Historical Linguistics 3130 A

Review of sound changes 1

I have uploaded a 2-page sheet (Acrobat PDF format) that you can print to review the main points of the first class on sound changes.

Reading chapter 2

As I mentioned last class, you should try to read as much as possible of chapter 2 before Monday's class.

The first 15 pages (section 2.1 through 2.6) we covered on Thursday, so reading this is just a review of that.

Section 2.7 will be the major topic of Monday's lecture. I thuink it will help if you read it over ahead of time. This is the part that requires a little bit of memorizing terminology. Anything that says it is "frequently used," you really need to learn. If it says it is not frequently used, you will not be required to know it for the test, but read it over anyway, just so you'll have heard of it if you ever read it anywhere. Most of the rest have fairly obvious names and shouldn't be difficult.

Section 2.8 is only one page, but it's important. You are probably familiar with this idea already from rule ordering in phonology.

We will do Section 2.9 (chain shifts) on Monday if we have time. It has already come up and will come up again I'm sure, even if we don't get to it Monday.

I will be updating the web site with some notes other things later today (Saturday), so check the blog Sunday or Monday before class if you can.

Exercise 1.1 advice

I assigned you exercise 1.1 from the textbook to be discussed on Monday. I should have emphasized that I don't expect you to spend hours and hours on it. As long as you have a few points written down, you'll have something to say at the next class. In fact, if you have one or two things to say about 3 of the 5 parts, that should be good enough. Some hints:

1. For the first part, finding letters in newspapers is probably easiest using the Internet. You could try the news feed in the links column at the left of this page. Try looking for things on Google News (link is at the left near the bottom). Through the uOttawa library, you can search The Toronto Star Pages of the Past for any 5-year period since the paper began. You can specify only editorials/opinion/letters. The trick is knowing what word or phrase to search for. I leave that to your imagination ("grammar" might be good). It wouldn't hurt to include "letters" or "letters to the editor" as one of your search terms. Letters to the Editor are generally in section A, so I wouldn't bother to look at any other page. The Globe and Mail might also be good (also available back to 1844 with you library password). They seem to get a lot of letters about English.
2. The "Ask your friends and family" question should be quick and easy for anyone.
3. As for finding books about grammar, see if you have one lying around somewhere. You can look in the library if you want, but don't good too far out of your way.
4. Question 4 is more of a thinking question. You should be able to research it from your own head, so I expect everyone to have at least one point for that.
5. The last question about etiquette books really would require a trip to the library unless you have one of those lying around. I have a lot of books, but I don't know that I have one about etiquette. Don't worry if you have nothing for this, but it would be nice if someone had a comment for this question.

Any comments and concerns, click on the comments link for this entry and leave something.

Examples of historical varieties of English

Old English

The example of Old English that I played in class is from The Funeral of Scyld Scefing (click on the large decorative initials to hear it being read). There is also a "Modern English" translation on that site.

The page entitled A (Very) Brief History of the English Language has examples of The Lord's Prayer in Old English (with audio), and (text only) Middle English, and Early Modern English. You might notice that the dates on this page don't exactly match what I told you in class. Exact dates for stages like this are somewhat arbitrary.

Middle English

The Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales with audio is at http://web1.umkc.edu/lib/engelond/prologue.htm. If you listen to the whole Web page, you'll hear quite a bit more than what we heard in class. If you have a bit of extra time, see if you can find "rules" for what kinds of changes have happened since then.

Early Modern English

The Early Modern English example we looked at was from King Arthur Aloud. Click on the title, "Malory from The Book of Tristram de Lyones: 'Launcelot and Elaine'" to hear it being read. This is from the very earliest period of Early Modern English, but it is definitely not being read with a Middle English "accent."

I also mentioned the recent performance of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with the lines pronounced as they would have been performed originally. The book about how this was done is called Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment. It was written by Prof. David Crystal, author of The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language and The Cambridge encyclopedia of language among numerous other books. If you follow the Performing Shakespeare link to Amazon.com, there is an except from the book and it might be interesting to take a quick look at it. What you get when you click on "Excerpt" is not very interesting in my opinion, but if you click on "Surprise Me," you'll might like to look at a couple of pages from some random place in the book. There were several issues in setting up the Globe Experiment, including giving regional accents to characters from various parts of England, and giving lower class characters appropriately different accents from higher class speakers.

Syllabus corrections and clarifications

There are a couple of small corrections to the syllabus that was handed out at the first class on Thursday, both concerning dates.

Firstly, Thanksgiving is October 10, not October 11. I wouldn't want any of you to miss Thanksgiving because of me :-), not that there's any serious danger of that.

Secondly, the final exam review class is Monday, December 5, in our regular class time, not December 6 as the handout indicated.

Remember that the Monday classes are in SMD 428, in a different building from the Thursday classes. This is a more cramped space without so much hi-tech equipment. Unfortunately, there was no room available to have both the Monday and Thursday sessions in the same place.

The corrected syllabus with clickable links for all the web pages and e-mail addresses is linked on the home page of this course web site.

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