Questions tagged [old-english]
The old-english tag has no usage guidance.
3
votes
0answers
35 views
Is there an Old English word meaning RAPIDS or RIFFLE (a rocky shoal causing a rapid)?
I would like to find an old (Old English) word meaning "a place in a river where the water overflows a natural stone or rocky obstacle situated across the entire watercourse".
See the picture below.
...
0
votes
0answers
40 views
details about the (C)3V(C)3 structure of the Old English syllable
I'm looking for a detailed description of the Old English syllable. Wikipedia gives me clear information about the onset and the nucleus but nothing about the coda. I'd appreciate any document ...
0
votes
0answers
29 views
Are there any historical runic transcriptions that utilize two runes to represent a sound change? (particularly in the Anglo Saxon rune sets)
Anglo Saxon did not distinguish by voicing usually, particularly with the sounds /s~f~z~v/. After the adoptions of the Latin Alphabet letters "f" and "s" were doubled when representing a voiceless ...
3
votes
0answers
75 views
Kaluza's law and Beowulf.64b
in short :
(1) how shall I scan Beowulf.64b "herespēd ġyfen" ?
(2) How shall I understand Seiichi Suzuki's remark about 64b :
"[a verse whose] second lift fails to be occupied by a sequence of a
...
2
votes
1answer
81 views
Old English forms of address
I am doing some research on Anglo-Saxon England and wondering if there are any particular forms of address in Old English that are a) roughly equivalent to Mr. Mrs. Ms., etc. in terms of formality, b) ...
7
votes
2answers
320 views
Why does “begin” have /g/ instead of /j/ if it's from PG *ginnan?
My understanding is that the reflexes of Proto-Germanic velar consonants before front vowels were usually palatal consonants in Old English, which in turn generally yield palatal or palato-alveolar ...
0
votes
2answers
207 views
“Only” in Old English?
I'm looking for a word that means 'only' or 'but,' but only in a specific context. The sample sentence that I'm wanting to translate is "I am only human" in the sense that they are nothing more than ...
2
votes
1answer
396 views
Why were words for the four cardinal directions in Romance languages borrowed from Old English?
Why were words for the four cardinal directions (east, west, north, south) in Romance languages borrowed from Old English? They could have used their own words derived from Latin because these words ...
1
vote
0answers
37 views
Middle and Old English Corpora Distributable Under Open Source License
I'm working on an open source computational linguistics project, and I need Old and Middle English corpora that I can distribute along with the software. Most of the corpora that I've been able to ...
3
votes
1answer
185 views
declining numerals in Old English
Disclaimer : this thread is perhaps off-topic. I thank you for your indulgence since I couldn't ask such a question on https://english.stackexchange.com/ .
I read in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the ...
-3
votes
2answers
114 views
What is the underlying meaning of the English 'of'? [closed]
TL;DR: What is the semantic field or the big picture behind the English 'of'?
I seek an explanation like this which exposes the underlying semantic field of ‘tally’.
Addendum:
of (as a ...
3
votes
1answer
117 views
English & Competing Borrowings: How many “pre-Norman” loanwords are known to have been replaced by “post-Hastings” ones?
What I am looking for:
As my question suggests, I'm interested in words English has adopted from other languages. More specifically, I'm interested in old Celtic or Scandinavian (or other) loanwords ...
1
vote
0answers
152 views
Translation of “Beowulf”
In the brief span of time I have studied this ancient poem, particularly verses 1829-30, I have read several translations. While observing each individual rendering of the text, it was evident to me ...
