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betwuxaworpennys, betwuxalegednys˙ ‘that which is thrown or placed between’ for interiectio, getacnung¯ (< tacnian¯ ‘mark, signify’ < tacen¯ ‘sign’) for significatio; (b) the translation is relatively free and does not follow the morphological structure of the original (= ‘loan creation’), e.g. þæs naman spelgend˙ ‘substitute for the name’ for pronomen, fag¯ -wyrm ‘variegated reptile’ for basiliscus. Semantic loans and loan translations or loan creations are of course rather difficult to identify, except if one deals with translations. This is why there are hardly any systematic investigations of this phenomenon, but for OE see Gneuss (1955).
In other cases, the original meaning of a lexeme is extended by applying it to new referents. Thus current originally only referred to the movement of water, but after the invention of electricity, it also adopted the meaning ‘flow of electric energy’; and mouse, originally a lexeme referring to an agile little animal, adopted the additional meaning of a computer gadget in connection with the development of personal computers.
Other examples illustrating different kinds of changes are the pairs bird : fowl, dog : hound. In OE, the general term was fugol, with the meaning ‘bird’, whereas brid or bird meant ‘young bird, chicken’; in Modern English the originally more specific term has become the general term bird, whereas fowl has become more specific, referring only to particular subspecies. The same holds for the other pair. OE hund was the general term, whereas docga, which is only attested in a few quotations, must have referred to some more specific breed. But during the ME period, dog gradually developed the Modern English general meaning, while hound came to be restricted to hunting dogs. Another example is knave. OE knafa simply meant ‘boy’, but in ME this acquired a negative connotation and today is equivalent to ‘rogue’ except in card games. The OE compound hus¯ -w¯ıf ‘housewife’ ended up as Modern English hussy and was therefore replaced by the more recent new formation housewife.
Another factor playing an important part in meaning changes is taboo, when a lexeme may refer not only to an innocuous referent but also, at least in some specific instances, to referents which are unmentionable in everyday conversation. This is why in American English cock is generally replaced by rooster (British English seems to be less prudish in this case), and lexemes like erection, ejaculation tend more and more to be avoided because of their sexual overtones. A similar fate happened to gay, which until the 1960s just meant ‘jolly’, then adopted the additional meaning ‘homosexual’, and this meaning eventually took over so that gay can no longer be used in its original meaning.
4.2Old English
4.2.1 |
Introduction |
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What we conveniently call OE covers a span of about 500–600 years. In view of the differences between 1450 and today – roughly the same span – it
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is obvious that OE must also have undergone substantial changes during its time. But what we can say about OE is based on limited evidence, both temporally and locally, in terms of registers and text-types, which are relatively restricted (prose, mainly religious-didactic, legal or medical and poetry). What we can say with certainty, however, is that the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons was a typically ‘Germanic’ language: its vocabulary contains only very few loans, see above. It also has many other structural characteristics which Modern German has preserved, e.g. the relatively clear distinction between strong and weak verbs, and the whole range of ablaut nouns and adjectives related to strong verbs (see (3) above).
Due to the nature of the sources that have come down to us, what we have in the way of vocabulary – roughly 23,000 to 24,000 lexical items according to Scheler (1977), according to Hughes (2000: 86) some 40,000 words, probably a slight exaggeration – represents a fairly restricted spectrum. Any general conclusions as to its structure and organisation will therefore have to be drawn with due care. Nevertheless, the sample will still contain a substantial number of items that belong to the ‘common core of the language’ (Quirk et al., 1985: 16). Consequently, general conclusions as to certain structural properties, e.g. the domain of word formation, the structure of semantic fields, the attitude towards borrowing, etc., are not without a sufficiently large empirical basis (see Kastovsky, 1992).
One conspicuous feature of OE vocabulary is the existence of large lexical families tied together by means of word formation; see Section 4.1.3. This is also reflected by the behaviour with regard to borrowing, especially when translating Latin texts. The translator would usually coin an Anglo-Saxon word rather than just borrow the Latin word if the OE vernacular did not have an obvious equivalent, i.e. he would resort to loan translations and loan creations. In this respect, OE is diametrically opposed to early Modern English, where borrowing was the normal process. The attitude towards borrowing only changed towards the end of the OE period in the wake of the Benedictine Reform, when direct, unadapted loans became more frequent, paving the way for the later developments.
