The Origins and Development of English PDF

the backgrounds of english 61 Louisiana are descendants of exiles from Nova Scotia, which was earlier a French colony called Acadia. The speech of the old kingdom of Castile, the largest and central part of Spain, became standard Spanish. The fact that Spanish America was settled largely by people...

the backgrounds of english 61 Louisiana are descendants of exiles from Nova Scotia, which was earlier a French colony called Acadia. The speech of the old kingdom of Castile, the largest and central part of Spain, became standard Spanish. The fact that Spanish America was settled largely by people from southern Andalusia rather than from Castile accounts for the most important differences in pronunciation between Latin American Spanish and the standard language of Spain. Because of the cultural preeminence of Tuscany during the Italian Renaissance, the speech of that region—and specifically of the city of Florence—became standard Italian. Both Dante and Petrarch wrote in this form of Italian. Rhaeto-Romanic comprises a number of dialects spoken in the most easterly Swiss canton and in the Tyrol. Celtic Celtic shows such striking correspondences with Italic in its verbal system and inflectional endings that the relationship between them must have been close, though not so close as that between Indic and Iranian or Baltic and Slavic. Some scholars therefore group them together as developments of a branch they call Italo-Celtic. The Celts were spread over a huge territory in Europe long before the emergence in history of the Germanic peoples. Before the beginning of the Christian era, Celtic languages were spoken over the greater part of central and western Europe. By the latter part of the third century B.C. Celts had spread even to Asia Minor, in the region called for them Galatia (part of modern Turkey), to whose inhabitants Saint Paul wrote one of his epistles. The Celtic language spoken in Gaul (Gaulish) gave way completely to the Latin spoken by the Roman conquerors, which was to develop into French. Roman rule did not prevent the British Celts from using their own language, although they borrowed a good many words from Latin. But after the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived, British (Brythonic) Celtic was more severely threatened. It survived, however, and produced a distinguished literature in the later Middle Ages, including the Mabinogion and many Arthurian stories. In recent years, Welsh (Cymric) has been actively promoted for nationalistic reasons. Breton is the language of the descendants of those Britons who, at or before the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of their island, crossed the Channel to the Continent, settled in the Gaulish province of Armorica, and named their new home for their old one— Brittany. Breton is thus more closely related to Welsh than to long-extinct Gaulish. There have been no native speakers of Cornish, another Brythonic language, since the early nineteenth century. Efforts have been made to revive it: church services are sometimes conducted in Cornish, and the language is used in antiquarian recreations of the Celtic Midsummer Eve rituals—but such efforts seem more sentimental than practical. It is not known whether Pictish, preserved in a few glosses and place-name elements, was a Celtic language. It was spoken by the Picts in the northwestern part of Britain, where many Gaelic Celts also settled. The latter were settlers from Ireland 62 chapter 4 called Scots (Scotti), hence the name of their new home, Scotia or Scotland. The Celtic language that spread from Ireland, called Gaelic or Goidelic, was of a type somewhat different from that of the Britons. It survives in Scots Gaelic, sometimes called Erse, a word that is simply a variant of Irish. Gaelic is spoken in the remoter parts of the Scottish highlands and the Outer Hebrides and in Nova Scotia. In a somewhat different development called Manx, it survived until recently on the Isle of Man. In Ireland, which was little affected by either the Roman or the later AngloSaxon invasions, Irish Gaelic was gradually replaced by English. It has survived in some of the western counties, though most of its speakers are now bilingual. Efforts have been made to revive the language for nationalistic reasons in Eire, and it is taught in schools throughout the land; but this resuscitation, less successful than that of Hebrew in modern Israel, cannot be regarded as in any sense a natural development. In striking contrast to their wide distribution in earlier times, today the Celtic languages are restricted to a few relatively small areas abutting the Atlantic Ocean on the northwest coast of Europe. Germanic The Germanic group is particularly important for us because it includes English. Over many centuries, certain radical developments occurred in the language spoken by those Indo-European speakers living in Denmark and the regions thereabout. Proto-Germanic (or simply Germanic), our term for that language, was relatively unified and distinctive in many of its sounds, inflections, accentual system, and word stock. Unfortunately for us, those who spoke this particular development of IndoEuropean did not write. Proto-Germanic is to German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, and English as Latin is to Italian, French, and Spanish. But ProtoGermanic, which was probably being spoken shortly before the beginning of the Christian era, must be reconstructed just like Indo-European, whereas Latin is amply recorded. Because Germanic was spread over a large area, it eventually developed marked dialectal differences leading to a division into North Germanic, West Germanic, and East Germanic. The North Germanic languages are Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faeroese (very similar to Icelandic and spoken in the Faeroe Islands of the North Atlantic between Iceland and Great Britain). The West Germanic languages are High German, Low German (Plattdeutsch), Dutch (and the practically identical Flemish), Frisian, and English. Yiddish developed from medieval High German dialects, with many words from Hebrew and Slavic. Before World War II, it was a sort of international language of the Jews, with a literature of high quality. Since that time, it has declined greatly in use, with most Jews adopting the language of the country in which they live; and its decline has been accelerated by the revival of Hebrew in Israel. Afrikaans is a development of seventeenth-century Dutch spoken in South Africa. Pennsylvania Dutch (that is, Deutsch) is actually a High German dialect spoken by descendants of early American settlers from southern Germany and Switzerland. the backgrounds of english 63 The only East Germanic language of which we have any detailed knowledge is Gothic. It is the earliest attested of all Germanic languages, aside from a few proper names recorded by classical authors, a few loanwords in Finnish, and some runic inscriptions found in Scandinavia. Almost all our knowledge of Gothic comes from a translation mainly of parts of the New Testament made in the fourth century by Wulfila, bishop of the Visigoths, those Goths who lived north of the Danube River. Late as they are in comparison with the literary records of Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, and Latin, these remains of Gothic provide us with a clear picture of a Germanic language in an early stage of development and hence are of tremendous importance to the history of Germanic languages. Gothic as a spoken tongue disappeared a long time ago without leaving a trace. No modern Germanic languages are derived from it, nor do any of the other Germanic languages have any Gothic loanwords. Vandalic and Burgundian were apparently also East Germanic in structure, but we know little more of them than a few proper names. During the eighteenth-century “Age of Reason,” the term Gothic was applied to the “dark ages” of the medieval period as a term of contempt, and hence to the architecture of that period to distinguish it from classical building styles. The general eighteenth-century sense of the word was ‘barbarous, savage, in bad taste.’ Later the term was used for the type fonts formerly used to print German (also called black letter). Then it denoted a genre of novel set in a desolate or remote landscape, with mysterious or macabre characters and often a violent plot. More recently it was applied to an outré style of dress, cosmetics, and coiffure, featuring the color black and accompanied by heavy metal adornments and body piercing in unlikely parts of the anatomy. Thus the name of a people and a language long ago lost to history survives in uses that have nothing to do with the Goths and would doubtless have both puzzled and amazed them. COGNATE WORDS IN THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES Words that come from the same source are said to be cognate (Latin co- and gnatus ‘born together’). Thus the verb roots meaning ‘bear, carry’ in Sanskrit (bhar-), Greek (pher-), Latin (fer-), Gothic (bair-), and Old English (ber-) are cognate, all being developments of Indo-European *bher-. Cognate words do not necessarily look similar because their relationship may be disguised by sound changes that have affected their forms differently. Thus, English work and Greek ergon are superficially unlike, but they are both developments of Indo-European *wergom and therefore are cognates. Sometimes, however, there is similarity—for example, between Latin ignis and Sanskrit agnis from Indo-European *egnis ‘fire,’ a root that is unrelated to the other words for ‘fire’ cited earlier, but that English has in the Latin borrowing ignite. Some cognate words have been preserved in many or even all Indo-European languages. These common related words include the numerals from one to ten, the word meaning the sum of ten tens (cent-, sat-, hund-), words for certain bodily parts (related, for example, to heart, lung, head, foot), words for certain natural phenomena (related, for example, to air, night, star, snow, sun, moon, wind), 64 chapter 4 certain plant and animal names (related, for example, to beech, corn, wolf, bear), and certain cultural terms (related, for example, to yoke, mead, weave, sew). Cognates of practically all our taboo words—those monosyllables that pertain to sex and excretion and that seem to cause great pain to many people—are to be found throughout the Indo-European languages. Historically, if not socially, those ancient words are just as legitimate as any others. It takes no special training to perceive the correspondences between the following words: Latin ūnus duo trēs Greek oinē duo treis 1 Welsh English Icelandic Dutch un dau tri one two three einn tveir þrír een twee drie 1 ‘one-spot on a die’ Comparison of the forms for the number ‘two’ indicates that non-Germanic [d] (as in the Latin, Greek, and Welsh forms) corresponds to Germanic [t] (English, Icelandic, and Dutch). A similar comparison of the forms for the number ‘three’ indicates that non-Germanic [t] corresponds to Germanic [θ], the initial sound of three and þrír in English and Icelandic. Allowing for later changes—as in the case of [θ], which became [d] in Dutch, as also in German (drei ‘three’), and [t] in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (tre)—these same correspondences are perfectly regular in other cognates in which those consonants appear. We may safely assume that the non-Germanic consonants are older than the Germanic ones. Hence we may accept with confidence (assuming a similar comparison of the vowels) the reconstructions *oinos, *dwō, and *treyes as representing the Indo-European forms from which the existing forms developed. Comparative linguists have used all the Indo-European languages as a basis for their conclusions regarding correspondences, not just the few cited here. INFLECTION IN THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES All Indo-European languages are inflective—that is, all have a grammatical system based on modifications in the form of words, by means of inflections (endings and vowel changes), to indicate such grammatical functions as case, number, tense, person, mood, aspect, and the like. Examples of such inflections in Modern English are cat–cats, mouse–mice, who–whom–whose, walk–walks–walked–walking, and sing– sings–sang–sung–singing. The original Indo-European inflectional system is very imperfectly represented in most modern languages. English, French, and Spanish, for instance, have lost much of the inflectional complexity that once characterized them. German retains considerably more, with its various forms of noun, article, and adjective declension. Sanskrit is notable for the remarkably clear picture it gives us of the older Indo-European inflectional system. It retains much that has the backgrounds of english 65 been lost or changed in the other Indo-European languages, so that its forms show us, even better than Greek or Latin can, what the system of Indo-European must have been. Some Verb Inflections When allowance is made for regularly occurring sound changes, the relationship of the personal endings of a verb in the various Indo-European languages becomes clear. For example, the present indicative of the Sanskrit verb cognate with English to bear is as follows: Sanskrit bharā-mi bhara-si bhara-ti ‘I bear’ ‘thou bearest’ ‘he/she beareth’ bharā-mas bhara-tha bhara-nti ‘we bear’ ‘you (pl.) bear’ ‘they bear’ The only irregularity here is the occurrence of -mi in the first person singular, as against -o in the Greek and Latin forms cited immediately below. It was a peculiarity of Sanskrit to extend -mi, the regular first person ending of verbs that had no vowel affixed to their roots, to those that did have such a vowel. This vowel (for example, the -a suffixed to the root bhar- of the Sanskrit word cited) is called the thematic vowel. The root of a word plus such a suffix is called the stem. To these stems are added endings. The comparatively few verbs lacking such a vowel in Indo-European are called athematic. The m in English am is a remnant of the Indo-European ending of such athematic verbs. Leaving out of consideration for the moment differences in vowels and in initial consonants, compare the personal endings of the present indicative forms as they developed from Indo-European into the cognate Greek and Latin verbs: Greek 1 Latin pherō pherei-s pherei2 ferō1 fer-s3 fer-t phero-mes (Doric) phere-te phero-nti (Doric) feri-mus fer-tis feru-nt 1 In Indo-European thematic verbs, the first person singular present indicative had no ending at all, but only a lengthening of the thematic vowel. 2 The expected form would be phere-ti. The ending -ti, however, does occur elsewhere in the third person singular—for instance, in Doric didōti ‘he gives.’ 