AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Part I

Course Material

written by András Cser

2000

CONTENTS

Remark on transcription ...................................................................................................................................... 2 Abbreviations of languages and dialects.............................................................................................................. 2 Abbreviations of grammatical categories ............................................................................................................ 3 Further symbols used........................................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgements.............................................................................................................................................. 3

1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 4 1.1. The data of historical linguistics and the notion of relatedness .................................................................... 4 1.2. Comparative and internal reconstruction ...................................................................................................... 9 1.3. Summary of chapter 1................................................................................................................................. 11

2. The Indo-European languages ........................................................................................................................... 12 3. The structure of Proto-Indo-European............................................................................................................... 18

3.1. Phonology................................................................................................................................................... 18 3.2. Morphology ................................................................................................................................................ 21 3.3. Lexicon....................................................................................................................................................... 24

4. The Germanic languages and their external history........................................................................................... 26 4.1. East Germanic ............................................................................................................................................ 26 4.2. North Germanic .......................................................................................................................................... 26 4.3. West Germanic ........................................................................................................................................... 27 4.4. Map: The Germanic homeland and the migrations..................................................................................... 29 4.5. Summary: a time-scale diagram of Germanic ............................................................................................. 30

5. Germanic innovations........................................................................................................................................ 31 5.1. Phonology................................................................................................................................................... 31 5.2. Grammar and vocabulary............................................................................................................................ 33 5.3. Differences between the Germanic languages ............................................................................................ 36 5.4. The earliest attestations of Germanic.......................................................................................................... 39 5.5. Sample texts in seven Old Germanic languages ......................................................................................... 41

6. Introduction to Old English ............................................................................................................................... 45 6.1. Anglo-Saxon and Old English: matters of chronology ............................................................................... 45 6.2. Aspects of the external history of Old English ........................................................................................... 45 6.3. Old English dialects and their attestation.................................................................................................... 48

7. Sounds and phonology....................................................................................................................................... 50 7.1. Pronunciation.............................................................................................................................................. 50 7.2. The phonology of Old English.................................................................................................................... 52

8. The grammar of Old English ............................................................................................................................. 55 8.1. The morphology of verbs............................................................................................................................ 56 8.2. The morphology of nouns, pronouns and adjectives .................................................................................. 59 8.3. Major syntactic features of Old English ..................................................................................................... 60

9. The vocabulary of Old English .......................................................................................................................... 62 10. A sample text ................................................................................................................................................... 64 Bibliographical notes............................................................................................................................................. 67 Bibliography.......................................................................................................................................................... 68

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Remark on transcription Phonetic transcriptions are always given in bold face without any flanking symbols (slants or square brackets). This is a recent convention in linguistics and its great advantage is that there is no need to take sides in the phonological status of segments, which would often be unpractical and/or impossible. The capital letters S and N in phonetic transcriptions stand for any sonorant and any nasal, respectively; C stands for any consonant, V for any vowel. Forms that are attested are given in italics, as usual, as are forms that are reconstructed but for which there exists a tradition of transliteration (Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic in the first place). When referring specifically to spelling, we put letters between angle brackets (e.g. <k>). Grammatical category markers are given in small capitals and are listed below.

Abbreviations of languages and dialects Alem Alemannian Arm Armenian AmE American English Av Avestan Bav Bavarian BrE British English Du Dutch E English ENHG Early New High German EME Early Middle English EMoE Early Modern English EWS Early West Saxon Fr French Fris Frisian G German Go Gothic Gr Greek Hitt Hittite Hu Hungarian IA Indo-Aryan IE Indo-European La Latin Langb Langobard Latv Latvian Li Lithuanian LME Late Middle English LWS Late West Saxon MDu Middle Dutch ME Middle English MHG Middle High German MLG Middle Low German MoE Modern English MoG Modern German OChS Old Church Slavonic

OE Old English OF Old French OFris Old Frisian OHG Old High German OIc Old Icelandic OIr Old Irish OLFr Old Low Franconian ON Old Norse OS Old Saxon PGmc Proto-Germanic PIE Proto-Indo-European PrDE Present Day English RhFr Rhine Franconian Ru Russian Skt Sanskrit StHu Standard Hungarian Sw Swedish Toch Tocharian W Welsh

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Abbreviations of grammatical categories 1 First person 2 Second person 3 Third person ABL Ablative ACC Accusative ADJ Adjective AOR Aorist CONST Constituent DAT Dative FEM Feminine FINV Finite Verb GEN Genitive IMP Imperative IMPF Imperfective INF Infinitive INSTR Instrumental

LOC Locative MASC Masculine NEUT Neuter NOM Nominative NONFINV Nonfinite Verb O Object OPT Optative PART Participle PERF Perfective PLUR Plural S Subject SING Singular SUBJ Subjunctive V Verb VOC Vocative

Further symbols used > developed historically into < derives historically from ∼ synchronically alternates with ← is an adoption of (in case of borrowing) → is borrowed in the form ⇒ is the derivational basis of (in synchronic morphology) * reconstructed form (sound, phoneme, morpheme or word) ** non-existent form

Acknowledgements My thanks must go to those who read this material and commented on it before this more or less final version was completed, namely Prof. Kathleen Dubs, Dr. Katalin Halácsy, Dr. Ádám Nádasdy, who also taught me this subject at ELTE, Dr. Dóra Pődör and László Kristó. They are not responsible for any remaining errors. The foundation Pro Renovanda Cultura Hungariae helped me with a generous grant.

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1. Introduction

1.1. The data of historical linguistics and the notion of relatedness Historical linguistics is the study of the way language changes over time. It falls into several subfields each of which investigates a level of linguistic elements. Thus there is historical phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and there is etymology, which studies the history of words and makes use of (and also provides data for) all the other subfields. Etymology itself has branches like onomastics, the study of the history of proper names. Internal history in linguistics means the history of the language system in the narrow sense (sounds, words, sentence structures and meanings). It is distinguished from external history, which is the history of the language set in the perspective of political or cultural history and geography. For example, the fact that the English language (or its ancestor) was carried from the continent to the British Isles in the fifth century AD and to North America with the early modern colonisation belongs to the external history of the language but the fact that the Old English sound has turned into by Modern English times (as in the word stone) belongs to its internal history. These two aspects are conceptually different and rarely explain each other (the sound change above could probably have taken place in any geographical location), but they do converge at several points. Many changes would not have happened, or at least not in the same way, without two languages coming into contact. But language contact is due to external factors: migrations, or the emergence of cultural and political powers that exert influence on speech communities of other languages. The history of the word stock provides conspicuous examples for this convergence of external and internal aspects. For instance, it is due to external factors that the vocabulary of law and administration is largely of Latin origin in English but not in Hungarian, but since words are obviously linguistic objects their history belongs to the internal history of the language. Further examples of changes due to language contact will be given at several points throughout this work.

When studying any aspect of historical linguistics, the first questions that we have to ask are these: how do we know that languages change and how do we know how they change? In a different wording, what are the data from which we draw our conclusions in the diachronic investigation of languages? In the first place, there are the written sources of our knowledge. Textual records1 from times past betray much about the previous periods of a language. In the Funeral speech, the first Hungarian text (twelfth century) to have come down to us, one finds forms like halalnec (> halálnak), puculnec (> pokolnak), which show that vowel harmony had not yet affected the suffix –nek at that time. In English texts prior to modern times one finds that you was only used for more than one person, while in the singular another pronoun referred to the addressee (OE þu > ME and EMoE thou) and the verb also took a suffix that no longer exists when the subject was this pronoun: thou speakest. These are two examples picked at random from two languages; they happen to be relatively straightforward and there is little controversy about them. But this should not lead us to believe that the linguistic interpretation of textual records is usually an easy matter: the truth is very far from that.

Grammatical information is generally gained from them more easily than phonetic information. For instance, the fact that in OE and ME second person singular and plural were distinguished from each other by way of pronoun as well as suffix choice is obvious: it is inconceivable that the difference only existed in writing and not in speech (like the difference 1 A terminological remark: textual record or simply document correspond to Hu nyelvemlék in a narrow sense (something like Hu szövegemlék); attestation is any scrap of writing including extensive textual records but also fragmentary and short inscriptions on objects, stone walls or elsewhere.

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of MoE flower and flour) and the lost singular pronoun is well attested in the closely related languages (German du; what exactly this relationship means will be seen later). But we do not know how exactly the vowel of the suffix was pronounced, say, 1200 years ago. We know that long before that time it had been i, then by about 1000 at the latest it must have reduced to some sort of a schwa ( ), but at what stage was it in the century when English came to be extensively written? It is not at all certain that it was ever pronounced e, even though <e> was the most frequent spelling for it. At the same time, no one doubts that the consonants of the suffix were always pronounced much as one would expect on the basis of spelling, like the final cluster of the word best. Or, to take Old Hungarian halalnec, it is clear that the consonants were h l l n k, it is generally agreed that the last vowel was , but there is some uncertainty as regards the first and the second vowel: was the first labial (like in Modern Hungarian) or non-labial (the short variant of á), and was the second vowel short or long when the Funeral speech was written down? On the other hand, no such uncertainty exists about the morphological composition of the word or about its function in the sentence.

These examples were only meant to illustrate that documents are invaluable for the investigation of the history of a language, but they cannot be studied in as straightforward a manner as contemporary linguistic data. In fact, the study of such documents is by necessity an interdisciplinary activity. Knowledge of the political, cultural and ecclesiastical circumstances, for instance, helps us decide what scribal practices may have been current at the time, and such information is often crucial for us to be able to proceed to linguistic analysis and description. However, such considerations are not going to feature high in the present work: this is intended to be more about linguistics than about anything else.

So far we have been speaking of documents from the past of a language. But how about its undocumented prehistory? It is at this point that comparative linguistics is needed for gaining information. When one compares two or more languages, naturally enough one finds differences between them. The English say table, Hungarians say asztal – this is a difference between two languages, and not a particularly interesting one. But when one finds systematic differences in the sound shape of words, then those are relevant differences. Let us look at the following English words and their German counterparts: (1) English German two zwei ten zehn to zu tooth Zahn tongue Zunge twig Zweig ‘bough’ town Zaun ‘fence’ token Zeichen ‘sign’ As can be seen, all the words begin with t in English but with the affricate ts (written <z>) in German. This difference is systematic because it recurs in a multitude of examples. The reason why the difference between asztal and table is an irrelevant one is not that the two words do not resemble each other in the least: neither do tooth and Zahn. It is that the difference between asztal and table is isolated and we do not find more words (or at least not in any patterned fashion) that differ in the same way. Systematic differences in the sound shape of words between two languages are called phonological correspondences. They constitute the most important evidence of the relatedness of languages. What relatedness means is that two languages go back in time to one and the

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same language (called their parent language) from which they have developed through differentiation, i.e. they underwent innovations independently of each other. Thus the claim of relatedness is a historical statement about languages. In the present case there are two theoretically possible explanations for the correspondence of word-initial E t and G ts. One is that in their parent language all the words that show this correspondence began with t, which was then replaced by ts in German. The other is the opposite: the words in question began with ts in the parent language and ts was then replaced by t in English2. In this case we happen to know that the first solution is the correct one; the arguments at this stage need not concern us. The point is that we derive the two languages from a third one that has long ceased to exist in its original form and is continued by various languages, among them English and German. The second kind of evidence for the relatedness of languages is similarities in their grammatical structure. To carry on with the example of English and German, one may note that possession by first and second person is expressed with the help of determiners (my house = mein Haus) as opposed to, say, Hungarian (ház-am) or Terena (Brazil) in which nasalisation over the word expresses the same (owoku 'his house' but owo u 'my house'). Another similarity is that verbs only have two tenses (present and past) that are expressed morphologically and not with the help of auxiliaries. Furthermore, there are fundamentally two ways of forming the past tense: either with a dental stop (love-d = lieb-te) or by changing the stem vowel (give ∼ gave = geben ∼ gab). The list could be extended: same suffixes for comparative and superlative of adjectives, same suffixes for genitive, prepositions instead of postpositions, and so on. The third kind of evidence concerns the nature of the words that show phonological correspondences. They must include a substantial part of the layer of the vocabulary that refers to most basic elements of human experience and is thus the least culture-specific and most resistant to borrowing. The so-called basic word stock includes denotations of the parts of the body, small numbers, natural phenomena (water, fire, thunder), basic qualities (good, bad, small), everyday activities and states (come, go, sleep, feel, hate). Phonological correspondences are only regarded as valid if they occur in this, in all likelihood the oldest, section of the vocabulary. Hungarian for example corresponds to Latin s in a large number of words (sors, pestis, infarktus, vírus, juss(a), ostya, sekrestye etc.), yet this is not taken to be a sign of common ancestry precisely because these words do not belong to the basic word stock: they are relatively late borrowings that entered the language in the wake of medieval and modern cultural and scientific developments. Thus the three kinds of evidence of the relatedness of languages are as follows: (i) phonological correspondences, whereby we establish the etymological identity of words and the sound changes that differentiated them; (ii) similarity of the grammatical system, which is regarded as common inheritance from the parent language; (iii) substantial overlap in the basic word stock of the languages, by which we mean etymological identity (i.e. being connected by a series of phonological correspondences), again regarded as common inheritance from the parent language.

It is important to distinguish etymological identity from two things with which it may be confused. One is similarity of sound shape. Often indeed etymologically identical words are superficially similar, like E hand and G Hand, E son and G Sohn, but this is not always the case. E tooth and G Zahn are also identical,3 but they do not at all sound similar – nevertheless

2 In fact, there are correspondences that can only be explained with reference to a third segment, e.g. the f in E wife and the corresponding p (written <b> and alternating with phonetic b as in the plural Weiber) in G Weib are known for sure to go back to a prehistoric v. 3 Strictly speaking only if one disregards the final –th of tooth, but the rest is indeed the same.

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they are connected by a series of correspondences. E twig and G Zweig ‘bough’ do not share a single segment (Zweig is pronounced tsva k) and their meaning is also different. Yet, since they are connected by correspondences in all their segments, and either meaning can be derived from the other, their identity is beyond dispute. This already brings us to the second point: etymologically identical words do not necessarily have the same meaning. This is not surprising since language constantly changes on all levels, including that of word meanings. In the case of twig and Zweig, sound changes differentiated them alongside a meaning change (either ‘twig’ > ‘bough’ in German or the opposite in English). E tide is an even more spectacular example. It corresponds to G Zeit ‘time’ in a perfectly regular fashion, but in one language (in this case in English) the meaning of the word has changed.4 Thus neither the sound shape, nor the meaning is the same in the two languages, but we are still able to claim with certainty that the two words are etymologically identical. In the list of examples above, similar meaning changes can be seen in the town = Zaun and the token = Zeichen pairs.

We seem to have proved that English and German are related languages. It is possible to go further and demonstrate that they are related to other languages, such as Latin. The following examples show a correspondence of the initial consonants: (2) English German Latin foot Fuss pes fish Fisch piscis father Vater pater feel fühlen palma 'palm of hand' far, fare fahren 'travel' portare 'carry' full voll plenus few (OHG fo) paucus foam Feim pumex The two Germanic languages have f which corresponds to Latin p, and this is just one of the several correspondences. There are similarities in the grammar as well: for instance, Latin also uses possessive determiners (mea domus or domus mea ‘my house’), it also has vowel change past (ago ‘I do’ → egi ‘I did’) but no dental past – this is something that distinguishes it from the other two languages. What these and many further facts show is that Latin is related to English and German but the latter two are more closely related to each other than either is to Latin. Schematically: (3) English German Latin The above chart is a partial family tree, a diagram that indicates degrees of relatedness among languages. Family trees are constructed on the basis of shared and independent innovations:

4 The original meaning still exists in compounds such as Christmastide, Eastertide.

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languages that share more innovations and have undergone fewer changes independently of each other are placed closer. English and German share innovations like the p > f change and the development of the dental past, which are independent of Latin. These changes are shared by some other languages, among them Swedish, Dutch and Gothic. These are collectively called the Germanic languages. They derive from a parent language that was not written and thus has to be reconstructed entirely with the help of comparative work. That parent language is referred to as Proto-Germanic. The Germanic languages derive from it in much the same manner as Italian, Spanish, French etc. derive from Latin. Thus the status of Latin in the family tree is analogous to that of Proto-Germanic; the difference between them is that Latin was written whereas Proto-Germanic was not. (This is actually what the term Proto- expresses: an undocumented parent language.) Latin and Proto-Germanic go back in time to a common proto-language even more remote in time (this is proved by the relatedness illustrated above). That proto-language has been named Proto-Indo-European because the two geographical extremes where the languages deriving from it were historically spoken are India and Europe. The entire family is thus called Indo-European. To make the above chart more complete:5 (4) English German Swedish Dutch … French Italian Spanish … Proto-Germanic Latin … Proto-Indo-European A family tree has two functions. One is taxonomic or classificatory: languages that are "sisters", placed on the same level and immediately attached to the same superior node constitute a group that shares certain features. Those connected to the Proto-Germanic node are the Germanic languages, the only ones to have e.g. dental past in the family. The other function is genealogical or historical: the nodes are all conceived of as real languages that were spoken in a certain period in a certain geographical location: thus Latin and Proto-Germanic as nodes in the tree mean real languages that were spoken in more or less definable areas of Europe at roughly the same time (but only one of them was a written language). Family trees are extremely useful in historical linguistics because they make feasible the organisation of the limited amount of information that comparative linguistics is able to gather. However, family trees in themselves give the erroneous idea that with the passage of time, languages only become more and more different from each other. In reality, languages can also acquire features from each other: the basic mechanism of innovations is that they spread in time and space like waves on water. Slovak, for instance, acquired word-initial stress from Hungarian, later Czech acquired it from Slovak.6 Thus language change is not only divergence, it is also convergence, but this fact cannot be represented in a family tree.

5 Though not really complete; the IE family as well as the PIE language will be discussed in more detail in chapters 2 and 3. 6 Compare Czech jéden ’one’ with Russian odín. Word-initial stress is an innovation in the two Slavonic languages, but not in Hungarian.

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1.2. Comparative and internal reconstruction Comparative reconstruction has as its goal the phonological characterisation of proto-forms from which attested cognates (i.e. words or morphemes that show phonological correspondences in different languages) can be derived with the help of postulated sound changes. The procedure is that cognates from apparently related languages are collated and a principled guess is made about the proto-form that underlies them historically and the sound changes that differentiated them.7 Looking at the list of cognates in (1) which show the E t ∼ G ts correspondence the question is posed: what underlies it? is it t or is it ts? In this case the answer is easy because German is the only language that shows ts, all other Germanic languages have t corresponding to it: (5) English Dutch German Swedish two twe zwei två tooth tand Zahn tand tongue tong Zunge tunga But let us take another series of correspondences: (6) English Dutch German Swedish three drie drei tre thank dank Dank tack thatch dekken decken täcka Which of the three sounds ( d t) is the original Proto-Germanic segment? What we note when we look at the sets of cognates in (5) and (7) is that d and t take part in other correspondences as well, but for (6) is the only typical one. (7) English Dutch German Swedish deaf doof taub döv deep diep tief djup deed daad Tat dåd If we take it that the original sound in (6) was t, we need to postulate that it split in the course of its development within every language except Scandinavian (here represented by Swedish): in the three-words (6) it turned into in English and into d in German and Dutch, but in the two-words (5) it turned into ts in German and remained t in all the others. If we assume that the original sound was d a similar split has to be assumed in every language except Dutch: in the three-words it turned into in English and into t in Scandinavian, but in the deaf-words (7) it turned into t in German. If we assume that the original sound was , no splits need to be postulated, only the merger of the original sound with t in Scandinavian and with d in Dutch, while it also turned into d in German, but no merger resulted because original d had turned into t by then. The reason why the third solution is regarded as the correct one is that splits can only be assumed when a phonetic environment can be assigned to them. No matter how many examples we look at, there is nothing common in the phonetic shape of the three-words vs. the deaf-words vs. the two-words, but splits of sounds without phonetic motivation are 7 It goes without saying that from the point of view of linguistics, including comparative reconstruction, no difference is made between taking data from different languages or from dialects of the same language.

