Originally posted by Eine Alpensinfonie
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I don't know any books on this but the timeline overview on the British Library website, though brief, is an interesting resource (and has a good video intro about Beowulf by David Crystal). And as Crystal suggests, Anglo-Saxon - at least Beowulf - should sound dramatic when spoken. It's such a strong, earthy language.
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EA: there seem to be at least three interesting topics in play here:Originally posted by Eine Alpensinfonie View Post
1) languages in general;
2) the history of English;
3) English place names.
Can't help you with readings on 1).
For 2) at Foxrod Uni donks ago we were directed to a History of the English Language by A C Baugh which was very readable. I still refer to my well-thumbed copy. It's still in print and has been revised/updated by some academic successor - I've seen a 2003 or 2006 edition I think.
On 3) an excellent way to start is the Dictionary of English Place-names by A D Mills, a nice cheap paperback which is designed to cover IIRC at least all the place-names in any decent motoring atlas. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dictionary-B.../dp/019960908X My copy says it has 12,000+ entries. For more detail of a particular area the first point of call is usually the relevant volume of the English Place Names Society (EPNS), of which Dr Onions is or was a council member. There's still a great deal of work to be done in many parts of the country, not least down here in Cornwall, but of course we have our own problems with the complex residues of the Cornish language: "Tre, Pol and Pen" etc etc.
EDIT: Here's the Baugh vol - a bit pricey even as p/b but a very solid work http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_...glish+languageI keep hitting the Escape key, but I'm still here!Comment
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Good post. I lived within a half hour of Shrewsbury for 21 years and noticed a third pronunciation - Shoosbury - was very common.Originally posted by LeMartinPecheur View PostThe natives, which includes me, generally use shroa. It pretty certainly has nothing to do with shrews. The mediaeval form IIRC is Scrobbesbyrig. This might have come through as Scrubsbury which is rather tasteful
- 'fortified place of the scrubland region'. Perhaps it's nicer to think of shrub instead of scrub, essentially the same OE word but this spelling presumably shows the northern (Viking) preference for sk over soft, gentle southern sh. (I'm guessing that this occurrence may be from an up-country text.)
Cf skirt/ shirt were exactly the same thing
. Northerners skreeked where southerners shreeched, so with typical British compromise we've ended up with shriek and screech, and over the years developed a subtle distinction in meaning too! Ain't we Brits wonderful??
The pronunciation of the AS Scrobbesbyrig may be slightly more complicated, since sc is usually taken as the AS 'sh' at the beginning of a word (as in scir - shire) and is not believed to have been 'sk' (with a hard c). It's perfectly likely that the Normans may have messed it up, for they replaced the written 'sc' with 'sh' (presumably because they were more comfortable with it) and also introduced the 'k' to designate the hard 'c', because their c was always soft. C was always hard in AS, except in the sc (sh) sound, so there's certainly room for confusion. A couple of hundred years of this (in an age when most people didn't write) and people had forgotten the AS spellings and distinctions. Scrub and shrub is another pair created, probably during this confused Middle English period, because of different pronunciations that were floating around - later generations just treated them as different (but usually related) words.
I used to work with someone who spelt show as 'shew'. This is a relic of the Great Vowel Shift (though in his case it was affectation) during which the spelling of the long 'oh' changed from ew to ow - so in that sense at least, Shrewsbury with an 'oh' sound is older for that spelling. This also explains the relic spelling of 'sew', by the way - for some reason it didn't change.Last edited by Pabmusic; 10-01-13, 00:34.Comment
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I have found this book a splendid resource for many year ---Originally posted by Eine Alpensinfonie View Post
---- it is now OOP, but copies are widely available from abebooks etc.
