Linguistica inglese., Appunti di Linguistica Inglese

Scarica Linguistica inglese. e più Appunti in PDF di Linguistica Inglese solo su Docsity! LINGUISTICA INGLESE PRIMO SEMESTRE. 
 • Codification: the act, process, or result of stating the rules and principles applicable in a given context. Language usage is codified by means of grammar books, dictionaries, or the indication of an Academy. → A lot of meaning in words is not there but can be deduced, so the meaning of a word can differ and is connected to the context in which it is used. Example: “Stamattina mi sono alzato alle 7”, “è suonato il telefono e mi sono alzato di scatto” → same verb, its meaning is different because the context is. Another example: “Stamattina mi sono alzata alle 7.00:”, si presuppone che la persona sia sdraiata, “E’ suonato il telefono e mi sono alzato di scatto” si presuppone che la persona sia seduta, si evidenzia come lo stesso verbo possa avere diversi significati a seconda del contesto e della sua interpretazione. • Standardisation: the process of making something conform to a standard, or of making things of the same type all have the same basic features. Linguistic standardisation is the process in which the language is standardised for its linguistic forms as well as social communicative functions of language, it’s the opposite of codification. • Languages change, they are always on the move, even while or exactly because we use them, we decide what form is proper to use. When we talk about language change we have to mention variation. If a language change while we use it, we could have problems in the comprehension.
 A language usually changes because two forms compete with each other:
 A: given element in the language, a phoneme, a morphosynctatic element or a lexical item
 B: a different form competing with A
 A vs B
 What happens next?
 The old A form wins the competition and the new form B is discontinued after some time → A vs B → A.
 The B form wins the competition and the new form A is discontinued after some time → A vs B → B.
 The old and the new form accomodate to each other and both survive. Old English: the historical background (external history). The Celts. The celts covered a wide area in Europe, they were the firsts inhabitants of the island. This may have been possible because the channel was smaller, the sea was lower and there were small islands in between, so the land was more easy to conquer. From the 3rd century BC all over Europe: Celtiberians, Galicia (NW Spain), Galatia (Turkey), Galati, the Gauls. The Galati were attacked by the Romans on the continent (Roman Gallia) actual France, and later on the island. The Roman won and then moved on the island. Why? Because the Celtic populations came to help their “cousins” in the continent so the land was uncovered.
 Celtic languages: a) continental → Celtiberian, Galatian, Gallaecian, Gaulish, Lepontic, Noric; b) insular → Brittonic (Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish, Breton) and Gaelic (Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic).
 Today: Gaelic in Ireland, Isle of Man, Ebridi and Scotland and British or Brythonis in Wales and Britain. Roman Britannia.
 Cesar conquered France but not the island (55, 54 BC) and Claudius occupied the land 43 AD, the Romans called it Britannia (southern part of the island), they didn’t have definite control over Caledonia, in the north. 40000 people came, not only soldiers but even citizens, and the land was organised in 5 main towns: Verulamium, Gloucester, Colchester, Lincoln and York. Latin as 2nd language (the use of latin was strengthened by Celts’ christianisation), the Celtic people started to speak the roman language, romans spoke latin and some people stayed in between, so this kind of people became bilingual. In the bilinguals there were some christians and this helped in the christianisation. 314 AD: Council of Arles, it was attended by bishops from London, York and Colchester. The christianisation of the Celts is one of the most important facts because the religion acted as a link, so for the first time there were connections. All of a sudden, in 410 AD, the empire ended. The Barbarians invaded the empire, the Roman troops were forced to depart from Britain and, as a result, the Anglo-saxons came. 3-10-2023. The romans left in the beginning of the 5th century, the barbarians came and invaded the roman empire so they had to go back to Italy. When talking about Old English or Anglo- Saxon we refer to the period between 449 and 1066 DC ca. (about the mid of 5th century). The English language was born in 449 d.c. so this date is very relevant, we can say that because of some works and historical books. The writers of those book said to have seen some ships sailing up the river Thames and then the Anglo-saxons getting into the island, but in order to have a new language Saussure said that we must have a speech community and a place, not necessarily with political borders and a recognisable area. From the very beginning English was complex because the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes were 3 different germanic tribes who belonged to the Germanic koinè but that spoke their own dialect, they understood each other well linguistically and culturally but there were some differences. This complexity was also influenced from the Celtic substratum of the inhabitants of the island. These tribes crossed the channel and spread through the land, but why did these Germanic tribes get there? for people who speak different languages to understand each other a little bit (loanwords, ongoing change made more evident and easier...).This is what happened when the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavian invaders stopped killing each other, the Scandinavian occupied the north. Given time they started to do combined marriages between the anglo-saxons and the Scandinavians to bring peace and so on the children between them became bilingual. Two linguistic groups mixed because they spoke different languages that were mutually comprehensible and this is why in English we have many different Scandinavian loanwords. The evolution of the language in time got simplified, so when the Anglo-saxons and the Scandinavian talked to each other, they relied more in the meaning and less in the grammar, the contact between them, in a way, simplified the English morphology. They relied on the books and the grammar in those, so the contacts between these two groups favoured the morphological simplification. Danelaw is the name of the land of the Danes and the Scandinavians, the area where the Danes held power (especially east and north); they came to distinguish, in the late Anglo- Saxons time, a variety of English which was based on the dialect of Wessex which was free from the Scandinavian linguistic influence (?), another region where the Scandinavian… “Watling Street” was the boundary between north, north-east and south and it originally was a roman route. King Alfred “the great” or “the wise”, he was able to reconstruct what had been lost and destroyed, he was aware that his world had nearly died so he did anything he could to make his land and country remember him, and to reconstruct the primacy of the land of the Anglo-saxons world. He (himself or by others) translated books and these works no longer tell us he was special, but those were the most important books that he translated for the Christian world (non sono i più importanti al mondo ma furono i più importanti per il mondo cristiano): “Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum”, “Cura pastoralis e Dialogi miraculorum”, “De consolatione philosophiae”, “Soliloquia”, “Historiae adversos paganos”. He wanted them to be translated because hardly anybody in the Anglosaxons land could understand Latin, because it was hardly taught and studied. They are the reverse sign of success, they proved that nobody could read them; Alfred wanted his people to be able to understand them. Then he did something else: he knew that the Anglo- saxons world was disappeared so he asked to his scholars to write the history of the land → what we call “Anglo-saxons Chronicles”, they did it in the traditional medieval way: they started the history from Adam and Eve until the recent past. Those became the History of the Anglo-saxons. Then he ordered many copies, some of them were hidden, some were brought all over the land and from different places were updated; we still have seven copies with the same front but the final stages diverge, the different copies added something specific. Primacy of the West Saxon dialect: it came to be the most important dialect because there was a time when all the books were written in this language since there were no other places to write and no people who were able to do that. After this dialect became a language model , standard, people had come to accept the idea that the language of literature had to be the West Saxon language.
