Archives for February 2008
So, I’m trying to earn my salt a little bit on this blog, and since I’m not really capable of doing some sort of in depth linguistic analysis I came up with this instead.
I think it’s important to remember that all of this language change and development is going on in a historical context, and [...]
We will be meeting for class on Feb. 14. My paleography workshop was canceled at the last minute. See you then.
Being a probable politics major, I was interested in the interplay between language change and political power as described in the Crystal reading (Ch. 2 & 3). It seems that linguistic dominance and politics are inexorably linked in the history of the English language. The extent to which words were integrated seems to rely heavily [...]
It’s almost certain that the various dialects of OE were mutually intelligible despite phonetic and morphological differences. It’s equally certain that the language that became OE was very similar to the Germanic dialects spoken on the Continent (i.e. Frankish), but that over time OE diverged from German spoken on the Continent and in Scandinavia. But [...]
Reading about the four main dialects of Old English that have been “established” by linguists, I couldn’t help thinking about how slim the margin was that gave us West Saxon OE instead of some other form. According to Chapter 2 in Crystal (and elsewhere, I think, in Freeborn), the West Saxon dialect is the best-studied [...]
So I personally thought that the chapter we read for Tuesday was kind of confusing in terms of IPA stuff, so I figured it might be good if I uploaded some IPA charts I’ve used in phonology classes before so you guys who haven’t taken a million linguistics classes can see the other forms of [...]
Geoffrey claimed his authority from an unnamed (and probably mythical) “ancient British book in the British language” given to him by the Archdeacon of Oxford. He never names the author of this book, nor has anything which could plausibly be identified as this alleged book survived written in either Latin or Welsh. Yet it [...]