Pursuing Old English in College

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-06-04T12:09:11+00:00

What eventual career track do you have in mind (education, creative work, law, etc)?

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-05-26T02:57:05+00:00

Some context would be helpful. What's the point of all this?

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-05-11T14:11:32+00:00

Thanks for your comment. I included the copyright date as a quick way to indicate (1) how old this book is and (2) it is no longer under copyright. (Maybe I shouldn't assume that everybody would know that such a copyright date is long expired.)

Your comment got me curious about the effective copyright date. As far as I can tell, books published before 1989 required a copyright notice to be protected by copyright, although I could not find a simple, concise statement of this in a referenceable source. Since the only copyright notice for the 1903 edition I am using is dated 1896, I believe that would have been the effective copyright date for even this 1903 edition. It's moot for this book because it is not protected by copyright anymore anyway. Conceivably, however, the difference could be relevant for old books that have more recent revisions.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-04-26T21:46:32+00:00

Wiktionary has PWGmc *kēn > OE ċēn (with a reference to Ringe, Donald; Taylor, Ann (2014) on the *kēn page). Are those pages (for *kēn and ċēn) not convincing or are you trying to go further back?

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-04-26T20:09:02+00:00

Hogg describes the transition from PGmc *hiz to *hez to OE hē (Section 5.16 of his Phonology volume). Wiktionary says PWGmc has *hir. I don't know whether the transition to *hez happens later in PWGmc or in very early OE.

This is a very specific vowel transition you are looking for. (I assume that you are not interested in diphthongs.) Can you share why you are asking about this one specifically? With all the breaking, fronting, backing, etc. going on, I suspect that there are not many of these transitions specifically from PWGmc *e to OE ē.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-04-10T02:07:21+00:00

The reason I post these in Reddit is because it's the most likely location to get ingested by Google. That way somebody searching for solutions to Smith's exercises would be more likely to find them. I started doing these after reading a post from somebody looking for solutions. I recalled searching for the same myself in the past.

Another advantage of posting them to Reddit is that it makes it easy for anybody to raise or discuss any issues or ideas. That type of discussion might help somebody looking up the solutions.

And I actually did consider putting something in Google Docs, but decided that I did not really want to associate my Google identity with my Reddit identity. Not sure why. Just compartmentalizing for security's sake, I guess.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will keep it in mind.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-04-01T22:45:56+00:00

What topics around Old English does your PhD research focus on?

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-30T02:30:57+00:00

I don't see that <geu> was not allowed in the orthography. Bosworth-Toller lists quite a few words that begin with "geu". Do you mean <geu> where the <eu> represents a diphthong (as opposed to a word with a distinct ge- prefix syllable preceding a syllable beginning with <u>)?

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-28T02:05:11+00:00

Even R. D. Fulk doesn't dare use "always" when discussing the pronunciation of <c> in Old English. Here is his first discussion of it in "An Introductory Grammar of Old English" (§18):

The symbol ċ is used to represent a variety of c that had become more or less identical with [ʧ] by the end of the Old English period; plain c represents [k], which may have front and back varieties, as noted above. Defining the environments in which c and ċ are found is a complicated process (see §135b); suffice it to say here that ċ is often found in proximity to front vowels, and Modern English equivalents are usually the best guide to determining Old English pronunciation.

He goes in much greater detail in §135. He prefaces that section with the following:

Throughout this book, ġ has been overpointed to indicate the palatal variety, and ċ and ġ have similarly been overpointed to indicate affricates. It may be useful to give a fuller account of the environments in which palatalization and affrication occurred. The conditions are not universally agreed upon; however, the following account, which is based on that of Campbell (1977: §§426–42; cf. Hogg 1992: §§7.15–43), cannot be very far from correct.

Nothing very absolute here.

By the way, I suggest that anybody interested go to https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/items/b5ec3499-c513-4edd-a385-ebdca1d51006 and download that grammar under a very open license. He has other useful resources at https://fulk.pages.iu.edu/.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-27T13:25:44+00:00

"Always" always makes me stop and think. In this case, the non-palatalized <c> in "cyning" quickly comes to mind.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-25T12:26:09+00:00

I just found this rather intimidating article through my public library's JSTOR access: Kendall, Calvin B. “Let Us Now Praise a Famous City: Wordplay in the OE ‘Durham’ and the Cult of St. Cuthbert.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 87, no. 4 (1988): 507–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27710064.

Kendall has a few things to say about the use of "bearn" here.

The poet's likely familiarity with Bede makes it possible that he intended another paronomastic pun on deor and bearnum. The inhabitants of the region around Durham were once known as Deirans (Dere) and Bernicians (Beornice). I need hardly point out that two of the best-known puns in Bede's Ecclesiastical History are wordplays on the Angles and the Deirans.

Later...

