NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution - Volume 68, Issue 2, 2015

The inscription on the Vimose buckle has been the subject of a long and diverse historiography. Taken in the light of early runic epigraphic typology, however, the inscription appears to preserve an early example of Germanic ritual language. Rather than a product of Romanisation (as archaeologists have assumed for similar votive bog finds), the inscription on the Vimose buckle is better understood in terms of the linguistic anthropology of dedicatory epigraphs. The Vimose text shows clear signs of being a thoroughly native expression, a linguistically archaic inscription which alliterates, features pro-drop, verb-final word order and athematic verbal inflection.

This article offers a critical overview of earlier readings and interpretations of the elder-futhark inscription from the Nydam axehandle, which are found wanting, and proposes instead a new reading and interpretation. The inscriptions from the Køge/Sjælland bracteate, Gallehus horn, Kårstad stone, and Istaby stone, as well as the patronymic use of the suffix -ijaz, are also discussed.

Explanations of the long ī in the Old Gutnish tīa ‘toe’ (>ModGu täiå) have been put forward that posit different ablaut grades than the Proto-Germanic *taihwōn which underlies the forms found in other Germanic languages. This is because it was thought the Old Gutnish form could not reflect the standard proto-form. This paper concludes on the basis of the parallel development of *slaihwōn ‘sloe berry’, which appears as ModGu släiå, that long ī can in fact continue the Proto-Germanic sequence *-aihw- as the result of regular sound development.

Im Anschluss an mein Buch Lautverschiebungen in den germanischen Sprachen (2005) verteidigt dieser Aufsatz die Rekonstruktion der Aspiration als bewegendes Moment bei der Ersten und der Zweiten Lautverschiebung. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung über das Vorkommen der Aspiration in den modernen germanischen Sprachen und Dialekten zeigt, dass die Aspiration ohne Zweifel eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Entwicklung des germanischen Konsonantismus gespielt hat. Fast alle modernen germanischen Dialekte, nicht nur die hochdeutschen, haben also in irgendeiner Form an der Zweiten Lautverschiebung teilgenommen. Dialekte, die keine Aspiration aufweisen, beruhen entweder auf Substrateinwirkungen oder bewahren noch den Zustand aus der Zeit vor der Zweiten Lautverschiebung. Besonders einschlägig in diesem Zusammenhang ist der Fall des Niederländischen, das für seine Aspirationslosigkeit bekannt ist.

A split infinitive construction denotes a type of syntactic tmesis in which a word or a phrase, especially an adverb, occurs between the infinitive marker to and the verb. The early instances of the split infinitive in English date back to the 13th century, when a personal pronoun, an adverb or two or more words could appear in such environments (Visser 1963-1973 II: 1038-1045). This paper investigates the split infinitive in Middle English with the following objectives: a) to trace the origin and development of the construction; b) to analyse the nature of the splitting adverb in terms of its etymology and lexico-grammatical features; and c) to examine the prosodic patterns contributing to the acceptance of particular splitting combinations. The source of evidence comes from the following corpora: Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, Penn-Parsed Corpora of Historical English, Middle English Medical Texts, Middle English Grammar Corpus, and the Malaga Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose.