Accentuation system.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 812.

The phonetics of the Old English period was characterised by a system of dynamic stress. The fixed stress fell on the first root syllable:

agāne (gone); ʒesēon – j (see); ʒaderian γ – г (gather)

Polysyllabic words and com­pounds could have two stresses: chief (on the first component) and secondary. Grammatical endings were unstressed, so in different grammatical forms of a word the stress remained on the same syllable, and it wasn't changed in word-building:

hlaforde – hlaford (lord, guardian of bread);

cyninʒe [j] - cyninʒ [g] (king);

æþelinʒʒa – æþelinʒ (nobleman)

Though grammatical endings were never stressed, the situation with pre­fixes was different. Verb prefixes were unaccented but in adjectives and nouns the stress shifted onto the prefix.

a-'risan (arise), mis-'faran (faran – go astray) - verbs.

'or-eald (eald – very old), 'to-weard (towards)- adjectives.

'mis-dæd (misdeed) - noun.

If words were derived from the same root, word stress served to distin­guish nouns from verbs.

'and-swaru (noun) – and-'swarian (verb) – (answer)

onʒin (noun) - on'ʒinnan (verb) – (beginning, begin).

Today we can observe the same phenomenon in pairs like import - to import, project - to project.

Old Engish system of consonantsconsisted of 14 consonants denoted by the letters

p, b, m, f, t, d, n, s, r, I, þ (ð), c, ʒ, h.

Some of the modern sounds were non-existent: [ʃ], [ʒ], [ʧ], [ʤ].

The OE consonantal system consisted of several classes of sounds. All the consonants fell into noise con­sonants and sonorants (сонорный согласный). Noise consonants were subdivided into plosives and fricatives which were further grouped as voiced and voiceless. Sometimes voicing was only the point of difference between allophones - variants of a phoneme depending on the phonetic surrounding and serving to distinguish between words. OE consonantal sys­tem also had palatalised sounds which are not typical of today's English.

Another distinctive feature in the system of consonants was the difference in length: OE had both short and long consonants. Sounds like /f, s, n/ can obvi­ously be made longer or shorter. But plosives like /p, t / could also be long and were doubled in spelling to indicate their length. Today it would roughly corre­spond to the pronunciation of:

part-time, big game.

In OE this difference could be semantic:

hopian /p/ - to hope

hoppian /p:/ - to hop

[k] cwelan /l/ – to die

[k] cwellan /l:/ - to kill

mete /t/ - to meet

mette / t: / - met

The length was distinguished mostly in the intervocal position.

Some consonantal changes were common for all Germanic languages and some were specifically English. In OE consonants were subjected to the processes of:

- voicing - devoicing;

- doubling;

- metathesis;

- Grimm's law;

- Verner's law;

- hardening;

- rhotacism;

The phonemes denoted by letters f, þ, ð, s are voiced and voiceless depending on their phonetic position. They are voiced in “intervocal position”:

hlaf [f] (bread) – hlaford [v] (breadkeeper)

[g] ʒos [s] — ʒoses [z]

(goose, Nom. Sing.) (Gen, Sing.)

toð [θ] — toðes [ð]

(tooth, Norn. Sing.) (Gen. Sing.)

The phoneme denoted by the letter с also gave at least two variants — palatal [к'] and velar [k]. In the majority of cases it was a velar consonant and palatal generally before the vowel i. Compare: cild (child) , scip (ship) where с denotes the palatal consonant [k'] and such words as can (can), climban (to climb) when the letter с denotes the corresponding velar variant of the phoneme [k].

Similar remarks can be made about the phoneme denoted by the letter ʒ: we have the voiced velar plosive variant [g] of it at the beginning of the word before back vowels or consonants or in the middle of the word after n:

ʒod (good), ʒretan (to greet, to address), ʒаnʒаn (to go), the voiced velar fricative variant [γ] in the middle of the word between back vowels: daʒas (days), the voice palatal fricative variant [j] before and after front vowels: dæʒ (day), ʒeаr (year).

Doubling meant prolonging the consonant sound to indicate long vowels. This was widely employed in the process of i-umlaut, in the 8th century.

Badi (Gth.) – bedd (bed);

fulian –fyllan (become foul).

The only consonant not affected by it was /r/.

Metathesis - метатеза (перестановка звуков и слогов на основе процессов ассимиляции и диссимиляции) is a phonetic change in which two sounds exchange their places (most usually it concerned /r/ and the following vowel):

brid - bird;

drit - dirt;

forst -frost;

grapsen — grasp;

moudle - mould.

Grimm's law explains the correspondence between certain groups of Germanic and non-Germanic consonants. Those correspondences involve three sets of Germanic consonants, consequently they generally speak of three stages of Grimm's law. But we shall speak here about only one stage which is the simplest to explain and the most consistent — the Germanic consonants [f], [θ], [h] and the corresponding consonants [p], [t] [k] we find in similar phonetic environment.