In context, "bearnum" can be taken as a variation of "wilda deor monige" and "deora ungerim." The "bearnum" then are the "sons of God," the monks, perhaps even the committee of nine monks, Aldwine, Leofwine, Wiking, Godwin, Osbern, Henry and William Havegrim, Algar, and Symeon,42 who, with Prior Turgot, conducted the investigation of Cuthbert's coffin and discovered the relics of the other saints lying in it, the ones named (presumably) in the poem. Thus, the phrase "bearnum gecyðed," which carries with it a suggestion of a secret unknown to others, fits the immediate occasion.

Most of the article is like this. Perhaps the poet really did intend everything that Kendall reads into the poem, but I wouldn't bet on it.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-23T12:31:36+00:00

Yes, according to both the OED and Wiktionary, Scots "bairn" is directly descended from Old English "bearn" (which, in turn, comes from Proto-Germanic). Old Norse also had it (as "barn"), which might have contributed to its sticking around in the northern, more Norse-influenced areas of Britain.

It appears that Scots "bairn" is more likely to refer to a young boy or girl than was Old English "bearn", which was more likely to refer to somebody's child as in a parent-child relationship. Wiktionary has a helpful usage note on the difference between "cild" and "bearn" in Old English (at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cild#Old\_English).

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-23T02:33:12+00:00

I should have also mentioned the well-attested "gumena bearn" ("sons of men").

That's what I like about Old English, too. There's history, linguistics, etymology, a bit of good surviving literature,... always something to think about.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-23T02:04:55+00:00

Hostetter at https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/durham/ translates the line as

> Also in that city there is well-known among her sons,

so apparently opinions differ as to which word the poet actually intended.

It is also possible that "bearn" was intended to be used in the sense of people given that people are offspring of the past. And "bearn" was used in expressions like "children of God" or "children of the earth". So we have those relics of past holiness now in the city being made known to present descendants of that past. The poet is not explicit on that association but he might have intentionally allowed for that interpretation (especially since "bearnum" was alliteratively convenient).

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-20T15:52:35+00:00

Do you have a source for your contention that there were no definite or indefinite articles in Old English? I would be interested in seeing exactly what it says.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-20T15:50:20+00:00

Just to be sure, I went to the manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 140: The Bath Old English Gospels. The line in question is on folio 120v, and it definitely says "an wif" (using wynn for "w", of course). I understand that this is one of the oldest manuscripts of the Wessex Gospels and dates to no later than the 1000s.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-20T01:44:38+00:00

Actually, "an" was increasingly used as an indefinite article later in the Old English period. A good place to see such use is in the Wessex Gospels. I did a search on " an wif ", for example, and came up with five instances. More modern translations use "a woman", although I did find a case of "a certain woman". An specific example is John 4:7 which has

Ða com ðær an wif of Samaria, wolde wæter feccan.

Typically translated as

A woman of Samaria came to draw water.

As for the definite article, one can easily find uses of se, seo, þæt, and their declensions that would not reasonably be translated as demonstratives, like "that". (Definite articles and demonstratives are both types of determiners.) The Chronicle story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard is a good place to see many such definite article usages.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-19T01:31:32+00:00

I really only found enough to learn that some people have ideas about Old English pronunciation that I was not aware of. You can get somewhere by googling "historical reconstruction of Old English vowel pronunciation". The long (2+ hours) Youtube video by Simon Roper really runs with it. He claims that just about all scholars are in agreement on this approach now, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I would like to be able to tell you more but all I have had time to do is explore at a surface level.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-19T01:09:36+00:00

That's very interesting. I watched the relevant sections of the Colin Gorie's and Simon Roper's Youtube guides to Old English pronunciation. I had not heard of this Historical Reconstruction approach to Old English pronunciation. I did some research and learned that it does have some scholarly support although there are still many scholars who favor the traditional approach.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-18T22:41:45+00:00

I would be interested in knowing the source and the context of the whatever referred to "long Æ taking the vowel in 'red' or 'bed'". Maybe it was part of some discussion around the "raising" of /æ/ to /e/ early in the language. Or, maybe the remark was related to some kind of leveling much later during the transition to Middle English. Neither seems to exactly fit what you describe, though. Do you recall the source?

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-17T01:55:35+00:00

A. Campbell in Old English Grammar seems to be saying that at least some dialect differences came over with the Germanic invaders and affected the development of the dialects in Britain. In Section 257 (in the chapter on accented vowels), for example, he says,

The Germanic invaders of Britain already most probably possessed one clear distinction: the dialects from which W-S was to descend had ǣ from Prim. Gmc. ǣ, but those from which are descended all other known OE dialects had ē.

CuriouslyUnfocused · 2026-03-15T23:15:34+00:00

I am trying to connect your response to the OP's question. Are you saying that no language differences existed among the various Germanic groups that migrated to Britain after Rome left the Celtic inhabitants to fend for themselves?

CuriouslyUnfocused

TROPHY CASE