On the rise of the ordinal number "second" in the Middle English

The article discusses the late Middle English replacement of the ordinal number other by the Romance loanword second. The major cause of the change was the ambiguity and polyfunctionality of the older native word. The study is based on the language material from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the Middle English Compendium and the Anglo-Norman Dictionary

Brains "versus" software: new possibilities and limitations of computer assisted historical studies of English syntax

Although the article was written fourteen years ago, its main idea is still valid: despite great progress in computer technology, also applied in linguistic studies, successful interpretation of the corpus material can only be performed by the human brain. The problem of identifying multiple meanings has been partially solved by better and better automatic disambiguation techniques. Upgraded search engines can now retrieve words in their original spellings. Many more diachronic English databases have become available since the end of the 20th century. Libraries all over the world have been supplying digitalized facsimiles of more and more medieval manuscripts, which enables scholars to have their own interpretations of ancient texts without referring to the printed ‘emended’ editions. This has already resulted in the publication of several important studies which changed generally accepted views. However, we were too optimistic concerning the Dictionary of Old English project: while the complete DOE Corpus is ready, the compilers of the dictionary itself are currently working on the entries beginning with the letter H. The Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is still rather far from completion. Not only in this respect we have a long way to go

German and English : the two sisters who each went her own way

English borrowed quite a few words from German, also when German immigrants introduced them to American English, especially in the field of food and drink, but not only, e.g. hamburger, frankfurter, wurst, sauerkraut, kindergarten, blitz(krieg), dachshund, wunderkind, leitmotiv, umlaut. German, which for centuries managed to remain a pure language, is now finding it very difficult to resist the influx of English words, like most languages of the world after 1950. Thus die Klimaanlage is becoming die Aircondition, die Drogerie – der Body-Shop, die Stadtmitte – die City, der Höhepunkt – das Highlight, arbeiten – jobben, der Saft – der Juice, die englische Königin – die Queen, die Feier – die Party, and dozens of other examples could be listed. Some of these words are pseudo-anglicisms, as they mean something else in English, e.g. what Germans (and after them Poles) call Smoking is in fact ‘dinner jacket’ (British) or ‘tuxedo’ (American); Handy is an adjective synonymous with ‘useful’ and is never used with reference to ‘mobile phones’ (British) or ‘cellphones’ (American). Anyway, after fifteen centuries of separation English and German have come into direct contact again and the increasing number of English words are finding their way back to the continental Urheimat of the Anglo-Saxons, including the peninsula of Angeln. The two sisters, who each went her own way, are having a reunion, though one of them appears to be imposing her way of life on the other

The semantic shift in the adjective ill

In this article I trace the semantic development of the adjective and adverb ill in English, whose history strongly corroborates LEECH’S (1981) semantic transfer rules and TRAUGOTT’S (1989, 1995) theory of subjectification. The illustrating language material comes from the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Middle English Dictionary (MED) and the source references are marked according to the conventions of their lexicographers. The modern translation of the medieval examples is my own. The adjective ill appeared in English in the early 13th c. as a Norse loanword and it did not acquire its modern prototypical sense of ‘sick, unwell’ until the Early Modern English times. The original sense of the Norse adjective illr was ‘bad’, as in the following quotation from the Old Icelandic Snorra Edda: (1) Skaði’s Marriage 100: ulfa þytr þóttumk illr vesa hjá soengvi svana (quoted after GORDON, 1957: 100). ‘The wolves’ howling seemed to me to be bad as compared with the seabirds’ singing’. The same sense (often contrasted with the adjective god ‘good’) is also found in the earliest English uses of the adjective in the Ormulum: (2) ?c1200 Orm. (Jun 1) 54: 3a þa þatt wærenn gode menn, 3a þa þatt wærenn ille. ‘Both those that were good men and those who were bad’. The word bad(de) of obscure origin (cf. OED, MED) is not attested in English until the late 13th c. The usual adjective corresponding to modern bad in Old English was yfel and it continued to be used in Middle English, e.g. (3) a1425(?a1400) RRose (Htrn 409) 4899: Youthe...makith hym love yvell company. ‘Youth makes him love evil company

Reviews

The team of linguists affiliated with the English Department of the University of Helsinki have had a long tradition of diachronic corpus studies of English ever since they started compiling searchable text corpora in the early 1990s. A few years later they were organized into a special Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), continuing their efforts in creating new corpora of dialectal and specialist texts. Owing to their pioneering work the community of English historical linguists all over the world had access to searchable, albeit limited, diachronic corpora long before the Toronto complete Dictionary of Old English Corpus and the University of Michigan Middle English Compendium became available […]

Trzymać asa w rękawie. Czym jest oszustwo w grach wideo?