3 In this verb, the lack of the thematic vowel is exceptional. The expected forms would be feri-s, feri-t, feri-tis for the second and third persons singular and the second person plural, respectively. 66 chapter 4 Comparison of the personal endings of the verbs in these and other languages leads to the conclusion that the Indo-European endings were as follows (the IndoEuropean reconstruction of the entire word is given in parentheses): Indo-European -ō, -mi -si -ti (*bherō) (*bheresi) (*bhereti) -mes, -mos -te -nti (*bheromes) (*bherete) (*bheronti) Gothic and early Old English show what these personal endings became in Germanic: Gothic Early Old English bair-a bairi-s bairi-þ ber-u, -o biri-s biri-þ baira-m bairi-þ baira-nd bera-þ1 bera-þ bera-þ 4 From the earliest period of Old English, the form of the third person plural was used throughout the plural. This form, beraþ, from earlier *beranþ, shows Anglo Frisian loss of n before þ. Germanic þ (that is, [θ]) corresponds as a rule to Proto-Indo-European t. Leaving out of consideration such details as the -nd (instead of expected -nþ) in the Gothic third person plural form, for which there is a soundly based explanation, the Germanic personal endings correspond to those of the non-Germanic IndoEuropean languages. Some Noun Inflections Indo-European nouns were inflected for eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative, and instrumental. These cases are modifications in the form of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives that show the relationship of such words to other words in a sentence. Typical uses of the eight Indo-European cases (with Modern English examples) were as follows: nominative: subject of a sentence (They saw me.) vocative: person addressed (Officer, I need help.) accusative: direct object (They saw me.) genitive: possessor or source (Shakespeare’s play.) dative: indirect object, recipient (Give her a hand.) the backgrounds of english 67 ablative: what is separated (He abstained from it.) locative: place where (We stayed home.) instrumental: means, instrument (She ate with chopsticks.) The full array of cases is preserved in Sanskrit but not generally in the other descendant languages, which simplified the noun declension in various ways. The paradigms in the following table show the singular and plural of the word for ‘horse’ in Proto-Indo-European and five other Indo-European languages. IndoEuropean also had a dual number for designating two of anything, which is not illustrated. Indo-European Noun Declension1 Indo-European Sanskrit Greek Latin Old Irish Old English Singular Nom. Voc. Acc. Gen. Dat. Abl. Loc. Ins. *ekwos *ekwe *ekwom *ekwosyo *ekwōy *ekwōd *ekwoy *ekwō aśvas aśva aśvam aśvasya aśvāya aśvād aśve aśvena hippos hippe hippon hippou hippōi equus eque equum equī equō equō ech eich ech n-2 eich eoch eoh Plural N./V. Acc. Gen. D./Ab. Loc. Ins. *ekwōs *ekwons *ekwōm *ekwobh(y)os *ekwoysu *ekwōys aśvās aśvān(s) aśvānām aśvebhyas aśvesu aśvais hippoi hippous hippōn hippois equī equōs equōrum equīs eich eochu ech n-2 echaib ēos ēos ēona ēom eoh ēos ēo 1 There are a good many complexities in these forms, some of which are noted here. In Greek, for the genitive singular, the Homeric form hippoio is closer to Indo-European in its ending. The Greek, Latin, and Old Irish nominative plurals show developments of the pronominal ending *-oi, rather than of the nominal ending *-ōs. Celtic was alone among the Indo-European branches in having different forms for the nominative and vocative plural; the Old Irish vocative plural was eochu (like the accusative plural), a development of the original nominative plural *ekwōs. The Greek and Latin dative-ablative plurals were originally instrumental forms that took over the functions of the other cases; similarly, the Old Irish dative plural was probably a variant instrumental form. The Latin genitive singular -ī is not from the corresponding Indo-European ending, but is a special ending found in Italic and Celtic (Old Irish eich being from the variant *ekwī). 2 The Old Irish n- in the accusative singular and genitive plural is the initial consonant of the following word. WORD ORDER IN THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES Early studies of the Indo-European languages focused on cognate words and on inflections. More recently attention has been directed to other matters of the grammar, especially word order in the parent language. Joseph Greenberg (“Some Universals of Grammar”) proposes that the orders in which various grammatical elements occur in a sentence are not random, but are interrelated. For example, languages like Modern English that place objects after verbs tend to place modifiers 68 chapter 4 after nouns, to put conjunctions before the second of two words they connect, and to use prepositions: verb þ object: (The workman) made a horn. noun þ modifier: (They marveled at the) size of the building. conjunction þ noun: (Congress is divided into the Senate) and the House. preposition þ object: (Harold fought) with him. On the other hand, languages like Japanese that place objects before verbs tend to reverse the order of those other elements—placing modifiers before nouns, putting conjunctions after the second of two words they connect, and using postpositions (which are function words like prepositions but come after, instead of before, a noun). Most languages can be identified as basically either VO languages (like English) or OV languages (like Japanese), although it is usual for a language to have some characteristics of both types. English, for example, regularly puts adjectives before the nouns they modify rather than after them, as VO order would imply. Winfred P. Lehmann (Proto-Indo-European Syntax) has marshaled evidence suggesting that Proto-Indo-European was an OV language, even though the existing Indo-European languages are generally VO in type. Earlier stages of those languages often show OV characteristics that have been lost from the modern tongues or that are less common than formerly. For example, one of the oldest records of a Germanic language is a runic inscription identifying the workman who made a horn about A.D. 400: ek hlewagastiR holtijaR horna tawido I, Hlewagastir Holtson, [this] horn made. The order of words in sentences like this one (subject, object, verb) suggests that Proto-Germanic had more OV characteristics than the languages that evolved from it. In standard Modern German a possessive modifier, as in der Garten des Mannes ‘the garden of the man,’ normally follows the word it modifies; the other order—des Mannes Garten ‘the man’s garden’—is possible, but it is poetic and old-fashioned. In older periods of the language, however, it was normal. Similarly, in Modern English a possessive modifier can come either before a noun (an OV characteristic), as in the building’s size, or after it (a VO characteristic), as in the size of the building, but there has long been a tendency to favor the second order, which has increased in frequency throughout much of the history of English. In the tenth century, practically all possessives came before nouns, but by the fourteenth century, the overwhelming percentage of them came after nouns (84.4 to 15.6 percent, Rosenbach 179). This change was perhaps under the influence of French, which may have provided the model for the phrasal genitive with of (translating French de). When we want to join two words in English, we put the conjunction before the second one (a VO characteristic), as in the Senate and people. But Latin, preserving an archaic feature of Indo-European, had the option of putting a conjunction after the second noun (an OV characteristic), as in senatus populusque, in which -que is the backgrounds of english 69 a conjunction meaning ‘and.’ Modern English uses prepositions almost exclusively, but Old English often put such words after their objects, so that they functioned as postpositions, thus: Harold him wið gefeaht. Harold him with fought. Evidence of this kind, which can be found in all the older forms of IndoEuropean and which becomes more frequent the farther back in history one searches, suggests that Indo-European once ordered its verbs after their objects. If that is so, by late Indo-European times a change had begun that was to result in a shift of word-order type in many of the descendant languages from OV to VO. MAJOR CHANGES FROM INDO-EUROPEAN TO GERMANIC One group of Indo-European speakers, the Germanic peoples, settled in northern Europe near Denmark. Germanic differentiated from earlier Indo-European in the following ways: 1. Germanic has a large number of words that have no known cognates in other Indo-European languages. These could have existed, of course, in Indo-European but been lost from all other languages of the family. It is more likely, however, that they were developed during the Proto-Germanic period or taken from non-Indo-European languages originally spoken in the area occupied by the Germanic peoples. A few words that are apparently distinctively Germanic are, in their Modern English forms, broad, drink, drive, fowl, hold, meat, rain, and wife. The Germanic languages also share a common influence from Latin, treated in Chapter 12 (248–9). 2. Germanic languages have only two tenses: the present and the preterit (or past). This simplification of a much more complex Indo-European verbal system is reflected in English bind–bound, as well as in German binden–band and Old Norse binda–band. No Germanic language has anything comparable to such forms as those of the Latin future, perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect forms (for instance, laudābō, laudāvī, laudāveram, laudāverō), which are expressed in the Germanic languages by verb phrases (for instance, English I shall praise, I have praised, I had praised, I shall have praised). 3. Germanic developed a preterit tense form with a dental suffix, that is, one containing d or t (as in spell–spelled [spɛld, spɛlt]) alongside an older pattern of changing the vowels inside a verb (as in rise–rose). All Germanic languages have these two types of verbs. Verbs using a dental suffix were called weak by the early German grammarian Jacob Grimm because they needed the help of a suffix to show past time. Verbs that did not need such assistance, he called strong. Grimm’s metaphorical terminology is not very satisfactory, but it is still used. An overwhelming majority of our verbs add the dental suffix in the preterit, so it has become the regular and only living way of inflecting verbs in English and the other Germanic languages. All new verbs form their preterit that way: televise–televised, rev–revved, dis–dissed, and so forth. And many older strong verbs have become weak. Historically speaking, however, the 70 chapter 4 vowel change in the strong verbs, called ablaut or gradation (as in drive–drove and know–knew), was quite regular. On the other hand, some weak verbs, which use the dental suffix, are irregular. Bring–brought and buy–bought, for instance, are weak verbs because of the suffix -t, and their vowel changes do not make them strong. No attempt at explaining the origin of this dental suffix has been wholly satisfactory. Many have thought that it was originally an independent word related to do. 4. All the older forms of Germanic had two ways of declining their adjectives. The weak declension was used chiefly when the adjective modified a definite noun and was preceded by the kind of word that developed into the definite article. The strong declension was used otherwise. Thus Old English had þā geongan ceorlas ‘the young fellows (churls),’ with the weak form of geong, but geonge ceorlas ‘young fellows,’ with the strong form. The distinction is preserved in present-day German: die jungen Kerle, but junge Kerle. This particular Germanic feature cannot be illustrated in Modern English, because English has happily lost all such declension of adjectives. The use of the terms strong and weak for both verbs and adjectives, in quite different ways for the two parts of speech, is unfortunate but traditional. 5. The “free” accentual system of Indo-European, in which the accent shifted from one syllable to another in various forms of a word, gave way to the Germanic type of accentuation in which the first syllable was regularly stressed, except in verbs like modern believe and forget with a prefix, whose stress was on the first syllable of the root. None of the Germanic languages has anything comparable to the shifting accentuation of Latin vírī ‘men,’ virṓ rum ‘of the men’ or of hábeō ‘I have,’ habḗ mus ‘we have.’ Compare the paradigms of the Greek and Old English developments of Indo-European *pə tḗ r ‘father’: Singular nominative Singular genitive Singular dative Singular accusative Singular vocative Plural nominative Plural genitive Plural dative Plural accusative Greek Old English patḗr patrós patrí patéra páter patéres patérōn patrási patéras fǽder fǽder(es) fǽder fǽder fǽder fǽderas fǽdera fǽderum fǽderas In the Greek forms, the accent may occur on the suffix, the ending, or the root, unlike the Old English forms, which have their accent fixed on the first syllable of the root. Germanic accent is also predominantly a matter of stress (loudness) rather than pitch (tone); Indo-European seems to have had both types of accent at different stages of its development. 6. Some Indo-European vowels were modified in Germanic. Indo-European o was retained in Latin but became a in Germanic (compare Latin octo ‘eight,’ Gothic the backgrounds of english 71 ahtau). Conversely, Indo-European ā became Germanic ō (Latin māter ‘mother,’ OE mōdor). 7. The Indo-European stops bh, dh, gh; p, t, k; b, d, g were all changed in what is called the First Sound Shift or Grimm’s Law. These changes were gradual, extending over long periods of time, but the sounds eventually appear in Germanic languages as, respectively, b, d, g; f, θ, h; p, t, k. FIRST SOUND SHIFT Grimm’s Law Because the First Sound Shift, described by Grimm’s Law, is such an important difference between Germanic and other Indo-European languages, we illustrate it below by (1) reconstructed Indo-European roots or words (for convenience omitting the asterisk that marks reconstructed forms), (2) corresponding words from a non-Germanic language (usually Latin), and (3) corresponding native English words. (Only a single Indo-European root is given for each set, although the following words may be derived from slightly different forms of that root. Therefore, the correspondence between the two derived words and the Indo-European root may not be exact in all details other than the initial consonants.) 