1.
Geoffrey Chaucer
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Geoffrey Chaucer, known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages. He was the first poet to be buried in Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey, among his many works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde. He is best known today for The Canterbury Tales, Chaucers work was crucial in legitimizing the literary use of the Middle English vernacular at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin. Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London sometime around 1343, though the precise date and his father and grandfather were both London vintners, several previous generations had been merchants in Ipswich. In 1324 John Chaucer, Geoffreys father, was kidnapped by an aunt in the hope of marrying the boy to her daughter in an attempt to keep property in Ipswich. The aunt was imprisoned and the fine levied suggests that the family was financially secure. In the City Hustings Roll 110,5, Ric II, dated June 1380, Geoffrey Chaucer refers to himself as me Galfridum Chaucer, filium Johannis Chaucer, Vinetarii, Londonie. He also worked as a courtier, a diplomat, and a civil servant, as well as working for the king from 1389 to 1391 as Clerk of the Kings Works. In 1359, in the stages of the Hundred Years War, Edward III invaded France and Chaucer travelled with Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, Elizabeths husband. In 1360, he was captured during the siege of Rheims, Edward paid £16 for his ransom, a considerable sum, and Chaucer was released. After this, Chaucers life is uncertain, but he seems to have travelled in France, Spain, around 1366, Chaucer married Philippa Roet. She was a lady-in-waiting to Edward IIIs queen, Philippa of Hainault, and a sister of Katherine Swynford and it is uncertain how many children Chaucer and Philippa had, but three or four are most commonly cited. His son, Thomas Chaucer, had a career, as chief butler to four kings, envoy to France. Thomass daughter, Alice, married the Duke of Suffolk, thomass great-grandson, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was the heir to the throne designated by Richard III before he was deposed. Geoffreys other children probably included Elizabeth Chaucy, a nun at Barking Abbey, Agnes, an attendant at Henry IVs coronation, Chaucers Treatise on the Astrolabe was written for Lewis. According to tradition, Chaucer studied law in the Inner Temple at this time and he became a member of the royal court of Edward III as a valet de chambre, yeoman, or esquire on 20 June 1367, a position which could entail a wide variety of tasks. His wife also received a pension for court employment and he travelled abroad many times, at least some of them in his role as a valet. In 1368, he may have attended the wedding of Lionel of Antwerp to Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo II Visconti, two other literary stars of the era were in attendance, Jean Froissart and Petrarch
2.
The Canterbury Tales
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The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387–1400. In 1386, Chaucer became Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace and and it was during these years that Chaucer began working on his most famous text, The Canterbury Tales. The prize for this contest is a meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. He uses the tales and descriptions of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, Chaucers use of such a wide range of classes and types of people was without precedent in English. Although the characters are fictional, they offer a variety of insights into customs. Often, such insight leads to a variety of discussions and disagreements among people in the 14th century, structurally, the collection resembles The Decameron, which Chaucer may have read during his first diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372. It is unclear to what extent Chaucer was seminal in this evolution of literary preference, while Chaucer clearly states the addressees of many of his poems, the intended audience of The Canterbury Tales is more difficult to determine. Chaucer was a courtier, leading some to believe that he was mainly a court poet who wrote exclusively for nobility, the Canterbury Tales is generally thought to have been incomplete at the end of Chaucers life. In the General Prologue, some thirty pilgrims are introduced, according to the Prologue, Chaucers intention was to write two stories from the perspective of each pilgrim on the way to and from their ultimate destination, St. Thomas Beckets shrine. Although perhaps incomplete, The Canterbury Tales is revered as one of the most important works in English literature, not only do readers find it entertaining, but it is also open to a wide range of interpretations. The question of whether The Canterbury Tales is finished has not yet been answered, there are 83 known manuscripts of the work from the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, more than any other vernacular literary text with the exception of The Prick of Conscience. This is taken as evidence of the popularity during the century after Chaucers death. Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought to have been complete at one time, even the earliest surviving manuscripts are not Chaucers originals, the oldest being MS Peniarth 392 D, compiled by a scribe shortly after Chaucers death. The most beautiful of the manuscripts of the tales is the Ellesmere Manuscript, the first version of The Canterbury Tales to be published in print was William Caxtons 1478 edition. Only 10 copies of this edition are known to exist, including one held by the British Library, since this print edition was created from a now-lost manuscript, it is counted as among the 83 manuscripts. In 2004, Professor Linne Mooney claimed that she was able to identify the scrivener who worked for Chaucer as an Adam Pinkhurst. No authorial, arguably complete version of the Tales exists and no consensus has been reached regarding the order in which Chaucer intended the stories to be placed, textual and manuscript clues have been adduced to support the two most popular modern methods of ordering the tales. Some scholarly editions divide the Tales into ten Fragments, however, between Fragments, the connection is less obvious
3.
England
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England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west, the Irish Sea lies northwest of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east, the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain in its centre and south, and includes over 100 smaller islands such as the Isles of Scilly, and the Isle of Wight. England became a state in the 10th century, and since the Age of Discovery. The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the worlds first industrialised nation, Englands terrain mostly comprises low hills and plains, especially in central and southern England. However, there are uplands in the north and in the southwest, the capital is London, which is the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland through another Act of Union to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain, the name England is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means land of the Angles. The Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages, the Angles came from the Angeln peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea. The earliest recorded use of the term, as Engla londe, is in the ninth century translation into Old English of Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars, it has been suggested that it derives from the shape of the Angeln peninsula, an angular shape. An alternative name for England is Albion, the name Albion originally referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus, specifically the 4th century BC De Mundo, in it are two very large islands called Britannia, these are Albion and Ierne. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, the word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins. Albion is now applied to England in a poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England, Lloegr, the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximately 780,000 years ago. The oldest proto-human bones discovered in England date from 500,000 years ago, Modern humans are known to have inhabited the area during the Upper Paleolithic period, though permanent settlements were only established within the last 6,000 years
4.
Wales
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Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, and it had a population in 2011 of 3,063,456 and has a total area of 20,779 km2. Wales has over 1,680 miles of coastline and is mountainous, with its higher peaks in the north and central areas, including Snowdon. The country lies within the temperate zone and has a changeable. Welsh national identity emerged among the Celtic Britons after the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, Llywelyn ap Gruffudds death in 1282 marked the completion of Edward I of Englands conquest of Wales, though Owain Glyndŵr briefly restored independence to Wales in the early 15th century. The whole of Wales was annexed by England and incorporated within the English legal system under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542, distinctive Welsh politics developed in the 19th century. Welsh Liberalism, exemplified in the early 20th century by Lloyd George, was displaced by the growth of socialism, Welsh national feeling grew over the century, Plaid Cymru was formed in 1925 and the Welsh Language Society in 1962. Established under the Government of Wales Act 1998, the National Assembly for Wales holds responsibility for a range of devolved policy matters, two-thirds of the population live in south Wales, mainly in and around Cardiff, Swansea and Newport, and in the nearby valleys. Now that the countrys traditional extractive and heavy industries have gone or are in decline, Wales economy depends on the sector, light and service industries. Wales 2010 gross value added was £45.5 billion, over 560,000 Welsh language speakers live in Wales, and the language is spoken by a majority of the population in parts of the north and west. From the late 19th century onwards, Wales acquired its popular image as the land of song, Rugby union is seen as a symbol of Welsh identity and an expression of national consciousness. The Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons came to use the term Wælisc when referring to the Celtic Britons in particular, the modern names for some Continental European lands and peoples have a similar etymology. The modern Welsh name for themselves is Cymry, and Cymru is the Welsh name for Wales and these words are descended from the Brythonic word combrogi, meaning fellow-countrymen. The use of the word Cymry as a self-designation derives from the location in the post-Roman Era of the Welsh people in modern Wales as well as in northern England and southern Scotland. It emphasised that the Welsh in modern Wales and in the Hen Ogledd were one people, in particular, the term was not applied to the Cornish or the Breton peoples, who are of similar heritage, culture, and language to the Welsh. The word came into use as a self-description probably before the 7th century and it is attested in a praise poem to Cadwallon ap Cadfan c. 633. Thereafter Cymry prevailed as a reference to the Welsh, until c.1560 the word was spelt Kymry or Cymry, regardless of whether it referred to the people or their homeland. The Latinised forms of names, Cambrian, Cambric and Cambria, survive as lesser-used alternative names for Wales, Welsh
5.