The central premise of the following text concerns the concept of cheating in video gaming. It studies the various ways of abusing gaming rules, like exploitation or the use of external devices, from traditional, non-digital games to modern computer or console games. The goal of this dissertation is to answer the question: is cheating in video games possible and whether it’s morally acceptable

Pochodzenie spójników przyczynowych w języku angielskim

After some general information about the origins of the English language and the theoretical foundations of grammaticalization, we discuss the development of causal connectives in medieval English. The prototypical causal conjunction in the continental sisters of English was the word (h)want(a), unattested in even the earliest Anglo-Saxon texts. Instead in Old English we find the phrase forþon (þe) in numerous morphological and/or phonetic variant forms, which must have been an original insular formation, as no cognate forms are recorded in continental Germanic. Forþon (þe) was a high frequency word, functioning as a conjunction and an adverb alike. Its etymology is transparent: the prepositional phrase consisting of for, the preposition of cause, and the dative/instrumental form of the demonstrative pronoun must have undergone a syntactic reanalysis and was lexicalized as a new conjunction of cause or a phrasal subordinator (we find analogous formations in e.g. French par-ce (que), Polish dla-tego (że). In the 12th century forþon and its more common late OE variant forþi (þæt) rapidly dropped the deictic element from the conjunction leaving just for by itself as the usual multipurpose conjunction of cause and explanation in the next three centuries. In the last quarter of the 14th century we witness the first attestations of the new conjunction by-cause (that), grammaticalized from the original phrase by the cause that, which, we believe, arose first among bilingual Anglo-Norman and Middle English speakers in London as a loan translation of the Anglo-French causal conjunctive phrase par (la) cause que. In situations of common code-switching the educated bilingual Anglo-French speakers (and writers) copied the French strategy of forming the new causal conjunction into their English and the innovation must have become very fashionable in late-14th century London, from where it rapidly spread to the other dialects and to all social groups

Rozwój diachroniczny konstrukcji kontrfaktycznych w języku angielskim

The article is concerned with the historical development of counterfactual (or ir­realis) constructions from the earliest Old English texts until modern times. Thro­ughout the hi story of English one can observe here an interesting interaction of mood, tense, modality and other counterfactual markers, which undergo significant cyclical changes. There have been two competing tendencies as far as verb forms are concer­ned. At some stages parallel verb forms prevail in both clauses of the conditional period. On the other hand, being more remote from the reality than the protasis, the apodosis tends to take a more moda! form. In Modern English (especially 18th and 19th centuries) certain changes are slowed down or even prevented due to strong authority of prescriptive grammarians

Tryb łączący a czasowniki modalne w języku angielskim : spojrzenie diachroniczne

Rekonstrukcja języka praindoeuropejskiego dowodzi, iż istniały w nim cztery tryby: indicativus (oznajmujący), imperativus (rozkazujący), optativus (tryb życzący) i coniunctivus (tryb łączący, wskaźnik podrzędności). Semantycznie tryb jest wykładnikiem prawdziwościowej postawy mówiącego względem wypowiadanej treści i reprezentuje modalność zdania. W tradycji gramatycznej terminem „tryb” określa się najczęściej morfologiczne wykładniki modalności, czyli formy fleksyjne czasownika, chociaż w językach analitycznych często mamy tu do czynienia z formami złożonymi, peryfrastycznymi. Dodatkowo czasownikowym formom trybów mogą obligatoryjnie towarzyszyć inne wykładniki w postaci partykuł, spójników itd. [fragm. tekstu

„Rana” w językach świata

In accordance with the saussurean principle of arbitrariness of the linguistic sign the word "rana" has manifold senses in the languages of the world. From among numerous examples the author pays special attention to the Romance "rana" ‘frog’ and the Slavonic (in particular Polish) "rana" ‘wound’. The discussion concerns the earliest attestations of the word in Old Polish, modern phrases and collocations, cross‑linguistic literary and cultural associations and homonyms