Another conspicuous feature is primarily due to the fact that a high proportion of the material preserved consists of poetic texts, which are characterised by a special style and vocabulary choice. One of the main artistic devices of poetry was lexical variation, the expression of the same concept by a set of different lexemes occurring next to each other. Thus there are certain areas in the vocabulary that abound in near-synonyms or perhaps even complete synonyms, where it is not always possible to establish clear meaning differences between these lexemes.
4.2.2 |
The stratification of the vocabulary |
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Let us begin with diatopic variation. Traditionally, one distinguishes four dialect areas in the OE period, Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish; see further Section 7.2. OE dialectology was originally based primarily on phonological criteria, but more recently an OE word geography has developed investigating the dialectal (and also chronological) distribution of the vocabulary,
218 D I E T E R K A S T O V S K Y
which provides additional criteria for localising manuscripts (see Gneuss, 1972; Hofstetter, 1987; Schabram, 1965; Wenisch, 1979). Most of this work is concerned with the difference between West Saxon and especially its emerging written standard, on the one hand, and Anglian, on the other; it reveals rather marked and conscious lexical choices, especially on the part of the West Saxon authors connected with Æþelwold’s Winchester school like Ælfric, one of the most prolific writers around 1000. This diatopic variation intersects with a diachronic difference, because King Alfred’s ninth-century prose, though based on the language of his capital, Winchester, but influenced by Anglian sources, also differs markedly in its vocabulary from the vocabulary of the late ninth and the eleventh centuries belonging to the same area. A good illustration of this variation is found in Schabram’s (1965) study of the lexical field superbia ‘pride, haughtiness’. There are four lexical families with numerous derivatives (41 items all in all) based on the following central lexemes: ofer-hygd˙-, ofer-mod¯ -, modi¯ g˙-, prut¯ -/prud¯ -, all meaning ‘pride’ or ‘proud’. But there is a clear dialectal split: the ofer-hygd˙- family is restricted to Anglian, while the other three families are only found in West Saxon and Kentish. But there is also a diachronic split: ofer-mod¯ - dominates in early West Saxon, modi¯ g˙- is introduced in connection with the translation of the Benedictine Rule and begins to dominate from c.1000, but does not replace ofer-mod¯ - completely, and from c.950 onwards the French prut¯ -/prud¯ - family enters the scene, which is the only one that survived into Modern English. Other specifically Anglian lexemes (with their West Saxon equivalents in parentheses) are in (on) ‘in’, nemne, nymþe (buton¯ ) ‘unless, except’, gen,˙ geona˙ (giet˙) ‘yet’; alan (fedan¯ ) ‘feed’, bebyc˙gan˙ (sellan) ‘sell’, bisene (blind) ‘blind’, cluc˙ge˙ (bell) ‘bell’ (see Kastovsky, 1992: 342–51). There is also an interesting difference in the distribution of the suffixes -estre (West Saxon) and -ic˙ge˙ (Anglian) for the formation of female agent nouns. Thus byrdic˙ge˙ ‘embroideress’, dryic˙ge˙ ‘sorceress’, huntic˙ge˙ ‘huntress’ only occur in Anglian texts, whereas bepæcestre ‘whore’, berþestre ‘female carrier’, hearpestre ‘female harper’, huntigestre˙ ‘huntress’ are only found in West Saxon texts. But there is a substantial core of the vocabulary that is shared by all dialects.
Diaphasic variation is difficult to assess in view of the nature of the OE texts. The only attempt at representing spoken language is Ælfric’s Colloquy, a Latin didactic text with an interlinear gloss, from which we may gather that eal¯ a¯ glosses ‘oh, lo, alas’, which would seem to belong to spoken language. Thus variation with regard to social group, medium and attitude is absent. There have been some attempts to discover colloquialisms in riddles, and it has been suggested that wamb ‘womb’, neb ‘nose’, þyrel ‘hole’, steort ‘tail’, all possibly with obscene connotations and absent in other types of poetry, as well as the meaning ‘lust’ of wlonc and gal, might have been colloquial. But such conclusions must remain tentative.
