The Earliest English

An Introduction to Old English Language

Chris Mccully, Sharon Hilles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317876977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

The Earliest English provides a student-friendly introduction to Old English and the earliest periods of the history of the English Language as it evolved before 1215. Using non-technical language, the book covers basic terminology, the linguistic and cultural backgrounds to the emergence and development of OE, and the OE vocabulary that students studying this phase of the English language need to know.

In eight carefully structured units, the authors show how the vocabulary of Old English contains many items familiar to us today; how its characteristic poetic form is based on a beautiful and intricate simplicity; how its patterns of word building and inflectional structure are paralleled in several present day languages and how and why the English language and its literature continued to change so that by the mid-12th century the English language looks more like the 'English' that we are familiar with in the 21st century. Features of the book include:

• the provision of accessible guides to some important 'problem topics' of classical OE
• stimulating cross-linguistic comparisons, e.g. the pronoun system of OE as compared with the pronoun system of present day Dutch
• cleverly laid out translation exercises, with structural help in the form of selective glossaries
• careful division into eight units, designed for both classroom use and self-study

Written in a clear and accessible manner, The Earliest English provides a comprehensive introduction to the evolution of Old English language and literature, and will be an invaluable textbook for students of English Language and Linguistics.

Unit One

Thinking about the earliest English

1.0 Preliminaries

This book is primarily about the earliest English language, the language used for 400 or so years before, and for some time after, ad 1066 in many parts of what is now England, southern Scotland and the Welsh borders. But the book has another purpose: if it’s ‘about’ the earliest English language, it’s also about the people who spoke it, and about the gradual, the rapid or even the catastrophic changes in that society – changes that came radically to affect the historical development of English.

To get an idea of what the earliest English sounded like, before you go any further, try browsing the websites listed at the end of this chapter. You’ll hear Old English (OE) being spoken – that is, reconstructed. No one is completely sure how OE sounded, but scholars have a pretty good idea. (On how and why scholars have a good idea of how OE sounded, read further in Unit 1, and see also Units 2 and 5.) What you’ll hear is a best guess about how OE was pronounced. You may be surprised that it doesn’t sound like Chaucer (who was writing at the end of the 14^th century), Shakespeare (who was writing around the end of the 16^th) or the King James Version of the Bible (1611). Students frequently remark that OE sounds more like German than present-day English (PDE). A language spoken 1000 or more years ago may seem very distant. What could people living in the 21^st century possibly have in common with what might seem, on a mere and ignorant acquaintance, to be what one of our more unenlightened students called ‘the remote grunts of an unwashed peasantry’? Contrary to what we might expect, surviving manuscripts from the OE period do not reveal a linguistically primitive version of ‘modern mankind’. Instead, a rather vivid picture emerges of a people in love with language; a people who prize not only a good story, but a story cleverly, beautifully and well told; a people who employ a vigorous language, often rich with stylistic density and metaphor. We’ll see a complex, often aristocratic and highly organised society, with values, ideals and ideas about the world and life that can seem hauntingly contemporary. By the time you finish this book, we think that you’ll agree with us: neither the human spirit, nor the conditions with which it engages, have changed much, if at all, in the last 1500 years. Some of the best as well as the worst parts of our culture have a long history, and one that is often singularly expressed in the English language.

1.1 Uniformity and change

These remarks have an immediate linguistic point. What we do in these pages, as generations of scholars working in the fields of OE and, more recently, historical linguistics have done, is to reconstruct part of the history of a language. But we immediately wonder whether we are reconstructing, or simply constructing? To talk about history at all, whether it’s a linguistic history or the history of royal dynasties, is essentially to relate a narrative, to tell a story. Even though it might not be immediately apparent, if we think about it for a moment it becomes clear that all narratives have a theoretical framework – that is, a set of surrounding assumptions, that helps to make the story plausible. A story isn’t a story, by our standards, unless it can be told within such a framework. One linguistic assumption of our theoretical framework, an assumption that is at least intuitively attractive, is that speakers of OE, and of early Middle English (eME), had the same vocal equipment as ours, and used it in very much the same ways. For example, just as there is a constraint in present day English to the effect that (crudely) ‘no syllable may end in the sound segments */-pdf/’ (there are no English words such as *mupdf or *ipdf), then we might expect, on quite general articulatory grounds, that no syllables ended that way in OE or eME either. The combination of speech sounds */pdf/is of course ‘difficult to say’, but it also, more importantly, violates the enduring principles that determine what speech sounds may precede or follow one another to make up a well-formed English syllable. One issue we will track in these pages is this: what is, linguistically, impossible today was probably impossible in earlier periods of the language. There are, as always, exceptions to this. OE cniht, boy, was pronounced with syllable-initial /kn-/, that is, both the /k/ (corresponding to written <c>) and the /n/ were pronounced; OE hring, ring, was pronounced with initial /h/ followed by an /r/. These syllable-initial combinations of speech sounds are impossible in present day English, but were certainly possible in OE, just as they are today – and this is a key point – in other European languages. Nevertheless, despite these and other apparent exceptions, we’ll continue to believe, at least generally, that what’s linguistically impossible today was probably impossible yesterday. Put differently, what currently obtains in a language in terms of possible word orders, sounds, sound systems and so forth was possible, even probable, in the language long ago. Though it may be a depressing truth for those who believe in the evolutionary betterment of the human condition, language users don’t change much.

