From the history of one quote… (The role of the French language in the international arena in the XVI century: diachronic aspect)

The article is devoted to analyzing the role of the French language in the European society of the XVI century, when la langue francoyse becomes the common language of the communication to both in the field of the official correspondence and in the literature. The research is conducted in the diachronic aspect, concerning different extralinguistic factors (political, ideological, historical and cultural). The origins of this phenomenon are considered: for example, since the XI century, French language was the official language of the court of England and the aristocracy, and then became the working language of the court (le français du loi) and Parliament (the so-called Norman French). Gradually, the tendency to use French as a means of communication between the king and his entourage became the norm of court etiquette in Europe. The XVI century is not only the period of active formation of the French language as the national literary language of France, but also the time of its distribution in Europe as the language of diplomacy, international business and cultural communication of the European elite. The work shows how, due to the compositions of encyclopedic scientists, the work of Francophone teachers outside of France, and the popularization of the French language by translators-humanists (who served at the court of the king François I and his descendants), la langue francoyse consolidated its position in the international arena in the XVI century. At the same time, with the spread of translations into French from the ancient languages (Latin, ancient Greek) the interest of the secular elite of France increases to the past of Europe. And the translations into French from the “living” languages (Italian and Spanish) contributed to the interest to the current problems of modern European literature, as well as history, politics and culture, which was typical for the Renaissance. The article deals with the special attitude of the Renaissance to the French language through the prism of the language worldview of that epoch.

Sunnyside

This book traces developments in the history of British house-names from the tenth century, beginning with medieval house-naming practices referencing the householder’s name, the householder’s occupation, and the appearance of the house. In the early fourteenth century heraldic names appeared on commercial premises: tavern names such as la Worm on the Hope, and shop names such as the Golden Tea Kettle & Speaking Trumpet. From the eighteenth century five main categories are identified: the transferred place-name, the nostalgically rural, the commemorative, names associated with the nobility, and the latest fashion or fad. From the nineteenth century new developments are ‘pick & mix’ names consisting of uncoupled elements from British place-names joined together in new combinations, and jocular house-names. Historically, the house-name Sunnyside predominates in Scotland, and is traced through Middle English, Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman French Scottish Gaelic, and the influence of Old Norse, recording a prehistoric Nordic land-division practice known as solskifte. It was spread southwards in the eighteenth century by Nonconformists, and became a Quaker shibboleth. Quakers took the name to North America where it remains in use as a church name. A specific historic Sunnyside in the Scottish Borders influenced author Washington Irving to name his famous New York Sunnyside, which boosted the name’s popularity. London Sunnysides of the 1870s were grand suburban residences owned by rich industrialist Nonconformists with Scottish family ties, confirming the trend.

‘That's proper cool’

Intensifying adverbs are devices which scale a quality up, down, or somewhere between the two (Bolinger 1972: 17). To intensify the adjective cool, speakers of British English have a variety of functionally equivalent intensifiers at their disposal. They can use very, really, so, dead, bloody, right and well, among many others. A seemingly recent arrival to the British intensifier system is proper, as in that was proper cool. Believed to have entered English from the Latin proprius via Norman French (OED, proper), proper now has a variety of denotations in Present Day English. As an adjective, it can denote suitability (e.g., wear the proper equipment), etiquette (e.g., it wouldn't be proper to do that) and worthiness/authenticity (e.g., it's proper street food). As an adverb, proper can function as an adverb of manner (e.g., we like to do things proper in our house), and a marker of degree (e.g., he is proper tall); the degree function applying exclusively to British English. Some examples of proper intensifying adjectives from the present dataset are reported in (1).

John Trevisa

The English translator John Trevisa (b. c. 1342–d. 1402) was an exact contemporary of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. As is the case with Chaucer, very little of Trevisa’s life can be reconstructed from extant documents. Like Chaucer, Trevisa observed social and political events but referred only obliquely to them, and like Chaucer he staked his legacy to a body of work in English only. If Chaucer’s achievement was to elevate English poetry to a status rivaling that of poetry in Latin, Italian, and French, Trevisa’s was to prove English prose capable of conveying nuanced theological, political, and historical arguments. Trevisa’s known translations are of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus; the Dialogus inter militem et clericum (“Dialogue between a knight and a cleric”), a defense of temporal power; Archbishop Richard FitzRalph’s antifraternal sermon, Defensio curatorum (“Defense of secular priests”); Aegidius Romanus’s De regimine principum (“On the rule of princes”); Ranulph Higden’s universal history, Polychronicon; and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum (“On the properties of things”). Early modern antiquarians believed that Trevisa translated the Bible into English, but hard evidence is lacking (see under Trevisa, the Bible, and the Wycliffite Movement). Under his own name, Trevisa wrote a Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk on Translation and an Epistle to Lord Berkeley upon Translation as prefaces to his translation of the Polychronicon. He also composed one original poem, with which he prefaced his translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus. No longer attributed to Trevisa are the Middle English version of the Revelationes of Pseudo-Methodius, a translation of Vegetius’s De re militari that accompanies De regimine principum in its sole manuscript witness, and Apocalypse texts in Anglo-Norman French painted on the ceiling and walls of Berkeley Chapel, Gloucestershire, England.

