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Henry Sweet

Henry Sweet

Henry Sweet (1845-1912) was a philologist, and is sometimes also considered to be an early linguist. He specialized in languages related to English (Anglo-Saxon, Old Icelandic and West Saxon). Sweet also published on larger issues of phonetics and grammar in language, but his work on the Germanic languages is more widely remembered. Some of Sweet's works are still in print and continue to be used as course texts at colleges and universities. Some of the books he wrote are Handbook on Phonetics (1877), Oldest English Texts (1885), Primer of Old Icelandic (1888), and he edited several books for the Early English Text Society. He never managed to get a position with a college, which disturbed him greatly; he had done poorly in school, he had annoyed many people through bluntness, and didn't take every effort to gather official support. C. L. Wrenn found George Bernard Shaw's character "Henry Higgins" in Pygmalion to be a largely accurate portrayal of Sweet. A bibliography and Collected Papers were published by H. C. Wyld.

External link

- Sweet, Henry Sweet, Henry

1845

1845 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar).

Events

- January 29 - The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe is published for the first time (New York Evening Mirror).
- February 7 - In the British Museum, drunken visitor smashes Portland Vase - it takes months to repair
- March 1 - President John Tyler signs a bill authorizing the United States to annex the Republic of Texas.
- March 3 - Florida is admitted as the 27th U.S. state.
- March 3 - For the first time the U.S. Congress passes legislation overriding a presidential veto.
- March 11 - First Maori War: Chiefs Kawiti and Hone Heke lead 700 Maoris in the burning of the British colonial settlement of Kororareka, now known as Russell.
- March 17 - The rubber band is invented in England
- May 20 - The HMS Erebus and Terror with 134 men under John Franklin sail from the River Thames beginning a disastrous expedition to find the Northwest Passage.
- July 4 - Near Concord, Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau embarks on a two-year experiment in simple living at Walden Pond (see Walden).
- July 20 - Charles Sturt enters the Simpson Desert in central Australia
- August 28 - Scientific American begins publication
- October 10 - In Annapolis, Maryland, the Naval School (later renamed the United States Naval Academy) opens with 50 midshipmen students and seven professors.
- October 13 - A majority of voters in the Republic of Texas approve a proposed constitution, that if accepted by the U.S. Congress, will make Texas a U.S. state.
- December 2 - Manifest Destiny: US President James Polk announces to Congress that the Monroe Doctrine should be strictly enforced and that the United States should aggressively expand into the West.
- December 5 - Templars of Honor and Temperance founded.
- December 6 - Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity founded.
- December 27 - Anesthesia is used for childbirth for the first time (Dr. Crawford Williamson Long in Jefferson, Georgia).
- December 29 - Texas is admitted as the 28th U.S. state.
- December 30 - Queen's Colleges of Belfast, Cork and Galway are incorporated in Ireland.

Month/day unknown

- Second separation of Republic of Yucatan from Mexico
- Beginning of the Irish potato famine.
- James K. Polk succeeds John Tyler as President of the United States of America
- Ephraim Bee reveals that the Emperor of China has given him a special dispensation; that he had entrusted him with certain sacred and mysterious rituals through Caleb Cushing, the US Commissioner to China, to "extend the work and influence of the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus" in the new world.
- Templars of Honor and Temperance established in U.S.
- Aberdeen Act signed

Ongoing Events

- Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849)

Births

- February 15 - Elihu Root, American statesman and diplomat, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (d. 1937)
- February 25 - George Reid, fourth Prime Minister of Australia, (d. 1918)
- March 3 - Georg Cantor, German mathematician (d. 1918)
- March 10 - Emperor Alexander III of Russia (d. 1894)
- March 27 - Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1923)
- April 24 - Carl Spitteler, Swiss writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1924)
- May 12 - Gabriel Fauré, French composer (d. 1924)
- May 16 - Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, Russian microbiologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1916)
- May 17 - Jacint Verdaguer, Catalan poet (d. 1902)
- May 25 - Eugène Grasset, Swiss-born artist (d. 1917)
- May 25 - Lip Pike, baseball player (d. 1893)
- May 30 - King Amadeus I of Spain (d. 1890)
- June 7 - Leopold Auer, Hungarian violinist and composer (d. 1930)
- June 9 - Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 4th Earl of Minto (d. 1914)
- June 18 - Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, French physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1922)
- July 18 - Tristan Corbière, French poet (d. 1875)
- July 19 - Horatio Nelson Young, American naval hero (d. 1913)
- August 10 - Abai Kunanbaev, Kazak poet (d. 1904)
- August 19 - Edmond James de Rothschild, French philantropist (d. 1934)
- August 25 - King Ludwig II of Bavaria (d. 1886)
- November 10 - John Sparrow David Thompson, Prime Minister of Canada (d. 1894)
- Joshua Levering, American Presidential candidate

Deaths

- April 10 - Dr. Thomas Sewall, American anatomist
- May 12 - Janos Bacsanyi, Hungarian poet (b. 1763)
- June 8 - Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United States (b. 1767)
- October 12 - Elizabeth Fry, British humanitarian (b. 1780) ---- 1845 is also the name of a song on One Minute Silence's album Buy Now... Saved Later. Category:1845 ko:1845년 ms:1845 simple:1845

Philology

Philology is the study of ancient texts and languages. The term originally meant a love (Greek philo-) of learning and literature (Greek -logia). In the academic traditions of several nations, a wide sense of the term "philology" describes the study of a language together with its literature and the historical and cultural contexts which are indispensable for an understanding of the literary works and other culturally significant texts. Philology thus comprises the study of the grammar, rhetoric, history, interpretation of authors, and critical traditions associated to a given language. Such a wide-ranging definition is becoming rare nowadays, and "philology" tends to refer to a study of texts from the perspective of historical linguistics. In its more restricted sense of "historical linguistics", philology was one of the 19th century's first scientific approaches to human language but gave way to the modern science of linguistics in the early 20th century due to the influence of Ferdinand de Saussure, who argued that the spoken language should have primacy. In the United States, the American Journal of Philology was founded in 1880 by Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, a professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University.

Branches of philology

Comparative philology

One branch of philology is comparative linguistics, which studies the relationship between languages. Similarities between Sanskrit and European languages were first noted in the early 18th century and led to the speculation of a common ancestor language from which all of these descended - now named Proto-Indo-European. Philology's interest in ancient languages led to the study of what were in the 19th century "exotic" languages for the light they could cast on problems in understanding and deciphering the origins of older texts.

Radical philology

Radical philology is a contemporary re-appropriation of a centuries-old tradition of scholarly interaction with the materiality of texts. In its main outlines, radical philology diverges from main-stream philology in its understanding of the relationship between textual scholarship and literary interpretation. While main-stream philology uses the fruits of textual research as "evidence" for broader, more abstract claims, radical philology sees textual research as an end in itself.

Text reconstruction

Philology also includes elements of textual criticism, trying to reconstruct an ancient author's original text based on variant manuscript copies. A related study, known as Higher criticism, which studies the authorship, date, and provenance of texts, proves invaluable in these attempts, but also is informed by them. These philological issues are often inseparable from issues of interpretation, and thus there is no clear-cut boundary between philology and hermeneutics. As such, when the content of the text has a significant political or religious influence (such as the reconstruction of early versions of christian gospels), it is difficult to find neutral or honest conclusions.

Deciphering ancient texts

Another branch of philology is the decipherment of ancient writing systems, which had spectacular successes in the 19th century involving Egyptian and Assyrian. Beginning with the sensational publication of the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, a number of individuals attempted to decode the great inscriptions of the ancient world. Work on the ancient languages of the middle east progressed rapidly, with Hittite decoded in 1915 by Bedřich Hrozný, and the cuneiform languages of the Behistun Inscription, namely Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, being decoded by Sir Henry Rawlinson. The most famous inscriptions, also amongst the most important for what they tell of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations, are Linear A, and Linear B. While Linear B was deciphered in the 1950's by Michael Ventris and proclaimed as an early form of Greek (indicating that the Mycenaean language, and thus likely the Mycenaeans, was Greek), this conclusion is still heavily debated in the field. Linear A, the unknown language of the Minoans (which would shed much light on this ancient civilisation), on the other hand, still resists translation. Work still continues on scripts such as Mayan hieroglyphics (with great progress made in the late 20th century), and on Etruscan. J.R.R. Tolkien was a noted philologist of his day, although he is now best known for writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Another was C.S. Lewis, his friend and colleague at Oxford, who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Perhaps the most famous however was Friedrich Nietzsche, who started his career with an extensive knowledge in classical philology ( He was Extraordinary Professor of Classical Philology at the University Of Basel) but soon took up philosophy. However his love of language never left him, and it formed the basis of some of his most illuminating works.

External links

- [http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/bibliography.html A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology (ed. José Ángel García Landa, University of Zaragoza, Spain)] Category:Historical linguistics Category:Writing ja:文献学 ko:고전문헌학

Old English language

Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. It is a West Germanic language and therefore is similar to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. It is also quite similar to Old Norse (and by extension, to modern Icelandic). Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years – from the Anglo-Saxon migrations which created England in the fifth century to some time after the Norman invasion of 1066, after which the language underwent a major and dramatic transition. During this early period it assimilated some aspects of the languages that it came in contact with, such as the Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse from the invading Norsemen who were occupying and controlling the Danelaw in northern and eastern England. The term Old English does not refer to older varieties of Modern English such as are found in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, which are called Early Modern English by linguists. In some older works (such as the 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary), Old English refers to Middle English, or also more specifically Middle English as used from 1150 to 1350, with the older form of the language referred to exclusively as Anglo-Saxon. [http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster%27s&word=English]. Middle English developed from 1150 to 1500, and was the form of English which was used by Chaucer.

