An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press
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- Anglo-Norman in- fluence. Secondly, OE possessed geminate
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an ‘neigh’, hwæt ‘what’. Although almost all of these clusters have been simplified in PDE, there is a clear remnant of /xw-/ in those, mainly Scots, dialects which distinguish between / w / and / /, as in weather vs. whether. Note that the spelling than the OE fluence. Secondly, OE possessed geminate, or long, consonants, which occurred in medial position. Thus we find examples such as hoppian ‘hop’ vs. hopian ‘hope’. These geminates may seem strange, but the phenom- enon is by no means confined to OE. See, for example, Italian, where there is a similar phenomenon, and long consonants appear frequently, as in sorella ‘sister’. Note also that there is no variation in the pronun- ciation of the first vowel in each word, as there mostly is in present-day English. At one stage in the history of OE these geminates must have occurred in final position too, and this accounts for spelling variations such as both bedd and bed for ‘bed’. It is this presence of geminates which accounts for the failure of / ʃ / ever to be voiced, because a word such as fisc . as ‘fishes’ had a medial geminate, and this prevented voicing. There were seven long and seven short vowels in OE: three front, three back, and one front rounded vowel, to which I shall return. There is a major difference between OE and PDE, in that in the former vowel length is critical, whereas in PDE it is vowel quality which is critical. In 10 AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH 02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 10 PDE, for example, the difference between the vowel of feet and that of fit is primarily determined by vowel quality, thus there is a contrast between /fit/ and /fit/. But in OE the contrast between, say, bı¯tan ‘bite’ and biter ‘bitter’, is mainly of length, hence /bi tan/ vs. /bit ə r/. The three pairs of front vowels were: / i / ~ /i/, / e / ~ /e/, /æ / ~ /æ/, and examples of the latter two pairs are: me¯tan ‘meet’ ~ metan ‘measure’; mæ¯st ‘most’ ~ mæst ‘mast’. It should now be obvious why I have always marked long vowels with a macron. The back vowels pattern in the same way. Therefore we find the following scheme: / u /, du¯n ‘hill’ ~ /u/, dun ‘dun’; / o /, go¯d ‘good’ ~ /o/, god ‘god’; / ɑ /, ha¯ra ‘hoary’ ~ / ɑ /, hara ‘hare’. It is at least arguable that the short vowels tended to be lower or more centralised than the long ones, so that, for example, short /e/ and /o/ were phonetically closer to [ ε ] and [ ɔ ] respectively, thus having a pronunciation quite close to that of bed and the Scottish pronunciation of cot. The systematic pairing of long and short vowels, although foreign to most dialects of PDE, is close to the systems operating in a language such as Modern German. The final pair of vowels are the front rounded pair, / y / and /y/, as in sy¯ll ‘pillar’ and syll ‘sill’. Although these are mostly absent from PDE, at least as far as standard varieties are concerned, they are quite easily equated to the German long and short umlauted ü in, say, dünn ‘thin’ or the same sound in French lune ‘moon’. In addition to these vowels, OE had four diphthongs, again paired off, so that we find other. Examples are be¯or ‘beer’, beofor ‘beaver’ and he¯ah ‘high’, heard ‘hard’. In dialects other than Late West Saxon, and occasionally even there, the diphthongs <ı¯o> and can be equated with not yet provided a proper phonological statement of these diphthongs. There is a reason for that. These diphthongs are amongst the most controversial issues in OE linguistics. This is not the place for a dis- cussion of the controversy, but it is necessary to admit its existence. The critical issue is whether the so-called short diphthongs are indeed diphthongal, rather than monophthongal. Here I shall assume that the diphthongal interpretation is correct, partly because it seems more prob- able, partly because it is the simpler way to approach the question. Under this assumption, the phonemic values for the diphthongs might appear to be approximately / eo / and so on. That might have been the case at one early stage, but it is certain that by the time of Ælfric the second element had been reduced to an unstressed element, which is called schwa. Thus we can give the following values to the first pair above: / eə /, / eə /. The second pair, ORIGINS AND SOURCES 11 02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 11 the shape you might expect, because it is agreed that the first element is a low vowel, not a mid one. Therefore we find / ə /, / ə /. You may come across another apparent pair of diphthongs, namely <ı¯e> and Saxon texts such as those associated with Alfred. In Late West Saxon they are replaced by one of the two monophthongs i and y under slightly complex conditions which we can ignore here. Exercises 1. Using the discussion in §1.4, give the PDE equivalents of the follow- ing OE words: ofer mann bedd dæg . sc . ip fisc . æsc . t e t orn e e e orn hyll t ynn cynn miht 2. In §1.5 I gave some examples of some simplified OE sentences. Here are some further examples (again simplified). Try to turn them into PDE: T a¯ cwæ e seo ha¯lig . e Agnes e us [seo = ‘the’] E a¯s martyras næ¯ron næ¯fre on lı¯fe t urh wı¯f besmtytene [the third and fourth words show a double negative construction!] T a¯ sume dæg . bæd he¯ t one bisc . eop blætsian his ful [ t one = ‘the’; ful = ‘cup’] 3. Using an atlas find six place-names containing the suffix -by and three with the suffix -thwaite. 