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empirically unknown or at least extremely rare and therefore undesirable as hypothetical explanations. Mergers, on the other hand, are not constrained in such a way and therefore they can explain correspondences like the ones above with more validity. But apart from theoretical considerations, palaeographic evidence also suggests that the third solution is the correct one. In early documents of Scandinavian there are clear indications of there being a difference between the three-words and the two-words. Similarly in Old Low Franconian (the ancestor of Dutch) three-words are distinguished in spelling from the deaf-words. Thus our conclusion must be that in this case it is the majority of Germanic languages that innovated and only two (English and Icelandic8), in fact, have preserved original . To sum up the above discussion in a chart: (8) English Dutch German Scandinavian Proto-Germanic (two) t t ts < *t t (three) d < * d (deaf) d t d < *d Internal reconstruction, as opposed to comparative reconstruction, only takes data from one language and tries to establish forms belonging to previous periods with their help. In particular, internal reconstruction usually focuses on morphological alternations and attempts to explain them on the assumption that they reflect earlier sound changes. Let us start with a Hungarian example. It is well known that many suffixes have two forms, one with a front vowel and one with a back, and the choice of the suffix variants depends on the vowels of the stem: kör-ben as opposed to ól-ban. There are notorious counterexamples: híd, for instance, has a front vowel in the stem but always takes back suffixes (híd-on, híd-ban etc.). The simplest and most straightforward explanation of its irregular behaviour is that the vowel of the stem used to be back, and it regularly induced back vowels in the suffixes; later the vowel in such stems turned front, but the suffixes remained. The back vowel closest to i is (high unrounded), thus the original form of the particular stem in question must have been *h d. As can be seen, this explanation hinges on the well-supported idea that morphological irregularities of the present often reflect phonological regularities of the past.9 Another example concerns the dental past suffixes of English. The dental stop either turns up d as in loved, seemed, or t as in looked, kept. The two are so close phonetically and their distribution is so predictable that it is tempting to assume that they go back to a single variant from which they developed through phonological differentiation. The environmental specification is by and large that t turns up after voiceless segments, d after voiced ones. So we may surmise either original t > d after voiced segments or original d > t after voiceless ones. If one looks at the phonotactic system of English one finds that voiceless consonant + d sequences indeed do not exist, but the language abounds in voiced segment + t sequences. This very strongly suggests that the d > t change is the correct solution, otherwise how would we account for the multitude of words like saint, melt, sit? From this it follows that the original form of the past suffix was d and not t.10

8 Icelandic is exceptional among Scandinavian languages in this respect. 9 This explanation is also supported by the investigation of those languages from which some of these words were borrowed, in this case Iranian. 10 Here as in many other cases it is true that comparative reconstruction and other evidence (e.g. palaeographical data) point to the same conclusion: suffice it to say that the past suffix is always t in German.

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1.3. Summary of chapter 1 Historical linguistics studies the way language changes mainly with the help of two sorts of data. One comes from textual records, the other from reconstructive work that relies on the comparison of related languages (comparative reconstruction) or the analysis of certain patterns within one language (internal reconstruction). In actual linguistic work the two (or three) sorts of evidence as well as information coming from the external history of the language (palaeography, ecclesiastical history etc.) are often all indispensable because in isolation the various pieces of information would hardly be meaningful. Languages that are shown to be related by comparative reconstruction (with reference to phonological correspondences, the basic word stock and grammatical similarities) constitute families. By definition, families go back to a single parent language, but there may be further parent languages within the family that underlie subgroups (like Latin and Proto-Germanic within the Indo-European family, which in its entirety goes back to Proto-Indo-European). If a parent language is not documented, it has to be reconstructed on various planes: the sound shape, morphological properties and meaning of words or grammatical morphemes (this is the domain of etymology) and syntactic structures. In this introductory chapter we have not said anything about the latter but the historical syntax of Germanic languages will be discussed in 5.2.3. A form that historically underlies a more recent one is called its etymon, and the other is called the reflex of the former. Thus the reconstructed PGmc word *dauvaz yielded (= is the etymon of) E deaf, G taub, Du doof, Sw döv etc., which are its reflexes and each other's cognates.11 The amount of data coming from the historical investigation of languages has made it possible to make generalisations and construct theories concerning language change. In this course material we will refer to such ideas only occasionally (one such occasion was the absence of phonetically unmotivated splits above); these belong properly to works of a different character. But, as in other fields of this science, theories and data constantly interact: historical linguistics actually creates much of its own data in a theoretically well founded way through reconstruction and through the interpretation of sources and then draws conclusions and makes generalisations based on those data. This is the best way found so far to learn anything about the past of languages.

11 Above we only reconstructed the initial consonant of this word, but comparative reconstruction gives fairly unambiguous results for all the segments of the stem as well as the masculine nominative singular ending *-z.

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2. The Indo-European languages The IE family can be conveniently described as consisting of twelve subgroups all of which are established on a genealogical, rather than geographical, basis. Of these, Germanic will be discussed in more detail than the rest in chapter 4. In this section the remaining divisions of the family will be characterised on external grounds, i.e. when and where the languages belonging to them were or are spoken, when the first attestations appear and when literacy begins. Some, though by far not all, structural traits of the various IE languages are pointed out in chapter 3. 2.1. Indo-Aryan The IA population infiltrated into the Indian subcontinent from north-west. Theirs became the dominant languages there, though non-IE, viz. Dravidian, languages are still spoken in the south of India as well as Sri Lanka. Physically the oldest attestations of IA, which display several dialects, date from the third century BC but many younger documents were written in a language that is clearly much more archaic. These latter texts had been composed in the second and first millennia BC and passed on orally but very faithfully in all respects. Thus they count as belonging to the oldest attestations of IE. Linguistically the oldest form of IA is called Old Indic or Sanskrit, itself subdivided chronologically into at least two varieties. The language of the Vedas, the sacred texts of the Indians, of which the oldest appear to go back to about 1500 BC, is called Vedic Sanskrit. The use of Sanskrit was later extended to a variety of spheres and, through the work of grammarians, among them the most famous Panini, the language acquired a standardised form in the last centuries BC referred to as Classical Sanskrit. This variety of the language continued to function as a lingua franca and the language of religion and science in India in much the same fashion as Latin in Europe. It ceased to function as a spoken language already in the period when it crystallised into its classical form and a number of vernaculars called Prakrits developed from the original variety of Old Indic. Some of these attained the status of literary languages, the most important being Pali, the language of Buddhism from the sixth century BC. It is from these Prakritic languages that the vernaculars of modern India (called New Indo-Aryan languages) derive. The most important of these are Hindi (the official language of India), Urdu (Pakistan) and Bengali (Bangladesh). Urdu is characterised by a considerable admixture of Persian and Arabic elements. Romany, or Gypsy, is a New IA language originating from north-west India that has been carried through Persia and the Balkans to Europe. The first script used for Indo-Aryan was brahmi, probably of Semitic origin. Most scripts ever used in India derive from it, among them Nagari, which came to replace nearly all other scripts and became the official writing system of India. Certain Indic languages spoken by Muslims, like Urdu, are written in the Persian-Arabic and one (Konkani) is written with the Latin alphabet. 2.2. Iranian The linguistic similarities between Indic and Iranian suggest that the population speaking these two groups of languages migrated together in prehistoric times and split relatively late. Speakers of Iranian settled in the great Plateau of Iran as well as the belt of steppe reaching as far as central China. The first remains of these languages (Old Iranian) appear in two varieties. Avestan is the language of the Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrians, of which the earliest parts probably go back as far as the seventh century BC (though extant manuscripts date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD). The other variety is called Old Persian; this is the

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language of the cuneiform inscriptions in which the achievements of Darius (522–486 BC) and Xerxes (486–466 BC) were committed to posterity. Middle Persian, or Pahlavi, was the official language of religion and administration under the dynasty of the Sassanids (AD 226–652) and still is the language of Zoroastrianism. Several other Middle Iranian languages were spoken over a vast territory, but their documentation is scarce. Alan (to which modern Ossetic is closely related) is the language from which Hungarians borrowed many words (asszony, gazdag, híd, üveg) on their way south and west. What is called Classical Persian was born in the eleventh century, with the poet Firdausi, whose language became the literary norm and the lingua franca of Iranian-speaking territories under Moslem dominance. Among Modern Iranian languages the most important one is Farsi, or Modern Persian, the official language of Iran. Kurdish also belongs to this group, as does Pashto (the language of Afghanistan), Tajik (the language of Tajikistan) and Ossetic, among others. The script used for Old Persian was an adaptation of the Babylonian cuneiform syllabary. Avestan texts remain in the writing system of the Middle Persian period, which derives from Aramaic script. Since the Arab conquest the Arabic alphabet has been used. 2.3. Armenian Armenian is a language somewhat isolated within the family, no closer links to other IE languages have been convincingly demonstrated. Spoken in and around Armenia, south of the Caucasus, it has acquired several features of the neighbouring but unrelated Caucasian languages and absorbed a strong impact of Greek, Persian and Turkish through cultural contacts and political submission. The Armenian population is believed to have arrived into its traditional homeland (stretching far beyond the current political boundaries) between the eighth and fifth centuries BC. They embraced Christianity very early and, as was normal in the orbit of Byzantium, the Bible was translated into their language in the fifth century AD followed by a wealth of further translations as well as original works. The Armenian alphabet was created for this purpose on the basis of Greek and probably an Aramaic script borrowed from northern Iranian territory. The Old Armenian period (fifth–sixthcenturies) was highly literate. In the Middle Armenian period (twelfth–seventeenth centuries) the cultural centre shifted to Cilicia and major dialectal differentiation took place along an east–west axis. The Modern period saw the gradual standardisation of the language – besides the virtual disappearance of speakers of the western dialects through the 1915 massacre. 2.4. Tocharian Tocharian is the language of a series of documents dating from the sixth–eighth centuries AD which were discovered in the west of China and in monasteries along the silk road at the beginning of the twentieth century. These documents are mostly religious translations. Tocharian literacy appears to have developed within the scope of Buddhist culture, the writing system is a modification of brahmi script, hence its decipherment was relatively easy. The language cannot be assigned to any group within the family, but phonologically it is a centum language (see 3.1.1) despite its eastern location. 2.5. Celtic The prehistoric homeland of the Celtic tribes was probably along and north of the upper Danube. By the last centuries before the Christian era, the Celtic population spread basically all over Europe and even into Asia Minor, but they only formed organised societies in Gaul and the British Isles. Gaul was successfully romanised by Julius Caesar, Britain was also held by the Roman Empire for more than three centuries, but there, as opposed to Gaul, the Latin

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language never replaced or even posed a real threat to Celtic – unlike English in the course of later history. After their gradual retreat before advancing Latin and Germanic dialects, Celtic languages left scarce traces either physically or in loanwords in the languages that replaced them. In modern times, Celtic languages are only spoken on the fringes of western Europe by a dwindling number of people, only one of them (Welsh) by more than a million – and no speakers of any Celtic language are monolingual.

Irish, Scottish and the virtually extinct Manx form the Gaelic group, Welsh and Breton are collectively called Brittonic. Gaelic and Brittonic are referred to as the Insular Celtic languages, since they are or were spoken in the British Isles. Speakers of Breton fled to the continent (the west of present-day France) after the Germanic conquest. Where they have lived since is called Bretagne, i.e. 'Britain' in French; Great Britain is called Great to distinguish it from the "other" Britain. The Celtic languages spoken on the continent in Antiquity and attested only in inscriptions are identified by their geographical location: Gaulish in Gaul, Lepontic in northern Italy, Celtiberian or Hispano-Celtic on the Iberian peninsula.

The first extant attestation of Celtic was found in northern Italy and dates from the sixth century BC. Its script is based on that of Etruscan (then the dominant civilisation and language of central and northern Italy). Most of the inscriptions in Gaul are from the first and second centuries BC, their script is Greek and Latin. The earliest remains of Insular Celtic are the Ogam-inscriptions from AD 400–600, their language is called archaic Irish. The origin of the script of these inscriptions remains unsolved: neither runes nor the Latin alphabet are satisfactory to explain its development. The flourishing culture of the following centuries, of course, used the Latin script, though in a characteristically modified form. The severe cultural oppression suffered at the hand of the English even in modern times has greatly contributed to the demise of Celtic, though literacy in the extant languages has been continuous. 2.6. Italic The Indo-European population of the Italian peninsula was much more varied in prehistoric times than the historical dominance of Latin, one of the Italic languages, would suggest. Closely related to Latin, there was Oscan and Umbrian, those two languages of which we have extensive enough documentation to allow serious linguistic investigation. Texts in these languages, carved in tablets, date from the period 600 BC – AD 100. The importance of Oscan was equal to that of Latin in diplomacy until 90–89 BC. There are other languages which were spoken in Italy but which are very scarcely documented, such as Illyrian, Messapic, Venetic – these seem to be IE, but are not assigned to the Italic branch. All the languages attested in Italy (including Latin) used some modification of the Greek alphabet current in the Greek colonies of southern Italy. Probably the first attestation of Latin (the language of Rome) is a quadrangular tombstone from the fifth century BC. From the end of the third century BC onwards, adaptations of Greek models developed into a flourishing literary life but, as opposed to Greek, Latin literature only ever existed in one dialect. With the expansion of Roman dominance by the first century BC, first the original languages of Italy, then the languages spoken in the western half of the Empire (with the strange exception of Basque) were completely replaced by Latin as far eastwards as the Istrian peninsula. The Latin daughter-languages of the Mediterranean bear witness to this: Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Provençal, French, Italian, Rhaeto-Romance (spoken in Switzerland) and Rumanian. In the case of the last, it has been clearly established that the Romance-speaking population migrated into ancient Dacia from the south of the Balkans long after the collapse of Roman rule. Latin also

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survived the disappearance of the Empire as the language of the Church, of administration, law and education: hence the characteristically Latin-dominated European Middle Ages. 2.7. Hellenic The branch of IE designated by the name Hellenic practically means Greek. Other IE languages that are known to have been at one time spoken in the Balkans or the Aegean (e.g. Phrygian, Thracian) are so fragmentarily attested that no closer links can be established between them and Greek (or any other IE language, for that matter). The Greek-speaking population invaded the Balkans and the multitude of islands south and east of it in the course of the second millennium BC. The successive groups of the conquerors spoke different dialects, four of which were later to attain literary status. The oldest extant documents of Greek (and, alongside the Hittite clay tablets, of any IE language) are the tablets found in Crete and Mycenae dating from 1400–1200 BC. These were written in a syllabary conventionally referred to as Linear B and were deciphered relatively recently. In the "dark period" between 1200–800 BC literacy seems to have disappeared to be learnt again in the course of the Greek colonisation of the eighth–sixth centuries. The new phonematic script, picked up by the Greeks in Syrian merchant colonies, was of northern Semitic origin and was later to serve as the basis of all European writing systems, with Etruscan, then Roman mediation in the west, and also in the east in the form of Glagolitic, Cyrillic and other, more distant alphabets (e.g. Armenian and Georgian) derived from the Greek one. The archaic (eighth to sixth centuries) and more markedly the classical period of Greek culture (fifth and fourth centuries BC) saw the emergence of an unprecedented wealth of all forms of literature in a variety of dialects. Interestingly, the actual cradle of Greek culture before Athens took the lead (after 500 BC) was not where Greece is now located but in the south of Italy and the west of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). In the Hellenistic and the Roman era (third century BC until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire) the Attic dialect (i.e. that of Athens and its surroundings) developed into a supra-regional lingua franca, aptly named in its own time koiné 'common [dialect]'. This is the variety in which, for instance, the New Testament was written. All dialects of Middle and Modern Greek (with one exception) go back to this late antique form of the language. Literacy has been continuous throughout Byzantine, Turkish and modern times, and (as a consequence of this) a highly conservative written language (katharevusa 'purified') now stands in opposition to the naturally developed vernacular (dimotiki 'popular, vernacular'). 2.8. Slavonic Slavonic peoples are first mentioned in historical records in the fourth century AD. Their homeland may have been roughly where the Ukraine is now, though various theories collectively cover a rather large area between the rivers Oder and Dnieper. In the early Middle Ages there were two writing systems for Slavonic: Glagolitic, worked out by the missionaries St. Methodius and St. Cyril (originally called Constantine) in the ninth century and Cyrillic, which probably dates from the tenth century (and, despite its name, cannot be attributed to St. Cyril). Both are based on the Greek alphabet. Before they set out on their journey, the two famous missionaries translated the Gospels, liturgical and other religious texts into the Slavonic dialect closest to Saloniki, hence the oldest written form (Old Church Slavonic) is the rendering of a southern variety, Old Bulgarian. Their successors translated texts of the same character into other dialects as well. The first remaining documents in Slavonic are the Kiev sheets, seven sheets of a missal copied in tenth century Moravia. From this and the following centuries there are a number of manuscripts in the two scripts that served liturgical purposes. The only document in Latin

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script is the Freising fragment from around AD 1000, which can be regarded as the first document in Slovenian. Later those Slavonic peoples that were converted to Roman instead of Byzantine Christianity, i.e. all the west Slavonic peoples as well as Croatians and Slovenes, adopted the Latin alphabet. Slavonic languages geographically and linguistically fall into three major groups. East Slavonic includes Russian, Belorussian (or White Russian) and Ukrainian. West Slavonic includes Polish, Slovakian and Czech, furthermore Sorbian, spoken by a diminishing number of bilingual people in the east of Germany (not to mention Kashub, which is now regarded as a dialect of Polish, and the extinct Polab). South Slavonic includes Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian and Macedonian as well as Old Church Slavonic. 2.9. Baltic Baltic languages, which are structurally and lexicologically very close to Slavonic, are spoken along the coast of the Baltic sea – hence the name which, in fact, came to be used in its modern sense only in the twentieth century. There are two extant languages, Lithuanian and Latvian, to which one may add the extinct Old Prussian. Baltic literacy appeared rather late by European standards: the first attestation is two lines of poetry in Old Prussian (the Basle fragment) followed by two dictionaries from the early fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively. For Old Prussian, the most important document is a mid-sixteenth century translation of Luther. For Latvian we have translations of the Lord's Prayer and lists of guilds from the early 1500s and a Catholic catechism from 1585. For Lithuanian, the earliest extant text is a translation of the Lord's Prayer, Hail Mary and the Creed from around 1515. Though documented only in a relatively late period, Baltic languages are extremely valuable for comparative linguistics because of their surprisingly archaic traits. 2.10. Anatolian The best documented of Anatolian languages, all long extinct, is Hittite. The golden age of the Hittite Empire, located in the central part of Asia Minor, was the middle of the second millennium BC. Clay tablets belonging mostly to its royal archives were unearthed in the nineteenth century in the vicinity of the Turkish village Bogazköy, but deciphered only in the 1910s. The tablets date from 1900–1200 BC, hieroglyphic texts also later (up to about 700 BC); they (and Greek in Linear B) are the oldest attestations of IE. The script is partly ideographic, partly phonetic (cuneiform borrowed from Akkadian, the diplomatic language of that period). The decipherment of Hittite was instrumental in the underpinning of the laryngeal theory (see 3.1.2) whose foundations had been laid by Saussure about forty years earlier. After the collapse of the Hittite empire, the language ceased to be documented and ultimately disappeared altogether. Lydian and Lycian are two Anatolian languages attested in inscriptions. Luwian and Palaic are two further languages closely related to Hittite but only documented in words scattered in cuneiform Hittite texts. 2.11. Albanian Another isolated language, Albanian is first documented in the fifteenth century. By that time it had absorbed so much of Latin, Greek, Turkish and Slavonic vocabulary and structure that virtually nothing can be said with certainty about its ancestry (apart from its IE origins) or closer affiliations within the family. Besides Albania, it is spoken in Kosovo and by enclaves of substantial size in Turkey and the south of Italy. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the Greek and even the Arabic alphabet was used besides the more frequent Latin

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script. After the national revival of the mid-1800s, Latin became the exclusive writing system for Albanian in 1908.

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3. The structure of Proto-Indo-European

3.1. Phonology

3.1.1. Consonants The following consonant system has been safely established for PIE: (9) obstruents: labial dental palatal velar labiovelar stops voiceless p t k' k kw voiced b d ' w aspirated bh dh 'h h wh fricative s

sonorants:

labial dental palatal labiovelar nasals m n liquids l, r glides j w

The most conspicuous feature of the obstruent system is the abundance of stops and the paucity of fricatives. In fact, all IE languages later underwent changes that reduced the number of stops and increased that of fricatives. Grimm's Law, to be discussed in 5.1.1, is an instance of this. No historically attested IE language reflects five different places of articulation for obstruents. The reason why PIE is believed to have had so many is a pattern of mismatches in the phonological correspondences between two well-defined sets of IE languages. Note the following three sets of cognates: Gr (he)katon La centum E hund(red) Skt śatam Ru sto 'hundred' Gr kreas La cruor OE hreaw Skt kraviş- Ru krov’ 'blood, raw meat' Gr tis La quis OE hwa Skt kas Ru kto 'who' As can be seen, Greek has the same initial consonant in the first two words (k as opposed to t in the third) and so does Latin (k spelled <c> as opposed to kw spelled <qu>) as well as in (Old) English (h in hundred and the etymon of MoE raw as opposed to hw in the etymon of MoE who). Contrary to these three languages, Sanskrit has the same consonant in the second two words (k in 'meat' and 'who' as opposed to the -like sound traditionally transcribed ś, in 'hundred') as does Russian (k as opposed to s).

The generally accepted explanation for the numerous mismatches such as these is that in PIE three different places of articulation underlie the three sets of correspondences. Two places of articulation merged into one in each IE language, but not always the same two. In some languages, palatal and velar stops merged and were kept distinct from labiovelars: these are referred to as centum-languages (the name is the Latin for 'hundred'). In others, velar and labiovelar stops merged and were kept distinct from palatals: these are called satem-languages (Avestan for 'hundred'). In satem languages furthermore the original palatal stops developed

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into affricates and fricatives. This bifurcating development affected not only the voiceless, but also the voiced and aspirated stops. Represented graphically: (10) PIE > centum-lgs. examples k' *k’mtom > La centum, Gr (he)katon k k *kr(e)w- > La cruor, Gr kreas kw kw *kwi-(/kwo-) > La quis, Gr tis

PIE > satem-lgs. examples k' k' > , s *k’mtom > Skt śatam, Ru sto k *kr(e)w- > Skt kraviş-, Ru krov’ k kw *(kwi-/)kwo- > Skt kas, Ru kto

Satem languages are Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Baltic, Slavonic, Armenian and Albanian; centum languages are Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Greek, Tocharian and Anatolian. In geographical terms, satem languages are also referred to as eastern, centum as western IE languages (but note the unusual location of Tocharian in the east). Sonorants could all be syllabic (much like in MoE button, little, though no MoE syllabic sonorant is the reflex of a PIE syllabic sonorant). Syllabic j was i, syllabic w was u. A syllabic m can be found in the word 'hundred'. Syllabic and nonsyllabic sonorants alternated with each other in the patterns called ablaut, to be discussed in the following section.

3.1.2. Vowels The reconstructed vowel-inventory looks as follows: (11) short: i e a o u

long: i e a o u Vowels entered into a series of alternations that are of great importance for the morphophonemic system of PIE (and indeed of many IE daughter languages: as will be seen later, ablaut plays a very important part in the Germanic verb system). These alternations are collectively called ablaut, a German term introduced in the last century. It seems that these alternations were originally conditioned by word stress (which was not phonologically fixed in PIE) but other factors contributed to their complexities.12 In a highly simplified form, ablaut involves the patterns in (12) and (13):

12 It is quite clear that zero grade was associated with unstressed syllables. Phonetically speaking, lack of stress induces loss of vowels in many languages (including Modern English, though this, of course has nothing to do with PIE ablaut). In PIE, o-grade also appears to be related to lack of stress, though that relation is more of a mystery.

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(12) e ∼ o ∼ e ∼ o ∼ ∅ The example here is the PIE root *bher- 'carry, bear':13 e-grade: *bher- > OE beran (> MoE bear), La fero, Gr phero 'I carry' o-grade: *bhor- > OE b r '(I/he) carried', Gr phoreo 'I keep carrying', phoros 'who carries' e-grade: *bher- > OE b ron '(we/you/they) carried' o-grade: *bhor- > Gr phor, La fur 'thief' ∅-grade: *bhr- > Gr pharetra 'quivel', OE boren (> MoE born) Note that when there is no vowel (i.e. in the zero-grade) the r (or any adjacent sonorant) becomes syllabic, but syllabic sonorants are not normally preserved as such in the individual IE languages. Instead we find u or o + sonorant in Germanic (witness E hund(red) < *k’mtom and born < *bhr- above), a + sonorant in Greek (as in pharetra) and so on. The other major pattern of vowel-alternations is between long vowels and schwa: (13) e ∼ o ∼ The example here is the PIE root *dhe- 'do, put': e-grade: *dhe- > E deed, Gr (ti)t hemi 'I put', La feci 'I did' o-grade: *dho- > E do, Gr thomos 'heap, mound' -grade: *dh - > La facio 'I do', Gr thetos 'put (in the PASTPART sense)'

Although the analysis of this second kind of ablaut is an important chapter of IE linguistics in many respects, because of its complexity and its relative lack of significance for Germanic languages we will not dwell on it here. Suffice it to say that a theory first proposed by Saussure, later modified by others, corroborated by evidence from Hittite and by now universally accepted, claims that there were additional consonants in PIE (now called the three laryngeals: h1 h2 h3) that had a lengthening and quality-changing effect upon neighbouring vowels. Thus long-vowel ablaut can be fully reconstructed as short-vowel ablaut (that is, there are no e-, o- and -grades in the second type of alternations, only e-, o- and zero-grades) with the help of a simple set of sound changes as follows: e-grade: *dheh1- > *dhe- > ... o-grade: *dhoh1- > *dho- > ... ∅-grade: *dhh1- > *dh - > ... The phonetic properties of the laryngeals can be reconstructed with much less certainty than those of other PIE segments, but they are generally held to have been fricatives (as their reflexes still were in Hittite). Note that * is nothing else but the syllabic variant of the laryngeals. Apart from long-vowel ablaut, laryngeal theory has successfully explained a series of problematic phenomena in the IE languages not to be discussed here.

13 The particular forms in which such roots appear are called their grades.

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3.2. Morphology

3.2.1. Preliminaries The basic unit of morphological structure in PIE was the root. Roots were the minimal meaningful non-analysable core lexical units that could be augmented with stem-forming elements and inflectional suffixes. Schematically: Root + derivational affix = Stem Stem + inflectional suffix = Word Roots, as opposed to stems, were not specified for word class or any morphosyntactic category; they were only specified by their consonantal skeleton and their meaning. Above we saw various formations based on the roots *bher- and *dhe-. It is crucial to understand that these (and other) roots are in themselves neither verbs nor nouns nor indeed of any other category, although for practical purposes we are compelled to gloss them with verbal or nominal "meanings". The actual words based on the roots are formed with various derivational (or stem-forming) and inflectional suffixes. Greek phoros is a noun meaning someone who carries something: it consists of the o-grade of the root, the derivational suffix -o- and the inflection -s of NOMSING. Hence in the different cases only the inflectional ending varies, the derivational suffix does not: NOMSING phor-o-s, ACCSING phor-o-n, NOMPLUR phor-o-i and so on. Latin fur (as well as Gr phor) 'thief, i.e. who carries things away' is a noun based on the o-grade of the root but is formed without a derivational suffix, hence its root is identical to the stem and takes inflections immediately: NOMSING fur, ACCSING fur-em, NOMPLUR fur-es and so on. Latin fero is a verb based on the e-grade and takes no stem-forming elements. Similar to fur, which is a root-noun, fero is a root-verb which takes inflectional endings immediately in many of its forms: PRESSING2 fer-s, PRESSING3 fer-t etc. (Its Greek cognate, phero, also has no stem-forming suffix but takes suffixes with an intervening vowel called thematic vowel: PRESPLUR1 pher-o-men, PRESPLUR2 pher-e-te.) Greek phoreo is again based on the o-grade but takes a stem-forming element whereby the root is augmented to a stem phor-e(j)- which then takes the appropriate inflectional suffixes.

3.2.2. The morphosyntactic categories of nominals The term "nominal" here covers nouns, adjectives and pronouns. The categories that were morphologically expressed in them were threefold: gender, number and case.

Gender differences originated in the distinction between living and non-living entities. The latter class developed into what we call neuter in the documented languages, the former bifurcated into masculine and feminine on the basis of natural gender but also on the basis of stem-formation differences. The distinction between living and non-living entities was, of course, not based on biological criteria only but on the naive perception of the world by prehistoric people. This is nicely borne out by the fact that, for instance, limbs and outer parts of the body (eyes, fingers etc.) are denoted by masculine and feminine words because their motions were visible, whereas for internal organs (heart, spleen) neuter words are used because their activity could not be observed.

The only difference between masculine and neuter was the marking of subjects and objects. In the singular, neuters never took the nominative suffix -s and did not distinguish accusative from the nominative. In the plural they took the suffix -a in both cases. By contrast, feminine often differed from the other two genders morphologically (in spite of the fact that

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this bifurcation appeared later): different stem-forming elements were used between the root and the inflection. This is here exemplified with the help of the Latin adjective novus 'new': (14)

PIE > Latin Greek MASC NOM *new-o-s novus neos

ACC *new-o-m novum neon NEUT NOM *new-o-m novum neon

ACC *new-o-m novum neon FEM NOM *new-a-∅ nova nea

ACC *new-a-m novam nean The root is *new-, the stem-forming elements (derivational affixes) are -o- in the masculine and neuter and -a- in the feminine. The inflectional suffixes are -s in the NOMSING and -m in the ACCSING. Feminines in -a- exceptionally do not take -s, and neuters take the ACCSING suffix in the nominative (or they take zero in both). Number in PIE could be singular, dual and plural. It was not marked in itself, i.e. normally no part of a word could be isolated as the exponent exclusively of number. What marked number was the choice of case suffixes (besides, of course, agreement with the verb and dependent elements in the sentence). There were eight cases in PIE, their number gradually decreasing in most IE languages in the course of their history. Nominative was the case of the subject, accusative that of the object but also used to indicate motion towards a point, genitive was preserved for possessive structures, dative meant to/for somebody or something, ablative indicated motion from a point, instrumental was used for instruments of activities or motion through a space, locative to indicate location statically, finally vocative was used for addressing someone. Case endings are here illustrated for the root (noun) *ped- 'foot': (15) SING DUAL PLUR

NOM pe(d)s ped-e/-i ped-es VOC ped ped-e/-i ped-es ACC ped-m ped-e/-i ped-ms GEN ped-es/-os ped-os ped-om/-om ABL ped-es/-os ped-bhjo/-mo ped-bh(j)os/-mos DAT ped-ej ped-bhjo/-mo ped-bh(j)os/-mos INSTR ped-eh1 ped-bhjo/-mo ped-bhis/-mis LOC ped-i ped-ow ped-su

Reconstruction has resulted in alternatives at several points. In the chart we have not indicated that the root turns up in different grades in different languages (Germanic languages show the o-grade, see English foot, Greek shows the o-grade, see ACCSING poda, Latin shows the e-grade, see ACCSING pedem). A more important discrepancy is shown by the dual and plural endings beginning with a labial consonant (ablative, dative and instrumental). In Germanic, Slavonic and Baltic, these suffixes always have -m-, in all other languages, -bh-. Hence the characteristic nasal suffix of Germanic (OE DATPLUR fot-um and MoG Füss-en as opposed to La ped-ibus and Skt pad-bhyas).

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Adjectives differed from nouns only in that they could be of any of the three genders. Personal pronouns (only found in first and second person) did not distinguish gender, but demonstratives did. Of this latter the most important set is so (MASC) tod (NEUT) sa (FEM), the distant ancestors of E this, that and the article the. Their case and number inflection displayed features partly different from the general nominal pattern, e.g. plural cases were formed with the help of a -j- element. There is only one further remark we wish to make on nominal morphology. Those who learn old IE languages (including Old English) are accustomed to learning about various declensions as inflectional classes to which nouns and adjectives belong. In PIE, no such things existed. All nominals took the same suffixes with the exceptions and sub-regularities mentioned above. What emerged as formally different noun classes by historical times (e.g. o-stems, a-stems, consonant stems etc.) resulted from different stem-formations and the phonological interference of the endings of stems and inflectional (i.e. case) suffixes.

3.2.3. The morphosyntactic categories of verbs The morphology of the PIE verbs is much more complicated than that of nouns. There are more woolly edges here, but the outlines as well as perhaps the majority of details seem clear. The basic categories were voice, aspect, mood, person and number. There were two voices in PIE, active and middle. Somewhat surprisingly, there was no passive voice: it developed later independently in the daughter languages. The middle probably had the reflexive meaning of doing something to or for the sake of oneself, but its uses in the attested languages are quite varied. Aspect seems to be the central category of verbs in that it is the only category expressed within the root. Three aspects can be distinguished: imperfective,14 perfective and aorist. The imperfective (in several IE languages simply the present tense) expresses duration mainly in the present. The perfective had a stative sense (somewhat like I have understood it = I know it), whereas the aorist was punctual in meaning without reference to either duration or connection with the present. Aspect was formed in a variety of ways, but one of the most important patterns was ablaut variation. In Greek we find verbs like the following: (16) IMPF leíp-o 'I leave' ∼ PERF lé-loip-a 'I am left over' ∼ AOR é-lip-on 'I left' Besides reduplication of the initial consonant in the perfective and a prefixed e- in the aorist, the verb stem appears in three different grades: e-grade in the imperfective (< *lejkw-), o-grade in the perfective (< *lojkw-) and zero-grade in the aorist (< *likw-)15. This must have been a general regularity, as is shown by Germanic (where perfective and aorist merged into a past tense) here represented by OE: (17) PRES sing-e ∼ PASTSING sang ∼ PASTPLUR sung-on and PASTPART sung-en 'to sing' These forms go back to the PIE stem variants *sengwh- ∼ songwh- ∼ sngwh-, respectively.

Besides stem vowel alternations, aspectual stems were also formed with the help of affixes. The greatest variety of affixes is found in the imperfective. The only infix of PIE morphology is found here: it is a nasal inserted in stems like that of Latin frang-o 'I break 14 In traditional terminology, the term imperfective is often used with reference to the past of the imperfective aspect and present is used for what we call imperfective aspect here. 15 Also notice the placement of stress: the root shows e-grade when it is stressed. The change kw > p is regular in Greek.

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(IMPF)' vs. freg-i 'I broke (PERF)', fund-o 'I pour (IMPF)' vs. fud-i 'I poured (PERF)'. In English, one verb still shows the nasal infix: stand vs. stood. But the imperfective affix -j-, the most productive one in this class, is of far greater importance for Germanic.We will return to the -j- suffix when we discuss OE weak verbs (8.1.2).

Four moods can be safely conjectured for PIE. The indicative was the unmarked mood of declarative sentences. The subjunctive expressed a modality more removed from reality (injunctions, potentialities), the optative expressed desire and possibility, and the imperative, which only had a handful of forms instead of full paradigms, expressed commands. The subjunctive and the optative probably also had the purely grammatical function of marking certain subordinate sentence types.

Person and number were expressed by unanalysable endings (that is, much like case and number in nominals). To spare the reader further details, we illustrate some of what has been reconstructed of PIE verbal paradigms with the familiar root verb *bher- 'carry':16 (18) IND SUBJ OPT IMP

SING 1 bher-o(-mi) bher-o bher-oj-m 2 bher-e-si bher-e-s bher-oj-s bher-e 3 bher-e-ti bher-e-t bher-oj-t bher-e-t PLUR 1 bher-o-mes bher-o-me bher-oj-me 2 bher-e-te(s) bher-e-te bher-oj-te bher-e-te 3 bher-o-nti bher-o-nt bher-oj-nt bher-o-nt.

Finally a few words on the existential and copulative verb that underlies E be. The attested languages point to different roots: *es- and *bhu- are found scattered within the paradigm and in the derivatives of the verb in many languages: La est 3SINGPRES vs. fuit 3SINGPERF, Gr esti 3SINGPRES vs. phusis 'nature', Ru jest' 'there is' vs. byt' 'to be', E is vs. be. To these two a third must be added, *wes-, which functions in the past in Gmc languages (E was, were, G war etc.), and is continued by Skt vasati 'lives, dwells', perhaps Hitt huiš- 'to be alive'.

3.3. Lexicon With the help of etymology, many words and stems that were part of the PIE basic word stock have been reconstructed. By way of illustration, we will pick some in a semantic arrangement. Words are glossed only where they differ in meaning from the English reflex. Parts of the body: *kerd-/krd- > E heart, G Herz, La cor(d-), Gr kardia, OIr cride, Ru serdce *nas- > E nose, G Nase, La nasus, Li nósis, Ru nos, Skt nas- Family relations: *dhug ter- > E daughter, G, Tochter, Gr thugater, Skt duhitár, Ru doč, Av dug dar *sunus > E son, G Sohn, Ru syn, Av hunuš, Toch soy, Skt sunú- *widhewa > E widow, G Witwe, La vidua, Skr vidháva, Av viδava

16 The vowel -o-/-e- that appears between the stem and the personal endings is called the thematic vowel. Note that this verb is not conjugated thematically in all languages: in Latin it is partly athematic (see 3.2.1).