 By translating those books, king Alfred created all the English prose, because, up to this time, when we mention Anglo-saxon literature we refer to poetry, because poetry was the literary output of the Germanic poets and prose was born as a result of this. And if we compare a textbook from those times and the Anglo-saxons chronicles we see many differences, because the English translations of these texts rely on the structure, on the syntax, so latin in a way was the skeleton of the structure. The early Anglo-saxon books were written in a very similar way, they were very simple and a sentence after the other(?), rhetorically built sentence stories. The most important books and manuscripts come from the late 10th century, which means that until then, as far as we know, poetry was simply sung orally and then they started copying it and we still have these manuscripts. “Beowulf” is considered the masterpiece of English Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition; the Beowulf manuscript was nearly destroyed so how many other works may have been destroyed? Maybe it wasn’t the best heroic story but nowadays is the only one we have. The translations are a consequence of the fact that nobody could understand or read latin, so King Alfred started those translation to help people understand literature. Other text spoke about religious topic and they were obviously made by the church, there’s a mix of the old and new Christian world. 10/03/2023. Following events. Two important points: • 1) The Benedictine/monastic revival or reform: the monopoly of the church upon the culture all over the Europe, in a way, helped the re-learning in England. The bishops became very important and, as a consequence of the situation, in the late 10th century the Anglo-saxons poetry was written down (as far as we know), before it was transmitted orally and then written down for a sort of an antiquarian interest. They were aware of the fact that the Anglo-saxons may have been destroyed, so they decided to write some texts down, like Beowulf for example. We consider Beowulf as a masterpiece but we don’t know if it was or not, we consider it as masterpiece because it is the only one we have. Certainly there were other manuscripts that were lost. Some of these (Julius was a scholar that studied the works of the Anglo- Saxons and the Vercelli book etc) were found in different lands, so its clear that culture improved thanks to people who travelled among the lands. • 2) England between the late 10th and 11th century; Alfred pushed the Scandinavian back but the situation was still moving, Knut ruled over Denmark, Normandy and England. In those days England was part of the Scandinavian reign. They spoke a very different language. 
 Middle english : an historical introduction. The Bayeux Tapestry. It’s an embroiled cloth (nearly 70 metres long and 50 centimetres wide) depicting the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England (describes the conquest of the Scandinavian). They visually told the story of the conquest; William the conqueror almost destroyed all the power in the Anglo-saxons’s reign, the Scandinavian killed the king and all the most important people around him (even those that lead the small villages). So the conquest brought very big change; this change was obviously perceived in a negative way, but in the long run it was also positive. This is represented in the miniature of a manuscript, in this miniature we have the letter “C” and inside the initial we find the structure of the European feudal society represented (society structured with the king, the clergy etc). On the first side we have the representation of the cleric society (the church had the monopoly of culture), on the other side we have a workman (representing the common people) and in the middle the knight (representing the military and economic power). Before, the organisation of Anglo-saxons England was is a way more “equal”, when William the Conqueror came he had very clear in mind what to do, he killed the king and took the land, then he choose some noble man to “governate” small pieces of land, like York. The interesting fact was that William kept for himself more land (more people, more power) than all the member of nobility together, so, as we see, he had more power. The socio-linguistic consequences of the Norman conquest (1066): • a new èlite in power, life didn’t changed for the workmen or the “normal” people, but only for the noble that had some sort of power. • In the linguistic there were no direct consequence ( why no direct? Because the majority of the population spoke English before the conquest and continued even after it), but Anglo- norman (or Norman-french) started to be spoken in the island, so there were two languages spoken at the same level. Anglo-norman means a variety, a dialect, of French spoken in Normandy and then spoken in England. Paradoxically the linguistic impact was not strong because they led separate lives, the top society spoke French and they didn’t care about the others; the two languages were mutually incomprehensible but they ha no contact so it wasn’t a problem. Since people in power spoke French, and sometimes Latin, the Norman were not interested in texts written in English because they couldn’t understand them and because manuscripts were Examples of different linguistic lexis. When the Scandinavian settled in the North and East of England the written language was produced only in the South and in the King Arthur England, in areas far from Scandinavian influence. In the anglo-saxons time we have no evidence of the Scandinavian influence, because when they where there no text was written. The influence could only happen through the spoken language (thanks to inter-marriages, children bilingual etc) but it took centuries for the Scandinavian influence to emerge in written text. Scandinavian became evident in the language only in medieval times. Some texts were written in the north because, little by little, texts started to be written everywhere, but the difference was that the West Saxon dialect was no longer the standard language, because the standard language was French. The west Saxon dialect became just a variety of the north, no variety was considered better than the other. And in the variety of English spoken in north and in north-east we could find examples of Scandinavian influence, that after became part of the language (and are still used). Scandinavian influence. Semantic loan (prestito): “dream” (pronounced as it was written), the anglo-saxons word meant joy, happiness, getting together → the corresponding Scandinavian word in German “Traum” meant dreaming; they recognised that they were the same word and the English one adopted the semantic loan, the meaning of “dream”. The reverse happened as well with the phonological loan: yive/give (the starting point was germanic, the “y” sound from German, the “y” sound became “g”, it was palatalised, the meaning was identical but they took the Scandinavian strong pronunciation) the same happened with shirt/skirt, church/Kirk. The Scandinavian language brought some loanwords: cnif (knife), windowe (window), deien (“to die”), they anglo-saxons had the word “starve” to say that someone had died but, at the same time, the German had the word “Starben” which in present English we still use as “starve” (morto di sete/fame). A new word started to be used but the anglo-saxons word was able to survive only because it became specialised (the verb “take”); as well as the 3rd person plural pronouns: they/their/them. The anglo-saxons took the Scandinavian pronouns, thanks to the evolution of the morphological English; especially the contrast between stressed vowels and unstressed vowels made unstressed vowels less clear, or simply reduced to a “schwa” sound. The grammatical elements are made of sounds so they can be influenced by the evolution of sounds, and grammatical elements are there to distinguish meanings, but in the evolution of sounds they were no longer clearly distinguished so they no longer worked. So they adopted the different foreign forms, which were stronger. The map of the Anglo-saxons kingdom had the so called Heptarchy. In medieval times there were not kingdoms, there was only one kingdom. The different varieties of the language were not connected to any political power. So, when we talk about middle English times we refer to these dialects spoken in different areas, basically, South East, South West, Middle East, Middle West and Kentish. If we compare these with those of the Anglo-saxons England we see that the central part is divided and these different dialects are simply defined according to the area, without any influence of politics. Relevant because of the future implications, English came out of this situation; different varieties, none of them more important than the others because the important language was French. The different dialects in medieval England: Northern, West Midland, East Midland, Kentish and Southern. These different dialects are defined according to the area, nothing no longer having anything to do with politics and different kingdoms, because now in medieval England we have one centralised