Using character N-grams to explorediachronic change in medieval English

This paper applies character N-grams to the study of diachronic linguistic variation in a historical language. The period selected for this initial exploratory study is medieval English, a well-studied period of great linguistic variation and language contact, whereby the efficacy of computational techniques can be examined through comparison to the wealth of thorough scholarship on medieval linguistic variation. Frequency profiles of character N-gram features were generated for several epochs in the history of English and a measure of language distance was employed to quantify the similarity between English at different stages in its history. Through this a quantification of internal change in English was achieved. Furthermore similarity between English and other medieval languages across time was measured allowing for a measurement of the well-known period of contact between English and Anglo-Norman French. This methodology is compared to traditional lexicostatistical methods and shown to be able to derive the same patterns as those derived from expert-created feature lists (i.e. Swadesh lists). The use of character N-gram profiles proved to be a flexible and useful method to study diachronic variation, allowing for the highlighting of relevant features of change. This method may be a complement to traditional qualitative examinations.

Early Spelling Evidence for Scots L-vocalisation: A Corpus-based Approach

This chapter showcases the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) Project database, which comprises texts from the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS), of the period 1380-1500. This new resource for historical dialectology makes it possible to test earlier assumptions about phonological changes that are characteristic of Scots and not shared with Southern English. This chapter uses LAOS to test the claim that L-vocalisation, which entails the loss of coda-/l/ following short back vowels with concomitant vocalic lengthening or diphthongisation (as in OE full > OSc fow), was completed by the beginning of the sixteenth century. Based on attestations of <l>-less forms and reverse spellings, including /l/~ø alternations in borrowed items from (Norman) French (as in realme~reaume ‘realm’), the chapter maps the spread of <l> loss in different phonological contexts over time and space, and presents evidence of <l> loss in less than 1% of relevant environments. The final position of <l> is an important locus, but there is no evidence of a spread.

The Middle English Creolization Hypothesis: Persistence, Implications, and Language Ideology

Bailey and Maroldt (1977) and Domingue (1977) were the first to argue that language contact during the Middle Ages between Old English and both Old Norse and Norman French resulted in linguistic creolization. This theory, known as the Middle English creolization hypothesis, implies that Middle English, and perhaps Modern English as well, should be classified as a creole. Though frequently discredited on historic, linguistic, and terminological grounds, the creolization hypothesis has attracted interest for longer than might be expected. This paper argues that the persistence of the hypothesis may be ideologically motivated. The first section examines connotations of the term “creole” and applies these connotations to an analysis of the initial presentations of the creolization hypothesis. The second and third section of the paper review and analyze the forty-year history of the debate, focusing separately on arguments for creolization (and koinezation) between Anglo-Norman French and Old Norse, respectively. The fourth and final section examines challenges presented by the concept of creole exceptionalism to common attitudes about language equality and the theory of Universal Grammar. It is argued that these issues attract greater interest when contextualized within a discussion of a “major” world language such as English than when creolization is understood as an atypical process restricted to “peripheral” languages such as Haitian Creole. This paper also references relevant political issues such as the current controversy among medievalists about the field’s historic lack of inclusivity.

Does language loss follow a principled structural path? Evidence from Jersey Norman French

ABSTRACTThis study examines contact-induced change in Jèrriais, the severely endangered Norman variety currently spoken by some 1% of the population of Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands. Today, English dominates all linguistic domains of island life, and all speakers of Jèrriais are bilingual. The analysis uses original data to test empirically whether Myers-Scotton's (2002) five theoretical assumptions about the structural path of language attrition (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the individual) also have relevance for the process of language obsolescence (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the community). It explores i) whether Jèrriais is undergoing contact influenced language change owing to its abstract grammatical structure being split and recombined with English, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's Abstract Level model; and ii) whether different morpheme types of Jèrriais are related to the production process in different ways and are, accordingly, more or less susceptible to change during the process of language obsolescence, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's 4-M model. In addition to its contribution to linguistic theory, this study increases existing knowledge about Jèrriais and makes data from this language available for systematic comparison with other languages.

The Translation of the Sibylla Tiburtina into Middle Welsh

The Sibylla Tiburtina is a medieval prophetic text with roots in Late Antiquity. It tells the story of the wise Sybil, who is summoned to the court of the Roman emperor when a hundred of his senators dream the same dream during the same night. Her explanation of this dream is a lengthy prophecy about future kings and their qualities and faults, as well as about the natural disasters and wars the future will bring. The whole culminates in a prophecy about the signs of the Day of Judgment. The text has a long and complicated history of transmission. Originally written in Byzantine Greek, it has undergone considerable changes since being translated into Latin around the turn of the first millennium. Of this Latin text we have an edition with variants published by Ernst Sackur (1898). More recently, Anke Holdenried has worked extensively on the various versions of the Latin Sybil, and the differences between them, notably in her book The Sybil and her Scribes (Holdenried 2006). The first extant vernacular translation is in Norman French and dates from the twelfth century. There are two Middle Welsh versions of this text, one in Peniarth 14, the other in the Red Book of Hergest [RB] and the White Book of Rhydderch [WB]. In this paper, the latter will be discussed. There are only slight variations between these two versions, and I base my text on RB as edited recently on the Welsh Prose 1300–1425 project (Luft et al. 2013), with a few variant readings from WB in the same corpus. The Latin source of this translation is unknown, but must, as Marged Haycock has noted (Haycock 2005: 123), have been close to Sackur’s text. In my research I am interested in the translation process of the text from Latin into Middle Welsh, and in this paper I discuss some of the general tendencies of the Welsh translator of Sibli Ddoet ‘the wise Sybil’.