Most words with antepenultimate stress are learned borrowings from Latin, e. This process has gone even farther in French, with deletion of all post-stressed vowels, leading to consistent, predictable stress on the last syllable: This applies even to borrowings: Stress on verbs is almost completely predictable in Spanish and Portuguese, but less so in Italian. Adjectives and pronouns must agree in all features with the noun they are bound to. The gender of animate nouns is generally natural i.
Although Latin had a third gender neuter , there is little trace of this in most languages. A similar class exists in Italian, although it is no longer productive e. Spanish also has vestiges of the neuter in the demonstrative adjectives: Portuguese also has neuter demonstrative adjectives: Remnants of the neuter, interpretable now as "a sub-class of the non-feminine gender" Haase Oppositions with masculine typically have been recategorized, so that neuter signifies the referent in general, while masculine indicates a more specific instance, with the distinction marked by the definite article.
Phonological forms of articles vary by locale. In all Romance languages, this system was drastically reduced. In most modern Romance languages, in fact, case is no longer marked at all on nouns, adjectives and determiners, and most forms are derived from the Latin accusative case. Much like English, however, case has survived somewhat better on pronouns. Most pronouns have distinct nominative, accusative, genitive and possessive forms cf.
English "I, me, mine, my". The system of inflectional classes is also drastically reduced. The basic system is most clearly indicated in Spanish, where there are only three classes, corresponding to the first, second and third declensions in Latin: The same system underlines many other modern Romance languages, such as Portuguese, French and Catalan. In these languages, however, further sound changes have resulted in various irregularities. Noun inflection has survived in Romanian somewhat better than elsewhere.
The inflectional classes of Latin have also survived more in Romanian than elsewhere, e. Many other exceptional forms, however, are due to later sound changes or analogy, e. In Italian, the situation is somewhere in between Spanish and Romanian. This inflection distinguished nominative from oblique, grouping the accusative case with the oblique, rather than with the nominative as in Romanian.
The oblique case in these languages generally inherits from the Latin accusative; as a result, masculine nouns have distinct endings in the two cases while most feminine nouns do not. A number of different inflectional classes are still represented at this stage. A number of synchronically quite irregular differences between nominative and oblique reflect direct inheritances of Latin third-declension nouns with two different stems one for the nominative singular, one for all other forms , most with of which had a stress shift between nominative and the other forms: A few of these multi-stem nouns derive from Latin forms without stress shift, e.
All of these multi-stem nouns refer to people; other nouns with stress shift in Latin e. As described above, case marking on pronouns is much more extensive than for nouns.
Most Romance languages have the following sets of pronouns and determiners:. Unlike in English, a separate neuter personal pronoun "it" generally does not exist, but the third-person singular and plural both distinguish masculine from feminine. Also, as described above, case is marked on pronouns even though it is not usually on nouns, similar to English. There is also an additional set of possessive determiners, distinct from the genitive case of the personal pronoun; this corresponds to the English difference between "my, your" and "mine, yours".
Similarly, in place of the genitive of the Latin pronouns, most Romance languages adopted the reflexive possessive, which then serves indifferently as both reflexive and non-reflexive possessive. Note that the reflexive, and hence the third-person possessive, is unmarked for the gender of the person being referred to. Hence, although gendered possessive forms do exist—e.
When the two are different, it is usually because of differing degrees of phonetic reduction. Generally, the personal pronoun is unreduced beyond normal sound change , while the article has suffered various amounts of reduction, e. Originally, object pronouns could come either before or after the verb; sound change would often produce different forms in these two cases, with numerous additional complications and contracted forms when multiple clitic pronouns cooccurred.
Most languages, however, have simplified this system by undoing some of the clitic mergers and requiring clitics to stand in a particular position relative to the verb usually after imperatives, before other finite forms, and either before or after non-finite forms depending on the language. These result from dative object pronouns pronounced with stress which causes them to develop differently from the equivalent unstressed pronouns , or from subject pronouns.
The subject pronouns are used only for emphasis and take the stress, and as a result are not clitics. These forms cannot be stressed, so for emphasis the disjunctive pronouns must be used in combination with the clitic subject forms. Friulian and the Gallo-Italian languages have actually gone further than this and merged the subject pronouns onto the verb as a new type of verb agreement marking, which must be present even when there is a subject noun phrase.
