Who were there before Germanic tribes invaded Britain?
- Celts
- Romans
- Scots
Who came to the Celts before the Germanic tribes came?
- Britons; 1,000 BCE probably.
- Romans by 55 BCE; 3 Celtic peoples
- Britton’s, Caledonians and Picts
- Scottish place names linked to the Picts: Pitlochry, Pittenweem.
Julius Caesar: [they] “dye themselves with woad, which produces a blue colour, and makes their appearance in battle more terrible. They wear long hair, and shave every part of the body save the head and the upper lip.”
When Romans in England?
They never went up to Scotland because of two walls.
From c. 50 BC - 410 AD.
When Irish pirate raids? When Kingdom of Scotland?
In the meantime, the Scots were in the north.
• 300 AD; Irish pirate raids
• 500-900 AD: Kingdom of Scotland
• P-Celtic -> Q-Celtic
The Roman collapse in the South
410 AD: Romans leave Romanised Brits to their own devices.
Marcellinus (c. 390 AD): “During this period practically the whole Roman world heard the trumpet-call of war, as savage peoples stirred themselves and raided the frontiers nearest to them. The Alamanni were ravaging Gaul and Raetia at the same time; the Picts, Saxons, Scots (Irish) and Attacotti were bringing continual misery upon Britain…”
What are the roots of Kent? And what is OE Kentish similar to?
Celtic (Cantto; border land), similar to Frisian.
Recent study about mass migration in Britain (2022)
DNA points to mass migration of both men and women. BUT there’s no clear signs of an armed conquest:
• Locals adopted cultural practices
• Intermarriage
• Also movement back to continent = much more mobility!
There were few Celtic borrowings, but which were there?
- Geographical: crag, cumb (deep, valley), binn, carr (rock).
- River names: Avon, Thames, Usk.
- Place names: Dover
Substratum
L2 shift phenomena -> simplification grammatical system/pronunciation.
What kind of culture had Pre-historic OE?
Oral culture
When was Old English: Christianisation
596/7 AD
Old English: Latin borrowings
Angel, priest, mass, nun, school, verse.
• But overall preference for native words; god and not deus, godspell (gospel) and not evangelium.
Which scripts influenced Old English?
- Roman: ð [θ] [ð] æ ʒ
- Runic: wyn, Þ [θ] [ð]
Pre-historic Old English sound changes
- Palatalisation: Anglo-Frisian
- Velars [k] [sk] [g] are fronted before/after front vowels to [tʃ] [ʃ] [j].
• *OE: ascian -> /‘askojana/
Back vowels fronted (and raised) when followed by i/j.
1. Plural -iz
2. Verb-suffix *-jan
3. Noun-suffix *-itha/o
4. Comparatives in -ir
PDE morphology: inflections
- Two noun inflections: cats and cat’s.
- Four verbal endings: meows, meowed, meowed, meowing.
- Adjective/adverb inflections: kinder, kindest cat.
- Only pronouns show case (nom, acc, gen).
Old English morphology: inflections
- Grammatical gender and number concord.
- Four cases
- Nouns (strong and weak)
- Adjective/adverb inflections (gender, number, case, comparative, superlative, definiteness; strong and weak).
Old English morphology: pronouns
- Three cases retained; dat and acc merged.
- Dual category lost.
- Second p. pl. and sg. distinction lost (except yourself/selves).
- OE had no reflexives yet.
- Neuter got its own possessive pronoun.
Overlap in strong noun endings
- Overlap of endings in strong sg. masc., neuter
- Nom sg noun rarely provides a clue about gender
- Acc identical to non pl
- Root initial stress took care of the rest
- Regularisation by analogy
Word order in OE was flexible but some clear preferences existed:
- Most common: SV, SVO
- SVO
- VS(O)
- SOV
- Pre-verbal object pronoun
The decline of inflections in English was partly inherited from…
Proto-Germanic
1. Root initial stress
2. Reduction of inflectional endings
Fricative voicing: allophonic variation
[f] → [v], between two voiced sounds
[s] → [z], between two voiced sounds
[θ] → [ð], between two voiced sounds
What remnants of the futhorc alphabet can you spot in Old English manuscripts?
Thorn and Wynn
The reconstructed singular and plural forms of mouse in Proto-Germanic are mus and musiz. How did English end up with the plural mice
Because of i-mutation. The high front vowel /i/ caused the preceding vowel /u/ to be fronted and raised to /y/, resulting in the shift from mus to mys.
