English in the ‘transition period’: the sources of contact-induced change

Contact ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert McColl Millar
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
The North ◽  
Celtic Languages ◽  
Germanic Languages

Perhaps the central chapter of Contact, we focus here on the rapid and radical changes English passed through in relation to inflectional morphology (in particular but not exclusively in the noun phrase) in the later Old English and early Middle English periods. Comparison is made to other Germanic languages; the concept of drift is introduced. Theories for why these changes occurred and why the changes took place where, when and how they did are considered, with particular focus on earlier contact explanations. Recent proposals that bilingualism with Celtic languages was the primary impetus for the changes are critiqued. It is suggested that, while Celtic influence should not be dismissed, it is contact between Old English and Old Norse in the North of England which acted as catalyst. This contact is seen as a koine whose origin is markedly similar to that postulated for modern new dialects.

scholarly journals A native origin for Present-Day English they, their, them

Diachronica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelle Cole
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
The North ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Pronominal System ◽  
Germanic Languages

Abstract It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.

The noun phrase and the ‘Viking Hypothesis’

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paola Crisma ◽  
Susan Pintzuk
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Direct Descendant ◽  
Traditional Account ◽  
Competing Hypotheses ◽  
English Noun

ABSTRACTIn this article we use the syntax of the noun phrase to evaluate two competing hypotheses: the traditional account, that Middle English is a West Germanic language with Old English as its immediate ancestor, and Emonds and Faarlund's (2014) proposal, that Middle English is a North Germanic language, the direct descendant of Old Norse. The development of nominal syntax shows that the Middle English noun phrase can be derived only from Old English, not from Old Norse. We examine six nominal characteristics; in each case, we find in Middle English exactly the construction that one would expect given the nominal syntax of previous Old English stages. The evidence from Old Norse shows that, although some of the same constructions did develop in the same way in the attested Norse varieties, the development occurred only at a later stage, too late to have affected the syntax of Middle English.

Blame the Barbarians

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-82
Author(s):  
Arika Okrent ◽  
Sean O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Old English ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
The North ◽  
The People ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Over Time

This chapter tells the story of how English got to be the weird way it is, which begins with the Germanic languages and the barbarians who spoke them. During the 5th century, an assortment of them poured across the North Sea, from what is today Denmark, the Netherlands, and Northern Germany, and conquered most of England. After about a century of the Germanic tribes taking over and settling in, the Romans returned. This time it was not soldiers but missionaries who arrived. The monks who came to convert the island to Christianity brought their Latin language with them, and they also brought the Latin alphabet. They set about translating religious texts into the language of the people they encountered, a language that by this time had coalesced into something that was Old English. However, there is another group of barbarians to blame: the Vikings. Their language was similar enough to Old English that they could communicate with the Anglo-Saxons without too much difficulty, and over time their own way of speaking mixed into the surrounding language, leaving vocabulary and expressions behind that do not quite fit the rest of the pattern at the old Germanic layer.

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.

Early Latin loan-words in Old English

1993 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Wollman
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Complete List ◽  
The West ◽  
Loan Words ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Celtic Languages ◽  
Germanic Languages

It is a well-known fact that Old English is rich in Latin loan-words. Although the precise number is not yet known, it is a fairly safe assumption that there are at least 600 to 700 loan-words in Old English. This compares with 800 Latin loan-words borrowed in different periods in the Brittonic languages (Welsh, Cornish, Breton), and at least 500 early Latin loan-words common to the West Germanic languages. These rather vague overall numbers do not lend themselves, however, to a serious analysis of Latin influence on the Germanic and Celtic languages, because they include different periods of borrowing which are not really comparable to each other. The basis of these estimates, moreover, is often not stated very clearly. Although the establishment of a complete list of Latin loan-words in the various Germanic languages is a desideratum, it can only be achieved in a later stage of our studies.

scholarly journals Middle English

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-45
Author(s):  
Sarah G. Thomason
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Basic Vocabulary

The Viking hypothesis is fatally flawed, in part because syntax is readily borrowed in intense contact situations, while inflectional morphology usually is not—and Middle English inflectional morphology is overwhelmingly of West Germanic origin. The dismissal of lexical evidence is also misguided: the vast majority of basic vocabulary items come from Old English, not from Norse.