At the more formal level we notice remarkable differences between poetry and prose, and even within these categories, e.g. between heroic and Christian poetry, or between didactic, legal or scientific prose (see especially Godden, 1992). There are basically three categories of lexemes: (1) those that are common OE and
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occur both in prose and poetry, e.g. blod¯ ‘blood’, heofon ‘heaven’, hus¯ ‘house’, man ‘man’; (2) those that only or predominantly occur in poetry, e.g. beorn, freca, hæleþ, rinc, sec˙g˙ ‘hero, warrior, man’, brego, eodor, fengel, ræswa, þengel
‘prince, king’, ides ‘woman, queen’; (3) those that only or predominantly occur in prose, e.g. abbod ‘abbot’, borg ‘surety’, ege˙ ‘fright’, hopa ‘hope’, derived nouns in -ere, verbs in -læcan¯, loan translations, later loans from Latin, etc. (see Stanley, 1971). Of these categories, the group of poetic lexemes has attracted the greatest attention, especially in connection with the poetic device of variation, i.e. the use of different lexemes side by side for the same concept, as in the following passage from Beowulf:
frean Scyldinga
the ruler of the Scyldings beaga bryttan
of rings the giver þeoden mærne the prince famous
Ic þæs wine Deniga,
I that the lord of the Danes, frinan wille
ask will
swa þu bena eart
as thou petitioner art ymb þinne si
concerning thy travel (visit)
‘I shall ask the lord of the Danes, the ruler of the Scyldings, giver of rings, as you make petition, ask the famous prince concerning your visit . . .’
Here, wine Deniga, frean Scyldinga, beaga bryttan, þeoden mærne all refer to King Hrothgar but describe him from different points of view and attribute different properties to him. This poetical device requires a large number of synonyms, and especially with the simple lexemes it is not always clear whether there is a meaning difference between them or not, whereas with complex lexemes, because of their morphosemantic transparency, meaning differences can be more easily ascertained. Examples of such densely populated lexical fields are expressions for ‘man’ and ‘warrior’ (beorn, guma, hæleþ, rinc, sec˙g˙; man, wiga˙), ‘battle’ (gu¯þ, hild, beadu; wig˙), or ‘heart’, ‘mind’ (sefa, ferhþ, hyg˙; mod¯ ). The lexical items before the semicolon are predominantly or exclusively used in poetry, while those after the semicolon are of general currency.
Another phenomenon widespread in poetry is the metaphorical use of simple or complex lexemes with clearly different meanings for the same extralinguistic referent. Such lexemes are called ‘kennings’, a term borrowed from Old Norse and Icelandic poetry. Thus a lord or king will not only be referred to by frea¯ ‘ruler, lord’, or cyning ‘king’, but also by epithets such as burg-agend¯ ‘city-owner’, beag¯ -gifa˙ ‘ring-giver’, e¯ðel-weard ‘lord of the realm’, etc. And the sea is not just called sæ, geofon˙, heafu, mere, lagu or just wæter, but also fam¯ ‘foam’, wæ¯g˙
‘wave’, or hryc˙g˙ ‘back, ridge’, as well as ar¯ -gebland˙ ‘waveblend, surge’, stream¯ - gewinn˙ ‘strife of waters’, hwæl-weg˙ ‘whale-way’, seolh-bæþ ‘seal-bath’, etc. And ship is not just referred to as scip˙ but also as brim-wudu ‘water-wood’, ceol˙ ‘keel’, hringed-stefa ‘ship having a ringed prow’, mere-hus¯ ‘sea-house’, sæ¯-genga˙ ‘sea-traveller’, sæ¯-hengest, sund-hengest ‘see-steed’, wæ¯g˙-flota ‘see-floater’,
220 D I E T E R K A S T O V S K Y
y¯þ-mearh ‘wave-horse’. Again the importance of word formation is obvious here, since very often we find compounds or derivatives which are fully transparent or at least used metaphorically without losing their transparency completely (as, e.g., flota ‘something which floats = ship’, sæ¯-genga˙ ‘sea-goer = ship’, and the metaphorical brim-wudu, wæ¯g˙-hengest, etc.). Thus in the 3,182 lines of Beowulf we find 903 distinct substantival compounds, of which 518 only occur in this poem, and 578 are found only once in it. For a more detailed description see Kastovsky (1992: 352ff.).