Germanic origins

The most important shaping force on Old English was its Germanic heritage in vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar that it shared with its sister languages in continental Europe. Some of these features were specific to the West Germanic language family to which Old English belongs, while some other features were inherited from the Proto-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages are believed to have been derived. Though many of these links with the other Germanic languages have since been obscured by later linguistic influences, particularly Norman French, many remain even in modern English. Compare modern English 'Good day' with the Old English Gōdne dæg, modern Dutch Goedendag, or modern German Guten Tag. Today the European language most similar to Old English is Frisian, a language spoken by several hundred thousand people in the northern Netherlands and northern Germany. Like other West Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases, which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. It also assigned gender to all nouns, even to those that describe inanimate objects: for example, sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, while se mōna (the Moon) was masculine. In terms of morphology modern German is more similar to Old English than modern English itself is, because it still has complex gender, case, and verb conjugation systems similar to those of Old English, as well as many similar words of Germanic stock which have been displaced by French or Latin words in modern English.

Latin influence

A large percentage of the educated and literate population (monks, clerics, etc.) were competent in Latin, which was then the prevalent lingua franca of Europe. It is sometimes possible to give approximate dates for the entry of individual Latin words into Old English based on which patterns of linguistic change they have undergone, though this is not always reliable. There were at least three notable periods of Latin influence. The first occurred before the ancestral Saxons left continental Europe for England. The second began when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and Latin-speaking priests became widespread. However, the largest single transfer of Latin-based words occurred following the Norman invasion of 1066, after which an enormous number of Norman French words entered the language. Most of these Oïl language words were themselves derived ultimately from classical Latin, although a notable stock of Norse words were introduced, or re-introduced in Norman form. The Norman Conquest approximately marks the end of Old English and the advent of Middle English. The language was further altered by the transition away from the runic alphabet (also known as futhorc) to the Latin alphabet, which was also a significant factor in the developmental pressures brought to bear on the language. Old English words were spelt as they were pronounced; the silent letters of Modern English therefore did not often exist in Old English. For example, the 'hard-c' sound in cniht, the Old English equivalent of 'knight' was pronounced. Another side-effect of spelling words phonetically was that spelling was extremely variable – the spelling of a word would reflect differences in the phonetics of the writer's regional dialect and also idiosyncratic spelling choices which varied from author to author. Thus, for example, the word "and" could be spelt either and or ond. Therefore, Old English spelling can be regarded as even more jumbled than modern English spelling, although it can at least claim to reflect some existing pronunciation, while modern English in many cases cannot. Most students of Old English in the present day learn the language using normalised versions and are only introduced to variant spellings after they have mastered the basics of the language.

Viking influence

modern English spelling and the green area is the extent of the other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility]] The second major source of loanwords to Old English were the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries. In addition to a great many place names, these consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland). The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English in that they both derive from the same ancestral Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as occurs during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language, and one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English. Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the North and latest in the Southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence. Regardless of the truth of this theory, the influence of Old Norse on the English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky and the modern pronoun they.

Celtic influence

The number of Celtic loanwords is of a remarkably lower order than either Latin or Scandinavian. Only twelve loanwords have been identified as being entirely secure. Out of all the known and suspected Celtic loanwords, most are names of geographical features, and especially rivers.

Dialects

To further complicate matters, Old English was rich in dialect forms. The four main dialect forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian (the latter two known collectively as Anglian), Kentish, and West Saxon. Each of these dialects were associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. The portion of Mercia and all of Kent that were both successfully defended, were then integrated into Wessex. After the process of unification of the diverse Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 878 by Alfred the Great, there is a marked decline in the importance of regional dialects. This is not because they stopped existing: regional dialects continued even after that time to this day, as evidenced both by the existence of middle and modern English dialects later on, and by common sense – people do not spontaneously develop new accents when there is a sudden change of political power. However, the bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex, Alfred's kingdom. It seems likely that with consolidation of power, it became necessary to standardise the language of government to reduce the difficulty of administering the remoter areas of the kingdom. As a result, paperwork was written in the West Saxon dialect. Not only this, but Alfred was passionate about the spread of the vernacular, and brought many scribes to his region from Mercia in order that previously unwritten texts were recorded. The Church was likewise affected, especially since Alfred initiated an ambitious programme to translate religious materials into English. In order to retain his patronage and ensure the widest circulation of the translated materials, the monks and priests engaged in the programme worked in his dialect. Alfred himself seems to have translated books out of Latin and into English, notably Pope Gregory I's treatise on administration, "Pastoral Care". Due at least partially to the centralisation of power and to the Viking invasions, there is little or no written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred's unification.

Phonology

The inventory of Old English surface phones, as usually reconstructed, is as follows. The sounds marked in parentheses are allophones:
- is an allophone of occurring after and when geminated
- is an allophone of occurring before and
- are allophones of respectively, occurring between vowels or voiced consonants.
- are allophones of occurring in coda position after front and back vowels respectively
- is an allophone of occurring after a vowel The front mid rounded vowels occur in some dialects of Old English, but not in the best attested Late West Saxon dialect. 2. It is uncertain whether the diphthongs spelt ie/īe were pronounced or . The fact that this diphthong was merged with in many dialects suggests the former.

Standardised orthography

Old English was at first written in runes (futhorc), but shifted to the Latin alphabet with some additions: the letter yogh, adopted from Irish; the letter eth and the runic letters thorn and wynn. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction 'and', a character similar to the number seven ('7'), and a symbol for the relative pronoun 'þæt', a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender (' '). Also used occasionally were macrons over vowels, abbreviations for following 'm's or 'n's. All of the sound descriptions below are given using IPA symbols.

