COLLECTIVE ASSIGMENT LECTUREINTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE Rahmila Murtiana,M.A

OLD ENGLISH

MADE BY :GROUP I

1. ISTAWATI2. BETTY YOHANA3. AMINAH4. AHMAD MURSYADA

INSTITUT AGAMA ISLAM NEGERI ANTASARIFAKULTAS TARBIYAH

PENDIDIKAN BAHASA INGGRISBANJARMASIN

2013

History• Old English (Ænglisc, Anglisc, Englisc)

or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southern and eastern Scotland, more specifically in the England Old Period, between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon.

• It is a West Germanic language closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Old English had a grammar similar in many ways to Classical Latin. In most respects, including its grammar, it was much closer to modern German and Icelandic than to modern English.

• It was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), three grammatical numbers (singular, plural, and dual) and threegrammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only and referred to groups of two.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Germanic_dialects_ca._AD_1.png

The history of Old English can be subdivided into:• Prehistoric Old English (c. 450 to 650); for this period, Old English

is mostly a reconstructed language as no literary witnesses survive (with the exception of limited epigraphic evidence). This language, or bloc of languages, spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and pre-dating documented Old English or Anglo-Saxon, has also been called Primitive Old English.

• Early Old English (c. 650 to 900), the period of the oldest manuscript traditions, with authors such as Cædmon, Bede, Cynewulf and Aldhelm.

• Late Old English (c. 900 to 1066), the final stage of the language leading up to the Norman conquest of England and the subsequent transition toEarly Middle English.

• The Old English period is followed by Middle English (12th to 15th century),Early Modern English (ca. 1480 to 1650) and finally Modern English (after 1650).

Phonology The inventory of classical Old English (i.e. Late West Saxon) surface 

phones, as usually reconstructed, is as follows.

Bilabial Labiodental

Dental Alveolar Postalveolar

Palatal Velar Glottal

Plosive p b t d k ɡ

Affricate tʃ (dʒ)

Nasal m n (ŋ)

Fricative f (v) θ (ð) s (z) ʃ (ç) (x) (ɣ) h

Approximant

r j w

Lateral approximant

l

The Sound The sounds marked in parentheses in the chart

above are allophones:• [dʒ] is an allophone of /j/ occurring after /n/ and

when geminated• [ŋ] is an allophone of /n/ occurring

before /k/ and /ɡ/• [v, ð, z] are allophones of /f, θ, s/ respectively,

occurring between vowels or voiced consonants• [ç, x] are allophones of /h/ occurring in coda

 position after front and back vowels respectively• [ɣ] is an allophone of /ɡ/ occurring after a vowel,

and, at an earlier stage of the language, in the syllable onset.

The front mid rounded vowels /ø(ː)/ occur in some dialects of Old English, but not in the

best attested Late West Saxon dialect.

Dipthongs Short (monomoraic) Long (bimoraic)

First element is close iy i:y

Both elements are mid eo e:o

Both elements are open æɑ æːɑ

Orthography

• Old English was first written in runes (futhorc) but shifted to a (minuscule) half-uncial script of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish Christian missionaries[12] from around the 9th century. This was replaced by insular script, a cursive and pointed version of the half-uncial script. This was used until the end of the 12th century when continental Carolingian minuscule (also known as Caroline) replaced the insular.

• The letter ðæt ð (called ⟨ ⟩ eth or edh in modern English) was an alteration of Latin d , and the runic letters ⟨ ⟩ thorn þ and ⟨ ⟩ wynn ƿ are borrowings ⟨ ⟩from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction and, a character similar to the number seven ( , called a ⟨⁊⟩ Tironian note), and a symbol for the relative pronoun þæt, a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender (⟨ꝥ ). ⟩ Macrons ¯ over vowels were rarely used to indicate long ⟨ ⟩vowels. Also used occasionally were abbreviations for a following m or n. All of the sound descriptions below are given using IPA symbols.

Poetry• Old English poetry falls broadly into two

styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the Christian. With a few exceptions, almost all Old English poets are anonymous.

