Evidence from the Past

The comparative method works from living languages, but historians of language also have direct evidence: things people wrote, names they gave places, and words other languages borrowed from them. This chapter looks at those kinds of evidence, then follows one language, English, across its documented history to see them working together.

Written Texts and Philology

Wikipedia defines philology as the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It overlaps with textual criticism, literary criticism, history and linguistics, and it also covers the authenticity, original form and meaning of texts. In older, especially British, usage it is conflated with comparative and historical linguistics, and in British English it remains largely synonymous with historical linguistics. Historical and comparative linguistics often rely on philological materials.

Place Names

Toponymy studies place names: their origins, meanings, usage and types. Many names have a generic (the kind of place) and a specific (what distinguishes it). In Oldham and Newham the generic is ham ("homestead") and the specifics are old and new. Some names are "simplex", a generic only: Bath, Chester, Poole.

• Names can preserve languages that left no texts. Hellespont was explained by Greek poets through Helle, but the name is probably from an older language, such as Pelasgian, that those poets did not know. George R. Stewart suggests it originally meant something like "narrow Pontus".
• Names show settlement. Toponyms "illustrate ethnic settlement patterns" and can help identify "discrete periods of immigration" (McDavid, 1958; Kaups's study of Finnish place names in Minnesota, 1966).
• Names change through language change, politics and border adjustments.

F. M. Powicke (1954) said place-name study "uses, enriches and tests the discoveries of archaeology and history and the rules of the philologists". The page presents this as a scholarly view, not a settled conclusion. The page does not discuss Celtic river names, Norse -by endings or Old English -ton, so they are not used here.

Loanwords

Chapter 6 showed that loanwords reveal contact. Here is the evidence side: a loanword can preserve a form, or a word that later disappeared in the source language. The next section shows English loanwords from two sources.

Worked Case: English

Wikipedia's History of English gives these periods, with approximate dates from the page:

The settlers

Germanic settlers from northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands arrived in Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries. Their Ingvaeonic dialects displaced Celtic languages and possibly British Latin in much of England. The page cites the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account of Vortigern inviting the Angles around 449, but notes it was not a contemporaneous source.

Old Norse

Viking raids began in the late 8th century. The Great Heathen Army invaded in 865, bringing much of northern and eastern England under Scandinavian control (the Danelaw). English borrowed about 2,000 Old Norse words, several hundred of which survive: anger, bag, law, sky and they. Norse contact is believed to have contributed to grammatical simplification, such as the loss of grammatical gender and most case endings.

French and Latin

After 1066, Anglo-Norman replaced English for a time as the language of the upper classes. About 10,000 French and Norman loanwords entered Middle English, especially in government, church, law, the military, fashion and food. The page's pie chart gives about 29% of modern English words from Anglo-Norman or French and about 29% from Latin.

Spelling and the Great Vowel Shift

• English gained the th spelling for /θ/ and /ð/ in place of the Old English letters þ and ð. Printing had a standardising effect; most early presses came from continental Europe, so native letters such as þ and ð died out.
• The Great Vowel Shift is dated c. 1400-1700 in the timeline, "mainly during the 15th century" in the text, and c. 1500 in the phonology section. It "affected the qualities of most long vowels". It occurred after the spelling system was fixed, which explains pairs like mat and mate.
• The first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, was published in 1604, and Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language followed in 1755.

Samples of the texts

Read side by side with Chapter 7's examples: willan is Old English, and 'll is modern. Each text is evidence for the stage of the language it was written in, within the limits of the philology section.

Try It Yourself