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Grimm’s Law: A sound law first worked out in 1822 by Jakob Grimm (1785– 1863) which shows the regular way in which the Germanic sound system diverged from that of Indo-European. Nine sets of correspondences were shown, which fell into a clear phonetic pattern. Voiceless stops in Indo-European became voiceless fricatives in Germanic; voiced stops became voiceless stops; and voiced aspirated stops became voiced stops. These relationships explain, for example, why words which begin with /p/ in Latin, Greek or Sanskrit generally have /f/ in English (e.g. pater – father).

Indo-European: The term used to describe the related languages of Europe,

India, and Iran, which are believed to have descended from a common tongue spoken roughly in the third millennium B.C. by an agricultural peoples originating in Southeastern Europe. English is a member of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.

Inflection: A change in the form of a word to provide grammatical information: e.g., –s as in texts for plural; –ed as in worked for past tense. Applies to both conjugation and declension.

Kinship terms: The system of lexical items used in a language to express

personal relationships within the family, in both narrow and extended senses.

Lengthening: Sound change usually involving the turning of a short vowel

into a long vowel: e.g., a set of quantitative changes in ME. Sound change from long to short vowels is called shortening.

Leveling: In historical linguistics, the gradual loss of a linguistic distinction, so that forms which were originally contrastive become identical. For example, Old English nouns generally distinguished nominative and accusative cases, but in Modern English these have been levelled to a single form.

Also called a “semi-vowel”, a liquid falls between a vowel and a consonant: the air flow from the lungs and through the mouth or nose is only

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partially obstructed, unlike a consonant, in which the stream is obstructed, or a vowel, in which it is not obstructed. Liquids in Modern English and Old English include “r,” “l” and “w”.

Loan word: A word borrowed from another language: e.g., castle (French), inflammation (Latin), koala (Australian aboriginal). In English, borrowing was a particularly productive method of word formation in the early modern period.

Macron: A horizontal bar over the top of a vowel to indicate a long vowel

(ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) is called a macron. Macrons to indicate vowel length are not found in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.

Any unit that indicates a specific feature: e.g., –ed as a tense marker for preterite; –’s as a case marker for the possessive.

Metathesis: The reversal of the linear sequence of sounds in a word. A common form of metathesis is the reversal of /r/ and a short vowel in the histories of both English and German, e.g. three ~ third; bird < ME brid(d). Metathesis is most frequent with vowels but is also found with consonants, e.g. aks, waps for ask, wasp respectively, both historically and regionally in English.

The language, in its various dialects, spoken by the inhabitants of England from roughly the period following the Norman Conquest (the late 11th century) until roughly the period of completion of the Great Vowel Shift (late 15th – early 16th century).

Minor declension noun: Nouns that do not fall into the major declensions (strong and weak) are considered “minor” declension nouns.

Modern English: The language, in its various dialects, that emerged after the end of the Great Vowel Shift, roughly in the middle of the 16th century. Monophthongs: Vowel sounds that are made up of only one continuously, without any noticeable change in its quality, produced sound: e.g., /i/ in bid, /^/ in bug, /g/ feet.

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Multiple negation: Use of two or more negative elements in one sentence to denote negation: e.g., I cannot go no further (Shakespere). It came to be considered non-standard in the prescriptive grammar of the eighteenth century.

Number: Grammatical category for counting, associated especially with

nouns. In English, ‘plural’ and ‘singular’ numbers are distinguished inflectionally (e.g. ‘dogs’ versus ‘dog’). In Old English there was also a dual category, occasionally used with pronouns and adjectives.

Old English: The language, or group of related dialects, spoken by the

Anglo-Saxon people in England from 449 until roughly the end of the 11th century.

Palatalization: Sound change involving consonants adjacent to [i / j] or a

front vowel: e.g., OE [g’] became [d]; ModE [z] has become [w] in occasion. Paradigm: The set of forms associated with a noun or an adjective in forming a declensional class, or with a verb in a conjugational class.

Periodization: The history of English is conventionally divided into three periods. Old English (OE) started in 449 and lasted through the Norman Conquest and the few subsequent decades. The term Anglo-Saxon may be used for Old English to underline its connection with the Germanic languages of the Continent. The second period is Middle English (ME), which ends in the late fifteenth century. The third period is New English (NE) that lasts until nowadays. A subperiod of the New English period that corresponds roughly with the Renaissance period and covers the time necessary for the completion of the Great Vowel Shift (15th – 16th centuries) is often referred to as Early New English period (ENE). Contemporary English may be called Present-Day English (PDE) or Modern English (ModE), although there is no consensus as to when it begins.

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Person: Grammatical category associated especially with pronouns, identifying individuals in relation to the speaker and hearer. English distinguishes ‘first person’, referring to the speaker(s) – I, we, ‘second person’, referring to the addressee(s) – you, and ‘third person’, referring to one or more individuals who are neither the speaker(s) nor the addressee(s) – he, she, it, they.

Personal pronoun: A word that stands in for a noun and can be used to designate the first, second or third person is a personal pronoun (contrasted with a demonstrative pronoun, which points out something).

Possessive: A grammatical form for indicating possession: –’s is a possessive ending for nouns (e.g., dog’s tail); possessive adjectives include my, their, etc. and possessive pronouns include mine, theirs, etc.

Preterite: A term used especially in traditional grammar to refer to a form of the verb expressing past time without any aspectual consideration; also called a ‘simple past tense’.

Protolanguage: An unrecorded or unattested language from which a group of historically attested languages have presumably derived. Hence all IndoEuropean languages are supposed to share (Proto-) Indo-European as parent language. Likewise, Proto-Germanic is the presumed ancestor of all Germanic languages.

