The origin of Standard Old English and Æthelwold's school at Winchester

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7521132
AutoresHelmut Gneu (autor correspondente), Helmut Gneuss (autor correspondente)
Ano1972
Volume1
Páginas63-83
Data de publicação1972-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAnglo-Saxon England (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0263-6751 • E-ISSN: 1474-0532
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0263675100000089
OpenAlexW2004047419
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas33
Referências citadas10

In literary culture’, Sir James Murray has said, ‘the Normans were about as far behind the people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made themselves masters of Greece.’ Indeed when the Normans set foot on English soil Anglo-Saxon England was in possession not only of a remarkable literature but also of a highly developed written standard language, known and used in all regions of the country. Most of our Old English manuscripts were written in the late tenth century and in the eleventh in a form of English – although not always quite pure – which the grammarians call late West Saxon. This form of the language is by no means just a dialect, any more than its literature is merely the literary product of a dialect. This fact is first brought home to us when we examine the negative evidence – the rareness before the end of the tenth century of texts in dialects other than West Saxon and their almost complete absence after this time, a state of affairs for which various explanations might be found, historical factors among others. Considerably more important, however, is a positive criterion: texts in this late West Saxon were written and read in other parts of the country too, in Kent (Canterbury), in Mercia (Worcester) and indeed even in Northumbria (York). Moreover, texts which had originally been written in Anglian were transcribed into late West Saxon, as was a large part of Old English poetry. There can be no doubt: in our Old English texts of the eleventh century we are dealing with a standard literary language which, although based on a dialectal foundation, had extended its domain beyond the borders of this dialect

Anglo saxon · Archaeology · Art · Eleventh · Linguistics · Literature · Old English · Poetry · Possession (linguistics · Classics · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Medieval Literature and History · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Philosophy