The alphabet

- a: (spelling variations like land/lond "land" suggest it may have had a rounded allophone before in some cases)
- ā:
- æ:
- :
- b:
- c (except in the digraphs sc and cg): either or . The pronunciation is sometimes written with a diacritic by modern editors: most commonly ċ, sometimes č or ç. Before a consonant letter the pronunciation is always ; word-finally after i it is always . Otherwise a knowledge of the historical linguistics of the word in question is needed to predict which pronunciation is needed. (See Old English phonology#The distribution of velars and palatals for details.)
- cg: (the surface pronunciation of geminate ); occasionally also for
- d:
- ð/þ: and its allophone . Both symbols were used more or less interchangeably (to the extent that there was a rule, it was to avoid using ð word-initially, but this was by no means universally followed). Many modern editions preserve the use of these two symbols as found in the original manuscripts, but some attempt to regularise them in some fashion, for example using only the þ. See also Pronunciation of English th.
- e:
- ē:
- ea: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes or
- ēa: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes
- eo: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes
- ēo:
- f: and its allophone
- g: and its allophone ; and its allophone (when after n). The and pronunciations are sometimes written ġ or by modern editors. Before a consonant letter the pronunciation is always (word-initially) or (after a vowel). Word-finally after i it is always . Otherwise a knowledge of the historical linguistics of the word in question is needed to predict which pronunciation is needed. (See Old English phonology#The distribution of velars and palatals for details.)
- h: and its allophones . In the combinations hl, hr, hn and hw, the second consonant was certainly voiceless.
- i:
- ī:
- ie: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes
- īe: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes
- k: (rarely used)
- l: ; probably velarised (as in Modern English) when in coda position.
- m:
- n: and its allophone
- o:
- ō:
- oe: (in dialects with this sound)
- ōe: (in dialects with this sound)
- p:
- q: – Used before u representing the consonant , but rarely used, being rather a feature of Middle English. Old English preferred or in modern print cw.
- r: ; the exact nature of r is not known. It may have been an alveolar approximant , as in most Modern English accents, an alveolar flap , or an alveolar trill .
- s: and its allophone
- sc: or occasionally
- t:
- u:
- ū:
- (wynn): , replaced in modern print by w to prevent confusion with p.
- x: (but according to some authors, )
- y:
- :
- z: . Rarely used as ts was usually used instead, for example bezt vs betst "best", pronounced . Doubled consonants are geminated; the geminate fricatives ðð/þþ, ff and ss cannot be voiced.

Syntax

As a West Germanic language, Old English syntax has a great deal of common ground with Dutch and German. Old English is not dependent upon S (subject), V (verb), O (object) or "SVO" word order in the way that Modern English is. The syntax of an Old English sentence can be in any of these shapes: SVO order, VSO order, and OVS order. The only constant rule, as in German and Dutch, is that the verb must come as the second concept. That is, in the sentence 'in the town, we ate some food', it could appear as 'in the town, ate we some food', or 'in the town, ate some food we'. This variable word order is especially common in poetry. Prose, while still displaying variable word order, is much more likely to use SVO ordering. Similarly, word order became less flexible as time went on: the older a text is, the less likely it is to have a fixed word order. To further complicate the matter, prepositions may appear after their object, though they are not postpositions, as they may occur in front of the noun too, and usually do, for example: God cwæð him þus tō (lit.) God said him thus to that is God said thus to him

Morphology

Unlike modern English, Old English is a language rich with morphological diversity and is spelled essentially as it is pronounced. It maintains several distinct cases: the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and (vestigially) instrumental, remnants of which survive only in a few pronouns in modern English.

Sample text

This text is from the epic poem Beowulf.

External links

- [http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/IOE/index.html The Electronic Introduction to Old English]
- [http://www.kami.demon.co.uk/gesithas/OEsteps/ First steps in Old English - a course for absolute beginners]
- [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm Old English (Anglo-Saxon) alphabet]
- [http://home.comcast.net/~modean52/oeme_dictionaries.htm Old English - Modern English dictionary]
- [http://lonestar.texas.net/~jebbo/learn-as/origins.htm The Origins of Old English]
- [http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/oegermanic.html Guide to using Old English computer characters] (Unicode, HTML entities, etc.)
- [http://www.doe.utoronto.ca Dictionary of Old English Project at the University of Toronto]
- [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/language_resources.html The Germanic Lexicon Project]
- [http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/oe/oe-texts.html Text Collections - Texts and Translations]
- [http://wandership.ca/collect/links/oe.php Links relating to Old English, including learning resources]

References

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- English, Old ja:古英語 simple:Old English language

