70.  Over the years from Old English period to the Modern English period, English has undergone some major sound changes. Illustrate these changes with some examples.
71.  What are the most widely-spread morphological changes in the historical development of English?
72.  What are the causes of language change? Discuss them in detail.

I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
l.T   2.T   3.T   4.F   5.F   6.T   7.F   8.F   9.T   10.F
11.T  12.F  13.T  14.F  15.F  16. F  17. T  18. T  19. F  20.T
II. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
21.Historical         22.diachronic         23.Renaissance       24.Vowel
25.Apocope         26.epenthesis         27.Law              28. Metathesis 29.Backformation     30.broadening        31.protolanguage     32.assimilation 33. internal         34.comparative       35. morphosyntactic
III. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
36.D   37.A   38.B   39.C   40.A   41.C   42.B   43.B   44.A   45.C
46. D  47.A   48. D   49. D  50. C
IV. Define the following terms:
1.  Apocope : Apocope is the deletion of a word-final vowel segment.
2.  Metathesis: Sound change as a result of sound movement is known as metathesis. It involves a reversal in position of two neighbouring sound seg-ments.
3.  Derivation: It is a process by which new words are formed by the addition of affixes to the roots, stems or words.
4.  back-formation: It is a process by which new words are formed by taking away the supposed suffix of an existing word.
5.  semantic narrowing: Semantic narrowing is a process in which the meaning of a word be-comes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning.
6.  Protolanguage: It is the original form of a language family that has ceased to exist.
7.  Haplology: It refers to the pheno广告网址n of the loss of one of two phonetically similar syllables in sequence.
8.    Epenthesis: A change that involves the insertion of a consonant or vowel sound to the middle of a word is known as epenthesis.
9.    Compounding: It is a process of combining two or more than two words into one lexical unit. 
10.    Blending: It is a process of forming a new word by combining parts of other words.
11.    semantic broadening: Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the  meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically earlier denota-tion.
62. semantic shift: Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related, meaning.
63.  Great Vowel Shift: It is a series of systematic sound change at the end of the Middle English period approximately between 1400 and 1600 in the history of English that involved seven long vowels and consequently led to one of the major discrepancies between English pronunciation and its spelling system.
64. Acronym: An acronym is a word created by combining the initials of a number of words.     
65.  sound assimilation: Sound assimilation refers to the physiological effect of one sound on an-other. In an assimilative process, successive sounds are made identical, or more similar, to one another in terms of place or manner of articulation, or of haplology.
V. Answer the following questions:
66.  What is the purpose or significance of the historical study of language?
1)   Researches in historical linguistics shed light on prehistoric developments in the evolution of language and the connections of earlier and later variants of the same lan-guage and provide valuable insights into the kinship patterns of different languages.
2)   The identification of the changes that a particular language has undergone enables us to reconstruct the linguistic history of that language, and thereby hypothesizes its earlier forms from which current speech and writing have evolved.
3)   The historical study of language also en-ables them to determine how non - linguistic factors, such as social, cultural and psychological factors, interact over time to cause linguistic change.
67.  What are the characteristics of the nature of language change?
  All living languages change with time and language change is inevitable. As a general rule, language change is universal, continuous and, to a considerable de-gree, regular and systematic. Language change is extensive, taking place in virtually all aspects of the grammar.
  Although language change is universal, inevitable, and in some cases, vigorous, it is never an overnight occurrence, but a gradual and constant process, often indiscernible to speakers of the same generation.
68.  What are the major periods in the history of English?
    The major periods in the history of English are Old English period (roughly from 449 to 1100), Middle English period(roughly from 1100 to 1500), and Modern English period (roughly from 1500 to the pre-sent). Old English dates back to the mid-fifth century when Anglo-Saxons invaded the British Isles from northern Europe.
   The pronunciation of Old English is very different from its modem form. For example, the Old English word "ham" is pronounced as /ha:m/. In terms of morphology, nearly half of the nouns are inflected to mark nomi-native , genitive, dative, and accusative cases . In addition, suffixes are added to verbs to indicate tense. Syntactical-ly , the verb of an Old English sentence precedes, hut does not follow, the subject.
    Middle English began when the Norman French invaders invaded England under William the Conqueror in 1066. Middle English had been deeply influenced by Norman French in vocabulary and grammar. For example, such terms as " army," " court," " defense," " faith," "prison" and "tax" came from the language of the French rulers.
    Modern English period starts with European renaissance move-ment. A di-rect consequence of the Renaissance movement was the revival of Latin as a literary language. In the post-Renaissance period, the "British Empire" set up English-speaking colonies in many parts of the world. By the nineteenth century, English was recognized as the language of the government, the law, higher education, and business and commerce in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Today Modern English is widely used and has in fact become an important tool of international communication among peoples of different countries.
69.  As language changes over time, the meaning of a word may deviate from its original denotation. Discuss the major types of semantic changes.
   Major types of semantic changes are semantic broadening, semantic narrowing and semantic shift.
    Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically earlier denota-tion. Take the word "holiday" for example,  The older meaning was a " holy day." Today everyone enjoys a holiday, whether he or she is religious or not.
    Semantic narrowing is a process in which the meaning of a word be-comes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning. For ex-ample, " wife," used to mean "any woman," but now it means “married fe-males” only.
    Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related, meaning. For example, the word silly meant “happy” in Old English, and naive in Middle English, but "foolish" in Modern English.
70.    Over the years from Old English period to the Modern English period, English has undergone some major sound changes. Illustrate these changes with some examples.
The major sound changes include changes in vowel sounds, and in the loss, gain and movement of sounds.
The changes in vowel sounds can be seen in the Great Vowel Shift in the history of English, which led to one of the major dis-agreements between the pronunciation and the spelling system of Modern English. These changes involve seven long, or tense vowels, for example
Words  
Middle English  
Modem English  
Five 
fi:v  
faiv
Mouse
Mu:s
maus
Feet
fe:t
fi:t 
Mood 
Md  
mu:d 
Break
Brε:ken
breik
    Sounds do not just change, they can be lost. vowel sounds change, but some sounds simply disappeared from the general pronunciation of English. One example of sound loss is the /kn - / clusters in the word - initial position. In Old and Middle English, both /k/ and /n/ were pro-nounced, as is shown in the spelling of such words as "knight" and "knee." Although Modern English spelling of these words still keeps the initial letter k, its sound is no longer pronounced.