scholarly journals Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon. Megan E. Hartman. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Pp. xii+213.

2021 ◽  
pp. E000-E000
Author(s):  
Joseph Harris
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Poetic Style

scholarly journals Metrical Positions and their Linguistic Realisations in Old Germanic Metres: A Typological Overview

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seiichi Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
The Other ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Common Scale ◽  
The Common ◽  
Linguistic Alignment ◽  
The One ◽  
Linguistic Material

This paper provides a typological account of Old Germanic metre by investigating its parametric variations that largely determine the metrical identities of the Old English Beowulf, the Old Saxon Heliand, and Old Norse eddic poetry (composed in fornyrðislag, málaháttr, or ljóðaháttr). The primary parameters to be explored here are the principle of four metrical positions per verse and the differing ways in which these constituent positions are aligned to linguistic material. On the one hand, the four-position principle works with a maximal strictness in Beowulf, and to a slightly lesser extent in fornyrðislag, whereas it allows for a wider range of deviations in verse size in the Heliand and ljóðaháttr. In málaháttr, however, the principle in itself gives way to the five-position counterpart. On the other hand, the variation in the metrical– linguistic alignment in the three close cognate metres may be generalised by positing the common scale, Heliand > Beowulf > fornyrðislag, for the decreasing likelihood of resolution, the increasing likelihood of suspending resolution, and the decreasing size of the drop.

Urgermanisch *þe-na-z ‘Gefolgsmann’

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-299
Author(s):  
Stefan Zimmer
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Technical Term ◽  
Old Saxon

Proto-Germanic *þe-na-z (Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Norse) is traditionally understood as ‘child, follower, servant’, connected with Greek teknon ‘child’, both from *tek- ‘to beget’.This is unfounded; the meaning ‘child’ is unattested, the traditional etymology highly improbable. Proto-Germanic *þe-na-z is from *tek- ‘to stretch out one's hand, touch, receive’, designating basically ‘follower, retainer’, thus a technical term of Germanic Gefolgschaftswesen. Pertinent textual passages, the theory of Germanic heathen baptism, and the rites whereby a warrior is accepted into a lord's retinue are crucial for the analysis.

Using Historical Glottometry to Subgroup the Early Germanic Languages

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-357
Author(s):  
Joshua R. Agee
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Quantitative Approach ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
Germanic Languages

Historical Glottometry, introduced by Kalyan & François (2018), is a wave-based quantitative approach to language subgrouping used to calculate the overall strength of a linguistic subgroup using metrics that capture the contributions of linguistic innovations of various scopes to language diversification, in consideration of the reality of their distributions. This approach primarily achieves this by acknowledging the contribution of postsplit areal diffusion to language diversification, which has traditionally been overlooked in cladistic (tree-based) models. In this paper, the development of the Germanic language family, from the breakup of Proto-Germanic to the latest period of the early attested daughter languages (namely, Old English, Old Frisian, Gothic, Old High German, Old Low Franconian, Old Norse, and Old Saxon) is accounted for using Historical Glottometry. It is shown that this approach succeeds in accounting for several smaller, nontraditional subgroups of Germanic by accommodating the linguistic evidence unproblematically where a cladistic approach would fail.

scholarly journals Translating the Gospel in Viking Age England: The Evidence from Two Old Norse Loan Translations from Old English

2019 ◽  
Vol 137 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-560
Author(s):  
Nikolas Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Early Medieval Period ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Biblical Translation

Abstract A recent resurgence of interest in Old Norse linguistic borrowings in Old English has greatly expanded our knowledge of the contact situation between these two speech communities in the early medieval period and beyond. However, there are a significant number of words that have been considered borrowings in the “other” direction, i. e. from Old English to Old Norse, which have not attracted the same amount of attention in current scholarship. Much of this material requires reassessment and this paper provides a case study of two parallel compound formations in both languages – OE bærsynnig [mann]/ON bersynðugr [maðr] (‘one who is openly sinful; publican’), and OE healsbōc/ON hálsbók (‘phylactery, amulet’, lit. ‘neck-book’) – that have traditionally been considered loan translations from Old English to Old Norse with little evidence other than their formation from cognate elements. In the absence of clear-cut linguistic criteria for identifying loan translations between these two closely related languages, this paper draws on a range of literary evidence to argue for a strong likelihood of a relationship between the two compounds. Both words offer important evidence for biblical translation practices, and contribute to our knowledge about the Christianisation of Norse speaking peoples and Anglo-Norse language contact in Viking Age England.

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