This distinction was determined by the relationship between the speakers. In cases like this, the pronoun requires plural agreement in all cases whenever a single affix marks both person and number as in verb agreement endings and object and possessive pronouns , but singular agreement elsewhere where appropriate e. Many languages, however, innovated further in developing an even more polite pronoun, generally composed of a noun phrase e. A similar path was followed by Italian and Romanian. The result is that second-person verb forms have disappeared, and the whole pronoun system has been radically realigned.
Latin had no articles as such. Romance languages have both indefinite and definite articles, but none of the above words form the basis for either of these. A partitive article is used and in French, required whenever a bare noun refers to specific but unspecified or unknown quantity of the noun, but not when a bare noun refers to a class in general. For example, the partitive would be used in both of the following sentences:. The sentence "Men arrived today", however, presumably means "some specific men arrived today" rather than "men, as a general class, arrived today" which would mean that there were no men before today.
On the other hand, "I hate men" does mean "I hate men, as a general class" rather than "I hate some specific men". As in many other cases, French has developed the farthest from Latin in its use of articles. In French, nearly all nouns, singular and plural, must be accompanied by an article either indefinite, definite, or partitive or demonstrative pronoun. In more conservative Romance languages, neither articles nor subject pronouns are necessary, since all of the above words are pronounced differently. Such forms were often created even when not strictly needed to distinguish otherwise ambiguous forms.
Subsequent changes often reduced the number of demonstrative distinctions. Standard Italian, for example, has only a two-way distinction "this" vs. Modern French, however, has no distinction between "this" and "that": The passive voice, which was mostly synthetic in classical Latin, has been completely replaced with compound forms. Romance languages have borrowed heavily, though mostly from other Romance languages. However, some, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and French, have borrowed heavily from other language groups.
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Many Greek loans also entered the lexicon, e. Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms with regular morphology. Many Classical Latin words became archaic or poetic and were replaced by more colloquial terms: In some cases, terms from common occupations became generalized: The same thing sometimes happened to religious terms, due to the pervasive influence of Christianity: Many prepositions were used as verbal particles to make new roots and verb stems, e.
Many prepositions and commonly became compounded, e. Some words derived from phrases, e. A number of common Latin words that have disappeared in many or most Romance languages have survived either in the periphery or in remote corners especially Sardinia and Romania , or as secondary terms, sometimes differing in meaning.
In some cases, one language happens to preserve a word displaced elsewhere, e. Sardinian even preserves some words that were already archaic in Classical Latin, e. In many cases, the learned word simply displaced the original popular word: In French, however, the stress of the learned loan may be on the "wrong" syllable, whereas the stress of the inherited word always corresponds to the Latin stress: Borrowing from Classical Latin has produced a large number of suffix doublets.
Examples from Spanish learned form first: Similar examples can be found in all the other Romance languages.
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Many Greek prefixes and suffixes hellenisms also found their way into the lexicon: There was a tendency to eliminate final consonants in Vulgar Latin, either by dropping them apocope or adding a vowel after them epenthesis. Many final consonants were rare, occurring only in certain prepositions e. Many of these prepositions and conjunctions were replaced by others, while the nouns were regularized into forms based on their oblique stems that avoided the final consonants e.
As a result, only the following final consonants occurred in Vulgar Latin:. In unstressed syllables, the resulting diphthongs were simplified: Note how the environments become progressively less "palatal", and the languages affected become progressively fewer. The outcomes of palatalization depended on the historical stage, the consonants involved, and the languages involved. This has the effect of keeping the modern spelling similar to the original Latin spelling, but complicates the relationship between sound and letter.
The following are examples of corresponding first-person plural indicative and subjunctive in a number of regular Portuguese verbs: Several other consonants were "softened" in intervocalic position in Western Romance Spanish, Portuguese, French, Northern Italian , but normally not phonemically in the rest of Italy except some cases of "elegant" or Ecclesiastical words , nor apparently at all in Romanian.
The changes instances of diachronic lenition are as follows:. A few languages have regained secondary geminate consonants. While Western Romance words undergo word-initial epenthesis prothesis , cognates in Italian do not: During the Proto-Romance period, phonemic length distinctions were lost. This situation is still maintained in modern Italian: Soon, however, many of these vowels coalesced:. Some northern Italian languages e. Friulan still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but most languages dropped it by either diphthongizing or shortening the new long vowels.
This vowel length was eventually lost by around AD , but the former long vowels are still marked with a circumflex. A fourth vowel length system, still non-phonemic, has now arisen: This system in turn has been phonemicized in some non-standard dialects e.
A number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e. Metaphony is most extensive in the Italo-Romance languages, and applies to nearly all languages in Italy; however, it is absent from Tuscan, and hence from standard Italian. These diphthongizations had the effect of reducing or eliminating the distinctions between open-mid and close-mid vowels in many languages.
