Deck 2: Old English: Early Germanic Britain 450-700

Question 1

What was the social position of the Celtic-speaking population of Britain like in the period after the Anglo-Saxon conquest? What consequences did this have for the Celtic languages? for English?

Answer 1

The Celts were in a position of relative powerlessness. They were driven off the land or were treated like slaves. The consequence of this was the extreme dearth of words of Celtic origin in English. Furthermore, this resulted in the spread of English at the expense of Celtic, an expansion visible even in our own times, where Scottish Gaelic is dying out; Irish Gaelic is a distinctly minority language; Cornish and Manx are for all intents and purposes dead languages; only Welsh continues to be spoken by a larger speech community.

Question 2

What kind of contact did the Romans and the Germanic peoples have in Britain?

Answer 2

The Germanic peoples were active chiefly as mercenaries. When they settled, it was generally outside of the (Roman) towns.

Question 3

Why did conversion to Christianity take place so rapidly? What effect did Christianization have on the society of early Germanic England?

Answer 3

Christianization took place at the top of society. As the kings of the Anglo- Saxon kingdoms (Heptarchy) ­converted, they took their peoples with them. The major effect of Christianity was the spread of learning, which took place chiefly in the monasteries.

Question 4

What kind of literature is available to us from the OE period?

Question 5

What is the effect of the limitations in the literature which we have from the OE period on our
knowledge­ of the language?

Question 6

Characterize the influence of Celtic on OE and give some examples.

Question 7

What do place-names tell us about the settlement of England and the ethnic heritage of the various regions? Give examples.

Question 8

How was the Latin alphabet adapted for use in writing OE? What other writing tradition was drawn on for the writing of OE?

Question 9

Both OE and ModE have the category of gender in their grammars. In ModE gender is based largely on "natural gender," by which people mean the biological sex of what is referred to. For reference to a man
we use he; for a woman, she; and for a house, it. Explain how this differs in OE and give examples.

Question 10

What is the relationship of the Germanic kingdoms to the dialect areas of Anglo-Saxon England?

Question 11

Look into blood-type and DNA-evidence on the numerical relations between Anglo-Saxons and Celts. Literature: Weale et al. (2003), Capelli et al. (2003), Thomas, Stumpf, and Härke (2006), Pattison
(2008), Schiffels et al. (2016), Oppenheimer (2006).

Question 12

Substrate influence of Celtic on Old English is a hotly debated topic. One of the basic assumptions is that Celtic speakers shifted relatively rapidly to Old English thereby carrying into OE their Celtic speech habits (see Poussa 1990; Lutz 2009; Filppula and Klemola 2009; Schrijver 2012). You might look more closely either at pronunciation or at grammar.
2a. Pronunciation habits prominently involved what is known as i-umlaut,¹ which refers to the fronting of back vowels in the first syllable when followed by front *i or *j in the second syllable. Schrijver (2012) sees this as phonetically similar to Irish palatalization in which a back consonant palatalizes (or fronts) when the second syllable contains a front vowel. The fronting is focused on the vowel in OE but on the consonant in Celtic (Schrijver 2012: 88). This still leaves the problem of accounting for i-umlaut in other West Germanic languages. Collect arguments for and against the two ways of understanding i-umlaut.
1 Also a/u umlaut, which will not be treated here (cf. Schrijver 2012: 63ff).
2b. The Celtic grammatical substrate is seen as the basis for the adoption of the double paradigm of the verb be in OE (Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto 2008; Lutz 2009; Schrijver 2012). Find out where the wesan forms and the bēon forms show up in other Germanic languages and how this differs from OE. How might this have come about? What are the arguments pro and con in regard to the possible Celtic origins of the double paradigm?

Question 13

In this chapter the runic alphabet (futhorc) was introduced. Find out about further writing systems used in the history of writing in the British Isles, such as the Ogham Alphabet (for Celtic) or the
Lodwick's­ universal alphabet (§12.5.1). What similarities in approach do they share? How do they ­differ? How widely used were these alternative systems?