Officially Sanctioned Crib Notes

Notes: Chapter One

Inflection: changes in a word form relating them to one another in a sentence; inflection can be internal (e.g. man to men, sing to sung) plurals, tenses, sub-verb agreement

Concord: (agreement) matching the inflectional ending of one word for a number, gender, case or person with that of another to which it is grammatically related, (e.g. this book, these books)

Word order: signal of an analytic language that often depends on function words in order for users to discern meaning.

Function words: grammatical signal words used with word order to serve some of the same functions as inflections—articles, auxiliaries, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and certain adverbial particles.

Morphemes: free: can be used alone – smallest meaningful linguistic sign that cannot be subdivided

Bound: cannot be used on its own – apple + Jack, 2 free; apple+-s (plural), one free, one bound.

Language changes:

Syntagmatic changes: nearby elements [within a word—e.g. Gramma goose’s sandwich] influence one another in the flow of speech

Paradigmatic changes: (associative): resulting from the influence on an expression of other expressions that might occur instead of it or are otherwise associated with it, as bridegum was changed to bridegroom, shift from lade board to Larboard to port

Social change: caused by change in way of life of its speakers, often the influence of other languages (invaders) or events (google, suicide bomber, Norman words in English)

Dialect: variation of language used by a particular place or social group; ethnic, social level, sex, age, grade, (idolect: unique to each person)

Register: var of lang. Used for a particular purpose or circumstances: sermons, classroom versus MTV.

Whorf Hypothesis: Proposal that the language we use affects the way we respond to the world (i.e. colors – the more words we have for them, the more variant colors we will name and see)

Chapter Two

Consonants classified by manner of articulation:

Stops/plosives: flow of air is stopped and then explodes without vibration (p,k,t)

Fricatives: a narrow opening is made somewhere in the mouth the air must move through(sibilants) (f,v,θ, s, z)

Affricatives: voiced and voiceless two sounds occur, one right after the other, counted as one sound(j)

Nasals: air through nose (m,n, ng)

Liquids: tip of the tongue on the alveolar ridge (l,r)

Vowels: classified by position of tongue vs. roof of mouth : high, mid, low and to position of highest part of tongue. (front, central, back)

diphthong: two vowel sesuqence pronounced by single syllable (sky, right, route [rowt])

tense vs. lax: tense are longer in duration than the closest lax vowel and also higher and less central (I, e,u,o) – current English length of vowels determined by neighboring sounds.

Monopthong: single, simple vowel

Effect of [r] : modifies quality of vowel before it (boat vs. boar)

Types and causes of sound change:

Asssimilation: sounds become more alike (pancake) ; palatizations (whatzyername, omina)

Dissimilation : sounds become less alike (caterpillar)

Elision : Sounds omitted (Galinda to Glinda; family to Fam’ly)

Intrusion: sounds inserted between consonants.

Metathesis: changing the order of sounds (ask – aks)

Substratum cause theory of sound change: different languages collide, and assimilate imperfectly

Languages tend to develop a balanced sound system.

Chapter Three

• writing grows out of drawing, imagistic in nature
• ideographic each word represented by a single symbol (Chinese)
• phonographic each letter represents a sound
• syllabary (rebus poems)

majuscule: capital letters

umlaut: symbols used to describe a specific pronunciation(usually lengthening) of a vowel (o, u)

rune: ancient symbols for sounds used in German, early English, Norse – six letters futhorc name of the alphabet; carved in stone or wood.

Insular hand: the decorative curly fancy writing of Old English monks

Thorn ( ) for (th) and p (wynn) for [w]

Chapter four

IndoEuropean is the language from which most Western languages can be traced. A cognate is a word which shows this ancestry through the ages into the difference languages, such as mithair, mother, mader, mater, etc.

The importance of word order:

Types of Language: (typological : show lang sim and diff)

Isolating ( one word, one idea, one syllable… English is more isolating now)

Agglutinative: words made up of parts whose syllables have clearer meaning

Incorporative: major sentence elements into a single word (Eskimo, Swahili)

Inflectional: suffixes that were once independent words (Old English, Latin)

Modern linguists use genetic classification (see tree)

Grimm’s Law: First Sound Shift

Aspirated voice stop becomes unaspirated voiced stop (bh to b, dh to d) BHATER-BROTHER

Voiceless stops become voiceless fricatives (p,k,t to f, [th], h) [UNLESS BEFORE S] PATER-FATHER

Indo-European voiced stop becomes voiceless stop (b,d,g to p,t,k) ABEL,JABLOKO, APPLE

Where is English on the tree?

Chapter Five:

*Celts invite Angles, Saxons and Jutes to fight picts; (A.D.449)

*St. Augustine of Canterbury brings monks/religion “musc. Lang of field capacity for abstract

thought” given by influence of Latin

*Vikings come in 787; come back in 865 to settle the good lands (eventually 2/3 of England)

*Alfred the Great keeps English alive through scholarship; Danish absorbed as neighbors trade.

Norman Invasion 1066

Traits of English: drive to simplify language – lose inflections to allow communication with Danes; hardy lang by joining with norse and Latin; Normans eventually intermarry English; Normans lose bond with territory across channel.

• handwriting was insular
• meanings changed (dream-joy, dreorig –bloody)
• words vanished (galdor-song, bochord –book hoard)
• Old English was gendered like French
• Inflective to isolating
• Nouns inflected: declensions: inflection of n, pron, adj, for case, number, and definiteness

Declensions are strong or weak (like the n-stem patterns)

• Like modern, OE verbs were weak (adding d or t) or strong (internal changes, sing-sang-sung)