state, with the Normans guiding the whole country. This is relevant for us because of the future implications, that is to say English came out of this situation; there were different varieties, none of them more important than the others, because the important language was French, the language spoken by the people in power was French. Since after the Norman conquest, Norman French became the language of power, and little by little English regained its supremacy, it went up the social pyramid. In the early part of middle english times, English was spoken only by the low class people and little by little it moved on with every generation, more and more people spoke English for every kind of usage. We see this because we have some texts written in English, which means that evidently these texts were not written for people at courts, because people at court didn’t understand English, weren’t interested in English and didn’t like english, they were written for low class people, typically religious texts or narrative stories (with heroes and main characters, which usually were Scandinavian heroes). Around the mid of the 13th century, two centuries after the conquest (1066-1250), Walter of Bibbesworth wrote “Traité”, which was used to teach French to the sons, the young people of the nobility; this is clear evidence that even the children of the nobel men were no longer native speaker of french, they did not lear French from their mothers, but they had to study (the parents wanted them to study)it. So French was considered important, because it was the language connected to power, but it was no longer the mother tongue; little by little, generation after generation, even the generation after William the conqueror, evidently they had started marring English women or men and French was no longer the native tongue of their children. “Provisions of Oxford”, similar to the “Magna Carta” which is written only in Latin because it was the language of bureaucracy and it wanted to establish the relationships between the king and his nobility, this is a similar document of 8 years after, but this text instead is written in Latin, French and English, so this is an example that even the nobility and the people that were interested in the relationships between the nobility and the king did not necessarily understand French. The relationship between external events, historical facts and the evolution of the language. The Black Death (1349), the plague, many people were killed because of it and this caused social changes, because people died so the situation changed; the main people who died were the workers, so there were fewer people who could produce things or that could work the land, and these people wanted to be paid more (so there was social unrest). The middle class became more and more important; traditionally when we distinguish the middle class from the aristocracy, we talk about the aristocracy and its business, which is based on the ownership of land. So, with the Black Death the society was changing, people were leaving the land because they thought and hoped to survive by moving away from the places were many people lived together; they moved to the countryside even if many people there didn’t have anything to live. By doing so, different people from different areas of the land were getting together and talking to each other, so the different varieties of the language got mixed (social confusion). Geoffrey Chaucer, the most famous medieval poet, wrote many works and the “Canterbury Tales” is the most famous one, but he started his career by translating the “Roman de la rose” from French to english, so he started his career as a poet by translating from French into English this very famous poem. What Chaucer did from the very beginning was using english, even though he spoke French very well, even though Chaucer lived and worked from the court; we can compare what Chaucer did with his close friend and poet John Gower, he wrote three works: “Mirour de l’omme” so “The mirror of man” written in French, “Vox clamantis” written in latin and “Confessio amantis”, a latin title for a poem written in English. John Gower is a very good example of a person speaking different languages, French the language of power, Latin the language of culture and English, but English for Gower as a poet arrived last, whereas Chaucer started from English and English only in his works; so some people call Chaucer the father of English literature, or father of the English language. He was a good example of a person living in a court who chose English for literature, this means that by the time Chaucer wrote these poems even people at court understood and spoke English. This is proved by Chaucer’s king, Richard II, who is supposedly the first English mother-tongue king since
 king Harold (who died during the Battle of Hastings while fighting the Norman invaders). French influence on the English language.
 Two varieties of French: Anglo-norman or Norman-french are not the mix of two languages, but Anglo-norman is simply the French dialect of Normandy spoken in England since after the day William the Conqueror got there, Norman-french is the variety of French spoken in Normandy, so the language of William the Conqueror and his following. This was the variety of French spoken in England, an important one because it was the language of power for a couple of centuries, but in general terms this was a regional variety, French spoken in Normandy, in an area which was not very important and the important variety came to be the variety of French spoken in the area of Paris (central French or Parisian French). In the middle ages, middle french literature became very important, very famous and very much read all over Europe, and this kind of literature was written in this variety (the Paris one), not in the variety of Normandy. We still have in present-day English more than 10.000 loanwords of French origin. Between 1050 and 1250 English adopted 900 loanwords from different varieties of French in general; in the period from 1250 to 1400 English adopted 4000 loanwords from French. What’s strange and wrong in this? Because in this period English regained his supremacy, it became very important and was spoken by more and more people, so how can we get together this fact with the fact that in the same period English adopted more loanwords? Little by little English moved up the social level; more and more people became bilingual and if these people, the upper class people, dropped French and started using English instead, these people were still people in power, rich people, elegant ladies (example: if elegant ladies had to describe the way they dressed, they had been used to use French words to describe their dresses, so if now they had to talk about their dresses using English, English had no words for that. So the only possible way was adopting loanwords); they started using English but they needed French words, because there were areas of social life where the only available lexical material was French. The new element was that Anglo-norman, the variety of French spoken in Normandy and brought to England by William the conqueror, was being replaced by Central French, the French of Paris, because it was more fashionable, it had become the fashionable variety of French. Old French in general: “A” sound followed by a nasal sound, typical sound of French even nowadays; the nasality of the French “A” sound was represented in Anglo-norman by having the “U” sound. These are handwritten letters but look like printed letters, because this is an important document with a huge miniature, very expensive. In a way this refers to the context when the handwriting was in the hands of the church and they could afford that, they could waste time and take things easy when they copied texts. But towards the end of the middle ages we start finding .... scribes, not priests, typically people and university students destined to become priests who dropped out of university sooner or later. So they did not become priests, they didn’t get their degree in theology but they had learnt how to read and write, so these people evidently started working as scribes, they started working when people needed to send letters or documents to be copied, but the point is that these scribes did their job because they wanted to earn money, they were not priests or monks who didn’t have to care about a wife or children, everything was already paid. These scribes had to survive economically and the result was that they changed the kind of handwriting because, in order to write like that (the gothic script), they needed a lot of time. They started writing very fast, so the kind of writing was less precise; these medieval scribes were paid by the line and this is the reason why they started adding some letters to words. Some sounds had no spelling and so people could write one single word in different ways and had what came to be known as “superfluous spelling”. William Caxton, known as the person who brought the printing press to England; everybody remembers the name of Gutenberg who invented the movable-type printing press, but Caxton was the man who brought the new technology to England.
