nm1254: er take those right take those right i've also got the a signing list 
so if you could sign your your name er and status that means whether you're 
married or not no no it can't it must mean something to do with what kind of 
student you are yeah right should take give you this right okay so this is the 
first of a few lect-, few lectures er eight lectures on historical linguistics 
or language change er and er i'm going to be away in the seventh week of term 
so there'll be no lecture in week seven but and then i've a feeling there's a 
Wednesday that's going to be deleted as well er i'm not quite sure which 
Wednesday that is bu-, 
sf1255: next week 
nm1254: next week is being deleted is it 
sf1256: no last week 
sf1257: there's a well there's another one 
nm1254: okay 
sf1258: there's another bank holiday 
nm1254: there's a bank holiday and no hang on we've 
sf1259: there's 
nm1254: we've already had one last week was deleted wasn't it 
sf1260: 
nm1254: that's right so so right okay there's only one one to be missing in the 
in the next few weeks okay er so you should all by now have a handout er and 
well it's 
er historical linguistics is well it's deals with language change that's the 
main thing it's not the history of linguistics although for various reasons it 
gets sort of intertwined with the with the history of linguistics er the reason 
being that er the in modern linguistics that i suppose you could think of as 
being a nineteenth century er phenomenon it dealt with language change ex-, 
almost exclusively and quite a lot of the modern theories of language change 
have their origins in the nineteenth century and those of you who did er our 
our first year course the F-U-E er will have heard about the regularity 
hypothesis er and that's something i'm going to be talking about very much more 
and many of you probably from er Europe have probably covered this in your 
linguistics courses as well er okay now for textbooks er there are there are 
quite a number there are there are two shall we say mainstream textbooks that i 
i'd recommend one is by Winfred Lehmann an American er person er 
Routledge Historical Linguistics and the other is by Trask also an American er 
Historical Linguistics and this one is Arnold so this this is a in some ways 
older although it's been updated and this is from ninety-six i think this one 
here er if you see you can you can see on your handout references to quite a 
number of of works er some of them are er older some are younger so er April 
McMahon nineteen-ninety-four Understanding Language Change okay this is er good 
on theory i would say of of language change and it's er extremely good read er 
it's perhaps not a beginners' level book which in some ways these other two are 
in that they they start from scratch then there's one by Raimo Anttila er a 
textbook called Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics although 
it's it's old n-, it's quite old er it's still valuable then there's one by 
Hock er Principles of Historical Lingustics there is there is a nineteen-ninety-
five edition or thereabouts er which is 
much more detailed and has loads of information in it and is not a particularly 
easy read er but but it's it's good for reference if you want to find out 
particular areas of it er Jeffers and Lehiste er this is a a a smaller thing 
Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics er Roger Lass Phonology there 
is stuff in there on the history of English particularly er April McMahon 
unaccountably occurs again on the top of the next page er but then Peter 
Mühlhäusler on pidgins and creoles which is something i won't really be 
covering but it is relevant to you er Barbara Strang The History of English 
some of you will have come across that previously er a good sort of social and 
historical accounts of the language and then finally Trudgill Dialects in 
Contact he brings us up to date in the sense that he is interested in 
sociolinguistics and also contact phenomena particularly contact within 
varieties of the same language rather than actual language contact which is not 
something 
i'll i'll really be talking about all that much okay er so er you have change 
that can occur on various linguistic levels the phonetic the phonological 
morphology lexicon syntax semantics all these are areas of language that can 
change that are subject to modification through cultural pressures perhaps if 
you can think of in fairly obvious terms er lexical change er languages borrow 
very heavily from each other er and the donor language the language that gives 
the words is often the culturally or economically dominant one and today that 
is probably English i suppose worldwide er although English as many of you will 
know has been the recipient of huge numbers of words from French and Latin and 
lesser extent from from Scandinavian so so while English has absorbed absorbed 
vocabulary it has now the position has now reversed in the last hundred years 
or so that it that it's er supplies the words and there's a lot of neologism 
all right coinage of new words takes place as 
well er in in the in the sciences in a-, anything technical at all and a lot of 
since since American technology seems to be in the in the lead er a lot of the 
