БЕЛОРУССКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ ПЕДАГОГИЧЕСКИЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

Хрестоматия по истории английского языка

составитель Зеленков В. В.

Введение 3

Old English 4

Analysis of Old English Text 4

Beowulf 6

Account on Ohthere’s Voyage 7

The Story of Isaac’s Deceit 9

Middle English 10

Analysis of Middle English Text 10

The Peterborough Chronicle 12

The Canterbury Tales 14

Grammar: Old English 16

Nouns 16

Adjectives 17

Pronouns 18

Verbs 19

Grammar: Middle English 20

Nouns 20

Adjectives 20

Personal pronouns 20

Glossary 21

Literature 36

Введение

Данное пособие предназначено для ознакомления студентов высших учебных заведений с историей английского языка и методами анализа древне- и среднеанглийских аутентичных текстов.

В пособие включены:

- отрывки из литературных памятников древне- и среднеанглийского периода;

- грамматический комментарий к наблюдаемым в текстах языковым явлениям;

- глоссарий, содержащий развернутые указания к словам, имеющимся в текстах;

- предисловия, содержащие историческую и филологическую информацию о представленных текстах.

Пособие разделено на четыре части, первые две из которых содержат сами тексты, комментарии к ним и образцы анализа для соответствующего периода. Третья часть содержит общий грамматический комментарий, четвертая – глоссарий.

Old English Analysis of Old English Text

Linguistic analysis of any text presupposes dragging information from it in several spheres:

Graphical properties;

Phonetic features;

Morphological properties;

Syntactic features of the text;

Etymology of its words.

All information can be derived through comparing the forms we find in that text with grammatical tables, words from other Germanic and non-Germanic Indoeuropean languages. For that we should use the text itself, the glossary to it and a grammatical description of Old English. Let’s take the following text:

Þā fōr hē norþryhte be þǽm lande; lēt him ealne weჳ þǽt wēste land on ðǽt stēorbord, and þā wīd-sǽ on ðǽt baec-bord þrīe daჳas.

1) Graphical properties.

If we look at the text, we can see that the majority of the letters are Latin, yet there are several letters, that cannot be found in the Latin alphabet. These are “þ” in “þā” and “ð” in “ð” “ðǽt”, “ǽ” in “þǽm”, “ჳ” in “daჳas”. Besides we can see strokes above some vowel letters. They indicate the length of the vowel, showing that they are long. One more note concerns prononcuation of the letters. The majority of the letters are pronounced according to the norms, existing in Latin classical times. It means that the letter “y” is pronounced as French “y” in such words as “rue” or German “ů” in German “fůr”. The letters “f” , “þ”, “ð”, “s” are pronounced as voiced consonants between vowels after the stress or in position before or after voiced consonants or sonorants.

Letter “ჳ” is pronounced as [g] at the beginning of syllables. Between vowels this letter is pronounced as [γ] (as in “daჳas”) and as “j” after or before front vowels – as in “weჳ”.

2) Phonetic features.

Phonetic features in the Old English text mean detecting changes of phonemes in common Germanic and in Old English. We have to find the following common Germanic phonetic changes:

1) Grimm’s Law;

2) Verner’s Law;

3) Narrowing of long “a” – becomes “o”;

4) Opening of short “o” – domus;

5) Levelling of diphtongs.

These phonetic changes can be found by comparing the Old English word with non-Germanic indoeuropean words. For example, if you take “hē” from the Glossary, you would see the following:

Hē – personal pronoun, 3^rd, masculine, Singular> he; He: он; cf. OSax. he, hi, Du. hij, Rus. сей, Lat. cis.

Taking the words given after the mark “cf.”, we can see Germanic and non-Germanic correspondences. Among non-Germanic we find Latin “cis” (pronounced [kis]). Thus we find that voiceless, occlusive in Latin corresponds to voiceless fricative in English. So we can state that in this word we can establish Grimm’s Law. Other words illustrating Grimm’s Law: Þā, þǽm, þǽt, ðǽt (OE þāt, Rus. тот), fōr (infinitive faran, Rus. переть), norþryhte (OE ryhte, Lat. rectus), and (Greek anti), þrīe (Rus. три).

Verner’s Law is reflected in the word “and”: Greek anti> Germanic anþi> Germanic anði, English and. Unfortunately long vowels in this text were narrow yet in Indoeuropean, short Indoeuropean “o” is reflected as “ǽ” in “þǽt” (compare Rus. тот).

English phonetical changes:

1) “i” umlaut – fronting of back vowels under the influence of “i” and “j”.

2) Breaking (fracture) short vowels “e” and “a” change into short diphtongs “eo” and “ea”, before “r”, “l” or “h”+ consonant.

3) Voicing of frikatives between vowels after the stress.

4) Loss of consonants – loss of “n” or “m” before frikatives “f”, “th”, “h”, “s”.

5) Lengthening. 1) when consonant is lost. 2) Lengthening of short vowels before “nd”, “ld”, “nb”, “ng”, “rd”. Started in the X century.

6) Palatalization – back consonants “k”, “gh”, “sk”, and “h” are pronounced softer before “i”, “e”, “æ”

7) Doubling of consonants – the structure “consonant + j-vowel” becomes “vowel-long soft consonant-vowel”.

These changes can be traced by comparing Old English words with their Germanic correspondences.

