Skip to main content

Where did the week go?

 Oh, it's been 18 months? Huh.

Picking up where I left off as though it weren't 18 months later, I'm back to studying linguistics, and back to wanting to record my thoughts and share the love. I'm currently working my way through Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language. It's not too technical, and probably just right for an amateur like me.
I'm in Chapter 2: Perpetual Motion, which is, as you might guess, about language change - one of my favorite topics. One example of language change is in the smallest of words, and possibly one of the first concepts ever verbalized: I. You'd think that such a small but important English word would stay pretty static in pronunciation over the years, but even in the last millennium, it's undergone quite a bit of change.
  • In the 10th century A.D., the first person pronoun was spelled Ic, and pronounced almost like 'itch.' English showing its Germanic roots, I think. But I guess I'd have to know German's linguistic history to know for sure, and... well, one thing at a time, friends.
  • By 1400, the 'c' was dropped in writing, and the 'tch' sound with it. But this 'I' was pronounced as a long E sound, rhyming with 'bee.'
  • The 15th century brought with it the Great English Vowel Shift, and 'I', like all other long E sounds, morphed to long A sounds. So by the 16th century, 'I' was now said 'ay' - like modern 'hey.' Or 'say.' Or 'bae.'
  • And then, lastly, in the 18th century, it changed again to what we now consider standard - 'eye.'
The ubiquitousness of print has slowed written language change. Will the prevalence of recordings slow pronunciation change? I guess time will tell. But it's fun to think about where it might go from here. Could we get lazy, and lose the second half of the diphthong, and pronounce it as 'ah'? I already say something close to "ah dunno." or "ahm goin' d' the store."
It's not an impossible shift. Sometimes I'm sad just thinking there's (hopefully) a whole future of English language change I'll never hear. Learning about history's language change is the next best thing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Here goes...

  I've literally put my money (and my time and sanity) where my mouth is and have started a Masters in Applied Linguistics through OU . (OK, technically, it's an MA in Education with a concentration in AL, but whatevs.) It's a bananas amount of work, considering I'm doing this for fun. I'm going to try posting here regularly in hopes that when I need to write papers I'll have something to draw on. We'll see.
Post a Comment
Read more

Universal Grammar Basics

  I've heard of Universal Grammar, but I have to say, I've never thought it sounded probable. Or, maybe it sounded too probable; something we wanted to be true. "Hey, look! There are reasons we speak this way. It's right ." And I'm not a prescriptivist, so I bristled a bit at the thought of One True Way to speak. Most people who love language love the variety of it. But then I read the research and yeah, it doesn't look entirely like BS. There are four basic principles. Monsieur Jordain's Principle: Like things should be together. The thing that does the action should be somewhere near the action. The words describing a thing should probably be in the same clause as the thing. There are languages that don't follow this as strictly, but they're the exception. Caesar's Principle: The action usually follows our perception of time. The famous example is Caesar's "Veni, Vidi, Vici" - I came, I saw, I conquered. It would make a com...
Post a Comment
Read more

Here, here!

OK, it hurt just writing that. But really, I do agree with this article , and will be buying this book.
Post a Comment
Read more