Search results for "old english"
showing 10 items of 20 documents
Abbo of Fleury
2001
Preprint version
Italian Translations of Beowulf
2012
Il saggio prende in esame criticamente le traduzioni italiane del Beowulf, analizzando i vari aspetti che le caratterizzano e confrontandole sia tra loro che con il testo anglosassone.
The third book of theBella Parisiacae Urbisby Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and its Old English gloss
1986
A certain ‘Descidia Parisiace polis’, which can safely be identified with the work of Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés now commonly known as theBella Parisiacae Urbis, is listed among the books given by Æthelwold to the monastery of Peterborough. We shall never know if Æthelwold's gift corresponds to any of the surviving manuscripts of Abbo's poem – though probably it does not – but the inventory gives evidence of the popularity of his work in England. In the following pages I shall consider the genesis and successive fortune of Abbo's poem and provide a new assessment of the value of theBella Parisiacae Urbis. This assessment is a necessary first step to the understanding of the reasons for …
The Old English term heoru reconsidered
2004
L’articolo prende in considerazione il lessema anglosassone ‘heoru’ e i suoi numerosi composti, allo scopo di dimostrare come il significato di ‘spada’ ad esso attribuito dalla maggior parte dei dizionari e delle grammatiche sia in realtà non del tutto corretto. Alla luce di un’analisi completa dei passi letterari - in tutto il corpus anglosassone - in cui occorrono tali termini, e sulla base anche di un confronto con le kenning anglosassoni ad essi collegate, si dimostra che nella maggior parte dei casi il termine assume, mediante meccanismi di tipo metonimico, dei valori traslati che andrebbero registrati nei dizionari per una efficace comprensione dei testi in questione.
Old English byrððīnenu: the Anglo-Saxon midwife
2018
Midwives were clearly viewed as professionalized figures in the Mediterranean world of antiquity and late antiquity and they were responsible for women’s healthcare, such as gynecological and obstetrical needs. They were referred to in Roman law, admonished in Christian edicts and memorialized in statues and inscriptions. Their status is attested to by medical texts specifically intended for midwives’ use dating from at least the third century B.C. to the sixth century A.D. According to Green, professional midwives disappeared along with the slow disintegration of the urban environments that supported medical specialization and reemerged as a specialized profession only in the thirteenth ce…
Strength and weakness of the Old English adjective
2021
Abstract As regards Old English, the inflectional strength and weakness are characterised by a kind of inconsistency. In the case of Old English adjectives these two inflectional properties appear to be different from those associated with nouns and verbs. In the case of the latter the two properties seem to be lexically determined while in the case of adjectives they appear to be determined by syntactic conditions. The traditional accounts of the Old English grammar attribute two paradigms to one adjectival lexical item. The analysis presented in this article postulates that one can actually speak about one adjectival inflection and what is traditionally presented as strong and weak adject…
The development of the Englishbe+ V-ende/V-ingperiphrasis: from emphatic to progressive marker?
2014
Author's version of an article in the journal: English Language and Linguistics. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1360674314000148 The article discusses the grammaticalization of the be + V-ende/V-ing periphrasis as a progressive marker. On the basis of quantitative data, it is claimed that the periphrasis started out as an emphatic alternative to the simple tenses. Its length, unusualness and optionality made it well suited as an emphatic marker. In the Early Modern English period (c. 1500–1700), the periphrasis was reinterpreted as an emphatic progressive marker. The prototypical – so-called focalized – use of the construction gradually became obligatory (f…
Learning to read: English in comparison to six more regular orthographies
2003
Reading performance of English children in Grades 1–4 was compared with reading performance of German-, Dutch-, Swedish-, French-, Spanish-, and Finnish-speaking children at the same grade levels. Three different tasks were used: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. The pseudowords shared the letter patterns for onsets and rimes with the number words. The results showed that with the exception of English, pseudowords in the remaining orthographies were read with a high level of accuracy (approaching 90%) by the end of Grade 1. In contrast to accuracy, reading fluency for pseudowords was affected not only by regularity but also by other orthographic differences. The …
Adnominal adjectives in Old English
2010
Even though adnominal adjectives in Old English are distributionally versatile in that they may precede, follow or flank the noun they modify, their positioning is not random but follows from systematic interpretive contrasts between pre- and postnominal adjectives, such as ‘attribution vs predication’, ‘individual-level vs stage-level reading’ and ‘restrictive vs non-restrictive modification’. These contrasts are largely independent of adjectival inflection (pace Fischer 2000, 2001, 2006). The placement of adnominal adjectives in Old English is investigated in relation to recent comparative and theoretical studies on word order and word order variation (see Cinque 2007; Larson & Maruši…
‘Old English lida and the Sailors of the North Sea’
2017
The essay examines the words for ‘sailor’ in the Germanic languages, with particular regard to those going under the sobriquet of North Sea Germanic languages. The research begins with the lida of Maxims I and his safe return home. As with OE lida and līðend, nomina agentis from verbs of motion turn out to be among the most frequent formations for ‘sailor’, both in OE and many other Germanic languages. The research does not yield a common stock of Germanic words, but for the cognates of OE scipmann and sǣmann, that, however, are not recorded in all the Germanic languages. As to the līðend-compounds, their occurrence in more than one language might be due to the influence of OE models on bot…