In Spanish and Romanian, all open-mid vowels were diphthongized, and the distinction disappeared entirely. Portuguese is the most conservative in this respect, keeping the seven-vowel system more or less unchanged but with changes in particular circumstances, e. In French and Italian, the distinction between open-mid and close-mid vowels occurred only in closed syllables. Standard Italian more or less maintains this. This is still the situation in modern Spanish, for example. Originally, all vowels in both languages were nasalized before any nasal consonants, and nasal consonants not immediately followed by a vowel were eventually dropped.
In French, nasal vowels before remaining nasal consonants were subsequently denasalized, but not before causing the vowels to lower somewhat, e. Other vowels remained diphthongized, and were dramatically lowered: Sometimes the nasalization was eliminated: Nasal vowels that remained actually tend to be raised rather than lowered, as in French: In Portugal, vowels before a nasal consonant have become denasalized, but in Brazil they remain heavily nasalized. There was more variability in the result of the unstressed vowels. Originally in Proto-Romance, the same nine vowels developed in unstressed as stressed syllables, and in Sardinian, they coalesced into the same five vowels in the same way.
In Italo-Western Romance, however, vowels in unstressed syllables were significantly different from stressed vowels, with yet a third outcome for final unstressed syllables. This system is still preserved, largely or completely, in all of the conservative Romance languages e. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan. In final unstressed syllables, results were somewhat complex. The original five-vowel system in final unstressed syllables was preserved as-is in some of the more conservative central Italian languages, but in most languages there was further coalescence:.
Intertonic vowels were the most subject to loss or modification. But many languages ultimately dropped almost all intertonic vowels. The Romance languages for the most part have kept the writing system of Latin, adapting it to their evolution. Catalan eschews importation of "foreign" letters more than most languages. While most of the 23 basic Latin letters have maintained their phonetic value, for some of them it has diverged considerably; and the new letters added since the Middle Ages have been put to different uses in different scripts.
Most languages added auxiliary marks diacritics to some letters, for these and other purposes. The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly simple, and consistent within any language. Since the spelling systems are based on phonemic structures rather than phonetics, however, the actual pronunciation of what is represented in standard orthography can be subject to considerable regional variation, as well as to allophonic differentiation by position in the word or utterance. Among the letters representing the most conspicuous phonological variations, between Romance languages or with respect to Latin, are the following:.
Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:. Gemination, in the languages where it occurs, is usually indicated by doubling the consonant, except when it does not contrast phonemically with the corresponding short consonant, in which case gemination is not indicated. Phonemic contrast of geminates vs. The double consonants in French orthography, however, are merely etymological. Romance languages also introduced various marks diacritics that may be attached to some letters, for various purposes. In some cases, diacritics are used as an alternative to digraphs and trigraphs; namely to represent a larger number of sounds than would be possible with the basic alphabet, or to distinguish between sounds that were previously written the same.
Diacritics are also used to mark word stress, to indicate exceptional pronunciation of letters in certain words, and to distinguish words with same pronunciation homophones. Depending on the language, some letter-diacritic combinations may be considered distinct letters, e.
Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet: In particular, all Romance languages capitalize use uppercase for the first letter of the following words: The Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones. Unlike English, the names of months, days of the weeks, and derivatives of proper nouns are usually not capitalized: However, each language has some exceptions to this general rule.
The tables below provide a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and Romance languages, along with a selection of minority languages. Words are given in their conventional spellings. In addition, for French the actual pronunciation is given, due to the dramatic differences between spelling and pronunciation.
English has developed over the course of more than 1, years. There are more people who have learned it as a second language than there are native speakers. Although the high degree of influence from these languages on the vocabulary and grammar of Modern English is widely acknowledged, most specialists in language contact do not consider English to be a true mixed language. Old English was divided into four dialects: Old English is very different from Modern English and difficult for 21st-century English speakers to understand.
The translation of Matthew 8: John of Trevisa, ca. By the 12th century Middle English was fully developed, integrating both Norse and Norman features; it continued to be spoken until the transition to early Modern English around In the Middle English period, the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer.
The next period in the history of English was Early Modern English — The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages.
Even after the vowel shift the language still sounded different from Modern English: Many of the grammatical features that a modern reader of Shakespeare might find quaint or archaic represent the distinct characteristics of Early Modern English. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. English also facilitated worldwide international communication. A major feature in the early development of Modern English was the codification of explicit norms for standard usage, and their dissemination through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications.
Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes. Earlier English did not use the word "do" as a general auxiliary as Modern English does; at first it was only used in question constructions where it was not obligatory. Regularisation of irregular forms also slowly continues e. British English is also undergoing change under the influence of American English, fuelled by the strong presence of American English in the media and the prestige associated with the US as a world power.
The countries in which English is spoken can be grouped into different categories by how English is used in each country. English does not belong to just one country, and it does not belong solely to descendants of English settlers. English is an official language of countries populated by few descendants of native speakers of English.
Kachru bases his model on the history of how English spread in different countries, how users acquire English, and the range of uses English has in each country. The three circles change membership over time. Countries with large communities of native speakers of English the inner circle include Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, where the majority speaks English, and South Africa, where a significant minority speaks English.
They have many more speakers of English who acquire English in the process of growing up through day by day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by speakers who are not native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners. The standard English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries.
In the three-circles model, countries such as Poland, China, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, and other countries where English is taught as a foreign language make up the "expanding circle". In these countries, although English is not used for government business, its widespread use puts them at the boundary between the "outer circle" and "expanding circle". English is unusual among world languages in how many of its users are not native speakers but speakers of English as a second or foreign language.
Many users of English in the expanding circle use it to communicate with other people from the expanding circle, so that interaction with native speakers of English plays no part in their decision to use English. Pie chart showing the percentage of native English speakers living in "inner circle" English-speaking countries. Native speakers are now substantially outnumbered worldwide by second-language speakers of English not counted in this chart. The norms of standard written English are maintained purely by the consensus of educated English-speakers around the world, without any oversight by any government or international organisation.
American listeners generally readily understand most British broadcasting, and British listeners readily understand most American broadcasting. Most English speakers around the world can understand radio programmes, television programmes, and films from many parts of the English-speaking world. Most people learn English for practical rather than ideological reasons. As decolonisation proceeded throughout the British Empire in the s and s, former colonies often did not reject English but rather continued to use it as independent countries setting their own language policies.
While the European Union EU allows member states to designate any of the national languages as an official language of the Union, in practice English is the main working language of EU organisations. In a official Eurobarometer poll, 38 percent of the EU respondents outside the countries where English is an official language said they could speak English well enough to have a conversation in that language.
The next most commonly mentioned foreign language, French which is the most widely known foreign language in the UK and Ireland , could be used in conversation by 12 percent of respondents. This has led some scholars to develop the study of English as an auxiliary language.
The increased use of the English language globally has had an effect on other languages, leading to some English words being assimilated into the vocabularies of other languages. In a single-syllable word, a vowel before a fortis stop is shortened: The pronunciation of vowels varies a great deal between dialects and is one of the most detectable aspects of a speaker's accent. The vowels are represented with symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet; those given for RP are standard in British dictionaries and other publications. In GA, vowel length is non-distinctive. Because lenis consonants are frequently voiceless at the end of a syllable, vowel length is an important cue as to whether the following consonant is lenis or fortis.
An English syllable includes a syllable nucleus consisting of a vowel sound. Syllable onset and coda start and end are optional. The consonants that may appear together in onsets or codas are restricted, as is the order in which they may appear. Onsets can only have four types of consonant clusters: Clusters of obstruents always agree invoicing, and clusters of sibilants and of plosives with the same point of articulation are prohibited.
Furthermore, several consonants have limited distributions: Stress is a combination of duration, intensity, vowel quality, and sometimes changes in pitch. Stress is also used to distinguish between words and phrases, so that a compound word receives a single stress unit, but the corresponding phrase has two: Stressed syllables are pronounced longer, but unstressed syllables syllables between stresses are shortened. Varieties of English vary the most in pronunciation of vowels.
Some differences between the various dialects are shown in the table "Varieties of Standard English and their features". English distinguishes at least seven major word classes: Some analyses add pronouns as a class separate from nouns, and subdivide conjunctions into subordinators and coordinators, and add the class of interjections.
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The seven word classes are exemplified in this sample sentence: English nouns are only inflected for number and possession. New nouns can be formed through derivation or compounding. Mass nouns can only be pluralised through the use of a count noun classifier, e. Orthographically the possessive -s is separated from the noun root with an apostrophe.
They can also include modifiers such as adjectives e. Regardless of length, an NP functions as a syntactic unit.
A definite noun is assumed by the speaker to be already known by the interlocutor, whereas an indefinite noun is not specified as being previously known. The noun must agree with the number of the determiner, e. Determiners are the first constituents in a noun phrase. Adjectives modify a noun by providing additional information about their referents. In English, adjectives come before the nouns they modify and after determiners. English pronouns conserve many traits of case and gender inflection.
