Introduction to Old English E-Book

Peter S. Baker

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 948

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Featuring numerous updates and additional anthology selections, the 3rd edition of Introduction to Old English confirms its reputation as a leading text designed to help students engage with Old English literature for the first time. * A new edition of one of the most popular introductions to Old English * Assumes no expertise in other languages or in traditional grammar * Includes basic grammar reviews at the beginning of each major chapter and a 'minitext' feature to aid students in practicing reading Old English * Features updates and several new anthology readings, including King Alfred's Preface to Gregory's Pastoral Care

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Half Title page

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the Third Edition

How to use this book

Chapter 1: The Anglo-Saxons and Their Language

1.1 Who were they?

1.2 Where did their language come from?

1.3 What was Old English like?

1.4 Old English dialects

Chapter 2: Pronunciation

2.1 Quick start

2.2 More about vowels

2.3 More about c and g

2.4 Syllable length

2.5 Accentuation

2.6 On-line pronunciation practice

2.7 Summary

Chapter 3: Basic Grammar: A Review

3.1 Parts of speech

3.2 Phrases

3.3 Clauses

3.4 Elements of the sentence or clause

Chapter 4: Case

4.1 What is case?

4.2 Uses of the cases

Chapter 5: Pronouns

5.1 Quick start

5.2 More about personal and demonstrative pronouns

5.3 Interrogative pronouns

5.4 Indefinite pronouns

5.5 Relative pronouns

5.6 Reflexive pronouns

5.7 Reciprocal pronouns

Chapter 6: Nouns

6.1 Quick start

6.2 More about strong nouns

6.3 Minor declensions

Chapter 7: Verbs

7.1 Quick start

7.2 More about endings

7.3 More about weak verbs

7.4 More about strong verbs

7.5 Verbs with weak presents and strong pasts

7.6 More about preterite-present verbs

7.7 Dn, gn, willan

7.8 Negation

7.9 The verbals

7.10 The subjunctive

Chapter 8: Adjectives

8.1 Quick start

8.2 Strong adjectives

8.3 Weak adjectives

8.4 Comparison of adjectives

8.5 The adjective in the noun phrase

Chapter 9: Numerals

9.1 Quick start

9.2 Cardinal numbers

9.3 Ordinal numbers

Chapter 10: Adverbs, Conjunctions and Prepositions

10.1 Quick start

10.2 Adverbs

10.3 Conjunctions

10.4 Correlation

10.5 Prepositions

Chapter 11: Concord

11.1 Quick start

11.2 Subject and verb

11.3 Pronoun and antecedent

11.4 Noun and modifiers

11.5 Bad grammar?

Chapter 12: Word-Order

12.1 Quick start

12.2 Subject-Verb

12.3 Verb–Subject

12.4 Subject … Verb

12.5 Correlation

12.6 Anticipation

12.7 Periphrastic verbs

Chapter 13: Metre

13.1 Alliteration

13.2 Rhythm

Chapter 14: Poetic Style

14.1 Vocabulary

14.2 Variation

14.3 Formulas

Chapter 15: The Grammar of Poetry

15.1 Inflections

15.2 Syntax

Chapter 16: Old English in its Material Context

16.1 Manuscripts

16.2 Runes

16.3 Other inscriptions

Appendix A: Common Spelling Variants

A.1 Vowels of accented syllables

A.2 Unaccented syllables

A.3 Consonants

Appendix B: Phonetic Symbols and Terms

B.1 International Phonetic Alphabet symbols

B.2 Phonetic terms

Appendix C: Further Reading

C.1 General works

C.2 Grammars

C.3 Dictionaries and concordances

C.4 Bibliographies

C.5 Old English texts and translations

C.6 Literary criticism; sources and analogues; metre

C.7 History and culture

C.8 Manuscripts, art and archaeology

C.9 On-line aids

C.10 On-line amusements

Anthology

1 The Fall of Adam and Eve

2 The Life of St Æthelthryth

3 Cynewulf and Cyneheard

4 The Martyrdom of Ælfheah

5 Sermo Lupi ad Anglos

6 King Alfred’s Preface to Gregory’s Pastoral Care

7 Ohthere and Wulfstan

8 The Story of Cædmon

9 Boethius on Fame

10 A Selection of Riddles

11 The Battle of Maldon

12 The Wanderer

13 The Dream of the Rood

14 The Battle of Finnesburh

15 Waldere

16 Wulf and Eadwacer

17 The Wife’s Lament

18 The Husband’s Message

19 Judith

Textual Notes

Glossary

References

Index

Introduction to Old English

Praise for previous editions

‘Baker’s Introduction is the kind of book that students of Old English – and their teachers – have been waiting for for a long time.’

Hugh Magennis, Queen’s University Belfast

‘This is a truly outstanding textbook for today’s student of Old English. Written in lucid and friendly prose, Baker brings the language to life in a manner that will inspire students.’

Elaine Treharne, University of Leicester

‘Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English offers an innovative combination of the traditional and the cutting edge. Beginning with the basics of the language, the chapters proceed through intelligently paced levels so that by the end the user is reading the most sophisticated literature in Old English.’

Daniel G. Donoghue, Harvard University

‘Peter Baker’s excellent new book, a combined grammar and reader, deserves to find a central place in the university teaching of Old English. It is unabashedly designed to be accessible to absolute beginners, but students who progress attentively through the whole book will in fact find themselves in command of a great deal of what makes Old English language and literature tick … the sections on poetry in particular deserve to be read by all students beginning the translation of Old English for the first time.’

Notes and Queries

‘The new edition is a solid tool that both an independent student and a classroom full of students will find useful. The book’s approach is balanced. It includes just the right amount of explanatory text … while also offering … grammar tools and exercises. The selection of readings is varied and exemplary. Much thought was put into the choice, quantity, and order of the other texts in the anthology. I would certainly recommend this book for an introductory course in Old English … Baker’s new edition is a pleasure to read and would be a pleasure to use in the classroom.’

Comitatus

‘Excellent introduction designed to provide reading knowledge … He [Baker] constructs the book to encourage beginning students to start translating almost immediately.’

The Medieval Review

This third edition first published 2012© 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Edition history: Blackwell (1e 2003 and 2e 2007)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBaker, Peter S. (Peter Stuart), 1952–Introduction to Old English / Peter S. Baker. – 3rd ed.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN: 978-0-470-65984-7 (pbk.)1. English language–Old English, ca. 450–1100.   2. English language–Old English, ca. 450–1100–Grammar.   I. Title.PE135.B34 2012429′.82421–dc23

2011035196

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Preface

This Introduction to Old English is for students whose interests are primarily literary or historical rather than linguistic. It aims to provide such students with a guide to the language that is detailed enough to enable them to read with facility, but it omits a great deal of the historical linguistic material that has traditionally been included even in beginning grammars. The linguistic material that the student needs in order to read Old English well is presented here as morphological feature rather than as historical ‘sound change’. For example, i-mutation is understood as one of several ways of inflecting nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Its origin as a phonological change is treated briefly, as a sidelight rather than as an essential fact. Students who are interested in learning more about the history of the English language than is presented here may consult one of the grammars or linguistics texts listed in the References and discussed under Further Reading.

This book assumes as little as possible about the student’s knowledge of traditional grammar and experience of learning languages. Technical terminology is avoided where possible, and, where unavoidable, it is defined in simple terms. A brief grammar review is provided for those who need help with grammatical terminology.

The contents of this book are accessible via the Internet. The grammar may be consulted at the website of the Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies at Western Michigan University (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/index.html) and the texts in the anthology are available on-line at the Old English Aerobics website (http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/). Additional texts will be added to the Old English Aerobics website from time to time; these will be presented in such a way that they can either be used on-line or printed as a supplement to this book. The author and his publishers expect that students will find it a convenience to have this material available via the Internet as well as in printed form.

I would like to thank both the Rawlinson Center and Blackwell Publishing for agreeing to an innovative publishing venture. I would also like to thank James R. Hall of the University of Mississippi, Dan Wiley of Hastings College, and an anonymous reader for the Rawlinson Center for a number of valuable suggestions. Most of all I am indebted to my students at the University of Virginia who for the past two years have used this book and helped me to refine it. Among these students I am especially grateful to Samara Landers and John Bugbee for specific suggestions.

