48. The Linguistic Consequences of the Norman Conquest.

In 1066 a considerable army headed by William crossed the Channel and defeated the English army. In the battle of Hastings, fought in October 1066, Harold was killed & the English were defeated. William became king of England. He was mercilessly suppressing the numerous rebellions of the English. The greater part of the England nobility was either killed or it fled from the country & their places were killed by William’s French followers. All the important positions in the government, church & army were occupied by the French. Following the conquest hundreds of people from France crossed the Channel to make their home in Britain. The English occupation, naturally spoke English, but gradually many of them mastered French, so that the number of people using both l-ges was constantly increasing.

The French influence was especially felt in the vocabulary of the English l-ge and in its orthography. The early French borrowings reflect accurately the spheres of Norman influence upon English life; later borrowings can be attributed to the continued cultural, economic and political contacts between the countries. The French influence added new features to the regional and social differentiation of the l-ge.

36. ME dialects. Development of the monophthongs y, a, a, ae in different dialects

36. Development of vowels in oe

The phonetics of the OE period was characterized by a system of dynamic stress. The fixed stress fell on the 1^st root syllable.

The vowels had the following characteristic features:

9. the quantity and the quality of the vowel depended upon its position in the word. Under stress any vowel could be found, but in unstressed position there were no diphthongs or long monophthongs, but only short vowels a, e, I, o, u.

10. the length of the stressed vowels was phonemic, which means that there could be two words differing only in the length of the vowel .

11. there was an exact parallelism of long and short vowels.

There were the following vowel phonemes in Old English:

Monophthongs: i, i:, y, y:, u, u:, e, e:, o, o:, ae, ae:, a, a:

Diphthongs: eo, eo:, ea, ea:

All the diphthongs were falling diphthongs with the first element stronger than the second, the second element being more open that the first.

OE vowel system classified according to the following principles:

4. According to the place of articulation or to the position of the bulk of the tongue: front, central, back.

5. According to the tongue-high: high, mid, low

6. According to the length: long and short. For every short vowel there was a long vowel.

The Old English vowel system formed on the basis of Common Germanic vowel system and also under the influence of different processes. OS monophthongs are, as a rule, a further development of some Common Germanic monophthongs.

For example

OE [ae] [i] [o]

From Common Germanic [a] [i] [u]

Some OE monophthongs developed from Common Germanic diphthongs

OE [a:]

From Common Germanic [ai]

OE diphthongs are a result of some further development of Common Germanic diphthongs, though in the course of history the quality of the diphthong may have undergone a change

OE ceosan ceas

From Common Germanic kiusan kaus

OE short diphthongs originated from monopgthongs

OE eald heorte

From Common Germanic ald herte

Changes in OE vowel phonemes

The changes that took place in the prehistoric period of the development of the English language and which explain the difference between OE and Common Germanic vowels were of two types: assimilative changes and independent changes. Independent changes do not depend upon the environment in which the given sound was found. They cannot be explained, but they are merely stated. Assimilative changes are explained by the phonetic position of the sound in the word and the change can and must be explained. Among the many phonetic assimilative changes which took place in the prehistoric period of the development of the English language and which account for the discrepancy between the OE and the Common Germanic vowel system the most important are breaking and palatal mutation. Breaking (I-mutation). The process of breaking took place in the 6^th century. It affected two vowels – [ae] and [e] when hey were followed by the consonant [r], [l], [h] generally followed by another consonant. The resulting vowel was a diphthong; consequently the process may be summed up as diphthongization of short vowels [ae] and [e] before certain consonant clusters. Palatal mutation it occurred somewhere during the 6^th-7the centuries. The process affected Germanic words where a vowel in a stressed syllable was immediately followed by the sound [i] or [j] in the next syllable. Almost all vowels, both diphthongs and monophthongs, in the context described above became further forward and higher, or more palatal and more narrow, with the exception of [e] and [i] which could go no further.

As a result of this process a new phoneme entered the vowel system in Old English – y/y/. It appeared as a result of narrowing u/u/.