scholarly journals Fromsickertosure: the contact-induced lexical layering within the Medieval English adjectives of certainty

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-300
Author(s):  
RAFAŁ MOLENCKI
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Relative Paucity ◽  
Anglo Norman

The major Old English adjective of certainty was(ge)wiss, which in early Middle English came to be replaced withsickerderived from very weakly attested Old Englishsicor, a word of ultimate Romance origin (from Latinsēcūrus). The relative paucity of occurrences of both adjectives in theDictionary of Old Englishcorpus is attributed to their use in mostly spoken language. The rapid increase in the usage ofsickerin the thirteenth century is a mystery with possible, yet difficult to prove, Norse and/or Anglo-Norman influence. The fourteenth century marks the appearance ofsureandcertainborrowed from Anglo-Norman first by bilingual speakers and writers, and the quick diffusion of the new lexemes to all dialects and genres. This article looks at the adoption of the different senses of these polysemous adjectives into Middle English in the context of subjectification, which appears to affect not only semantic developments within one language but also the process of borrowing. Whensureandcertainwere used epistemically, they tended to occur in the predicative position, usually following the copula. It took several centuries of lexical layering (coexistence of synonyms) beforesickerwas lost from Standard English in the sixteenth century.

Thirteenth-century anonymous Margaret poems and their later redactions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana Dresvina
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
South English Legendary ◽  
Manuscript Context

Chapter 2 examines thirteenth-century verse lives of St Margaret that continued to be copied, rewritten, and adapted well into the sixteenth century. These include multiple versions of two Middle English poems, a free-standing Meidan Maregrete, and the saint’s life from the South English Legendary corpus, their variations, deviations, manuscript context, raising the question of their genre – a hagiography–romance hybrid. Then it looks into Anglo-Norman and French versified lives of St Margaret, paying special attention to the so-called G version, immensely popular in Europe and preserved in over one hundred manuscripts. This popularity appears to result from the text’s claim that a copy of the poem can itself act as the saint’s relic.

Talking about MOTION in Middle English

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Huber
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Other ◽  
Motion Verbs ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Analysis Of Motion

Chapter 6 begins with an overview of the language contact situation with (Anglo-) French and Latin, resulting in large-scale borrowing in the Middle English period. The analysis of 465 Middle English verbs used to express intransitive motion shows that there are far more French/Latin loans in the path verbs than in the other motion verbs. The range of (new) manner of motion verbs testifies to the manner salience of Middle English: caused motion verbs are also found in intransitive motion meanings, as are French loans which do not have motion uses in continental French. Their motion uses in Anglo-Norman are discussed in terms of contact influence of Middle English. The analysis of motion expression in different texts yields a picture similar to the situation in Old English, with path typically expressed in satellites, and neutral as well as manner of motion verbs being most frequent, depending on text type.

New Light on Early Middle English Borrowing from Anglo-Norman: Investigating Kinship Terms in grand‑

2019 ◽  
Vol 137 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-277
Author(s):  
Philip Durkin
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Germanic Languages

Abstract It is well known that the set of kinship terms in Middle English showed considerable influence from French. In the case of aunt and uncle, this accompanied major restructuring of the system of kinship terms, as the Old English set of four distinct terms for paternal and maternal uncles and aunts were replaced by just two terms for ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’, regardless of whether paternal or maternal. In comparison, the words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ have attracted little attention, as their story has appeared simpler: Old English had words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’, irrespective of whether paternal or maternal, and so did Middle English. The terms are also similar in structure, with native terms in which words for ‘father’ or ‘mother’ are the head and eald ‘old’ is the modifier (whether in a compound or a phrasal structure) being replaced by borrowed terms (grandsire, granddame) or hybrid terms (grandfather, grandmother) in which French grand ‘big’ is the modifier. This paper shows that behind this apparently simple story there lurk some significant complications which point to considerable disruption and instability in the terms for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ in both Middle English and French (with interesting and perhaps significant parallels also in other West Germanic languages). Consideration of these complications also casts new light on early lexical borrowing into Middle English from Anglo-Norman.

scholarly journals Agricultural Treatises in Eurasia before ca. 1500: The Iceberg Method, a Survey, and a Grand Hypothesis