Old icelandic

and the green area is the extent of the other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility]] Old Norse is the Germanic language once spoken by the inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300. It evolved from the older Proto-Norse, in the 8th century. Due to the fact that most of the surviving texts are from Medieval Icelandic, the de facto standard version of the language is its dialect Old West Norse, that is Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. Sometimes, Old Norse is even defined as Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. However, there was also an Old East Norse dialect which was very similar and was spoken in Denmark and Sweden and their settlements. Moreover, there was no clear geographical separation between the two dialects. Old East Norse traits were found in eastern Norway and Old West Norse traits were found in western Sweden. In addition, there was also an Old Gutnish dialect, sometimes included in Old East Norse due to it being the least known dialect. Until the 13th century these three dialects were considered by their speakers to be one and the same language, and they called it dansk tunga (in the eastern dialect) or dönsk tunga (in the western dialect). This autonym translates as "Danish tongue". Old Norse was mutually intelligible with Old English and Old Saxon and other Low Germanic languages spoken in northern Germany. It gradually evolved into the modern North Germanic languages: Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. Modern Icelandic is the descendant which has diverged the least from Old Norse. Faroese also retains many similarities but is influenced from Danish, Norwgeian, and Gaelic (Scots and/or Irish). Although Swedish, Danish and the Norwegian languages have diverged the most, they still retain mutual intelligibility. This could be because these languages have been mutually affected by each other, as well as having a similar development due to impact from Low German.

Geographical distribution

Old Icelandic was essentially identical to Old Norwegian and they formed together the Old West Norse dialect of Old Norse. The Old East Norse dialect was spoken in Denmark and Sweden and settlements in Russia, England and Normandy. The Old Gutnish dialect was spoken in Gotland and in various settlements in the East. In the 11th century, it was the most widely spoken European language ranging from Vinland in the West to the Volga in the East. In Russia it survived longest in Novgorod and died out in the 13th century.

Modern descendants

Its modern descendants are the West Scandinavian languages of Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian and the extinct Norn language of the Orkney and the Shetland Islands as well as the East Scandinavian languages of Danish and Swedish. Norwegian has decended from West Norse (West Scandinavian), but over the centuries it has been heavily influenced by East Norse (East Scandinavian). Among these, Icelandic and the closely related Faroese have changed the least from Old Norse in the last thousand years, although with Danish rule of the Faroe Islands Faroese has also been influenced by Danish. Old Norse also had an influence on English dialects and particularly Lowland Scots which contains many Old Norse loanwords. It also influenced the development of the Norman language. Various other languages, which are not closely related, have been heavily influenced by Norse, particularly the Norman dialects and Scottish Gaelic. Russian and Finnish also have a number of Norse loanwords; "Russian" itself is derived from "Rus", a Norse term.

Sounds

Vowels

The vowel phonemes mostly come in pairs of long and short. The orthography marks the long vowels with an acute accent. The short counterpart of is not a phoneme but an allophone of . The long counterpart of has merged with in the classical (13th century) language. All phonemes have, more or less, the expected phonetic realization.

Consonants

Old Norse has six stop phonemes. Of these is rare word-initially and and do not occur between vowels. The phoneme is realized as a voiced fricative between vowels.

Orthography

The standardized Old Norse spelling is for the most part phonemic. The most notable deviation is that the non-phonemic difference between the voiced and the unvoiced dental fricatives is marked. As mentioned above, long vowels are denoted with acutes. Most other letters are written with the same glyph as the IPA phoneme, except as shown in the table below.

Dialects and texts

The earliest inscriptions in Old Norse are runic, from the 8th century (although there are 200 inscriptions in Proto-Norse going as far back as the 2nd century), and runes continued to be used for a thousand years. The main literary texts are in the Latin alphabet, the great sagas and eddas of medieval Iceland. As Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse, in the 8th century, the effects of the umlauts varied geographically. The typical umlauts (for example fylla from
- fullian) were stronger in the West whereas those resulting in diaeresis (for example hiarta from herto) were more influential in the East. This difference was the main reason behind the dialectalization that took place in the 9th and 10th centuries shaping an Old West Norse dialect in Norway and the Atlantic settlements and an Old East Norse dialect in Denmark and Sweden. A second difference was that the old diphthongs generally became monophthongs in East Norse. For instance in East Norse stain became sten, whereas it became steinn in West Norse. In Old Gutnish, this diphthong remained. Old West Norse and Old Gutnish kept the diphthong au as in auga, whereas it in East Norse became øgha. Likewise, West Norse had the ey diphthong, as in heyra, while it in East Norse became ø, as in høra, and in Old Gutnish was oy as in hoyra. A third difference was that Old West Norse lost certain combinations of consonants. The combinations -mp-, -nt-, and -nk- were assimilated into -pp-, -tt- and -kk- in Old West Norse, but this phenomenon was limited in Old East Norse. However, these differences were an exception. The dialects were very similar and considered to be the same language, a language that they called the Danish tongue, for example Móðir Dyggva var Drótt, dóttir Danps konungs, sonar Rígs er fyrstr var konungr kallaðr á danska tungu (Snorri Sturluson, the Ynglinga saga). Translation: Dyggve's mother was Drott, the daughter of king Danp, Ríg's son, who was the first one to be called king in the Danish tongue. Here is a comparison between the two dialects. It is a transcription from one of the Funbo Runestones (U990) meaning : Veðr and Thane and Gunnar raised this stone after Haursa, their father. God help his soul: :Veðr ok Þegn ok Gunnarr reistu stein þenna at Haursa, föður sinn. Guð hjalpi önd hans. (OWN) :Veðr ok Þegn ok Gunnarr ræistu stæin þenna at Haursa, faður sinn. Guð hialpi and hans (OEN)