P. S. B.

Preface to the Second Edition

This new edition includes many revisions intended to clarify obscure points in the grammar. In addition, four new texts have been added to the anthology: Ælfric’s homily on the Book of Job from the Second Series of Catholic Homilies; the obituary of William the Conqueror from the Peterborough Chronicle, anno 1087; the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan from the Old English Orosius; and The Battle of Maldon. An innovation in the glossary is that entries for words with many definitions (e.g. se) have been subdivided so as to make it easier to determine the definition of any cited instance.

In this edition references to the on-line ‘Old English Aerobics’ exercises have been omitted, as the technology on which they depend has aged poorly. At the author’s website instructors will find exercises intended to be downloaded and printed; all are welcome to make free use of this ‘Old English Aerobics Workbook’. The ‘Old English Aerobics Anthology’ still duplicates the anthology, and as it has a sturdy web interface it should continue to be a useful supplement to the book.

For extensive suggestions and corrections I am grateful to James R. Hall of the University of Mississippi and Nicole Guenther Discenza of the University of South Florida. For various corrections I would like to thank Daniel Donoghue of Harvard University, Claire Fennell of the University of Trieste and Pétur Knútsson of the University of Iceland.

P. S. B.

Preface to the Third Edition

In this edition new sections on noun phrases have been added to chapters 6 and 8 and sections on runic and other inscriptions to chapter 16 (renamed ‘Old English in Its Material Context’). The tables in chapter 7 (‘Verbs’) have been remodelled for clarity, and a number of minor revisions have been made everywhere in the book.

Three readings have been removed from the anthology: ‘Ælfric on the Book of Job’, ‘William the Conqueror’ and ‘A Lyric for Advent’. Statistics gleaned from the Old English Aerobics Anthology (http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/anthology/) indicated that these readings were less popular than the others. Though these readings have been removed from the printed book, they remain available on-line both as web pages and as printable PDF files. These are free, and instructors may use them as they see fit. Instructors should also watch the website for additional exercises and other instructional material.

Four readings have been added: Alfred the Great’s Preface to Gregory’s Pastoral Care, a selection of verse riddles, The Battle of Finnesburh and Waldere. The first of these is a favourite in Old English anthologies, and for very good reasons. A step up in difficulty from the Ælfric texts that begin the anthology, it is a valuable exercise in the analysis of complex sentences as well as a text of enormous historical and cultural interest. Easy and enjoyable, the riddles work well as introductory texts for students just beginning to read poetry. The Battle of Finnesburh and Waldere, though fragmentary, are rare representatives of narrative heroic poetry in Old English; they are comparable in difficulty to Beowulf and make a good prelude to that poem.

I have benefited from corrections and suggestions from many directions: from instructors and students, via email; from readers leaving comments at Amazon.com; from teachers of Old English generously responding to questions from the publisher; and always, most of all, from my own students.

P. S. B.

How to use this book

This book can be read in any of several ways. If you have a great deal of experience learning languages, you may wish to read through from beginning to end, possibly skipping chapter 3. If you are like most students, though, reading about grammar is not your favourite activity, and you’d like to get started reading Old English texts as quickly as possible. In that case, you should first read the ‘Quick Start’ sections that begin most chapters. Then you may begin to read easy texts such as the ‘minitexts’ scattered through the book and ‘The Fall of Adam and Eve’ (reading 1 in the anthology). As you read these Old English texts, go back and read the rest of chapters 2 and 5–12.

Once you have finished reading chapters 2–12, you are ready for the more advanced texts in the anthology. Remember, as you read, that it is important to make liberal use of the glossary. Look up not only words you do not know, but also words you do know that seem to be used awkwardly, for these may not mean what you think they do. If you are not sure you have identified a word correctly, check the list of references in the glossary entry to see if it is there. The glossary lists the grammatical forms of words that can be inflected; you may check the number, person and other characteristics of words by locating forms in these lists, but remember that the glossary’s ‘parsing’ is no substitute for learning inflections.

This book contains over two hundred short passages illustrating grammatical and other points. As you encounter these passages, you may find it profitable to look up words exactly as if you were reading a minitext or one of the texts in the anthology – all words in even the shortest passages are registered in the glossary. Consult the accompanying translations to check your understanding of the grammar and sense of the Old English; if you find you have misunderstood a passage, use the translation to help you puzzle it out. Following this procedure will speed your acquisition of the language and improve your comprehension.