Scotland
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Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and covers the northern third of the island of Great Britain. It shares a border with England to the south, and is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east. In addition to the mainland, the country is made up of more than 790 islands, including the Northern Isles, the Kingdom of Scotland emerged as an independent sovereign state in the Early Middle Ages and continued to exist until 1707. By inheritance in 1603, James VI, King of Scots, became King of England and King of Ireland, Scotland subsequently entered into a political union with the Kingdom of England on 1 May 1707 to create the new Kingdom of Great Britain. The union also created a new Parliament of Great Britain, which succeeded both the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of England. Within Scotland, the monarchy of the United Kingdom has continued to use a variety of styles, titles, the legal system within Scotland has also remained separate from those of England and Wales and Northern Ireland, Scotland constitutes a distinct jurisdiction in both public and private law. Glasgow, Scotlands largest city, was one of the worlds leading industrial cities. Other major urban areas are Aberdeen and Dundee, Scottish waters consist of a large sector of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, containing the largest oil reserves in the European Union. This has given Aberdeen, the third-largest city in Scotland, the title of Europes oil capital, following a referendum in 1997, a Scottish Parliament was re-established, in the form of a devolved unicameral legislature comprising 129 members, having authority over many areas of domestic policy. Scotland is represented in the UK Parliament by 59 MPs and in the European Parliament by 6 MEPs, Scotland is also a member nation of the British–Irish Council, and the British–Irish Parliamentary Assembly. Scotland comes from Scoti, the Latin name for the Gaels, the Late Latin word Scotia was initially used to refer to Ireland. By the 11th century at the latest, Scotia was being used to refer to Scotland north of the River Forth, alongside Albania or Albany, the use of the words Scots and Scotland to encompass all of what is now Scotland became common in the Late Middle Ages. Repeated glaciations, which covered the land mass of modern Scotland. It is believed the first post-glacial groups of hunter-gatherers arrived in Scotland around 12,800 years ago, the groups of settlers began building the first known permanent houses on Scottish soil around 9,500 years ago, and the first villages around 6,000 years ago. The well-preserved village of Skara Brae on the mainland of Orkney dates from this period and it contains the remains of an early Bronze Age ruler laid out on white quartz pebbles and birch bark. It was also discovered for the first time that early Bronze Age people placed flowers in their graves, in the winter of 1850, a severe storm hit Scotland, causing widespread damage and over 200 deaths. In the Bay of Skaill, the storm stripped the earth from a large irregular knoll, when the storm cleared, local villagers found the outline of a village, consisting of a number of small houses without roofs. William Watt of Skaill, the laird, began an amateur excavation of the site, but after uncovering four houses
6.
Ireland
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Ireland is an island in the North Atlantic. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, Ireland is the second-largest island of the British Isles, the third-largest in Europe, and the twentieth-largest on Earth. Politically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland, which covers five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, in 2011, the population of Ireland was about 6.4 million, ranking it the second-most populous island in Europe after Great Britain. Just under 4.6 million live in the Republic of Ireland, the islands geography comprises relatively low-lying mountains surrounding a central plain, with several navigable rivers extending inland. The island has lush vegetation, a product of its mild, thick woodlands covered the island until the Middle Ages. As of 2013, the amount of land that is wooded in Ireland is about 11% of the total, there are twenty-six extant mammal species native to Ireland. The Irish climate is moderate and classified as oceanic. As a result, winters are milder than expected for such a northerly area, however, summers are cooler than those in Continental Europe. Rainfall and cloud cover are abundant, the earliest evidence of human presence in Ireland is dated at 10,500 BC. Gaelic Ireland had emerged by the 1st century CE, the island was Christianised from the 5th century onward. Following the Norman invasion in the 12th century, England claimed sovereignty over Ireland, however, English rule did not extend over the whole island until the 16th–17th century Tudor conquest, which led to colonisation by settlers from Britain. In the 1690s, a system of Protestant English rule was designed to materially disadvantage the Catholic majority and Protestant dissenters, with the Acts of Union in 1801, Ireland became a part of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland saw much civil unrest from the late 1960s until the 1990s and this subsided following a political agreement in 1998. In 1973 the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community while the United Kingdom, Irish culture has had a significant influence on other cultures, especially in the fields of literature. Alongside mainstream Western culture, an indigenous culture exists, as expressed through Gaelic games, Irish music. The culture of the island shares many features with that of Great Britain, including the English language, and sports such as association football, rugby, horse racing. The name Ireland derives from Old Irish Eriu and this in turn derives from Proto-Celtic *Iveriu, which is also the source of Latin Hibernia. Iveriu derives from a root meaning fat, prosperous, during the last glacial period, and up until about 9000 years ago, most of Ireland was covered with ice, most of the time
7.
Early Modern English
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Prior to and following the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, the emerging English standard began to influence the spoken and written Middle Scots of Scotland. Modern readers of English are generally able to understand texts written in the phase of the Early Modern English period. The Early Modern English of the early 17th century forms the base of the grammatical and orthographical conventions that survive in Modern English. The change from Middle English to Early Modern English was not just a matter of vocabulary or pronunciation changing, it was the beginning of a new era in the history of English. An era of change in a language with large variations in dialect was replaced by a new era of a more standardised language with a richer lexicon. 1476 – William Caxton starts printing in Westminster, however, the language he uses reflects the variety of styles,1485 – Caxton publishes Thomas Malorys Le Morte dArthur, the first print bestseller in English. Malorys language, while archaic in some respects, is clearly Early Modern,1491 or 1492 – Richard Pynson starts printing in London, his style tends to prefer Chancery Standard, the form of English used by government. C. 1509 – Pynson becomes the official printer. From 1525 – Publication of William Tyndales Bible translation,1539 – Publication of the Great Bible, the first officially authorised Bible in English, edited by Myles Coverdale, largely from the work of Tyndale. This Bible is read to congregations regularly in churches, familiarising much of the population of England with a form of the language. 1549 – Publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in English under the supervision of Thomas Cranmer and this book standardises much of the wording of church services. 1557 – Publication of Tottels Miscellany, 1586–15931592 – The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd c.1590 to c.1612 – Shakespeares plays written. Early vocabulary specific to American English loaned from indigenous languages,1611 – The King James Bible is published, largely based on Tyndales translation. It remains the standard Bible in the Church of England for many years,1623 – Shakespeares First Folio published 1630-1651-William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, writes in his journal. It will become Of Plymouth Plantation, one of the earliest texts written in the American Colonies,1647 – publication of the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio The period of the English Civil War and the Interregnum was one of social and political upheaval and instability. The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention,1651 – Publication of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. 1660-1669-Samuel Pepys writes in his diary and it will become an important eyewitness account of the Restoration Era. 1662 – New edition of the Book of Common Prayer, largely based on the 1549 and this also long remains a standard work in English
8.
Scots language
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Scots is the Germanic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster. It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language which was restricted to most of the Highlands. The language developed during the Middle English period as a distinct entity, although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects do exist, these often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a linguistic continuum. Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way Norwegian is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish. In the 2011 Scottish census, a question on Scots language ability was featured, native speakers sometimes refer to their vernacular as braid Scots or use a dialect name such as the Doric, or the Buchan Claik. The old-fashioned Scotch, an English loan, occurs occasionally, especially in Northern Ireland, the term Lallans, a variant of the Modern Scots word lawlands, is also used, though this is more often taken to mean the Lallans literary form. Scots in Ireland is known in circles as Ulster-Scots or Ullans. Scots is a contraction of Scottis, the Older Scots and northern version of late Old English Scottisc, before the end of the 15th century, English speech in Scotland was known as English, whereas Scottish referred to Gaelic. From 1495 the term Scottis was increasingly used to refer to the Lowland vernacular and Erse, meaning Irish, the Gaelic of Scotland is now usually called Scottish Gaelic. Northumbrian Old English had been established in what is now southeastern Scotland as far as the River Forth by the seventh century and it remained largely confined to this area until the thirteenth century, continuing in common use while Gaelic was the language of the Scottish court. Scots also includes loan words resulting from contact with Gaelic, Early medieval legal documents include a body of Gaelic legal and administrative loans. Contemporary Gaelic loans are mainly for geographical and cultural features, such as ceilidh, loch, from the thirteenth century Early Scots spread further into Scotland via the burghs, proto-urban institutions which were first established by King David I. The growth in prestige of Early Scots in the century. By the sixteenth century Middle Scots had established orthographic and literary norms largely independent of those developing in England, from 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster large numbers of Scots-speaking Lowlanders, some 200,000, settled there. In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one, Modern Scots is used to describe the language after 1700 when southern Modern English was generally adopted as the literary language though Scots remained the vernacular. In Scotland, Scots is spoken in the Scottish Lowlands, the Northern Isles, Caithness, Arran, in Ulster it is spoken in the Counties of Down, Antrim, Londonderry and Donegal. Dialects include Insular Scots, Northern Scots, Central Scots, Southern Scots, many speakers are either diglossic and/or able to code-switch along the continuum depending on the situation in which they find themselves
9.