words are coined in America and then trans-, transmitted to the rest of us er 
but that is the most tangible that's the sort of thing that people write to the 
newspaper editors about er but there's phonetic change as well okay there are 
there are there are small or greater changes in pronunciation er that take 
place over a period of time the motivations for these are not obviously 
cultural so if i start saying if i start changing my vowel in [Tru:] to [Tr}] 
to [TrY] or something like that which many English people do then that is not 
er because of the er decline in the industries in the north of England or 
anything like that er the c-, you can't really find an obvious motivation for 
the the fronting of a vowel shall we say nor can you find any sort of obvious 
external motivation for the the loss of some 
confonant consonant so for example a word like through once had a [X@] sound at 
the end of it about six or seven-hundred years ago that dropped out now you 
can't say that was er because of the decline of the feudal system or something 
like that okay but if you look at all the French words that came in that's five 
or six-hundred years ago then there are obvious cultural influences going on 
there right er one thing that historical linguistics shows us the study of 
language change shows us is that these linguistic levels i've mentioned 
phonetics phonology morphology lexicon syntax semantics are in some way 
interdependent all right there's been a tendency to treat each of these levels 
as separate and that's reflected in the courses that you're taking you you take 
a course in phonetics another one in phonology sometimes the lecturers don't 
even bother to point out the similarities although i hope they do er certainly 
then you get you go and listen to someone else 
talking about syntax and it's a like another world from phonology er likewise 
you get a lecture on morphology which is doesn't appear to be related to syntax 
which in s-, many ways it obviously is er and so on now one of the things that 
you find in language change is that er these levels are they clearly influence 
each other and particular items can pass from one level to another level and 
i'll i'll show you some examples and particularly particularly in regard to 
phonetics phonology and perhaps morphology as well right okay so in terms of 
your handout er we are on page two right that's the first sheet page two er two-
thirds of the way down where it says studying language change interdependence 
of linguistic levels that's where we are located er right now okay i'm going to 
give you a new you an example from Ancient Greek of this fluidity of linguistic 
levels if you like now then first of all bit of a struggle over here right okay 
now er there was 
in at some point in Ancient Greek a sound change whereby and i'm going to use 
sort of phonological notation if you like S goes to nothing er in environment 
between vowels right if you're f-, you're familiar with that kind of notation 
all right S goes to nothing between vowels er how do we know that well we use 
something called the comparative method which i'll be mentioning a bit later on 
er and we look at languages that we know to be historically related in some way 
er historically related in that they have a common origin and i want come back 
to those common origins a bit later but just take it on trust that this is what 
we believe right there is a er Greek word Ancient Greek word geneos okay and 
this meant this is the genitive case possessive case of a word meaning kind a 
kind of something right a noun er now there is a a Sanskrit equivalent okay 
that's Greek Sanskrit er the liturgical language of India from about three-
thousand years ago er word meaning exactly the same 
thing is like this er janasas i don't know how you pronounce it [dZ{n{s{s] or 
something like that er there is a Latin word er two-thousand years ago have 
exactly the same meaning and function generis generis okay now what you see is 
that there is some kind of consonant here and here there's a [r] and there's a 
[s] but in Greek there is nothing okay nothing at all so and this we think is 
because of this er sound change that er took took took place at some early 
stage of Greek right 
now what you find however okay th-, these are the initial facts of the er th-, 
then comes the however there is in Ancient Greek er a verb luo lu-, i don't 
know how to pronounce it but er luo and it means loosen to loosen something er 
there is another verb timao something like that to esteem or to hold s-, to 
hold something in in awe or honour or something like that timao these had er 
aorist moods i'm not entirely sure what this means but anyway aorist it's a 
kind of tense which took the following forms for luo it was elusa and for the 
other the other w-, verb it was etimef-, e-, er etimesa like this right now 
what you notice there is that there is an S between vowels but that shouldn't 
happen right if this sound change is is correct so what we have to say is we 
have to 
try and explain this one thing you can say is to say well sound change isn't 
regular er that's something i'll be coming back to the idea of regularity of 
sound change but the idea of regularity is that given a phonological 
environment like consonant between two vowels a change will always happen in a 
