 | |
| Author | Peter Schrijver |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Linguistics |
Publication date | 2014 |
| Media type | Hardcover, paperback, ebook |
| ISBN | 978-0-415-35548-3 (Hardcover) |
Language Contact and the Origins of the Germanic Languages is a 2014 scholarly book by the Dutch linguist Peter Schrijver, published by Routledge. [1]
Chapter 1 starts from the observation that recent work on contact linguistics in well understood social contexts provides a new platform for trying to use evidence for historical language change as evidence for past social contexts and interactions. It emphasises the role of human social interactions in language change, rather than viewing language change as happening abstractly outside human interactions. A key premise is that people often adopt a new language because it is socially expedient to do so, but learn it with an accent determined by their native language. In some circumstances, this can lead to the pronunciation of the expanding language to change among all its speakers. A simple way to put many of Schrijver's arguments is to say that different Germanic dialects came to be spoken with the foreign accents of people who switched language to Germanic: thus Old English came to be characterised by a British Celtic accent, Old High German by a late Latin accent, and so forth.
The book focuses on the history of the Germanic languages but discusses the Finnic languages, Romance languages and Celtic languages extensively. Compared with other academic studies in historical linguistics, it is written in a usually plain and accessible style.
Chapter 2, 'The Rise of English', focuses on the much debated question of whether English, and particularly Old English, shows any sign of contact between the West Germanic-speaking immigrants who became the Anglo-Saxons and the speakers of British Celtic and Latin whom these immigrants encountered during the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain around the fifth century CE. The chapter argues that Middle English betrays the belated appearance of contact features, which had been previously obscured by the literary conservatism of Anglo-Saxon writing, but focuses on Old English phonology. It argues that this contains features strikingly similar to Old Irish (particularly regarding the Old English vowel-changes known as 'i-umlaut' and 'breaking'), and that in these respects Old Irish may provide good evidence for the kind of Celtic spoken in south-eastern Roman Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon settlements. Thus it argues that Old English does show Celtic influence.
On the way, Chapter 2 also argues that a Latin-speaking elite fled southern Britain to the northern and eastern uplands, and that their imperfect adoption of British Celtic there helps to explain the dramatic changes apparent in the medieval Brittonic languages, and to explain why those changes were so similar to the changes Latin underwent as it became the Romance languages. It further suggests that Brittonic and Irish began to diverge only around the first century AD, and accordingly that the language that became Irish only came to Ireland at that time (perhaps due to migrations prompted by the Roman conquest of Britain). In this reading, the rapid changes undergone by Irish around the fifth to sixth centuries also reflected the adoption of the language by speakers of Ireland's former language (which is known to have given Irish some loan-words but is otherwise now lost).
Chapter 3, 'The Origin of High German', focuses on the High German consonant shift. It argues that the way the shift manifested in Old Low Franconian in the Rhineland and in Langobardic in Italy is so similar to the manifestation of affrication in Late Spoken Latin in those areas that there must be a causal connection. Thus the chapter argues that the shift reflects Latin-speakers switching to German and carrying features of their own pronunciation over to it. The change then spread to other High German-speaking regions, being simplified and extended in the process.
Chapter 4, 'The Origins of Dutch' argues that several developments distinctive to Western Dutch—particularly the dialectally complex frontings of various vowels—also arose from contact with Old French as Dutch expanded into previously Romance-speaking regions.
Chapter 5, 'Beginnings', considers the origin of the Germanic languages themselves, addressing how Common Germanic came to emerge from its Indo-European ancestor. Germanic loanwords show that the Finnic languages were heavily influenced by Germanic at an early stage, and Schrijver argues that key developments in the Germanic consonant system arose by Finnic-speakers in the southern Baltic region transferring aspects of their native sound-system to Germanic. Thus Schrijver sees the rhythmic consonant gradation distinctive to the Uralic languages that include Finnic being the underlying cause of the Germanic sound-change described by Verner's law, and even speculates that the first Germanic consonant shift was triggered by native Finnic-speakers' inability to cope with the difference between voiced and voiceless plosives in the language that became Germanic.
The chapter also examines how the changes to the low vowels ā, ō and ǣ which marked the divergence of both North Germanic and West Germanic from Common Germanic have surprising parallels in the development of the Saami languages. None of these languages seems likely as the source of these changes to the others. Since Saami is known to have borrowed many words from a language now lost as Saami culture spread northwards into Scandinavia, Schrijver argues that Saami, West Germanic and North Germanic were all affected in similar ways by contact with a language or group of languages which 'shared a peculiar vowel system, whose features were impressed on North and West Germanic as well as Saami' (p. 194).