Forth and Bargy dialect
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The Forth and Bargy dialect, also known as Yola, is an extinct variety of English once spoken in the baronies of Forth and Bargy in County Wexford, Ireland. It is thought to have evolved from Middle English, which was brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion, as such, it was similar to the Fingallian dialect of the Fingal area. Both became extinct in the 19th century, when they were replaced by modern Hiberno-English, the name Yola means old in the dialect. The dialect was spoken in County Wexford, particularly in the baronies of Forth and this was the first area English-speakers came to in the Norman invasion of Ireland, supporting the theory that the dialect evolved from the Middle English introduced in that period. As such it is thought to have similar to Fingallian. After this point, the Forth and Bargy dialect and Fingallian were the only attested relicts of this form of English. Modern English was widely introduced by British colonists during and after the 17th century, the new varieties were notably distinct from the surviving relict dialects. As English continued to spread, both the Forth and Bargy dialect and the Fingal dialect died out in the 19th century, as in the Dutch language, in southwestern varieties of English and in German, most voiceless fricatives in Forth and Bargy became voiced. The Middle English vowels are well-preserved, having only partially and sporadically undergone the changes associated with the Great Vowel Shift, Forth and Bargy pronouns were similar to Middle English pronouns. The definite article was at first a, which was replaced by the. Forth and Bargy verbs had some conservative characteristics, the second and third person plural endings were sometimes -eth as in Chaucerian English. The past participle retained the Middle English y prefix as ee, some nouns retained the -en plural of ME children, such as been bees and tren trees. The glossary compiled by Jacob Poole provides most of what is known about Forth, Poole was a farmer and member of the Religious Society of Friends from Growtown in the Parish of Taghmon on the border between the baronies of Bargy and Shelmalier. He collected words and phrases from his tenants and farm labourers between 1800 and his death in 1827, although most of its vocabulary is Anglo-Saxon in origin, Forth and Bargy contains many borrowings from Irish and French. Compare Dorset dialect, one, two, dree, vower, vive, zix, zeven, aïght, nine, ten, diarmaid Ó Muirithe travelled to South Wexford in 1978 to study the English spoken there. His informants ranged in age between 40 and 90, the papers editor Mr Edmund Hore writes, The most remarkable fact, in reality, in connexion with the address is this. Double ee sounds like e in “me”, and most words of two syllables the long accent is placed on the last, to follow the English pronunciation completely deprives the dialect of its peculiarities. To’s Excellencie Constantine Harrie Phipps, y’ Earle Mulgrave, Lord Lieutenant-General and General Governor of Ireland, ye soumissive Spakeen o’ouz Dwelleres o’ Baronie Forthe, Weisforthe
10.
Fingallian
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Fingallian or the Fingal dialect is an extinct variety of English formerly spoken in Fingal, Ireland. It is thought to have been an offshoot of Middle English, which was brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion, although little is known of Fingallian, it is thought to have been similar to the Forth and Bargy dialect of County Wexford. The surviving literature of Fingallian consists of two satirical or humorous poems, the short Fingallian Dance and the much longer Purgatorium Hibernicum. Both poems are anonymous and are thought to be parodies of Fingallian by non-native speakers. Fingallian was spoken in the region of Fingal, traditionally the part of County Dublin north of the River Tolka and it was spoken in the area near the northern border. The name Fingal is from the Irish Fine Gall, or territory of foreigners, linguist Alf Sommerfelt proposed the idea of a Norse influence on the Fingallian dialect, though later scholars have found no evidence of such a connection. Like the Yola dialect of County Wexford, Fingallian is thought to have derived from Middle English, Middle English was well established in southeastern Ireland until the 14th century, when the area was re-Gaelicized and English was displaced. As such, the Yola and Fingal dialects would have been the only attested relicts of this original English variety in Ireland. The poem most likely to have composed by a native speaker of Fingallian is The Fingallian Dance. It is a mildly indecent poem about a man going to see dancers at a bullring, although the poem is likely to have been standardised when written down, it gives a flavour of Fingallian, particularly forms like fat for what or fen for when. Other words that need explanation are ame them and plack-keet, part of a petticoat. - But fire take ame, They made me ashame, the Purgatoriam Hibernicum is a humorous and bawdy burlesque or travesty on the Roman poet Virgils Aeneid. Virgils prince Aeneas and his noble lover Dido are transformed into a bumbling young Fingallian called Prince Nees, the names of all the characters are converted into mock Irish forms and the places mentioned in Virgils text become places in Fingal. Part of the humour for the Anglo-Irish readers of the poem is that Nees, although the intention is supposedly to mock their speech, it is rendered with such vitality and wit that the effect is actually to give the reader an appreciation of its richness. The short extract below provides an example of Fingallian. In it Nees encounters Dydy again and seeing her look pale and unwell realises that he may have been responsible for giving her the flame or venereal disease. A few features need explanation, V is used instead of W in Fingallian, suggam is a kind of rope, Ful dea ro is derives from Irish fuil Dé. Sayes Nees, dis me old vench is, but when he drew more neare her quarters, And know her by her suggam garters, Ful dea, ro, dou unlucky jade, Ill chance upon dee
11.
Language family
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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others
12.
Indo-European languages
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The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, the most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. The Indo-European family includes most of the languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia, the ancient Tarim Basin and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic migrations, all Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other language families. In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, in 1583, English Jesuit missionary Thomas Stephens in Goa wrote a letter to his brother in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin. Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. However, neither Stephens nor Sassettis observations led to further scholarly inquiry and he included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorns suggestions did not become known and did not stimulate further research. Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission, gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving from the extremes of the language family. A synonym is Indo-Germanic, specifying the familys southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches, a number of other synonymous terms have also been used. Franz Bopps Comparative Grammar appeared between 1833 and 1852 and marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline, the classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleichers 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmanns Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmanns neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussures development of the theory may be considered the beginning of modern Indo-European studies. This led to the laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics. Isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite mentioned in Semitic Old Assyrian texts from the 20th and 19th centuries BC, Hittite texts from about 1650 BC, Armenian, writing known from the beginning of the 5th century AD
13.
Germanic languages
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It is the third most spoken Indo-European subdivision, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of Balto-Slavic languages. Limburgish varieties have roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, the main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, the last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Proto-Germanic, along all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of todays northern Germany, furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It is also a language in Nicaragua and Malaysia. German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico, a German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania in the United States. Dutch is a language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as a language after Indonesian independence. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa, but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations as well, low German is a collection of sometimes very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany. Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Luxembourgish is mainly spoken in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, though it extends into small parts of Belgium, France. Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Danish is also spoken natively by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Norwegian is the official language of Norway. Icelandic is the language of Iceland, and is spoken by a significant minority in the Faroe Islands
14.
West Germanic languages
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The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages. The three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch, additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch and English as they were languages of colonial empires. The West Germanic languages share many lexemes not existing in North Germanic and/or East Germanic—archaisms as well as common neologisms, most scholars doubt that there was a Proto-West-Germanic proto-language common to the West Germanic languages and no others, though a few maintain that Proto-West-Germanic existed. Although there is quite a bit of knowledge about North Sea Germanic or Anglo-Frisian, linguists know almost nothing about Weser-Rhine Germanic, in fact, these two terms were coined in the 1940s to refer to groups of archeological findings rather than linguistic features. Only later were these terms applied to hypothetical dialectal differences within both regions, the rhotacism of /z/ to /r/. The development of the demonstrative pronoun ancestral to English this, rhotacism, for example, was largely complete in West Germanic at a time when North Germanic runic inscriptions still clearly distinguished the two phonemes. However, there are also a number of common archaisms in West Germanic shared by neither Old Norse nor Gothic, the debate on the existence of a Proto-West-Germanic clade was recently summarized, That North Germanic is. A unitary subgroup is completely obvious, as all of its dialects shared a series of innovations. Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West-Germanic morphological paradigms and many authors have reconstructed individual Proto-West-Germanic morphological forms or lexemes, the first comprehensive reconstruction of the Proto-West-Germanic language was published in 2013 by Wolfram Euler. If indeed Proto-West-Germanic existed, it must have been between the 3rd and 7th centuries, after that, the split into West and North Germanic occurred. It has been argued that, judging by their nearly identical syntax, over the course of this period, the dialects diverged successively. Bordering dialects very probably continued to be mutually intelligible even beyond the boundaries of the consonant shift, in fact, many dialects of Limburgish and Ripuarian are still mutually intelligible today. The High German consonant shift distinguished the High German languages from the other West Germanic languages, by early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North. Although both extremes are considered German, they are not mutually intelligible, the southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, whereas the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift. Of modern German varieties, Low German is the one that most resembles modern English, the district of Angeln, from which the name English derives, is in the extreme northern part of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast. The area of the Saxons lay south of Anglia, the Anglo-Saxons, two Germanic tribes, were a combination of a number of peoples from northern Germany and the Jutland Peninsula. Note that divisions between subfamilies of Germanic are rarely defined, most form dialect continua, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible. Also note that English is part of the North Sea Germanic branch of the West Germanic languages, some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages
15.