It is not so much descriptive of languages' evolution, but more a cross-section of all branches of IE. It provides a historical description and an assessment of each language; it also provides the Lord's Prayer in all living and some dead languages, an original text in each, and examples of grammatical paradigms for comparison purposes. And it's readable, more or less.Comment
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Here's a few. I've not suggested any real 'academic' books as they can be hard work! But these are all readable and interesting books to dip into:Originally posted by Eine Alpensinfonie View Post
Bill Bryson: Mother Tongue (excellent general overview of the rise of English)
Bill Bryson: Made in America (the development of American English, with so much else besides)
Jeremy Butterfield: Damp Squid: the English language laid bare (a bit technical, but very interesting)
Basil Cottle: The Penguin Dictionary of Surnames (very good intro that really fired my enthusiasm)*
David Crystal: The English Language (excellent overview, though I find Crystal's books can often be dry)
Alex Games: Kick the Bucket & Swing the Cat (very readable, quite long, book on the origins of words and phrases)
David Sacks: The Alphabet (very readable book about the origins of the English alphabet)
Michael Quinion: Port Out Starboard Home, and othe language myths (concentrates on individual words and their often mistaken folk explanations)
Michael Quinion: Why is Q Always Followed by U? (ditto)
*I looked on Amazon and saw that prices range from 1p to £139.12!Comment
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In the northern towns and cities (e.g. York, Durham) I always understood that "gate" meant a street rather than a town gate, and that this was a Viking derivation. "Gatan" means "street" in Swedish. Your suggestion of a link with the German "Gasse" had never occurred to me before! It is so obvious now you point it out. Very fascinating.Originally posted by decantor View PostComment
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No, you're right. Gate implies a gap (must see if that's a related word) such as through hills, or a road between high buildings, or a break in a wall. It's just that determining quite what the locals had in mind depends partly on when the name was given, because there's no doubt that the prime suspect in a city in late medieval times must be a gate through the walls.Originally posted by decantor View Post
The German gasse raises an interesting point to do with the Great Vowel Shift. It didn't only affect vowels. There was a time when speakers of High German (the language of the mountainous areas - Austria, Bavaria, Switzerland) started to pronounce their Ts with a sort of lisp. Presumably it began as a fashion, but it stuck and modern German (which descends from High German) is full of ß or -ss- sounds where Low German has T. Consider:
English: water, foot, eat
Dutch: water, voet, eten
German: wasser, fuss, essen
I suspect that gasse belongs in this list, too.Comment
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When I was teaching a course called History and Varieties of English to Polish undergraduates, I made much use of a book prepared for the English language A level - Dennis Freeborn's From Old English to Standard English - a Course Book in Language Variation across Time.
I can't recommend it highly enough to any non-specialist looking for a flavour of Old English. The texts chosen are all of great intrinsic interest, and their interest is increased by the examples given in facsimile.
I was looking for an extract to post, but here's the whole thing for you to browse:
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Anyone who knows more Latin than Old English will find Aelfric's Colloquy fascinating.
It's a schoolbook, a simple Latin text with a parallel translation in Old English for the Old English pupils (and their teachers?) who'll be studying it.
All the versions I can find online concentrate on the Old English, but there's an edition by Garmonsway published by the University of Exeter Press that has the Latin as well.
It's great fun.Comment
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Thanks again.
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It is interesting that browsing through this there is quite a lot made of the regional dialects used by the writers (e.g East Midland dialect of the Ormulum or the Peterborough AS Chronicle), and later on in Middle English there is the northern dialect of the author of Gawain and the Green Knight. When I was studying Anglo-Saxon history an age ago, it was the Peterborough chroniclers who seemed to be the most eloquent among the various authors of that heterogeneous work, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.Dennis Freeborn's From Old English to Standard English - a Course Book in Language Variation across Time.
As Pabmusic has alluded to Low/High German usage, it would be good to have some more about the development of languages outside these shores, German, French, Spanish etc.Comment
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Genuine Somerset dialect (fast dying out alas) retains a lot of ancient features, as in:
Bin 'ospital hass'n? (Hast not thou)
Brork tha leg diss'n? (Didst not thou)
Canst walk as well as couldst cast? (Thou canst not...canst thou)
They also transpose consonants (aks for ask and wapsie for wasp).
Why the word er, means he (as in 'er avn't av 'er meaning 'he hasn't has he') I cannot imagine.
There is also a plethora of dialect words (spuddle, ginnel, dimpsey) which are fast disappearing.
There is a splendid book "Glowing embers from a Somerset Hearth" which sounds like a rose-tinted spectacled romantic view of thye past...but isn't:
Last edited by ardcarp; 11-01-13, 00:46.Comment
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There's more general examples of this. 'Third' is simply a version of 'thrid' (formed from three) that caught on and eventually replaced the original. At one time there were also 'oneth' and 'twoeth'.Originally posted by ardcarp View PostComment
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