 Caxton was an English man who, as a very young man, had gone to the continent, spent there most of his life and then got back to England importing this new technology. As a matter of fact, the very first book printed by Caxton was “Recuyell of the Hystoryes of Troye” and this book was published in the continent, so the first English printed book was published in the continent and not in England. This is a printed text even though, if we look at it, it looks very much like an hand-written text, the shape of the letters is certainly not similar to what we use nowadays and it looks like a manuscript, but it isn’t. On the page we see some space left for a miniature, as they did when they could use important manuscripts, so the scribe copied the text but if a miniature was wanted, the scribe wasn’t able to do that and so they just left some room for it. William Caxton copied the technology and the layout of a handwritten work, of a manuscript; he did that because he himself, his leadership and the people who were expected to buy this books were used to manuscripts.
 This “new technology” didn’t kick out the old ones (the manuscripts). One of the strange things that we can find in this text is contained in the word “comaūdemēt” → “commandment”, we see the “U” sound and the “E” sound with an “-“ (hyphen) on it, which in manuscripts stood for an “N”; so he used the very same convention spelling of the manuscripts for printed books. Caxton wanted to publish books and wanted to sell them, what’s the difference between a manuscript and a printed book? If you produce a manuscript you produce one single copy and if you produce this book you know exactly who this handwritten book is for (so you know the person, you know what they are interested in, you know what kind of language they speak). When you produce a book you produce, just to say, 200 copies, so you want to sell 200 copies; of course books were less expensive than manuscripts but they still costed a lot of money, so you needed to find 200 people who could spend a lot of money. In order to find these people who were ready to pay for the books, London wasn’t enough, the south of England wasn’t enough, so you had to sell them all over England; but in different places of England they spoke different kind of English. If you produce, if you print a book, you have to choose and linguistically adapt the text for someone; so Caxton understood that if he wanted to sell those books he had to compose them so that everybody could be able to understand them and buy them. Even when books started to be printed, and a standard language had been taken, there were problems and, in a way, what became the standard language was not necessarily the best option. Sometimes we can say why one form was successful and other weren’t, but in other cases we can’t say it. With printed books we started recognising words in written texts by their shape, in a way, when we write or read English, we have become so used to the language that we spell all the words in a given way, whatever the pronunciation is, even if there is a mismatch between spelling and pronunciation. We don’t read an English word by reading every single letter, we have learnt how to associate strings of sounds to the strings of letters, whatever the relationship between sound and spelling. Early modernism English: 16th century and beyond. What is new in the early modern period is the development of a sort of metalinguistic awareness, on the part of the speakers of the language, so more systematically than before, in the early modern period, scholars started to analyse English, to study it and not simply to use it. This is one reason why the early modern period becomes different than ... The second element is in a way connected to the first one, we will see that English starts for the very first time to leave the bounders, the limits of the island and starts moving towards the world. William caxton brought the movable type printing press in England and so from this time onwards, books started being printed in England and as a consequence this promoted the development of education, which promoted the publication of books. Manuscripts cost a lot, so only very few people could afford them or they were kept in monasteries, so they were not for everyone; not even books in the beginning were for everybody, because they were expensive but much less expensive than manuscripts. When Caxton started printing books was because more and more people were able to read and could afford buying books, as more and more people came to be educated, literacy became more common so, of course, the market of books grew bigger. Another point is the development of some sort of social consciousness, which means that people became more aware, that they belong in a social group which had some rights and that was the base of the development of the the social hierarchy as we know it now. The final point is the development of this metalinguistic awareness: people were aware of the language used and especially they were aware of language variation and change, and generally speaking they didn’t like it. People commented and complained of the shortcomings of English. English was considered, by the English people themselves, an inferior language, inferior to Latin. Latin was the language of culture, very important, it was a fixed language and it did not change. So English was considered to be an inferior language → 4 key-words: 1) mis-spelt, so a problem of orthography, English was spelt very bad, which is a problem that we still face nowadays in many cases, when we find a very strange and, in theory, unacceptable relationship between sounds and the way they are represented in writing. English was considered to be 2) unruled, to have no rules, the grammar of English was poor and basically the idea was that one given grammatical grammatical function could be expressed in different ways (example: we know very well that when we want to make a negative statement, we have to use a negative form and we have to use an auxiliary verb, “i do not know” but in Chaucer’s time it was possible to say “i not know” or “i know not”, because there were no rules) we tend to say that English has simple and very regular rules for the use of its grammar. English was said to be 3) rude, that is to say having limited lexical store and too few words, not enough words and why is that? Why did they say that English did not have all the words they needed to convey a given idea? Because until before those time, there were some areas, some topics where latin especially was used, so if you had to talk about medicine or philosophy, the traditional language was latin; when latin came to be replaced by English it was okay because they used their native language, but English didn’t have the words to talk about anatomy, for example, it didn’t have the words they needed to talk about some topics. English was considered 4) barbarous, rhetorically inadeguate, this refers to style, to the organisation of communication (nowadays we tend to use the word “rhetoric” in a negative sense). Possible solutions to these problems: 1) they tried to introduce spelling reforms, not successful at all, since those days there have been more than 200 attempts at the reform of the English language, but none of them was successful, why? Because especially after the introduction of the printing press, when people started getting used to see words spelt in a given way, they kept on writing a given word in that way even though the connection, the relationship between spelling and pronunciation was hardly acceptable. Spelling in modern language is fixed nowadays, but we can see that when we read: if we read a newspaper we don’t read all the letters, we don’t read the whole word, we understand and we move on without reading, we recognise some hints. A general reform was out of the question, what they could do was write spelling books, that is to say make many lists of words and how they were spelled; a student learns and spells these words as they find them in these lists, even though the spelling in those words is not the ideal spelling, it doesn’t show the best relationship between spelling and pronunciation, or even though I spell a word in that way and in some decades the word will be pronounced differently, so spelling is no longer efficient. Dictionaries as well, generally speaking we look a dictionary up in order to find the meaning, in most cases but in those day the main reason was finding the right spelling, or what was considered the right spelling. 