Comment on the Shift of English Language from a Highly Synthetic Language into an Analytic One 英语论文.doc

comment on the shift of english language from a highly synthetic language into an analytic one nowadays, english is a global language, and there are more than 370million people who speak english as their first language. but even for these native english speakers, if you present a page of old english to them, they may look at it more strange than look at a page of french or italian because of the huge differences between old english and modern english. generally speaking, old english distinguishes from modern english in such aspects as spelling, pronunciation, the lexical and the grammar. of these differences, grammar is of fundamental feature that makes old english different from the language of today. old english is a highly inflectional language. inflectional languages fall into two classes: one is synthetic, the other is analytic. synthetic language is also called inflected language. it refers to one in which its meaning is expressed by inflectional endings, not by word order. synthetic language uses inflectional forms, such as affixes, as primary means of indicating the grammatical function of the words in the language. in indo-european languages, these most commonly take the form of endings on the noun and pronoun, the adjective and the verb. the opposite of a synthetic language is an analytic language, also known as isolating language. it refers to one in which every morpheme forms a separate word, and individual particles are used to convey grammatical functions. in analytic language, the word forms are mostly or totally fixed, and grammatical functions are indicated through the use of helper words and word order. chinese is an example of an analytic language. modern english is also an analytic. in modern english, the subject and the object do not have distinctive forms, nor do we have inflectional endings to indicate the other relations marked by case endings in latin, except in the possessive case and in pronouns. the development of english from old one to new one is a vivid illustration of the language shift from highly synthetic to analytic. the shift of english language from highly synthetic to analytic is not finished in a day, but through several periods covering a span of more than 1500 years. generally, it can be divided into four distinctive periods.they are the old english(450-1100); middle english(1100-1500); early modern english(1500-1800) and later modern english(1800-present). during each period, there are several elements which caused the change of english either in spelling, pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary. 1. old english old english is known as a full-inflectional language period. the ancestors of modern british people, jutes, saxon and angle were from jutland and southern demark of west gemanic. they spoke a mutually intelligible language, because they shared many common features of germanic language. they were very similar at grammar such as possessing a strong and weak declensions of adjective and verb; all the three languages showed some shift in certain consonants, and also they beard a distinctive type of conjugation of the verbs so called weaker regular verbs. old english was chiefly used as a spoken language, the spoken language was not stable, it might vary from person to person. so old english was not entirely uniformed language. it was distinguished in four dialects, they were the northumbrain spoken in north of humber; mercian spoken between the humber and the thames; west saxon the dialect of the west saxon kingdom in the south west and kentish spoken by jutes in the southeast. these dialects merged into the anglo-saxon language known as old english. besides these four dialects, old english was also influenced by other factors which could be traced from the resources of vocabulary. generally, there were three resources where old english could borrow. one is the celtic language. old english had handful of celtic language. it borrowed celtic words mainly in the names of places such as dover, london, york, etc. another borrowed language is scandinavian language. the scandinavian influence upon old english was also mainly about the names of places such as the places named by using suffixes -by, -throp, -thwaite, etc. the third influence came from latin. during the 400 years of roman controlling british, latin influenced english slightly. this was the first period of the latin influence, which was the slightest of all the influences. the second period and also the large scale of latin words pouring into english was through conversion of britain to roman christianity beginning in 597. for example, some learning terms came from latin because education was chiefly run by church. as for the characteristics of old english, they would be showed through the following three ways. first is the phonology. old english retained the five vowels, /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/ and long vowels /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/ and consonants such as p=th, sch=sh c=r. the second is lexicon. the vocabulary of old english which purely belonged to the gemanic family died out in large scale. the survived old english words became the basic words today. the third is syntax. old english retained all the inflectional features. in grammar, old english resembles modern german. theoretically the noun and adjective are inflected for four cases (they are nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) in the singular