Ingvaeonic languages
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Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the North Sea coast. It is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison. The other groupings are Istvaeonic, from the Istvaeones, including Dutch, Afrikaans, and related languages and it did not generally undergo the nasal spirant law, it kept the three plural endings distinct and it did not have the -s plural. However, it underwent near-full monophthongization, lost the reflexive pronoun and had the same four relic verbs in weak class 3, amsterdam, John Benjamins B. V. ISBN 978-90-272-3255-7. Das Westgermanische - von der Herausbildung im 3,244 p. in German with English summary, London/Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-9812110-7-8. Maurer, Friedrich Nordgermanen und Alemannen, Studien zur germanischen und frühdeutschen Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde, ringe, Donald R. and Taylor, Ann. The Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English, band I, Einführung – Genealogie – Konstanten. Early Germanic Grammar, Pre-, Proto-, and Post-Germanic
16.
Anglo-Frisian languages
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The Anglo-Frisian languages is the group of West Germanic languages that includes Anglic and Frisian. For additional detail, see Phonological history of Old English, ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the West Germanic languages that comprises Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon. It is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison. High German languages Low Franconian languages Friedrich Maurer, Nordgermanen und Alemannen, Studien zur Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde,244 p. in German with English summary, Verlag Inspiration Un Ltd. Ringe, Donald R. and Taylor, Ann, the Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English, vol
17.
Old English
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Old English or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers probably in the mid 5th century, Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain, Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West Saxon. It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the standard of the later Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse influence due to Scandinavian rule, Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, and its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is different from Modern English. Old English grammar is similar to that of modern German, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms. The oldest Old English inscriptions were using a runic system. Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is a process, Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, a period of full inflections. Perhaps around 85 per cent of Old English words are no longer in use, Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic dialects from the 5th century. It came to be spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which became the Kingdom of England and this included most of present-day England, as well as part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for several centuries belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island – Wales and most of Scotland – continued to use Celtic languages, Norse was also widely spoken in the parts of England which fell under Danish law. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century, the oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmons Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries. The Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century, with the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, a later literary standard, dating from the later 10th century, arose under the influence of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, and was followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham. This form of the language is known as the Winchester standard and it is considered to represent the classical form of Old English
18.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
19.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
20.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
21.
Norman conquest of England
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Williams claim to the English throne derived from his familial relationship with the childless Anglo-Saxon King Edward the Confessor, who may have encouraged Williams hopes for the throne. Edward died in January 1066 and was succeeded by his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson, within days, William landed in southern England. Harold marched south to confront him, leaving a significant portion of his army in the north, Harolds army confronted Williams invaders on 14 October at the Battle of Hastings, Williams force defeated Harold, who was killed in the engagement. Although Williams main rivals were gone, he faced rebellions over the following years and was not secure on his throne until after 1072. The lands of the resisting English elite were confiscated, some of the elite fled into exile, to control his new kingdom, William granted lands to his followers and built castles commanding military strongpoints throughout the land. More gradual changes affected the classes and village life, the main change appears to have been the formal elimination of slavery. There was little alteration in the structure of government, as the new Norman administrators took over many of the forms of Anglo-Saxon government. In 911 the Carolingian French ruler Charles the Simple allowed a group of Vikings under their leader Rollo to settle in Normandy as part of the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. In exchange for the land, the Norsemen under Rollo were expected to provide protection along the coast against further Viking invaders and their settlement proved successful, and the Vikings in the region became known as the Northmen from which Normandy and Normans are derived. The Normans quickly adopted the culture, renouncing paganism and converting to Christianity. They adopted the langue doïl of their new home and added features from their own Norse language, in 1002 King Æthelred the Unready married Emma of Normandy, the sister of Richard II, Duke of Normandy. Their son Edward the Confessor, who spent many years in exile in Normandy, childless and embroiled in conflict with the formidable Godwin, Earl of Wessex and his sons, Edward may also have encouraged Duke William of Normandys ambitions for the English throne. When King Edward died at the beginning of 1066, the lack of a clear heir led to a succession in which several contenders laid claim to the throne of England. Edwards immediate successor was the Earl of Wessex, Harold Godwinson, Harold was immediately challenged by two powerful neighbouring rulers. William and Harald at once set about assembling troops and ships to invade England, in early 1066, Harolds exiled brother, Tostig Godwinson, raided southeastern England with a fleet he had recruited in Flanders, later joined by other ships from Orkney. Threatened by Harolds fleet, Tostig moved north and raided in East Anglia and Lincolnshire, but he was back to his ships by the brothers Edwin, Earl of Mercia. Deserted by most of his followers, he withdrew to Scotland, King Harald Hardrada invaded northern England in early September, leading a fleet of more than 300 ships carrying perhaps 15,000 men. Haralds army was augmented by the forces of Tostig, who threw his support behind the Norwegian kings bid for the throne
22.
High Middle Ages
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The High Middle Ages or High Medieval Period was the period of European history around the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. The High Middle Ages were preceded by the Early Middle Ages and followed by the Late Middle Ages, by 1250 the robust population increase greatly benefited the European economy, reaching levels that would not be seen again in some areas until the 19th century. This trend was checked in the Late Middle Ages by a series of calamities, notably the Black Death but also including numerous wars, from about the year 780 onwards, Europe saw the last of the barbarian invasions and became more socially and politically organized. The Carolingian Renaissance led to scientific and philosophical revival of Europe, the first universities were established in Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Modena. The Vikings had settled in the British Isles, France and elsewhere, the Magyars had ceased their expansion in the 10th century, and by the year 1000, a Christian Kingdom of Hungary was recognized in Central Europe, forming alliances with regional powers. With the brief exception of the Mongol invasions in the 13th century, in the 11th century, populations north of the Alps began to settle new lands, some of which had reverted to wilderness after the end of the Roman Empire. In what is known as the clearances, vast forests. At the same time settlements moved beyond the boundaries of the Frankish Empire to new frontiers in Europe, beyond the Elbe River. The High Middle Ages produced many different forms of intellectual, spiritual, the rediscovery of the works of Aristotle led Thomas Aquinas and other thinkers of the period to develop Scholasticism, a combination of Catholicism and ancient philosophy. For much of the time period Constantinople remained Europes most populous city, in architecture, many of the most notable Gothic cathedrals were built or completed during this era. The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, beginning at the start of the 14th century, in England, the Norman Conquest of 1066 resulted in a kingdom ruled by a Francophone nobility. The Normans invaded Ireland by force in 1169 and soon established throughout most of the country. Likewise, Scotland and Wales were subdued to vassalage at about the same time, the Exchequer was founded in the 12th century under King Henry I, and the first parliaments were convened. In 1215, after the loss of Normandy, King John signed the Magna Carta into law, from the mid-tenth to the mid-11th centuries, the Scandinavian kingdoms were unified and Christianized, resulting in an end of Viking raids, and greater involvement in European politics. King Cnut of Denmark ruled over both England and Norway, after Cnuts death in 1035, England and Norway were lost, and with the defeat of Valdemar II in 1227, Danish predominance in the region came to an end. Meanwhile, Norway extended its Atlantic possessions, ranging from Greenland to the Isle of Man, while Sweden, under Birger Jarl, however, the Norwegian influence started to decline already in the same period, marked by the Treaty of Perth of 1266. Also, civil wars raged in Norway between 1130 and 1240, by the time of the High Middle Ages, the Carolingian Empire had been divided and replaced by separate successor kingdoms called France and Germany, although not with their modern boundaries. Germany was under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire, which reached its mark of unity
23.
