Language Archive
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Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources completed after 100 years
Posted on December 10, 2013 | No CommentsAfter over 58,000 entries, 3830 pages and seventeen volumes, the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources is now finished. -
The Bones in the Soup: The Anglo-Saxon Flavour of Tolkien’s The Hobbit
Posted on December 9, 2013 | No CommentsBy reading The Hobbit from an Anglo-Saxonist point of view, we not only learn more about what inspired Tolkien to compose his narrative, we can also highlight the enduring value of studying his original sources. -
A Word About Our Words
Posted on November 28, 2013 | No CommentsThis may be a little hard to believe, considering the conspicuous lack of “thee” and “thou” in modern writing, but the forms of English that came before are even more foreign. -
By God’s Bones: Medieval Swear Words
Posted on November 8, 2013 | No CommentsWhat were bad words in the Middle Ages? -
The status of hwæt in Old English
Posted on November 4, 2013 | No CommentsWhat does hwæt actually mean? -
Shadow and Paradoxes of Darkness in Old English and Old Norse Poetic Language
Posted on September 20, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis confronts, explores, and attempts to meaningfully interpret a surprising nexus of stimulating cruces and paradoxes in Old English poetry and prose and Old Norse skaldic and Eddic poetry. -
When Latin gets sick: mocking medical language in macaronic poetry
Posted on August 27, 2013 | No CommentsSince, at the time of the rise of macaronic poetry, Latin was the language of learn- ing, including medicine, it is expected that an analysis of the Latin in macaronic poetry and its interaction with other linguistic varieties in the same, can reveal changes in the relative social position of various groups. -
The Final Countdown: A Historiographical Analysis on Language in the Year 1000 A.D.
Posted on August 15, 2013 | No CommentsWe must now begin to ask ourselves what led to this increase in millenarian belief that the world would end between either 1000-1033 A.D.; 1033 being the 1000th year anniversary of the death of Christ. From the evidence provided in the first hand accounts of religious figures in the early eleventh century, it can be argued that this millenarian idea was not uncommon throughout Europe. -
What Seamus Heaney Did to Beowulf : An Essay on Translation and Transmutation of English Identity
Posted on July 24, 2013 | No CommentsHeaney’s Beowulf provides us with a great deal which other translations do not: a poetic fluency rendered in Modern English, a skilled understanding of linguistic choices, and most importantly, a consciousness of the translative act which negotiates fluidly between modern perspectives and Anglo Saxon artistry. -
Impregnable friendship : locating desire in the middle English ‘Amis and Amiloun’
Posted on July 24, 2013 | No CommentsScholarship on Amis and Amiloun has generally been divided into two critical schools. The majority of critics have read the work as an exemplar of perfect friendship, overlooking (or ignoring) any trace of homoeroticism, citing the possibility itself as anachronistic, or explaining away its presence by offering historical or theoretical justification for intimacy among medieval men. -
Lexical imposition Old Norse vocabulary in Scottish Gaelic
Posted on July 19, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough few specifics are known about the historical daily patterns of interaction between ON speakers and Gaelic speakers in the Highlands and Western/Hebrides Islands of what is present-day Scotland, it is clear neverthe- less that the groups lived more or less side by side in that region over a period of several centuries. -
The case for a West Saxon minuscule
Posted on July 19, 2013 | No CommentsJulian Brown's famous analysis of what he termed the Insular system of scripts marked out a number of routes, now well trodden, through the debris of undated and unlocalized manuscript material from the pre-Viking-Age British Isles. -
Beowulf Is Not God Cyning
Posted on June 28, 2013 | No CommentsBy understanding the etymology of the Old English cyning, and by recognizing the poet's use of Scyld as the model for a good king, we can see that each of the three uses of the phrase 'Þæt wæs god cyning' has a different meaning... -
Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis
Posted on June 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists. -
Scotland’s Other Heritage: The forgotten legacy of Germanic Scotland
Posted on May 28, 2013 | No CommentsIt would be fair to say that Scotland is roughly half Germanic, but this part of the Scottish heritage is often downplayed while the Celtic side is discussed. -
Listening for the Vikings: Some Evidence from Etymology
Posted on May 18, 2013 | No CommentsThe Vikings left behind several kinds of evidence during their stay in Anglo-Saxon England. Richard Dance notes that 'one crucial aspect is the etymological.' -
Visualization in Medieval Alchemy
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsTherefore, rather than attempting to establish an exhaustive inventory of visual forms in medieval alchemy or a premature synthesis, the purpose of this article is to sketch major trends in visualization and to exemplify them by their earliest appearance so far known. -
Teaching the Creed and Articles of Faith in England: Lateran IV to Ignorantia sacerdotum
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsThe broad conclusion of this thesis is that the available evidence shows that the basic principles of Christian doctrine were available both to the lower clergy who would preach and teach the Creed and Articles of Faith and also to the laity who would receive this preaching and instruction. -
Old English and the lexicography of Old High German
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsIn this lecture I will focus on how Old English affected the early German written record and on the difficulties of its lexicographical description. -
Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: From Oriental Bazar to English Cloister in Anglo-French
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsUntil recently, such limited interest as late Anglo-French was able to arouse amongst scholars specializing in medieval French has been confined, with only a very few exceptions, to the efforts made in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to teach what was by now a language unknown to most of the inhabitants of a country moving inexorably towards the unchallenged dominance of English as the national language. -
Heorot and the Plundered Hoard: A Study of Beowulf
Posted on March 31, 2013 | No CommentsTime and again the Beowulf poet's choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found. -
Why There May Have Been Contacts between Slovenes and Jews before 1000 A.D.
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsThe first documented evidence of a Jewish presence in Slovenia dates from the 13th century, when Yiddish- and Italian-speaking Jews migrated south from Austria to Maribor and Celje, and east from Italy into Ljubljana. This is a good three centuries after the first mention of Jews in the Austrian lands. -
Conquest, Contact, and Convention: Simulating the Norman Invasion’s Impact on Linguistic Usage
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsHow do conventions arise? Lewis adressed this in his work Convention via signaling games, a mathematical model of communication where a sender sends a message to a receiver who then interprets it. When we say conventions, we mean by that a system of coor- dinated behavior pairing information states with actions -
Contemplating the Evolution of Medieval Double-Entendre Literature
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe linguistic composition of the Exeter Book Riddles supports this, and in fact, the genre became a refuge for contemporary colloquial speech which was seen as coarse and lower class within the ideologies of Christianity and Germanic heroism. -
Bernard of Morlaix: the literature of complaint, the Latin tradition and the twelfth-century “Renaissance”
Posted on March 9, 2013 | No CommentsBernard of Morlaix was a monk of the order of Cluny who flourished around 1140. Excerpts from one of his poems appear in some anthologies of medieval Latin verse1 and he is briefly noticed in some works on the twelfth-century renaissance, but he has received little critical attention and only one of his poems has been translated from the Latin.
