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Extract: [...]Of all the print-media newspapers are the most commonly used. They are not literature in the sense of belles letters, but they should not be underestimated in their political, social and personal importance. No other printed product is as closely linked with everyday life as the newspapers. The day begins under their influence, and their contents mirror the events of the day with varying accuracy. Newspapers are strongly reader-oriented. They want to inform, but they also want to instil opinions. Specific choices of information shape the content level. Specific choices of language are resorted to in order to spread opinions and viewpoints. Language creates solidarity between the producers and the consumers of newspapers and thereby supports ideologies by specifically targeted linguistic means. Other strategies are employed for the same purpose, too. Visual aspects are of great importance, such as the typographical layout, the use of pictures, drawings, colours, fonts, etc.[...]
The language situation in the Philipines between the many different native languages and English is complex. The book under review outlines the various contact situations, focussing on the contact between Tagalog, the most important indigenous language of the Philipines on the one hand and English on the other. This serves as the basis for a detailed discussion of the sociological determinasts of the contact continuum between Tagalog on the one hand and Standard English on the other. The main asset of the book is to be found in its well informed survey character resulting from personal teaching experience.
In previous research, the methodology of typological investigations into languages was based on the analysis of standard languages (or rather standardised written languages). Prof. Kortmann's collection of essays broadens this methodological scope by directing the scholars' typological interest to the traditional dialects, most of them transmitted orally only. Undoubtedly, there is a great potential in this effort. Most of the contributions in this volume, however, show, that the attempt to unify or perhaps rather to accommodate the methodologies of typological research and traditional dialectology needs to be further harmonised in future research in order to bear sound generalisable insights to the rich data available.
This paper argues that the texts surviving from the Old English period do not reflect the spoken language of the bulk of the population under Anglo-Saxon elite domination. While the Old English written documents suggest that the language was kept remarkably unchanged, i.e. was strongly monitored during the long OE period (some 500 years!), the spoken and "real Old English" is likely to have been very different and much more of the type of Middle English than the written texts. "Real Old Engish", i.e. of course only appeared in writing after the Norman Conquest. Middle English is therefore claimed to have begun with the 'late British' speaking shifters to Old English. The shift patterns must have differed in the various part of the island of Britain, as the shifters became exposed to further language contact with the Old Norse adstrate in the Danelaw areas and the Norman superstrate particularly in the South East, the South West having been least exposed to language contact after the original shift from 'Late British' to Old English. This explains why the North was historically the most innovative zone. This also explains the conservatism of the present day dialects in the South West. It is high time that historical linguists acknowledge the arcane character of the Old English written texts.
A close comparison of selected parts of the translation of the Venerable Bede's 'Historia Ecclesiastica gentis anglorum' into Old English and Old Irish reveals how selective the translators proceeded in their translation work and how they adapted the Latin original to the genre traditions of their vernacular styles of writing. By their omissions, their choices of lexis and syntax they clearly expressed their translation interests. Part of the differences also seems to have been motivated by the targeted written and the oral mode of communication. While the Irish translation is entirely written in character and hardly lends itself to reading out aloud ('prelecting'), the style and rhythm of the Old English translation suggests that it was to serve public reading purposes in front of illiterate or semi-literate listening audiences.
This article provides a survey of the research carried out by Celtic scholars in Germany during the 15 years between 1980 and 1995. It is based on the respective bibliography published in 'Studia Celtica Japonica' 9 (1997). The major research fields covered are IE Studies, Celtic philology, linguistics, literature, archaeology and cultural studies.
This paper argues that the texts surviving from the Old English period do not reflect the spoken language of the bulk of the population under Anglo-Saxon elite domination. While the Old English written documents suggest that the language was kept remarkably unchanged, i.e. was strongly monitored during the long OE period (some 500 years!), the spoken and "real Old English" is likely to have been very different and much more of the type of Middle English than the written texts. "Real Old Engish", i.e. of course only appeared in writing after the Norman Conquest. Middle English is therefore claimed to have begun with the 'late British' speaking shifters to Old English. The shift patterns must have differed in the various part of the island of Britain, as the shifters became exposed to further language contact with the Old Norse adstrate in the Danelaw areas and the Norman superstrate particularly in the South East, the South West having been least exposed to language contact after the original shift from 'Late British' to Old English. This explains why the North was historically the most innovative zone. This also explains the conservatism of the present day dialects in the South West. It is high time that historical linguists acknowledge the arcane character of the Old English written texts.
