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Dictionaries
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- AHD:
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
- Descriptive dictionary used in our course for information on contemporary
English in U.S. An electronic version of the fourth edition is available
through the Belk Library Electronic Resources webpage. Entries include
headword (spelling and syllabification), pronunciation information with
non-IPA "user friendly" symbols, list of inflected form spellings,
senses arranged by main meaning (not historical like OED
listings), occasional quotes, short etymological note at end of entry,
and occasionally special Usage Notes or historical discussions of special
words. The CD-Rom basic search function covers headwords; word hunter
function provides search of full article except for phonological entry.
The electronic and book edition have an appendix of Indo-European
roots, sections of which appear at the end of the listing for individual
words; these entries for roots show English words that have developed
from them and the etymons in other IE languages .
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- OED: Oxford
English Dictionary
- Comprehensive descriptive historical dictionary of English. Entries
give headword (current U.K. spelling), pronunciation (usually British
Received Pronunciation) in IPA symbols, form history giving variant
spellings over time (2nd edition numbers=teenth century [4=fourteenth century]),
considerable etymological information, senses arranged chronologically,
large numbers of examples of word's use over history of English. The
on-line version
allows word (headword only), text (the entire dictionary), quotation
(only text in quotation examples), and etymology (only text in etymological
entry) of the twenty volumes of the second edition and its supplements.
Systems
and Structures in Language
- Competence:
- Speaker's knowledge of language rules and structures that allow her
to interpret and generate utterances. We have competence in Modern English.
Our knowledge is different from the competence of an Old English speaker.
- Arbitrary:
- Term used to describe the non-universal differing ways that different
languages handle representation and rules. For example, human beings
do not by genetic necessity have a common term for 'dog' or a common
way of forming plurality; arbitrary forms develop within separate speech
communities.
- Conventional:
- Term used to describe the accepting of a shared set of rules by a
speech community. English dog 'dog' is a convention our speech
community shares. Using /z/ to pluralize it is a common morphological
convention we share. Human languages are largely arbitrary and conventional.
- Exernal history
- Events in social and cultural life that affect language. Conversion to Christianity led to the Anglo-Saxons using the Latin alphabet for writing and the borrowing into Old English of a set of religious, educational, and scientific terms from Latin.
- Internal history
- Change in the structure of language over time. Example: External
historical events: The Anglo-Saxons separate themselves from other West
Germanic speakers by migrating to Britain. Internal historical change:
Sound changes occur in the transmission of this WGmc dialect that distinquish
it as Old English, e.g., /sk/ becomes the sh-sound (I don't have
the long-s symbol [or the s with a wedge used in Principles]
in my font inventory for HTML pages).
- Phonology:
- Sound structure of a language. Grimm's Law describes a set of phonological
changes in the development of IE consonants to Gmc. We noted stress on initial syllable as a phonological change in the Germanic languages. McGowan has given a rough rule for transcribing OE vowels: Use the phonetic symbol resembling the letter on our OE vowel diagram (the trapezoid we filled in three times in class).
- Orthography:
- The writing system of a language. OE orthography developed from the
adoption of the Latin or Roman alphabet to represent English sounds. IN an OE word, all graphs (letters) match a sound; there are no "silent" letters.
- Lexicon:
- Set of words and bound morphemes in a language. A literate speaker
understands the phonological, orthographic, and semantic shape (pronunciation,
spelling, meaning) of these items and also their morphological and grammatical
characteristics. Modern English has a cosmopolitan vocabulary, a large
lexicon including many morphemes borrowed from other languages, particularly
French and Latin, but OE had a primarily Germanic lexicon with much
dependence on word formation processes such as compounding and derivation.
- Morphology:
- Rules of word formation including compounding, derivation, and inflecting.
Old English morphology included a much more complicated inflectional
system than Modern English. Using McGowan's set of paradigms allows
you to approximate the morphological competence of an OE speaker.
- Morpheme:
- Smallest meaning unit in the formation of a word. Free morphemes may
occur as independent words; bound morphemes always occur within a word
attached to a stem or base word.
- Derivation:
- Word formation process in which an affix that is not an inflection
is attached to a stem or base word. Derivation changes the meaning of
the word or its part of speech classification. E.g., manly produces
an adjective from a noun; unmanly negates the meaning of manly.
- Derivational affix:
- Bound morpheme that carries semantic meaning or changes part of speech
of root to which it is attached. Old English added the affix -nes
'condition of having the property of' to the adjective ðri
to form the noun ðrines 'Trinity' to handle a new Christian
cultural concept. (Inflections are distinguished from derivational affixes;
inflections carry grammatical meaning and don't change the part of speech.)
- Inflection:
- Bound morpheme that expresses grammatical information. E.g., -as,
an important inflection of a-stem strong masculine verbs in OE
expresses nominative or accusative case and plural number; it is attached
to nouns to mark that case and number. This inflection is, in fact,
the ancestor of our ModE plural inflection for nouns.
- Synthetic language:
- Language building meaning and grammatical relations into single word
particularly by the use of inflections. OE is synthetic and highly inflected.
Fennel also calls this characteristic "fusional" (59).
- Analytic language:
- Language that mainly uses word order and function words (prepositions,
auxiliary verbs, pronouns) to signal grammatical relations, rather than
depending heavily on inflections. Modern English is analytic, isolating,
and lightly inflected.
- Grammar or Syntax:
- Rules that order arrangement of words in a sentence. OE definite article
agreement is a grammatical rule. Old English grammar was synthetic;
Modern English grammar is analytic.
- Semantics:
- Rules about the meaning of words and utterances. Because of conversion
to Christianity, an event in external history, an Anglo-Saxon understood
god 'supernatural being' with a new meaning, 'one God'; a semantic
change had occurred in the internal history of English.
- Pragmatics:
- Rules governing the social use of language. To determine how these work in earlier forms of English is difficult because of lack of evidence.
Pre-English
Language History
- Indo-European:
- Prehistoric "parent" language from which a large set of European and
western Asian languages developed. Sir William Jones proposed this relationship
in 1786 after observing common elements between Sanskrit, Latin, and
Greek. Included in this family are the Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Hellenic,
Balto-Salvic, Indo-Iranian, and other language families. Not included
are three European languages (Finnish, Hungarian, and Basque), African
languages, North American Native languages, and many Asian languages
such as Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese. Using the comparative method
to reconstruct the proto-IE lexicon, linguists have argued for south
central Europe (southern Russia) as the home of the Indo-Europeans before
the migrations that developed separate descendant languages. An appendix
of The American Heritage Dictionary give many
of these reconstructed roots, and its CD-ROM version, a root is sometimes
give after the entry of a PDE word that developed from it.
- Cognate words:
- Words with a common ancestor. Cognates allow reconstruction of Proto-IE
and Proto-Germanic. Often Merriam-Webster uses "akin to" to show cognates.
The AHD IE roots entries show cognates.
- Germanic:
- Indo-European family to which English, German, and Scandinavian languages
(minus Finnish) belong and which is distinguished by first syllable
stress, characteristic vowel changes, the First Consonant Shift or Grimm's
Law, two-tense verb system (present/past), use of the dental suffix
to signal 'past' in weak verbs, strong and weak adjectives, and a common
distinctive vocabulary.
- West Germanic:
- Branch of Germanic that includes German and English. North Germanic
includes Scandinavian languages; East Germanic includes Gothic, the
language of Ulfilla's biblical translations. Comparing common early
forms of these languages allows linguists to reconstruct Proto-Germanic.
- Anglo-Frisian:
- West Germanic branch including English and Frisian, the WGmc language
some linguists argue as most closely related to Old English. The cattle
farmer speaker in The Mother Tongue illustrates common vocabulary
between Frisian and English.
- Italic:
- IE branch including Latin and its Romance descendants. OLd English borrows some words from Latin. Later English
borrows considerable vocabulary from French and Latin, developments
of this family. Those borrowings show non-Grimm's Law developments of
certain consonants.
- Hellenic:
- IE branch including Greek.
- Celtic:
- IE branch including the language of the Britons and Gaelic languages
of Ireland and Scotland. OE borrows very little from the Celtic inhabitants of the island of Britain.
- Comparative linguistics:
- Method by which nineteenth-century researchers of Indo-European reconstructed
its lexicon, grammatical features, and phonology. Linguistic writing sometimes uses * to mark reconstructed forms that are not attested by written evidence.
Old
English Characteristics
- Old English:
- Form of English spoken and written between 449 and 1100 by the Anglo-Saxon
invader-settlers of Britain.
- Declension:
- Group sharing common inflections to which an OE noun or adjective
belongs. Each of the columns on the item-arrangement grammar shows a
declension's basic pattern. The largest noun declension in OE was the
a-stem strong masculine nouns.
- Case:
- Form of noun, pronoun, adjective, or definite article in OE that expresses
its function or agreement in a phrase. In working with OE case, we use
the Latinate terms nominative, accusative, dative,
and genitive.