4.2.3 |
Foreign influence |
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For Old English, Latin is the dominant source of influence. Usually three periods of Latin influence are distinguished (see Serjeantson, 1935: 1ff.; Baugh & Cable, 1978: 75): (1) continental borrowing; (2) borrowing during the settlement period (‘Latin through Celtic transmission’, Baugh & Cable, 1978: 79); (3) borrowings in connection with the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons after c.600/650 and the rise of Anglo-Saxon civilisation and learning, with the Benedictine Reform in the late ninth and the tenth centuries as a crucial dividing line separating this third period into two sub-periods. Before this reform, Latin words were usually integrated more or less completely into the linguistic system, so that they were not really recognisable as loans, e.g. antefnere ‘gradual’ < antiphonaria, tropere ‘troper’ (book containing tropes) < troparium, (p)salter(e) ‘psalter’ < psalterium, c˙¯ıese ‘cheese’ < caseus, pytt ‘hole, well’ < puteus, turnian
‘turn’ < turnare, fersian ‘versify’ < versus. Moreover, borrowing during this period seems to have primarily happened at an oral level and more often than not from Vulgar rather than Classical Latin, which is also indicated by the fact that the Latin source had undergone some sound change, e.g. copor ‘copper’ < VLat. coprum < cuprum, peru ‘pear’ < VLat. perum < pirum. But during and after the Benedictine Reform, lexemes were very often borrowed without any attempt at adaptation, for instance keeping their Latin inflectional endings, e.g. circulus, zodiacus, firmamentum, terminus (Ælfric), sacramentor(i)um, antiphonaria. This suggests that these words were borrowed through the written rather than the oral medium and from Classical Latin. Sometimes this leads to doublets, where an early loan is matched or replaced by a later, learned one, e.g. cel˙c/cali˙c˙ ‘cup’, cliroc / cleri¯ c˙ ‘clerk’, cellendre˙ /coryandre ‘coriander’, leahtric˙ / lactuca ‘lettuce’, læden¯ / latin ‘Latin’.
There had been contacts between the Germanic tribes and the Latin-speaking peoples since the days of Julius Caesar, with more and more Germanic tribesmen joining the Roman military forces. It is therefore not surprising that quite a few lexemes referring to everyday objects in use in camp and town, or to plants and animals hitherto unknown, made their way into the vocabulary of the Germanic tribes the Romans came in contact with. It is estimated that about 170 lexemes recorded in OE were borrowed during the continental period (see Serjeantson, 1935: 271–7; Williams, 1975: 57). Examples are:
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Plants: box ‘box-tree’ < buxum, ciris˙ ‘cherry’ < ceresia, plante ‘pant’ < planta, |
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w¯ın ‘wine’ < vinum |
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Animals: catt(e) ‘cat’ < cattus, elpend/ylpend ‘elephant’ < elephant-, pea/p¯ awa¯ |
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‘peacock’ < pavo |
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Food: butere ‘butter’ < butyrum, ciese˙ ‘cheese’ < caseus, must ‘must, new wine’ |
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< mustum |
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Household items: bytt ‘bottle’ < bottis, cetel˙ ‘kettle’ < catillus, cupp(e) ‘cup’ < |
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cuppa, disc˙ ‘plate, dish’ < discus, mylen ‘mill’ < molinis, -a |