Late Middle Ages
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The Late Middle Ages or Late Medieval Period was the period of European history generally comprising the 14th and 15th centuries. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the modern era. Around 1300, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt, a series of famines and plagues, including the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it was before the calamities. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare, France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie and the Peasants Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict in the Hundred Years War. To add to the problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively these events are called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. Despite these crises, the 14th century was also a time of progress in the arts. Following a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman texts that took root in the High Middle Ages, combined with this influx of classical ideas was the invention of printing, which facilitated dissemination of the printed word and democratized learning. These two things would lead to the Protestant Reformation. Toward the end of the period, the Age of Discovery began, the rise of the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, eroded the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire and cut off trading possibilities with the east. Europeans were forced to seek new trading routes, leading to the expedition of Columbus to the Americas in 1492 and their discoveries strengthened the economy and power of European nations. The changes brought about by these developments have led scholars to view this period as the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of modern history. However, the division is artificial, since ancient learning was never entirely absent from European society. As a result there was continuity between the ancient age and the modern age. Some historians, particularly in Italy, prefer not to speak of the Late Middle Ages at all, but rather see the period of the Middle Ages transitioning to the Renaissance. The term Late Middle Ages refers to one of the three periods of the Middle Ages, along with the Early Middle Ages and the High Middle Ages, leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodization in his History of the Florentine People. Flavio Biondo used a framework in Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman Empire. Tripartite periodization became standard after the German historian Christoph Cellarius published Universal History Divided into an Ancient, Medieval, for 18th-century historians studying the 14th and 15th centuries, the central theme was the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of ancient learning and the emergence of an individual spirit
24.
Movable type
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Movable type is the system and technology of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document usually on the medium of paper. In 1377, currently the oldest extant movable metal print book, the diffusion of both movable-type systems was, however, limited. Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg made another version of a metal printing press in Europe, along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix. The more limited number of characters needed for European languages was an important factor, Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony—and these materials remained standard for 550 years. For alphabetic scripts, movable-type page setting was quicker than woodblock printing, the metal type pieces were more durable and the lettering was more uniform, leading to typography and fonts. The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible established the superiority of movable type in Europe, the printing press may be regarded as one of the key factors fostering the Renaissance and due to its effectiveness, its use spread around the globe. The 19th-century invention of hot metal typesetting and its successors caused movable type to decline in the 20th century, the technique of imprinting multiple copies of symbols or glyphs with a master type punch made of hard metal first developed around 3000 BC in ancient Sumer. These metal punch types can be seen as precursors of the letter punches adapted in later millennia to printing with metal type. Cylinder seals were used in Mesopotamia to create an impression on a surface by rolling the seal on wet clay and they were used to sign documents and mark objects as the owners property. By 650 BC the ancient Greeks were using larger diameter punches to imprint small page images onto coins and tokens, seals and stamps may have been precursors to movable type. A few authors even view the disc as technically meeting all definitional criteria to represent an early incidence of movable-type printing, recently it has been alleged by Jerome Eisenberg that the disk is a forgery. The Prüfening dedicatory inscription is medieval example of movable type stamps being used, yet copying books by hand was still labour-consuming. Not until the Xiping Era, towards the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty did sealing print and it was soon used for printing designs on fabrics, and later for printing texts. Woodblock printing, invented by about the 8th century during the Tang Dynasty, then carvers cut away the parts of the board that were not part of the character, so that the characters were cut in relief, completely differently from those cut intaglio. When printing, the characters would have some ink spread on them. With workers’ hands moving on the back of paper gently, characters would be printed on the paper, by the Song Dynasty, woodblock printing came to its heyday. Although woodblock printing played a role in spreading culture, there remained some apparent drawbacks. Firstly, carving the printing plate required considerable time, labour and materials, secondly, it was not convenient to store these plates, with woodblock printing, one printing plate could be used for tens of hundreds of books, playing a magnificent role in spreading culture
25.
History of the Scots language
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The history of the Scots language refers to how Anglic varieties spoken in parts of Scotland developed into modern Scots. At the same time Gaelic speakers began to spread from the Western Coast of Scotland north of the Clyde into the east. When Northumbrian lands were incorporated into Scotland in the 11th century Gaelic became the language there and had some influence. In the far north, Viking incursions brought Old Norse speakers into Caithness, Orkney, current insights into pre-literary Scots stem largely from place-names, archaeology and a few words in Latin documents. Northumbrian Old English had been established in south-eastern Scotland as far as the River Forth by the 7th century and it remained largely confined to this area until the 13th century, continuing in common use while Scottish Gaelic was the court language. English then spread further into Scotland via the burgh, after the 12th century early northern Middle English began to spread north and eastwards. Most of the evidence suggests that English spread further into Scotland via the burgh, incoming burghers were mainly English, Flemish and French. Although the military aristocracy employed French and Gaelic, these small urban communities appear to have been using English as something more than a lingua franca by the end of the 13th century. As a consequence of the outcome of the Wars of Independence though, the growth in prestige of English in the 14th century, and the complementary decline of French in Scotland, made English the prestige language of most of eastern Scotland. Eventually the royal court and barons all spoke Inglis, from the late 14th century even Latin was replaced by Inglis as the language of officialdom and literature. The first known instance of this was by Adam Loutfut c, in 1560 an English herald spoke to Mary of Guise and her councillors, at first they talked in the Scottish tongue but because he could not understand they continued in French. By this time Scots had diverged significantly from its south of the border and had become the vehicle for an extensive. Free variation was a prominent and important feature of the Middle Scots spelling system, however, nevertheless, the uniformity of Middle Scots is one of its most striking features. From 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster some 200,000 Scots settled in the north of Ireland taking what were to become Ulster Scots dialects with them, from the middle of the 16th century Scots began to become increasingly Anglicized. With the Reformation came Bibles in English and this process took slightly longer in unpublished vernacular literature and official records. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603 the Scots speaking gentry had increasing contact with English speakers and it was this remodelling that eventually led to the formation of Scottish English. In the 18th century polite society now considered Scots as provincial and unrefined and this was not universally accepted by all educated Scots of the period and a new literary Scots came into being. Unlike Middle Scots, it was based on contemporary colloquial speech
26.
Inflection
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An inflection expresses one or more grammatical categories with a prefix, suffix or infix, or another internal modification such as a vowel change. For example, the Latin verb ducam, meaning I will lead, includes the suffix -am, expressing person, number, the use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause I will lead, the lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense. The inflected form of a word contains both one or more free morphemes, and one or more bound morphemes. These two morphemes together form the inflected word cars and its categories can be determined only from its context. Requiring the forms or inflections of more than one word in a sentence to be compatible with each other according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement. For example, in the choir sings, choir is a singular noun, languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages. These can be inflected, or weakly inflected. Languages that are so inflected that a sentence can consist of a highly inflected word are called polysynthetic languages. Languages such as Mandarin Chinese that never use inflections are called analytic or isolating, in English most nouns are inflected for number with the inflectional plural affix -s, and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed. English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the person singular in the present tense. English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms, in addition, English also shows inflection by ablaut and umlaut, as well as long-short vowel alternation. For example, Write, wrote, written Sing, sang, sung Foot, feet Mouse, mice Child, children For details, see English plural, English verbs, and English irregular verbs. When a given word class is subject to inflection in a particular language, words which follow such a standard pattern are said to be regular, those that inflect differently are called irregular. For instance, many languages that feature verb inflection have both regular verbs and irregular verbs, in English, regular verbs form their past tense and past participle with the ending -d, thus verbs like play, arrive and enter are regular. However, there are a few hundred verbs which follow different patterns, such as sing–sang–sung and keep–kept–kept, irregular verbs often preserve patterns which were regular in past forms of the language, but which have now become anomalous. Example, Latin dīcō, dīcere, dīxī, dictum > Spanish digo, decir, dije, strong vs. weak inflection—Sometimes two inflection systems exist, conventionally classified as strong and weak. Ancient Greek verbs are likewise said to have had a first aorist, suppletion—The irregular form was originally derived from a different root
27.