As you read, you will notice that some paragraphs are boxed with an exclamation mark in the margin. These paragraphs contain valuable tips and sometimes also alert you to possible pitfalls. You will also notice that some paragraphs are set in small type and marked with an i in a circle. These communicate useful or interesting information that you may not need to know right away. If one of these paragraphs looks confusing, skip it now and return to it later.

No one book on Old English has everything you need. Consult the list of references and Appendix C, ‘Further Reading’ to start reading in areas that interest you.

Chapter 1

The Anglo-Saxons and Their Language

1.1 Who were they?

‘Anglo-Saxon’ is the term applied to the English-speaking inhabitants of Britain from around the middle of the fifth century until the time of the Norman Conquest, when the Anglo-Saxon line of English kings came to an end.

According to the Venerable Bede, whose Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), completed in the year 731, is the most important source for the early history of England, the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the island of Britain during the reign of Martian, who in 449 became co-emperor of the Roman Empire with Valentinian III and ruled for seven years.

Before that time, Britain had been inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages: the Scots and Picts in the north, and in the south various groups which had been united under Roman rule since their conquest by the emperor Claudius in AD 43. By the beginning of the fifth century the Roman Empire was under increasing pressure from advancing barbarians, and the Roman garrisons in Britain were being depleted as troops were withdrawn to face threats closer to home. In AD 410, the same year in which the Visigoths entered and sacked Rome, the last of the Roman troops were withdrawn and the Britons had to defend themselves. Facing hostile Picts and Scots in the north and Germanic raiders in the east, the Britons decided to hire one enemy to fight the other: they engaged Germanic mercenaries to fight the Picts and Scots.

It was during the reign of Martian that the newly hired mercenaries arrived. These were from three Germanic nations situated near the northern coasts of Europe: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. According to Bede, the mercenaries succeeded quickly in defeating the Picts and Scots and then sent word to their homes of the fertility of the island and the cowardice of the Britons. They soon found a pretext to break with their employers, made an alliance with the Picts, and began to conquer the territory that would eventually be known as England – a slow-moving conquest that would take more than a century.

It is many years since Bede’s narrative was accepted uncritically, but recent research has introduced especially significant complications into his traditional account of the origins of the Anglo-Saxons. Genetic research generally suggests that neither the Anglo-Saxon invasion nor any other brought about a wholesale replacement of the British population, which has remained surprisingly stable for thousands of years: presumably the landholding and ruling classes were widely replaced while the greatest proportion of the population remained and eventually adopted Germanic ethnicity – a process that has parallels on the Continent. Yet in some areas it may well be that some, at least, of the older British landholding class survived by intermarrying with the invaders. The occurrence of Celtic names among early West Saxon kings points to the possibility, and genetic research appears to bear it out, especially for the south. It increasingly appears that the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasion’ is as much the invasion of an ethnicity as that of a population.

Though Bede’s account cannot be accepted without reservation, his story nevertheless gives us essential information about how the Anglo-Saxons looked at themselves: they considered themselves a warrior people, and they were proud to have been conquerors of the territory they inhabited. Indeed, the warrior ethic that pervades Anglo-Saxon culture is among the first things that students notice on approaching the field.

But Europe had no shortage of warrior cultures in the last half of the first millennium. What makes Anglo-Saxon England especially worthy of study is the remarkable literature that flourished there. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms converted to Christianity in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, and by the late seventh and early eighth centuries had already produced two major authors: Aldhelm, who composed his most important work, De Virginitate (On Virginity), twice, in prose and in verse; and the Venerable Bede, whose vast output includes biblical commentaries, homilies, textbooks on orthography, metre, rhetoric, nature and time, and of course the Historia Ecclesiastica, mentioned above. A small army of authors, Bede’s contemporaries and successors, produced saints’ lives and a variety of other works in prose and verse, largely on Christian themes.

These seventh- and eighth-century authors wrote in Latin, as did a great many Anglo-Saxon authors of later periods. But the Anglo-Saxons also created an extensive body of vernacular literature at a time when relatively little was being written in most of the other languages of western Europe. In addition to such well-known classic poems as Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, The Seafarer and The Battle of Maldon, they left us the translations associated with King Alfred’s educational programme, a large body of devotional works by such writers as Ælfric and Wulfstan, biblical translations and adaptations, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other historical writings, law codes, handbooks of medicine and magic, and much more. While most of the manuscripts that preserve vernacular works date from the late ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, the Anglo-Saxons were producing written work in their own language by the early seventh century, and many scholars believe that Beowulf and several other important poems date from the eighth century. Thus we are in possession of five centuries of Anglo-Saxon vernacular literature.

