Old English Primer

English Reference

1973

This annual publication lists and reviews books concerning teaching principles and practice, source books and course books, mass media, composition-writing-rhetoric, language and oral work, poetry, prose, drama, criticism, the retarded reader, and the migrant child. (LL) Teachers will be, however, bitterly disappointed. The author's sampling of schools is skewed in the direction of the 'barbarous. .. and derelict'.

1974

This annual publication of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English contains reviews of books in ten categories: teaching principles and practice; source books; composition, writing, rhetoric; language; potry and prose; drama; criticism; mass media/general studies; multi-media kits; and the retarded reader. Also included are an index of advertisers, an index of the books reviewed (listed by title), and a list of the reviewers» (3M) 'V S! DE PANIMENT dF 141ALTW, EDUCATION I WELFARE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION 4 .4.4 Guide to glish Boob 1974 minutes reading ft) the class. . some time improvising drama. .. some time hearing the less able readers and making sure that the children get opportunities to talk in a constructive way. It should he possible to give the children the chance to write each daya variety of "types" of writing, fluor the mechanical to the personal. On many days the teacher will want to spend a brief period drawing the attention of a section of the class (occasionally the whole class) to a point of construction which they may not be too sure about. In addition. a good deal of time will be carried out in projects and topic work'. In general, Tucker is assuming that English is not a separate time-tabled subject, but is taught in healthy relation to other school pursuits. In one sense there is nothing new in this; in other senses, it is new and even alarming to some people. Teaching English in the Middle Years hacks up its general approach with one of the hest and hest-annotated lists of hooks and other relevant resources that I have ever seen. Dr Just's pamphlet defends examinations on the grounds that education is concerned with knowledge, that knowledge is info;mation which (somehow) generates skill, and that 'academic justice' is-best done by the public examination of knowledge by subject experts, Is it or Is it not strange that in Australia in 1973 a body sponsored b,' prominent academics (in English. especially) would produce a piece tha. in ideology shows no significant advance on that of Mr Gradgrind? Dr Just stands for academic standards, he claims, yet there is no evidence in his work or any acquaintance with the established academic work on knowledge and its assessment. On knowledge, there is no recognition of the various forms and levels of knowledge as they have been analysed by Hirst or Gagne and many others, who have collectively exposed the fallacies of simplistic thinking in this area. On assessment, Dr Just reveals no acquaintance with the scholarly work on the grave problems of :.ampling and validity and reliability, Reference to even one major study, English and its Assessment (Milling Keepes and Rechter, A.C.E.R.), might have led Dr Just to at least begin to grapple with the very difficult issues he so readily glosses over. Dr Just's negative case is hardly better than his positive one. He lumps. together all reformers or critics under a single anathema. Mild souls who put the casewith some evidencethat some form of cumulative assessment with moderation might he more valid and do less harm. are identified with the rathag fringe of the left. (That there is a rathag fringe of the right is not noticed.) Weak though the positive and negative cases are, as put, these are strong compared to the relationship of the argument to mundane realties such us the sheer logistics of examinations, Dr Just laments the demise of public examinations below. as well wi at, matriculation level. He has not taken the trouble to find out such facts as that if a three-hour English paper were still set at the N.S.W. School Certificate. 75,000 or so papers could only he marked by con. cripting all qualified persons and locking them up for over a month. he next month, of course, they would have to stay locked up to mark the Higher School Certificate. The trend to remain at school for the 'aumination years' makes one consider Teaching Principles caul Practice 5 whether similar problems will not soon be upon Higher School Certificates, tooif this is not already the case. In short, examinations are for an elite, if for no other reason that when everyone takes them, there are not enough experts to mark them. No doubt-there is a conservative case for examinations and all they imply, which would be worth putting. But Dr Just's case is not it, unless it is considered th:'t ill-informed dogmatism, indiscriminate condemnation of opposing views and the ignoring of relevant historical changes arc satisfactory forms of debate. I believe that there are many Dr Justs in the environment of English in this and other countries. 1 fear that English has developed its new and better ways too much internally, with too me effort to explain and justify them to others. The evidence is, as James Britton asserts in New Movements. that 'There is no future in trying to go back to the educational manners and methods that worked forty years ago'. But has the evidence been put adequately to the public, and even to the profession? Some of the books at least try. but they nifty he preaching to the converted.G.L.

Secular Learning in Anglo-Saxon England: Exploring the Vernacular, 2012

Back in the days when the Dictionary of Old English was still in its infancy and the authors vainly hoped to finish it 'within the coming twenty or thirty years', 1 Old English texts were fixed into six categories: poetry, prose, interlinear glosses, Latin-Old English glossaries, runic inscriptions, and vernacular inscriptions in the Latin alphabet. 2 The prose texts cover a wide range of topics, 3 of which the cluster of computus, medical texts, other scientific texts and folklore -complemented with items such as prose romance and vision literature, prose dialogues, proverbs, and the translation of the Elucidarium -roughly equates to prose of secular learning in the vernacular, as the topic was delineated by Hollis and Wright in 1992. 4 The present volume grew out of our curiosity to discover how the study of Old English secular learning had evolved in the two decades that separate the present from Hollis and Wright's Old English Prose of Secular Learning. The latter observed that '[a]ny classification of texts is bound to cut across other well-established groupings'. 5 With this caveat in mind, the present volume abandons the division between prose and poetry, omits materials that were included in Hollis and Wright's classification and includes materials that were omitted. We invited fellow Anglo-Saxonists to contribute to our volume, and we asked Stephanie Hollis to write the opening essay. The result is a book that presents research in the following disciplines of secular learning: 1 H. Gneuss, 'Guide to the Editing and Preparation of Texts for the Dictionary of Old English', A Plan for the Dictionary of Old English, ed. R. Frank and A. Cameron, Toronto OE Ser. 2 (Toronto, 1973), 9-24, at 23. 2 A. Cameron, 'A List of Old English Texts', A Plan for the Dictionary of Old English, ed. Frank and A. Cameron, 25-306, at 26. 3 Ibid. 44. Some of these topics also feature in the glosses section, e.g., interlinear glosses to prognostics (ibid. 228). 4 Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 1-4. 5 Ibid. 2.

