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This site is incomplete. More will be added in due course. Thank you for your patience!
Course Outline
Introduction For
lists of words descended from Proto Indo European, and a good discussion
concerning reconstruction, see Kathleen Hubbard's site on
http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/PIE.html): Germanic Grimm's Law (also known as the First Sound Shift) A series of changes that took place in the Germanic branch of IE, with the following outcomes:
Examples: IE bhrater Gmc brother (cf non Germanic Latin frater) IE abel- Gmc apple (cf non Gmc Russian jabloko) IE kerd- Gmc heart (cf non Gmc Latin cord-)
Not all Gmc words showed the outcomes expected of Grimm's Law, and these 'exceptions' were explained in 1877 by a law discovered by Karl Verner. This law provides a further step, after Grimm's law, taken by the unvoiced labiodental, interdental and velar fricative sounds (sorry, not all symbols available here) in the context of voiced sounds and a preceeding unaccented vowel
Examples IE p*ter - Grimm's Law changes it to unvoiced th - Verner's Law changes it to the voiced sound (later, and after more changes, seen in Eng. father). [Here * stands for the ash symbol] Further examples are hard to find because subsequent changes have largely disguised Verner's Law in modern languages. Old
English (OE) When the Romans invaded England, the British Isles were inhabited by a Celtic people known as the Britons. Surviving Celtic languages include Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Irish and Breton (spoken on the West coast of France) When
the Romans left to defend their territories elsewhere, Angles, Saxons, Jutes
moved in. In fact some of them had started before the Romans moved out. You
can find good links to Anglo Saxon sites on the: Monks,
Literacy and Vikings It is frequently said that the English language was only written once Christianity (and monks) came to the country, and in terms of the subsequent, long-term history of the written language this can be taken as true. One should not, however, forget that the Romans were a literate people and that many of the more successful Britons (pre-Anglo Saxon natives of England) must have been able to read and write during the 400 years of the Roman occupation, so there was writing in England before there was English writing. Furthermore, at least some of the invading Angles, Saxons and Jutes should have known of the well established practice of runic writing in their homelands (the earliest runic inscriptions found on the continent date from 200AD), although the number of writers may have been small. Runic writings in England date from 400AD, more than a century before the conversion of AS tribes to Christianity. The
best book on Runes that I have come across is *Runes* by R. I Page. London:
British Museum Publications, 1987. The same work may be found as a section
in the book *Reading the Past*, also a British Museum Publication. Many
web sites that claim to be about runes are in fact about
"fluffy-minded" occult claims, put in their proper place by Page and
other scholars who put this sort of thing down as simply
nonsensical. The
Anglo Saxons brought the English language to Britain from around the year 440;
Christian missionaries brought writing and also Latin, from 595;
the vikings brought . . . violence and terror.
(Don't be taken in by those 'trading posts and peaceful relations' arguments). And
then they settled down and let their language (Old Norse) merge with and
influence Old English.
ASSIGNMENTS 1:
You will each be given 4 words. Using the OED you should look up
the history of these words: where they came from origianally (tracing their
'journeys' to Present Day English) and what their previous meanings were.
The assignments are to be handed in to me after the presentations.
2:
Text 91 (Text 62 in old ed): Write
an acceptable MnE version of this texts, make two lists, one of the differences
between the language of the text and Present day English, the other of the
similarities. Don’t forget to look at Syntax, Morphology, Vocabulary and
Spelling. In class we will discuss this task and the characteristics of the
language which you found notable or interesting.
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