[MR] From Whence Came the English Language (Fwd: Aoife-Links Digest, Vol 2, Issue 1)

[SNSpies at aol.com]

Today's  Topics:

1. Links: From Whence our English language hails  (Aoife)


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Message:  1
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 08:49:54 -0400
From: "Aoife"  <aoife at scatoday.net>
Subject: [Aoife-Links] Links: From Whence our  English language hails
To: <aoife-links at scatoday.net>
Message-ID:  <004e01c4bdb5$ca65dca0$2a75bacc at pcbz6mpmt4r04r>
Content-Type:  text/plain;    charset="iso-8859-1"

Greetings, my Faithful  Readers!

This edition of the Links list was the brainchild of Iustinos  Tekton (Called
Justin), publisher of SCAtoday. He sent me a post by someone  named  Jen on
the SCA-Bards list (the topic was alliteration), and a  Links List was born.
In fact, the first few links are Jen's, so Jen,  wherever you are, THANKS!

Please enjoy this list on the origins of the  Modern English Language (which
is really a Germanic Language at it's  roots). If English word history isn't
your bag, however, scroll down to the  end where you will find dictionaries
for both Old Icelandic and Old  Scotts.

As always, please feel free to forward this list wherever it  will find
interest, but please remove my email address first. I have put my  address
below in a sort of non-readable format for those machines that  crawl
webmessages looking for valid addresses. On this new address I have  already
received my first virus disguised as a bounced message---so let's  try to
keep a good thing going and NOT spread germs  :)

Cheers

Aoife
aoife at scatoday dot net

Dame Aoife  Finn of Ynos Mon
Canton of Riverouge
Barony of the Endless  Hills
Kingdom of Aethelmearc

ROBERT CAWDREY'S
A TABLE  ALPHABETICAL (1604)
an old-spelling edition of STC 4884  (An Early  Dictionary)
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/cawdrey/cawdrey0.html#htmltable
(Site  Excerpt) Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, first printed in 1604,
is  generally regarded to be the first fully developed representative of  the
monolingual dictionary in English. For each of the 2543 headwords  contained
in its first edition, Cawdrey provided a concise definition --  the standard
entry rarely exceeded more than a few words, usually synonyms  -- and he
marked those words thought to be of French or Greek origin; in  some cases,
he also marked those words which were a "kind of" a larger  group.

Bartleby.com: Changes in the Language to the Days of Chaucer.§  11. Words
adopted from  French.
http://www.bartleby.com/211/1911.html
(Site Excerpt) In the  Peterborough Chronicle written about 1154, the French
words amount to  nearly a score. Their character is significant. They include
emperice  empress, cuntesse countess (of Anjou), curt court (king Henry II
"held  mycel curt" at London in 1154), dubbian to dub a knight, prison,
privilege,  rente, tenserie (the name of an impost). We are told that king
Henry II  "dide god iustice and makede pais (peace)."

Word Origins: A (Very)  Brief History of the English  Language
http://www.wordorigins.org/histeng.htm
(Site Excerpt--and a  note that we shouldn't forget "fadir" in Old Norse :)
The influence of the  original Indo-European language, designated
proto-Indo-European, can be  seen today, even though no written record of it
exists. The word for  father, for example, is vater in German, pater in
Latin, and pitr in  Sanskrit. These words are all cognates, similar words in
different  languages that share the same root.

Martha Barnette's Funwords (the  origin of words--note the link is to the
alphabetical list of word and  their origins)
http://www.funwords.com/archive.htm
(Site Excerpt)  accismus (ak-SIZZ-muss)  The pretended refusal of something
that is  actually desired very much. Experts in the art of rhetoric use
accismus to  refer to a statement that feigns disinterest. There's a famous
instance of  accismus early in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," when Caesar
gives the  impression that he's reluctant to accept the crown. A more
everyday example  might be: "Why no, I couldn't possibly have that last bite
of your fallen  chocolate souffle with hot fudge sauce." It's from the Greek
akkismos,  which means "coyness," or "affectation."  "Really now, Gerald,
your  accismus is hardly persuasive."

Old English at the University of  Virginia
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/
See Escespially the practice  sentences link (with sound files)  at:
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/Guide.Readings/PracticeA.html
(Site  Excerpt) This site contains resources for students of Old English at
the  University of Virginia and elsewhere, including texts and  exercises,
information about Introduction to Old English, the new textbook  by the
creator of this web site (with a link to the free on-line version),  and
links to a selection of on-line resources. Students everywhere are  invited
to make free use of these pages.

Georgetown University: Old  English
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/oe/old_english.html
(Site  Excerpt) An index to electronic editions of Old English  texts,
translations, and images of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts available on the  Web.

AWRITAN ON ENGLISC (SUNY  Rochester)
http://www.rochester.edu/englisc/
An e-list for composition  in Old English.

