2. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE - A Study on Old and Modern English Used in the Play of drama Oedipus Rex Sophocles

2. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

  We often hear people delivering opinions about different languages: French is romantic Italian musical. For the students of language, such impressionistic judgements are not very useful. Rather, to describe a language we need to explain how it goes about doing the work that all languages must do; and it is helpful to compare it with other languages especially members of the language groups it belongs to.

  Language may be compared in a number of ways. Every language has its own repertory of sounds,as known by all students who have had so struggle to learn to pronounce a foreign language. Every language also has its own rules for accentuating words and its own patterns of intonation, the rising and falling pitch of our voices as we speak. Every language has its own vocabulary, of course, though when we‘re lucky we find a good bit of overlap between the vocabulary of our native language and that of the language w e‘re learning. And every language has its own way of signalling how words function in utterances of expressing who performed an action, what the action was, when it took place, whether it is now finished or still going on, what or who was acted upon, for whose beneft the action was performed and so on.

  Based on above description there are three kinds of English language, namely Old English, Middle English and Modern English.

2.1 Old English

  Old English is prior the beginnings of English, the inhabitants of Great three tribes invaded England from Western Germany and Denmark. These tribes spoke a similar language that, over says, develop into Old English. There are three about Old English

1) The Indo-Eorupean languages

  The Indo-Eorupean languages do certain things in much the same way. For example, they share some basic vocabulary. Consider these words for ―father‖ : Old English : foe Latin : pater Greek : pater Sanskrit : pitr

  We can easily see the resemblance among the latin, greek and sanskrit words. We may begin to understand why the Old English word looks different from the others when we compare these words for ―foot‖: Old English : fot Latin : pedem Greek : poda Sanskrit :

  padam

  If we suspect that Latin ―p‖ will always correspond to Old English ―f‖, we are right, more or less. Torecognize that the Indo-Eorupean languages share a good bit of vocabulary, through the changes that all languages go through often bring it about that the same word looks quite different in different languages.

  Perhaps the most important development that distinguishes the Germanic languages from others in the Indo-European family is the one that produced the difference, illustrated above, between the

  ―p‖ of Latin and the ―f‖ of Old English faeder.

3) West Germanic and Low German

  The West Germanic languages differ from North and East Germanic in number of features which are not very striking in themselves, but quite numerous.

  For example, the consonant [z] became [r] in North and West Germanic.

  Low German is defined in part by something that did not happen to it. This non- event is the ‗high german consonan shift‘, which alterd the sounds of high german dialects as radically as Grimm‘s Law had altered the sounds of Germanic.

  Students of Modern German will recognize the effects of the High German consonant shift in such pairs as English eat and German essen, and English sleep and German schlafen. Another important difference between high German and Low German is that the Low languages did not distinguish person in plural verbs.

  In grammar, Old English was much more highly inflected than Modern English is. That is,there were more case endings for nouns, more person and number and number endings for verbs, a more complicated pronoun system, various endings for adjectives, and so on. Old English nouns had four cases- nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. Adjectives had five- all these and an instrumental case besides. Present day English has only two case for nouns- common case and possessive case. Adjectives now have no case system at all. On prepostions, auxilieries, and the like) to express relationships than Old English did.

2.2 Middle English

  The invaders from the northern regions of France brought a form of French with them. The new language became the official languabge of the government, trade and the rulling class. The division of the classes began to include linguistics, with the upper or noble classes speaking French, while the lower classes spoke Middle English. This contiuned until the 14th century when English once more became the common language. Middle English changed considerably over the centuries to include a number of French words in the vocabulary.

2.2.1 Early Middle English

  Early Middle English (1100

  • –1300) has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (with many Norse borrowings in the northern parts of the country), but a greatly simplified inflectional system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by the dative and locative cases are replaced in Early Middle English with prepositional constructions. This replacement is, however, incomplete: the Old English genitive "-es" survives in the modern

  it is now called the "possessive": e.g., the form "dog's" for the longer "of the dog". But most of the other case endings disappeared in the Early Middle English period, including most of (expressing exactly two of a thing) also disappeared pronouns), further simplifying the language.