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Dress, etc.: belt ‘belt’ < balteus, sacc ‘sack’ < saccium, ‘bag’, side ‘silk’ < |
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VLat. seda < seta |
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Buildings, building material, etc.: ceaster˙ ‘city’ < castra, cycene˙ ‘kitchen’ < |
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coquina, port ‘gate, door’ < porta, port ‘harbour’ < portus, tigle˙ ‘tile, brick’ |
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< tegula, weall ‘wall’ < vallum |
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Military, legal, geographical etc. terms: camp ‘field, battle’ < campus (with |
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campian ‘to fight’, cempa ‘fighter’), diht ‘saying, direction’ < dictum, scr˙¯ıfan |
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‘allot, decree’ < scribere |
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Trade, etc.: c˙eap¯ ‘goods, market’, c˙eapian/¯ |
c˙¯ıepan ‘buy’ < caupo ‘inn-keeper, |
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wine-seller’, mangere ‘trader’, m¯ıl ‘mile’ < mille (passum), pund ‘pound’ < pondo
Religion: abbud ‘abbot’ < abbat-em, mæsse ‘mass’ < missa, munuc ‘monk’ < monachus, mynster ‘minster’ < monasterium, predician ‘preach’< praedicare, scol¯ ‘school’ < scola
The source of the loans of the second period, which is usually identified with the settlement period after c.450 until the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons towards the end of the sixth century, was also mainly Vulgar and not Classical Latin. There is no agreement as to whether the loans attributed to this period were borrowed directly from Latin (if it was still a kind of official language; see Jackson, 1953: ch. 3; Strang, 1970: 390) or via Celtic transmission, if Latin was no longer in use as a spoken medium (see Baugh & Cable, 1978: 80). It is rather difficult to separate these loans from the continental loans, and there is no agreement about individual cases, but the following seem to be generally accepted as belonging to this period: eced ‘vinegar’ < acetum, forca ‘fork’ < furca, læden¯ ‘Latin; a language’ < latinus, lent ‘lentil’ < lent-em, munt ‘mountain’ < mont-em, mur¯ ‘wall’ < murus, oele ‘oil’ < oleum, segn˙ ‘sign’ < signum, torr ‘tower’ < turris, truht ‘trout’ < tructa.
In the third period, the type of loans gradually changed, because the church became the dominant vehicle for their introduction. Moreover, especially from the ninth century onwards, loans came more and more from Classical Latin, and partly through the written language. Loans coming in during the late tenth and the eleventh centuries in connection with the Benedictine Reform probably never entered the spoken register at all and remained confined to the written language. Thus the introduction of the Benedictine Reform at the end of the tenth century was a crucial dividing line as to the type of borrowing. It marks the
222 D I E T E R K A S T O V S K Y
beginning of a preference for borrowing rather than loan translation, and at the same time the beginning of borrowing without an attempt to adapt the loans to the native morphological (and phonological) patterns, thus paving the way for the subsequent development in Middle and early Modern English.
During the first part of this period, loans were still adapted to a certain degree, e.g. alter ‘altar’ < altar, (a)postol ‘apostle’ < apostolus, bete¯ ‘beetroot’ < beta, (e)pistol ‘letter’ < epistola, fenester ‘window’ < fenestra, mæsse ‘mass’ < missa, offrian ‘sacrifice’ < offerre.