Grammatical case
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Case is a special grammatical category whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by a noun, pronoun, adjective, participle or numeral in a phrase, clause, or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, determiners, participles, prepositions, numerals, articles and their modifiers take different inflected forms depending on what case they are in. Distinctions can be seen with the pronouns, forms such as I, he and we are used in the role of subject, whereas forms such as me, him. A language may have a number of different cases, commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. A role that one of these languages marks by case will often be marked in English using a preposition, as a language evolves, cases can merge, a phenomenon formally called syncretism. More formally, case has been defined as a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads, cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as agent and patient. They are often related, and in languages such as Latin several thematic roles have an associated case. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, because thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence. The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, the Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. falling, fall. The sense is that all cases are considered to have fallen away from the nominative. This picture is reflected in the word declension, from Latin declinere, to lean. The equivalent to case in several other European languages also derives from casus, including cas in French, caso in Spanish, the Finnish equivalent is sija, which can also mean position or support. Although not very prominent in modern English, cases featured much more saliently in Old English and other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. Among modern languages, cases still feature prominently in most of the Balto-Slavic languages, with most having six to eight cases, as well as Icelandic, German and Modern Greek, in German, cases are mostly marked on articles and adjectives, and less so on nouns. Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the role in the sentence. This is not how English works, where word order and prepositions are used to achieve this, Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class, for other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the genitive clitic -s. The oblique case, used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, for an absolute disjunct, the genitive case, used for a grammatical possessor
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Anglo-Norman language
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Anglo-Norman, also known as Anglo-Norman French, is a variety of the Norman language that was used in England and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the British Isles during the Anglo-Norman period. One of these was Old Norman, also known as Old Northern French, other followers spoke varieties of the Picard language or western French. It was spoken in the law courts, schools, and universities and, in due course, in at least some sections of the gentry and the growing bourgeoisie. Private and commercial correspondence was carried out in Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French from the 13th to the 15th century though its spelling forms were often displaced by continental spellings. Social classes other than the nobility became keen to learn French, manuscripts containing materials for instructing non-native speakers still exist, although Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French were eventually eclipsed by modern English, they had been used widely enough to influence English vocabulary permanently. Thus, many original Germanic words, cognates of which can still be found in Nordic, German, other such examples are heir apparent, court martial, and body politic. The Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom still features in French the mottos of both the British Monarch, Dieu et mon droit and the Order of the Garter, Honi soit qui mal y pense. Dieu et mon droit was first used by Richard I in 1198, the motto appears below the shield of the Royal Coat of Arms. Anglo-Norman was never the administrative language of England, Latin was the major language of record in legal. There is evidence, too, that foreign words often entered English via Anglo-Norman, by the late 15th century, however, what remained of insular French had become heavily anglicised, see Law French. It continued to be known as Norman French until the end of the 19th century even though, philologically, among important writers of the Anglo-Norman cultural commonwealth is Marie de France. Much of the earliest recorded French is in fact Anglo-Norman French, Latin did not disappear in medieval England either, it was used by the Church, the royal government and much local administration, as it had been before 1066, in parallel with Middle English. The early adoption of Anglo-Norman as a written and literary language probably owes something to this history of bilingualism in writing, thus, typically, local records are rather different from continental French, with diplomatic and international trade documents closest to the emerging continental norm. English remained the vernacular of the people throughout this period. The resulting virtual trilinguism in spoken and written language was one of medieval Latin, diverse French varieties, from the conquest until the end of the 14th century, French was the language of the king and his court. During this period, marriages with French princesses reinforced the French status in the royal family, nevertheless, during the 13th century, intermarriages with English nobility became more frequent. French became progressively a second language among the upper classes, moreover, with the Hundred Years War and the growing spirit of English nationalism, the status of French diminished. French was the tongue of every English king from William the Conqueror until Henry IV
29.
Old Norse
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Old Norse was a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during about the 9th to 13th centuries. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century, Old Norse was divided into three dialects, Old West Norse, Old East Norse and Old Gutnish. Old West and East Norse formed a continuum, with no clear geographical boundary between them. For example, Old East Norse traits were found in eastern Norway, although Old Norwegian is classified as Old West Norse, most speakers spoke Old East Norse in what is present day Denmark and Sweden. Old Gutnish, the more obscure dialectal branch, is included in the Old East Norse dialect due to geographical associations. It developed its own features and shared in changes to both other branches. The 12th century Icelandic Gray Goose Laws state that Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Danes spoke the same language, another term used, used especially commonly with reference to West Norse, was norrœnt mál. In some instances the term Old Norse refers specifically to Old West Norse, the Old East Norse dialect was spoken in Denmark, Sweden, settlements in Kievan Rus, eastern England, and Danish settlements in Normandy. The Old Gutnish dialect was spoken in Gotland and in settlements in the East. In the 11th century, Old Norse was the most widely spoken European language, in Kievan Rus, it survived the longest in Veliky Novgorod, probably lasting into the 13th century there. Norwegian is descended from Old West Norse, but over the centuries it has heavily influenced by East Norse. Old Norse also had an influence on English dialects and Lowland Scots and it also influenced the development of the Norman language, and through it and to a smaller extent, that of modern French. Various other languages, which are not closely related, have heavily influenced by Norse, particularly the Norman dialects, Scottish Gaelic. The current Finnish and Estonian words for Sweden are Ruotsi and Rootsi, of the modern languages, Icelandic is the closest to Old Norse. Written modern Icelandic derives from the Old Norse phonemic writing system, contemporary Icelandic-speakers can read Old Norse, which varies slightly in spelling as well as semantics and word order. However, pronunciation, particularly of the phonemes, has changed at least as much as in the other North Germanic languages. Faroese retains many similarities but is influenced by Danish, Norwegian, although Swedish, Danish and the Norwegian languages have diverged the most, they still retain asymmetric mutual intelligibility. Speakers of modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish can mostly understand each other without studying their neighboring languages, the languages are also sufficiently similar in writing that they can mostly be understood across borders
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Great Vowel Shift
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The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in England between 1350 and 1600. Through the Great Vowel Shift, all Middle English long vowels changed their pronunciation, English spelling was becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of the peculiarities of English spelling. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist and Anglicist, the main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English in the year 1400 and Modern English is in the value of the long vowels. Long vowels in Middle English had continental values, much like those in Italian and Standard German, the change in pronunciation is known as the Great Vowel Shift. This timeline shows the vowel changes that occurred between late Middle English in the year 1400 and Received Pronunciation in the mid-20th century by using representative words. The Great Vowel Shift occurred in the half of the table. The changes that happened after 1600 are not usually considered part of the Great Vowel Shift proper, Pronunciation is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet, Before the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English in Southern England had seven long vowels, /iː eː ɛː aː ɔː oː uː/. The vowels occurred in the bite, meet, meat, mate, boat, boot. The words had very different pronunciations in Middle English from their pronunciations in Modern English. In addition, Middle English had a long /ɛː/ in beat, like modern short e in bed but pronounced longer, after around 1300, the long vowels of Middle English began changing in pronunciation. The two close vowels, /iː uː/, became diphthongs, and the five, /eː ɛː aː ɔː oː/. The changes are known as the Great Vowel Shift and they occurred over several centuries and can be divided into two phases. The first phase affected the close vowels /iː uː/ and the close-mid vowels /eː oː/, /eː oː/ were raised to /iː uː/, and /iː uː/ became the diphthongs /ei ou/ or /əi əu/. The second phase affected the open vowel /aː/ and the open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/, /aː ɛː ɔː/ were raised, the Great Vowel Shift changed vowels without merger so Middle English before the vowel shift had the same number of vowel phonemes as Early Modern English after the vowel shift. After the Great Vowel Shift, some vowel phonemes began merging, immediately after the Great Vowel Shift, the vowels of meet and meat were different, but they are merged in Modern English, and both words are pronounced as /miːt/. This is a picture of the changes that happened between late Middle English and todays English. Pronunciations in 1400,1500,1600, and 1900 are shown, to hear recordings of the sounds, click the phonetic symbols. Before labial consonants and also after /j/, /uː/ did not shift, the first phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English close-mid vowels /eː oː/, as in beet and boot, and the close vowels /iː uː/, as in bite and out
31.