The essence of this stage of the first Germanic consonant shift is the following:

The voiceless plosive consonants [p], [t], [k] of non-Germanic Indo-European languages shifted in Germanic languages into the voiceless fricative consonants [f], [θ], [h]. This change affected Germanic languages at the beginning of the first millennium AD. Examples:

It should be noted, however, that these correspondences are not absolutely clear in all the cases. Some more complicated phenomena were formulated in the so-called Verner's law.

A careful analysis of Germanic words and the corresponding non-Germanic Indo-European words shows, however, that there are certain words or word-forms in Germanic languages where instead of the expected voiceless fricative consonants we find voiced plosive consonants. These seeming "exceptions" to the rule are a result of the further development of the fricative consonants which appeared in Germanic languages after the first consonant shift.

The essence of this change was explained by Karl Verner — hence its name: Verner's law.

The Germanic voiceless fricative consonants [f], [θ], [h] which appeared due to Grimm's law later became voiced if they were found after unstressed vowels. Compare:

Latin Old English

pater fæder (father)

t → θ in accordance with Grimm's law, but as the stress in the word " fæder" in the prehistoric period was on the second syllable the voiceless fricative consonant [θ] became voiced [ð]; later the voiced fricative consonant [ð] underwent "hardening" and became [d]. Hardening illustrated the transition of IE /ð, v, γ / into /d, b, g/ initially and after nasals, turning fricatives into plosives. Consequently the whole process of the change may be presented in the following way:

I.E. [t] > Com. Germ. [θ] > [ð] > [d]

Grimm's law - Verner's law - hardening

Verner's law also affected a fourth consonant — [s] in addition to the three consonants which appeared in the language under Grimm's law, i.e. [f], [θ], [h]. The [s] was also voiced after unstressed vowels — [s] > [z], later the resulting consonant [z] became [r] — the change [z] > [r] is called rhotacism. Verner's law explains the appearance of "consonant gradation" in some strong verbs. For instance:

I II III IV

cweðan cwæð cwædon cweden (say)

ceosan ceas curon coren (choose)

In Common Germanic the stress in the third and fourth verb-forms originally fell on the second syllable, hence the consonant [9] and the consonant [s] which were originally in the forms cwædon/cweden and curon/coren became voiced, i.e. *[θ] > [ð] and [s] > [z] — Verner's law, later [ð] > [d] — hardening and [z] > [r] — rhotacism.

The Old English spelling was mainly phonetic, i.e. each letter as a rule denoted one sound in every environment.

The vowels had the following characteristic features:

a) 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].

b) The length of the stressed vowels (monophthongs and diphthongs) was phonemic [fə'nimɪk] (фонематический), which means that there could be two words differing only in the length of the vowel:

metan (to measure) — mētan (to meet)

pin (pin) — pīn (pain)

god (god) — gōd (good)

c) There was an exact parallelism ['pærəlelɪz(ə)m] of long and short vowels:

Short: monophthongs - а о e u i æ у; diphthongs - ea eo

Long: monophthongs- āō ē ū ī æ ÿ; diphthongs - ēа ēо

Monophthongs in OE developed from Germanic sounds in the process of fronting. So Germanic [a] and [a:] split into several vowels:

OE diphthongs developed from Germanic sequences of monophthongs ei, ai, eu, au. Some of them were monophthongised and the rest formed the group of OE diphthongs. Short diphthongs were produced as the result of the phonetic change called “fracture", or "breaking". It is diphthongisation of the short vowels [a] and [e] before certain consonant clusters:

-a turned into ea before h + cons., l + cons., г + cons., or final h: arm — earm (arm), æld – eald (old), æhta –eahta (eight), sah – seah (saw).

- e turned into eo before lc, lh, h, r + cons.: melcan —meolcan (to milk), selh — seolh (seal), herte – heorte (heart), feh – feoh (cattle).

Diphthongs also appeared as the result of diphthongisation. A back vowel (a, o, u) in the suffix turned the stressed root vowel into a diphthong: sifun – siofon (seven), swestar – sweostar (sister), hefon – heofon (heaven).

But probably one of the most important vowel changes in OE was i-umlaut, or "palatal mutation". It is front­ing of a vowel in the root under the influence of i, j in the succeeding syllable. Since i, j were common in suffixes and endings, i-umlaut was very frequent. Some­times it also involved doubling of the root consonant: badi — bedd, fulian — fyllan.

However these сhanges mainly concerned stressed syllables. In unstressed posi­tions final vowels were shortened and short vowels were even dropped.

At the same time certain vowels could be lengthened as the result of the loss of consonant: funf – fif (five). In such cases the law of compensationwas applied. If one consonant was lost in a word, the previous vowel had to be lengthened or the consonant doubled. This law was essential because the loss of sounds could disturb the accentuation pattern – the sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables in an utterance.