Old West Norse

Most of the innovations that appeared in Old Norse spread evenly through the Old Norse area, but some were geographically limited and created a dialectal difference between Old West Norse and Old East Norse. One difference was that Old West Norse did not take part in the monophthongization which changed æi/ei into e, øy/ey into ø and au into ø. An early difference was that Old West Norse had the forms bu (dwelling), ku (cow) and tru (faith) whereas Old East Norse had bo, ko and tro. Old West Norse was also characterized by u-umlaut, which meant that for example Proto-Norse
- tanþu was pronounced tönn and not tand as in Old East Norse. Moreoever, there were nasal assimilations as in bekkr from Proto-Norse
- bankiaz. The earliest body of text appears in runic inscriptions and in poems composed ca 900 by Tjodolf of Hvin. The earliest manuscripts are from the period 1150-1200 and concern both legal, religious and historical matters. During the 12th and 13th centuries, Trøndelag and Vestlandet were the most important areas of the Norwegian kingdom and they shaped Old West Norse as an archaic language with a rich set of declensions. As the body of text has come down to us until ca 1300, Old West Norse was a uniform dialect and it is difficult to see whether a text was written in Old Icelandic or in Old Norwegian. It was called norrœn tunga (the Northern tongue). Old Norwegian differentiated early from Old Icelandic by the loss of the consonant h in initial position before l, n and r. This meant that whereas Old Icelandic had the form hnefi (fist), Old Norwegian had the forms næve and neve. About 1300, the court moved to south-eastern Norway, and the old written standard was felt to be old-fashioned. After the union with Sweden ca 1319, Old Swedish began to influence Norwegian, and the plague, about 1350, meant more or less the end of the old literary tradition. The influence from East Norse had only begun and was continued after the union with Denmark in 1380.

Text example

The following text is from Egils saga. The manuscript is the oldest known for that saga, the so called θ-fragment from the 13th century. The text clearly shows how little Icelandic has changed structurally. The last version is legitimate Modern Icelandic, although nothing has been altered but the spelling. The text also demonstrates, however, that a modern reader might have difficulties with the unaltered manuscript text, to say nothing of the lettering.

Old East Norse

Old East Norse, between 800 and 1100, is in Sweden called Runic Swedish and in Denmark Runic Danish, but the use of Swedish and Danish is not for linguistic reasons. They are called runic due to the fact that the body of text appears in the runic alphabet. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark, which only had 16 letters. Due to the limited number of runes, the rune for the vowel u was also used for the vowels o, ø and y, and the rune for i was used for e. A change that occurrered in Old East Norse was the change of æi (Old West Norse ei) to e, as in stæin to sten. This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read stain and the later stin. There was also a change of au as in dauðr into ø as in døðr. This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from tauþr into tuþr. Moreover, the øy (Old West Norse ey) diphthong changed into ø as well, as in the Old Norse word for "island". Until the early 12th century, Old East Norse was a uniform dialect. It was in Denmark that the first innovations appeared that would differentiate Old Danish from Old Swedish and these innovations spread north unevenly creating a series of isoglosses going from Zealand to Svealand. The word final vowels -a, -o and -e started to merge into -e. At the same time, the voiceless stop consonants p, t and k became voiced stops and even fricatives. These innovations resulted in that Danish has kage, bide and gabe whereas Swedish has retained older forms, kaka, bita and gapa. Moreover, Danish lost the tonal word accent present in modern Swedish and Norwegian, replacing the grave accent with a glottal stop.

Text example

This is an extract from the Westrogothic law (Västgötalagen). It is the oldest text written as a manuscript found in Sweden and from the 13th century. It is contemporaneous with most of the Icelandic literature. The text marks the beginning of Old Swedish. :Dræpær maþar svænskan man eller smalenskæn, innan konongsrikis man, eigh væstgøskan, bøte firi atta ørtogher ok þrettan markær ok ænga ætar bot. [...] Dræpar maþær danskan man allæ noræn man, bøte niv markum. Dræpær maþær vtlænskan man, eigh ma frid flyia or landi sinu oc j æth hans. Dræpær maþær vtlænskæn prest, bøte sva mykit firi sum hærlænskan man. Præstær skal i bondalaghum væræ. Varþær suþærman dræpin ællær ænskær maþær, ta skal bøta firi marchum fiurum þem sakinæ søkir, ok tvar marchar konongi. Translation: :If someone slays a Swede or a Smålander, a man from the kingdom, but not a West Geat, he will pay eight örtugar and thirteen marks, but no wergild. The king owns nine marks from manslaughter and the killing of any man. If someone slays a Dane or a Norwegian, he will pay nine marks. If someone slays a foreigner, he shall not be banished and have to flee to his clan. If someone slays a foreign priest, he will pay as much as for a foreigner. A priest counts as a freeman. If a Southerner is slain or an Englishman, he shall pay four marks to the plaintif and two marks to the king.