1. Indo-European bh, dh, gh (voiced stops with a puff of air or aspiration, represented phonetically by a superscript [ʰ]) became respectively the Germanic voiced fricatives β, ð, ɣ, and later, in initial position at least, b, d, g. Stated in phonetic terms, aspirated voiced stops became voiced fricatives and then unaspirated voiced stops. These Indo-European aspirated sounds also underwent changes in most non-Germanic languages. Their developments in Latin, Greek, and Germanic are shown in the following table: Indo-European bh dh gh (that is, [bʰ], [dʰ], and [gʰ]) Latin f- f- h- (initially; medially: -b-, -d- or -b-, -g-) Greek φ θ χ (that is, [pʰ], [tʰ], [kʰ], transliterated ph, th, ch) Germanic b d g Keep these non-Germanic changes in mind, or the following examples will not make sense: Indo-European bh Latin f-, Greek ph Germanic b bhrāter bhibhrubhlē bhregbhudhbhāgobhəg- frāter fiber flāre fra(n)go fundus (for *fudnus) fāgus (Gk.) phōgein ‘to roast’ brother beaver blow break bottom beech bake 72 chapter 4 Indo-European dh Latin f-, Greek th Germanic d dheighdhwerdhēdhug(h)ətēr fi(n)gere ‘to mold’ foris (Gk.) thē- ‘to place’ (Gk.) thugatēr dough door do daughter Indo-European gh Latin h-, Greek ch Germanic g ghordhoghostighomon- hortus hostis homo gholghedghaido- (Gk.) cholē (> cholera) (pre)he(n)dere ‘to take’ haedus ‘kid’ (OE) geard ‘yard’ guest gome (obsolete, but in brideg(r)oom) gall get goat 2. Except when preceded by s, the Indo-European voiceless stops p, t, k became respectively the voiceless fricatives f, θ, x (later h in initial position): Indo-European p Latin, Greek p Germanic f pətēr piskpelpūrprtupulopedpeku- pater piscis pellis (Gk.) pūr portus pullus ped(em) pecu ‘cattle’ father fish fell ‘animal hide’ fire ford foal foot fee (cf. Ger. Vieh ‘cattle’) Indo-European t Latin t Germanic θ treyes terstū tentumtonə- trēs torrēre ‘to dry’ tū tenuis tumēre ‘to swell’ tonāre three thirst (OE) þū ‘thou’ thin thumb (that is, ‘fat finger’) thunder Indo-European k Latin k (spelled c, q) Germanic h krnkerdkwod kerkmtom kelkap- cornū cordquod cervus centcēlāre ‘to hide’ capere ‘to take’ horn heart what (OE hwæt) hart hund(red) hall, hell heave, have the backgrounds of english 73 3. The Indo-European voiced stops b, d, g became respectively the voiceless stops p, t, k. Indo-European b Latin, Greek, Lithuanian, Russian b Germanic p treb- trabs ‘beam, timber’ (> [archi]trave) (Lith.) dubùs (Russ.) jabloko (archaic) thorp ‘village’ dheubabel- deep apple The sound b was infrequent in Indo-European and extremely so at the beginning of words. Examples other than those above are hard to come by. Indo-European d Latin, Greek d Germanic t dwō dentdemədrewdekm ed- duo dentis domāre (Gk.) drūs ‘oak’ decem edere two tooth tame tree ten (Gothic taíhun) eat Indo-European g Latin, Greek g Germanic k genu- genu agrogenəgwengrənognō- ager ‘field’ genus (Gk.) gunē ‘woman’ grānum (g)nōscere knee (loss of [k-] is modern) acre kin queen corn know, can Verner’s Law Some words in the Germanic languages appear to have an irregular development of Indo-European p, t, and k. Instead of the expected f, θ, and x (or h), we find β, ð , and ɣ (or their later developments). For example, Indo-European pətēr (represented by Latin pater and Greek patēr) would have been expected to appear in Germanic with a medial θ. Instead we find Gothic fadar (with d representing [ð]), Icelandic fað ir, and Old English fæder (in which the d is a West Germanic development of earlier [ð]). It appears that Indo-European t has become ð instead of θ. This seeming anomaly was explained by a Danish scholar named Karl Verner in 1875. Verner noticed that the Proto-Germanic voiceless fricatives (f, θ, x, and s) became voiced fricatives (β, ð , ɣ, and z) unless they were prevented by any of three conditions: (1) being the first sound in a word, (2) being next to another voiceless sound, or (3) having the Indo-European stress on the immediately preceding syllable. Thus the t of Indo-European pətēr became θ, as Grimm’s Law predicts it 74 chapter 4 should; but then, because the word is stressed on its second syllable and the θ is neither initial nor next to a voiceless sound, that fricative voiced to ð . Verner’s Law, which is a supplement to Grimm’s Law, is that Proto-Germanic voiceless fricatives became voiced when they were in a voiced environment and the Indo-European stress was not on the immediately preceding syllable. The law was obscured by the fact that, after it had operated, the stress on Germanic words shifted to the first syllable of the root, thus effectively disguising one of its important conditions. (The effect of the position of stress on voicing can be observed in some Modern English words of foreign origin, such as exert [ɪgˈzərt] and exist [ɪgˈzɪst], compared with exercise [ˈɛksərsaɪz] and exigent [ˈɛksəǰənt].) The later history of the voiced fricatives resulting from Verner’s Law is the same as that of the voiced fricatives that developed from Indo-European bh, dh, and gh. The z that developed from earlier s appears as r in all recorded Germanic languages except Gothic. The shift of z to r, known as rhotacism (that is, r-ing, from Greek rho, the name of the letter), is by no means peculiar to Germanic. Latin flōs ‘flower’ has r in all forms other than the nominative singular—for instance, the genitive singular flōris, from earlier *flōzis, the original s being voiced to z because of its position between vowels. We have some remnants of the changes described by Verner’s Law in present-day English. The past tense of the verb be has two forms: was and were. The alternation of s and r in those forms is a result of a difference in the way they were stressed in prehistoric times. The Old English verb frēosan ‘to freeze’ had a past participle from which came a now obsolete adjective frore ‘frosty, frozen.’ The Old English verb forlēosan ‘to lose utterly’ had a past participle from which came our adjective forlorn. Both these forms also show the s/r alternation. Similarly, the verb seethe had a past participle from which we get sodden, showing the [θ/d] alternation. In early Germanic, past participles had stress on their endings, whereas the present tense forms of the verbs did not, and that difference in stress permitted voicing of the last consonant of the participle stems and hence triggered the operation of Verner’s Law. The Sequence of the First Sound Shift The consonant changes described by Grimm and Verner probably stretched over centuries. Each set of shifts was completed before the next began and may have occurred in the following order: 1. Indo-European (IE) bh, dh, gh → (respectively) Germanic (Gmc) β, ð, ɣ 2. IE p, t, k → (respectively) Gmc f, θ, x ( → h initially) 3. Gmc f, θ, x, s → (respectively) Gmc β, ð, ɣ, z (under the conditions of Verner’s Law) 4. IE b, d, g → (respectively) Gmc p, t, k 5. Gmc β, ð, ɣ, z → (respectively) Gmc b, d, g, r WEST GERMANIC LANGUAGES The changes mentioned in the preceding section affected all of the Germanic languages, but other changes also occurred that created three subgroups within the the backgrounds of english 75 Germanic branch—North, East, and West Germanic. The three subgroups are distinguished from one another by a large number of linguistic features, of which we can mention six as typical: 1. The nominative singular of some nouns ended in -az in Proto-Germanic—for example, *wulfaz. This ending disappeared completely in West Germanic (Old English wulf) but changed to -r in North Germanic (Old Icelandic ulfr) and to -s in East Germanic (Gothic wolfs). 