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Animals and Plants: *kwon 'dog' > E hound, G Hund, La canis, Gr kuon, OIr cú, Toch ku, Arm šun *swinos > E swine, G Schwein, La suinus, Gr huinos, Latv suvens, Ru svinja *bher g- > E birch, G Birke, La fraxinus, Ru berëza, Skt bhurjas, Li beržas Common activities, objects and qualities *wegh-/wogh- 'carry' > E way, G Weg, La veho 'carry', Gr okhos 'chariot', Skt váhati, Ru vesti *mert-/mrt- 'die, death' > E murder, G Mord, La mort-, Ru (s)mert', OIr marb, Skt marate *dhwer-/dhur- > E door, G Tor, La fores, Gr thura, Ru dver', Li durys, Skt dvar *r(o)udhros > E red, G rot, La ruber, Gr eruthros, Skt rudhira- *meg-/mag- 'big' > E much, La magnus, Gr megas 'large', Skt maha-, Arm mec Numbers *seks > E six, G sechs, La sex, Gr hex, Skt şaş, Ru šest' *sep(t)m > E seven, G sieben, La septem, Gr hepta, Skt sapta, Ru sem'.

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4. The Germanic languages and their external history In historical records, Germanic peoples are described in a relatively detailed fashion already in the first century AD and in several works in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Scattered attestations of their languages appear already in the third century AD, continuous and extensive documentation only begins somewhat later, at a time when the languages already show increasing differentiation. It is from these two kinds of sources that we have to figure out how the languages that are called Germanic emerged in history and how they relate to one another. This is not an easy task: the sources are not always reliable or relevant, and the tribes involved were notoriously mobile in the centuries that shaped the linguistic geography of Europe. Yet, historians and linguists have arrived at conclusions that provide a framework for describing their early history, and this is what we will outline here.

In language-internal terms it does not prove useful to speak of a family tree for Germanic in the sense of sub-proto-languages between Proto-Germanic and the individual languages. Although West Germanic languages are distinguished from the rest by a cluster of phonological as well as morphological developments, and although English and Frisian are connected by several innovations that set them apart from the rest of West (and other) Germanic languages, one would not want to attribute the same historical and linguistic reality to a hypothetical Proto-West-Germanic or a Proto-Anglo-Frisian language as to Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European. With this in mind we can still divide the Germanic conglomerate into three groups that are, in a loose sense of the word, linguistic as well as historical "realities".

4.1. East Germanic The group that historically settled in the territory of present day Poland, between the rivers Oder and Vistula, is called East Germanic (or Illevionic). The only documented East Germanic language is Gothic, hence in linguistics the two names are used synonymously. Goths moved to the regions north of the Black Sea around AD 200. Their kingdom came under pressure from the Huns towards the end of the fourth century so they sought refuge within the East Roman Empire. In these times they were converted to Christianity, and Wulfila, their bishop, translated much of the Bible into Gothic in the 370s, for which he created an alphabet on the basis of Greek. This Bible still exists in one manuscript and is an extremely valuable source for Germanic studies. Apart from a few inscriptions and other short texts, this is what remains of the Gothic language.

Goths moved westwards, wreaking havoc on much of the Mediterranean in the fifth century. The western tribes (Visigoths) finally founded a kingdom on the Iberian peninsula, eastern Goths (Ostrogoths) in Italy after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Both kingdoms were later overwhelmed by others, and the Goths assimilated linguistically and culturally to the Latin-speaking population everywhere. A little group remained on the Crimean peninsula and their language is documented in a Flemish diplomat's list of 86 words he scribbled down in Constantinople in 1562. This is the last we ever hear of Goths in history.

4.2. North Germanic North Germanic denotes Scandinavian languages. The homeland of the tribes here included, also known as Vikings, was the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula. They were not affected by the first great waves of migrations which drifted Goths and others south- and westwards in Europe. First they were engaged in large-distance trade, later made themselves

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known with their raids between the end of the eighth and the beginning of the tenth centuries whereby they reached many of the European coastal cities and those located along large rivers. They established permanent settlements in several parts of the continent including the vicinity of Rouen in the north of Francia, which came to be called Normandy (the name includes north and man). They also settled in the east and north of England as well as in Ireland and in Scotland.

In the course of their migrations they populated Iceland and other islands north-west of Europe and are known to have reached Greenland as well as North America, though they did not manage to establish permanent settlements there. They were the last of the Germanic peoples to be converted to Christianity and, probably as a result of this, their language is documented extensively only after 1000. Modern Scandinavian languages are subdivided into East and West Scandinavian, Swedish and Danish belonging to the first, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese to the second group.

4.3. West Germanic Within the largest division, West Germanic, we further distinguish three geographical-linguistic groups. The easternmost (called Herminons) lived along the river Elbe; the most significant tribes were Alemannians, Bavarians and Langobards. Langobards moved southwards and, after settling for a short period in the Carpathian basin, they moved on to northern Italy and established a short-lived kingdom there at the end of the sixth century. They never developed substantial literacy and thus most of what remains of their language is a fair number of loan-words in Italian. Bavarians and Alemannians also moved south of the Danube, crossing what used to be the border of the Roman Empire. Literacy in these dialects is contemporaneous with Old English (from about 700 onwards) and developed within the political, cultural and religious framework of the Frankish Empire. It is a good approximation to say that the German spoken in modern Austria is a descendant of Bavarian and that spoken in Switzerland now goes back to Alemannian. In terms of Modern German these can be labelled non-standard High German dialects. The second West Germanic group lived between the rivers Weser and Rhine. They are called Franks or, in antique terminology, Istvaeons. In the fifth century, with the weakening of the Roman Empire, they moved southwest and occupied first only the north of Gaul, then in the following centuries the whole of it. Franks were the only continental Germanic tribal conglomerate that managed to erect a stable political structure over the territory they occupied. This gradual process culminated with Charles the Great (or Charlemagne), whose Empire was the first to dominate much of Europe in the way that the Roman Empire once did. From the point of view of the documentation of continental Germanic, the cultural and religious revival that took place under his rule (and, of course, Alcuin of York's administration) is of a significance similar to Alfred's and Aelfric's "renaissances" in England (see 6.2). In the west of the Empire, where the original population was romanised, Franks gave up their language in the subsequent centuries in favour of Gallo-Romance. This is the reason why the language of France is not German or Dutch now. The name Old High German denotes the Germanic dialects spoken in the south-east of the Frankish Empire. OHG emerged between the third and eighth centuries from a convergence of dialects originally belonging to more distantly related tribes, part of them Frankish (e.g. Rhine Franconians), part of them Elbe-Germanic (Alemannians and Bavarians). The feature that most markedly distinguishes OHG from the rest of Germanic is the overall shift of the obstruent system of these dialects, a change that is generally held to have proceeded from the south towards the north but stopped short of affecting the northernmost dialects. The centre of gravity of the gradual

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standardisation of German from the sixteenth century on was a mixture of High German dialects that were ultimately of Frankish, rather than Elbe-Germanic origin.

The language of those Franks who remained around the mouths of the river Rhine is the distant ancestor of modern Dutch, called Old Low Franconian in its earliest period (though Dutch, in fact, shows certain Ingvaeonic characteristics as well). Its documentation begins with fragmentary translations in the tenth century; in the twelfth there is already a considerable amount of fine poetry. The language called Afrikaans was originally the dialect of Dutch spoken by the settlers of South Africa. It gained official status as an independent language only at the end of the nineteenth century.

The third West Germanic group is called North Sea Germanic or Ingvaeonic. The tribes collectively denoted as Ingvaeons inhabited Jutland (present day Denmark) and the coastal regions in its vicinity. Some of these peoples (in Bede's account the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes) invaded the British Isles beginning in the fifth century and formed a population that after a couple of centuries collectively referred to itself as English. Among those who remained on the continent were the Frisians, living along the coastline of modern Holland. Their language has converged to Dutch to such an extent that it is nowadays regarded as one of its dialects. Many of the Saxons also remained and populated the north of modern Germany. Their dialects developed into Low German, which was, in the course of history, so heavily influenced by High German that in modern dialectological terms it has become customary to speak of a German language that falls into High and Low dialects with further subdivisions.

Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry, is a Germanic language whose formation is different from that of the others. It is properly regarded as a relatively recent offshoot of High German. Its cultural centre used to be in the east, in the communities of Jews in the Ukraine, Poland and Russia, Hungary and the Baltic, but it was also spoken in Germany and the east of France. After the tragic events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the majority of (partly Yiddish-speaking) Jews now lives in America, apart from a substantial number in Israel. The earliest texts in Yiddish are glosses in religious works dating from the twelfth century. Major documents (poetry etc.) were first written in the fourteenth century, and Yiddish has ever since been an important vehicle of Ashkenazic Jewish culture. It has not gained official status anywhere except in Birobidzhan, an autonomous territory created in south-east Siberia within the bounds of the Soviet Union in 1934.

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4.4. Map: The Germanic homeland and the migrations This map, taken from Keller (1978:55), shows where the five Germanic groups were approximately located in the very first centuries of our era and the major directions of their migrations.

Key to the map:

East Germanic or Oder-Vistula Germanic (Illevionic) Elbe-Germanic (Herminonic) Weser-Rhine Germanic (Istvaeonic) North Sea Germanic (Ingvaeonic) North Germanic (Scandinavian)

Numbered arrows indicate the major directions of the initial migrations: (1) Goths to regions north of the Black Sea, c. AD 200, (2) Ingvaeonic tribes to the British Isles, fifth century, (3) Alemannians to Germania Superior and Rhaetia bw. 300 and 450, (4) Franks to Germania Inferior and northern Gaul, fifth century, (5) Bavarians to northern Alps, Rhaetia and Noricum, Langobards to northern Italy, sixth century.

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4.5. Summary: a time-scale diagram of Germanic AD 2000 English (Frisian) Dutch German (Faroese) Icelandic Danish – Yiddish Norwegian Swedish – – – Crimean AD 1500 ENHG Gothic – OFris MLG – – ME MHG ON – AD 1000 – OE OLFr OS OHG – RhFr Bav – Alem Langb – AD 500 Runic Runic – Gothic – – – Ingvaeonic Istvaeonic Herminonic Scandinavian Eastern 1 – – Proto-Germanic – – 500 BC At the top of the diagram (based on Keller [1978:49]) the contemporary standard languages are placed. Those bracketed have not reached that status but rank above dialects. Unbroken lines indicate continuous and relatively extensive attestation. A broken line above a recorded language indicates interrupted or somehow less direct written tradition. Early runic attestations cannot safely be assigned to particular languages, they display northern and western features.

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5. Germanic innovations

5.1. Phonology

5.1.1. Grimm's Law, Verner's Law and the Stress Shift The term Grimm's Law refers to the overall restructuring of the PIE obstruent system exclusively in Germanic.17 It involved the change of the manner of articulation of every stop in the following way: voiceless stops turned into voiceless fricatives when not preceded by an obstruent, voiced stops turned into voiceless stops in all environments, finally aspirated stops turned into voiced fricatives in intervocalic position18 and into unaspirated voiced stops elsewhere. Schematically: (19) p t k kw > f x xw

b d w > p t k kw bh dh h wh > b/v d/ / (w)/ (w)/w

In the examples English (or Old English) is taken to represent Germanic for practical purposes and is contrasted with Latin, Russian or Greek: (20) *piskis > fish but La piscis

*trejes > three but La tres *krn-/korn- > horn but La cornu19 *kwod > what (OE hw t) but La quod *abl- > apple but Ru jabloko *ed- > eat but La edo *agro- > acre but La ager *gwen-/gwn- > queen but Gr gune 'woman' *bhrater- > brother but Gr phrater *nebhel- > OE nifol 'mist' pronounced nivol but Gr nephele 'cloud' *dheh1- > deed but Gr the- 'do, place' *ghostis > guest but La hostis 'enemy' *songwh- > sang but Gr omphe 'song'20

In the tradition of Germanic philology, the letter <þ> is often used for the sound here phonetically transcribed with the IPA symbol . This is because in the script of the historically attested languages that letter (called thorn) is used for that sound. Another difference is that the letter < > or <b> is used where we use v. This difference is meant to be phonetic, instead of palaeographic, viz. labial instead of labiodental fricative, which we find unconvincing.

The following are examples of the absence of fricativisation when a voiceless stop is preceded by an obstruent in PIE:

17 Its name is a tribute to Jacob Grimm, who described it in 1821. 18 Intervocalic position means position between vowels but includes the vicinity of liquids as well. There is some uncertainty about word-initial position: it appears that instead of occurred there in the earliest times. 19 The sound x (= a voiceless velar fricative) is often transcribed as <h>. Word-initially it actually phonetically changed into h very early. 20 The reflexes of PIE wh are, in fact, notoriously irregular in many languages. In Germanic usually either or w turns up as in sang above and in * whermos > E warm but Gr thermos, respectively.

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(21) *st - > stand, La stare

*okto > eight (OE eaht pronounce xt), La octo *spek- > spy,21 La specio 'look'.

Often one finds that PIE voiceless stops turn up as voiced instead of voiceless fricatives in Germanic. For reasons that will be apparent later we take two examples from German instead of English. PIE *sepm gave G sieben 'seven' (compare La septem, formed with a t-suffix), where the word-internal b is a reflex of Proto-Germanic *v, whereas PIE *nepo- gave G Neffe 'nephew' (compare La nepot- also formed with a t-suffix), in which the internal f is the continuation of Germanic *f. Similar examples can be found for all the PIE voiceless stops. It was Karl Verner, a Danish linguist who solved the riddle in 1877. When comparing forms in various Germanic languages with their cognates in Sanskrit, he noticed that there was a consistent correlation between the placement of word stress (which is known for Sanskrit) and voicing in Germanic. On the assumption that Sanskrit represents the original PIE stress patterns preserved even in Germanic for some time, it is clear that voiceless Germanic fricatives (including s, not only those coming from PIE stops) were voiced when they were not immediately preceded by stress.22 Indeed: the Vedic Skt cognate of sieben is saptán, whereas that of Neffe is nápat-. This led to the formulation of the sound change named later Verner's Law: voiceless fricatives in Proto-Germanic are voiced if they stand in a vocalic environment in the middle or at the end of a word and are not immediately preceded by stress. It is important that the law was operative before original PIE stress patterns were given up for the sake of stem-initial stress that came to characterise Germanic (even in MoE, whose stress system is so confused, it is true that all words that are not stem-initially stressed are of non-Germanic origin). To summarise the etymology of the above two examples in the light of the three changes: (22) Grimm's Law Verner's Law Stress Shift PIE *sepm > PGmc *sefún > *sevún > *sévun > MoG sieben PIE *népo- > PGmc *néfo- > MoG Neffe Spectacular examples are found in the verbal paradigms. In Old English, the verb freosan (> MoE freeze) had the past form freas in the singular but fruron in the plural and its past participle is froren. Leaving aside the alternation of vowels (eo ∼ ea ∼ u ∼ o) as well as the suffixes (SING ∅ vs. PLUR -on vs. PART -en) for the moment, let us note that the stem-final consonant appears as s in the present and the past singular but as r in the past plural and participle. It is known that Proto-Germanic *z appears in many of the daughter languages as r, hence it is obvious that the s ∼ r alternation goes back to an earlier s ∼ z alternation. It is also known that stress was originally on the stem in the present and in the past singular, but on the suffix in the past plural and the participle (this is actually the reason for the alternation of vowels too). Later in PGmc, when stress moved to the stem-initial syllable, the alternating consonants remained, hence the typical Old English (and OHG, ON etc.) patterns, of which more will be seen in 7.2.2.1 and 8.1.1.23 21 In fact, spy is a borrowing from French, but in French it is a borrowing from Germanic, so it is an example after all. 22 But, as pointed out above, voiced fricatives are realised as voiced stops in certain environments. 23 Actually, it was the comparative analysis of Germanic and Sanskrit verbal paradigms that led Verner himself to the realisation of the regularity.

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5.1.2. Vowels Vowels underwent several changes in Germanic, of which we will here mention only a few. PIE e > PGmc i when before a nasal plus a consonant example: PIE *wentos > PGmc *windaz (but La ventus) > MoE wind (noun) PIE e > PGmc i when the following syllable contains i or j, also ej > i example: PIE *sed-j- > PGmc *sitj- (but, without -j-, La sedeo) > MoE sit PIE syllabic sonorants > PGmc u plus nonsyllabic sonorant24 example: PIE *plnos > PGmc *fulnaz > MoE full PIE a > PGmc o (merger with PIE o ) example: PIE *mater- > PGmc mo or > MoE mother PIE o > PGmc a (merger with PIE a) example: PIE *oktow > PGmc *ahtau > MoE eight, G acht.

5.2. Grammar and vocabulary

5.2.1. Verbs PGmc is distinguished by two very important developments in verbal morphology from the rest of the IE languages. One is that the tripartite opposition (imperfective – perfective – aorist) was replaced by a simple opposition of present and past. It is still true that morphologically no other temporal distinction is expressed in the Germanic languages: if other tenses exist, they are expressed periphrastically (i.e. with the help of auxiliaries like will, have and be in English).

The other exclusively Germanic innovation in the verb system is the dental past: the majority of verbs form their past (as well as their past participle) with a suffix that either did not exist or had no such function in PIE. The suffix in PGmc was d/ , in the modern daughter languages it appears as d (E loved, seemed) or t (E looked, kept, G liebte 'loved') depending on the sound laws pertaining to the individual languages. It is this suffix that defines what is traditionally called the class of weak verbs as opposed to the ablauting strong verbs. The origin of the dental suffix is debated; there are two theories that are equally solid both grammatically and phonologically. One idea is that the suffix was originally that of the past participle and derives from the widely attested PIE suffix *-tos (as in La fac-tus PASTPART of facere 'to do', Gr hora-tos 'visible' from horan 'to see', Skt ga-ta- PASTPART of gam- 'to go'). From the past participle it spread to the finite past forms, hence their identity in the case of weak verbs.25 The other theory says that the suffix arose from the PGmc verb *don ( > MoE do) which was compounded with the main verb to form a periphrastic past tense (as if instead

24 This change is included here for practical purposes. 25 The adoption of participles for past tense use is quite frequently found in various languages. It happened in Slavonic, where the -l, -la, -lo, -li past suffixes derive from participial markers and the same is true of the Hungarian -tt- past suffix.

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of he came one said he come-did) and the two verbs eventually coagulated into one finite past form of the main verb.

5.2.2. Nominal morphology The general demise of PIE nominal morphology is quite apparent already in PGmc. The dual went out of use and the eight original cases collapsed into a system of four. Only nominative, accusative, genitive and dative were distinguished, with the markers of the rest of the cases being reassigned to the remaining cases if not discarded altogether. To take only one example, the OE dative suffix -e (as in dæge DATSING of dæg 'day') continues the PIE dative suffix of o-stems, the Gothic dative suffix -a (as in daga, DATSING of dags 'day') continues the PIE instrumental ending, while the OIc dative suffix -e (as in dege, DATSING of dagr 'day') is thought to represent a PIE locative suffix. As is normal with grammatical change, leftovers are found at the peripheries of the language system: Gothic has preserved certain vocative forms distinct from the nominative, OE shows dual forms of the personal pronouns and a handful of instrumental cases (e.g. hwy [> MoE why], INSTR of hwæt [> what]). Another important innovation affected the declension of adjectives. When placed in a noun phrase that began with a determiner (mostly definite NP-s), adjectives were declined in what we call the "weak" way; when there was no determiner (mostly indefinite NP-s), the "strong" declension was used. Exemplified with the phrases 'the good man' and 'good man' in OE and MoG: (23) OE weak SING PLUR

NOM se goda mann þa godan menn ACC þone godan mann þa godan menn GEN þæs godan mannes þara godan manna DAT þæm godan menn þæm godan mannum

OE strong SING PLUR NOM god mann gode menn ACC godne mann gode menn GEN godes mannes godra manna DAT godum menn godum mannum MoG weak SING PLUR NOM der gute Mann die guten Männer ACC den guten Mann die guten Männer GEN des guten Mannes der guten Männer DAT dem guten Mann den guten Männern MoG strong SING PLUR NOM guter Mann gute Männer ACC guten Mann gute Männer GEN guten Mannes guter Männer DAT gutem Mann guten Männern

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As can be seen, the rationale behind the weak declension is that cases are not distinguished in the adjective if there is a determiner that carries markers of case. In the terminology of Germanic linguistics, weak adjectives are declined as "weak nouns", i.e. n-stems.