2) English has no rules, what can we do? We can start codifying the language, to codify the language means to produce grammar books, dictionaries, manuals; codifying, in linguistics, means to describe the language scientifically for teaching and learning purposes. So in the 16th century we start finding this kind of texts, but the impact of these texts wouldn’t be felt until a couple of centuries later. 3) The English language was rude, so let’s add new words, let’s expand the lexical store. Manuals were written and published, so for example: we know very well the “Rhetoric manual” that Shakespeare used, and evidently we have clear evidence that he had it when he was writing his works. English was less prestigious than Italian and French, two of the most important languages in those days, especially Italian which in the 16th century was what English is nowadays, the international language for diplomats and very important; then there was French, but Latin was still Also because these new words could be explained in the text itself; these examples are taken from Sir Thomas Elliot, for example he introduced the word “animate” and when he used the word “animate” he wrote in the sentence “animate or give courage to others”, so it is as if a dictionary definition is included in the text. So a new word is introduced and it’s explained at the same time; when we find in today’s newspapers most probably the new word will be in inverted commas or in italics, it stands out, it is made evident because it is new and possibly it is explained (this is more or less what they did). The different positions regarding the issue of using or rejecting words from other languages, basically from latin and greek, gave birth to the so called: inkhorn controversy, the “horn” of the “ink” so the ink stamp, where they put ink in. The meaning is the controversy about written words, not spoken words, because these words derive from written books and these long, difficult words of latin and greek origin were very difficult to understand and also formally different from English words. Think of the reverse example, think of English words in present- day Italian, they are not easy to introduce in Italian because generally speaking English words are short, monosyllables and they end with a consonant (whereas most Italian words end with a vowel). English words look and sound strange, and with polysyllabic words from greek and latin origin in English, they have the same reversed problem (long words were considered difficult to understand). Sir John Cheke, was professor of greek at Oxford, still he was against the introduction of latin and greek loanwords in English; so he wrote a letter to Thomas Hoby who had translated the “Cortegiano” by Castiglione, a very important book (which created the English gentleman (?)). So Hoby had translated the “Cortigiano” in English and Cheke wrote this letter to Hoby, who printed this letter and added it to his translation of the “Cortigiano”. Basically what Cheke says is that he doesn’t want to borrow words, we have to notice the metaphor, we still use the word “borrowing” or we use the word “loanword” to refer to a foreign word which is adopted, borrowing means “prestare” and loanword means “prestito”, but as a matter of fact borrowings are not borrowed, they are taken but they are not payed back, it’s a theft not a borrowing. So the image implied is that words are like money, like coins, so if I borrow a coin I should give it back to you but I do not; so the idea here is that if we do not take care by time, we keep on borrowing words and never paying our debt, what happens is that the English language will go bankrupt, so Cheke says to be careful. What did Hoby do? Hoby introduced some borrowings, so for example the word “wellbeing” is a translation of Italian “benessere” and brought into English from this translation, in this case Hoby did not adopt the borrowing but recreated and interpreted the word “benessere”. Let’s go back to what Cheke said in the letter and analyse it: “i think that English should not take borrowings from other languages”, unfortunately he doesn’t realise that the word “bankrupt” that he used in the letter is actually the Italian word “bancarotta”, a borrowing from Italian, or the words “pure” and “opinion” which come from latin. So how could he make such stupid mistakes? Because the words “bankrupt”, “opinion”, “pure” had gotten into the language centuries earlier, in the middle ages, so he evidently he considers them as English words; the point is: we may adopt “wellness” or “wellbeing”, for example, and what will happen in some centuries is that this words will be considered an English word, its origin will be forgotten. No pure languages exists, all the languages are conditioned by other languages, but if you take a small tribe in Amazzonia having no contacts with groups speaking other languages, of course their language will be somehow “pure”, but as soon as they met another group speaking a different variety of a language, in time borrowings will be adopted and the pureness will be over. Cheke was writing insisting on being reasonable, on not exaggerating and this is what Thomas Wilson’s “Arte of Rhetorique”, a rhetoric manual, argues on, in this book a plain and simple language was promoted as a model. When we think of rhetoric we don’t need to think of a baroque language, even plainness may be a stylistic feature, simplicity is something we want to reach. So Wilson created, invented this “ynkehorne” letter. Even in those days one could write to an important person, to a politician, for a recommendation and that was the letter, so Wilson wrote this letter in order to catch some help from an important person and he filled this letter with big words from latin and greek, to show how exaggerated one could write if they kept on using this loanwords. This letter includes these words: fatigate, impetrate, indent, magnifical, verbosity are no longer in the language, no longer used in English, whereas: contemplate, communion, prerogative are still used. How can I say why “fatigate” is no longer used and “contemplate” is? Why? It happens. This is a very long list of different loanwords which in new times entered in the language, all of them are still used nowadays. Words very clearly deriving from latin or greek, polysyllabic words, we could analyse them and explain why they were brought in the language. A number of these words, in a way, were introduced because they conveyed a new idea, so they were important. The Purists argued that the lexicon might be enlarged by using existing resources of the language such as derivation (so using the suffixes or prefixes), composition (joining two words together) and semantic changes (modifying the meaning of words, expanding the previous semantic