2. The endings for the second and third persons singular in the present tense of verbs continued to be distinct in West and East Germanic, but in North Germanic the second person ending came to be used for both: Old English Gothic Old Icelandic bindest bindeþ bindis bindiþ bindr bindr ‘you bind’ ‘he/she binds’ 3. North Germanic developed a definite article that was suffixed to nouns—for example, Old Icelandic ulfr ‘wolf’ and ulfrinn ‘the wolf.’ No such feature appears in East or West Germanic. 4. In West and North Germanic the z that resulted from Verner’s Law appears as r, but in East Germanic it appears as s: Old English ēare ‘ear’ and Old Icelandic eyra, but Gothic auso. 5. West and North Germanic had a kind of vowel alternation called mutation (treated in the next chapter); for example, in Old English and Old Icelandic, the word for ‘man’ in the accusative singular was mann, while the corresponding plural was menn. No such alternation exists in Gothic, for which the parallel forms are singular mannan and plural mannans. 6. In West Germanic, the ð that resulted from Verner’s Law appears as d, but it remains a fricative in North and East Germanic: Old English fæder, Old Icelandic fað ir, Gothic fað ar (though spelled fadar). West Germanic itself was divided into smaller subgroups. For example, High German and Low German are distinguished by another change in the stop sounds— the Second or High German Sound Shift—which occurred comparatively recently as linguistic history goes. It was nearing its completion by the end of the eighth century of our era. This shift began in the southern, mountainous part of Germany and spread northward, stopping short of the low-lying northernmost section of the country. The high in High German (Hochdeutsch) and the low in Low German (Plattdeutsch) refer only to relative distances above sea level. High German became in time standard German. We may illustrate the High German shift in part by contrasting English and High German forms, as follows. In High German: Proto-Germanic p appears as pf or, after vowels, as ff (pepper–Pfeffer). Proto-Germanic t appears as ts (spelled z) or, after vowels, as ss (tongue–Zunge; water– Wasser). Proto-Germanic k appears after vowels as ch (break–brechen). Proto-Germanic d appears as t (dance–tanzen). 76 chapter 4 The Continental home of the English was north of the area in which the High German shift occurred. But even if this had not been so, the English language would have been unaffected by changes that had not begun to occur at the time of the Anglo-Saxon migrations to Britain, beginning in the fifth century. Consequently English has the earlier consonantal characteristics of Germanic, which it shares with Low German, Dutch, Flemish, and Frisian. Because English and Frisian (the latter spoken in the northern Dutch province of Friesland and in some of the islands off the coast) share certain features not found elsewhere in the Germanic group, they are sometimes treated as an AngloFrisian subgroup of West Germanic. They and Old Saxon share other features, such as the loss of nasal consonants before the fricatives f, s, and þ, with lengthening of the preceding vowel: compare High German gans with Old English gōs ‘goose,’ Old High German fimf (Modern German fünf) with Old English fīf ‘five,’ and High German mund with Old English mūð ‘mouth.’ English, then, began its separate existence as a form of Germanic brought by pagan warrior-adventurers from the Continent to the relatively obscure island that the Romans called Britannia and, until shortly before, had ruled as part of their mighty empire. There, in the next five centuries or so, it developed into an independent language quite distinct from any Germanic language spoken on the Continent. FOR FURTHER READING General Trask. Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Watkins. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. History of Language Fischer. A History of Language. Janson. Speak: A Short History of Languages. Nature of Language Change Aitchison. Language Change. McMahon. Understanding Language Change. Peoples and Genes Oppenheimer. The Origins of the British, a Genetic Detective Story. Sykes. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts. Wade. “A United Kingdom? Maybe.” Indo-European Language Baldi. An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages. Beekes. Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. the backgrounds of english 77 Clackson. Indo-European Linguistics. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. Indo-European Homeland and Culture Curtis. Indo-European Origins. Day. Indo-European Origins. Fortson. “Proto-Indo-European Culture and Archaeology.” Gimbutas. The Kurgan Culture. Lincoln. Myth, Cosmos, and Society. Mallory. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Renfrew. Archaeology and Language. History of Linguistics Dinneen. General Linguistics. Robins. A Short History of Linguistics. Seuren. Western Linguistics. Historical Linguistics Campbell. Historical Linguistics. Campbell and Mixco. A Glossary of Historical Linguistics. Fox. Linguistic Reconstruction. Hock and Joseph. Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship. Lehmann. Historical Linguistics. Trask. Trask’s Historical Linguistics. The World’s Languages Ruhlen. A Guide to the World’s Languages. Germanic Languages Green. Language and History in the Early Germanic World. Harbert. The Germanic Languages. Nielsen. The Germanic Languages. CHAPTER 5 ±± ±± ±± ±± ±± ±± ±± ±± ± The Old English Period (449–1100) The recorded history of the English language begins, not on the Continent, where we know its speakers once lived, but in the British Isles, where they eventually settled. During the period when the language was spoken in Europe, it is known as pre–Old English, for it was only after the English separated themselves from their Germanic cousins that we recognize their speech as a distinct language and begin to have records of it. SOME KEY EVENTS IN THE OLD ENGLISH PERIOD The following events during the Old English period significantly influenced the development of the English language. • • • • • • • 78 449 Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians began to occupy Great Britain, thus changing its major population to English speakers and separating the early English language from its Continental relatives. This is a traditional date; the actual migrations doubtless began earlier. 597 Saint Augustine of Canterbury arrived in England to begin the conversion of the English by baptizing King Ethelbert of Kent, thus introducing the influence of the Latin language. 664 The Synod of Whitby aligned the English with Roman rather than Celtic Christianity, thus linking English culture with mainstream Europe. 730 The Venerable Bede produced his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, recording the early history of the English people. 787 The Scandinavian invasion began with raids along the northeast seacoast. 865 The Scandinavians occupied northeastern Britain and began a campaign to conquer all of England. 