A close comparative analysis of the attrition of inflections in historical English and Welsh reveals that Welsh had already lost its entire NP inflection when it surfaces in writing in the 7c AD, while English was still fully inflected both in the NP and VP. The comparison of the modern English and Welsh morphological categories shows that English overtook Welsh in its rate of analyticising drift. This shows first in writing during the Middle English period. Thus in English, the attrition bothfully affected the NP and the VP, while in modern Welsh the attrition of the verbal inflection in the VP is much less advanced than in English. Both languages, however, share the shift in the VP from the synthetism of verbal tense, mood (and voice) marking towards analytic aspect marking, which continues to gain in importance in both languages today. The question is raised, whether this joint development may have been due to the influence of the 'Late British' speaking shifters to Old English, to prolongued areal contactin the island of Britain ("Sprachbund") and/or to a more general drift from syntheticity to analycity in (Western) IE languages in Europe, which affects some languages more than others. The Appendix prints the earliest Old English and Old Welsh texts (dated by absolute chronology) and marks their loss of inflections, in order to highlight the advanced analycity in the Old Welsh NP as opposed to the Old English NP.
The continued linguistic contact in the islands of Britain and Ireland over the past two millenia has led to linguistic convergence processes between the Insular Celtic and West Germanic languages involved. While the Latin, Old Norse and Norman French contact scenarios were recognised and have been well studied since the 19c, the Celtic component received much less scholarly attention until the 1990s because of the continued linguistic bias, once fostered by 19c Anglo-Saxonisms and the idea of racial purity of the Egnlish population. It is only in the very recent past that the many different contact areas between English and the Insular Celtic languages have received recognition after New Labour's post-1997 introduction of "devolution" politics. The closest and longest interaction took of course place between English and Welsh. The present article looks at three major types of interaction which led to convergence in a number of important linguistic features: (1) mutual retention of shared archaic features, (2) mutual shared innovations, and (3) transfer from one language to another, either by unilateral or by bilateral transfer. The exemplary contact features discussed in this article relate to the retention of interdental fricatives, the shared innovation of analycity and multi-word verb formation, and clefting as feature transfer. Transfer is likely to have taken place under the following conditions: (a) earlier written documentation in the donor language, (b) higher frequency of occurrence in the donor language, (c) conformity with other structures in the donor language, and (d) grammaticalisation in the donor language. The conclusion endorses Salikoko Mufwene's claim that the making of English in the island of Britain was subject to the same contact processes which created the English based creoles from indigenised Englishes during the colonial period.
DO-Periphrasis in Irish
(2002)
Periphrastic DO constructions are very common both in English and in the Neo-Brittonic languages and are used for various functional purposes. These form part of a larger linguistic area in western and northern Europe. The literature does not mention comparable constructions for Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Irish informants, however, confirm orally that they are in common use among present day Gaeltacht speakers. They appear also to have been common in late spoken Manx. This study is based on the "Caint Chonamara" electronic corpus, the field work for which was first untertaken by Hans Hartmann (Hamburg) and Tomás de Bhaldraithe (Dublin) in the early 1960s und brought to a close by Arndt Wigger (Wuppertal) in the 1990s. The file for the Ros Muc dialogues yielded a very low return of potential DO constructions, i.e. 14 tokens of DÉAN + VN out of 494 DÉAN tokens altogether in the file. This shows that the DÉAN + VN construction was grammatically correct and acceptable to the native speakers, but was not grammaticalised and had a very low frequency. This result is interesting, but not surprising, since the informants chosen for this file conformed to the NORMS category (non-mobile old rural males. They were born around the turn of the 19c/20c and acquired their language now more than 100 years ago. This was well before the independence of the Republic. They would have acquired their Irish orally from native speakers and underwent very little formal training in Irish, or none. This small sample confirms that Irish did not belong to the broad linguistic area in Western Europe which makes use of periphrastic DO constructions, at least not until very recently.