Why English is not dead: A rejoinder to Emonds and Faarlund

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old English ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Counter Argument

AbstractThis article argues against the claim by Emonds and Faarlund (2014,English: The language of the vikings. Palacký University: Olomouc) that English died out after the Norman Conquest, and was replaced by a North Germanic variety referred to as “Anglicised Norse”, which had been formed in the Danelaw area in a concerted effort by the Norse and Anglo-Saxon populations, presumably to overthrow the ruling French elite. Emonds and Faarlund base their claim on the existence of some 20–25 linguistic features which are said to have been absent from Old English, but which are present in Present-Day English and in Scandinavian languages. This article argues that genetic affiliation cannot be inferred from shared syntactic, morphological or lexical features, which may easily result from independent convergence in historically related languages. The main counter-argument, however, is chronological: the majority of the features adduced are indeed attested in Old English and often in other West Germanic languages also, and hence may not be attributed to Old Norse; nor can features which are not attested in English until late Middle English or early Modern English come from Old Norse. The continuity of English in the written record likewise renders the suggested scenario highly unlikely.

The Development of Old English eo/ēo and the Systematicity of Middle English Spelling

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Merja Stenroos
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Core Area ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Spelling Variation ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Almost All ◽  
English Spelling

This chapter uses a new resource, the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C), a corpus of 14th and 15th Century English texts, to answer an old question: it is possible to find traces of a systematic distinction between the reflexes of Old English e/ē and eo/ēo in Middle English? An investigation into the spelling variation found in 27 lexical items that contain a vowel representing Old English eo/ēo as well as the equivalent Old Norse element jó throws up a wide range of spellings, the vast majority of which show <e>/<ee>. Spellings that might suggest a rounded pronunciation are also fairly robustly present, however, particularly <eo>, with the Southwest Midlands as its core area. The second part of the investigation retrieves all words that were spelled with the digraph <eo>. The vast majority of these turn out to be reflexes of Old English eo/ēo, and almost all of them are localized to the Southwest Midlands. They occur either as reflexes of OE y/ȳ, or in unstressed syllables, or in words where <eo> follows <w> – three groups for which a rounded pronunciation would be plausible.

The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-205
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Middle High German ◽  
Chanson De Geste ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Skaldic Poetry ◽  
Vita Nuova ◽  
Vernacular Poetry ◽  
Germanic Languages

This chapter is concerned with the vernacular poetry of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Side-by-side with the monastic production and preservation of poetry, the castles and courts of the nobility became centres of culture. France, in particular, saw extensive poetic activity, notably in the genres of the chanson de geste and the troubadour lyric. Other French genres of the time include saints’ lives, romances, lais, and fabliaux; the use of the octosyllabic line for these poems is examined. Poetry in the Germanic languages, notably the Middle High German courtly epics and Minnesänger lyrics and the Old Norse eddic and skaldic poetry of Iceland, is discussed, as is the lyric poetry of Italy. The evidence for the experience of poetry in Dante’s Vita nuova is considered. The rhythmic variety of Middle English verse, it is argued, suggests some uncertainty in the adoption of French metres.

Old Frisian

Diachronica ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-115
Author(s):  
Laura Catharine Smith
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Middle High German ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Low German ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Germanic Languages

For a century, Old Frisian has largely remained in the shadows of its Germanic sister languages. While dictionaries, concordances, and grammars have been readily and widely available for learning and researching other Germanic languages such as Middle High German, Middle Low German and Middle English, whose timelines roughly correspond to that of Old Frisian, or their earlier counterparts, e.g., Old High German, Old Saxon and Old English, few materials have been available to scholars of Old Frisian. Moreover, as Siebunga (Boutkan & Siebunga 2005: vii) notes, “not even all Old Frisian manuscripts are available as text editions”1 making the production of comprehensive core research materials more difficult. Consequently, what materials there have been, e.g., von Richthofen (1840), Heuser (1903), Holthausen (1925), and Sjölin (1969), have typically not taken into consideration the full range of extant Old Frisian texts, or have focused on specific major dialects, e.g. Boutkan (1996), Buma (1954, 1961). This has left a gap in the materials available providing an opportunity for Old Frisian scholars to make substantial contributions to the field by filling these gaps.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document