I-umlaut can be found in “norþryhte”. The second element can be compared with German “recht”.

Recht> OE reocht (breaking) > riecht (mutation, because combination “ht” was always soft)> richt (spelled sometimes rycht, because at the end of OE the vowel “y”([ ů]) was often pronounced as [i] and the letter was rather often by mistake used instead of “i”).

Then wēste (OSax. wōsti).

Breaking can be found in the word “ealne”, if we compare it with German “all”. It can also be found in “ryhte” (see above).

Palatalization can be found in the word “weჳ” (compare Germanic “weg”).

Other changes cannot be found in this passage.

Morphology. Morphological features of OE words can be seen only if you first sort the words out according to the parts of speech they belong to. Morphological features can be found in four parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns. For nouns and verbs it is necessary to identify first of all their morphological class. It means types of declension (stem), and types of conjugation (strong, weak, and classes within). After that it is necessary to establish their forms; number, case, and gender for nouns; mood, tense, person and number for verbs. For adjectives and pronouns it is necessary to establish only grammatical forms. In this sentence there are 7 nouns of which the majority belongs to a-stem: lande, weჳ, land, stēorbord, bǽc-bord, daჳas. The noun wīd-sǽ belongs to i-stem. The noun “land” is used in two cases: Dative lande, Accusative land. The Dative case is shown by the ending “e”. Other words are used in Accusative. All nouns but “daჳas” are singular. “Daჳas” is Accusative plural, which is is shown by the ending “as”.

Verbs. In this passage only two verbs can be found and both of them are strong: fōr (faran) and lēt (lǽtan). “Faran” belongs to the 6^th class, while lǽtan belongs to the 7^th class. Both verbs are indicative, past, singular, 3^rd person. This is shown by change of the root vowel, and absense of the ending.

There’s only one adjective – “wēste” – in the text. This adjective is used in the singular, Accusative, weak declension. The ending “e” shows that the adjective is weak. The weak declension is used because the noun is preceded by the demonstrative pronoun “þǽt”.

Personal pronouns. There are two pronouns – “hē” and “him” in the text. Both of them are personal pronouns, 3^rd person, masculine, singular. “Him” is the Dative case of “hē”. “þǽt”, “ðǽt” – demonstrative pronouns, Singular, neuter; “þǽm” is the Dative Singular form. “Ealne” – masculine, Accusative, Singular. “Þā” is the demonstrative pronoun, Dative, Singular, feminine.

Syntactic analysis includes identification of 2 features:

Structure of the sentence.

Ways of connecting words together.

The structure of the sentence. This sentence is compound, because it includes two clauses:

The first clause is a personal clause with the subject “hē”, the predicate “fōr” and the adverbial structure “norþryhte be þǽm lande”. It is introduced by a particle “þā” which is used as a mark of connection with the previous sentences. The use of this particle usually caused inversion of the subject and predicate, which we can see in this clause. The second clause is impersonal, because the verb “lǽtan” cannot take any noun as a subject, as in Russian such verbs as “светать”, “смеркаться”, etc. As a result the clause has only the predicate “lēt” and three objects “him”, “þǽt wēste land”, and “þā wīd-sǽ”, an adverbial groups “ealne weჳ” and “þrīe daჳas”. Attributes are “ealne”, “þrīe” “wēste”, and attributive structures, introduced by the preposition “on”. Connection of words. In this sentence as is usual in Old English the most frequent ways of connecting words are agreement and government. Government is traced in connecting nouns and verbs thus “fōr” demands the Nominative case or its subject, “lēt” demands Dative case for one of the subjects (him) and the Accusative case for the other objects (land, wīd-sǽ). The other case of government is connection of nouns and prepositions. “Be” demands the Dative case – “lande”. “On”, if it means position, demands the Accusative case – “on stēorbord”, “on baec-bord”. Agreement as in Old English is found in two structures:

In subject-Predicate connection;

In attribute-noun connection.

For the first we can take “fōr”, which is 3^rd person singular, and “hē”, which is also 3^rd person Singular. For the noun-attribute connection we may take all uses of “þǽt” in this passage, whose case, number and gender depend upon the noun, following them. And structures “ealne weჳ” and “wēste land”. In these structures the attributes also posess the same case, number and gender as the nouns. Attributes in Old English might be also non-agreed and connected with the noun by means of prepositions. In this sentence the preposition “on” is used in this function. And finally we can see here in this sentence two cases of adjoinment, which is rather rare in Old English. We can find it in connection with the adverb “norþryhte”, and the numeral “þrīe”.

Etymology. Old English words by origin might be Indoeuropean, Germanic, English proper or borrowed from other languages. All words, found in this sentence might be traced back to the Indoeuropean if we take their elements (root, suffixes, inflections). Still some words are clearly Germanic, because we cannot find the roots of them in other Indoeuropean languages. In this passage such words are “lǽtan” (lēt), “land”, “daჳ” (daჳas), “norþ”, “bord”, “weჳ”. At the same time all the roots of the words, used in sentences, can be found in other Germanic languages. But the words, composed of them, are found only in Old English. In our passage these are “norþryhte”, “stēorbord”, “wīd-sǽ” and “bǽc-bord”. So we can consider these words English proper, though their elements are Germanic and Indoeuropean.