To learn more about the Anglo-Saxons, consult the Further Reading section of this book and choose from the works listed there: they will give you access to a wealth of knowledge from a variety of disciplines. This book will give you another kind of access, equipping you with the skills you need to encounter the Anglo-Saxons in their own language.

1.2 Where did their language come from?

Bede tells us that the Anglo-Saxons came from Germania. Presumably he was using that term as the Romans had used it, to refer to a vast and ill-defined territory east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, extending as far east as the Vistula in present-day Poland and as far north as present-day Sweden and Norway. This territory was nothing like a nation, but rather was inhabited by numerous tribes which were closely related culturally and linguistically.1

The languages spoken by the inhabitants of Germania were a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, which linguists believe developed from a single language spoken some five thousand years ago in an area that has never been identified – perhaps, some say, the Caucasus. From this ancient language come most of the language groups of present-day Europe and some important languages of South Asia: the Celtic languages (such as Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic), the Italic languages (such as French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian, descended from dialects of Latin), the Germanic languages, the Slavic languages (such as Russian and Polish), the Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian), the Indo-Iranian languages (such as Persian and Hindi), and individual languages that do not belong to these groups: Albanian, Greek and Armenian. The biblical Hittites spoke an Indo-European language, or a language closely related to the Indo-European family, and a number of other extinct languages (some of them poorly attested) were probably or certainly Indo-European: Phrygian, Lycian, Thracian, Illyrian, Macedonian, Tocharian and others.

The Germanic branch of the Indo-European family is usually divided into three groups:

North Germanic, that is, the Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese;

East Germanic, that is, Gothic, now extinct but preserved in a fragmentary biblical translation from the fourth century;

West Germanic, which includes High German, English, Dutch, Flemish and Frisian.

Within the West Germanic group, the High German dialects (which include Modern German) form a subgroup distinct from English and the other languages, which together are called ‘Low German’ because they were originally spoken in the low country near the North Sea.2

Surely the language spoken by the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain was precisely the same as that spoken by the people they left behind on the Continent. But between the time of the migration and the appearance of the earliest written records in the first years of the eighth century, the language of the Anglo-Saxons came to differ from that of the people they had left behind. We call this distinct language Old English to emphasize its continuity with Modern English, which is directly descended from it.

1.3 What was Old English like?

We often hear people delivering opinions about different languages: French is ‘romantic’, Italian ‘musical’. For the student of language, such impressionistic judgements are not very useful. Rather, to describe a language we need to explain how it goes about doing the work that all languages must do; and it is helpful to compare it with other languages – especially members of the language groups it belongs to.

Languages may be compared in a number of ways. Every language has its own repertory of sounds, as known by all students who have had to struggle to learn to pronounce a foreign language. Every language also has its own rules for accentuating words and its own patterns of intonation – the rising and falling pitch of our voices as we speak. Every language has its own vocabulary, of course, though when we’re lucky we find a good bit of overlap between the vocabulary of our native language and that of the language we’re learning. And every language has its own way of signalling how words function in utterances – of expressing who performed an action, what the action was, when it took place, whether it is now finished or still going on, what or who was acted upon, for whose benefit the action was performed, and so on.

The following sections attempt to hit the high points, showing what makes Old English an Indo-European language, a Germanic language, a West Germanic and a Low German language; and also how Old and Modern English are related.

1.3.1 The Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages do certain things in much the same way. For example, they share some basic vocabulary. Consider these words for ‘father’:

Old English

fæder

Latin

pater

Greek

Sanskrit

You can easily see the resemblance among the Latin, Greek and Sanskrit words. You may begin to understand why the Old English word looks different from the others when you compare these words for ‘foot’:

Old English

Latin

pedem

Greek

póda

Sanskrit

If you suspect that Latin p will always correspond to Old English f, you are right, more or less.3 For now, it’s enough for you to recognize that the Indo-European languages do share a good bit of vocabulary, though the changes that all languages go through often bring it about that the same word looks quite different in different languages.4

All of the Indo-European languages handle the job of signalling the functions of words in similar ways. For example, all add endings to words. The plural form of the noun meaning ‘foot’ was pódes in Greek, peds in Latin, and in Sanskrit – and English feet once ended with -s as well, though that ending had already disappeared by the Old English period. Most Indo-European languages signal the function of a noun in a sentence or clause by inflecting it for case5 (though some languages no longer do, and the only remaining trace of the case system in Modern English nouns is the possessive ’s). And most also classify their nouns by gender – masculine, feminine or neuter (though some have reduced the number of genders to two).