given language okay that's what's meant by regularity right now it didn't 
happen here it didn't happen here so this is a sign of irregularity but this is 
not a random matter it is because we believe er the S became a an aorist tense 
marker it then shifted to become part of the morphology of the language right 
you follow that so this is an example of what i mean by the interdependence of 
levels okay so that's the point i want to make er i'm now going to move on to 
the relationship between er phonology and phonetics and this then is er another 
example coming up now and er okay one thing i-, i'll be talking about from time 
to time is velar fronting okay velar fronting this 
is the process whereby velar consonants like [k] and [g] are fronted in the 
mouth so that you get a palatal sound perhaps like [k'] and [g'] slightly 
palatalized or even palatoalveolar like [tS] something of that sort you you 
find it may be appearing as a [s] anyway now in English there are two words one 
word is core another word is key and the [k] sound in those two words core and 
key if you just mouth them to yourself quietly you can feel that they're very 
different okay [k] isn't like [k_-] and [k_+] [k_-] [k_+] you can hear the 
difference 
and you can feel the difference er this is because of a coarticulation effect 
with the following front vowel high front vowel [i] okay which you can think of 
as a you could think of it as a palatal vowel i mean it's not a correct 
description but it's very close to the palatal consonant [j] right and it's not 
very far from [j] to [J\] which is an a a palatal stop so er okay this is 
something that is in our mouths all the time when we speak English and when we 
speak other languages er it's an entirely natural tendency but in some 
languages this gets accentuated somehow it's as if speakers start noticing it 
overtly consciously and they start believing well it is incorrect not to do 
this and those speakers over there in that other community this is where 
sociolinguistics comes in those people over there they don't really front their 
[k] sounds all that much in the environment of a high front vowel they say to 
themselves well they don't say that to themselves but they they say well those 
people over there they i mean we say [k'i] but they just say [ki] er so we're 
better than them so let's just start exa-, exaggerating this [k'i] thing this 
sort of fronting of the [k] and the lot in the other in the other village so 
they say d-, you know those lot er er people over there they they say [tsi] for 
[ki] how ridiculous er crazy way of pronouncing it we-, we're going to stick 
with [ki] right in our village over here however that village over there is a 
big village and the one where you're in one well you only say [ki] is a little 
village so then you start assimilating this 'cause it's regarded as a really 
good way a really wonderful great way of saying key to say [k'i] okay er 
nothing has changed at this point it's just that there's an allophone of [k] 
that is [k'] before a high front vowel allophones yes yeah right and then if 
you nods of recognition which i don't always get when i say allophone i get 
anyway good er you have just taken an exam in phonetics and phonology i think 
though some of you are second years er now the question is is this phonetics or 
phonology well once there is very obviously an allophone that is fronted more 
than would be predicted by coarticulation then you're dealing with phonology in 
some way er now er let just er think how this okay okay so let's let's say you 
got one community that's started saying [tSi] okay it is it gone the 
whole hog actually and is producing a f-, proper [tS] sound [tSi] it's still an 
allophone it's not possible to say [ki] in this dialect we're talking about you 
have to say [tSi] it's a bit like the Japanese who er have this sound here this 
phoneme [s] which is [s] in all environments except before a high front vowel 
where the [s] becomes [S] all right so that you see i mean i've just been 
reading about er a Japanese dialectologist who spells his name like that right 
that's pronounced [SIb{t{] right not [sIb{t{] but [SIb{t{] er because of this 
high front vowel now it's not 
possible for Japanese to say [sIb{t{] so when the Japanese are saying sit they 
have to be careful in English all right [laughter] so that's an a a strictly 
allophonic effect er now let's say we have these speakers who say [tSi] for key 
and er and then suddenly c-, s-, somebody comes along with a new word er let's 
say just invent a new completely new word right this is it here and this this 
means a kind of pot of some kind okay it's entirely it i invented it just now a 
kind of pot er [kim] and it's a cultural loan from some other language so in 
the [tSi] village people don't say [tSim] they say [kim] because that's the 
correct way of pronouncing it so you no-, you notice what's happened suddenly 
[tS] 
and [k] have become phonemes because they can appear in the same phonological 
environment in other words er they can inf-, occur before a high front vowel in 
this hypothetical entirely hypoth-, hypothetical case now then er er do you 
follow what i'm i'm saying it's been phonologized this is how the ph-, the the 