5.2.3. Syntax Very little is know for certain about PIE syntax and not much more about PGmc syntax. Nevertheless, there is at least one typical syntactic development that is recognised in Germanic, namely, the V-2 (read "verb second") rule. It is not known whether it existed already in PGmc but, since it is characteristic of all Germanic languages except MoE (though it used to be typical of OE and to a certain extent even of ME), it can safely be assumed that it is a very early development. V-2 means that the verb is normally the second constituent of the sentence. It can be preceded by just one constituent, which may, but need not, be the subject. (Note that we are speaking of constituents and not words: the verb is not necessarily the second word.) The verb is thus the central constituent of the sentence, with respect to which other constituents are located. Since MoG is a fairly conservative language in this respect, we will again take examples from there: (24) CONST1 VERB CONST2 CONST3 Er gab dem Kind einen Apfel. He gave to the child an apple alternatively: Dem Kind gab er einen Apfel. Einen Apfel gab er dem Kind. Several of the Gmc languages show V-2 only in main clauses, whereas in subordinate clauses the verb is in the final position and the typical constituent order is Subject–Object–Verb. It is believed by many linguists that PIE had this as its dominant constituent order and so Germanic actually continues an ancient pattern in subordinate clauses while innovating in main clauses. To take the same German sentence now in subordination as an example: (25) CONST1 CONST2 CONST3 VERB ...er dem Kind einen Apfel gab (e.g. Ich weiβ, daβ [Sub er dem Kind einen Apfel gab] = I know that he...).

5.2.4. Vocabulary A large portion of the Germanic word stock derives from PIE: all the PIE examples we have given so far could be repeated here. A certain part of the vocabulary shared with other languages is, in fact, paralleled only in those IE languages that were probably spoken geographically close to PGmc. One such word is (to) sow (and its derivative seed) which appears to go back to a PIE root *se- (or *seh1-) but only has cognates in Latin (sero 'to sow', semen 'seed'), Slavonic (OChS sěti), Baltic (Li séti) and Celtic (W had) outside the Germanic branch.

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A considerable part of the vocabulary is general within Germanic but completely unparalleled outside it. These words may be borrowings from a non-IE language with which others did not come into contact, but this is completely conjectural – there is no evidence whatsoever. A sample list of them: (26) bath (OE bæþ, OIc and OS bað, OFris beth, MoG Bad)

boat (OE bat, OIc beit) drink (OE drincan, Go drigkan, OIc drekka, MoG trinken) drive (OE drifan, Go dreiban, OS driban, MoG treiben) evil (OE yfel, Go ubils, OFris and MDu evel, MoG übel) finger (OE finger, Go figgrs, OIc fingr)26 hand (OE hand, Go handus, MoG Hand) sea (OE sæ, Go saiws, OIc sjár, OS seu, MoG See) ship (OE scip, Go, OS and ON skip, MoG Schiff).

A couple of words are known to have been borrowed from other IE languages so early that their inclusion in a discussion of PGmc is warranted. A famous one is the Celtic stem *rik- which turns up in many of the Gmc lanagues, e.g. OE rice 'kingdom', the etymon of MoE rich, G Reich 'empire', Go reiks 'king' and reiki 'kingdom'. The stem is attested in other IE languages too (La rex, Skt rajan- 'king') and is derived ultimately from PIE *reg- but the vowel i which regularly replaces PIE e in Celtic shows that it cannot have been a PIE inheritance in Germanic. Latin (and Greek) borrowings are more numerous and their cultural character shows that they date from the long period of extensive contact between Germanic tribes and the Roman Empire. Some of them are military terms that were acquired first by those who served in the Roman army, but many of them refer to notions connected to trade of Mediterranean goods, or simply eastern phenomena that were new to the Germanic peoples. Examples include wine (OE win, Go wein, MoG Wein ← La vinum), cheap (OE ćeap,'price, goods, market', ćeapian 'to bargain, trade', Go kaupon, MoG kaufen 'to buy' ← La caupo 'inn-keeper'), dish (OE disc, OS disk, MoG Tisch 'table' ← La discus 'plate'), street (OE stræt, OS strata, MoG Straße ← La strata [via] 'covered [road]'), church (OE ćiriće, MoG Kirche ← Gr kyriakon) and kitchen (OE cyćene, MoG Küche ← La coquina). Among the words lost by modern times we find OE elpend 'elephant', Go ulbandus 'camel' ← La (Gr) elephas, -antis.

5.3. Differences between the Germanic languages After the relative linguistic unity of the PGmc period, smaller-scale innovations deepened the differences between what later developed into the individual languages. These differences are, of course, far too many to be enumerated here, so we will only pick some of the most important here from among those that are typical of more than one language. West Germanic languages are characterised by a gemination of all consonants (except r) when followed by j. Example: PGmc *kunjaz > OE cynn (> MoE kin), OS and OHG kunni as opposed to Go kuni and ON kyn. West Germanic languages are also set apart from the rest by the replacement of by d in all environments: OE beodan 'to ask' (related to MoE bid), OS biodan as opposed to Go biu[ ]an, ON bjó a. The two sounds were in complementary distribution in PGmc. The other interdental spirant, , also turned into a stop but later than .

26 Some suggest that the word derives from PIE *penkwe 'five' (represented by E five as well as La quinque, Gr pente and Skt panča, among others), but this is uncertain.

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In all West Germanic languages except English and Frisian it became d: G drei, Du drie = E three; in Frisian as well as Scandinavian except Icelandic it became t: Fris trije, Sw tre. As seen in 1.2, English and Icelandic are the only modern Germanic languages that have preserved (Gothic naturally had it, but its documentation is earlier than the change). West and North Germanic languages share a phonological development called I-Mutation or Umlaut. This means that all back vowels turn into front vowels if they are followed by i or j with any number of consonants intervening. Example: PGmc *mann-iz (PLURNOM of *mann-) > *menniz > OE, ON menn, MoE men, MoG Männ(er) as opposed to Go mans. The singular, without i, retained the back vowel in every language: OE etc. mann. The word *kunjaz above is also an instance of this change. Because of the alternations it introduced, Umlaut is very important for the understanding of Old English morphology. We will come back to it in 7.2.4.2. High German dialects show a restructuring of their obstruent system comparable in scope to Grimm's Law. In the first centuries of the Middle Ages, voiceless stops turned into fricatives or affricates depending on phonological environment (compare G Pfeffer with E pepper) and voiceles stops were devoiced (G tun vs. E do) in Alemannian, Bavarian and those Franconian dialects that were spoken near the upper Danube and the upper Rhine. Since the Old High German Consonant Shift affected various dialects to various extents, and the later standardisation of German was not based on the "highest" High German dialects, Modern Standard German only shows the shift partially. Ingvaeonic languages (in terms of early documentation this means OE, Old Saxon and Old Frisian) are distinguished from non-Ingvaeonic languages by the loss of nasals before fricatives. E five (OE fif) and OS fif correspond to Modern German fünf (< *fimf-), E goose and OS (documented in MLG) gos to MoG Gans (<*gans-), E mouth and OS muth to MoG Mund (<*mun -). English and Frisian share two phonological developments. One is the fronting of a to æ (in Frisian to e), as exemplified by OE dæg (> MoE day) and OFris deg as opposed to Go dags, MoG Tag etc. This fronting, called Anglo-Frisian brightening, was blocked or reverted before nasals (hence mann) and before back vowels (hence OE dagas, the plural of dæg). The other is the palatalisation of velar consonants in the vicinity of front vowels27, as in E church, Fris tsjerke t - vs. Du kerk, G Kirche (< *kirika ← Gr kyriakon) and E yield, Fris jilde vs. Du gelden, G gelten (< *geldan). Velars were also palatalised in Scandinavian, but that is a much later and phonetically partly different development. We will return to these changes in the section on OE phonology. In terms of grammar, there are fewer differences. The Ingvaeonic languages generally lost person distinction in the plural of verbs, hence the original Gmc third person *-an (> OE -aþ) suffix is found in the first and second persons too. The other languages have preserved the original first person plural *-am and second person *-i suffix: OE bindaþ and OS bindad 'we/you/they bind' vs. OHG bintames – bintet – bintant and ON bindom – bindeþ – binda.

The V-2 rule of syntax was mentioned earlier; V-2 languages with the exception of Scandinavian (and partly of Yiddish) also show the clausal brace, or with the more current German term, Satzklammer. This means that non-finite verb forms are placed at the end of the clause and so the finite verb (typically an auxiliary) and the main (but non-finite) verb "embrace" (i.e. flank) the rest of the sentence (except the first constituent). Example from MoG:

27 The terms palatal and front denote the same place of articulation. In this work we use palatal with reference to consonants and front with respect to vowels. The same stands for velar and back.

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(27) CONS1 FINV CONS2 CONS3 NONFINV Wir sind gestern ins Kino gegangen we are yesterday to the cinema gone 'We went to cinema yesterday'

The clausal brace also existed in OE and we will exemplify it in 8.3. Satzklammer languages with the exception of Yiddish have verb-final subordinate clauses. Scandinavian languages have postposed articles: Sw ulv-en corresponds to E the wolf. Scandinavian languages as well as Dutch and Frisian have reduced the tripartite gender system to two genders (common vs. neuter), whereas English and Afrikaans have got rid of gender altogether – though this is a relatively modern development.

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5.4. The earliest attestations of Germanic There are a few hundred runic Germanic inscriptions, discovered mostly in present day Denmark, Germany, but some were found in Poland and Hungary. Their language is often referred to as Runic Norse, but in fact it is not always possible to assign such inscriptions to particular branches of Germanic, so it is more convenient to call them attestations of North-West Germanic. Here are two of the most famous specimens inserted and explained here for illustration.28 1) The Gallehus horn (first half of fifth century, present day Denmark)

e k h l e w a g a s t i z h o l t i j a z

h o r n a t a w i d o 'I, Hlewagastiz, son of Holt, made this horn' ek 'I'; Hlewagastiz Proper name; the first part, hlewa- is most likely to be the stem meaning 'fame' (<

PIE *klew-/klu), which also occurs in OE hlud (> loud) and hlystan (> listen) as well as in the Franconian name Chlodowig (MoG Ludwig, Fr Louis, Hu Lajos); the second part, gastiz (MoE guest) occurs in many compound names;

Holtijaz Proper name in genitive, meaning '(son) of Holt'; alternatively, a locative meaning '(coming) from (the place called) Holt' is not entirely out of question, though perhaps less likely;

horna 'horn' ACC; tawido 'make, complete' PASTSING1, a word lost in English but attested in Gothic (taujan) and

OHG (zauwen). 2) The Tjurkö bracteate (first half of fifth century, present day southern Sweden)

w u r t e r u n o z a n w a l h a k u r n e

h e l d a z k u n i m u d i u 'Heldaz made these runes on gold for Kunimund'

28 Several collections of Runic inscriptions exist, among them Musset (1965), Krause (1966), Antonsen (1975). Page (1973) is specifically concerned with Old English runic inscriptions.

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wurte 'make' PASTSING3, this verb is cognate with E work, wrought; runoz 'rune' PLURACC; an 'on'; walhakurne 'foreign corn' i.e. 'gold' SINGDAT; the first half of the compound walha- is a

denotation of foreign people widespread in Europe: it is found in the names E Wales, Hu vlach ('Rumanian'), olasz, vallon; the second half is cognate with E corn and has the dative suffix -e;

Heldaz Proper name in nominative; Kunimudiu Proper name in dative; the first half is kuni- 'race, tribe, kinsmen', cognate with E

kin and king; the second half is mund-, reflected by OE mund 'protection, hand', OHG and MHG munt 'protection', frequently found in names, e.g. Sigismund (Hu Zsigmond).

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5.5. Sample texts in seven Old Germanic languages Here we give the annotated text of the Lord's Prayer as a representative specimen in Gothic, Old Norse, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon and two Old High German dialects (Rhine Franconian and Alemannian). All the texts given here are original except the Old Frisian version, which is a word by word translation by the author of our source, Keller (1978:57–63), to facilitate comparison. The Old Saxon version is a free alliterative translation with several additions which have been omitted here. Numbers in the first column refer to notes. OHG OHG Gothic ON OE OFris. OS (Rh. Fr.) (Alem.) (1) atta faþer fæder feder fadar fater fater (2) unsar, varr, ure user, usa, unser, unseer, (3) þu sa þu þu þe thu (thi) thu thu thu (4) is ert eart bist pist (5) in i on in an in in (6) himinam, hifne heofonum, himele them himilom himile, himila bist, rikea (7) weihnai helgesk si ewied sie geuuihid si giuuihit si uuihi namo nafn þin thin thin namo namun þein þitt nama nama. namo. thin, dinan, gehalgod; (8) Qimai Tilcome Tobecume Kume Cuma quæme qhueme þitt þin thin thin (9) þiudinassus rike rice; rike. riki. richi rihhi þeins thin. din, (10) Wairþai Verþe Geweorþe Werthe Uuerða uuerdhe uuerde þinn þin thin thin (11) wilja vile willa willa, uuilleo uuilleo uuillo þeins, thin, diin, (12) on eorþan on ertha swe sua swa swa alsa so sama sama so so in himina a iorþ on in an erðo, in himile in heofonum. himele. himile jah sem so an endi sosa ana airþai. a hifne. them himilo in erthu. in erdu. rikea.

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(13) Gif Gef Syle Jef Gef Gib Kib uns oss us us us uns uns (14) himma daga idag to-dæg hiu-dega dago hiutu hiutu vart urne user dagligt gedæg- degelik gehuuilikes hwamlican (15) hlaif brauþ. hlaf; hlef rad, broot prooth unsarana unseraz unseer þana emezzigaz emezzihic sinteinan. Jah Ok And And endi Endi (16) aflet fyrerlat forgyf forjef alat farlaz oblaz uns oss us us us uns uns (17) þatei ossar ure usere managoro skulans skulder gyltas, skelda, mensculdio, sculdhi sculdi sijaima, unsero, unseero, (18) swaswe jah sua sem swa swa al sa al so sama so so (19) weis ver we wi uue uuir uuir (20) afletam fyrerlatom forgyfaþ forjevath farlazzem oblazem þaim userum oðrum uns skulam skeldichium. mannum scolom skuldikem doan. unsaraim. ossom urum unserem. skuldo- gyltendum. nautom. Jah Ok And And endi enti ni inn ne ne Ne ni ni unsih (21) briggais leiþ gelæd þu led lat gileidi firleiti uns oss us us us unsih eige farledean in i on in letha in in (22) fraistubnjai, freistne. costnunge forsekinge(?) wihti, costunga. khorunka ak (Heldr ac ak ac auh uzzer (23) lausei frels þu) alys ales help arlosi losi uns oss us us us unsih unsih af af of of uuithar fona fona þamma allun (24) ubilin. illo. yfele. evel. ubilon ubile. ubile. dadiun.

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Notes: (1) Gothic uses a different word for 'father', though fadar also existed. (2) Old Norse uses a different stem in the nominative of 'our'. The Ingvaeonic languages

show the loss of the nasal before s. (3) The relative pronoun (Latin qui) is rendered with a relative pronoun only in ON and OE,

in the other languages with the personal pronoun 'you SING'. (4) Gothic is the only language that shows an -s and not an -st suffix in 2SING. In OS and

OHG this form of the verb is not based on the *es- but the *bhu- root. Some doubt that OE eart continues the PIE *es- root variant.

(5) Strictly speaking, OE did not have the in preposition: on was used in its stead. (6) The word heaven shows twofold variation in its consonantal skeleton: m vs. v in the

second and n vs. l in the third position (cf. E heaven and G Himmel). The OS version consistently uses the phrase 'the kingdom of heavens'.

(7) The Latin passive (sanctificetur nomen tuum) is rendered in three different ways. Gothic has a class of weak verbs in -nan with inchoative meaning ('become holy'). ON uses a reflexive formed from a stem identical to that found in OE (halg- > hallow) with the help of the suffix -sk (identical to G sich 'oneself'). In the West Germanic languages an analytic passive consisting of the past participle and the verb be is used except by the Alemannian author who simply applies an active structure (hence namun dinan in the accusative).

(8) The verb come can be seen in each language. In ON it has the prefix til-, in OE two prefixes (to- and be-).

(9) The Celtic loanword rik- is used in every language except Gothic for 'kingdom', though otherwise Go also had the word reiki. In this Gothic text a word formed on the basis of þiuda 'people' is used. This latter word appears in every Germanic language: in OE as þeod 'people', the adjective from it as deutsch in Modern German (meaning 'German') and (through borrowing) as Dutch in Modern English. The same word underlies Hungarian tót.

(10) The word for 'become' is the same in every language (PGmc *wer - > MoG werden). (11) The word will shows gemination before j in the West Germanic languages. (12) The comparative construction is expressed with various elements including cognates of

so, as, same, and. The word earth is identical in each language (PGmc *er o). (13) The verb give appears in every language except OE where syllan (the etymon of sell) is

used. Old Frisian shows palatalisation (jef), Alemannian shows devoicing of the initial consonant (kib).

(14) The expressions for 'today' all consist of a deictic element and the word day (PGmc *dagaz). Even OHG hiutu (> MoG heute) includes the latter in the reduced form -tu.

(15) Germanic languages have two synonyms for bread: PGmc *hlaivaz (> MoE loaf) and *brauðam (> bread). In these texts Go, OE and OFris show the former, ON, OHG and probably OS the latter.

(16) The verbs for 'forgive, let away' are quite varied. There are two stems (cognate with give in OE and OFris, and with let in the rest of the languages). OE and OFris show palatalisation of the first consonant of the stem; OHG shows the shift of t to ts as part of the OHG Consonant Shift. The prefixes include for, ob, a, af.

(17) The Gothic translation actually runs here: 'forgive us that we are sinners' instead of 'forgive us our sins'. For 'sin' each language except OE shows a word going back to PGmc *skuldi- (> MoG Schuld, MoE shall). OE shows the etymon of guilt, of unknown origin.

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(18) For the comparative construction see note (12). (19) The pronoun we shows the original final *z devoiced in Gothic, rhotacised to r in OHG

and ON, and lost in the Ingvaeonic languages (OE, OFris and OS). (20) Note that in the Ingvaeonic languages the original third person *-an (> OE -aþ) suffix

is found in the first and second persons. The OS text here reads 'as we do to other men' instead of 'as we forgive to those sinning against us' or, literally, 'to our sinners' in the other languages.