2018

OLD ENGLISH (OCCASIONALLY known as "AngloSaxon") is the earliest recorded form of English, surviving in texts written between the late seventh and the early twelfth century A.D. The language is very different from any variety of modern or even later-medieval English, and is not intelligible to any modern speaker without study. It is known from some 412 surviving manuscripts (handwritten books) and from a large number of single-sheet legal documents, "charters," which were either written during the Old English period or are later copies of documents originally written then. During the Old and Middle English periods, most Old English manuscripts were produced and preserved in the libraries of medieval ecclesiastical institutions, mostly monasteries and nunneries. The survival of Old English texts was therefore dependent upon the survival of these libraries through the vagaries of dissolution, war, and fire. A few such libraries have survived to the present day: mos...

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders and/or settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually became predominant. The English language underwent extensive change in the Middle Ages. Written Old English of AD 1000 is similar in vocabulary and grammar to other old Germanic languages such as Old High German and Old Norse, and completely unintelligible to modern speakers, while the modern language is already largely recognizable in written Middle English of AD 1400. The transformation was caused by two further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. A large proportion of the modern English vocabulary comes directly from Anglo-Norman. Close contact with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English. However, these changes had not reached South West England by the 9th century AD, where Old English was developed into a full-fledged literary language. The Norman invasion occurred in 1066, and when literary English rose anew in the 13th century, it was based on the speech of London, much closer to the centre of Scandinavian settlement. Technical and cultural vocabulary was largely derived from Old Norman, with particularly heavy influence in the church, the courts, and government. With the coming of the Renaissance, as with most other developing European languages such as German and Dutch, Latin and Ancient Greek supplanted Norman and French as the main source of new words. Thus, English developed into very much a "borrowing" language with an enormously disparate vocabulary.

Language and Literature 25: 302-305, 2016

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0963947016660231

2020

English Vocabulary

From Old English to Standard English, 1998

Preface to the second edition x Acknowledgements xiv Symbols xv Texts and facsimiles xvi THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IS BROUGHT TO BRITAIN 9 2.1 Roman Britain 9 2.2 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 9 2.3 How the English language came to Britain 12 OLD ENGLISH (I) 21 3.1 Written Old English 21 3.2 Dialects and political boundaries 35 3.3 Danish and Norwegian Vikings 37 3.4 Effects of Viking settlement on the English language 46 3.5 The Norman Conquest 51 4.1 The language of Old English poetry 55 4.2 OE prose 60 4.3 OE grammar 65 v Contents 4.4 Latin loan-words in OE 71 4.5 ON loan-words in OE 4.6 Early French loan-words 5 FROM OLD ENGLISH TO MIDDLE ENGLISH 5.1 The evidence for linguistic change 5.2 The Norman Conquest and the English language 5.3 The earliest 12th-century Middle English text 5.4 The book called Ormulum 5.5 12th-century loan-words 6 EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH-12th CENTURY 6.1 Evidence of language change from late OE to early ME in La3amon's Brut 6.2 The Owl & the Nightingale 7 EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH-13th CENTURY 7.1 The Fox and the Wolf 7.2 The South English Legendary 7.3 A guide for anchoresses 7.4 Lyric poems 7.5 The Bestiary 7.6 The Lay of Havelok the Dane 7.7 Early 13th-century loan-words 1200-1249 8 NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN TEXTS COMPARED 8.1 Cursor Mundia history of the world 8.2 Later 13th-century loan-words 1250-1299 161 9 THE 14th CENTURY-SOUTHERN AND KENTISH DIALECTS 9.1 The dialect areas of Middle English 9.2 How to describe dialect differences 9.3 A South Eastern or Kentish dialect 9.4 An early South West dialect 9.5 A later 14th-century South West dialect 9.6 Loan-words 1300-1319 10 THE 14th CENTURY-NORTHERN DIALECTS 10.1 A 14th-century Scots English dialect 10.2 Another Northern dialect-York 191 10.3 The York Plays 10.4 Northern and Midland dialects compared 10.5 Chaucer and the Northern dialect 10.6 Loan-words 1320-1339 vi Contents II THE 14th CENTURY-WEST MIDLANDS DIALECTS 11.1 A NorthWest Midlands dialect-Sir Gawayn and jJe Grene Kn3t 207 11.2 A SouthWest Midlands dialect-Piers Plowman 215 11.3 Loan-words 1340-1359 223 12 THE 14th CENTURY-EAST MIDLANDS AND LONDON DIALECTS 224 12.1 The origins of present-day Standard English 224 12.2 A SouthEast Midlands dialect-Mandeville's Travels 225 12.3 The London dialect-Thomas Usk 227 12.4 Loan-words 1360-1379 229 13 THE LONDON DIALECT-CHAUCER, LATE 14th CENTURY 13.1 Chaucer's prose writing 231 13.2 Chaucer's verse 236 13.3 Editing a text 239 13.4 Loan-words 1380-1399 14 EARLY MODERN ENGLISH I-THE 15th CENTURY 247