phoneme [tS] in English actually came about not with this word here but in 
various other ways er okay i can show you er there was in Old English er a word 
that was spelled like this that's that's how it was written and this is how it 
was pronounced er and i'll say it okay cirice cirice and it meant church which 
is the direct antecedent of our word church this was already in the Old English 
period we're dealing with fifteen-hundred years ago not quite twelve thirteen-
hundred years ago it was it was already 
pronounced like that now then there was a particular er Norse invasion into the 
the north you know east of England and parts of Scotland and these 
Scandinavians came from Denmark and Norway and they introduced a word which 
they pronounced well this is the this is one pronounciation of it kirkia okay 
kirkia they they they said this word ends up as the Scots word kirk all right 
which is the name of the Scottish church the kirk right and you'll notice that 
it's not church it's kirk so they retained the ol-, the old Norse the old 
Scandinavian velar sounds here okay kirk and that remained forever er there is 
a an English word keel er the bottom bit of a boat er that is a Norse word as 
well the hard [k] now those of you who are Scandinavian who m-, in here might 
say but Norwegians they don't have a hard [k] in these words they have a a soft 
[k] 
they say well they say [tSVrLtS{] something for this and they say [tS3rl] for 
this but that's because in the years after the Viking invasions Norwegian 
underwent a sound change whereby the same palatalization occurred but entirely 
separately and much later in in middle Norwegian in some you know in the 
thirteenth century or fourteenth century or something like that hundreds of 
years after the Viking er the Vikings so that's why Norwegians say well 
depending what dialect you speak whether it's something like [tS3rl] for this 
and [tSVrLtS{] for this all right but at the time when the Viking invasions 
took place they had a [k] in these words right okay so when this kind of thing 
happened then [tS] and [k] 
became separate phonemes in in English okay right er there are other examples 
of this er it's a because it's such a natural change er there was a Latin word 
[amiko] which meant friend and the plural [amiki] er which meant friends and 
that ends up in mo-, modern Italian as [amiko] that's the same but [amitSi] 
right 
so a similar kind of thing happened in in well in v-, a very long time ago in 
early Latin er right okay how does this transition happen then okay so we've 
got this this thing moving from one area to another area another level if you 
like well er why do languages change at all why i mean why did this 
patalization occur when it did why didn't it occur before why didn't it occur 
later well these are unanswerable questions they're not answerable in relation 
to linguistic structure all right because of social factors something out 
external to the language historical linguists are very exercised by what 
constitutes internal motivations for language change structural motivations if 
you like whether there's a a tension in the system somewhere on the one hand 
and external reasons on the 
other hand namely to do with well sociolinguistic factors right there is a 
there's there's language contact maybe speakers of different languages come 
together there's dialect contact speakers of of different dialects coming 
together er there is a sense in which all of a sudden some particular sound 
becomes stigmatized becomes bad or it becomes favoured for some reason and then 
the t-, the change happens sometimes changes are entirely natural like the 
thing i'm talking about here er sometimes you can't really say whether they're 
they're natural like a vowel becoming l-, [E] going to [E_o] i mean there's 
nothing natural about that and [E] goes to [E_r] just as often j-, you get a 
lowering and and raising of vowels and sometimes if you take the English [{] 
vowel English A vowel er and trace that over 
the last hundred years in the south of England you'll see that it goes like a 
yo-yo from a something like [m{n] to [man] to [mAn] to [mEn] and back to [m{n] 
it goes up and down for no apparent reason other than well i mean social 
reasons every every time somebody says something different some er some 
something is er some sociolinguistic er er value is attached to it of some sort 
right but in general terms er if you think about sus-, the speech production 
system and speech perception system er there is a t-, a a tension between 
minimizing what is difficult to pronounce and minimizing the the effort on the 
part of the listener sort of to distinguish what what's being said so you've 
got ease of articulation and ease of perception on the other hand so the 
speaker does n-, not have the same interests as the 
listener and there is an intrinsic tension between those two and as you know er 
we often mishear each other and we have to get people to say things again some 
and when somebody repeats something what they tend to do is to pronounce it 
more clearly more explicitly so in informal speech it's fine to garble er 
because it's pretty predictable wha-, what we're going to say next anyway in a 
in an i-, typical ingroup situation er when you're reading the news it's not a 