(21) Here the cognate of the verb bring is used in Gothic, but that of lead in the other languages with the prefix ge-/gi- in OE and Rhine Franconian and fir- in Alemannian.

(22) The Latin word temptatio (and its Greek original peirasmos for Wulfila) denoted a Christian notion obviously problematic for Germanic translators. The OE word costnung originally meant 'trial, proving, testing'. This word also exists in Hu. (kóstol) as a borrowing from G (kosten 'to try, taste').

(23) All languages except ON and OS use a verb cognate with loose with a prefix in OE and Rhine Franconian. The OS text here reads 'help us against all evil deeds'.

(24) All languages except ON show the cognate of evil (< PGmc *uvilaz). ON shows a word that appeared later through borrowing in English as ill. Gothic alone uses the definite article here.

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6. Introduction to Old English

6.1. Anglo-Saxon and Old English: matters of chronology When speaking of the early Middle Ages in English political and cultural history, the term Anglo-Saxon is used with reference to the roughly six centuries between the beginning of Germanic settlement in Britain (mid-fifth century) and the Norman conquest (1066). This period overlaps, but is not coextensive with, what is called the Old English period in language history. In accordance with conventions of terminology, the first linguistically cohesive period in which a language comes to be written with some frequency is called the "old" period of that language. Because of this, the Old English period both starts and ends later than the Anglo-Saxon period. The first scraps of non-runic writing in English date from around AD 700 and literacy is henceforth continuous by early medieval standards. The Norman conquest brought about a drastic change in social and ecclesiastical structures, but the language was slow to absorb its effects and it is also clear that much of what changed in it over those centuries (radical demise of inflection, disappearance of grammatical gender, solidification of SVO order etc.) is not necessarily due to the Norman assumption of rule. In sum, the form of English that is unanimously regarded as different from Old English only emerged by the second half of the twelfth century. Thus the OE period is limited on internal grounds by the approximate dates AD 700 and the mid-twelfth century.

The time between the Germanic settlement and the first textual records is referred to as Pre-OE (or pre-literary or prehistoric OE, to which some extend the cover-term OE). Linguistically its importance lies in that many of the principal OE sound changes (palatalisation, breaking, perhaps umlaut) took place in those centuries. The OE of the period ending in the first decades of the tenth century is called early OE. The variety associated mainly with the works of Ælfric (c. 1000), which influenced the whole of the English-speaking (or, more properly, English-writing) territory, is called classical OE (actually the same as late West Saxon, see 6.2). The last hundred years (mid-eleventh to mid-twelfth centuries) that saw the demise of the standard established by Ælfric are often referred to as transitional OE, but frequently the term late OE is used to cover both the classical and the transitional periods.

6.2. Aspects of the external history of Old English It is the generally accepted view that the settlement of Ingvaeonic tribes in south-east Britain was the consequence of the withdrawal of the Roman army in 410. The chief source of the period, Bede gives 449 as the date of their arrival and identifies the three tribes as Angles, Saxons and Jutes. It would be naive to believe that the arrival of the ancestors of the English can be dated with such precision; it probably took several decades. Note that the first Germanic inscription in England dates from before 400; it is clear that there may well have been Saxon etc. mercenaries in the Roman garrison stationed in Britain. The names of the tribes are also to be treated with caution: Bede himself lived more than two hundred years after the main thrust of the settling took place, and although the names Angle and Saxon were current at the time, it is not clear what they denoted: tribes, tribal confederacies, or something else?

At any rate, the new settlers successfully subjugated the original Celtic population and it appears that within about two hundred years (of which, by the way, we know next to nothing) they established dominion over what is now England (except Cornwall) and some of the south of Scotland. Political power shifted considerably between the various tribes and

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kingdoms of what is somewhat misleadingly called the Heptarchy.29 Kent may have had a leading role in the very first times, since the Roman missionaries established the centre of the church in Canterbury. The arrival of the first, St Augustine (not the bishop of Hippo) to England in 597 is often cited as a significant date, which it is, but with a caveat. Christianity was not new to Britain: it was already deeply rooted among the Celtic population and, by St Augustine's time, British missionaries had been engaged in considerable activity in Northumbria emanating from their stronghold at Iona (founded in 563) off the west coast of Scotland. It was these Celtic monks who brought Latin alphabetic script to the Anglo-Saxons, and no continental form of writing appeared until the eleventh century. Thus English Christianity had two roots, Roman and Celtic, though with the Synod of Whitby in 663 the dominance of the Roman Church was established.

By the middle of the seventh century Northumbria emerged as the leader both politically and culturally. With important religious communities at Jarrow, Lindisfarne, Whitby and York, and outstanding figures like Bede or Egbert and Æthelberht (archbishops of York) or later Alcuin (who was the most prominent scholar at York in the 770s, then the prime mover of the Carolingian renaissance on the continent from 782 on), Northumbria was indeed one of the cultural centres of Western Europe around 700 and in the course of the eighth century. Politically speaking, in the second half of the eighth century the kingdom of Mercia dominated much of England. It was in this century that texts began to be written in English rather than Latin and for this reason most early OE texts show predominantly northern, i.e. Northumbrian and Mercian, features.

The Viking raids started in the last years of the eighth century. By the middle of the ninth century they became regular and eventually resulted in permanent settlement. There are two important consequences of this for the history of the language. One is that English was exposed to strong Scandinavian influence due to the close and often peaceful coexistence of speakers of the two languages, which were, at that time, so little different that a high degree of mutual comprehensibility may be assumed between them. Of Scandinavian loanwords in English we shall say more later.

The other consequence is that with Northumbria and Mercia largely destroyed, political and cultural supremacy shifted to the south, namely to the West Saxon kingdom with Winchester as its centre. Alfred, who came to the throne of Wessex in 871, successfully resisted the Viking pressure and established a truce that resulted in a relatively stable West Saxon dominance over most of England. With the invaders either departed or settled, there was comparative peace by Alfred's death in 899.

Alfred did not only achieve political stability, his reign also saw the first real flourishing of English literacy. Intent upon educational reform, he commissioned the writing of a year-by-year narration of events (known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles) and the translation of several earlier works from Latin, among them Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It is from this period that we first have a substantial corpus of prose texts. The language of this corpus is called early West Saxon. It shows a certain amount of Mercian influence because in his reforms Alfred sought the help of monks from Mercia, where the scholarly tradition of the North was only able to survive.

The tenth century saw the consolidation of a unified England under a single ruler and the revival of monasticism on the continent. At Cluny in Burgundy a Benedictine house was 29 The reason why this term is misleading is that it is not true that there were seven kingdoms into which the Germanic population was integrated. Only Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex are evidenced to have erected political structures stable enough to be termed kingdoms in an early medieval sense and to have exercised influence over relatively large territories. The tribal hidage, a sort of census list from c. AD 700 that gives invaluable information on the fabric of early Anglo-Saxon society, ranks East Saxons and South Saxons among such medium-size tribal groups as the Hwicca, the Lindesfarona, the Hendrica and the Chilterns.

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established in 910 which managed to add fresh impetus to monastic life with its strict observance and stress on discipline and spirituality. The movement was highly successful all over Christian Europe, and spread to England by the middle of the century. The central figures of ecclesiastical and cultural history of the following hundred years were reformed Benedictine monks. Æthelwold created a school devoted to religion and learning at the monastery of Winchester, and emanating from that school in the decades immediately before and after 1000 there came a series of manuscripts that were so consistent and regular in terms of spelling and grammar that they can be reasonably regarded as specimens of a written standard language. Even earlier prose texts were revised and brought into line with the new manner of writing. The key figure of this movement was Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham and an extremely prolific scholar. Among his numerous works there are homilies, lives of saints and a grammar he wrote for those translating from Latin and those reading his texts.30 His ambition was no less than writing a complete curriculum in the vernacular language. This is the second (and similarly short) period in which a substantial number of original texts were written. The sort of language Ælfric used (called late West Saxon) came to be used all over England except the farthest North, and it is for this reason that we regard it as a standard variety of OE that functioned as such in manuscript copying well until the second half of the eleventh century.

It is also from this period that the only manuscripts of OE poetry are extant. As opposed to prose, poetry has come down to our times almost exclusively in four books all of which were compiled around 1000 in connection with the Benedictine renaissance centring on Winchester. At the same time, it is obvious that much of that poetry dates from centuries earlier. The Ruthwell Cross, for instance, has a text carved on it that is nearly identical to part of the Dream of the Rood, which may mean that (if the carving and the text are contemporaneous) the poem existed in some form already in the early eighth century, when the cross was erected. Bede informs us that Cædmon, the first English poet known by name, lived in the late seventh century. Furthermore, it is obvious that Anglo-Saxon poetry has its roots in a long unwritten tradition and its parallels in other Germanic languages make it clear that some of that tradition may well go back to continental times. Linguistically it is interesting that OE poetry as it has come down to us appears not to have been composed in any well-defined dialect, but in a mixture of West Saxon and Anglian tinged with archaisms that had long gone out of use by the time the extant manuscripts were copied. To this variety, which is markedly different from the expected Ælfrician norm, some literary historians refer as a "common poetic dialect" – though it is uncertain to what extent this is a peculiarity of written composition and manuscript transmission rather than of the language of the poems.

With respect to the language significant changes set in by the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries for two reasons. One is language-internal and it is probably futile to seek particular explanations for it. The changes that the OE language had been undergoing (the smoothing of diphthongs, the overall merger of unstressed vowels, the concomitant erosion of the inflectional system, the shrinking of morphosyntactic categories like gender, the fixation of sentence patterns etc.) reached what is seen in retrospect as a critical mass that warrants calling the language of the following centuries by a different name, viz. Middle English – but this is already the topic of another chapter. The other reason is language-external and has to do with the assumption of rule by a French-speaking (but originally Scandinavian) political and military élite.

The Norman conquest brought about drastic changes in ecclesiastical life, since William the Conqueror very quickly replaced bishops with his own Norman appointees. This 30 It has been demonstrated that he even corrected manuscripts of his own earlier works where he thought they were grammatically inconsistent e.g. in terms of what case a given preposition governs.

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was followed by an influx of monks trained in France who brought their own orthographic and spelling conventions with them to England, so monasteries were no longer able to uphold the standards of Ælfric's school and in Anglo-Norman communities there was also no need for English texts. Latin was restored as the language of all serious writing, and this was detrimental to English literacy. After 1100 Old English poetry is no longer copied, and the prose of Alfred, Ælfric and Wulfstan continues into the thirteenth century mostly at peripheral places like Worcester and other West Midlands scriptoria.

By the mid-twelfth century English manuscripts become confused and inconsistent in their manner of spelling, since scribes no longer remembered how their predecessors had written and were trying to reconcile what they were writing with their own dialects of English. This transition is highly spectacular because it affected writing habits, but it must be borne in mind that orthographic change and language change are hardly ever synchronous and the former does not necessarily reflect the latter in any straightforward way.

6.3. Old English dialects and their attestation The varieties of Old English exemplified by surviving manuscripts are traditionally classified into four: Northumbrian, Mercian (these two are collectively called Anglian), West Saxon and Kentish. In a rather loose sense these correspond geographically to the North, the Midlands, the Southwest and the Southeast, respectively. It should, however, not be forgotten that in OE dialectology we are speaking of dialects of manuscripts rather than dialects of well-defined regions. A case in point is East Anglia: obviously a certain variety of Old English was spoken there, but we simply have no documentation of it, hence we do not speak of an East Anglian dialect or even less of the dialect of a spurious kingdom of Essex. It must also be remembered that the study of language variation in the early Middle Ages is intricately interwoven with the history of scriptoria and scribal habits. On the language of poetry, see 6.2.

For reasons pointed out above the earliest documents in English come from the North. To name the major texts with predominantly Northumbrian traits: one version of Cædmon's Hymn, the runic inscription of the Ruthwell Cross and the Franks Casket from the early eighth century, Bede's Death Song and the Leiden Riddle from slightly later, perhaps the ninth century, while late tenth-century Northumbrian is represented by interlinear glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels, part of the Rushworth Gospels and the Durham Ritual. The most important sources of Mercian are the archaic Epinal Glossary from the early eighth century, the Corpus Glossary and the Vespasian Psalter, an interlinear gloss, both from the early ninth century, finally the other part of the Rushworth Gospels from the late tenth. Kentish before the ninth century is not attested in continuous texts. An inscription in a manuscript called Codex Aureus dates from c. 850, then there are two tenth-century poetic texts, the Kentish Psalm and the Kentish Hymn, and contemporaneous glosses to Proverbs.

West Saxon is first extensively documented in Alfred's "renaissance". His own (!) translation of and preface to Pope Gregory the Great's work entitled Pastoral Care, his translation of the prose part of the Paris Psalter, of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and of St Augustine's Soliloquies, the anonymous translation of Orosius' history and of course the early parts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles constitute the core of the early West Saxon corpus. Though Bede's history was translated into English during Alfred's reign, the existing manuscripts date from later and display late West Saxon features. Late West Saxon, the English standard of the eleventh century, is best studied in Ælfric's works and in the Homilies of Wulfstan as well as the late Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.

In what follows we will chiefly be concerned with late West Saxon and will point out dialectal differences only occasionally.

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6.3.1. A Map of the OE dialects31

31 Taken from Baugh and Cable (1993:52).

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7. Sounds and phonology

7.1. Pronunciation Besides alterations normally made in textual editions (addition of punctuation, capitalisation, word and line division, resolution of abbreviations, emendation of scribal mistakes – on these see chapter 10), two further features are often added in texts designed for students (or for linguists not versed in OE) and in dictionaries whereby two important aspects of actual pronunciation are disambiguated. One is the marking of vowel length with a macron, the other is the marking of palatals with a diacritic (usually a dot) above the letter. Neither occurs in manuscripts: vowels were unmarked for length and palatals were written with the letters for velars. In the chart below we give "normal" letters in the first column, disambiguated transcription in the second, and phonetic value in the third. Numbered notes are indicated in a fourth column. (28) Normal Disamb. Phon. Note Normal Disamb. Phon. Note p p p i i i t t t i i c c k e e e ć t e e b b b d d d 11 g g y y y 12 1 y y 12 g j u u u d 2 u u cg cg 3 o o o 7 cg d 2 o o f f f 4 a a 7 v a þ þ 4 ie ie iy 8, 10 ie i y 8, 9 4 eo eo eo 10 eo e o 9 s s s 4 ea ea 10 z ea 9 h h x 5 h sc sc 6 m m m n n n l l l r r r w w w

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Notes: 1. The voiced velar fricative occurred instead of between vowels and liquids. When

teaching or reading OE it is usually deemed unnecessary to distinguish the two, but their difference is interesting historically in that the reflexes of are vocalic elements in later stages of English: boga > (a) bow, folg(ian) > follow, whereas that of is normally : docga > dog, finger > finger.

2. The affricate d is written either <g> or <cg>. 3. Geminates were normally marked by doubling the consonant letter, as in binnan 'inside',

hliehhan 'laugh'. The only regular exception to this is , often written <cg>, as in docga. 4. These three fricatives (f s) had a voiced allophone each in intersonorant position, which

spelling did not mark. The letters <þ> (called thorn) and < > (called eth) were used interchangeably without any functional differentiation. They could both freely mark either allophone ( and ): bæð or bæþ (> bath) and baðian or baþian (> bathe).

5. The voiceless velar fricative x was pronounced h word-initially. 6. The combination <sc> denoted sk instead of in certain words like ascian (> ask). 7. Before nasals, <a> and <o> often seem interchangeable, e.g. mann or monn (> man), lang

or long (> long), but the forms with o are more characteristically Anglian.. It is likely that what was actually pronounced in these words was a rounded nasal vowel between and o (something like ). The reflexes of this segment are not uniform (see the two examples).

8. The two diphthongs written <ie> are somewhat marginal in OE in that they only occur in EWS and even there they are frequently replaced by <i>. By LWS they merged with y( ). Their actual phonetic value in EWS is a matter of debate; that given here is one of the possibilities.

9. The pronunciation of the long diphthongs developed in the course of the OE period from w-ending diphthongs to -ending diphthongs to long monophthongs by ME times. The transcription given here captures a middle phase within OE, probably largely correct for the "classical" period, but it is certain that these segments were capable of a greater degree of variation. In the Anglian dialects diphthongs were often smoothed to monophthongs (leht instead of leoht [> light]).

10. Short diphthongs were allophones of the short front vowels. It must be pointed out that in writing, <ea> etc. often represented a simple back monophthong after a palatal consonant, e.g. sećean se t n 'seek' where a diphthong is out of question. The uncertainties mentioned in note (9) as well as Anglian smoothing are also relevant for short diphthongs.

11. In Northumbrian, Mercian and Kentish e is found instead of æ (brecon instead of bræcon 'we/you/they broke').

12. In Kentish, both long and short original y appears as e (efel instead of yfel [> evil]).

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7.2. The phonology of Old English

7.2.1. The consonant system In terms of contrastive units, the OE phonological system included the following consonants: (29) labial dental alveolar palatal velar stops voiceless p t t k voiced b d d fricatives voiceless f s x nasals m n liquids l r glides j w

7.2.2. Phonological regularities affecting consonants (positional variation, alternations) There are two major types of alternation between OE consonants, both affecting obstruents and entering into an intricate interplay with each other on occasion. One is the pattern of voicing and devoicing among fricatives, the other is the alternation of velars and palatals. The second type of alternation arose historically from the palatalisation of velars that characterises only English and Frisian; the alternations of fricative voicing have more varied and much older roots. Problems of fricatives are complicated by the fact that, since the earliest Germanic times, voiced stops also alternated with voiced fricatives. 7.2.2.1. Fricatives in OE The two rules of thumb are the following: (i) fricatives are voiceless at the end of a word: *wiv > wif (> wife); they are also voiceless word-initially and in gemination, but there had generally not been voiced fricatives in that position; (ii) fricatives are voiced between vowels and sonorants (and this is the only environment where voiced fricatives occur): ćeosan 'choose' INF but ćeas PASTSING, ćeorfan rv 'carve' INF but ćearf rf PASTSING, similarly bæð b (> bath) but baðian b i n (> to bathe).

To the three pairs of fricatives exemplified so far one must add , the original word-initial, intervocalic and word-final allophone of , which devoices word-finally into x: beag b > beah b x PASTSING, but bugan bu n INF (> to bow). A further complication is that original x disappears in the environment in which other fricatives are voiced, thus: *fleohan fl x > fleon fl n (> flee) INF but fleah fl x PASTSING.

Alternations of fricatives also include those introduced by Verner's Law. The velars x and alternate in fleon: fleah as opposed to flugon flu on PASTPLUR and (ge)flogen (je)flo en PASTPART; s/z (< PGmc *s) and r (< PGmc *z) alternate in ćeosan ∼ ćeas ∼ curon ∼ (ge)coren (same forms); / (< PGmc * ) and d (< PGmc * ) alternate in sniðan (-ð-) ∼ snað (- ) ∼ snidon ∼ (ge)sniden 'cut' (same forms). Vernerian alternations between f and v were obliterated by the other voicing and devoicing rules.

Some of these alternations have been inherited even by MoE. The wolf ∼ wolves, belief ∼ believe, bath ∼ bathe type is a remnant of the final voiceless ∼ intersonorant voiced

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alternation, was ∼ were is the only instance of Verner's Law in inflection with a couple more in derivational morphology: rise ∼ rear, lose ∼ forlorn, death ∼ dead.

