Language Archive
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The Anglo-Saxon Name for the s-Rune: Sigel, a Precious Jewel
Posted on February 22, 2014 | No CommentsThe Anglo-Saxon rune-name sigel has been interpreted as meaning ‘sun’. In some contexts Old English sigel does refer to the sun, in others it means ‘clasp’, ‘brooch’, or ‘jewel’. All these meanings, however, are difficult to reconcile with the maritime imagery of the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem’s sigel stanza. -
Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
Posted on February 20, 2014 | No CommentsA Professor in Applied Linguistics believes he has decoded a few words from the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, a 600-year old work that has baffled scholars for the last hundred years. -
Norse Rune code cracked
Posted on February 7, 2014 | No CommentsA scholar of the University of Oslo has cracked one of the rune codes used by the Vikings, revealing they were sending each other messages such as 'Kiss me'. -
The Most Significant Manuscript Sources of Medieval Croatian Vernacular Verse
Posted on February 4, 2014 | No CommentsThe first part of the article gives a brief overview of the history of Croatian literacy up to the first written record of poetry in the Old Croatian language. -
Medieval English for Dummies
Posted on January 30, 2014 | No CommentsA quick-and-dirty guide for would-be Time-travellers -
The Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers and its Latin Source
Posted on January 25, 2014 | No CommentsThe earliest extended treatment of the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in a western vernacular language is the anonymous Old English prose version preserved in British Library MS Cotton Julius E vii... -
The Rise of the French Language in Medieval Europe
Posted on January 23, 2014 | No CommentsA free exhibition, The Moving Word: French Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge, begins today at Cambridge University Library. -
Víking – ’rower shifting’? An etymological contribution
Posted on January 18, 2014 | No CommentsThere is an extensive literature on the etymology of víking f. ‘freebooting voyage’ and víkingr m. ‘sea warrior’, but none of the well-known suggestions are satisfactory. -
How To Tweet From Another Century
Posted on January 7, 2014 | No CommentsMartha Bayless shares rune sticks from centuries past that illustrate how brief and personal everyday messages (exactly like tweets) — sometimes sharing 'too much information'— are nothing new! -
Is the Author Really Better than his Scribes? Problems of Editing Pre-Carolingian Latin Texts
Posted on January 1, 2014 | No CommentsLatin texts composed after ca. 600 and before the Carolingian writing re- forms that began in the late eighth century present problems that editors rarely have to face when working on classical texts (including most writings of late antiquity), or texts written after ca. 800. -
Losing the null subject : a contrastive study of (Brazilian) Portuguese and (Medieval) French
Posted on December 30, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper deals with the development and the use of subject pronouns in Portuguese and discusses the question of whether or not Brazilian Portuguese is a language which is losing its null subject property or which has already lost it -
Heathen: Linguistic Origins and Early Context
Posted on December 29, 2013 | No CommentsIt is my hope that this endeavor will allow the reader to have a serious understanding of the origins, early history, and more importantly the context of the word heathen, and what this might have meant for the people implied by it. -
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...