good idea to garble too much because the listener is being provided with new 
information and there's no opportunity for the listener to ask the newsreader 
to repeat himself or herself okay so anyway er in terms of the speaker the 
easiest thing in the world would be just to abandon er all these different 
consonantal divisions we have in English and some of you have been struggling 
with things like [T] and so on er so that so just abandon all that 
and maybe abandon consonants altogether as they impede the the breath and just 
stick with well abandon all the vowels too just have one vowel but that isn't 
really very good because language it's it's not efficient it is not an 
efficient way to organize language just to have one vowel and no consonants er 
it might be fine for the speaker but it doesn't help the listener now the 
listener needs er i mean i i think speakers can perceive a few hundred 
different distinctions listeners can i think something like that whatever it is 
so therefore it's no coincidence that the number of phonemes in languages 
ranges between i don't know fifteen to seventy or something like that whatever 
it is i'm not quite sure er w-, with most probably being forty or fifty or som-,
or something like that phonemes i suppose er the-, there aren't any languages 
with five-hundred phonemes for example i mean in principle there could be 
'cause we can produce five-hundred 
different sounds so there is something cognitive there as well to do with the 
auditory system that's adapted to hearing speech sounds and the brain both the 
audit-, both the the er auditory system and the brain are adapted to perceiving 
speech sounds so there is a constant tension between these two and it never 
settles down basically you always get some-, something happening in in 
languages er er because of this tension which is then exacerbated by the fact 
that there's also social changes as well which means that to do with people 
moving around and ha-, and acquiring different statuses and so on er there's no 
sign of languages as i indicated language sort of slowing down over the many 
tens of thousand language change slowing down over tens of thousands of years 
er what you can say though is that with globalization in the one se-, in the 
sense of English being a major language a major donor language and we're 
talking about just the last fifty years out of all the hundreds of 
thousands of years in which languages have been spoken er and with the demise 
of isolated communities where er very shall we say small languages are spoken 
small m-, only meaning a small number of speakers doesn't mean it's small in 
its system but only only in the sense of small numbers of speakers there are 
fewer and fewer languages with small numbers of speakers and what's happens is 
not that those people die off but they shift to somebody else's language so 
that that somebody else's language then acquires more speakers so that that 
that is the tendency but that's what different now from what from two-hundred 
years ago all right er the the loss of isolated linguistic communities er and 
that does have certain consequences for for change but anyway i'm not i won't 
be going on on to those er okay what are our sources for language change where 
do we get the information from for language change now the o-, obvious thing is 
written down versions of language 
the unfortunate thing about that is that writing is a f-, relatively recent 
activity in the history of human language it's perhaps five-thousand years old 
or so and what we have i mean the er Egyptian from about three-thousand years 
ago Chinese no five-thousand years ago Chinese maybe three-thousand years ago 
Greek three-thousand years Sanskrit four-thousand years er and that's about it 
right writing systems er i mean vast majority of languages only received 
writing systems if they have received them yet within the last i don't know 
five-hundred years or so er so the time depth is very shallow for English which 
is the the object of so much investigation er not because of any quality of to 
do to English but because of its er political influence er that we only have 
well thirteen-hundred years of written history right er with other languages we 
have slightly more or slightly less and then with yet other languages we have 
no written history whatsoever anyway er and 
even the written sources are variable in their usefulness to us if you have a 
writing system that is simply shall we say picture writing er pictography i 
think is a word for it there is a direct iconic relation with the real world so 
if i were to draw a map of an ar-, treasure island with an arrow on it okay 
that would be intended to be a direct scaling down of the thing i was 
illustrating okay it doesn't have any bearing to language at all er secondly i 
can strip down this thing and and make something much simpler so i can draw 
something like this all right oh God isn't that awful anyway [laughter] [laugh] 
that is not a rosette or something it's supposed to be a something you might 
find on a loo er er anyway er [sniff] okay this does not i s-, i mean apart 
from the fact it's a very poor representation of the thing i'm trying i was 
aiming at er we just understand that this sort of stick man kind of thing 
represents a man and then there's a stick woman who who has her both legs 