During the second part of this period, roughly 150 additional Latin loans are attested, many of which were scarcely integrated into the native system. Loans of this period mainly fill gaps relevant to the concerns of the educated people dealing with religion and other scholarly concerns. Examples of borrowing attributed to this third period are:
Religion: acolitus ‘acolyte’, apostata ‘apostate’, creda¯ ‘creed, belief’, disc¯ıpul
‘disciple’ < discipulus, parad¯ıs ‘paradise’ <paradisus
Books and learning: biblioþece¯ ‘library’ < bibliotheca, capitol(a) ‘chapter’ < capitulum, decl¯ınian ‘decline’ < declinare, notere¯ ‘notary’ < notarius, punct
‘point’ < punctum
Astronomy: cometa¯ ‘comet’ (but also glossed as feaxede steorra ‘haired star’, a loan creation)
Food, vessels, etc.: ampulle ‘flask’, press ‘wine-press’ < pressa, scutel ‘dish, scuttle’ < scutula
Plants: berbene¯ ‘verbena’, ceder¯ ‘cedar’, cucumer ‘cucumber’ < cucumer, organe ‘marjoram’ < origanum, peonie ‘peony’ < paeonia, perwince˙ ‘periwinkle’, salfie ‘sage’ < salvia
Animals: aspide ‘asp, viper’ < aspida, basilisca ‘basilisk’ (also glossed as feahwyrm) < basiliscus, cancer ‘crab’, leo¯ ‘lion’
Medical terms: mamma ‘breast’, plaster ‘plaster’ < emplastrum, scrofel¯ ‘scrofula’
< scrofula, temprian ‘to mix, mingle’ < temperare
As earlier, the overwhelming majority of the loans are nouns; adjectives and verbs are relatively rare, but we do find denominal adjectives and denominal verbs derived from these nouns coined on the basis of OE word-formation patterns, which shows that these loanwords were integrated to a certain degree into the vocabulary.
Considering the impact that Roman culture and Christianisation had on the way of thinking and on the material culture of the Anglo-Saxons, the number of Latin loans is remarkably small, in particular if we compare it to the number of loans in ME and early Modern English. The main reason seems to have been the versatility with which the native vocabulary could be used in order to render a foreign concept. We still lack a full-scale investigation of semantic loans, loan translations and loan creations for the OE period. It would seem that these processes were all-pervasive and far outweigh the loans discussed here (cf. Kroesch, 1929;
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Gneuss, 1955, 1972, 1985). But loans are much easier to recognise. Nevertheless, semantic borrowings and loan translations can sometimes be identified. Thus semantic borrowing certainly played a role in the following examples: þrowung¯ ‘suffering’ > ‘Christ’s Passion’ < passio, tunge ‘tongue’ > ‘language’ < lingua, hierde ‘shepherd’ > ‘pastor, guardian of the soul’ < pastor, god ‘heathen deity (with plural)’ > God ‘God’ < deus, dryhten ‘ruler, king’ > ‘Lord God’ < Dominus, rod¯ ‘rod, pole’ > ‘cross, rood’ < crux.
The following are examples of loan translations: bletsung¯ -boc¯ ‘book of blessings’ < liber benedictionum, godspell-boc ‘gospel book’ < liber evangelii
(compounds); efen-herian ‘praise together’ < col-laudare, eft-gan¯ ‘go back’ < re-gredi, forþ-cyþan ‘announce’ < e-nuntiare, un-sce˙ðð-end-e ‘innocent, harmless’ < in-noc-en-s (prefixations); bisceop˙-had¯ ‘office of bishop, episcopate’ < episcop-atus, ge˙-agn¯ -iendl¯ıc˙ ‘possessive’ < possess-ivus, hæl-end ‘Saviour’ < Salvator, þre¯-ness ‘trinity’ < trinitas, an¯ -horn, an¯ -hyrne ‘unicorn’ / ‘having one horn’ < unicornis, unicornuus, lytel-mod,¯ wac¯ -mod¯ ‘having little courage’ < pusillanimus (suffixations, zero derivations).
Loan renditions, i.e. somewhat less direct translations, are illustrated by the following examples: ge˙-hus¯ -scipe˙ lit. ‘houseship’ = ‘family, race’ < domus, fela- sprec-ol-ness lit. ‘much-speakingness’ = ‘loquacity’ < loquacitas, milc-deo¯ -nd, milc-suc¯ -end ‘suckling, i.e. someone who sucks milk’ < lact-ans, reste-dæg˙ ‘day of rest’ < sabbatum.
