Old English. Part 3. General Characteristics.ppt

OLD ENGLISH
GENERAL
CHARACTERISTICS

 How did OE emerge?
 Where was OE spoken?
 How did OE work?
 What was the sound of the language?

Old English can be defined in four ways:
 Geographically
 Historically
 Genetically
 Typologically

A. Geographically
 OE is a language spoken by the
Germanic settlers in the British
Isles

B. Historically
 OE is a language spoken from the
time of the Germanic settlement in
the 5th century until the Norman
Conquest in 1066

Traditional periodisation of the
history of English
 Old English (5th -11th centuries)
 Middle English (12th -15th )
 Modern or New English (16th - up to
now)

C. Genetically or diachronically
 OE is a Lowlands branch of the West
Germanic group of languages.
This branch emerged from languages
spoken in what are now Holland, northern
Germany, and Denmark.

D. Typologically or synchronically
OE is a language with:
 a particular sound system (phonology),
 grammatical endings (morphology),
 word order patterns (syntax),
 vocabulary (lexis).

OE is bounded by geography
 The earliest inhabitants of the British Isles -
a group of Paleolithic peoples (Stonehenge
and other stone-circle monuments).
However, we have no linguistic, literary or
verbal remnants of their lives.
 Scientists can reconstruct the language of
Celtic speakers who migrated from Europe
to the British Isles in the 2nd half of the 1st
millennium B.C.

The Celtic tribes
 The Celtic branch of Indo-European
linguistic family - at one time among its
most numerous representatives:
at the beginning of our era - the territories
of the present-day Spain, Great Britain,
western Germany and northern Italy;
before that - Greece and Asia Minor.
But under the steady attacks of Italic and
Germanic tribes the Celts had to retreat.

The Celts in Britain
 Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, the
central part of England
Modern Celtic languages
 Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh,
Cornish, Breton
 remnants of the Celtic group of languages
face the threat of disappearance, unable to
survive in the competition with English

The Celts were displaced in two moves:
 first – by the Latin-speaking Romans
(55 B.C. - 5th century A.D.). Latin - the
prestige language of administration,
education, and social life. However, some
Celtic words entered Roman Latin during
the occupation, esp. words for geographical
places: Avon = river
 second – by the Germanic tribes

Germanic tribes of the Angles, Saxons,
Jutes and Frisians
 up to the 5th century A.D. had lived in
western Europe between the Elbe and the
Rhine
 a far inferior civilization than the Romans;
agricultural rather than pastoral;
disintegrating tribal organisation;
hosts of warriors, but also labourers,
women, children

 The invaders plundered the country, took
possession of almost all the fertile land
there and partly exterminated, and partly
drove away the native population to the
less inhabited mountainous parts of the
country — Cornwall, Wales, Scotland.
 The language of the invaders underwent
few changes under the influence of the
Celtic tongue as almost no normal
intercourse between the invaded and the
invaders was possible, as the invaded were
very few and far below socially.

Heptarchy (seven kingdoms)
 North of the Humber River in England -
Northumbria (formed by the Angles).
 Central part of England - the kingdoms of
Mercia and Anglia (the Angles);
 Southeast - Kent (the Jutes);
 Southwest - Wessex, Sussex and Essex (the
Saxons); the Frisians did not form a separate
kingdom, but intermarried with the population
belonging to different tribes.

Heptarchy (seven kingdoms)
and OE dialects
 8th century - OE emerged as a distinctive
language and developed 4 major dialects
 OE dialects are names after the names of
the kingdoms on the territory of which the
given dialect was spoken:
 the Northumbrian dialect
 the Mercian dialect
 the Wessex dialect

Factors contributing to
the unity of England
 The domination of Wessex, Mercia and
Northumbria;
 The appearance of Christianity in England
in 597 A.D.
 The geographical separation of England
from the Continent favoured the further
development of the characteristic features
that already distinguished English from its
parent Germanic language.

The Nothumbrian dialect
 The historian, ecclesiastic and grammarian of
Northumbria - the Venerahle Bede (Ecclesiastical
History of the English Church and Peoples , 731)
epitomises the efflorescence of Nothumbria
culture at the end of the 7th and the beginning of
the 8th centuries.
 Records: Caedmon’s Hymn, the great Bibles and
Gospels of early English life (enormous hand-
made manuscripts, rich with illumination and
colour), interlinear glosses, translations of Latin
texts into the Northumbrian dialect.