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
Janken Myrdal
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Agricultural Technologies ◽  
Agricultural Knowledge ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
The Mediterranean

This article analyzes all extant agricultural treatises produced before the sixteenth century throughout Eurasia, in order to highlight their importance for the study of agricultural praxis, their significance for constructing a transnational intellectual history of the medieval globe, and their relevance for the development of pragmatic literacies. Such texts emerged both in China and around the Mediterranean before 200 BCE, and somewhat later in India, but few have been preserved and many are difficult to date. Thereafter, the medieval transmission of agricultural knowledge moved via several different regional trajectories and traditions, with Anglo-Norman England becoming a fourth and largely independent birthplace of the agricultural treatise genre during the thirteenth century. The proliferation of these texts becomes evident throughout Eurasia around 1000 CE and increases further from the fourteenth onward. Throughout this longue durée, the contents of these treatises reflect real changes in agricultural technologies, dominant crops, and climate.

scholarly journals Animal vocalization and human polyglossia in Walter of Bibbesworth’s thirteenth-century domestic treatise in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 525-541
Author(s):  
William Sayers
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Animal Vocalizations ◽  
Animal Vocalization ◽  
Norman French ◽  
Extensive List ◽  
Linguistic Communities

Walter of Bibbesworth’s late thirteenth-century versified treatise on French vocabulary relevant to the management of estates in Britain has the first extensive list of animal vocalizations in a European vernacular. Many of the Anglo-Norman French names for animals and their sounds are glossed in Middle English, inviting both diachronic and synchronic views of the capacity of these languages for onomatopoetic formation and reflection on the interest of these social and linguistic communities in zoosemiotics.

scholarly journals Behind the Early Modern English Translation of The Laws of Oléron: Determining the Underlying French Text

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (6) ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Kinga Lis
Keyword(s):  
French Text ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
French Texts

The objective of this paper is to analyse the sixteenth-century French texts which might lie behind an Early Modern English translation of a sea-code known as the Laws of Oléron, in an attempt to determine which of them served as the actual basis for the rendition. The original code has been dated back to the thirteenth century, with the earliest extant copies coming from the fourteenth century, at which point it was already known and used in England. It was not, however, before the sixteenth century that a translation was commissioned and appeared in a book called The Rutter of the Sea. The publication in question went through multiple editions and the views concerning the French text that served as the basis for the rendition diverge greatly. This paper analyses the various proposed theories and juxtaposes the actual French texts with each other and the Early Modern English translation.

scholarly journals Old English and its sound correspondences in Old English and Middle English

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 687-718
Author(s):  
GJERTRUD F. STENBRENDEN
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
English System ◽  
Almost All

This article seeks to identify the phonetic correspondence(s) of the digraph <cg> in Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME), assessing a range of sources: the etyma in early Germanic (Gmc) languages, the various spellings in OE and the spelling evidence in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. Almost all the textbooks on OE claim that <cg> was pronounced /dʒ/, i.e. as a phonemic affricate, in OE. Evidence is thin on the ground, and the argument rests on certain back spellings <cg> for words with etymological <d+g>, e.g. midgern <micgern>. Words with <cg> in OE go back to Gmc *g(g)j, which subsequently underwent palatalisation, and eventually assibilation and affrication. This article argues that the value [ɟj] is more likely for OE and early ME, and that such an interpretation agrees with the available spelling evidence for both OE and ME, in that there is not one <d>-type spelling in the entire historical corpus until late ME. It is also argued that the development of the voiced (pre-)affricate was later than that of its voiceless counterpart, as voiced fricative phonemes are a late, and infrequent, development in Gmc. Moreover, it is likely that the development of /dʒ/ was affected by the high number of French loans with /dʒ/ which entered the English lexicon after 1066. Thus, the English system of consonant phonemes may not have acquired /dʒ/ until the thirteenth century at the earliest.