Indo-European languages have ways to inflect words other than by adding endings. In the verb system, for example, words could be inflected by changing their root vowels, and this ancient system of ‘gradation’ persists even now in such Modern English verbs as swim (past tense swam, past participle swum). Words could also be inflected by shifting the stress from one syllable to another, but only indirect traces of this system remain in Old and Modern English.

1.3.2 The Germanic languages

Perhaps the most important development that distinguishes the Germanic languages from others in the Indo-European family is the one that produced the difference, illustrated above, between the p of Latin pater and the f of Old English fæder. This change, called ‘Grimm’s Law’ after Jakob Grimm, the great linguist and folklorist, affected all of the consonants called ‘stops’ – that is, those consonants produced by momentarily stopping the breath and then releasing it (for example, [p], [b], [t], [d]):6

Unvoiced stops ([p], [t], [k]) became unvoiced spirants ([f], [θ], [x]), so that Old English fæder corresponds to Latin pater, Old English þro ‘three’ to Latin tres, and Old English habban ‘have’ to Latin capere ‘take’.

Voiced stops ([b],7 [d], []) became unvoiced stops ([p], [t], [k]), so that Old English dop ‘deep’ corresponds to Lithuanian dubùs, tw ‘two’ corresponds to Latin duo and Old English æcer ‘field’ to Latin ager.

Voiced aspirated stops ([bh] [dh], [h])8 became voiced stops ([b] [d], []) or spirants ([β], [ð], []), so that Old English brðor corresponds to Sanskrit and Latin frater, Old English duru ‘door’ to Latin fores and Greek thúra, and Old English iest ‘stranger’ to Latin hostis ‘enemy’ and Old Slavic gosti ‘guest’.

Almost as important as these changes in the Indo-European consonant system was a change in the way words were stressed. You read in §1.3.1 that the Indo-European language sometimes stressed one form of a word on one syllable and another form on another syllable. For example, in Greek the nominative singular of the word for ‘giant’ was gígs while the genitive plural was gigóntn. But in Germanic, some time after the operation of Grimm’s Law, stress shifted to the first syllable. Even prefixes were stressed, except the prefixes of verbs and the one that came to Old English as e- (these were probably perceived as separate words rather than prefixes). The fact that words in Germanic were almost always stressed on the first syllable had many consequences, not least of which is that it made Old English much easier than ancient Greek for modern students to pronounce.

Along with these sound changes came a radical simplification of the inflectional system of the Germanic languages. For example, while linguists believe that the original Indo-European language had eight cases, the Germanic languages have four, and sometimes traces of a fifth. And while students of Latin and Greek must learn a quite complex verb system, the Germanic verb had just two tenses, present and past. Germanic did introduce one or two complications of its own, but in general its inflectional system is much simpler than those of the more ancient Indo-European languages, and the Germanic languages were beginning to rely on a relatively fixed ordering of sentence elements to do some of the work that inflections formerly had done.

1.3.3 West Germanic and Low German

The West Germanic languages differ from North and East Germanic in a number of features which are not very striking in themselves, but quite numerous. For example, the consonant [z] became [r] in North and West Germanic. So while Gothic has hazjan ‘to praise’, Old English has herian. In West Germanic, this [r] disappeared at the ends of unstressed syllables, with the result that entire inflectional endings were lost. For example, the nominative singular of the word for ‘day’ is dagr in Old Icelandic and dags in Gothic (where the final [z] was unvoiced to [s]), but dæ in Old English, dag in Old Saxon, and tac in Old High German.

