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Bright's Old English grammar & reader Third edition second corrected printing F.G. Casidy Richard N. Ringler copyright 1891, 1894, 1917, 1935, 1961, 1971 by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, inc Library of Congress Catalog Card number: 76-179921 ISBN 0_03_084713_3 printed in the united states of america 1234567890 038 0987 Contents preface Abbreviations iii xi Grammar The Place of Old English 1 Speech Sounds 8 Vowels 11 OE spelling and pronunciation 16 Phonological Changes 21 Personal Pronouns 23 Anomalous Verbs 26 Phonological Changes (continued) 30 Demonstrative Pronouns 32 Adjectives; Analogy 35 Possessive pronouns Phonological Changes (continued) 39 Weak Adjectives 42 Participles Comparison Nouns: the a-Declension 46 Nouns: the o-Declension 49 Nouns: Minor Declensions 52 Later Sound Changes 56 Verb Classes 59 Weak Verbs Classes II, III ...
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Chapter 1 The Place of Old English

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  1.1.  Scholars of the English language divide it for historical treatment into three stages: Old English (OE), or Anglo-Saxon 1  c500---c1100 Middle English (ME) c1100---c1500 Modern English (MnE) c1500---c1900 Though These dates are set up partly for convenience, they nevertheless reflect a linguistic reality: by each of the boundary times, 1100 and 1500, the accumulation of gradual changes has become so considerable that in each case the language is clearly seen to have entered a new phase. 1.2.  In its earliest phase one cannot even properly speak of the language as "English"; it was a collection of dialects brought over to Britain from the continent by Germanic invaders (the familiar Angles, Saxons, and Jutes 2 ). These dialects were members of the Germanic (Gmc) branch of Indo-European (IE), the "family" to which most present European languages belong. The history of Old English cannot be fully understood unless its Gmc and IE connections are recognized. The ...
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Chapter 2 Speech Sounds

  2.1.  In order to understand how OE was pronounced and how certain OE sounds changed before, during, and after the OE period, it is necessary to know the basic principles of phonetics, the science of speech sounds. How the sounds of speech are produced, what kinds there are, how they affect each other, how and why they change - these are the questions that need to be answered. The following brief account will touch only on features relevant to OE. Speech Production 2.2.  The sounds of speech are produced by air expelled from the lungs and modified variously by organs in the throat, the mouth passage, and the nose passage. The air leaves the lungs through the  trachea  or  windpipe  but produces no sounds before entering the  larynx  ("Adam's apple," the cartilaginous "box" at the top of the trachea). In the larynx the air meets two membranes ( vocal cords ,  bands , or  folds ) which are attached along its inner sides from front t...
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Chapter 3 Speech Sounds. Vowels

  3.1.  In the OE manuscripts (MSS), long vowels and diphthongs are sometimes marked with and acute accent (´); edited modern texts, the present one included, usually indicate etymologically long vowels with a macron (¯), leaving the short unmarked. Thus  gōd , good, but  God , God;  wītan , to keep, but  witan , to know; and so on. Scholars know which to mark or leave unmarked after comparisons made with cognate forms in other Gmc languages and from observing how these vowels later developed in ME and MnE. Another valuable source of evidence is OE poetry, where vowel length is often indicated by the meter (see pp. 274-288). Classifying Vowels 3.2.  Vowels may differ from one another in  quantity  (i.e. length),  quality  or both. They are classified as regards quality chiefly by three factors taken together: the degree of openness of the oral cavity, the position of the tongue, and the shape of the lips. In fuller detail: The cavit...
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Chapter 4 OE Spelling and Pronunciation

  4.1.  The growth of literacy and literary culture among the Anglo-Saxons was a consequence of their conversion to Christianity. The Latin alphabet, introduced by missionaries, displaced the Germanic  ƒuþark  (runic alphabet), which in any event had only been used for brief inscriptions of a magical, monumental, or practical nature and never for the transcription of extended texts. It was in the  scriptoria  of the early monasteries that writing was done on a large scale for the first time in Anglo-Saxon England. The monks were concerned first and foremost with the creation and transmission of Latin texts, which they had been taught to write by Irish monks. When they started writing their own vernacular language they naturally maintained the same correspondence between sound and symbol to which they were accustomed in writing Latin. As a consequence, OE spelling before Ælfred's reign, and to some extent after it, approached a phonetic rendering of the actu...
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Chapter 5 Phonological Changes

  5.1.  In learning  OE  it is necessary to take careful note of the sound-changes which occurred in it and which give it its characteristic differences from other Low Germanic languages. These sound-changes also underlie, of course, the sounds which developed in  ME  and  MnE . They will be outlined in chronological order in this and following chapters, beginning here with the three earliest. The vowel changes dealt with concern only those in syllables having primary or secondary, not weak stress. Gemination 5.2.  A type of consonant lengthening, traditionally called  gemination , occurred in the  WGmc  stage (see Diagram 2), hence it affected not only  OE  but all the other  WGmc  dialects as well. Rule :  A single consonant (except r), when preceded in  Gmc 1  by a short vowel and followed by  j , was lengthened in  WGmc 2 Examples :  Thus  Gmc   *cunja - became  WG...
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Chapter 6 Personal Pronouns

  6.1.  The personal pronoun in  OE  like that of  MnE , has singular and plural forms. It also preserves the  IE   dual  forms. The dual is especially effective for showing close association between two people -- as two men fighting side by side, or or husband and wife, or lovers. (See, for example, Selection 22/21a - 3a.) The dual forms, however, disappeared early in the  ME  period. 6.2.  Like  MnE ,  OE  has forms for the three persons, with masculine, feminine, and neuter genders in the third person. As against the three case forms of  MnE , however,  OE  has four, since it distinguishes dative from accusative. (In  ME  these fell together under the dative form to produce the  MnE  "object case".) First Person Sg Dual Pl Nom ic , I wit , we two wē , we Gen mīn uncer ūser, ūre 1 Dat mē unc ūs Acc mec ,  mē uncit, unc ūsic, ūs Second Person thou you two you Nom ðū git gē Gen ...
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