  Deeper changes occurred in the grammar. Gradually, the wealthy and the government remained the dominant language of literature and law until the 14th century, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the the complex system of inflected endings Old English had, was gradually lost or simplified in the dialects of spoken Middle English. This change was gradually reflected in its increasingly diverse written forms as well. The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages, and therefore cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population: English did, after all, remain

  

  that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that, although Norse- and English-speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other, the Norse-speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced Middle English's loss of inflectional endings. Another argument is that the morphological simplifications who were bilingual in Old English and eithe(which lacks noun case) or

  (which may have lacked noun case, like most modern Romance languages).

  Modern English began in the 15th century, the transition from Middle Eglish to Modern English began. Much of the transition was authority to the expansion of the British Empire throughout the world and to the development of printing. The printing press and increasing in publishing of books drove the standardization of the languge. spelling grammar was formalized due to the publication of various literary works and pamphlets.

  Barnet (1967 : 64) say that Modern English was also the period of the English Renaissance when people develoved, on the one hand, a keen interest in the past and, on the other, a more daring and imaginative view of the picture.

  Modern English has made many features of Modern English perfectly familiar to many people down to present times, even though we do not use these features in present day speech andwriting. It is not always realized, however, that considerable sounds changes have taken place between early Modern English and the english of the present day. Modern English did succeed in establishing certain attiudes which, though they haven‘t had much effect on the development of the language itself, have certainly changed the native speakers feeling about the language.

  When we speak English now, we must specify whether we mean American English, British English, and Australian English, Indian English, or what, since the diffrences are considerable. The American cannot go to England orthe Englishman to America confident that he will always understand and be understood.

  Old and Modern English are very related. Modern English are very related to Old English, though in different way, for old and Modern English are really different stages in the development of a single language. The changes that turned Old english into Middle English and Middle English into Modern English took places gradually, over the centuries and there never was a time when people perceived their language as having broken radically with the language spoken a generation before. It is worth mentioning in this connection that the terms Old English, and Modern English are themselves modern, speakers of these languages all would have said, if asked that the language they spoke was English.

  There is no point, on the other hand in playing down the differences between Old and Modern English, for they are obvious at a glance. The rules for spelling Old English were different from the rules for spelling Modern English, and that accounts for some of the difference. But there are more substantial changes as well. The three vowels that appeared in the inflectional endings of Old English words were reduced to one in Middle English and then most inflectional endings dissappeared entirely. Most case distinctions were lost, so weremost of the endings added to verbs, even while the verb system became more complex, adding such features as a future tense, a perfect and a pluperfect. While the number of endings was reduced, the order of elements within clauses and sentences became more fixed, so that, it came to sound archaid and awkward to place and object before the verb, as Old English hadfrequently done. related to the vocabularyof such languages as Dutch and German than to Frenchor Latin. The viking age, which culminated in the reign of the Danish king Cnut in England, introduced a great many Danish words in to English but these were Germanic words as well.the conquest of England by a French speaking people in the year 1066 eventually brought about immense changes in the vocabulary of english. During the Middle English period, English borrowed some ten thousand words from French, and at the sme time it was friendly to borrowings from latin , dutch and flemish. Now relatively few Modern English words come form Old English; but the words that do survive are some of the most common in the language, including almost all the grammar words‘ (articles, pronouns, prepositions) and a great many words for everyday concepts. For example, the words in this paragraph that come to us from Old English