7.2.2.2. Velars and palatals in OE Three palatal segments (t d j) alternate with the velars (k ) in many palatal environments. Thus, to return to one of the previous examples, ćeosan and ćeas begin with t because the vowels are front, but curon – (ge)coren have k because the following vowels are back. Similarly, giellan (> yell) and geal begin with j whereas the other two forms of the same verb, gullon and gollen begin with . These alternations, of course, occur in nominal paradigms too: compare geat j t 'gate' with its plural gatu tu, or dæg d j (> day) with its plural dagas d s. The affricate d occurs as the palatalisation of and of post-nasal , as in bycgan bydd n (< *buggjan with West Germanic gemination) 'buy', whose past bohte boxte (> bought) shows the devoiced reflex of a non-geminated and non-palatalised ; engel end el 'angel' (← La/Gr angelus) shows a post-nasal palatalised . The palatal fricative is the reflex of Pre-OE sk; its oddity is that it did not only turn up in the vicinity of front vowels but in all environments (e.g. *skoh > OE scoh o x > shoe), hence by classical OE times it left no alternations. It is held by many that the sk > change started in the same environments as the other palatalisations, but then it was generalised. An argument against this suggestion is that the same change took place in German (compare Schuh), where there was no palatalisation of velars at all.

7.2.3. The vowel system (30) monophthongs diphthongs front back front high i i y y u u (i y) mid e e o o e o low æ æ æ As has been mentioned, there also existed three short diphthongs (iy eo æ ) but these were allophones of the short front vowels (i e æ) respectively before certain consonant clusters (e.g. r + consonant) and often before u in the following syllable. This phenomenon is traditionally called Breaking.

7.2.4. Morpho-phonological regularities affecting vowels Vowels display even more complicated patterns of alternations than consonants. One part of these, viz. ablaut, goes back to PIE even if not all the actual words that display it have PIE etymologies. Umlaut has crucial morphological consequences in OE due to the loss of its original conditioning environment. Two further "local" vowel changes, Anglo-Frisian brightening and breaking have shaped the OE vowel system, of which two we will briefly discuss the first. 7.2.4.1. Ablaut Since we have already explained the phenomenon in 3.1.2, we will not dwell on it here long. It has been made clear that ablaut differences were at the heart of the system of Germanic strong verbs (singan – sang – sungon – gesungen, beran – bær – bæron – geboren etc.). It is also apparent that, when learning OE, one comes across large "families" of words that show

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ablaut-relations in their derivational morphology. For example, related to beran 'carry' (e-grade), there is bearwe (> barrow), bearm 'lap, bosom' representing the o-grade, bær (> bier, a frame for carrying corpses), gebæran 'conduct oneself', bære 'manner, behaviour' representing the e-grade and -bora 'carrier' in compounds like rædbora 'consellor', lit. 'who brings advice', representing the ∅-grade. 7.2.4.2. Umlaut Umlaut or I-Mutation was the fronting of back vowels before i or j in West and North Germanic. It resulted in alternations where two forms of a word differed in having or not having a suffix that included the trigger. Hence the numerous singular vs. plural umlaut words, since one suffix of the plural was *-iz in PGmc. Many suffixes, however, were lost in Pre-OE through sound changes and so the vowel difference came to be the only sign of several morphological distinctions. Thus we have mus vs. mys (> mouse and mice), fot vs. fet (> foot and feet),32 mann vs. menn (> man and men), where the plurals go back to PGmc *musiz, *fotiz and *manniz, respectively. Furthermore, j was the most productive verb-forming (originally imperfective) suffix since PIE times, so we also find ful vs. fyllan (> full and fill), fod vs. fedan (> food and feed), hal 'entire, healthy' vs. h lan (> whole33 and heal), where the verbs go back to *ful-jan, *fod-jan and *hal-jan, respectively. In strong verbs umlaut shows up in second and third person singular forms, since the original suffixes of these were *-ist and *-i . Hence do 'I do' and doþ 'we/you PLUR/they do' vs. dest 'you SING do' and deþ 'he does'. In OE, umlaut affected the diphthongs too. This is shown by verbs like creopan (> creep), which declines in the present as follows: SING creope, crypst, crypþ, PLUR creopaþ, following exactly the same principle as don above. When a velar intervenes, it is palatalised: *drank-jan > drenćan 'make sb. drink' (> drench, from the same root as drink). At the same time, a velar that precedes a mutated vowel remains unpalatalised: the plural of gos is ges (> goose and geese), the plural of cu is cy (> cow and EMoE kine with double plural marking, now replaced by the regularised cows). In terms of relative chronology, this indicates that umlaut took place later than palatalisation. 7.2.4.3. Anglo-Frisian brightening and the low vowels The history of low vowels is rather intricate in (Pre-)OE. It is clear that both PGmc a and a were mostly fronted to OE and respectively. A comparison of OE gl d (> glad) and G glatt 'smooth', OE s d (> seed) and G Saat illustrates this, as does OE ćeap (> cheap) and G kaufen 'buy' (PGmc au > OE æ ). As mentioned in 5.3, this fronting is either blocked or reverted in certain environments, primarily before nasals and back vowels. Since, however, morphological levelling of various kinds has blurred the original alternations, and other sound changes (among them umlaut, the PGmc ai > OE change and the diphthongisation of short vowels called breaking) have interfered ruthlessly, the existing alternations in documented OE are rather incoherent. Two more or less consistent patterns are the following: one involves before back vowels, elsewhere, as in fæt SING ∼ fatu PLUR 'vessel'; the other involves in open syllables, in closed syllables, as in glæd SINGNOM, glædra PLURGEN ∼ glades SINGGEN, glade PLURNOM (> glad). This latter occurs with adjectives.

32 The original umlaut of o was, in all likelihood, , a sound much like in Hu fő. It was delabialised to e very early. 33 The w in whole is an ossified misspelling; there never was a phonetic w in this word.

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8. The grammar of Old English OE morphology was much richer than that of MoE, but there are clear signs of a general demise already in the Anglo-Saxon period. The morphological devices generally employed are of four kinds: root vowel modification, suffixation, prefixation and compounding. Derivation involved all, whereas inflection only the first two.34 Root vowel modification has two historical sources: ablaut and umlaut. Other changes resulted in vowel alternations too (Anglo-Frisian brightening in the first place) but these do not play such a significant morphological role in OE. Neither do consonantal alternations (except perhaps Vernerian alternations), though they obviously contribute to the formal variety of inflection. Root vowel modification was functional in the two-, three- or four-way distinction of present, past singular, past plural and past participle forms of strong verbs (ćeosan ∼ ćeas ∼ curon ∼ [ge]coren) and also of a few weak verbs (tellan ∼ tealde [> tell ∼ told]). Furthermore, it occurred in the 2–3 person present forms of many strong verbs. It also played a significant part in a handful of nouns in distinguishing forms according to number and case (mann ∼ menn). Certain adjectives underwent root vowel modification in comparison (lang [> long] ∼ lengra ∼ lengest). By IE standards, suffixation was a rather poorly applied device in inflectional morphology, but it was much richer than in MoE. Some distinctions (e.g. person/number in the present of verbs) were very often only expressed through it (singe ∼ singest ∼ singeþ ∼ PLUR singaþ). Suffixes were more widely used in derivation, where many of them had originated in full words. From fisc (> fish) the word fisc-aþ 'fishing' is formed, from strang (> strong) we get streng-þu (> strength) and streng-u (meaning the same) with two different suffixes, both with concomitant umlaut. Two suffixes are added to the root *bur- (zero grade of ber- 'carry' < PIE *bher-) in byr-þ-enn (> burden, also with umlaut). Prefixation only existed in derivational morphology (if one disregards the optional ge- of past participles). Several of the prefixes also existed as prepositions (much like in Modern German). For some prefixes it is very difficult to establish a consistent meaning if one remains strictly within the domain of OE, e.g. for- in don (> do) ⇒ for-don 'destroy', heard (> hard) ⇒ for-heard 'very hard', drincan (> drink) ⇒ for-drincan 'make/be drunk', bitan (> bite) ⇒ for-bitan 'bite through', gietan (> get) ⇒ for-gietan (> forget). Others have more stable meanings, e.g. ed- 'back' in gift (> gift) ⇒ ed-gift 'restitution', cwic 'alive' (> quick) ⇒ ed-cwic 'restored to life', gyldan 'pay' (> yield) ⇒ ed-gyldan 'remunerate'. As opposed to suffixation, prefixation never causes modifications (whether of vowels or consonants) in the root. All three devices are combined in many cases, as in wealcan 'to roll' ⇒ ge-wilc-þ 'rolling'. Similarly to prefixation, compounding was used for the formation of new lexical items only. Many types can be distinguished according to the category of items taking part in the process or the semantic relations holding between the items compounded and the result of the compounding. Many morphemes used in compounds were on the way to becoming pre- or suffixes, which makes it difficult to classify them. The word lic 'body' (> like) is a noun that was used in itself, as the first half of a compound (licburg 'cemetery') or the second half of a compound (manlica 'effigy, image'). Its stem is also found in gelic 'similar'. In ćildlic the meaning has changed from 'a child's body, appearance, likeness' to 'childish', but the original formation is still more or less transparent semantically. In many words, however, -lic is clearly an adjectival suffix and cannot be interpreted as part of a compound, as in hungerlic 'hungry' from hungor (> hunger).35 In other cases the elements are clearly separate words that fully retain their semantic identity, as in dureweard 'janitor' from duru (> door) and weard (> 34 Interestingly, this division of labour is typical of many languages, among them Hungarian. 35 As the reader will have realised, it is this -lic that the MoE suffix -ly continues.

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ward). It was in the field of compounding that poetic language was most inventive: many such words only occur in poetry. We will return to derivation in chapter 9.

8.1. The morphology of verbs

8.1.1. Strong verbs Verbs in all Germanic languages fall into two major classes, strong and weak. They differ in their past formation: that of strong verbs is an inheritance from PIE, that of weak verbs (the dental past) is a Germanic innovation (see 5.2). Strong verbs are assigned to seven classes in the grammatical literature on the basis of the vowel variation they display. Classes I–V clearly continue PIE ablaut patterns, classes VI–VII are problematic in that no generally accepted explanation of their origin exists. Vowel variation differs in classes I–V for two reasons: different ablaut series are represented by classes I–III vs. IV–V and the segmental context induced different sound changes in the individual classes. To take the principal parts of strong verbs in classes I–V, this means the following (the verbs are bitan [> bite], creopan [> creep], bindan [> bind], beran [> bear] and etan [> eat]):36 (31) Verb forms Ablaut (PGmc) Ablaut (PIE) Relevant sound changes Class I PRES bitan i ej PIE ej > PGmc i PASTSING bat ai oj PIE oj > PGmc ai > OE PASTPLUR biton i i PASTPART biten i i Class II PRES creopan eu ew PASTSING creap au ow PIE ow > PGmc au PASTPLUR crupon u u PASTPART cropen o u PIE u > PGmc o % Class III PRES bindan iS (or eS) eS PIE eNC > PGmc iNC PASTSING band aS oS PIE o >PGmc a PASTPLUR bundon uS (or oS) S PIE S > PGmc uS PASTPART bunden uS (or oS) S PIE S > PGmc uS Class IV PRES beran eS eS PASTSING bær aS oS PIE o > PGmc a > OE æ PASTPLUR bæron aS eS PIE e > PGmc a > OE æ PASTPART boren oS S PIE S > PGmc uS > oS %

36 The percent sign (%) indicates that a sound change operated only in a significant number of words including the triggering environment.

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Class V PRES etan e e PASTSING æt a o PIE o > PGmc a > OE æ PASTPLUR æton a e PIE e > PGmc a > OE æ PASTPART eten e e Behind the apparent diversity of forms there lies a very simple regularity: PIE e-grade in the present, o-grade in the past singular, zero (classes I–III) or e-grade (IV–V) in the past plural, zero (I–IV) or e-grade (V) in the past participle. To this one must only add the sound changes typical of Germanic and OE. The remaining two classes display vowel variations that have no straightforward explanation in terms of ablaut. Class VI has a ∼ o ∼ o ∼ a, class VII verbs have one vowel in the present and the past participle, and another (either e or eo) in the past. Here we will illustrate them without further comment. The two verbs are scacan (> shake) and cnawan (> know). (32) Class VI PRES scacan PASTSING scoc PASTPLUR scocon PASTPART scacen Class VII PRES cnawan PASTSING cneow PASTPLUR cneowon PASTPART cnawen A strong verb is inflected according to person/number in the declarative mood in the following fashion (the example is creopan): (33) PRESENT SINGULAR PLURAL PAST SINGULAR PLURAL 1 creope creopað 1 creap crupon 2 crypst creopað 2 crupe crupon 3 crypð creopað 3 creap crupon Three things are to be noted: (i) there are no person distinctions in the plural; (ii) the PASTSING2 form is based on the PASTPLUR stem, this is generally true of West Gmc languages; (iii) with many strong verbs there is umlaut in the PRESSING2–3 forms due to the original *-ist, *-i suffixes. As a result of umlaut, for some strong verbs there was actually a five-way root vowel alternation: in this case, creop- ∼ cryp- ∼ creap- ∼ crup- ∼ crop-. In the subjunctive, verbs only distinguished four forms altogether: present singular vs. plural, past singular vs. plural. Singular forms took the ending -e, plurals took -en. Thus:

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(34) PRESENT SINGULAR PLURAL PAST SINGULAR PLURAL creope creopen crupe crupen The subjunctive -e- goes back to the PIE thematic optative marker *-oj- (see the paradigm in 3.2.3).

8.1.2. Weak verbs The majority of weak verbs show no stem variation. Originally all these verbs were formed with the PIE *-j- imperfective suffix and their past and past participle forms had the *-d- suffix (which we discussed in some detail in 5.2.1). They are traditionally divided into three classes, which we exemplify with the verbs hieran (> hear), lufian (>love) and libban (> live). (35) Class I PRESENT SINGULAR PLURAL PAST SINGULAR PLURAL 1 hiere hierað 1 hierde hierdon 2 hierst hierað 2 hierdest hierdon 3 hierð hierað 3 hierde hierdon Class II PRESENT SINGULAR PLURAL PAST SINGULAR PLURAL 1 lufie lufiað 1 lufode lufodon 2 lufast lufiað 2 lufodest lufodon 3 lufað lufiað 3 lufode lufodon Class III PRESENT SINGULAR PLURAL PAST SINGULAR PLURAL 1 libbe libbað 1 lifde lifdon 2 leofast libbað 2 lifdest lifdon 3 leofað libbað 3 lifde lifdon Given that class III is a collection of four verbs that may be regarded as exceptions, it suffices to concentrate on classes I–II. The difference between them is that class II originally had a thematic vowel *-o- before the *-j- and thus the roots could retain their back vowel (there are no back vowel roots in class I because of umlaut) and the suffixes appear with -a- and -o- before them. Subjunctives were formed in the same way as those of strong verbs.

8.1.3. Miscellaneous There are many verbs in OE that do not entirely fit into the categories set out above. As is so often the case, the most frequently used verbs display idiosyncratic behaviour and preserve ancient structures that the rest of the language had long got rid of. Preterite-present verbs, for instance, have only past paradigms, one strong and one weak, and the formally strong past is used in the function of the present. The verb cunnan has the "present" forms SING can, canst, can (> MoE can), PLUR cunnon, and its past is cuðe (> could) etc. Most Modern English modal auxiliaries derive from OE preterite-presents. The verb beon (> be) is also irregular in

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several ways (but not a preterite-present). It is the only verb to have preserved the PIE SING1 suffix *-mi (eom > am).

8.2. The morphology of nouns, pronouns and adjectives The three morphosyntactic categories relevant for these word classes are those inherited from PIE: gender, number and case. Gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) was grammatical but signs of a transition to natural gender are already apparent (e.g. the neuter noun wif 'woman' receives the neuter determiner ðæt in ðæt wif 'the woman', but when it is referred to again in the discourse the feminine anaphor heo 'she' is used instead of the neuter hit [> it]). Number was singular or plural. The morphological dual had virtually disappeared except for two pronouns: wit 'we two' vs. ić [> I] and we [> we] and git 'you two' vs. ðu 'you SING' and ge 'you PLUR'.

There were two major types of case marking in OE: we may call one pronominal, the other nominal. Functionally they are characterised by a division of labour to a certain extent. Full-fledged and highly disambiguated case marking was only typical of pronominal elements, which often functioned as determiners in the first positions of noun phrases. Nouns in themselves distinguished relatively few forms. Adjectives were capable of extensive differentiation much in the manner of pronouns, but only in the absence of a determiner. With a determiner, they had nearly zero case marking. This bifurcation is at the heart of the strong vs. weak declension of adjectives (which we discussed in 5.2.2). As for nouns, the literature on OE distinguishes several stem types and subtypes (a-stems, o-stems, i-stems, wa- and ja-stems as subtypes of a-stems etc.). These distinctions are made on the basis of PGmc stems and their relevance for OE is hardly transparent in many cases since the suffixes that the various stem-types receive overlap to a great extent. For illustration we give three relatively different paradigms representing a-stems, n-stems (weak nouns) and u-stems, respectively. The examples are stan (> stone), nama (> name) and sunu (> son). (36) SING PLUR SING PLUR SING PLUR NOM stan stanas nama naman sunu suna ACC stan stanas naman naman sunu suna GEN stanes stana naman namena suna suna DAT stane stanum naman namum suna sunum As can be seen, distinctions were rather meagre: in nama, five out of eight forms are naman, in sunu, five out of eight are suna. Stan represents a class in which case distinctions are perhaps the most elaborate. Root vowel alternations are much rarer among nouns than among verbs, but they do occur. For one example here is the paradigm of the feminine word boc (> book):37

37 The paradigm of mann as well as adjectival paradigms and that of se were given in 5.2.2.

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(37) SING PLUR NOM boc beć ACC boc beć GEN beć/boce boca DAT beć bocum Here umlaut and the palatalisation of c bear witness to the original suffixes (*-iz in GENSING, NOMPLUR and ACCPLUR and *-i in DATSING). Strictly speaking, there was originally no article in OE. The demonstrative pronoun se, ðæt, seo (> that, the) assumed such a function by late OE times (as its counterparts did in other languages, such as French or Hungarian), but only in prose texts. Its marked absence in poetry is probably an archaic feature.