The second major influence on OE vocabulary is due to the Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw, an area north of a line roughly between Chester and London occupied by Danish and Norwegian settlers from the ninth till the twelfth century, when they were finally anglicised, i.e. gave up their Scandinavian language; see further Sections 1.3 and 6.5.6. The intensity of the Scandinavian influence on all parts of the vocabulary as well as its temporal deployment needs some explanation. In OE we only find about 150 loans, mainly technical terms for ships, money, legal institutions, warfare, etc., but in ME there are several thousand (Hansen, 1984: 63), especially in western and northern manuscripts, of which between 400 and 900 (Hansen, 1984: 60; Geipel, 1971: 70) have survived in standard English, and a further 600 or more in the dialects. And these include numerous everyday words: nouns such as band, bank, birth, egg, fellow, gift, kettle, knife, leg, loan, root, score, scrap, sister, skill, skin, sky, slaughter, snare, steak, window; adjectives such as ill, loose, low, odd, scant, tight, weak; and verbs such as call, cast, clip, crave, crawl, die, gasp, get, give, glitter, lift, raise, rake, scare, scowl, sprint, take, thrive, thrust. Furthermore, the phrasal verb type come on, make up seems to be due to Scandinavian influence (Poussa, 1982: 73) or was at least strengthened by a parallel Scandinavian pattern (Hiltunen, 1983: 42–4). Moreover, not only lexical items were borrowed, but also form words such as the pronouns they, them, their, both, same, or the prepositions till, fro (in to and fro), though. This kind of borrowing points to a language contact situation in Old English, an issue which is discussed in Section 1.3 and Chapter 3, passim.
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The relatively low number of loans in the earlier period is typical of a cultural clash, where words denoting referents unknown to one language are borrowed by the other, especially when this is the language of the rulers, as was the case in the Danelaw. But after 1066, the situation must have changed drastically, because from then on many everyday lexemes were borrowed. The most plausible explanation for this is language death with concomitant language shift: the Scandinavianspeaking population was gradually switching to English with concomitant loss of bilingualism. This is corroborated by what happened to French in late ME: there, too, the major borrowing of everyday vocabulary coincides with the switch of the French-speaking population to English, during which they took along a considerable part of their native vocabulary. We are thus faced with two different contact situations with different effects on the language. The early Scandinavian loans were mainly adopted by bilingual, and possibly also monolingual, speakers for whom English was the basic language and Scandinavian was the language of the overlords. The ME loans, on the other hand, are primarily, although certainly not exclusively, due to speakers of Scandinavian descent and their switch from Danish/Norwegian to English.
On account of the genetic relationship between Scandinavian and OE there is a considerable overlap in core vocabulary. It is therefore necessary to establish some criteria that allow us to distinguish Scandinavian loans from native lexical items. Fairly safe criteria are phonological differences resulting from different phonological developments in the two languages. The most noticeable feature is the lack of palatalisation and assibilation of velar stops in front of originally front vowels and of initial /sk/, i.e. the pre-OE and OE changes /g/ > /j/ (giefan˙), /k/ > /tʃ/ (cild˙), /gg/ > /dd / (sec˙gan˙), /kk/ > /ttʃ/ (strec˙can˙), /sk/ > /ʃ/ (scyrte˙). On the basis of this criterion, the following examples are clearly Scandinavian replacements of originally OE words, which had a palatal glide instead of the stop: again, begin, dike (vs ditch < OE d¯ıc˙), gate, give, gear, get, guest, kettle, scant, score, scrub, skill, skin, skirt (vs shirt <OE scyrte˙), sky. Another safe criterion is the development of Germanic /ai/, which in OE became /ɑ / = ModE /əυ/, while in Scandinavian it became /ei/ or /e / = ModE /e /, cf. the pairs no/nay, whole/hale, lord/laird.
The earliest Scandinavian loans appear in the Treaty of Wedmore between Alfred and Guthrum (886), viz. healfmearc ‘half a mark’ and l¯ıesing ‘freedman’. More can be found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, especially in the D and E manuscripts from York and Peterborough, in some of Æthelred’s laws, in vocabularies, in the Lindisfarne and Rushworth Gospels and in the Durham Ritual. The following small selection taken from Peters (1981a, b), the most comprehensive investigation of the loans of this period, illustrates the main semantic domains.