Roots of English An Etymological Dictionary by Prof.  Eugene Cotter, Seton
Hall  University
http://pirate.shu.edu/%7ecottereu/rootsof.htm
(Site Excerpt)  Roots of English is a free software package developed by Dr.
Cotter
at  Seton Hall University. The software was created using Asymetrix's
Toolbook,  but it is self-contained and packages as a simple, standard
Windows  Installation program for the PC. (sorry, no Mac version).
The software will  help you find the Greek and Latin roots of thousands
of words in the  English language, and  the hypertext links make it fast
and easy to  use. The Dictionary also contains background on the history
of English and  details on the sources of individual words.

The Forest of  Rhetoric
silva  rhetoricae
http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm
(Site Excerpt)  This online rhetoric, provided by Dr. Gideon Burton of
Brigham Young  University, is a guide to the terms of classical and
renaissance rhetoric.  Sometimes it is difficult to see the forest (the big
picture) of rhetoric  because of the trees (the hundreds of Greek and Latin
terms naming figures  of speech, etc.) within rhetoric.

English 419 (Historyof  English)
http://asstudents.unco.edu/faculty/tbredehoft/UNCclasses/ENG419/OE419.html
(Site  Excerpt) Old English (OE) is the general term linguists apply to  the
Germanic language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain  from
roughly the time they conquered the island in the fifth century to the  time
they were themselves conquered (by the French-speaking Normans) in  the
eleventh century. As with all languages which are no longer spoken,  Old
English is known only from written sources and from what we are able  to
deduce about it from other languages, both related tongues like Old  High
German (OHG), Old Norse (ON), and Gothic (Go), and more recent  descendants,
such as Middle English (ME) and Modern English (ModE). Old  English is
usually taught as a foreign language nowadays; it is different  enough from
the language we speak to be completely unintelligible, most of  the time.

Old English Riddles
Se Sceawere-stede
by Prof. Andrew  Orchard
http://sp.uconn.edu/~mwh95001/riddles/riddles.html
Some  resources for the class (alas, no riddles!)

Instant Old English--a  phrasebook
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/englisc/instant-oe.html
(Site  Excerpt) Ic grete þe.[I greet you (sing.).]
Ic þe þancas doThank you [I  give you (sing.) thanks]


Hwæt!
Old English in  Context
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/hwaet/
(Site Excerpt)  Hwæt! This is the first word of Beowulf, where translators
render it  variously as Lo, Listen, Hear me, and Yes. There is in fact no
translation  equivalent in Modern English, and using a dictionary isn't much
help. To  understand this word, you must see how it is used in a number of
contexts:  i.e., in Old English texts. It is the premise of the present book
that all  words in another language ought to be learned in context, and that
they can  be learned in this way.

The Dictionary of Old English
Centre for  Medieval Studies
University of  Toronto
http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/
(Site Excerpt--Word of the  Week--note there is a link to download a font
that is old-english  compatible)  geomor-frod ---sad in (one's) old age, sad
and  old

A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue
from the twelfth  century to the end of the  seventeenth
http://www.arts.ed.ac.uk/dost/
(Site Excerpt) The Dictionary  of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) is a
comprehensive dictionary of Older  Scots, the language of Lowland Scotland
from the early Middle Ages to the  seventeenth century. It was inspired by
Sir William Craigie who was its  first editor. From 1955 to 1983 his work was
continued and greatly expanded  by Professor A.J.Aitken as Senior Editor and
from 1983 to 1985 by Dr  J.A.C.Stevenson. Together with the Scottish National
Dictionary, whose  period of coverage is 1700 to the present day, DOST
completes the record of  Scots from its beginnings to modern times. It is
based on upwards of  1,000,000 quotations excerpted by 80 volunteers from
more than 2000 printed  and manuscript sources.

A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910,  551 pp), by Geir T. Zoëga
http://www.northvegr.org/zoega/index.php
This  site is an electrnic image index of Old Icelandic Words, from an
original  publication (print). CLicking on a letter takes you to a  list  of
words.  Clicking in a word will take you to an image of the page  upon which
the word appears int he publication.

Fontes  Anglo-Saxonici
A Register of Written Sources Used by Anglo-Saxon  Authors
http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk/
(Site Excerpt) Fontes  Anglo-Saxonici: A Register of Written Sources Used by
Authors in  Anglo-Saxon England is intended to identify all written sources
which were  incorporated, quoted, translated or adapted anywhere in English
or Latin  texts which were written in Anglo-Saxon England (i.e. England to
1066), or  by Anglo-Saxons in other countries.

Anonymous Old English Homilies: A  Preliminary Bibliography of Source
Studies,  Richard Rawlinson Center  for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript
Research, Medieval  Institute
Western Michigan  University
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/homilies/
(Site  Excerpt) This monograph is the first in a series of bibliographies to
be  prepared as part of the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici project. The primary
purpose  of the series is to aid the compilers of the 'Register of Written
Sources  used by Authors in Anglo-Saxon England,' by providing details  of
potentially relevant publications already in the public  domain.