This principle is in fact so important that the historical linguist Roger Lass devotes a great deal of Chapter 1 of his book Historical linguistics and language change to it (Lass 1992:4–43, see especially Section 1.5). There, Lass calls it the General Uniformity Principle: ‘No linguistic state of affairs (structure, inventory, process, etc.) can have been the case only in the past’ (1992:28). This is linked with a weaker principle, which Lass dubs the Uniform Probabilities Principle: ‘The … likelihood of any linguistic state of affairs (structure, inventory, process, etc.) has always been roughly the same as it is now.’

To illustrate the first principle, the General Uniformity Principle, consider the OE word heofon. You might make a reasonable, and correct, assumption that this word can be translated as ‘heaven’. But notice that the OE form is spelled with <f>. Why isn’t it spelled with <v>? The answer is two-fold. First, we have evidence that Anglo-Saxon scribes (on the distinction between ‘Old English’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’, see below) didn’t have access to the letter shape <v>. They used the written symbol <f> to do duty both for the speech-sound /f/ (as in fisc, fish or faran, to travel, cf. PDE to fare) and the speech-sound /v/ (as in heofon or lufian, to love). For reasons that needn’t concern us at the moment, it appears that the letter written as <f> in OE was pronounced in two different ways. It was pronounced /f/ when it was initial or final in the word and as /v/ when it occurred between voiced sounds. (‘Voicing’ is explained in the following paragraphs.) These two voiced sounds were frequently vowel shapes. Vowels are always – under normal circumstances, excluding whispering – voiced in English, so if the sound was written as an <f>, it was pronounced as a /v/ when it occurred between two vowels and as an /f/ elsewhere.

This notion isn’t quite as arbitrary as it might seem. As it turns out, the two sounds /f/ and /v/ are almost identical. They’re pronounced in exactly the same way, using exactly the same articulatory organs (most clearly, the lips and teeth), in exactly the same place. There’s only one clear difference. In production of (‘realisation of’) the sound /f/, the vocal cords don’t vibrate; in the realisation of /v/, they do. To feel this for yourself, whisper the first sound in the word fat, and then the first sound in the word vat. Do this very slowly. You’ll see – feel – that they sound exactly the same. Do it again and pay close attention to where your teeth are with respect to your lips during both sounds. They should be in exactly the same place. Now notice how much air comes out when you pronounce both sounds. Again it should be the same. That’s because the speech sounds /f/ and /v/ are very similar except for the feature of production that linguists call voicing.

To illustrate that point more precisely, put your fingers gently on the side of your throat next to your Adam’s apple. This time say (i.e. don’t whisper) the first sounds in both of those words (fat and vat). You should feel a vibration (and hear a buzzing sound) on the first sound of the second word, vat. In other words, one sound is voiced, or produced with vibration of the vocal cords, and the other sound is voiceless, that is, produced without vibration of the vocal cords. Put differently, and slightly more technically, we might say that ‘/v/ is the voiced counterpart of /f/’.

Thinking about matters this way leads us to a basic theoretical concept in linguistics. Languages might have one underlying speech-sound that is realised differently (in this case, as either voiced or voiceless) depending on where the sound appears in the word. In the case of OE, we might want to think about the claim that there was one underlying speech-sound, /f/, which speakers and writers thought of, and wrote, as <f>, and which could be realised in speaking either as [f] (a voiceless sound) or as [v] (a voiced sound), depending on the context in which it appeared. In fact, in OE it seems to have been pronounced [f] everywhere except when it occurred between two vowels, or any two other voiced sounds. In other words, /f/ – we might argue – became voiced most characteristically when it occurred between voiced sounds.

Exercise 1.1.0

At this point we’d like to invite you to discover some evidence for Lass’s General Uniformity Principle. Remember, this is the hypothesis that we should be able to find evidence in the present for what we are claiming existed long ago. If we apply this to our study of the history of the earliest English, we might say that if a sound, written as <f>, was voiced or voiceless depending on its location in a word in OE, there should be some evidence of this phenomenon in present-day English (PDE – we’ll use this abbreviation from here on). Luckily we won’t have to look at any languages other than PDE for evidence, because there are some word pairs in PDE in which this still happens.

There was an ending in OE that changed certain nouns into the infinitive form of a verb. That ending was <-ian>, and it had the effect of putting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Terminology
• Using this book
• UNIT 1: Thinking about the earliest English
• UNIT 2: History, culture, language origins
• UNIT 3: Nouns
• UNIT 4: Verbs
• INTERLUDE: Working with dictionaries
• UNIT 5: OE metrics
• UNIT 6: Standards and crosses
• UNIT 7: Twilight
• UNIT 8: Rebuilding English
• Appendix 1: At-a-glance guide to OE inflections – nouns and adjectives
• Appendix 2: At-a-glance guide to OE inflections – verbs
• References
• Index