LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Mutual Intelligibility, Back-Formation, Great Vowel Shift
Document Summary
Diachronic linguistics: synchronic vs. diachronic, synchronic: describe language at a particular time, diachronic: how and why language changes (describe linguistic facts in a language or a group or related languages across time) History of english: earlier english: old english, beowulf, middle english, phonology: the great vowel shift, canterbury tales, modern english, shakespeare"s works, various changes in phonology/morphology/syntax/semantics. Old english: 449-1066, 5th century invasions by angles, saxons, frisians and jutes from modern. Holland, n. saxony: germanic tribes pushed the celts west, old english is highly inflected, like german; the language of beowulf, germanic dialects evolved into english, norman conquest. Middle english: 1066-1500, 1066 french normans invade england under willian the conqueror, french and political and economic influence led to addition of 5000 words to. English: many british citizens of this period were bilingual, canterbury tales. Reconstruction guidelines: majority rule: reconstruct the most frequently occurring sound, naturalness over randomness: reconstruct natural processes (e. g. assimilation) rather than haphazard ones)
