-1385: school taught English

-mixed dialect (population, location)

-commerce

-court/government

-printing press (also based in Westminster)

-London-Oxford-Cambridge Triangle

-changes in vocabulary: loss of a large part of OE wordstock, addition of thousands of words from French and Latin

-changes in spelling conventions: infuence of French spelling rules

-changes in pronounciation: beginnings of the Great vowel shift, loss of unaccented inflectional endings

-changes in grammar: form a highly inflected language to an extremely analytic one

-Early Old English:

-Germanic inavsions (450)

-the germanic tribes of the Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes invaded the island to assist the Celts > 449 Germanic tribes defeat the Picts and the Scots > subjugate the Britons

-Christianisation of Britain since 597

-germanic invaders called the Celtic peoples wealas

-Celts referred to the Germanic as Saxones, but later replaced by Angli and Anglia

-OE writers used English to refer to the language

-Anglo-Saxon heptarchy: Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Esse, East Anglia, Mercia,Northumbria

-organisation of society by families and clans

-community life was based on kinship and on personal allegiance to a lord-> feudalist structure

-dispossessed Britons were called Wealas,Weals

-they called themselves Cymry, from British combroges

-approax. 750-1050 mass movement/invasion

- Danes invade Englnad

-Norwegians invade Ireland & the eastern part of Scotland

-739 the church and monastery of Lindisfarne was destroyed

-close language contact > speakers of Old Norse + Old English lived side by side

-languages were probably mutually comprehensible, bilingual community

-intermarriage and close neighbourly relationship

-> extensive borrowings

-isoglosses of dialectal terms that stem form use of Old Norse in Danelaw area

-vocabulary was rich and colorful, great capacity for producing new words

- affixation yields many new lexemes via derivation 

-compounding self-explaining compounds - meaning self-evident or rendered clear by association and usage

-OE was an inflected language

-relatively free word order

strong and weak adjectives

-noun inflections indicate number, case and grammatical gender

-two simple tenses: present and preterite

-weak and strong verbs

-strong verbs are characterised by root vowel alternation and divided into seven classes

-weak verbs fall into three classes, dental suffix for preterite and past participle

-Celtic people arrived in the British Isle

--probably originated in upper Rheinland

-knew how to smelt iron alloys for weapons, armour and tools

-Roman occupation (43-410 AD)

-Latin was official language but did not replace Celtic Languages

-Latin spoken by the Romans

-Celtic dialects were L-variety, spoken by the Britons

-no direct contact with the Germanic tribes but Latin influence on place names

-Old English had long and short consonants

-difference indicated in writing by doubling the consonants

-length distinction among one consonants lost in Middle English

-loss of velar fricatives