• Although there are Anglo-Saxon discourses on Latin prosody, the rules of Old English verse are understood only through modern analyses of the extant texts. The first widely accepted theory was constructed by Eduard Sievers (1893).,[8] who distinguished five distinct alliterativepatterns. Alternative theories have been proposed; the theory of John C. Pope (1942),[9] which uses musical notation to track the verse patterns, has been accepted in some quarters, and is hotly debated.

• The most popular and well-known understanding of Old English poetry continues to be Sievers' alliterative verse. The system is based upon accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and patterns of syllabic accentuation. It consists of five permutations on a base verse scheme; any one of the five types can be used in any verse. The system was inherited from and exists in one form or another in all of the older Germanic languages. Two poetic figures commonly found in Old English poetry are the kenning, an often formulaic phrase that describes one thing in terms of another (e.g. inBeowulf, the sea is called the whale road) and litotes, a dramatic understatement employed by the author for ironic effect.

Beowulf • The Original Beowulf Manuscript – a sample

Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagumþēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnonhū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedonOft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatummonegum mægþum meodo-setla oftēahegsian eorl syððan ǣrest weorþan

• Hwæt [what!] wē Gār-Dena [Spear-Danes] in geār-dagum [days of yore]þēod-cyninga [king of a people] þrym [power] gefrūnon [hear of],hū [how] ðā æþelingas [prince,hero] ellen [deeds of valour] fremedon [accomplish],Oft [often] Scyld Scēfing [name: Danish dynasty of the Scyldings] sceaþena [enemy] þrēatum [troop],monegum [many] mægþum [nation] meodo-setla [mead-bench] oftēah [take away];egsian [terrify] eorl [warrior] syððan [after] ǣrest [first] weorþan [become]

Heroic Poetry

Old English Prose

• The amount of surviving Old English prose is much greater than the amount of poetry.Of the surviving prose, the majority consists of sermons and translations of religious works that were composed in Latin.The division of early medieval written prose works into categories of "Christian" and "secular", as below, is for convenience's sake only, for literacy in Anglo-Saxon England was largely the province of monks, nuns, and ecclesiastics (or of those laypeople to whom they had taught the skills of reading and writing Latin and/or Old English). Old English prose first appears in the 9th century, and continues to be recorded through the 12th century as the last generation of scribes, trained as boys in the standardised West Saxon before the Conquest, died as old men.

Secular Prose• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was probably started in the time of

King Alfred the Great and continued for over 300 years as a historical record of Anglo-Saxon history.

• A single example of a Classical romance has survived, it is a fragment of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, from the 11th century.

• A monk who was writing in Old English at the same time as Aelfric and Wulfstan was Byrhtferth of Ramsey, whose books Handboc and Manual were studies of mathematics and rhetoric.

• Aelfric wrote two neo-scientific works, Hexameron and Interrogationes Sigewulfi, dealing with the stories of Creation.He also wrote a grammar and glossary in Old English called Latin, later used by students interested in learning Old French because it had been glossed in Old French.

• There are many surviving rules and calculations for finding feast days, and tables on calculating the tides and the season of the moon.

• In the Nowell Codex is the text of The Wonders of the East which includes a remarkable map of the world, and other illustrations.Also contained in Nowell is Alexander's Letter to Aristotle.Because this is the same manuscript that contains Beowulf, some scholars speculate it may have been a collection of materials on exotic places and creatures.

• There are a number of interesting medical works.here is a translation of Apuleius's Herbarium with striking illustrations, found together with Medicina de Quadrupedibus.A second collection of texts is Bald's Leechbook, a 10th century book containing herbal and even some surgical cures.A third collection, known as the Lacnunga, includes many charms and incantations.

• Anglo-Saxon legal texts are a large and important part of the overall corpus.By the 12th century they had been arranged into two large collections (see Textus Roffensis).hey include laws of the kings, beginning with those of Aethelbert of Kent, and texts dealing with specific cases and places in the country.An interesting example is Gerefa which outlines the duties of a reeve on a large manor estate.There is also a large volume of legal documents related to religious houses.

Play

• Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the morality plays. Themystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, ... (100 of 59,122 words)

The Movies old English

• Beowulf• King Arthur• Troy• Kingdom of Heaven• Beowulf and Grendel• Robin Hood• Canon and Barbarian,etc.