together it seems and a skirt er and that represents i mean doesn't represent a 
man it represents a ma-, a men's toilet for heaven's sake it's not a man you 
you don't expect to find men in there well you might do [laughter] but 
[laughter] but er i-, that's not the the intention of it so er that's stripping 
something down to the bare essentials if you like and then there is some added 
meaning to it as well er then you can have some kind of graphic sign er 
indicating a linguistic unit f-, particularly a word so that you have some kind 
of symbol which may or may not be iconic er s-, is si-, signifying a a word 
this means you get one word and one sign now this is not a very efficient way 
if you consider that we have i don't know what have we got in our heads thiry-
thousand words or something like that we don't have that number of symbols the 
Chinese have something along those lines except that there is er quite a 
careful organization within the s-, within the Chinese er symbols er 
now syllabic and alphabetic writing this is really they er the best source if 
you like for the the phonological form of words syllabic and alphabetic writing 
because they represent sounds and phonological systems in some in some way or 
other er alphabetic writing systems are essentially phonemic even the English 
one essentially phonemic er and er these are really the most useful so 
alphabetic writing systems were it's not known how whether they were just 
invented once thought they might have been invented twice once er in the sort 
of Egyptian er Near Eastern sort of area from that large area represented by 
that we don't know exactly when er and then once in Korea or something in the 
tenth century or something like that but apart apart from that er not er right 
so it i-, it is rather limited now writing systems have a disadvantage as well 
and English shows that very clearly and that is the that it's very conservative 
er particularly English 
writing system because it's relatively old and because it hasn't it never 
really got standardized by an academy er you have well if i were to say the 
word right to you right there are four ways of spelling this representing four 
different words er two of them have a W in front and two of them have a G-H in 
the middle so you get W-R- I-T-E R-I-T-E R-I-G-H-T and W-R-I-G-H-T all right 
meaning four different words er they represent four different pronunciations in 
earlier stages of the language okay so that's a problem er if you want to 
deduce the pronu-, er you know the contemporary pronunciation if anybody saw 
those words written down they would suppose they were pronounced differently er 
and then another thing that is not represented often in writing is er 
morphophonemic alternations now German has an alternation involving a word like 
this word here er two words both pronounced [Ra:t] approximately all 
right both pronounced [Ra:t] like that right well that's a phonetic 
transcription right er they can both be pluralized but then you will notice 
that in one case a a D appears in this one [RE:d@] [RE:d@] something like that 
and this is what what's the plural of can't remember 
sm1262: [RE:t@] 
nm1254: [RE:t@] yeah there's a [t] right and that is er preserved in the 
writing system so that it doesn't this does not show that at the end of German 
words there is a neutralization of the voicing contrast the writing system 
doesn't indicate that okay right er okay what about speed of change then er 
looking at old texts er you might suppose that change is discrete other words 
you go from stage A to stage B in er with a an a a abrupt 
switch er and that there is no variation in any given speech community or very 
little variation in any given speech community er so for example we find 
there's an Old English vowel er i'll just write down the word i'm thinking of 
this one here okay that says stan and that means stone all right stan this is 
the way it was written er with or without that accent on the top er by the time 
you get to the Middle English period we find it written like that or with an E 
on the end depending and that represents an [o] kind of vowel [ston] [ston] 
right so it goes from [stAn] to [ston] you get basically there is raising of 
this back vowel from [A] to 
[o] er we're not told when that happened or how that happened but if we then 
look at the Modern English versions of this O vowel in in the same word we have 
everything well i'll just write down a few variants [st8@n] [stI@n] er [sto:n] 
[stO:n] [sto8n] er [st@8n] [st@In] and so on all right these are the variants 
in Modern English and more besides er so it's almost as if suddenly there's 
been a flowering of variation but that's can't be the case 'cause there must 
always have been variation right this is because we can actually go out and 
listen to people now and the last for the last fifty years as well we've had 
reliable tape recordings of people so we can actually trace changes er 
so er this then is the sort of idealization when i say that something goes from 
X to Y in some early stage of a language you have to think you know well it 
well to put it well it wasn't as simple as that right er okay now what i want 
to do now okay this this handout you have in front of you er it's really for 
