Phonetic changes of the ME and NE periods. Consonants

25/The OE NOUN

- Gender (masculine, neuter, feminine)

- Number (singular, plural)

- Case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative)

System of declensions was based on: the stem-suffix, the gender of nouns, the phonetic structure of the word, phonetic changes in final syllables.

Nouns are divided into two categories of declension in Old English, the so called Strongand Weak nouns.

The strong declension

- a-stems: masculine or neuter

- ja-stems

- wa-stems

- o-stems: feminine

- jo-stems

- wo-stems

- i-stems: all genders

- u-stems: masculine or feminine

strong declension à vocalic stems (stem forming suffixes)

The weak declension

- n-stems: all genders

minor consonantal stems – root-stems:

- r-stems: masculine and feminine. Dative case sing. had a mutated vowel.

- s-stems: are all neuter. Due to rhotacism changed it into occasional appearance of –r sound in indirect cases.

*in present day in pl. form children we find remains of stem-forming suffix –s turned through rhotacism into –r+ en suffix in ME

Weak declension à root stems

26/Scandinavian borrowings

(King Alfred, Danelaw. 1013 Scandinavian invasion of king Sweyn, 1016- his son Canute)

The influence of Scandinavian on English was enormous. Not only were hundreds of individual nouns, verbs, and adjectives borrowed (as they had been, in smaller numbers, from Latin), but the pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, and even a form of the verb “to be” were incorporated from the language of the Danes. The pronouns “they” and “them” are Scandinavian, as is the word “are” (the standard Old English plural for “to be” was “syndon”). Prepositions “to” “from” and the conjunction “though” were borrowed from the Danes as well. In terms of grammar, using “-s” in the third person singular, present indicative form of verbs (“he walks,” “she thinks”) comes from Scandinavian. But far more significant was the influence of the Scandinavian languages on the inflectional system of Old English. There were many, many words in common between Old English and the language of the Danes (man, wife, father, mother, winter, summer, smile, ride, stand, set, spin, over, under, and many more); the major differences between words would be in the different endings added to them for grammatical purposes. Speakers of Old English and Scandinavian could thus more easily understand each other if they stripped away the inflections and relied upon other cues, most significantly word order, to indicate grammatical relationships. This reduction or elimination of the inflectional system was a major step toward modifying English from a synthetic language to the analytic language it is today (although it was the Norman Conquest that dealt the final blow to the inflectional system). As Otto Jesperson noted, you cannot “thrive,” be “ill,” or “die” without Scandinavian words, nor can you even eat “bread” and “eggs.” The influence of Scandinavian languages on English is enormous and we should recognize that the language of the Danes not only greatly enriched English but also primed the language for some of the major steps in its future evolutions.                                                                  

1. Sibilants

In OE there were no affricates and no sibilants, except [s, z]. the new type of consonants developed from OE palatal plosives [k, g], which had split from the corresponding velar plosives [k] and [g], and also from the consonant cluster [sk]. The three new phonemes which arose from these sources were [t], [dз] and [ʃ]. In Early ME they began to be indicated by special letters and digraphs, which came into use mainly under the influence of the French scribal tradition — ch, tch, g, dg, sh, ssh, sch.

2. voicing of fricatives

Allophones f v θ ð s z became independent phonemes. Firstly, f, v could be used for differentiation between words, which means they had turned into phonemes. Fricatives were pronounced as voiced if preceded by an unstressed vowel and followed by a stressed one/ Fricatives turned into phonemes.

3. Loss of consonants

In Late ME long consonants were shortened and the phonemic opposition through quantity was lost. The length of the syllable was regulated by the lengthening and shortening of vowels. The consonants j and r were vocalized finally and before consonants. In Early NE the aspirate h was lost initially before vowels(not in all the words)/ The initial sequences kn and gn were simplified to n/ Simplification of final clusters produced words like dumb, in which mb lost the final b.

28/The Great Vowel Shift

During the 14^th and the 18^th c.  all the long vowels became closer and diphthongized.

Exceptions:

1. did not take place before plosives (bread)

2. the changes e:>i: sometimes arrested by the preceding r (break)

3. in some words e:>i: but then >ai (choir)

4. in the words borrowed later (police)

5. before labial cons. u: (room)

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