The functions of weorðan and its loss in the past tense in Old and Middle English

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER PETRÉ
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mixed System ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
The Past ◽  
English System ◽  
Sudden Transition

In this article, I relate the loss of weorðan in the past tense to the loss of an Old English grammatical subsystem that encouraged the expression of narrative by bounded sentence constructions. This type of construction represents a situation as reaching its goal or endpoint, and serves to mark progress in a narrative (e.g. then he walked over to the other side). Instead of this system, from Middle English onwards a mixed system emerges with differently structured bounded sentence constructions as well as, increasingly, unbounded sentence constructions – which structure events as open-ended, usually by means of a progressive form (e.g. he was walking). I show how weorðan in Old English was strongly associated with the Old English system of bounded sentence constructions – an association with boundedness is not surprising given its meaning of ‘(sudden) transition into another state’. In the thirteenth century this rigid Old English system started to break down, as primarily evidenced by the disappearance of the time adverbial þa and the loss of verb-second. Wearð, being strongly associated with the old way of structuring narrative, decreased too and eventually disappeared.

Galen's de Constitutione Artis Medicaein the Renaissance

1993 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 302-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Fortuna
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Greek Manuscript ◽  
The Middle Ages

During the sixteenth century Galen'sDe constitutione artis medicae(i.224–304 Kühn) enjoyed a great success: in about fifty years it received four different Latin translations and three commentaries. Certainly this is also true of other medical classical texts, but such success is surprising for a treatise which did not have a wide circulation either in the Middle Ages or in the seventeenth century and later. In fact it is preserved in its entirety in only one Greek manuscript (Florence, Laur. plut. 74.3 = L of the twelfth or thirteenth century, with later corrections = L) and in a Latin translation by Niccolò of Reggio, who worked mainly for King Robert I in Naples in the first half of the fourteenth century. Furthermore, in his edition of 1679 René Chartier made a mistake, which the humanistic editors of the Greek Galen had avoided. The last part of theDe const, art. med.itself enjoyed a considerablefortunaas an independent tract on prognosis in the Greek and Latin manuscript tradition. The editors of the Aldine and the Basle editions knew such anexcerptum, at least in the manuscript Par. gr. 2165 (= P) of the sixteenth century, and rightly decided not to print it. Chartier found it in the manuscript Par. gr. 2269 of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and published it in the wrong belief that it was a new treatise of Galen's (vol. ii. 170–95 = viii.891–5). He was followed by Carl Gottlob Kühn in his edition of 1821, who printed theDe const, art. med.in the first volume (289–304) and theDe praesagiturain vol. xix.497–511. The error was not publicly detected until Kalbfleisch in 1896.

scholarly journals Exploring the penetration of loanwords in the core vocabulary of Middle English: carry as a test case

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-282
Author(s):  
PHILIP DURKIN
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Test Case ◽  
The Core ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Basic Vocabulary ◽  
Core Vocabulary ◽  
The Impact

This article takes as its starting point the extent of borrowing in Middle English among the hundred meanings included in the Leipzig–Jakarta List of Basic Vocabulary, a recently developed tool for exploring the impact of borrowing on basic vocabulary on a cross-linguistic basis. This is adopted for the possibility it provides for taking an empirically based approach to identifying at least a proportion of those loanwords that have most impact on the core lexicon. The article then looks in detail at a particularly striking example identified using this list: the verb carry, borrowed into English in the late fourteenth century from Anglo-Norman, and found with some frequency in its modern core meaning from the very beginning of its history in English. The competition this word shows with native synonyms, especially bear, is surveyed, and the systemic pressures that may have facilitated its widespread adoption are explored, as well as the points of similarity it shows with some other borrowings into the core vocabulary of Middle English; in particular, the hypothesis is advanced that a tendency towards isomorphism in vocabulary realizing basic meanings may be a significant factor here. The article also contends that the example of carry sheds new light on the receptivity of even basic areas of the lexicon to Anglo-Norman lexis in the late Middle English period. The trajectory shown by this word is particularly illuminating, with borrowing in a restricted meaning with reference to the commercial bulk transportation of goods, merchandise, etc. being followed by very rapid development of a much broader meaning, which even within the fourteenth century appears in at least some varieties (notably the works of Chaucer) to be a significant competitor for native bear as default realization of the basic meaning ‘to transfer/carry (something, especially in one's hands)’.

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