space of written words). Modern languages, Italian especially, has introduce many more words by using the existing resources of the language, by using what we call the “internal word strategies”, the strategies for creating new words by using the available material. This is what we do in most cases, but we notice instead the very few cases when we adopt a loanword, because a loanword is strange, we notice it. So in a way the Purists were right, but evidently if very many loanwords were brought not the language by translators, it’s because they had no time, so it was much easier and faster to introduce a loanword. Cheke also did an experiment, he translated the Gospel of Saint Matthew trying to avoid all the loanwords and trying to use only the existing resources: “biwordes” which we use in English and means something like “proverb or saying”, we use it to translate what came to be accepted as →“parables”. Or notice the use of “washing" meaning “baptism”, “baptism” is a special kind of washing in a way (washing away the sins in a newborn baby), this is a case of specialisation, he took a very common word and tried to give it a special meaning. The point is that Cheke’s translation of this Gospel was only published in the 19th century, so it remained a manuscript for centuries and didn’t have any impact on the issue discussed; still a puristic attitude is found in the following centuries. Archaizers revived old words. Spenser’s “The Shepheardes Calender”: “algate/ always”, the first element in each couple is a medieval word, which he used. He used “algate” instead of “always” “all ways, all the ways” literally speaking and “algate” “all the gates”, so the metaphor behind is similar. All the first elements in these couples look strange but at the time he used words that, as a matter of fact, survived and are still used because it was, in a way, popularised by Spencer and other archaizers. The role of Shakespeare is difficult to determine, there are lots of words that we do find in Shakespeare’s texts for the first time, but we can’t be sure that he created, invented them, he was a poet, a writer, he was very careful and payed attention to many things, so he may have overheard new words. As a matter of fact Shakespeare and king James’s Bible represent the two big pillars of early modern English, especially as documents of current usage and also for lexical creativity as a source of usage. As far as Shakespeare’s concern, we have neologism still in use, apparently very easy words like “downstairs”, some neologism which are present in Shakespeare’s works are no longer in use. What is the role of conversion? in linguistics we use the word “conversion” when we refer to a given word, for example a noun, which comes to the use as a verb, or a nouns as an adjective, very common in English without any morpheme...(?). The context will tell us that the word “book” is the noun “book” and not the verb “to book”. Quotations may become idioms, may become part of the language (we have examples in the slide). … 
 There were many ways a given meaning or a given linguistic function could be conveyed, think of relative pronouns: “who”, “whom” when we refer to people, “that” and “which” when we refer to things, in those days they could be used as interchangeable. So the different options came to be divided and used for different purposes, so if previously you had different possibilities now you had to choose just one. The form that was chosen was not necessarily the best one but it was one and the more people used it, the more the other options disappeared. we see that now we have a way to distinguish long and short vowels but before they hadn’t. So obviously came a time when they decided to mark the distinction, why? For example in Italian “Libro” vs “Libbra” → “libro” → the “i” sound is longer “li-bro” vs “lib-bra” how can we understand the difference? Dividing the words in syllables because in Italian phonology we tend to give the same amount of time to each syllable. In Italian is not relevant if a vowel is pronounced longer or shorter because the meaning doesn’t change unlikely the English. This is the reason why they started to distinguish the vowels: English spelling ca be a mess but there are some tendencies which work and describe the language in the correct use. So “Cild” became “Child”, but why do we say children? Because the vowel lengthening (one vowel became longer), depends on the “ld” cluster, but in “children” the cluster is even bigger, so its “biggness” prevents the lengthening. The OE form for the plural was “Cildru”, in ME they substitute it adding the -en ending → “Children” they adopted the plural form of “Ox-Oxen” even though the plural form of “Stan- stanes” was the strongest one. This shows that the grammatical system also changes because the sounds that “make” the grammatical ending came to be modified and they moved especially according to “sound trends” but never systematically (nella maggior parte dei casi ma non sempre.) “Sheep” was another instance of a less common grammatical ending but also also “fish”, “dear” but why didn’t these animals have marked plural ending? Because they were usually counted as plural (il plurale era già presente perché era più comune). And finally we have the “Foot - feet” - “mouse- mice” type → for a small number of words plurality is not indicated by adding a grammatical element but by modifying a vowel: the sound in the root syllable is changed → “metafonia” means moving one sound to another. The other example mentioned was the “-Er” suffix : if I refer to the word “lighter” → “my bag is lighter than yours” (comparative) or “I need a cigarette lighter” (noun); the word “ lighter” in this case is no longer the comparative morpheme/suffix but it is the -er suffix. The “-er” suffix may be also used referring to objects who act → Printer : the machine that “prints” or the person that prints. -er suffix much more ambiguous, why? In OE the grammatical morpheme for the comparative form was “-ere”, whereas the second meaning for nouns or objects who act was the latin form “-arius” which became “-ere” in OE, so the two forms became identical. Talking about verbs: few grammatical endings : “-ed”, English verbs can create the past tense by adding a voiced dental sound /d/ or by adding a voiceless dental sound /t/ or a voiced dental sound preceded by a vowel /id/ → (Played, looked, wanted). This is what we call regular/weak verbs; we contrast these with strong/irregular verbs : “ride - rode- ridden" and also for verbs like “sleep- slept/keep-kept”, but for those verbs its the same thing as the “To look- looked” (-ed), in “kept” we do no longer used the “- ed” spelling so we consider them irregular. The real irregular/strong form are those of “Ride - rode- ridden”, characterised by the apophony = change of sound. 7/11/2023
