History of English at Universität Wien

1) Linguistic (textual) evidence

2) Metalinguistic evidence

3) Comparative reconstruction

4) Internal reconstruction

Old grammar books and dictionaries

Similarities between words in different languages point to common ancestry. Ancestor languages can be reconstructed by comparison.

Words from different languages displaying similarities in terms of form and meaning due to common ancestry (as opposed to eg borrowing) = data for comparative reconstruction

It aims to detect regular correspondences between speech sounds.

-> Naturalness Principle (some sound changes more natural...e.g. vowel nasalisation plus nasal deletion)

-> Majority Principle: Change is (supposed to be) rarer than non-change (i.e parallel changes in related languages are unlikely)

A method for reconstructing earlier language stages that relies on comparative data from within one language

PIE --> Germanic --> West Germanic --> Old English --> Middle English --> Modern English

• Too far back in time --> nobody wrote stuff up back then
• Many of the words that have survived from PIE describe a setting (landscape , flora & fauna) that could've existed in the are north of the Black Sea.
• (e.g. domestication of horse and certain techniques for agriculture)

Regular sound change which affected the PIE plosive consonant inventory

• voiceless plosives -> voiceless fricatives
• voiced plosives --> voiceless plosive
• "bh" --> b

• Grimm's Law
• Fixed Root-Initial Stress
• Weak Past Tense
• Weak Adjectival Inflection

Development of a strong stress on first syllable of the root, leading to phonological reduction in other syllables

Class of verbs for which past tense is indicated by dental suffix (instead of vowel alternation)

eg loved (lufode), bought (brothe) kept (cepte)