8.3. Major syntactic features of Old English Recall that the dominant sentence pattern of Germanic has two characteristic traits: V–2 in main clauses and SOV order in subordinate clauses (see 5.2.3). Both are typical of OE as well, as the following sentence shows: (38) He ofslog þone aldorman [þe him lengest wunode] he killed the earl that him longest served 'He killed the earl that had served him longest' The verb ofslog is the second constituent of the main clause, whereas in the subordinate clause (beginning with þe, the general relative pronoun) the verb (wunode) is in final position. In this example, the first constituent of the main clause is the subject (he), but this need not be so – this is why V–2 is not the same as SVO. The following sentence shows this: (39) To þæm wife cwæð God to the woman said God 'To the woman God said...' Here the first constituent of the clause is the prepositional phrase to þæm wife. In actual fact, the V–2 rule has never been a very strict one in the documented history of English. Main clauses and coordinated clauses can also be verb-final in OE like subordinate clauses. Another regularity that overrides the basic pattern is that pronouns tend to come earlier in the clause than a functionally equivalent full NP. In the story of the temptation in Genesis, from where we took the previous sentence, the following line begins: (40) To Adame he cwæð to Adam he said 'To Adam he said...' Here the pronoun he referring to God is placed before the verb, hence the structure of (39) and (40) is not parallel. Let us consider the following example:

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(41) Oswold him com to Oswald him came to 'Oswald came to him' This sentence shows that a pronoun is preposed in the same manner even if it is the complement of a preposition. NPs preposed for topicalisation sometimes trigger the presence of a resumptive pronoun, as in this sentence: (42) Ðara iglanda ðe man hæt Ciclades ðara sindon ðreo & fiftig of those islands that one calls Cyclades of those are fifty-three 'Of the islands that one calls Cyclades there are fifty-three' Another recurrent feature is that "marked" sentence types, i.e. questions (without a question word), commands and negations often begin with the verb: (43) Gehyrst þu cyning? hear you king 'Do you hear (this), king?' Sy þin nama gehalgod be your name hallowed 'Hallowed be thy name' (from the Lord's Prayer) Ne com se cyning not came the king 'The king did not come' Finally, another fairly widespread Germanic feature, the clausal brace, is also found in OE with fair consistency. This means that non-finite verbs are placed at the end of the clause, as in: (44) He ne meahte ongemong oþrum mannum beon he not could among other men be 'He could not be among other men' Eastengle hæfdon þæm cyninge aþas geseald. East Angles had to the king oaths given 'East Angles swore oaths to the king'.

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9. The vocabulary of Old English All languages have devices whereby words are created on the basis of existing material. OE was extremely rich in such devices and applied them generously – this gives the OE vocabulary a character that MoE thoroughly lacks: large families of derivationally related words. Suffixation, prefixation and compounding was widespread and so was root vowel (and occasionally consonant) alternation along with various combinations of these four. To give an example, let us see a fragment of the family created on the basis of gan (> go): (45) gang NOUN 'going, journey, track, passage'

⇒ ćirićgang 'churchgoing' hingang 'going hence, death' mynstergang 'entering monastic life' ganghere 'army of foot-soldiers' gangeteld 'portable tent' genge NOUN 'troops, company' -genga NOUN in compounds: ⇒ angenga 'solitary goer' hindergenga 'backward-goer, crab' rapgenga 'rope-dancer' genge ADJ 'prevailing, going' gengan VERB 'to go' began/begangan VERB 'to go over, go to, visit, cultivate, worship' ⇒ begang/bigang NOUN 'practice, worship' beganga/bigenga 'inhabitant, cultivator' bigengere 'worker, worshipper' bigengestre 'hand maiden, worshipper' begangness 'celebration' ymbgan 'to go round, surround' ⇒ ymbgang 'circumference, circuit' forðgan 'to go forth' ⇒ forðgang 'progress' ingan 'to go in ⇒ ingang 'entrance' ingenga 'visitor, intruder'

And so on with the numerous prefixes.

In chronological terms, the oldest layer of the OE word stock is that inherited from PIE. There are also plenty of words that belong exclusively to the Germanic branch, this is the second layer. These two we discussed and exemplified amply in 3.3 and 5.2.4, and also the oldest borrowings from other languages (Latin and Celtic). Here we shall concentrate on those sections of the OE vocabulary that were acquired in the period after the settlement in Britain. As compared with MoE, the OE word stock is fairly homogeneous in terms of the provenance of words. In spite of the strong exposure to a highly literate civilisation which was superior in several ways and whose language served as the vehicle of Christianity, and in spite of the fact that almost everything that was written in the Anglo-Saxon period was either translated from Latin or had Latin models, writers and translators avoided direct borrowings from Latin with a consciousness that markedly contrasts with the later predilection for them so typical of the Renaissance (see the sections on Middle English and Early Modern English).

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The task of creating a native vocabulary for various kinds of expository prose was undertaken with zeal and accomplished with elegance and naturalness especially by Alfred (theology, philosophy) and Ælfric (grammar and science).

The expression "direct borrowings" is intentional here: indirect borrowings existed in great numbers. These are of two kinds: only meanings, notions are borrowed and attached to existing native words (this may be termed semantic borrowing) or, alternatively, a word consisting of several morphemes is translated into the recipient language morpheme by morpheme (this is called loan translation). An example of semantic borrowing is synn (> sin), which originally meant 'injury, enmity, feud' and acquired its "modern" sense of 'morally wrong' in the OE period as a result of Christianity. Most examples of semantic borrowing are unfortunately not as straightforward as this one, they are in fact highly elusive and difficult to capture for researchers from a distance of a millennium and a half. An example of loan translation is mildheortnis 'mercifulness', which was the rendering of Latin misericordia. The parts making up the whole are in semantic and functional correspondence:38 mild (> mild) = miseri-, heort (> heart) = cord- and -nis (> -ness) = -ia. Similarly, unsceððend 'innocent' translates La innocens: un- (> un-) = in-, sceðð- 'to hurt, harm' = noc(e)-, -end (suffix of present participle) = -ens, tungolcræft is the equivalent of the ultimately Greek word astronomy: tungol = astro- 'star', cræft = -nomia, in the relevant sense 'science'.39

Direct borrowings come in small numbers and almost exclusively from Latin in this period. They belong to different chronological stages: there is a clear difference between pre-Christian Latin loans (perhaps borrowed with the mediation of the Celtic population) and Christian Latin loans. The words ćest 'box' (> chest) ← La cista, forca (> fork) ← La furca and munuc (> monk) ← La (Gr) monachus may belong to the former, though there is some uncertainty about them. Christian Latin borrowings are more learned: alter (> altar) ← La altare, offrian (> offer) ← La offero, calend 'month' ← La calendae 'first day of a month', fers 'verse' ← La versus, pistol 'letter' ← La (Gr) epistula are clearly connected to ecclesiastical and monastic spheres. There are two other languages from which some borrowing took place, but these are insignificant compared to Latin. Old French gave the word prud 'arrogant' (> proud) and Old Saxon gave macian (> make) – this is nearly all one can say about their effect on OE.

A final note on Scandinavian is in place here. It is clear from the historical circumstances as well as from the Middle English period of the language that Scandinavian was liberally made use of as a source of massive and large-scale borrowing after the ninth century. However, in written documents Scandinavian loans only appear in early Middle English for reasons not entirely clear. It is possible that there were borrowings already in OE, but spelling did not show their peculiarities that could distinguish them from their OE cognates. At any rate, their discussion is relegated to the chapter on Middle English.

38 The equals sign (=) here indicates this semantic and functional correspondence, not etymological identity, even though in the case of heort = cord-, un- = in- and -end = -ens that also holds. 39 Loan translation was a very popular method of augmenting and enriching the vocabulary of Hungarian in the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries, cf. vízesés ← G Wasserfall, Aranka (Aranyka) ← La Aurelia etc.

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10. A sample text To see what sorts of data, i.e. texts as primary evidence, linguists and philologists actually work with when studying Old English, let us take a look at a short poetic text, the first lines of The Wanderer. This is how one sees it in the manuscript:40 (46)

This is the same text in an exact letter-by-letter rendering: (47)

1 Oft him anhaga are gebideð metudes miltse þeahþe he mod cearig geond lagu lade longe sceolde hreran mid hondum hrim cealde sæ wadan wræc lastas wyrd bið ful aræd • Swa cwæð eard stapa earfeþa gemyndig 5 wraþra wæl sleahta wine mæga hryre • Oft ic sceolde ana uhtna gehwylce mine ceare cwiþan nisnu cwic ra nan þeic him mod sefan minne durre sweotule asecgan ic to soþe wat þ biþ ineorle indryhten þeaw þæt he his ferð locan fæste binde healdne his hord 10 cofan hycge swahe wille • Nemæg werig mod wyrde wið stondan ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman • Forðon dom

Note that even though the text is poetry, there are no line and half-line divisions. The layout is like that of prose, written from margin to margin. Only the major thematic items are graphically distinguished with division signs rendered in our printing by bullets (the last two words, forðon dom belong to a following sentence not set out here). No further punctuation is used and capital letters only appear where a new division begins, as was normal medieval practice. Word boundaries are also somewhat blurred both ways, though the scribe of this manuscript is exceptionally precise by early medieval standards. A stressed and an adjacent 40 Taken here from a facsimile published in Mitchell–Robinson (1992:270). The original manuscript is called the Exeter Book, dating from c. 1000, one of the four manuscripts of Old English poetry. The first three lines are given enlarged in 15.1.

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unstressed word (or two unstressed words) are often written as one word, e.g. in eorle ('in [a] warrior', line 8), nis nu ('[there] isn't now', line 6), þe ic in line 7 (þe is a relative particle, combined with him it is the equivalent of a relative pronoun; ic is 'I') or ne mæg ('may not', in meaning closer to MoE 'cannot', line 10). On the other hand, compounds are normally written in two separate words, e.g. modcearig ('heart-sad', i.e. 'sad in heart', line 2), wræclastas ('exile-tracks', i.e. 'paths of exile', line 3) or ferðloca ('life-enclosure', i.e. 'body, breast, heart', line 9). Also note that at the end of line 6 an inflectional suffix is carried over into the next line without any indication (cwicra PLURGEN of cwic 'alive', cf. MoE quick).41 The word þæt is abbreviated þ in line 8. This as well as other abbreviations were much more frequent in the Middle Ages than this short text would suggest. The script here exemplified and exclusively used in Anglo-Saxon England is called Insular Hand and is the adaptation of Latin script created by Irish monks. The forms of the following individual letters are of particular interest: <s> (see nisnu, the last written word but one of line 6 or sæ, the fifth word in line 3; a different shape is used in stapa, the last written word but two of line 4), <w> (see swa, the fourth word of line 4 or cwic[ra], the last word of line 6), <g> (see anhaga and gebideð in line 1; the letter <g> is sometimes rendered in modern editions with the symbol < >, called "yogh"), <r> (see are in line 1 or hreran, the last word of line 2). Three letters are never replaced typographically even in modern editions: <þ> (as in wraþra, the first word of line 5 or cwiþan, the last word but two of line 6), <ð> (as in bið and cwæð, the first and fifth words of line 4) and the ligature <æ> (as in sæ [line 3], wræc, the last written word but two of line 3 or cwæð [line 4]). One may note many further subtleties, e.g. <d> has no ascender (vertical line going upwards), whereas <i> and <e> are often higher than other letters, cf. indryhten, the last word but two in line 8. Edited texts (which is what non-specialists and usually even specialists read without ever seeing the original manuscripts) include a large number of modifications all of which require a thorough interpretation of the text. Abbreviations (like þ for þæt) are resolved and potential scribal mistakes are corrected, e.g. in this text healdne (line 9), a clearly wrong form has been corrected by editors to healde, which fits perfectly into the context. Punctuation is added to indicate what are separate sentences and clauses, which of them are questions, exclamations, direct quotations by a different speaker and so on. This may actually result in radically different interpretations by different editors, all made possible by the manuscript. If the text is a poem, as in this case, lines and half-lines are typographically separated, but it must be remembered that even this is not a given in the text but the result of a great deal of research into Anglo-Saxon metrical structures. In editions designed specifically for beginners, length marks on vowels are often added. It is only after such varied kinds of massive editorial intervention that the text receives its final form (or at least one possible form42): (48) 1 Oft him anhaga are geb deð,

metudes miltse, þeah þe he modcearig geond lagulade longe sceolde hreran mid hondum hr mcealde sæ,

5 wadan wræclastas. Wyrd bið ful aræd!

41 Other manuscripts, in fact, display much greater violations of word boundaries; in some, for instance, prefixes are routinely attached to the word preceding the one the prefix belongs to. 42 This one is from Krapp and Dobbie's edition (1936), here cited on the basis of The Cambridge History of the English Language, p. 21, but with length marks added by us.

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Swa cwæð eardstapa, earfeþa gemyndig, wraþra wælsleahta, winemæga hryre: 'Oft ic sceolde ana uhtna gehwylce m ne ceare cw þan. Nis nu cwicra nan

10 þeic him modsefan m nne durre sweotule asecgan. Ic to soþe wat þæt biþ ineorle indryhten þeaw, þæt he his ferðlocan fæste binde, healde his hordcofan, hycge swa he wille.

15 Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.'

And, finally, a Modern English translation with line divisions kept:43 (49) 1 Often the solitary dweller waits for favour,

the mercy of the creator, although he, troubled in heart, has for a long time, across the sea-ways, had to stir with his hands the ice-cold sea,

5 travel the paths of exile; fate is fully determined. Thus spoke the wanderer, mindful of troubles, of cruel battles, of the fall of kinsmen: 'Often, alone at each dawn, I have had to lament my sorrow; now there is no one alive

10 to whom I dare openly reveal my thoughts. I know it to be true that it is an aristocratic practice for a warrior that he should bind fast his heart, hold his heart firm, whatever he may wish to think.

15 The weary heart cannot resist fate, nor the sorrowful mind be of help.'

43 The translation is by Hogg except for the last two lines, the source is that given in the previous note. Four different editions of this piece of text are analysed by him in p. 20–24. One must bear in mind that there are more than one possible interpretations at several points. For instance, it is not certain whether the first five verse lines should be understood as a quotation referred to by thus in line 6, similarly to the longer quotation beginning in line 8. The punctuation followed here suggests that it is not a quotation, rather the poet's introduction. The point is that such details are not to be taken for granted when reading Old English texts.

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Bibliographical notes Good general introductions to historical linguistics in English include Bynon (1977), Hock (1986) and MacMahon (1994), of which perhaps Hock's is the best. Bynon's work, which has been translated into Hungarian recently, is very useful on comparative and internal reconstruction and phonological and morphological change but says nothing about semantic change and is virtually useless on syntactic change. In modern introductory works unfortunately hardly any attention is paid to etymology as such, therefore such books should be read together with Malkiel (1993).

For a conspectus of Indo-European languages the best source is Mayrhofer (1986). The same is also the best summary of Proto-Indo-European segmental phonology. For morphology, the relevant chapters of Szemerényi (1999) may be consulted. Sihler (1995), though primarily focusing on Greek and Latin, is very interesting and informative on PIE phonology and morphology too. Kuriłowicz (1964) on inflectional morphology and (1968) on ablaut are very thorough but often idiosyncratic (especially the latter) and far-fetched discussions recommended to those seriously interested. Cser–Mayer (1999) is a course-size summary of the most important aspects of PIE in Hungarian. For Germanic, Keller (1978) is an excellent introduction. Prokosch (1939) is a classic worth consulting though slightly dated by now. Hutterer (1986) is interesting and good reading in Hungarian, but its linguistic value is less than one would expect. Coetsem and Kufner (1972) is a thorough treatment of PGmc phonology and grammar. Further works, general as well as specific, can be found in large numbers in German, e.g. Bammesberger (1990) on (P)Gmc nominal morphology.

There are many textbooks and overall works on the history of English, all of them have merits and drawbacks. Pyles and Algeo (1993) makes good reading, Strang (1970) is interesting with its reverse chronology. Baugh and Cable (1993) is generally regarded as readable but it is rather dated now and obvious mistakes in details are found in it. Anybody seriously interested in any aspect of the history of English must go to the Cambridge History of the English Language (1992–, general editor Richard M. Hogg), a collection of monographs on all questions pertaining to the language in each period ranging from phonology through onomastics and dialectology to external history. No doubt this is going to serve as the authority in the field for decades. We have relied greatly on the relevant chapters of volume I (The beginnings to 1066). For more details, its up-to-date bibliography is also recommended. Mitchell and Robinson (1992) and the newer Mitchell (1995) are excellent introductory textbooks tailored to the needs of learners of OE. On phonology Hogg (1992) has replaced the previous classic, Campbell (1959), which is still worth reading for its treatment of morphology. For syntax Mitchell (1985) is a comprehensive discussion. For OE vocabulary no comparable work exists; the best thing one can do is start with the excellent monograph by Kastovsky in CHEL and the bibliography given there. Finally, Lass (1994) must be mentioned, which is a readable linguistic companion to OE studies by one of the best historical linguists of the world. In spite of a few embarrassing mistakes that have slipped in, that book brings linguistic problems close to the reader in an extremely intelligent way. The largest dictionary of Old English is Bosworth and Toller (1898 etc.). A smaller one useful for students is Hall (1960). There are several etymological dictionaries for English, the ones we would recommend are Onions (1966) and Hoad (1986), a shorter version of the former. The Oxford English Dictionary also includes etymological sections.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Antonsen, E. A. (1975) A concise grammar of the older runic inscriptions. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Bammesberger, Alfred (1990) Die Morphologie des urgermanischen Nomens. Heidelberg: Carl

Winter. Baugh, Albert C., Thomas Cable (19934) A History of the English Language. London:

Routledge, Kegan Paul. Bosworth, J., T. N. Toller (1898) An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, (1921) Supplement by T. N.

Toller, (1972) Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda by A. Campbell. Bynon, Theodora (1977) Historical Linguistics. Cambridge:CUP. Campbell, A. (1959) Old English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coetsem, F. van & H. L. Kufner (1972) Toward a Grammar of Proto- Germanic. Tübingen:

Max Niemeyer. Cser András, Mayer Gyula (1999) 'Összehasonlító nyelvészet' in Havas László, Tegyey Imre

(szerk.) Bevezetés az ókortudományba II. Debrecen: KLTE, 7–82. Hall, J. R. Clark (19604) A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Cambridge: CUP. Hoad, Terry F. (1986) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: OUP. Hock, Hans H. (1986) Principles of Historical Linguistcs. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. Hogg, Richard M. (1992) A Grammar of Old Engish. Volume 1: Phonology. Oxford–

Cambridge MA: Blackwell. Hogg, Richard M. (gen. ed., 1992) The Cambridge History of the English Language. 1: The

Beginnings to 1066. Cambridge: CUP. Hutterer Miklós (1986) A germán nyelvek. Budapest: Gondolat. Keller, Eduard (1978) The German Language. London: Faber & Faber. Krause, Wolfgang (1966) Die Runeninschriften im älteren Futhark. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck

& Ruprecht. Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1964) The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg: Carl

Winter. Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1968) Akzent, Ablaut. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Lass, Roger (1994) Old English. Cambridge: CUP. MacMahon, April M. S. (1994) Understanding Language Change.Cambridge: CUP. Malkiel, Yakov (1993) Etymology. Cambridge: CUP. Mayrhofer, Manfred (1986) Indogermanische Grammatik I. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Mitchell, Bruce (1985) Old English Syntax. Oxford: Clarendon. Mitchell, Bruce (1995) An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford–

Cambridge: Blackwell. Mitchell, Bruce, Fred C. Robinson (19925) A Guide to Old English. Oxford–Cambridge:

Blackwell. Musset, Lucien (1966) Introduction à la runologie. Paris: Aubier Montaigne. Onions, C. T. (1966) The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: OUP. Page, R. I. (1973) An Introduction to English Runes. London: Methuen. Prokosch, Eduard (1939) A Comparative Germanic Grammar. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society

of America. Pyles, Thomas, John Algeo (19934) The Origins and Development of the English Language.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Sihler, A. L. (1995) New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Oxford: OUP. Strang, Barbara M. H. (1970) A History of English. London: Methuen. Szemerényi Oswald (1999) Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics. Oxford: OUP