and four in the plural, and in addition the adjective has separated forms for each of the three genders (they are masculine, feminine and neuter) , the inflection of the verb is less elaborate than that of the latin verb, but there are distinctive endings for the different persons, numbers (they are singular and plural), tenses (they are present, imperfect, aorist, perfect, plu perfect and future perfect) and moods (they are indictive, subjunctive, imperative and injunctive) the nature of the old english inflection will be illustrated from the following aspects. a. the noun the inflection of the old english noun indicates distinctions of number and case. the old english has only four cases. the endings of these cases vary with different nouns, but they fall into certain broad categories or declensions. there is a vowel declension and a consonant declension, also called the strong and weak declensions. their nature is gathered from two examples of the strong declension and one of the weak: stan(stone), a masculine a- stem; giefu (gift) a feminine o- stem; and hunta ( hunter), a masculine consonant - stem.singular n. stan gief -u hunt -a g. stan-es gief -e hunt -an d. stan-e gief -e hunt -an a. stan gief -e hunt -anplural n. stan -as gief -a hunt -an g. stan-a gief -a hunt -ena d. stan -um gief -um hunt -um a. stan -as gief -a hunt -anit is apparent from these examples that the inflection of the noun was much more elaborate in old english than it is today. these two examples illustrate clearly the synthetic character of english in its earliest stage. b. the adjective the inflection in the old english adjective contrasts in the most striking way with the complete absence of inflection from the adjective in modern english. because an important feature of the germanic languages is the development of a twofold declension of the adjective: one, the strong declension, used with nouns when not accompanied by a definite article or similar word ,the other, the weak declension, used when the noun is preceded by such a word. the forms are those of the nominative singular masculine in the strong and weak declensions respectively, as illustrated below. strong declension weak declension masc. fem. neut. masc. fem. neut. singular n. god god god god -a god -e god -e g. god -es god -re god -es god -an god -an god -an d. god -um god -re god - um god -an god -an god -an a. god -ne god -e god god -an god -an god -e i. god -e god -eplural n. god -e god -a god god -an g. god -ra god -ra god-ra god -ena or god -ra d. god -um god -um god -um god -um a god -e god -a god god -anc. the pronoun from the frequency of its use and the necessity for specific reference when used, the personal pronoun in all languages is likely to preserve a fairly complete system of inflections. old english shows this tendency not only in having distinctive forms for practically all genders, persons, and cases but also in preserving in addition to the ordinary two numbers, singular and plural, a set of forms for two people or two things -the dual number. singular n. ic u he (he) heo ( she) hit (it) g. min in his hiere his d. me e him hiere him a. me (mec) e (mec) hine hie hit dual n. wit (we two) git (ye two) g. uncer incer d. unc inc a. unc incplural n. we ge hie g. user (ure) eowr hiera d. us eow him a. us (usic) eow (eowic) hied. the verb old english distinguished only two simple tenses by inflection, a present and a past, and, except for one word, it had no inflectional forms for the passive as in latin or greek. it recognized the indicative, subjunctive, and imperative moods and had the usual two numbers and three persons. in old english the vowel of the past tense often differs in the singular and the plural; or to be more accurate, the first and the third person singular have one vowel while the second person singular and all persons of the plural have another. in the principle parts of old english strong verbs, therefore, we have four forms: the infinitive, the preterite singular ( first and third person), the preterite plural, and the past participle. in old english the strong verbs can be grouped in seven general classes. the followings illustrate the variations within each class. i drifan (drive) draf drifon (ge) drifen ii ceosan (choose) ceas curon coren iii helpan (choose) healp hulpon holpen iv beran (bear) b r b ron boren v sprecan (speak) spr c spr con sprecen vi faran (fare, go) for foron faren vii feallan (fall) feoll feollon feallen2. middle english (1100-1500) the middle english period was a period of english from inferior language to standard language. in 1066ad, william the conqueror, the duke of normandy, invaded and conquered england and the anglo-saxon, which was known as the nornan conquest. the norman also belonged to the germanic stock and spoke a dialect of old french known as anglo-norman. they brought a large amount of french words into british. the french speaking people dominated the society, so french became the official language and was spoken by the upper class. the french loyal class showed an indifferent attitude toward english . so english was in its inferiority only spoken by the english people who were at the bottom of the society. but english didnt die out, it survived. the survival of english at the early period was attributed to the following elements. first is the fusion of the two peoples. though the french were the upper class, they had to communicated with the english speaking people, such as tax official and estate official. they had to master some english in the process of communicating with the english