The most rigorous description ever undertaken of the Scandinavian influence on the vocabulary of a major Middle English text, and a new model for the collection and analysis of Norse loans in any English source. A new survey of the etymological evidence for nearly 500 words in one of the most famous and important Middle English poems Conducted in accordance with a groundbreaking new system of etymological classification, and with references to all relevant previous scholarship going back to the nineteenth century Contains new insights into the etymologies, forms, meanings and textual interpretation of hundreds of Middle English words Includes a new introduction to the scholarly study of the Old Norse influence on English vocabulary, including a detailed discussion of methodologies
This book presents a collection of papers from experts in a broad range of disciplines, including history, archaeology, genetics, and linguistics, to provide a detailed understanding of the Vikings in peace and in war. It focuses on one particularly exciting area of the Viking world, namely the north-west section of England, where they are known to have settled in large numbers. The 12 integrated studies in this book are designed to reinvigorate the search for Vikings in this crucial region and to provide must-reading for anyone interested in Viking history.
This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies to achieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.
This collected volume brings together a wide array of international linguists working on diachronic language change with a specific focus on the history of English, who work within usage-based frameworks and investigate processes of grammatical change in context. Although usage-based linguistics emphasizes the centrality of the discourse context for language usage and cognition, this insight has not been fully integrated into the investigation of processes of grammatical variation and change. The structuralist heritage as well as corpus linguistic methodologies have favoured de-contextualized analytical perspectives on contemporary and historical language data and on the mechanisms and processes guiding grammatical variation and change. From a range of different perspectives, the contributions to this volume take up the challenge of contextualization in the investigation of grammatical variation and change in different stages of English language history and discuss central theoretical notions such as gradable grammaticality, motivation in hypervariation, and hypercharacterization. The book will be relevant to students and linguists working in the field of diachronic and variational linguistics and English language history.
'[The book offers] meticulous case studies of authorial technique with much relevant historical detail. Discussion of sound symbolism is laudably precise and informative. [...] Glossed illustrative passages are provided throughout to maintain contact with a large potential audience. [...] The overall quality of the book cannot be ignored. This is an outstanding work of literary analysis.' Geoffrey Russom, Brown University
The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the greatest classics of English literature, but one of the least accessible to most twentieth-century readers. Written in an obscure dialect, it is far more difficult to digest in the original than are most other late medieval English works. Yet any translation is bound to lose much of the flavour of the original. This edition of the poem offers the original text together with a facing-page translation. With the alliterative Middle English before the reader, James Winny provides a non-alliterative and sensitively literal rendering in modern English. This edition also provides an introduction, explanatory and textual notes, a further note on some words that present particular difficulties, and, in the appendices, two contemporary stories, The Feast of Bricriu and The Knight of the Sword, which provide insight on the poem.
"The influence exerted upon English vocabulary by words that derive from the Scandinavian languages is widespread and profound. These words entered English by Norse speakers in the Anglo-Saxon period, and they claim amongst their number some of the most frequent and important items of everyday modern usage. There nevertheless remains a great deal about this element that we do not properly understand. This book presents etymological and contextual studies of the lexical terms originally derived from Old Norse that are found in the principal early Middle English texts from the South-West Midlands. This is a region that contains some of the most celebrated literary works of the period when Norse-derived words first appear in significant numbers in written English (the late twelfth to the later thirteenth century); being outside the area of the Danelaw, it also presents crucial opportunities for us to understand the transmission of Norse-derived vocabulary to parts of England beyond those of the heaviest initial Scandinavian settlement. This book will be of interest to scholars of early English lexicology, semantics and dialectology, to those studying the background to and linguistic resources of early Middle English literature, and to all those fascinated by the Scandinavian contribution to the history of the English language." --
The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. This volume occupies both a foundational and a revolutionary place. Its opening date--1100--marks the re-emergence of a vernacular poetic record in English after the political and cultural disruption of the Norman Conquest. By its end date--1400--English poetry had become an established, if still evolving, literary tradition. The period between these dates sees major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression. Middle English poetry reflects the influence of multiple contexts--history, social institutions, manuscript production, old and new models of versification, medieval poetic theory, and the other literary languages of England. It thus emphasizes the aesthetic, imaginative treatment of new and received materials by medieval writers and the formal craft required for their verse. Individual chapters treat the representation of national history and mythology, contemporary issues, and the shared doctrine and learning provided by sacred and secular sources, including the Bible. Throughout the period, lyric and romance figure prominently as genres and poetic modes, while some works hover enticingly on the boundary of genre and discursive forms. The volume ends with chapters on the major writers of the late fourteenth-century (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Gower) and with a look forward to the reception of something like a national literary tradition in fifteenth-century literary culture.
Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisit some of the issues already introduced in previous research, such as Latin interacting with European vernaculars and the complex relationship between code-switching and lexical borrowing. Collectively, the contributors show that multilingual practices share many of the same features regardless of time and place, and that one way or the other, all historical texts are multilingual. This book takes the next step in historical multilingualism studies by establishing the relevance of the multilingual approach to understanding language history.