Old Gutnish

The Gutasaga is the longest text surviving from Old Gutnish. It was written in the 13th century and dealt with the early history of the Gotlanders. This part relates of the agreement that the Gotlanders had with the Swedish king sometime before the 9th century: :So gingu gutar sielfs wiliandi vndir suia kunung þy at þair mattin frir Oc frelsir sykia suiariki j huerium staþ. vtan tull oc allar utgiftir. So aigu oc suiar sykia gutland firir vtan cornband ellar annur forbuþ. hegnan oc hielp sculdi kunungur gutum at waita. En þair wiþr þorftin. oc kallaþin. sendimen al oc kunungr oc ierl samulaiþ a gutnal þing senda. Oc latta þar taka scatt sinn. þair sendibuþar aighu friþ lysa gutum alla steþi til sykia yfir haf sum upsala kunungi til hoyrir. Oc so þair sum þan wegin aigu hinget sykia. Translation: :So, by their own volition, the Gotlanders became the subjects of the Swedish king, so that they could travel freely and without risk to any location in the Swedish kingdom without toll and other fees. Likewise, the Swedes had the right to go to Gotland without corn restrictions or other prohibitions. The king was to provide protection and aid, when they needed it and asked for it. The king and the jarl shall send emissaries to the Gutnish althing to receive the taxes. These emissaries shall declare free passage for the Gotlanders to all locations in the sea of the king at Uppsala (that is the Baltic Sea was under Swedish control) and likewise for everyone who wanted to travel to Gotland. Some important characteristics of old Gutnish are seen in this text. First, unlike contemporary East Norse all diphthongs are preserved. Second, the diphtong ai in aigu, þair and waita (and probably other words) is not umlauted to ei as in West Norse eigu, þeir and veita.

References

- Gordon, Eric V. and A.R. Taylor. Introduction to Old Norse. Second. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

External links

- [http://www.heimskringla.no «Kulturformidlingen norrøne tekster og kvad»]
- [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/language_resources.html Indo-European Language Resources] The resources in question are mostly Germanic, including two dictionaries of Old Icelandic (in English), two grammars of Old Icelandic (one in English, one in German) and a grammar of Old Swedish (in German).
- [http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/sounds/ragn1_2b.mp3 soundsample]
- [http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/ Old Norse for Beginners]
- [http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/eieol/norol-TC-X.html Old Norse Online], by Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum from the Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Category:Nordic folklore Norse language, Old Category:North Germanic languages ko:고대 노르드어 ja:古ノルド語

Grammar

:This article is about grammar from a linguistic perspective. For English grammar rules, see English grammar or Disputed English grammar Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. The set of rules governing a particular language is also called the grammar of the language; thus, each language can be said to have its own distinct grammar. Grammar is part of the general study of language called linguistics. The subfields of modern grammar are phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Traditional grammars include only morphology and syntax.

Types of grammar

- A prescriptive grammar presents authoritative norms for a particular language, and tends to deprecate non-standard constructions. Traditional grammars are typically prescriptive. Prescriptive grammars are usually based on the prestige dialects of a speech community, and often specifically condemn certain constructions which are common only among lower socioeconomic groups, such as the use of "ain't" and double negatives in English. Though prescriptive grammars remain common in pedagogy and foreign language teaching, they have fallen out of favor in modern academic linguistics, as they describe only a subset of actual language usage.
- A descriptive grammar attempts to describe actual usage, avoiding prescriptive judgements. Descriptive grammars are bound to a particular speech community, and attempt to provide rules for any utterance considered grammatically correct within that community. For example, in many dialects of English, the use of double negatives is very common, though ungrammatical from the point of view of a prescriptive English grammar. A descriptive grammar of a speech community where "I didn't do nothing" is acceptable will treat that sentence as grammatical, and provide rules that account for it. A descriptive grammar of formal English would rather provide rules for "I didn't do anything."
- Traditional grammar is the collection of ideas about grammar that Western societies have received from Greek and Roman sources. Prescriptive grammar is always formulated in terms of the descriptive concepts inherited from traditional grammar. Modern descriptive grammar aims to correct the errors of traditional grammar, and generalize them, so as to avoid shoehorning all languages to the model of Latin. Nearly all materials used in teaching language, however, are still based on traditional grammar.
- A formal grammar is a precisely defined grammar, typically used for computer programming languages.
- A generative grammar is a formal grammar that can in some sense "generate" the well-formed expressions of a natural language. An entire branch of linguistic theory is based on generative grammars. Generative grammars were popularized by Noam Chomsky.