Runic alphabet: Germanic and early OE writing; consisted at first of some

24 symbols to be scratched upon or coloured into stone or hard wood or metal, signs which generally by means of straight (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) lines could very roughly represent common OE sounds. These runes, at first the secret of a priestly class (the OE word rūn means ‘secret’), were employed in England to some extent after the conversion to Christianity for religious inscriptions such as that on the Ruthwell Cross, and also at times more widely; but they were unsuitable for any sort of continuous writing and remained only as tokens of antiquarian interest in the late OE period.

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Rhotacism: A common kind of phonetic change whereby a voiced sibilant [z] develops further into [r]. This is found, for instance, in German, compare English lose and German verlieren, and in Latin, compare flos (‘flower' – nom.)

– floris (‘flower' – gen.). As can be seen in English was – were, rhotacism was an important feature of Germanic verbal morphology because in some points in verbal paradigms an [s] was voiced (due to Verner’s Law) and this [z] developed further to [r].

Root: 1) In grammar the unalterable core of a word to which all suffixes are added, e.g. friend in un-friend-li-ness. 2) In etymology, the earliest form of a word. 3) In phonetics, the part of the tongue which lies furthest back in the mouth.

Schwa / shwa [∫wa:]: The usual name for the neutral vowel [ ], heard in

English at the beginning of such words as ago, amaze, or in the middle of afterwards; sometimes called the indefinite vowel. It is a particularly frequent vowel in English.

Second person singular and plural (you, thou, etc.): In Old and Early Middle English, second person singular and plural were morphologically distinguished (e.g., þu and we). In the 13th century, English adopted the French custom of using the plural form for the singular to register respect or politeness. This dual usage of thou/ye for second-person singular lasted until early Modern English when the plural form (you) became the norm for the singular.

Semantic change: The change in the meaning of a word over time.

Semantic field: A collective term for sets of meanings which are taken to belong together, e.g. colour, furniture, food, clothes. Most of the vocabulary of any language is organised into such fields, i.e. there are few if any words which are semantically isolated.

Stem: The stem of a word includes only those elements of the word that are unchanged regardless of the word's grammatical function. It is the part of the

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word onto which endings are attached. The stem may coincide with the “root” of the word if it contains no lexical suffixes.

Refers to consonants such as /p, t, k, b, d, g/, produced by blocking the flow of air before articulating. Also called plosive.

An Old English adjective that is not preceded by a demonstrative is called a strong adjective.

Strong verb: In the Germanic languages, a verb that signals change in tense through a meaningful change in the root vowel. For example, “Today I run, yesterday I ran”. In Old English and other, older forms of the Germanic languages, strong verbs were classified into groups according to the specific sets of vowel changes in their principle parts.

Suppletion: Phenomenon whereby one lexeme is represented by two or more different roots, depending on the context; for example, the verb ‘go’ is represented by ‘went’ in the past tense and ‘go’ elsewhere; the verb ‘be’ is represented by ‘am’, ‘is’, ‘are’ in the present.

Syllable: Consists of a vowel and its immediately preceding and following consonants. Synchronic: Pertaining to language at a specific historical point (and at least within a generation): e.g., analysis of syntax, phonology, etc. in PDE. Cf. diachronic.

Synthetic language: A language in which grammatical relationships among words in a sentence are determined by the inflections (for example, case endings) added to the words. OE was more synthetic than ModE.

Tense: A grammatical category for the indication of time through the forms of

verbs. Historically, (Proto-) Indo-European had three (according to some scholars, from five to six) formal tenses, but the number was reduced to two in Germanic languages. Hence OE had two formal tenses: Present (e.g., he writes) and Past or Preterit(e) (e.g., she wrote).

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Third person present singular: The OE and ME form for this verb conjugation was –(e)þ/–(e)th: e.g., hē drincþ wīn (‘he drinks wine’). This historical form was gradually replaced by the dialectal variant –(e)s until the latter became the norm by 1600.

Transitive: Pertains to verbs occurring with a direct object: e.g., he has a bike. Verbs are intransitive when they take no direct object: e.g., she drives to school. Some verbs may be used either as transitive or intransitive.

Umlaut: A historical process by which back vowels were fronted and front

vowels raised; the change is most easily observed in nouns such as foot ~ feet.

Verner’s law: A sound change, first worked out by the Danish linguist Karl

Verner (1846–96), which explained a class of apparent exceptions to Grimm’s law. He found that Grimm’s law worked well whenever the stress fell on the root syllable of the Sanskrit word; but when it fell on another syllable, the consonants behaved differently. Voiceless stops then did not stay as voiceless fricatives, but became voiced stops.

Word class: A category referring to a group of words that share syntactic and

morphological characteristics. Also called part of speech. Word classes in traditional English grammar include noun (e.g., flower, persuasion), adjective

(e.g., thick, irresponsible), adverb (quickly, there, also), verb (to speak, to pronounce), pronoun (we, everybody, much), preposition (to, under), conjunction (but, as though, while).

The process of creating new words by means of either affixation or compounding.

Weak adjective: In Old English adjectives that are supported by a demonstrative (rather than standing on their own, as does a strong adjective) are considered weak adjectives.

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Weak verb: In the Germanic languages, a verb that signals the past tense by adding a suffix. In Modern English, these suffixes have become –ed or –d. All new verbs that enter the English language (either by coinages or loans) enter as weak verbs.

Word order: Sequence in which words occur; of particular interest in Old English is the position of the verb.