Phonemes & Graphemes
The smallest unit of sound in a language.
What is a phoneme?
The earliest form of English spoken during the time of Beowulf.
What is Old English?
The language spoken by the Norman rulers after 1066.
What is French?
The case that marks the subject of a sentence.
What is nominative?
Process of change over an extended period of time.
What is evolution?
The written representation of a sound.
What is a grapheme?
The form of English used by Chaucer.
What is Middle English?
After 1066, the English language borrowed thousands of new words, mainly related to law, government, and food. Words borrowed are called this.
What are loanwords?
The case that marks possession.
What is genitive?
When different groups of people speak different languages and come into contact, English changes because of this interaction.
What is language contact?
The word “knight” has five graphemes but only three of these.
What are phonemes?
This historical event in 1066 drastically changed English vocabulary.
What is the Battle of Hastings?
The group who raised the animals and used Germanic words.
Who are the peasants/lower class?
A grammatical ending added to show a word’s function.
What is a case ending?
Why does “The Lord’s Prayer” in Old English seem unfamiliar?
What are sound changes and grammatical differences?
In the word “ship,” the letters “s” and “h” together create one of these.
What is a letter blend?
Old English relied heavily on this grammatical feature instead of strict word order.
What are case endings?
The group who ate the meat and used French vocabulary.
Who are the aristocrats or ruling class?
The process of changing a word’s form to show grammatical meaning.
What is an inflection?
The reason English today contains words from both Germanic roots (“cow”) and French roots (“beef”) is because of this major historical event in 1066.
What is the Norman Conquest?
In the word “cats,” the final “s” is written with one grapheme but can represent two different of these in English (/s/ in “cats” and /z/ in “dogs”).
What are phonemes?
The reason Old English word order was more flexible than Modern English.
What is the use of case endings/inflections?
After the Norman Conquest, England functioned in a situation where three languages were used for different social domains — Latin (church), French (government and nobility), and English (common people). This situation is known as this.
What is triglossia?
In Modern English, word order is important because we have mostly lost these.
What are case endings/inflections?
Although the Normans invaded and ruled England, today they don’t exist as a separate group. This happened because they gradually merged with the local population over time.
What is assimilation?