Old English Alphabet

The Old English Alphabet was borrowed from Latin, but there were also some letters that were borrowed from the Runic Alphabet: (“thorn”) = [q] and [ð];(“wynn”) = [w]; (“mann”) = stood for OE word “man”; (“dæζ”) = stood for OE word “day”. Some new letters were introduced:

ζ = [g] and [j]; ð/þ/Đ/đ = [q] and [ð]; æ = a ligature of [a] and [e]; œ = a ligature of [o] and [e].

Rules of Reading:

They resemble the modern rules, with several exceptions though:

1.f = [v] s = [z] 1. between vowels;2. between a vowel and a voiced consonant ( [r, m, n, l, d, etc.] ). ð/þ = [ð]

2.– [j] – before and after front vowels (y, e, i, æ] );

ζ (yough) – [g] – before back vowels ( [a, o, u] ) and consonants at the beg of words, after n

- [г бел] – between 2 back vowels (a,o,u) and after l. r

cζ = [г’] .

3. –[k’] before and after front vowels (y, e, i, æ)

c - [k]

4. –[x’]after front vowels (y, e, i, æ)

h - [x] after back vowels ( [a, o, u] ) and consonants at the beg of words, after l,r

- [h] before vowels at the beg of words

Old English Manuscripts

Most of the Old English manuscripts were written in Latin letters (some letters were changed and some new letters were added). The Old English manuscripts that give us the examples of the language of that period are:

· personal documents containing names and place names;

· legal documents (charters);

· religious texts

· textual insertions (pieces of poetry).

· Anglo-Saxon chronics

Old English Poetry

1.Among the earliest textual insertions in Old English are the peaces of Old English poetry. They are to be found in “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People” written in Latin in the 8^th c. by Bede the Venerable, an English monk. These two pieces are: 5 lines know as “Bede’s Death Song”; 9 lines of a religious poem “Cædmon’s Hymn”.

2.All in all we have about 30 000 lines of OE verse from many poets, but most of them are unknown. The two best known Old English poets are Cædmon and Cynewulf (Northumbrian authors).

3.The topics of Old English poetry:

· heroic epic(“Beowulf”, the oldest in the Germanic literature, 7^th c., was written in Mercian or Northumbrian but has come down to us only in a 10^th c. West Saxon copy. It is based on old legends about the tribal life of the ancient Teutons and features the adventures and fights of the legendary heroes);

· lyrical poems(“The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer”, etc. Most of the poems are ascribed to Cynewulf);

· religious poems(“Fate of the Apostles” (probably Cædmon), “Dream of the Rood”, etc.).

4.The peculiarities of Old English poetry:

· written in Old Germanic alliterative verse:

- the lines are not rhymed;

- the number of the syllables in a line is free;

- the number of stressed syllables in a line is fixes;

-the line is usually divided into 2 halves, each half starts with one and the same sound;

· a great number of synonyms (e.g. beorn, secζ, ζuma, wer were all the synonyms of “man”) and kennings metaphorical phrases or compounds describing the qualities or functions of a thing in which the 1^st element provides the clue to the riddle of the 2^nd element(e.g. hronrād “whale-road” (for “sea”); bānhūs “bone-house” (for “a person’s body”); hēaþu-swāt “war-sweat” (for “blood”)).

Main Written Records of the Middle English Period

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 3091