NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution - Volume 73, Issue 2, 2020

Abstract

Taylor (2014) observes that some of the factual claims made in Allen (1980), the most thorough examination of free relatives in Old English to date, are not entirely correct. Taylor presents some examples that Allen’s analysis of Old English free relatives does not account for and proposes an alternative analysis in which the relative pronoun can be internal to the relative clause and the case of the pronoun is determined by the case hierarchy proposed by Harbert (2007) for Gothic. This corpus-based study supplies new data showing that while Taylor’s relative-internal analysis is needed for some examples, the evidence does not support the suggested case hierarchy except in regulating optional case attraction. Latin influence may account for examples that do not fit the usual patterns.

Abstract

One of the earliest changes affecting Western Romance before the end of the Roman Empire was the lenition of intervocalic *p, *t, *k to *b, *d, *g. We find its effects in a number of Romance loanwords in West Germanic. The word for ‘market’ has not played a role in this discussion because it is often attested with t in the West Germanic languages. Still, there are strong indications that the word was borrowed into Germanic as *markadu after the lenition of intervocalic t in Romance. Its phonological make-up is comparable to that of Latin vocatus, which was borrowed into Germanic as *fogadu.

Abstract

This article contributes to Old English Lexicography with the lemmatisation of five Old English class VII verbs. The scope is restricted to ūtgangan, wiðhealdan, oferscēadan, onbefeallan and ongangan, for which very little information can be gathered from the available lexicographical sources. Lemmatisation is a pending task because there is not a complete list with all the attested forms by dictionary word, and because the available corpora are unlemmatised. The methodology focuses on the manual revision of the inflectional forms (retrieved from the DOEC) using lexicographical and textual sources with the aim of providing the citations together with their translation into Present-Day English. As a result, this work provides insights on building dictionary entries for these verbs, including the list of inflectional forms attested in the corpus, the meaning definition, and the morphology of the word formation. The entries for these lemmas, if listed by the dictionaries, are often incomplete, but more importantly, they are not based on a lemmatised corpus.

Abstract

The use of basic word lists has long been common in the fields of second language acquisition and language typology. The application to the study of mutual intelligibility between closely related languages on the other hand has never gained much traction. This article will analyse the degree of mutual intelligibility between the vocabularies of Old English (Anglian) and Old Norse (Old Icelandic) with the use of the Leipzig-Jakarta List which ranks vocabulary by their resistance to borrowing. The entries were transliterated to the International Phonetic Alphabet and truncated so that only the word-roots remained. The entries were then compared using a rule-set based on phonetic deviations, the so-called Levenshtein Distance and a method derived from it called ALINE. The study finds a relatively low phonetic distance between the lists and concludes that they are overall close enough to be mutually intelligible.

Abstract

The runic inscriptions of the older period contain a series of terms referring to the notion of speed, agility and alertness in a broader sense. Most of these forms that occur on runestones are conveniently explained in terms of bynames and individual names (cf. Brylla 1993). The paper explores the structure of this lexical field which has two major sub-groups: (1) Weapon names designating attack and swift motion, and (2) Personal names and bynames invoking the notions of speed, travel and alertness. Subgroup 1 includes East Germanic material, whereas subgroup 2 seems to be restricted to the Northwest Germanic linguistic territory. The recently discovered Rakkestad runestone from eastern Norway affirms the relevance of this interpretation of personal names and bynames. The paper argues that this linguistic discussion is of socio-cultural importance in an overarching perspective of Early Norse society.

This article reviews Gemination, Lenition, and Vowel Lengthening. On the History of Quantity in Germanic

This article reviews A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages