Uniwersytet Rzeszowski - strona 13

DIALECTS OF MIDDLE ENGLISH MidE is, one scholar has written, “parexcellence the dialectical phase of English,in the sense that while dialects have been spoken at all periods, it was in MidE that divergent local usage was normal indicated in writing” (Strang, p. 225). This fact means that we can use...

Four ways in which Old English made new words: Determinative compounding: common to all the Germanic languages, this kind of compounding forms new words by yoking together two normally independent nouns, e.g. Earhring (earring); bocstaef (book-staff, i.e., letter); or an adjective and a noun, e.g....

Norman French period of borrowing (11th-12th century): Religious terms: prophet, saint, Baptist, miracle, paradise, sacrament, etc. Social and political terms: prince, dame, master, court, rent, poor, rich, prison, crown, purple, prove, etc. Te...

Old English Dialects North of the Humber River was Northumbrian. This was the dialect that became the standard of a great religious and literary culture in the 8th and 9th centuries. In the middle of the country, between the Humber river to the north and the Thames to the south, was Mercia, a loos...

SAMUEL JOHNSON AND HIS DICTIONARIES I. The origins of lexicography are relatively recent. A. The increases in vocabulary during the 16 and 17c provoked the rise of handbooks of words. B. The early dictionaries offered lists of so-called “hard words: 1) Bullokar's Expositor (1616): words from logic,...

THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH Where does American English begin? Early settlements were points of linguistic entry: New England: 1. Boston, Massachusetts, Bay Colony (early 17c) 2. New London (early 18c) Middle Atlantic 1. New York (founded as New Amsterdam; seized by the English from the Du...

The Beginnings of English language English emerges out of a mix of Germanic languages and dialects in the period roughly around the 6th and 7th centuries. Our earliest recorded documents in the British Isles are from the late 7th and early 8th...

The loss of Inflections The term that describes the falling together of the old system of case endings is syncretism During the period from about 1000 to 1200, the following things were happening to English: Noun case endings were simplified o...

THE SCOPE OF MODERN ENGLISH: CHANGES IN SYNTAX AND GRAMMAR The shape and texture of our speech can be found in various developments of the 16 and 17c. One such example is the verb “do”. In ModE “do” has 4 uses dating from this period: 1. As a full verb, meaning to perform an action - I DID this. It...

Two broad periods of word-borrowing in Old English: Continental: These are words borrowed before OE split off from the parent Germanic languages during the first centuries A.D. They were words from the old Roman Latin vocabulary, e.g., architectural and civic phenomena. For example, the word str...