  Some of the Modern English which come Old English : Eald (old), brodor (brother), hus (house), nett (net), riht (right), widuwe (widow), wiftman (woman), half (loaf), apostle (apostol), chalk (cealc), wine (win), monk (munuc), gefaran (act), onettan (active, be), gelyfed (advanced), ongean (again, against), eall (all), mid (amid), hatheart (angry), deor (animal), ahwear (anywhere), gretan (approach), fyrd (army), gelendan (arrive), beon (be), leger (bed), geliefan (believe), deore (beloved), betera (better), begeondan (beyond), lean (blean), blestian (bless), blowan (bloom), blodig (bloody), blawan (blow), bat (boat), ban

  (bone), brieg (bridge), beorht (bright), byrnan (burn), ciese (cheese), breost (chest), betynan (close), heretoga (commander), bisgu (concern), belucan up), acennan (give birth), alecgan (give up), abugan (give away), awedan (go mad), abugan (yield), wage (war), anbidian (wait ), abaedan (ward off ), ansund (whole), amyran (wound), awritan (write), ahebban (raise), awestan (ravage), alysan ( release), aferran (remove), areccean (render), ahreddan (rescue), anwealda (ruler), asecgan (say), ahreddan (save), asendan (send), andgit (sense), assettan (set), anfeald (simple), asingan (sing), anlepe (single), ansund (sound), arian (spare), afylan (stain), astandan (stand up), abrecan (storm), asteccan ( stretch out), atteon (ateon), awendan ( translate), asmeagan (understand).

2.5 Old English different from Modern English

  First of all, Old English was spoken most recently almost a thousand years ago. Languages just do change, gradually and inevitably, over time, a phenomenon that linguistics has a fairly hard time explaining, and certainly predicting. But there are a couple of factors that affected the English language that tended to hasten linguistic change in English. (In contrast, Icelandic, a language quite similar to Old English in many ways, has undergone very little change, so that Icelandic children read the Viking sagas in school without need for much adaptation or special apparatus such as glossing.)

  The first factor that tended to make English change rapidly is the arrival in England, over a period of a couple of hundred years from the 850s onwards, of a fairly large number of people who spoke Old Norse, and the arrival over a period of another couple of hundred years of a bunch of people who spoke Old French. This wouldn't have made much of a difference if these people had simply their own languages and probably even insisted on them. Moreover, the groups who spoke these languages had prestige, whether locally in the "Danelaw" in the case of the Viking settlers who spoke Old Norse, or nationally in the case of the Norman conquerors--which meant that there was some pressure for English- speaking people to learn and even to prefer the other languages. Under these conditions, various kinds of linguistic mixture occurred: phonological, lexical, syntactic, and so on. In other words, English took on sounds, words, and ways of constructing sentences from these other languages.

  The second important factor producing rapid language change was the fact that for approximately two hundred years after the Norman conquest, English was hardly a written language at all, since almost all writing went on either in the language of the ruling Norman invaders (French) or in the international language of the church, of diplomacy, and of learning (Latin). (In fact, for a further hundred years after that, English was still not a prestigious language, although it was beginning to be a written language again.) Writing normally acts as a kind of brake to language change, since literate people are influenced in their linguistic habits not only by what they hear but by what they read, which is liable to be stuff from some time ago. Without writing, and exposed to influence from other languages with which it was mixing, English changed rapidly. By the time of Chaucer (end of the 14th century) when it was reestablishing itself as a prestige language in England, English had adopted hundreds of words from French and quite a few from Old Norse, and had undergone important simplifications in its Whether as a result of language mixture, or for some other reasons

  (linguists disagree), there was later a lot of sound changes in the English vowel system. During a period perhaps from about 1450 to about 1750 c.e. the change called the Great Vowel Shift occurred. It accounts for the quite startling differences in pronunciation between Modern English "long" vowels and Old English long vowels--most of the consonants stayed pretty much the same, and so did the short vowels.

  So to sum up, Modern English is different from Old English because languages just do change over time, because linguistic change was accelerated during a period of contact with other languages and the removal of written language from the equation, and because phonological change, especially the Great Vowel Shift, was added to lexical change (all those loan words) and syntactic/inflectional change.