Reflection paper

REFLECTION PAPER

1.Describe specific features of Old English Vocabulary.

Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. In Ecclesiastical History of the English People(Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), completed in A.D. 731, the Northumbrian cleric Bede reported that the Germanic settlers of Anglo-Saxon England came from "three very powerful Germanic tribes, the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes." According to tradition, the Jutes were the first to arrive, in 449. Settling in Britain, the invaders drove the indigenous Celtic-speaking peoples, notably the Britons, to the north and west. As time went on, Old English evolved further from the original Continental form, and regional dialects developed.
Old English had four dialects –Northumbrian and Mercian , subdivisions of the dialects spoken by the Angles; West Saxon, a branch of the dialect spoken by the Saxons;  and Kentish, originally the dialect spoken by the Jutes. West Saxon gradually gained ascendancy and the documents, which enable us to study Old English, are documents of West Saxon. This period is estimated to be c. AD 475–900 consisting the split between Old English and Old Frisian (c. AD 475) up through historic early West Saxon of AD 900. Grammatically, Old English is an inflected and synthetic language: Theoretically the noun and adjectives are inflected for four cases in the singular and four in the plural and in addition the adjective has separates forms for each of the three genders. The nouns are inflected for number (singular and plural) and case (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative): the verbs show two tenses by inflection (present and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative), two numbers and three persons; adjectives have a strong and a weak declension.

2. Creat a table of words that enrich the OE Vocabulary under the influence of different dialects and borrowed words and explain examples in several clumns.

LEXICAL BORROWING

During Anglo-Saxon period, essentially two sources:

Latin

Norse

Latin

Borrowings resulting from Christianity, e.g. altar, angel, font, mass, priest, psalm

Literacy and learning, e.g. history, school, title

General (e.g. domestic), e.g. plant, lentil, mat, sock

OLD ENGLIISH VOCABULARY

Three main types of borrowings

Place names

Personal names

General words

Place names

-by

-holm

-thorp

-thwaite

-toft

Personal names

-son vs. OE -ing

REFERENCES

Blake, Norman Francis (1996) A History of the English Language. Houndsmill: Palgrave Crystal, David (2005) 2^nd edn. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Gramley, Stephan (2012) The History of English: An Introduction. Abbingdon, Oxon: Routledge

McDowall, David (1989) An Illustrated History of Britain. Harlow, Essex: Longman Svartvik, Jan & Leech, Geoffrey (2006) English. One Tongue, Many Voices.

Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan

Shamon, Simon (2000) A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3000BC-AD1603.

London: BBC

Thomason, Sarah Grey & Kaufman, Terrence (1988) Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.