The reflexive pronouns are used when the oblique argument is identical to the subject of a phrase e. Prepositional phrases PP are phrases composed of a preposition and one or more nouns, e. Prepositions have a wide range of uses in English. They are used to describe movement, place, and other relations between different entities, but they also have many syntactic uses such as introducing complement clauses and oblique arguments of verbs. Traditionally words were only considered prepositions if they governed the case of the noun they preceded, for example causing the pronouns to use the objective rather than subjective form, "with her", "to me", "for us".
English verbs are inflected for tense and aspect and marked for agreement with third person singular subject. Auxiliary verbs differ from other verbs in that they can be followed by the negation, and in that they can occur as the first constituent in a question sentence. Most verbs have six inflectional forms. The primary forms are a plain present, a third person singular present, and a preterite past form. The secondary forms are a plain form used for the infinitive, a gerund-participle and a past participle.
English has two primary tenses, past preterit and non-past. English does not have a morphologised future tense. I was running , and compound tenses such as preterite perfect I had been running and present perfect I have been running. There is also a subjunctive and an imperative mood, both based on the plain form of the verb i. Finite verbal clauses are those that are formed around a verb in the present or preterit form. In clauses with auxiliary verbs, they are the finite verbs and the main verb is treated as a subordinate clause. The phrase then functions as a single predicate.
In terms of intonation the preposition is fused to the verb, but in writing it is written as a separate word. Instead, they consider the construction simply to be a verb with a prepositional phrase as its syntactic complement, i. The function of adverbs is to modify the action or event described by the verb by providing additional information about the manner in which it occurs. In most sentences, English only marks grammatical relations through word order. The example below demonstrates how the grammatical roles of each constituent is marked only by the position relative to the verb:.
An exception is found in sentences where one of the constituents is a pronoun, in which case it is doubly marked, both by word order and by case inflection, where the subject pronoun precedes the verb and takes the subjective case form, and the object pronoun follows the verb and takes the objective case form.
The example below demonstrates this double marking in a sentence where both object and subject is represented with a third person singular masculine pronoun:. In English a sentence may be composed of one or more clauses, that may, in turn, be composed of one or more phrases e. A clause is built around a verb and includes its constituents, such as any NPs and PPs.
Within a sentence, one clause is always the main clause or matrix clause whereas other clauses are subordinate to it. Subordinate clauses may function as arguments of the verb in the main clause. English syntax relies on auxiliary verbs for many functions including the expression of tense, aspect, and mood. Auxiliary verbs form main clauses, and the main verbs function as heads of a subordinate clause of the auxiliary verb. Passive constructions also use auxiliary verbs.
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A passive construction rephrases an active construction in such a way that the object of the active phrase becomes the subject of the passive phrase, and the subject of the active phrase is either omitted or demoted to a role as an oblique argument introduced in a prepositional phrase.
Who saw the cat? To whose house did you go last night? Because of the strict SVO syntax, the topic of a sentence generally has to be the grammatical subject of the sentence. In cases where the topic is not the grammatical subject of the sentence, frequently the topic is promoted to subject position through syntactic means. Through the use of these complex sentence constructions with informationally vacuous subjects, English is able to maintain both a topic-comment sentence structure and a SVO syntax.
Discourse markers are often the first constituents in sentences. While discourse markers are particularly characteristic of informal and spoken registers of English, they are also used in written and formal registers. Due to its status as an international language, English adopts foreign words quickly, and borrows vocabulary from many other sources. Many statements published before the end of the 20th century about the growth of English vocabulary over time, the dates of first use of various words in English, and the sources of English vocabulary will have to be corrected as new computerised analysis of linguistic corpus data becomes available.
English forms new words from existing words or roots in its vocabulary through a variety of processes. English, besides forming new words from existing words and their roots, also borrows words from other languages. This adoption of words from other languages is commonplace in many world languages, but English has been especially open to borrowing of foreign words throughout the last 1, years.
But one of the consequences of long language contact between French and English in all stages of their development is that the vocabulary of English has a very high percentage of "Latinate" words derived from French, especially, and also from Latin and other Romance languages. French words from various periods of the development of French now make up one-third of the vocabulary of English.
English has also borrowed many words directly from Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages, during all stages of its development. You've reached the maximum number of titles you can currently recommend for purchase. Your session has expired. Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages. If you're still having trouble, follow these steps to sign in.
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