King Alfred and the West Saxon
dialect
 came to the throne in 871;
 successfully fought with the Danes and their devastating
raids on the isles( 878 signed a peace treaty);
 set aside a half of the revenue (income) to be spent on
educational needs: established schools, brought in
foreign scholars and craftsmen, restored monasteries
and convents, published and enforced a collection of
laws;
 ordered the compilation of the first history book, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was continued for more
than two centuries after his death;
 commissioned to translate the major works of classical
and Christian antiquity into OE - into the West Saxon
dialect.

West Saxon as the literary and prestige dialect of
OE, as a national standard in the British Isles
 “Desire for and possession of earthly power never pleased
me overmuch, and I did not unduly desire this earthly rule. I
desired to live worthily as long as I lived, and to leave after
my life, to people who should come after me, the memory of
me in good works”.
 The influence of King Alfred was so great that both Latin
texts and Old English works in other dialects were translated
into West Saxon. In publishing works on Old English,
scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries edited them into West
Saxon forms even if those forms were not the original.

Historical division of OE
 5th —7th centuries - “the pre-written period” of English;
 8th century - “Runic Alphabet”: peculiar angular shape
(the technique of writing — the letters were not written
but carved on hard materials — wood, stone, bone);
magic signs; runic inscriptions 9 "Franks' casket" and
the "Ruthwell cross“);
 With the Christian faith there came many Latin-speaking
monks who brought with them their own Latin alphabet
which ousted the Runic alphabet;
 "insular writing“;
 7th - 9th centuries - the era of Northumbrian
efflorescence;
 9th - 10th centuries - Wessex became the seat of Anglo-
Saxon intellectual literary and political life

Typology - the major linguistic
features of Old English
 Phonetics
 a system of dynamic stress fixed on the
first root syllable:
• agāne (gone)
• ʒesēon (see)
• ʒaderian (gather)

Phonetics: the vowels
 a) The quantity and the quality of the vowel
depended upon its position in the word.
Under stress any vowel could be found, but
in unstressed position there were no
diphthongs or long monophthongs, but only
short vowels [a], [e], [i], [o], [u].

 b) The length of the stressed vowels
(monophthongs and diphthongs) was
phonemic - there could be two words
differing only in the length of the vowel:
• metan (to measure) — mētan (to meet)
• pin (pin) — pīn (pain)
• god (god) — gōd (good)

 c) There was an exact parallelism of long
and short vowels:
• Short: а о e u i æ у ea eo
• Long: ā ō ē ū ī æ ÿ ēа ēо

The macron ( ¯ ) above a vowel indicates
that the vowel is long: ē = [e:]
þēs [θe:s]
Within an OE diphthong the first element
makes the nucleus and is therefore
pronounced with more force and clarity
than the second element
hēah [hea:χ]
у stands for a front vowel [y], like in the
French word “rue”
суninʒ [kуniŋg]

Phonetics: the consonants
 Some of the modern sounds were non-existent:
[ʃ], [ʒ], [ʧ], [ʤ].
 The quality of the consonant very much depended
on its position in the word, esp. the resonance -
voiced and voiceless sounds:
hlāf [f] (loaf) — hlāford [v] (lord, bread-keeper)
and articulation - palatal and velar sounds:
climban [k] (to climb) — cild [k'] (child).

h [h] before vowels hē [he:]
[χ]
(хорошо)
1. before consonants
2. at the end of words
hrinʒ [χriŋg]
seah [seaχ]
[χ']
(хитрый)
in contact with front vowels ryht [ryχ't]
ʒ [j] 1. before front vowels. But: ʒēs [ge:s]
2. at the end of words after front vowels
ʒeard [jeard]
bysiʒ [‘byzij]
[g] 1. before consonants
2. before back vowels. But: ʒunʒ [jung]
3. at the end of words after consonants except
[r] and [1]
ʒrēne['gre:ne]
ʒōd [go:d]
с1урunʒ ['klypuŋg]
[γ]
(Bel. горад)
1. at the end of words after back vowels
2. between back vowels
3. after [r] and [1]
slōʒ [slo:γ]
draʒan ['draγan]
burʒ [burγ ]
folʒa ['folγa]
Сʒ [gg'] in contact with front vowels bгусʒ [brygg']
[gg] in other positions docʒa ['dogga]