Low German is defined in part by something that did not happen to it. This non-event is the ‘High German consonant shift’, which altered the sounds of the High German dialects as radically as Grimm’s Law had altered the sounds of Germanic. Students of Modern German will recognize the effects of the High German consonant shift in such pairs as English eat and German essen, English sleep and German schlafen, English make and German machen, English daughter and German Tochter, English death and German Tod, English thing and German Ding. Another important difference between High German and Low German is that the Low German languages did not distinguish person in plural verbs. For example, in Old High German one would say wir nemums ‘we take’, ir nemet ‘you (plural) take’, sie nemant ‘they take’, but in Old English one said w nimað ‘we take’, nimað ‘you (plural) take’, he nimað ‘they take’, using the same verb form for the first, second and third persons.

The most significant differences between Old English (with Old Frisian) and the other Low German languages have to do with their treatment of vowels. Old English and Old Frisian both changed the vowel that in other Germanic languages is represented as a, pronouncing it with the tongue farther forward in the mouth: so Old English has dæg ‘day’ and Old Frisian dei, but Old Saxon (the language spoken by the Saxons who didn’t migrate to Britain) has dæ, Old High German tac, Gothic dags, and Old Icelandic dagr. Also, in both Old English and Old Frisian, the pronunciation of a number of vowels was changed (for example, [o] to [e]) when [i] or [j] followed in the next syllable. This development, called i-mutation (§2.2.2), has implications for Old English grammar and so is important for students to understand.

Old English dramatically reduced the number of vowels that could appear in inflectional endings. In the earliest texts, any vowel except y could appear in an inflectional ending: a, e, i, o, u, æ. But by the time of King Alfred i and æ could no longer appear, and o and u were variant spellings of more or less the same sound; so in effect only three vowels could appear in inflectional endings: a, e and o/u. This development of course reduced the number of distinct endings that could be added to Old English words. In fact, a number of changes took place in unaccented syllables, all tending to eliminate distinctions between endings and simplify the inflectional system.

1.3.4 Old and Modern English

The foregoing sections have given a somewhat technical, if rather sketchy, picture of how Old English is like and unlike the languages it is related to. Modern English is also ‘related’ to Old English, though in a different way; for Old and Modern English are really different stages in the development of a single language. The changes that turned Old English into Middle English and Middle English into Modern English took place gradually, over the centuries, and there never was a time when people perceived their language as having broken radically with the language spoken a generation before. It is worth mentioning in this connection that the terms ‘Old English’, ‘Middle English’ and ‘Modern English’ are themselves modern: speakers of these languages all would have said, if asked, that the language they spoke was English.

There is no point, on the other hand, in playing down the differences between Old and Modern English, for they are obvious at a glance. The rules for spelling Old English were different from the rules for spelling Modern English, and that accounts for some of the differences. But there are more substantial changes as well. The three vowels that appeared in the inflectional endings of Old English words were reduced to one in Middle English, and then most inflectional endings disappeared entirely. Most case distinctions were lost; so were most of the endings added to verbs, even while the verb system became more complex, adding such features as a future tense, a perfect and a pluperfect. While the number of endings was reduced, the order of elements within clauses and sentences became more fixed, so that (for example) it came to sound archaic and awkward to place an object before the verb, as Old English had frequently done.

The vocabulary of Old English was of course Germanic, more closely related to the vocabulary of such languages as Dutch and German than to French or Latin. The Viking age, which culminated in the reign of the Danish king Cnut in England, introduced a great many Danish words into English – but these were Germanic words as well. The conquest of England by a French-speaking people in the year 1066 eventually brought about immense changes in the vocabulary of English. During the Middle English period (and especially in the years 1250–1400) English borrowed some ten thousand words from French, and at the same time it was friendly to borrowings from Latin, Dutch and Flemish. Now relatively few Modern English words come from Old English; but the words that do survive are some of the most common in the language, including almost all the ‘grammar words’ (articles, pronouns, prepositions) and a great many words for everyday concepts. For example, the words in this paragraph that come to us from Old English (or are derived from Old English words) include those in table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Some Modern English words from Old English

1.4 Old English dialects

The language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons at the time of their migration to Britain was probably more or less uniform. Over time, however, Old English developed into four major dialects: Northumbrian, spoken north of the river Humber; Mercian, spoken in the Midlands; Kentish, spoken in Kent; and West Saxon, spoken in the south-west.

All of these dialects have direct descendants in the English-speaking world, and American regional dialects also have their roots in the dialects of Old English. ‘Standard’ Modern English (if there is such a thing), or at least Modern English spelling, owes most to the Mercian dialect, since that was the dialect of London.