4. Alfred may have come from a place called Wilton; Ælfric from Abingdon; Bede from Jarrow and Offa ruled the Mercians at Lichfield. Find each of these places on a map. 5. Using an etymological dictionary, find one example of a word other than those in §1.7 which originally had the OE cluster /xn-/ and do the same for the other clusters noted in that section. 6. A further cluster which has been simplified in PDE is the cluster /wr-/. Find two words which once had that cluster and two other words with which they now share the same pronunciation, that is to say, they are homophones. Two other lost clusters are /gn-/ and /kn-/. Find two examples of each. Do not include loan-words such as gnu. 12 AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH 02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 12 2 The basic elements 2.1 Change and continuity As I made clear in Chapter 1, English is in origin a Germanic language. In the passage of time since the English arrived in Britain, these Germanic origins have to a remarkable degree been obscured in various ways. Thus, for example, about a third of English vocabulary is non- native. The most prominent source of non-native vocabulary is French, but even quite early on the language took words from other languages, notably from Latin and the Scandinavian languages, a point I touched upon in §1.6 in relation to place-names. However, if we restrict ourselves to Old English, then even Scandinavian words are very rare right up to the end of the period, and French words all but non-existent. As I discuss later in the book, Old English did have a substantial number of words taken from Latin, notably, but not exclusively, in the language of the church. Although what I have just said is true, and it is indeed the case that a substantial proportion of even the quite basic vocabulary of present-day English post-dates the time of Norman Conquest, this is by no means the whole story. For just as there have been substantial changes in the vocabulary since that date, so too have there been substantial changes in every other aspect of the structure of the language. Let me exemplify this by one example each from phonology, morphology and syntax, more or less at random. In phonology I mentioned in §1.7 that Old English had geminate consonants, giving the examples hoppian ‘hop’ and hopian ‘hope’. Present- day English, however, has no such contrast. Staying with these examples, you should be able to see that both these verbs share an ending, namely -ian. This is an ending which demonstrates that these verbs have been quoted in their infinitive form. But in present-day English the infinitive form of verbs is uninflected. Indeed, one of the most obvious differences between Old English and present-day English is that the former is 02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 13 clearly a reasonably fully inflected language, much like present-day German. But present-day English has only a very few inflections, such as the plural and the possessive of nouns. There was much more variety in Old English. Finally, in syntax, we do not find constructions such as the present-day English ‘I will arise’, for in Old English such usage is expressed by the simple present tense (occasionally with the addition of an adverb such as nu ‘now’). It is important to recognise that these differences between Old English and present-day English are not necessarily due to English having lost its essential Germanic structure (although there is a perfectly acceptable argument for claiming that is actually the case). These differ- ences arise from many, often unrelated, sources. Their overall effect on the present-day reader, however, is indeed to disguise the genuine continuities which persist throughout all ages. Here I shall always strive to emphasise those continuities. 2.2 Nouns If we take a basic simple sentence in Old English, such as: (1) Se guma slo¯h t one wyrm The man slew the dragon then it would appear as if word order in Old English was the same as in present-day English. Unfortunately that is far from generally true as we shall see later; however, it is a good place to start, since it postpones the need for immediate complication. Now compare (1) with the following sentence: (2) Se wyrm slo¯h t one guman The dragon slew the man As in present-day English, swapping the subject and object of the sentence changes the meaning as well. Thus in (1) the subject of the sentence was guma, but in (2) the subject is wyrm, and guman is the object, just as in (1) wyrm was the object. Such examples are for the most part quite transparent and easy to recognise, except in two vital respects. Firstly, note that the guma of (1) is matched by the slightly different form guman in (2). Secondly, the Old English equivalent of ‘the’ has two quite different shapes: se and † one. Furthermore, the different shapes are associated not with the specific noun that follows it, but rather with, respectively, the subject and the object. These two points are features which are associated with the inflec- tional properties of the language. Whereas in present-day English 14 AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH 02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 14 almost all nouns have an invariable shape except that an ending is added to distinguish plural from singular and also to show possession, in Old English nouns added rather more inflectional endings. Let me exemplify this with the noun sta¯n ‘stone’: Yüklə 1,93 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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