 Grammatical morphemes are made of sounds, talking about grammatical morphology means talking about phonology. This can be seen when we analyse things historically because the evolution of the language and the evolution of English morphology, largely depend on the evolution of sounds → for example: sounds becoming less clear, becoming confusing and confusable, when sounds become identical they create a problem because grammar is there to distinguish; the forms are no longer “doing their job”. Analysing morphology implies analysing the sound’s level and, as a consequence, the spelling level. The written language is the most “superficial”, the least important element, though we consider writing important because that is quite common in our life but, if we think of it, until not many centuries ago many people weren’t able to read and write but they were still able to live, they only spoke orally. Strong and weak verbs or irregular vs regular verbs. Regular verbs: past tense created with “-ed”, when we talk about this suffix we think of these suffixes /-d/, /-t/, /-id/; we are used to connect these suffixes and their representation with regular verbs. But If we think of the verb “To show” → showed (past tense), shown (past participle) we see that it is, in a way, in between from regular and irregular verbs (it can be compared with Write- wrote- written → strong verb because past tense and past participle are created by modifying a vowel , this modification of the vowel is called “Apophony.”). Irregular verbs or strong verbs create past tense and participle by an apophony and the regular create them by adding the -ed (dental suffix). But “to show” shows that the situation can be mixed, because “To help” nowadays is a regular verb, it was originally a strong verb, why can we say that a regular may become an irregular one? For simplification; in order to simplify and clean the language, regularity is better than irregularity. Another example is the verb “To keep” → kept (past tense) we found it as an irregular but it is exactly the same of “look-looked”but one difference is that the voiceless /t/ sound is represented in the written form of “kept” and it isn’t in “looked”, we don’t see that because the preceding consonant is a voiceless. In OE English it was → “cēpan” and “cēpte” /I:/(kept), cepte (chepte) /e/ with a long “e” sound, so “looked" and “kept” are similar, they have the same suffix/ morpheme but there’s a difference in the vowel; in present day “keep” (long) is opposed to “kept” (short), this happened because by adding the dental suffix a consonant cluster was created and made the preceding vowel shorter, because the following sound was heavier so they made the preceding vowel lighter (keep → long, kept → short, the form is distinguished for the sound). If I compare the OE form (cēpan) with the Modern English form (keep) and I compare the spelling, I notice that the “-an” ending is not there anymore because the stress was in the preceding vowel and the unstressed vowel/ syllables could be produced, they lose their role ??. If I consider the modern spelling I understand why it is written with 2 “e” because in the beginning it was a long sound, so they spelt it twice. This change happened when the sound was still spelt as /cheepen/ but now spelt it as /I/ because the user/speakers of the language had been used to spell the word in that way: before “cēpan” → became “keep” (sounds like “chiip”) so /epe/ became /ip/: this phenomenon is called the great vowel shift and is the most important involving long vowels in the time between early modern English and present day English. We can use this as a very good example for William Caxton who brought the printing press to England; we can say that by printing books the spelling became more fixed, but the problem was that sounds kept on changing, but there was a time when people became used to recognise sounds by the shape of the letters and not to the idea that “I think of a shape of a sound and I try to reproduce it”. Nowadays, as soon as we became professions at reading, we look at the beginning of a word and the final letter and we able to reproduce and reinterpret it even tough it is not a “clear form”. The big problem we have nowadays while we read English is that we notice the mismatch between spelling and pronunciation ex. [why “keep” and not “Kiip”] the spelling we use nowadays goes back 3/4 centuries, this is what makes the relationship between spelling and pronunciation not very easy. English children have the same problem with this mismatch, in fact English invented the “Intermediate writer language” in order to help in learning how to write some words to then move to the standard language. So the conclusion is that the sound spelling relationship in English is mad because, for example, for “women” or “busy” we have /I:/ and not “o” and this isn’t rational → so when we first learn these words we learn how to attach a given string of sounds and a given string of letters without correspondence. • Ghoti / blomby / lbmoyb → these words don’t exist so far but it is possible that one day they will, because the way the different sound are put together works; “bloom” the /bl/ cluster is possible, so the different sounds are possible but if I change the order of these sounds I wouldn’t have any word (*lbmoyb doesn’t exist), the word “ghoti” was created in 19th century by George Bernard Shaw and means “fish”, because I spell it in this way but I pronounce it as “fis” (/gh/ spelling can represent the /f/ sound usually in final position → enough /inaf/ (never in initial position). It’s a mistake but he used that to show how strange are the spelling relations in English. The /o/ represents the /I/ in “women” and the /ti/ to the /ʈʃ/ sound in words like “station” or “nation”. So the answer is that the relationship isn’t a completely madness and we can prove this with the example of “Write - wrote - written” which in present day it’s an irregular verb; the corresponding form in old English was “writan- wrat- writon - writen”. The first problem is the fact that we have three forms in present day English and four in old English (infinitive, past tense singular and plural form and past participle) why? We all know that the verb “was/were” has two forms → reflect this example. [“To be” is special, made up with special different roots.] We only have three now because they were very similar, the only difference was the unstressed vowel: the past tense and the plural form were pretty similar so they became the same word. So we see that between the OE form ad the current form there are many differences: one is that nowadays we spell it right but in real usage we no longer pronounce the consonant clusters; “writan” became “ritten”, the “wr” cluster got simplified in his pronunciation, but why we still spell the “w”: because spellings tend to be more conservative. There is a third element: Write /rait/ → the problem is that if we minimise the differences between spelling and pronunciation, for example with “Write” we see that another word already exist: “right” → this is’t surprising because we know that two words pronounced the same but with different spelling are called omophones. We can’t simplify the spelling of the word “write” because this will create confusion, they are identical in pronunciation but at least can be distinguished in writing. But why do we still spell the word “right” with “gh” ? Because there was a day in the past where there was a sound connected with those letters and then the sound was cancelled, but the spelling was kept and also the word “Wright” that can be a family name or can be used as a noun in the past etc... It would be a problem to simplify in spelling, it would make the sound spelling easier but it will create some problems. Another example is “light” /lite/ or “night -club” /nite/ → those are a re-spelling of the word “night” or “light” making it simpler [with /nite/ we don’t have the same problems as /rait/] but then we have another problem → “light” /lait/ traditional spelling but they made a new possible spelling / lite/ but why is the new spelling written in this way and not as /lait/? Because the sound spelling relationship of /lite/ implies some sort of conventional spelling in the relationship between a series of sound and a series of letters. To explain this we can use these examples: • TIME → OE: tima /ti:ma/, long /I:/ sound, the second vowel in unstressed so very probably was reduced as a schwa. • STONE → OE: stan /sta:n/.