Most Old English literature is not in the Mercian dialect, however, but in West Saxon, for from the time of King Alfred (reigned 871–99) until the Conquest Wessex dominated the rest of Anglo-Saxon England politically and culturally. Nearly all Old English poetry is in West Saxon, though it often contains spellings and vocabulary more typical of Mercian and Northumbrian – a fact that has led some scholars to speculate that much of the poetry was first composed in Mercian or Northumbrian and later ‘translated’ into West Saxon. Whatever the truth of the matter, West Saxon was the dominant language during the period in which most of our surviving literature was recorded. It is therefore the dialect that this book will teach you.

1 For an early account of the Germanic tribes, see Germania, a work by the late first- and early second-century Roman historian Tacitus.

2 The Low German languages are often called ‘Ingvaeonic’ after the Ingvaeones, a nation that, according to Tacitus, was located by the sea.

3 There is a complication, called ‘grammatical alternation’; see §7.4.2.

4 For example, it’s not at all obvious that Modern English four and Latin quattuor, or Modern English quick and Latin vivus ‘alive’, come from the same Indo-European word – but they do.

5 Inflection is the addition of an ending or a change in the form of a word (for example, the alteration of a vowel) to reflect its grammatical characteristics. See chapter 4 for a definition and explanation of case.

6 For the meanings of these International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols and of terms such as ‘stop’, ‘spirant’, ‘voiced’ and ‘unvoiced’, see Appendix B. IPA symbols in this book are enclosed in square brackets.

7 The consonant [b] for some reason was exceedingly rare in Indo-European, as a glance at the b entries in a Latin dictionary or the p entries in an Old English dictionary will show. Indo-European antecedents for Germanic words containing [p] are difficult to find.

8 An aspirated stop is a consonant that is accompanied by an h-like breathing sound. Most Indo-European languages altered the voiced aspirated stops in some way; for example, in Latin [bh] and [dh] became f, and [h] became h.

Chapter 2

Pronunciation

2.1 Quick start

No one knows exactly how Old English sounded, for no native speakers survive to inform us. Rather, linguists have painstakingly reconstructed the pronunciation of the language from various kinds of evidence: what we know of Latin pronunciation (since the Anglo-Saxons adapted the Latin alphabet to write their own language), comparisons with other Germanic languages and with later stages of English, and the accentuation and quantity of syllables in Old English poetry. We believe that our reconstruction of Old English pronunciation is reasonably accurate; but some aspects of the subject remain controversial, and it is likely that we will never attain certainty about them. The greatest Old English scholar in the world today might very well have difficulty being understood on the streets of King Alfred’s Winchester.

Despite the uncertainties, you should learn Old English pronunciation and get into the habit of reading texts aloud to yourself. Doing so will give you a clearer idea of the relationship between Old and Modern English and a more accurate understanding of Old English metre, and will also enhance the pleasure of learning the language.

If you find any of the terminology or the phonetic symbols in this chapter unfamiliar, you should consult Appendix B, ‘Phonetic Symbols and Terms’ (pp. 172–4).

2.1.1 Vowels and diphthongs

Old English had seven simple vowels, spelled a, æ, e, i, o, u and y, and probably an eighth, spelled ie. It also had two diphthongs (two-part vowels), ea and eo. Each of these sounds came in short and long versions. Long vowels are always marked with macrons (e.g. ) in modern editions for students, and also in some scholarly editions. However, vowels are never so marked in Old English manuscripts.

When we speak of vowel length in Old English, we are speaking of duration, that is, how long it takes to pronounce a vowel. This fact can trip up the modern student, for when we speak of ‘length’ in Modern English, we are actually speaking of differences in the quality of a vowel. If you listen carefully when you say (with ‘short’ ) and (with ‘long’ ), you’ll notice that the vowels are quite different: the ‘short’ version has a simple vowel , while the ‘long’ version is a diphthong, starting with a sound like the in and ending with a sound like the in . The same is true of other long/short pairs in Modern English: they are always qualitatively different. We do give some vowels a longer duration than others (listen to yourself as you pronounce and ), but this difference in duration is never significant: that is, it does not make a difference in the meaning of a word. Rather, we pronounce some vowels long and others short because of the influence of nearby sounds.