this week and next week and what i want to do is to move straight on to the 
second page of the handout in the last few minutes we have and to start talking 
about the er types of of of of changes that might exist so er right so on page 
three okay relatedness of languages i think i'll try and cover this point one 
on page three it should be possible to do that in the time available right now 
you see there er a table of and th-, it's on the overhead as well shut up right 
okay so you see there er a a table of items in English and German which have 
similar meanings and also similar phonetic forms er and what you will notice if 
you look at this 
concentrating on the consonants is that in English every English word in er in 
under A there is a [t] and in some of the German words there is a [ts] some 
other German words there's a [s] and yet others there's a [t] all right i mean 
the first thing to realize i suppose this thing that strikes you is that 
actually there's there's a general similarity about er the English and the 
German forms there so that leads you to suppose that maybe these two languages 
were derived from a common source er however there are details like this the 
relationship between [t] in English and these three other sounds in German that 
are a bit mystifying at the moment er likewise if you look under B the bit 
below er you'll see that er in German the other way round this time there's one 
vowel the [aI] vowel of 
German to get laib stein eiche mein eis zeit in German would then corresponds 
apparently to two sounds of English so you get loaf stone oak mine ice tide so 
the kind of questions we have to ask ourselves and i'll be doing this in a 
couple of weeks' time is how did this come about you know is is this actually 
complete mystery or is there something something er that we can that we can 
discover about this right let's look at the next table under C here er this 
time two more languages Icelandic and er well ne-, another adding another 
language which you know bears broad similarities to English in much of its 
vocabulary and phonetic form er and this time English and Icelandic seem to be 
paired quite closely and differentiated from German so what i've done is to 
take some basic vocabulary which seem to be 
which are shared between Icelandic and English but not German and and as as you 
can see you know the same words occur on both si-, er in both those columns but 
not in the German column this might lead you to suppose that in fact er okay 
German and and English are related as from you saw from A and B in some case 
but there may be er English and Icelandic are in fact more closely related than 
English is to German because of the shared vocabulary here that's not shared 
with with German now to the the answer is in fact er not really not 
historically now Icelandic is the closest we have to the language of the 
Vikings descended into the modern age er and it is also known that there were 
er Viking invasions and that a lot of Viking Scandinavian vocabulary came into 
English at the same time all those English words in the English column under C 
are in fact Norse loan words a result of language contact okay not a result of 
shared origin of those two languages all right so contact is 
something that and i'll be showing you some examples of this er a bit later on 
contact is something that muddies the waters if you can you you can er assume 
if if the assumption is that there is a sort of fa-, the so-called family tree 
theory which again is something i'll be mentioning that languages split off 
from each other and then split off into ever more diversified units so it so 
that in our case you have Indo-European which then splits into an Eastern and a 
Western branch and so on and there's a Germanic branch Germanic branch splits 
into English German Dutch Flemish er Frisian Scandinavian and and so on er what 
actually is happening all this time is well 'cause change is gradual these 
languages are still in contact with each other even though they might have 
split off at some point they can actually come back together again if you like 
so this is one s-, er so er i-, if you you just simply looked at English and 
Icelandic you might be you 
could be forgiven for thinking that they were er related more closely than they 
are er but that's because of contact after the time that they split off German 
and English are in fact more it's er they have a a more recent common origin 
than say German and Icelandic have which is then a step further back er and 
just to show that right for the right at the the bottom of the chart i've got 
an Icelandic word gera to do and then English and German words do make tun 
machen which Scandinavian simply doesn't have doesn't have those words well 
Norwegian does have maker maker skomaker er but that is a German loanword from 
much later on so that there's no contact then mucks up things even for 
Norwegian as well but Icelandic doesn't have that word i don't think or maybe 
it does but it would be a loanword if it does [laugh] okay okay so that's i'll 
leave you leave it there and i'll stop so er next week it'll be more of the 
same so if you can please bring that handout along next week 
sf1261: 
nm1254: oh yeah sure yeah er spare handouts anybody yeah