Schrijver's ideas, many of which appeared in the form of articles prior to the publication of the book, [2] [3] have been the focus of fairly extensive academic discussion. [4] [5] [6]
The Brittoniclanguages form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic language family; the other is Goidelic. The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython, meaning Ancient Britons as opposed to an Anglo-Saxon or Gael.
British English (BrE) is, according to Oxford Dictionaries, "English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English, Welsh English, and Northern Irish English. Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with] the word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity".
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia.
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland.
The toponymy of England derives from a variety of linguistic origins. Many English toponyms have been corrupted and broken down over the years, due to language changes which have caused the original meanings to be lost. In some cases, words used in these place-names are derived from languages that are extinct, and of which there are no known definitions. Place-names may also be compounds composed of elements derived from two or more languages from different periods. The majority of the toponyms predate the radical changes in the English language triggered by the Norman Conquest, and some Celtic names even predate the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the first millennium AD.
Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid 5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a group of Ingvaeonic languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages that had previously been dominant. Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. A significant subsequent influence on the shaping of Old English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by the Scandinavian Vikings who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th centuries, which led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical simplification. The Anglian dialects had a greater influence on Middle English.
The Gewisse was a tribe or clan of Anglo-Saxon England, historically assumed to have been based in the upper Thames region around Dorchester on Thames. The Gewisse are one of the direct precursors of modern-day England, being the origin of its predecessor states according to Saxon legend.
Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, is the ancestral proto-language of all known Celtic languages, and a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. It is not attested in writing but has been partly reconstructed through the comparative method. Proto-Celtic is generally thought to have been spoken between 1300 and 800 BC, after which it began to split into different languages. Proto-Celtic is often associated with the Urnfield culture and particularly with the Hallstatt culture. Celtic languages share common features with Italic languages that are not found in other branches of Indo-European, suggesting the possibility of an earlier Italo-Celtic linguistic unity.
The Britons, also known as Celtic Britons or Ancient Britons were the Celtic people who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age and into the Middle Ages, at which point they diverged into the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons. They spoke the Common Brittonic language, the ancestor of the modern Brittonic languages.
Old English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative since Old English is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of the language, and the orthography apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not difficult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of Old English phonology.
Peter Schrijver is a Dutch linguist. He is a professor of Celtic languages at Utrecht University and a researcher of ancient Indo-European linguistics. He worked previously at Leiden University and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
The name of London is derived from a word first attested, in Latinised form, as Londinium. By the first century CE, this was a commercial centre in Roman Britain.
British Latin or British Vulgar Latin was the Vulgar Latin spoken in Great Britain in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. While Britain formed part of the Roman Empire, Latin became the principal language of the elite, especially in the more romanized south and east of the island. However, in the less romanized north and west it never substantially replaced the Brittonic language of the indigenous Britons. In recent years, scholars have debated the extent to which British Latin was distinguishable from its continental counterparts, which developed into the Romance languages.
The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain is the process which changed the language and culture of most of what became England from Romano-British to Germanic. The Germanic-speakers in Britain, themselves of diverse origins, eventually developed a common cultural identity as Anglo-Saxons. This process principally occurred from the mid-fifth to early seventh centuries, following the end of Roman rule in Britain around the year 410. The settlement was followed by the establishment of the Heptarchy, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the south and east of Britain, later followed by the rest of modern England, and the south-east of modern Scotland.
The Insular Celts were speakers of the Insular Celtic languages in the British Isles and Brittany. The term is mostly used for the Celtic peoples of the isles up until the early Middle Ages, covering the British–Irish Iron Age, Roman Britain and Sub-Roman Britain. They included the Celtic Britons, the Picts, and the Gaels.
Brittonicisms in English are the linguistic effects in English attributed to the historical influence of Brittonic speakers as they switched language to English following the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon political dominance in Britain.
The decline of Celtic languages in England was the historical process by which the Celtic languages died out in what is modern-day England. It happened in most of southern Great Britain between about 400 and 1000 AD, but in Cornwall, it was finished only in the 18th century.
The Cornish language separated from the southwestern dialect of Common Brittonic at some point between 600 and 1000 AD. The phonological similarity of the Cornish, Welsh, and Breton languages during this period is reflected in their writing systems, and in some cases it is not possible to distinguish these languages orthographically. However, by the time it had ceased to be spoken as a community language around 1800 the Cornish language had undergone significant phonological changes, resulting in a number of unique features which distinguish it from the other neo-Brittonic languages.
The New Quantity System, or the Great British Vowel Shift, was a radical restructuring of the phonological system of the Common Brittonic language which occurred sometime after the middle of the first millennium AD, resulting in the collapse of the early Brittonic system of phonemic vowel length oppositions, which was inherited from Proto-Celtic, and its replacement by a system in which the formerly allophonic qualitative differences between long and short vowels is phonemicized, and vowel length becomes allophonic, and is determined by stress and syllable structure.