с [k'] before front vowels cild [k'ild]
[k] in other positions cuman ['kuman]
n [ŋ] before з and с sinʒan ['siŋgan]
[n] in other positions nama ['nama]
f, s, þ [v, z, ð] 1. between vowels. But: no voicing between
vowels at a prefix-root junction.
2. between a vowel and a voiced consonant
wesan ['wezan]
ʒe-fōn [je'fo:n]
hæfde ['hævde]
[f, s, θ] in other positions sēon [seo:n]

Grammar
 OE was a synthetic language, highly inflected, with
many various affixes. The principal grammatical means :
 Suffixation:
Ic cēре (I keep) — þu cēpst (you keep) — he cēрð (he
keeps)
 Vowel interchange or Ablaut:
wrītan (to write) — Ic wrāt (I wrote)
 Suppletive forms:
ʒān (to go) — ēode (went)
bēon (to be) — Ic eom (I am) – þu eart (you are) -
he is (he is)
 There was no fixed word-order in Old English.

Vocabulary: periods of borrowing in OE
 Continental period of borrowing (1st AD):
• Strata - street, strasse, stratum and strada are
Germanic cognates;
• war words - camp, wall, mile, pit;
• trade words: caupo - a tradesman; this entered
the Germanic languages as cheap in English or
kaufen in German. In Scandinavian languages, a
tradesman was a kaupmann, and his haven or
port was a kaupmannhofen. This would later
become the name for the city of Copenhagen.

 wine, pound, and mint
 specialty foods (cheese, pepper, butter,
plum, prune (чернослив), pea)
 words for architecture (chalk, copper
(медь), pitch (смола), tile). These are the
distinctive features of high Roman culture.
 word for rulership: the Latin Caesar gave
words for political control in many
languages, such as German Kaiser and
Russian tsar.

Vocabulary: insular or island period
 a) Latin loan words for newer religious
concepts, b) older Celtic terms from the
indigenous Celtic peoples living in the
British Isles, and c) words from the
Scandinavian languages of Viking and
Danish raiders in England came into the
Germanic languages.

 cross, priest, shrine, rule, school, master, pupil
 Scandinavian skirt, kirk, skip and dike have
Germanic family cognates in OE shirt, church,
ship, and ditch: sk and k correspond to the
sounds sh and ch in OE
 Scandinavian hard “g” sound was not present in
OE: muggy, ugly, egg, rugged; words with the “ll”
sound: ill.
 elaborate and learned Latin words: Antichrist,
apostle, canticle, demon, font, nocturne),
Sabbath, synagogue, accent, history, paper.

OE made new words with distinctive
approaches to compounding:
 Determinative compounding - forming new words by
connecting together two normally independent nouns or a
noun and an adjective.
• eahrring (earring)
• bocstæf (bookstaff)
• middangeard (middle-yard, "Earth”)
• federhoma (feather coat, plumage)
• bonloan (bone locker, body).
 Kenning is a noun metaphor that expresses a farmiliar object
in unfamiliar ways. The sea, for example, could be known as
the hronrad, whaleroad.

Repetitive compounding brings together
words that are nearly identical or that
complement and reinforce each other for
specific effect:
• holtwudu is wood-wood, or forest;
• gangelwæfre is going-about weaver, or
the swift-moving one - a spider.

 Noun-adjective formations:
• græsgrene (grass green),
• lofgeorn (praise-eager or eager for praise),
• goldhroden (gold-adorned ).
• In Modem English - king-emperor or fighter-bomber.
 Prefix formations. OE had many prefixes that derived
from prepositions and altered the meanings of words:
• the prefix "and-“ meant back or in response to. Thus, one
could swear in Old English or andswar, meaning to answer.
• the prefix "with-" meant against. One could stand or
withstand something in Old English, meaning to stand
against.

Caedmon's Hymn
Nu sculon herigcan
heofonrices Weard,
Meotodes meahte
ond his modgeþanc,
weorc Wuldorfæder
swa he wundra gehwæs
ece Drihten,
or onstealde.
He ærest sceop
eorðan bearnum
heofen to hrofe
halig Scyppend;
þa middangeard
moncynnes Weard,
ece Drihten,
ærfter teode,
firum foldan,
Frea ælmihtig.
Now we shall praise heaven-
kingdom's Guardian,
the Creator's might, and his mind-
thought,
the works of the Glory-father: how
he, each of us wonders,
the eternal Lord, established at
the beginning.
He first shaped for earth's
children
heaven as a roof, the holy
Creator.
Then a middle-yard, mankind's
Guardian,
the eternal Lord, established
afterwards,
the earth for the people, the Lord
almighty.

Old English. Part 3. General Characteristics.ppt

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