John Wycliffe
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John Wycliffe was an English scholastic philosopher, theologian, Biblical translator, reformer, and seminary professor at Oxford. He was an influential dissident within the Roman Catholic priesthood during the 14th century, Wycliffe attacked the privileged status of the clergy, which was central to their powerful role in England. He then attacked the luxury and pomp of local parishes and their ceremonies, Wycliffe was also an advocate for translation of the Bible into the vernacular. He completed a translation directly from the Vulgate into Middle English in the year 1382, Wycliffes Bible appears to have been completed by 1384, with additional updated versions being done by Wycliffes assistant John Purvey and others in 1388 and 1395. Beginning in the 16th century, the Lollard movement was regarded as the precursor to the Protestant Reformation, Wycliffe was accordingly characterised as the evening star of scholasticism and the Morning Star of the English Reformation. Wycliffes writings in Latin greatly influenced the philosophy and teaching of Czech reformer Jan Hus, whose execution in 1415 sparked a revolt, Wycliffe was born in the village of Hipswell in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England in the mid-1320s. His family was settled in Yorkshire. The family was large, covering considerable territory, principally centred on Wycliffe-on-Tees. Wycliffe received his early education close to his home and it is not known when he first came to Oxford, with which he was so closely connected until the end of his life, but he is known to have been at Oxford around 1345. From his frequent references to it in life, it appears to have made a deep. According to Robert Vaughn, the effect was to give Wycliffe Very gloomy views in regard to the condition, Wycliffe would have been at Oxford during the St Scholastica Day riot in which sixty-three students and a number of townspeople were killed. Wycliffe completed his arts degree at Merton College as a fellow in 1356. That same year he produced a treatise, The Last Age of the Church. In the light of the virulence of the plague that had subsided only seven years previously, while other writers viewed the plague as Gods judgment on a sinful people, Wycliffe saw it as an indictment of an unworthy clergy. The mortality rate among the clergy had been high. In this same year, he was presented by the college to the parish of Fillingham in Lincolnshire, for this he had to give up the headship of Balliol College, though he could continue to live at Oxford. He is said to have had rooms in the buildings of The Queens College, in 1362 he was granted a prebend at Aust in Westbury-on-Trym which he held in addition to the post at Fillingham. His performance led Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, to him in 1365 at the head of Canterbury Hall
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Isolating language
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An isolating language is a type of language with a very low morpheme per word ratio and no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each contains a single morpheme. Currently the most widely used isolating language is Mandarin Chinese, a closely related concept is that of an analytic language, which uses little or no inflection to indicate grammatical relationships. Isolating and analytic languages tend to coincide and are often identified, however, an analytic language such as English may still contain polymorphemic words due to the presence of derivational morphemes. Isolating languages contrast with languages, where words often consist of multiple morphemes. That linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic, to illustrate the relationship between words and morphemes, the English term rice is a single word consisting of only one morpheme. This word has a 1,1 morpheme per word ratio, in contrast, handshakes, is a single word consisting of three morphemes. This word has a 3,1 morpheme per word ratio, on average, words in English have a morpheme per word ratio substantially greater than one. It is perfectly possible for a language to have one inflectional morpheme yet more than one unit of meaning, effectively, four units of meaning in one inseparable morpheme, -yat/-ят. Languages that are relatively more isolating have a morpheme per word ratio that approaches 1,1, a purely isolating language would lack any visible morphology, since no word would have an internal compositional structure in terms of word pieces – thus it would lack bound morphemes like affixes. The morpheme per word ratio is a scalar category ranging from low ratios on the isolating hypothetical pole of the scale, the greater the overall ratio, the less isolating and the more synthetic the language. Analytic language Free morpheme Linguistic typology Synthetic language Zero-marking language Sapir, chapter 6, Types of linguistic structure. In Language, An Introduction to the Study of Speech
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Faroese language
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It is one of five languages descended from Old West Norse spoken in the Middle Ages, the others being Norwegian, Icelandic, and the extinct Norn and Greenlandic Norse. Around 900, the language spoken in the Faroes was Old Norse, however, many of the settlers were not from Scandinavia, but descendants of Norse settlers in the Irish Sea region. In addition, women from Norse Ireland, Orkney, or Shetland often married native Scandinavian men before settling in the Faroe Islands, as a result, the Irish language has had some influence on both Faroese and Icelandic. There is some evidence of Irish language place names in the Faroes, for example. Until the 15th century Faroese had a similar to Icelandic and Norwegian. The islanders continued to use the language in ballads, folktales and this maintained a rich spoken tradition, but for 300 years the language was not used in written form. This changed when Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb and the Icelandic grammarian and politician Jón Sigurðsson published a standard for Modern Faroese in 1854. They set a standard for the orthography of the language, based on its Old Norse roots and this had the advantage of being etymologically clear, as well as keeping the kinship with the Icelandic written language. The actual pronunciation, however, often differs from the written rendering, the letter ð, for example, has no specific phoneme attached to it. Jakob Jakobsen devised a system of orthography, based on his wish for a phonetic spelling. In 1937, Faroese replaced Danish as the school language, in 1938 as the church language. However, Faroese did not become the language of media. Today Danish is considered a language, although around 5% of residents on the Faroes learn it as a first language. Old Faroese is a form of Old Norse spoken in medieval times in the Faroe Islands, the most crucial aspects of the development of Faroese are diphthongisation and palatalisation. There is not enough available to establish an accurate chronology of Faroese. Iotacism may be connected with the palatalisation of k, g and sk before Old Norse e, i, y, ø, au > /kj, ɡj, skj/ > /cç, ɟʝ, ɕcç/ > /tʃʰ, tʃ. Before the palatalisation é and ǽ merged as /ɛː/ and approximately in the same period epenthesis u is inserted into word-final /Cr/, the Great Quantity Shift operated in the 15th/16th centuries. In the case of skerping, it took place after iotacism, the shift of hv to /kw/, the deletion of /h/ in word-initial /h/–sonorant clusters, and the dissolution of þ appeared before the end of the 13th century
34.
Icelandic language
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Icelandic /aɪsˈlændɪk/ is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. It is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages, historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the colonisation of the Americas. Icelandic, Faroese, Norn, and Western Norwegian formerly constituted West Nordic, Danish, Eastern Norwegian, modern Norwegian Bokmål is influenced by both groups, leading the Nordic languages to be divided into mainland Scandinavian languages and Insular Nordic. Most Western European languages have reduced levels of inflection, particularly noun declension. In contrast, Icelandic retains a four-case synthetic grammar comparable to, Icelandic is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic also has many instances of oblique cases without any governing word, for example, many of the various Latin ablatives have a corresponding Icelandic dative. The vast majority of Icelandic speakers—about 320, 000—live in Iceland, more than 8,000 Icelandic speakers live in Denmark, of whom approximately 3,000 are students. The language is spoken by some 5,000 people in the United States. Notably in the province of Manitoba, while 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue, the language is in decline in some communities outside Iceland, particularly in Canada. Icelandic speakers outside Iceland represent recent emigration in almost all cases except Gimli, Manitoba, the state-funded Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies serves as a centre for preserving the medieval Icelandic manuscripts and studying the language and its literature. Since 1995, on 16 November each year, the birthday of 19th-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson is celebrated as Icelandic Language Day, the oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD. Much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally, the most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise the historical works and the eddaic poems, the language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. Danish rule of Iceland from 1380 to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic, though more archaic than the other living Germanic languages, Icelandic changed markedly in pronunciation from the 12th to the 16th century, especially in vowels. The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from an established in the 19th century. The later Rasmus Rask standard was a re-creation of the old treatise, with changes to fit concurrent Germanic conventions. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used much in later centuries, rasks standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th-century changes include the use of é instead of je, apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts were written on vellum
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Vikings
