T: The treatment of low vowels in the normative British pronunciation of the 19th c A brief history of English lg: English

is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. This broad family includes most of the European languages spoken today. Time line: - Old English (500-1100 AD) - Middle English (1100-1500) -Early Modern English (1500-1800) The next wave of innovation in English came with the Renaissance. The revival of classical scholarship brought many classical Latin and Greek words into the Language and many survived to this day. Shakespeare wrote in modern English. But Elizabethan English has much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer. Many familiar words and phrases were coined or first recorded by Shakespeare, some 2,000 words and countless idioms are his. "One fell swoop," "vanish into thin air," and "flesh and blood" are all Shakespeare's. Words he bequeathed to the language include "critical," "leapfrog," "majestic," "dwindle," and "pedant." Two other major factors influenced the language and served to separate Middle and Modern English. The first was the Great Vowel Shift. This was a change in pronunciation that began around 1400. While modern English speakers can read Chaucer with some difficulty, Chaucer's pronunciation would have been completely unintelligible to the modern ear. Shakespeare, on the other hand, would be accented, but understandable. Vowel sounds began to be made further to the front of the mouth and the letter "e" at the end of words became silent. Chaucer's Lyf (pronounced "leef") became the modern life. In Middle English name was pronounced "nam-a," five was pronounced "feef," and down was pronounced "doon." In linguistic terms, the shift was rather sudden, the major changes occurring within a century. The shift is still not over, however, vowel sounds are still shortening although the change has become considerably more gradual. The last major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press. William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. Books became cheaper and as a result, literacy became more common. Publishing for the masses became a profitable enterprise, and works in English, as opposed to Latin, became more common. Finally, the printing press brought standardization to English. The dialect of London, where most publishing houses were located, became the standard. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the first English dictionary was published in 1604 (Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall). - Late-Modern English (1800-Present)* (some refrences provide the dates 1700-1900 or 1950) The principal distinction between early- and late-modern English is vocabulary. Pronunciation, grammar, and spelling are largely the same, but Late-Modern English has many more words. These words are the result of two historical factors. The first is the 1

Industrial Revolution and the rise of the technological society. This required new words for things and ideas that had not previously existed. The second was the British Empire. At its height, Britain ruled one quarter of the earth's surface, and English adopted many foreign words and made them its own. The industrial and scientific revolutions created a need for neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries. For this, English relied heavily on Latin and Greek. Words like oxygen, protein, nuclear, and vaccine did not exist in the classical languages, but they were created from Latin and Greek roots. Such neologisms were not exclusively created from classical roots though, English roots were used for such terms as horsepower, airplane, and typewriter.([Link] LOW/OPEN VOWELS An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue. In the context of the phonology of any particular language, a low vowel can be any vowel that is more open than a mid vowel. That is, open-mid vowels, near-open vowels, and open vowels can all be considered low vowels. The open vowels identified in the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

open front unrounded vowel [a] open front rounded vowel [] open central unrounded vowel [] open back unrounded vowel [] open back rounded vowel []

Open vowels are used in nearly all spoken languages (one exception is Arapaho) Standard British English: The variety of the English language that is generally used in professional writing in Britain (or, more narrowly defined, in England or in southeast England) and taught in British schools. Although no formal body has ever regulated the use of English in Britain, a fairly rigid model of Standard British English (also known as British Standard English) has been taught in British schools since the 18th century. Standard British English is sometimes used as a synonym for Received Pronunciation (RP) "[D]uring the 18th and 19th centuries publishers and educationalists defined a set of grammatical and lexical features which they regarded as correct, and the variety characterized by these features later came to be known as Standard English. Since English had, by the 19th century, two centres, Standard English came to exist in two varieties: British and US. These were widely different in pronunciation, very close in grammar, and characterized by small but noticeable differences in spelling and vocabulary. There were thus two more or less equally valid varieties of Standard English--British Standard and US Standard. There is no International Standard (yet), in the sense that publishers cannot currently aim at a 2

standard which is not locally bound." (Gunnel Melchers and Philip Shaw, World Englishes: An Introduction. Arnold, 2003) STANDARD ENGLISH The structure and use of the English lg has been studied from both synchronic and diachronic perspective since the 16th c. This results in the fact that today English is probably the best researched lg in the world. But there are some gaps in the knowledge of the English development. In this respect Late Modern English (1700-1950) has been given less scholarly attention than other periods in the history of English. This is particularly true when it comes to 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The main reason why this period was omitted by historical linguistics is presumably that at the first sight it seems to be slightly different from Present-day English, resulting in the view that not much has happened in the language in the course of about 200 yers. The development of SE is contradictory. SE is not a development from London Engl but it origins from some form of Midlands dialects. According to different sources is comes from East or Central Midlands. Midlands dialects selections is caused by 1) massive migration from Central Midlands to London in the 14th c OR by 2) small migration of important East Anglians. The reason why Midlanders might caused the change of Londoners dialect is vague as well as how Londoners changed their dialect from Southern English to Midlands English. One can also find information that SE came from the practices of the Chancery a medieval writing office of the King. Other explanations of English standardization at proper place and time are: 1) the prestige of educated speakers from Oxford, Cambridge and London triangle (even though Oxford, Cambridge and London English were very different from Stantard English in the past and now) 2) the naturaleness model, whereby SE simply came naturally into existence SE is in some respects a consensus dialect, a consensus of features from authoritative texts, in the sense that no single late MidE or early Modern authority will show all features that entered Standard Engl. In fact, standardization is not a linear, unindirectional or natural development. Its complex process occurring in a set of social aspects, developing at different rates in different registers in different idiolects. How speakers express their oral version of SE has its history in the development of Received Pronunciation. Roger Lass aim at presenting the spread of RP, especially spread of /a:/ in path. He finds that modern /a:/ largely represents lengthened and quality shifted 17th-c //; with lowering to [a:] during the course of the 18th c and gradual retraction during the later 19 th c.

Lengthening occurred before /r/, voiceless fricatives except // and to some extent before nasal groups /nt, ns/ which he calls the Lenghtening I. Whereas, Lenghtening II applies to later lengthening of // before voiced stops and nasals. Thus Lengthening I gives /a:/ in path, and L II gives // in bag. Lenghtening I is first commented on by Cooper in 1687, and has a complicated history in the following century, as commentators disagreed about which words had the new vowel, although they did agree to its quality. However, in the 1780s and 90s a reversal occurred and // seemed to be reinstated, before turning again into the present-day pattern. Simultaneously the pronunciation of moss and mawse became stigmatized as vulgar. By 1874 Ellis reported considerable variation he saw no conflict between variability and standardization. It is only in the 1920s that the situation seems to settled down to its present-day pattern. The trapbath split is a vowel split that occurs mainly in southern varieties of English English (including Received Pronunciation), and to a lesser extent in Boston English, and in the Southern Hemisphere accents (Australian English, New Zealand English, South African English), by which the Early Modern English phoneme // was lengthened in certain environments and ultimately merged with the long // of father. (Wells 1982: 1001, 134, 23233) In this context, the lengthened vowel in words such as bath, laugh, grass, chance in accents affected by the split is referred to as a long back [] in Received Pronunciation (RP). The sound change originally occurred in southern England, and ultimately changed the sound of [] to [] in some words in which the former sound appeared before [f, s, , ns, nt, nt, mpl], leading to RP [p] for path and [smpl] for sample, etc. The sound change did not occur before other consonants; thus accents affected by the split preserve // in words like cat. The lengthening of the bath vowel began in the 17th century but was "stigmatised as a Cockneyism until well into the 19th century". British accents In northern English dialects, the short A is phonetically [a a], while the broad A varies from [] to [a]; for some speakers, the two vowels may be identical in quality, differing only in length ([a] vs [a]) (Wells 1982: 356, 360). In some West Country accents of English English where the vowel in trap is realized as [a] rather than [], the vowel in the bath words was lengthened to [a] and did not merge with the // of father. In those accents, trap, bath and father all have distinct vowels /a/, /a/ and //. (Wells 1982: 34647). In some other West Country accents, and in many forms of Scottish English, there is no distinction corresponding to the RP distinction between // and //. ([Link] 4