Seafaring terms: æsc˙ ‘warship’ (semantic loan; cf. ON askr ‘ash, small ship’, as the usual term for the Scandinavian boats), cnearr ‘small ship’, ha¯ ‘oar-hole’, hæfene ‘haven, port’, lænding ‘landing-site’, healdan ‘proceed, steer’ (semantic loan; cf. ON halda skipi ‘to hold in a certain direction’ vs OE healdan ‘hold’), æsc˙-here ‘Viking army’ (lit. ‘ship-army’).
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Legal terms: cost ‘terms, condition’, feo¯ -laga ‘fellow, partner’, for-mæl/for¯- mal¯ ‘negotiation, treaty’, grið ‘truce, sanctuary’, lagu ‘law’ (first restricting OE æ¯ to ‘spiritual law’, and then replacing it altogether) together with numerous compounds (partly native, partly loan translations), e.g. lah-breca ‘law-breaker’, ut¯ -laga ‘outlaw’, n¯ıþing ‘outlaw’, sac ‘guilty’, sac-leas¯ ‘innocent’ (loan translation of ON sac-laus), seht ‘settlement’, un-seht ‘discord’, wrang ‘wrong’; bond,¯ bunda,¯ hus¯ -bonda¯ ‘householder, husbandman’, þræll ‘slave’; eorl ‘nobleman, chief’, also as semantic loan replacing OE ealdor-man (OE eorl ‘warrior, free man’).
War terms: brynige˙ ‘mail-shirt’, cn¯ıf ‘knife’, fesian,¯ fysian¯ ‘put to flight, banish’, genge˙ ‘troop’, lið ‘host, fleet’, rædan¯ on ‘attack’.
Measures: mans-lot ‘the amount of land allotted to the head of the family’, marc ‘mark, half a pound’, ora¯ ‘Danish coin’, oxan-gang ‘eighth of a ploughland, hide’, scoru ‘score’.
Other semantic areas: afol ‘power’, becc ‘brook, beck’, carl ‘man’, læst ‘fault, sin’, loft ‘air’ (cf. aloft), mæl¯ ‘speech’, rot¯ ‘root’, sala ‘sale’, scinn ‘skin, fur’, sneare ‘snare’, toft ‘homestead’, þreding¯ ‘third part of a county’, wæpen¯-get˙æc¯ ‘district’; partial loan translations: bryd¯-hlop¯ ‘ceremony of conducting a bride to her new home, wedding’, land(es)-mann ‘native’, rædes¯-mann ‘counsellor, steward’, ge˙-crocod¯ ‘crooked’, dearf ‘bold’ (with derivatives dearfl¯ıc˙ ‘bold, presumptuous’, dearfscipe˙ ‘boldness’), gold-wrec˙cen˙ ‘covered with gold’ (loan translation of ON gull-rekinn ‘prosper’), ge˙-eggian ‘to egg on’, hittan ‘hit’, tacan ‘take’.
There are some other languages which contributed to Old English vocabulary, although in a rather limited way, viz. Celtic, Continental Germanic and French.
The most puzzling phenomenon is the role of Celtic. When one people conquers another and subsequently the two peoples mix by intermarriage, the resulting contact situation normally has important linguistic consequences. Usually, one of the two languages, either that of the conquerors or that of the conquered people, will eventually prevail. In any case, the result will always be an interaction of the two languages with substantial changes in whichever language eventually surfaces as the ‘winner’. This was the case with Latin and Celtic in France, where the Celtic substratum substantially modified Latin (with a substantial admixture of Germanic later on), but Latin remained the foundation of what eventually became French. The same is true of the interaction between the Anglo-Saxon dialects and the dialects spoken by the Scandinavian invaders in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as well as the influence French exerted on English after the Norman invasion. A similar development would be expected after the gradual take-over of Britain by the Germanic tribes in the fifth and sixth centuries. It seems that the Celts were by no means completely exterminated by the invaders, as the placename evidence shows, although many Celts fled to the west and the north, where a Celtic-speaking population survives today in Wales and Scotland. There is a whole cluster of Celtic place-names in the northeastern part of Dorsetshire, and there is also evidence that Celtic must have lingered on in Northumbria because of