- Nominative:
- OE case form of subjects and subject complements (predicate nominatives).
- Accusative:
- OE case form of direct objects.
- Dative:
- OE case form of indirect objects, some objects of prepositions, and
certain adverbial expressions.
- Genitive:
- OE case form of possessive nouns. (A few verbs in OE do take genitive
objects.) Modern English signals this relation with {S2}.
- Number:
- Grammatical category signaling singular or plural. Old English first
and second person pronouns have an additional number: dual.
- Dual:
- Special number classification for pairs in first person and second
person pronouns. The OE first person dual wit meant 'the two
of us' and [nominative case]; inc, the second person dual accusative
and dative, meant 'the two of you.'
- Late West Saxon:
- Old English dialect which because of the special position of Wessex
through King Alfred's defense against the Vikings and his revival of
learning develops as a kind of written standard of Old English. Other
OE dialects were Northumbrian, Mercian, and Kentish.
- Grammatical gender:
- Special marking of nouns which some linguists have labeled as masculine,
feminine, and neuter. Three OE words all meaning 'woman' cwen,
wifmann, and wif are marked as feminine, masculine, and
neuter in the system of grammatical gender. English moves to a system
of natural gender in Middle English, which we inherit in ModE.
- Agreement:
- A grammatical rule by which items in a phrase share grammatical meanings.
OE adjectives and definite articles agree with nouns in case, number,
and gender through their inflections. OE verbs have a more complicated
subject-verb agreement rule than the {S3}
of Modern English; they agree in person and number.
- A-stem strong masculine:
- Largest declension of OE nouns. From its genitive singular -es
develops the general ME -es and ModE {S2};
from its nominative-accusative plural -as develops ME -es
and ModE ModE {S1}. These
endings are attached to nouns from other declensions "by analogy."
- Analogy:
- Language change by which an inflection from one group is generalized
to affect members of other groups. E.g., a child develops the past tense
form knowed by analogy, giving this strong verb the characteristic
dental suffix of weak verbs, the larger class in English.
- Weak adjective:
- Declension of endings for adjectives preceded by a determiner in an
OE noun phrase.
- Strong adjective:
- Declension of adjective inflections for adjectives not preceded by
a determiner.
- Determiner:
- Articles, possessive adjectives, and demonstratives (this,
that, those, these in ModE) that can precede an
adjective in a noun phrase in English. Having a determiner makes an
adjective weak in its inflected forms.
- Person:
- Grammatical category expressing relation to speaker. First person
in Modern English includes I and we, pronouns of the speaker.
Second person includes you, the person spoken to. Third person
are the other pronouns and nouns. OE pronoun morphology has more forms
than ModE including some differences between dative and accusative,
three number categories in first and second person (singular, dual,
and plural), and native h-forms in the third person plural.
- Dental suffix:
- Combination with /d/ or /t/ that forms past tense inflections in weak
verbs in Germanic languages, including Old English.
- Strong verbs:
- Verbs that form past tense by a vowel change called vowel gradation
or ablaut. E.g., run, ran, run in Modern English.
OE had more strong verbs in its lexicon. Our item-arrangement grammar shows the forms of singan, a class-1 strong verb with characteristic vowel changes between present and past.
- Borrowing:
- Expanding the lexicon by introducing or adapting a word or morpheme
from another language. Borrowing has given Modern English a cosmopolitan
vocabulary; however, OE was more conservative in lexical expansion,
depending more on derivation, compounding, functional shift or conversion,
and semantic change to handle new cultural concepts. OE did borrow a little
from Celtic and some from ON and Latin. Middle English marks the development
of greater acceptance of borrowed morphemes in the lexicon.
- Old Norse:
- Language spoken by Scandinavian raider-settlers of Britain during
Old English period. Linguists hypothesize that OE and ON speakers could
communicate and that a number of ON words for common cultural items
were borrowed into OE and ME. The ModE th-forms of the third
person plural pronoun (they, their, them) were borrowed from
ON and replaced the OE "native" h-forms, and some linguists propose
that {S3} also develops
from ON, replacing the native -eth (OE -eð) inflection
in the third present singular verb. For English to borrow such common
function words and inflection is unusual; most function words and inflections
are native, i.e., developed from Old English.
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- Middle English
- Historical variety of English spoken, written, and sung in England
from 1100-1500. Major changes from OE are reduction of inflections
and large borrowings in the lexicon from French and Latin.
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