 • MAKE → OE: macian /makian/. These examples tell us that problems in spelling relationship in most cases concerns vowels. The only ambiguous consonant was the “c” in /macian/ because it can represent both the /k/ sound and the /tS/ but this is the present day word “make” so the problem is solved. Looking at the present day word we can say that phonologically speaking are all monosyllabic, the typical structure of English syllable: CVC (consonant- vowel-consonant), but if we consider the spellings we might consider them as bisyllabic (which they are not), but in writing they could be. The words became “Tim”, “Mak” and so we see that in the sound spelling relationship of the word: Time /taim/, the final letter does’t represent anything but is there to suggest that the preceding vowel is a long sound, it is not /Tim/ but it’s /taim/, this is an instance of the so-called discontinuous grapheme, meaning that the letter that represents sounds isn’t a single letter and it’s discontinuous, there’s something in between. We have V-C and the final “e” which is not pronounced but suggests the pronunciation of the preceding vowel. The examples are meant to show that: in the word “time” the final “e” may be said to derive from what was part of the root of the word itself, then firstly became a schwa sound and then became nothing, a zero sound, but in spelling this final letter was kept to suggest the pronunciation of the preceding vowel. And since we can find many sounds where we can distinguish spelling and pronunciation, we can say that the sound spelling relationship in English has some rules that come form history, and were systematised in time. The OE form of “to write” were “Writon - writen” → 1 “t” → why do we now spell it with two if we still pronounce it as one? Because with just one /t/ we will be tempted to pronounce it as “Wrighton”. The final /I/ implies that in theory, we consider that as an open syllable (syllable that ends with a vowel) and in this kind of structure, the vowel must be long (time) and, in the reverse case, if I have a closed syllable the vowel must be short, as in “Wrighton”. Can we replace the spelling? For example /ph/ as /f/ → / fotograf/ → this would be easy because /th/ is a strange spelling in English, in photograph reflects the greek word. It concerns only a limited number of words but in other words the change would be important. they were all pronounced the same, but then “great” was attracted by a different model, the “ea” spelling tells us where they come from and the pronunciation tells us from where they derive. “Great” as “grata”, or “break” as “freno”,we also have different spellings, homophones. Spelling and pronunciation moving on in the same direction and possibly this homophones attracted the others which still kept the old spelling, so they simply play they different origin(?). In early modern times the “r” sound conditioned the pronunciation of all preceding vowels, both short and long; this is relevant because of the different pronunciation of the final “r” sound in different varieties of English (non è da sapere per l’esame). Let’s look at the first 3 examples, “herb”, “birth” and “curse”, we have 3 different vowels (e, i, u) followed by “r” and the result is the same sound, so 3 different sounds merging into one, becoming one because of the following “r” sound. The spellings tell us which the original vowel was. The different vowels came to become what we now call the schwa sound and we see the difference between stage 3 and present day English the consonant is not pronounced anymore and, as a consequence, the vowel has become (?). When we talk about English we generalise, but English is a plural reality. In the 16th century Italian was what English is for us nowadays; in those days the most important language was Italian and all the nobility wanted to learn Italian, that language of Renaissance literature, diplomacy and important people. Italian was important all over Europe, while English in those days was as important as Bulgarian is nowadays; a language spoken by an important nation in those days, an important power in Europe but the language was almost completely unknown, out of the island itself. In Shakespeare’s time, in Florio’s time, there were between 4 and 5 million people in Britain, not a very large number. What Florio did was to teach Italian and he also wrote a text for teaching Italian; this “Florio his firste fruites” (Florio’s first fruits) , in early modern times they no longer recognise the Saxon genitive, they thought that the apostrophe “s” stood for the possessive “his”. Florio’s work to teach Italian is a collection of dialogues with facing pages, so columns in Italian and English; there are two noble man speaking in the dialogue. In the text it’s said that when the merchants were out of England they spoke Italian, because was used as “lingua franca”, it was used by the upper class people, for diplomatic reasons and important relation. Italian was used as the international language for commerce. John Florio is very happy to speak badly of English (wanted to make money by teaching Italian), a“language confuse”, the controversy about the introduction of loanwords from greek, latin etc. we see the idea of terminological issues → loanwords = money = English will go bankrupt (idea of words as money, you borrow money and are expected to give them back). English is a very mixed language, Florio criticised this, but is this really a negative feature? We might say that it is exactly because English is a very confused language, it is a language fun of words of different origins that it can be easily understood by people. The mix nature of English, in a way, paved the way for the spread of English all over the word, given this mixed nature, it would be able in time to give and take. English went all over the word with the colonies and was given to a lot of different population and at the same time it was already trained to adopt words from these different languages. This is a very famous and, by now, quite old, almost 50 years old, representation of the presence of English all over the world. This representation is of an Indian scholar (interested in world englishes because Indian English is one of the most important varieties of English all over the world ). He suggested this representation: the inner circle, the outer circle and the expanding circle, these three different level presupposed three different kind of speakers because we can refer to English as a native language (ENL) → this refers to people who are native speakers of English (so USA or GB), as a second language (ESL) → refers to the situation when English is spoken as a second language by someone speaking another first language but the two are spoken almost contemporary, the second language is learned together with the first (typical of English spoken in the area of the formal colonies like India) and as a foreign language (EFL) → English as we studied it and learned it, in an institutionalised way. We use the acronyms. Three different types of English → three different ways to judge the type of English: we do say that English spoken by native speakers is the best form of English, or we may say that English spoken by the native speakers is the variety which provide the models. If we want to study English, we refer to the British form, we consider the standard british language as the model and we try to copy the model, we don’t question the model and accept everything. The members of the outer circle use English as the second language, and they learn it in a way together with the first, this is the result of colonial history basically, like Canadian English, Indian English etc, the people speaking English as a language they use it everyday, in everyday context, they don’t study it at school → they are not native speakers of English but they may be ready to provide alternative models, because they spoke their own language and at the same time English, so there may be some influence. The inner circle is, in a way, enticed to provide the model, the outer circle may accept, or reject, or provide alternatives, challenge the norms, whereas the expanding circle tend to adopt the norms without questions. As far as the spelling is concerned; spelling problems are minor problems, think of the innovation of English spelling that became popular in American English. In a way, the “relative fixeted” of English spelling nowadays, whatever the English variety, it represents something that keeps the language together, in most cases (apart from lexis) they use the same spelling, in written language they are identical; so the spelling isn’t perfect but keeps the language variations under control. There are definitely differences in morphology and morphosyntax. The inner circle is the smallest one, we see that the impact of the local languages is not that relevant, but this does not include the regional variety of English. The outer circle connected with the colonies, changes in lexis, grammar and some features of pronunciation. The expanding circle, nowadays we might say all over the world, which has nothing to do with colonisation, but we have to think of a kind of economic colonisation , the impact of the USA, for example the second WW; this might even include Europe too.