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The term is also commonly extended in modern English and other vernaculars to the inhabitants of Viking home communities during what has become known as the Viking Age. Facilitated by advanced seafaring skills, and characterised by the longship, Viking activities at times also extended into the Mediterranean littoral, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. A romanticized picture of Vikings as noble savages began to emerge in the 18th century, current popular representations of the Vikings are typically based on cultural clichés and stereotypes, complicating modern appreciation of the Viking legacy. One etymology derives víking from the feminine vík, meaning creek, inlet, various theories have been offered that the word viking may be derived from the name of the historical Norwegian district of Viken, meaning a person from Viken. According to this theory, the word simply described persons from this area, however, there are a few major problems with this theory. People from the Viken area were not called Viking in Old Norse manuscripts, in addition, that explanation could only explain the masculine and ignore the feminine, which is a serious problem because the masculine is easily derived from the feminine but hardly vice versa. The form also occurs as a name on some Swedish rune stones. There is little indication of any negative connotation in the term before the end of the Viking Age and this is found in the Proto-Nordic verb *wikan, ‘to turn’, similar to Old Icelandic víkja ‘to move, to turn’, with well-attested nautical usages. In that case, the idea behind it seems to be that the rower moves aside for the rested rower on the thwart when he relieves him. A víkingr would then originally have been a participant on a sea journey characterized by the shifting of rowers, in that case, the word Viking was not originally connected to Scandinavian seafarers but assumed this meaning when the Scandinavians begun to dominate the seas. In Old English, the word wicing appears first in the Anglo-Saxon poem, Widsith, in Old English, and in the history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen written by Adam of Bremen in about 1070, the term generally referred to Scandinavian pirates or raiders. As in the Old Norse usages, the term is not employed as a name for any people or culture in general, the word does not occur in any preserved Middle English texts. The Vikings were known as Ascomanni ashmen by the Germans for the ash wood of their boats, Lochlannach by the Gaels, the modern day name for Sweden in several neighbouring countries is possibly derived from rōþs-, Ruotsi in Finnish and Rootsi in Estonian. The Slavs and the Byzantines also called them Varangians, Scandinavian bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors were known as the Varangian Guard. The Franks normally called them Northmen or Danes, while for the English they were known as Danes or heathen. It is used in distinction from Anglo-Saxon, similar terms exist for other areas, such as Hiberno-Norse for Ireland and Scotland. The period from the earliest recorded raids in the 790s until the Norman conquest of England in 1066 is commonly known as the Viking Age of Scandinavian history, Vikings used the Norwegian Sea and Baltic Sea for sea routes to the south. The Normans were descended from Vikings who were given feudal overlordship of areas in northern France—the Duchy of Normandy—in the 10th century, in that respect, descendants of the Vikings continued to have an influence in northern Europe
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Danelaw
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The Danelaw, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is a historical name given to the part of England in which the laws of the Danes held sway and dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons. Danelaw contrasts West Saxon law and Mercian law, the term is first recorded in the early eleventh century as Dena lage. Modern historians have extended the term to a geographical designation, the areas that constituted the Danelaw lie in northern and eastern England. The Danelaw originated from the Viking expansion of the 9th century AD, in 886, the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum was formalised, defining the boundaries of their kingdoms, with provisions for peaceful relations between the English and the Vikings. The language spoken in England was also affected by this clash of cultures with the emergence of Anglo-Norse dialects. The Danelaw roughly comprised 14 shires, York, Nottingham, Derby, Lincoln, Essex, Cambridge, Suffolk, Norfolk, Northampton, Huntingdon, Bedford, Hertford, Middlesex, from around 800, there had been waves of Danish raids on the coastlines of the British Isles. In 865, instead of raiding, the Danes landed an army in East Anglia. The combined army was described in the annals as the Great Heathen Army, after making peace with the local East Anglian king in return for horses, the Great Heathen Army moved north. In 867, they captured Northumbria and its capital, York, the Danes then placed an Englishman, Ecgberht I of Northumbria, on the throne of Northumbria as a puppet ruler. King Æthelred of Wessex and his brother, Alfred, led their army against the Danes at Nottingham, King Burgred of Mercia then negotiated peace with Ivar, with the Danes keeping Nottingham in exchange for leaving the rest of Mercia alone. Under Ivar the Boneless, the Danes continued their invasion in 869 by defeating King Edmund of East Anglia at Hoxne, once again, the brothers Æthelred and Alfred attempted to stop Ivar by attacking the Danes at Reading. They were repelled with heavy losses, the Danes pursued, and on 7 January 871, Æthelred and Alfred defeated the Danes at the Battle of Ashdown. The Danes retreated to Basing, where Æthelred attacked and was, in turn, Ivar was able to follow up this victory with another in March at Meretum. On 23 April 871, King Æthelred died and Alfred succeeded him as King of Wessex and his army was weak and he was forced to pay tribute to Ivar in order to make peace with the Danes. During this peace, the Danes turned to the north and attacked Mercia, both the Danish leader Ivar and the Mercian leader Burgred died during this campaign. Ivar was succeeded by Guthrum, who finished the campaign against Mercia, in ten years, the Danes had gained control over East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia, leaving just Wessex resisting. Guthrum and the Danes brokered peace with Wessex in 876, when they captured the fortresses of Wareham, Alfred laid siege to the Danes, who were forced to surrender after reinforcements were lost in a storm. Two years later, Guthrum again attacked Alfred, surprising him by attacking his forces wintering in Chippenham, King Alfred was saved when the Danish army coming from his rear was destroyed by inferior forces at the Battle of Cynuit
37.
Normans
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The Normans were the people who, in the 10th and 11th centuries, gave their name to Normandy, a region in France. They were descended from Norse raiders and pirates from Denmark, Iceland and Norway who, under their leader Rollo, through generations of assimilation and mixing with the native Frankish and Gallo-Roman populations, their descendants gradually adopted the Carolingian-based cultures of West Francia. The distinct cultural and ethnic identity of the Normans emerged initially in the first half of the 10th century, the Norman dynasty had a major political, cultural and military impact on medieval Europe and even the Near East. The Normans were famed for their spirit and eventually for their Christian piety. They adopted the Gallo-Romance language of the Frankish land they settled, their becoming known as Norman, Normaund or Norman French. The Normans are noted both for their culture, such as their unique Romanesque architecture and musical traditions, and for their significant military accomplishments and their chief men were specially lavish through their desire of good report. They were, moreover, a race skillful in flattery, given to the study of eloquence, so that the boys were orators. They were enduring of toil, hunger, and cold whenever fortune laid it on them, given to hunting and hawking, delighting in the pleasure of horses, and of all the weapons and garb of war. The treaty offered Rollo and his men the French lands between the river Epte and the Atlantic coast in exchange for their protection against further Viking incursions. The area corresponded to the part of present-day Upper Normandy down to the river Seine. The territory was equivalent to the old province of Rouen. Before Rollos arrival, its populations did not differ from Picardy or the Île-de-France, the Norman language was forged by the adoption of the indigenous langue doïl branch of Romance by a Norse-speaking ruling class, and it developed into the regional language that survives today. The Normans thereafter adopted the growing feudal doctrines of the rest of France, the new Norman rulers were culturally and ethnically distinct from the old French aristocracy, most of whom traced their lineage to Franks of the Carolingian dynasty. Most Norman knights remained poor and land-hungry, and by 1066 Normandy had been exporting fighting horsemen for more than a generation, many Normans of Italy, France and England eventually served as avid Crusaders under the Italo-Norman prince Bohemund I and the Anglo-Norman king Richard the Lion-Heart. Opportunistic bands of Normans successfully established a foothold in Southern Italy, probably as the result of returning pilgrims stories, the Normans entered Southern Italy as warriors in 1017 at the latest. In 999, according to Amatus of Montecassino, Norman pilgrims returning from Jerusalem called in at the port of Salerno when a Saracen attack occurred. The Normans fought so valiantly that Prince Guaimar III begged them to stay, the Hauteville family achieved princely rank by proclaiming prince Guaimar IV of Salerno Duke of Apulia and Calabria. He promptly awarded their elected leader, William Iron Arm, with the title of count in his capital of Melfi
38.
Old French
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Old French was the Gallo-Romance dialect continuum spoken from the 9th century to the 14th century. In the 14th century, these came to be collectively known as the langues doïl. The mid-14th century is taken as the period to Middle French. The areal of Old French in contemporary terms corresponded to the parts of the Kingdom of France, Upper Burgundy. As part of the emerging Gallo-Romance dialect continuum, the langues doïl were contrasted with the langue doc, in these examples, we notice a clear consequence of bilingualism, that sometimes even changed the first syllable of the Latin words. Pope estimated that perhaps still 15% of the vocabulary of modern French derives from Germanic sources, at the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language, since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin. The second-oldest document in Old French is the Eulalia sequence, which is important for reconstruction of Old French pronunciation due to its consistent spelling. The Capetians langue doïl, the forerunner of modern standard French, did not begin to become the common speech of all of France, however, until after the French Revolution. In the Late Middle Ages, the Old French dialects diverged into a number of distinct langues doïl, during the Early Modern period, French now becomes established as the official language of the Kingdom of France throughout the realm, also including the langue doc-speaking territories in the south. Old French gives way to Middle French in the mid-14th century, the earliest extant French literary texts date from the ninth century, but very few texts before the 11th century have survived. The first literary works written in Old French were saints lives, the Canticle of Saint Eulalie, written in the second half of the 9th century, is generally accepted as the first such text. The first of these is the area of the chansons de geste. More than one hundred chansons de geste have survived in three hundred manuscripts. The oldest and most celebrated of the chansons de geste is The Song of Roland, a fourth grouping, not listed by Bertrand, is the Crusade cycle, dealing with the First Crusade and its immediate aftermath. Jean Bodels other two categories—the Matter of Rome and the Matter of Britain—concern the French romance or roman, around a hundred verse romances survive from the period 1150–1220. From around 1200 on, the tendency was increasingly to write the romances in prose, the most important romance of the 13th century is the Romance of the Rose which breaks considerably from the conventions of the chivalric adventure story. The Occitan or Provençal poets were called troubadours, from the word trobar to find, lyric poets in Old French are called trouvères. By the late 13th century, the tradition in France had begun to develop in ways that differed significantly from the troubadour poets
("þe", i.e. "the") has led to the modern mispronunciation of thorn as ⟨y⟩ in this context; see ye olde.[22])