Development of grammars

Grammars evolve through usage and human population separations. With the advent of written representations, formal rules about language usage tend to appear also. Formal grammars are codifications of usage that are developed by observation. As the rules become established and developed, the prescriptive concept of grammatical correctness can arise. This often creates a gulf between contemporary usage and that which is accepted as correct. Linguists normally consider that prescriptive grammars do not have any justification beyond their authors' aesthetic tastes. However, prescriptions are considered in sociolinguistics as part of the explanation for why some people say "I didn't do nothing", some say "I didn't do anything", and some say one or the other depending on social context. The formal study of grammar is an important part of education from a young age through advanced learning, though the rules taught in schools are not a "grammar" in the sense most linguists use the term, as they are often prescriptive rather than descriptive. Planned languages are more common in the modern day. Many have been designed to aid human communication (such as Esperanto or the intercultural, highly logic-compatible artificial language Lojban) or created as part of a work of fiction (such as the Klingon language and Elvish languages). Each of these artificial languages has its own grammar. It is a myth that analytic languages have simpler grammar than synthetic languages. Analytic languages use syntax to convey information that is encoded via inflection in synthetic languages. In other words, word order is not significant and morphology is highly significant in a purely synthetic language, whereas morphology is not significant and syntax is highly significant in an analytic language. Chinese and Afrikaans, for example, are highly analytic and meaning is therefore very context dependent. (Both do have some inflections, and had more in the past; thus, they are becoming even less synthetic and more "purely" analytic over time.) Latin, which is highly synthetic, uses affixes and inflections to convey the same information that Chinese does with syntax. Because Latin words are quite (though not completely) self-contained, an intelligible Latin sentence can be made from elements placed in largely arbitrary order. Latin has a complex affixation and a simple syntax, while Chinese has the opposite. ----- In computer science, the syntax of each programming language is defined by a formal grammar. In theoretical computer science and mathematics, formal grammars define formal languages. The Chomsky hierarchy defines several important classes of formal grammars.

External links

- [http://www.krysstal.com/grammar.html Grammar Terms]
- [http://www.gramster.com/ English Grammar Software]
- [http://www.figarospeech.com/ It Figures-Figures of Speech]
- als:Grammatik ja:文法 simple:Grammar th:ไวยากรณ์

C. L. Wrenn

Charles Leslie Wrenn was a British scholar. He became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford in 1945, the successor in the chair to J. R. R. Tolkien. Wrenn, CL

Pygmalion (play)

Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, written in 1913. Shaw completed Pygmalion and later that same year it was translated into German. This is important because the very first performance was played by English actors in Vienna, Austria, with none other than Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle. Pygmalion opened at the Hofburg Theatre on October 16, 1913, however it was moved to England, with the same cast, and opened there, on April 11, 1914 at His Majesty's Theatre. This was the first time Shaw's Pygmalion was performed in English. It is the story of Professor Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, who wagers that he can turn a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into the toast of London society merely by teaching her how to speak with an upper-class accent. In the process, he becomes fond of her and attempts to direct her future, but she rejects his domineering ways and marries a young aristocrat. The original stage play shocked audiences by Eliza's use of a swear word. Humour is drawn from her ability to speak well, but without an understanding of the conversation acceptable to polite society. For example, when asked whether she is walking home, she replies, 'Not bloody likely!' The actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw wrote the role, was thought to risk her career by uttering the line. In 1938, a film version of the stage play was released,[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030637] starring Leslie Howard as Higgins, Wendy Hiller as Eliza, Wilfrid Lawson as her father Alfred Doolittle, Scott Sunderland as Colonel George Pickering, and David Tree as Freddy Eynsford-Hill. It was adapted to film by Shaw, W.P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple, and Anatole de Grunwald from the Shaw play, and directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard. The movie was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. The play was the basis for the musical play and film My Fair Lady.[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058385] The play, the stage musical, and the film musical have different endings. At the end of the play, Eliza leaves Higgins to marry the aristocrat Freddy Eynsford-Hill. Shaw, annoyed by the tendency of audiences, actors, and even directors to seek 'romantic' re-interpretations of his ending, later wrote an essay for inclusion with subsequent editions in which he explained precisely why it was impossible for the story to end with Higgins and Eliza getting together. In the stage musical, this is left unresolved, and the final scene is of a lonely Higgins. Both the 1938 film and the filmed version of the musical add a final scene with both of them apparently about to reconcile. Shaw used Pygmalion from Roman mythology as the basis for his play. Contemporary versions of the Pygmalion motif can be found in Willy Russell's play Educating Rita (1980) and "Pretty Woman". A more recent version of the Pygmalion motif can be found indirectly in many teen movies, such as Can't Buy Me Love in the 80s (with its 2000s counterpart remake) and more directly in the movie She's All That.

External links

- [http://www.pygmalion.ws/stories/ Pygmalion stories across history]
- Category:Irish plays Category:1913 books Category:1938 films Category:Best Actor Oscar Nominee (film) Category:Best Picture Oscar Nominee

Category:1912 deaths

PP Augšperský potok

Augšperský potok je přírodní památka ev. č. 1449, lokalita Žebětín u Brna v okrese Brno-město. Správa AOPK Brno.
- Výměra: 1,85 ha
- rok vyhlášení: 1989 Důvodem ochrany je údolí s meandrujícím potokem sloužícím jako útočiště obojživelníků. Augšperský potok, Přírodní památka Augšperský potok, Přírodní památka

porady budowlane sylwester w g�rach piesni tekst tani sylwester

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C. L. Wrenn

Pygmalion (play)

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Category:1912 deaths

PP Augšperský potok

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