speaking people in order to finish their work. then the king and french nobilityshould learn some english to give instructions and orders to the anglo-saxon as their underlings. also in towns, there was some association between french people and english people in trade. so they should know each others purpose by communication. still there was the inter-marriage between the two people. the fusion of the two peoples made the two languages interwoven with each other. in short time, there appeared a lot of bilingual families. and quite a lot of young english speaking people tried to learn and speak french if they wanted to enter the upper society or get some better opportunities. so a lot of french words entered english. during the later part of middle english period, english gradually required its position as a standard english. in 1362, a law was passed in england parliament statute of pleading, which was written in english. it was the official cognition of english. since then, english began to be used in school and got its rapid development. middle english is a period when great changes have taken place. the change was more fundamental and extensive than any other period. these changes happened in the following aspects. a. the decay of inflectional endings old english was a highly inflectional language, but in middle english, the inflectional endings were gradually reduced. the following examples will present the change vividly. a. noun a comparison between examples of common noun declensions in old english and middle english shows how seriously the inflectional endings were disturbed. for example, in the london english of chaucer the forms stan, stanes, stane, stan in the singular and stanas, stana, stanum, stanas in the plural were reduced to three: stan, stanes and stane. in the west midlands and in the north the process had gone even further by the mid-fourteenth century. b. adjective in the adjective the leveling of forms had even greater consequences. partly as a result of the sound-changes, partly through the extensive working of analogy, the form of the nominative singular was early extended to all cases of the singular, and that of the nominative plural to all cases of the plural, both in the strong and the weak declensions. the result was that in the weak declension there was no longer any distinction between the singular and the plural: both ended in -e (eg: blinda blinde and blindan binde). the same was true with the adjectives under the strong declension. c. the verb the changes in the verb during the middle english period were the serious losses suffered by the strong conjugation. new verbs formed from nouns and adjectives or borrowed from other languages were regularly conjugated as weak. strong verbs became weak or lost. b. loss of grammatical gender the grammatical gender was gradually replaced by natural or objective gender. the gender of old english nouns was not often determined by meaning. it was revealed chiefly by the concord of the strong adjective and the demonstratives. when the inflections of these gender-distinguishing words were reduced to a single ending for the adjective, and the fixed forms of the, this, that, these and those for the demonstrative, the support for grammatic gender was removed. so in grammatical sense, the middle english gradually shifted from highly synthetic to analytic. besides the change of grammar, middle english vocabulary also went through a great change. there were a tremendous new words entering english. french influence is much more direct and observable upon the vocabulary. the influx of french words into english was neither sudden nor immediately apparent. it began slowly and continued until toward the end of the middle english period. and this borrowing can be divided into two stages. 1250 was the boundaryline. the first was different from the second. before 1250, about 900 french appeared in english. after 1250, the condition of french words made their way into english was supplemented. toward 14th century, almost every aspect of civilization was possessed by french. most french borrowed into english were nouns, verbs and adjectives. besides french influence, english also borrowed from scandivanian language. the largest amount of scandivanian came to english during 1150 to 1250. few more words to english from 1250 to 1350. the inflex reduced from 1350 to 1500. middle english also borrowed from latin. the latin words merging into english directly came from learnt words from the translation of latin text. latin was the official language of the church, so some religion words were latin. still, celtic language and dutch and low german also influence middle english, though their influences were not as obvious as the latin and french. besides the above, greek words,arabic words and hebrew language found their shadow in middle english, just borrowed vocabulary from other languages was not enough to express their thoughts, so some new words of middle english formed in the following other ways. the first is compounding, such as n.+n., adj.+n., n.+v. the second is affixing, such as the prefix ad suffix. there was still some other minor sources such as blending: smog, scroll while borrowing a lot of words from other languages, most of the old english vocabulary were lost during the middle english time. the imposition of foreign culture upon the nation responded to the dramatic influence upon the language. in addition, culture and technological change also responded to the loss of old vocabulary. 3. early modern english (1500-1800) the early modern e