871 Alfred became king of Wessex and reigned until his death in 899, rallying the English against the Scandinavians, retaking the city of London, establishing the Danelaw, securing the kingship of all England for himself and his successors, and producing or sponsoring the translation of Latin works into English. the old english period (449–1100) • • • • • • 79 987 Ælfric, the homilist and grammarian, went to the abbey of Cerne, where he became the major prose writer of the Old English period and of its Benedictine Revival and produced a model of prose style that influenced following centuries. 991 Olaf Tryggvason invaded England, and the English were defeated at the Battle of Maldon. 1000 The manuscript of the Old English epic Beowulf was written about this time. 1016 Canute became king of England, establishing a Danish dynasty in Britain. 1042 The Danish dynasty ended with the death of King Hardicanute, and Edward the Confessor became king of England. 1066 Edward the Confessor died and was succeeded by Harold, last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, who died at the Battle of Hastings while fighting against the invading army of William, duke of Normandy, who was crowned king of England on December 25. HISTORY OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS Britain before the English When the English migrated from the Continent to Britain in the fifth century or perhaps even earlier, they found the island already inhabited. A Celtic people had been there for many centuries before Julius Caesar’s invasion of the island in 55 B.C. And before them, other peoples, about whom we know very little, had lived on the islands. The Roman occupation, not really begun in earnest until the time of Emperor Claudius (A.D. 43), was to make Britain—that is, Britannia—a part of the Roman Empire for nearly as long as the time between the first permanent English settlement in America and our own day. It is therefore not surprising that there are so many Roman remains in modern England. Despite the long occupation, the British Celts continued to speak their own language, though many of them, particularly those in urban centers who wanted to “get on,” learned the language of their Roman rulers. However, only after the Anglo-Saxons arrived was the survival of the British Celtic language seriously threatened. After the Roman legionnaires were withdrawn from Britain in the early fifth century (by 410), Picts from the north and Scots from the west savagely attacked the unprotected British Celts, who after generations of foreign domination had neither the heart nor the skill in weapons to put up much resistance. These same Picts and Scots, as well as ferocious Germanic sea raiders whom the Romans called Saxons, had been a considerable nuisance to the Romans in Britain during the latter half of the fourth century. The Coming of the English The Roman army included many non-Italians who were hired to help keep the Empire in order. The Roman forces in Britain in the late fourth century probably included some Angles and Saxons brought from the Continent. Tradition says, 80 chapter 5 however, that the main body of the English arrived later. According to the Venerable Bede’s account in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin and completed around 730, almost three centuries after the event, the Britons appealed to Rome for help against the Picts and Scots. What relief they got, a single legion, was only temporarily effective. When Rome could or would help no more, the wretched Britons—still according to Bede—ironically enough called the “Saxons” to their aid “from the parts beyond the sea.” As a result of their appeal, shiploads of Germanic warrior-adventurers began to arrive. The date that Bede gives for the first landing of those Saxons is 449. With it the Old English period begins. With it, too, we may in a sense begin thinking of Britain as England—the land of the Angles—for, even though the longships carried Jutes, Saxons, Frisians, and doubtless members of other tribes as well, their descendants a century and a half later were already beginning to think of themselves and their speech as English. (They naturally had no suspicion that it was “Old” English.) The name of a single tribe was thus adopted as a national name (prehistoric Old English *Angli becoming Engle). The term Anglo-Saxon is also sometimes used for either the language of this period or its speakers. These Germanic sea raiders, ancestors of the English, settled the Pictish and Scottish aggressors’ business in short order. Then, with eyes ever on the main chance, a complete lack of any sense of international morality, and no fear whatever of being prosecuted as war criminals, they very unidealistically proceeded to subjugate and ultimately to dispossess the Britons whom they had come ostensibly to help. They sent word to their Continental kinsmen and friends about the cowardice of the Britons and the fertility of the island; and in the course of the next hundred years or so, more and more Saxons, Angles, and Jutes arrived “from the three most powerful nations of Germania,” as Bede says, to seek their fortunes in a new land. We can be certain about only a few things in those exciting times. The invading newcomers came from various Germanic tribes in northern Germany, including the southern part of the Jutland peninsula (modern Schleswig-Holstein). So they spoke a number of closely related and hence very similar Germanic dialects. By the time Saint Augustine arrived in Britain to convert them to Christianity at the end of the sixth century, they dominated practically all of what is now known as England. As for the ill-advised Britons, their plight was hopeless. Some fled to Wales and Cornwall, some crossed the Channel to Brittany, and others were ultimately assimilated to the English by marriage or otherwise. Many doubtless lost their lives in the long-drawn-out fighting. The Germanic tribes that came first—Bede’s Jutes—were led by the synonymously named brothers Hengest and Horsa (both names mean ‘horse,’ an important animal in Indo-European culture and religion). These brothers were reputed to be great-grandsons of Woden, the chief Germanic god, an appropriate genealogy for tribal headmen. Those first-comers settled principally in the southeastern part of the island, still called by its Celtic name of Kent. Subsequently, Continental Saxons were to occupy the rest of the region south of the Thames, and Angles, coming presumably from the hook-shaped peninsula in Schleswig known as Angeln, settled the large area stretching from the Thames northward to the Scottish highlands, except for the extreme western portion (Wales). the old english period (449–1100) 81 The English in Britain The Germanic settlement comprised seven kingdoms, the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy: Kent, Essex, Sussex, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria—the last, the land north of the Humber estuary, being an amalgamation of two earlier kingdoms, Bernicia and Deira (see the accompanying map). Kent early became the chief center of culture and wealth, and by the end of the sixth century its King, Ethelbert (Æðelberht), could lay claim to hegemony over all the other kingdoms south of the Humber. Later, in the seventh and eighth centuries, this supremacy was to pass to Northumbria, with its great centers of learning at Lindisfarne, Wearmouth, and Jarrow (Bede’s own monastery); then to Mercia; and finally to Wessex, with its brilliant line of kings beginning with Egbert (Ecgberht), who overthrew the Mercian king in 825, and culminating in his grandson, the superlatively great Alfred, whose successors after his death in 899 took for themselves the title Rex Anglorum ‘King of the English.’ The most important event in the history of Anglo-Saxon culture (which is the ancestor of both British and American) occurred in 597, when Pope Gregory I dispatched a band of missionaries to the Angles (Angli, as he called them, thereby departing from the usual Continental designation of them as Saxones), in accordance with a resolve he had made some years before. The leader of this band was Saint Augustine—not to be confused with the African-born bishop of Hippo of the same name who wrote The City of God more than a century earlier. The apostle to the English and his fellow bringers of the Gospel, who landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent, were received by King Ethelbert courteously, if at the beginning a trifle warily. Already ripe for conversion through his marriage to a Christian Frankish princess, in a matter of months Ethelbert was himself baptized. Four years later, in 601, Augustine was consecrated first archbishop of Canterbury, and there was a church in England. Christianity had actually come to the Anglo-Saxons from two directions—from Rome with Saint Augustine and from the Celtic Church with Irish missionaries. Christianity had been introduced to the British Isles, and particularly to Ireland, much earlier, before the year 400. And in Ireland Christianity had developed into a distinctive form, quite different from that of Rome. Irish missionaries went to Iona and Lindisfarne and made converts in Northumbria and Mercia, where they introduced their style of writing (the Insular hand) to the English. For a time it was uncertain whether England would go with Rome or the Celts. That question was resolved at a Synod held at Whitby in 664, where preference was given to the Roman customs of when to celebrate Easter and of how monks should shave their heads. Those apparently trivial decisions were symbolic of the important alignment of the English Church with Rome and the Continent. Bede, who lived at the end of the seventh century and on into the first third of the next, wrote about Christianity in England and contributed significantly to the growing cultural importance of the land. He was a Benedictine monk who spent his life in scholarly pursuits at the monastery of Jarrow and became the most learned person in Europe of his day. He was a theologian, a scientist, a biographer, and a historian. It is in the last capacity that we remember him most, for his Ecclesiastical History, cited above, is the fullest and most accurate account we have of the early years of the English nation. 82 chapter 5 BRITAIN IN OLD ENGLISH TIMES The First Viking Conquest The Christian descendants of Germanic raiders who had looted, pillaged, and finally taken the land of Britain by force of arms were themselves to undergo harassment from other Germanic invaders, beginning late in the eighth century, when pagan Viking raiders sacked various churches and monasteries, including Lindisfarne and Bede’s own beloved Jarrow. During the first half of the following century, other disastrous raids took place in the south. In 865 a great and expertly organized army landed in East Anglia, led by the unforgettably named Ivar the Boneless and his brother Halfdan, sons of Ragnar Lothbrok (Loð brók ‘Shaggy-pants’). According to legend, Ragnar had refused his bewitched bride’s plea for a deferment of the consummation of their marriage for three nights. As a consequence, his son Ivar was born with gristle instead of bone. This unique physique seems to have been no handicap to a brilliant if rascally career as a warrior. Father Ragnar was eventually put to death in a snake pit in York. On this occasion his wife, the lovely Kraka, who felt no resentment toward him, had furnished him with a magical snake-proof coat; but it was of no avail, for his executioners made him remove his outer garment. the old english period (449–1100) 83 During the following years, the Vikings gained possession of practically the whole eastern part of England. In 870 they attacked Wessex, ruled by the first Ethelred (Æðelræd) with the able assistance of his brother Alfred, who was to succeed him in the following year. After years of crushing defeats, in 878 Alfred won a signal victory at Edington. He defeated Guthrum, the Danish king of East Anglia, who agreed not only to depart from Wessex but also to be baptized. Alfred was his godfather for the sacrament. Viking dominance was thus confined to Northumbria and East Anglia, where Danish law held sway, an area therefore known as the Danelaw. Alfred is the only English king to be honored with the sobriquet “the Great,” and deservedly so. In addition to his military victories over the Vikings, Alfred reorganized the laws and government of the kingdom and revived learning among the clergy. His greatest fame, however, was as a scholar in his own right. He translated Latin books into English: Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, Orosius’s History, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and Saint Augustine’s Soliloquies. He was also responsible for a translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and for the compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—the two major sources of our knowledge of early English history. Alfred became the subject of folklore, some probably based on fact, such as the story that, during a bad period in the Danish wars, he took refuge incognito in the hut of a poor Anglo-Saxon peasant woman, who, needing to go out, instructed him to look after some cakes she had in the oven. But Alfred was so preoccupied by his own problems that he forgot the cakes and let them burn. When the good wife returned, she soundly berated him as a lazy good-for-nothing, and the king humbly accepted the rebuke. The troubles with the Danes, as the Vikings were called by the English, though they included Norwegians and Swedes, were by no means over. But the English so successfully repulsed further attacks that, in the tenth century, Alfred’s son and grandsons (three of whom became kings) were able to carry out his plans for consolidating England, which by then had a sizable and peaceful Scandinavian population. The Second Viking Conquest In the later years of the tenth century, however, trouble started again with the arrival of a fleet of warriors led by Olaf Tryggvason, later king of Norway, who was soon joined by the Danish king, Svein Forkbeard. For more than twenty years there were repeated attacks, most of them crushing defeats for the English, beginning with the glorious if unsuccessful stand made by the men of Essex under the valiant Byrhtnoth in 991, celebrated in the fine Old English poem The Battle of Maldon. As a rule, however, the onslaughts of the later Northmen were not met with such vigorous resistance, for these were the bad days of the second Ethelred, called Unrǣd (‘ill-advised’). (Rǣd means ‘advice,’ but the epithet is popularly translated as ‘the Unready.’) After the deaths in 1016 of Ethelred and his son Edmund Ironside, who survived his father by little more than half a year, Canute, son of Svein Forkbeard, came to the throne and was eventually succeeded by two sons: Harold Harefoot and Hardicanute (‘Canute the Hardy’). The line of Alfred was not to be restored until 1042, with the accession of Edward the Confessor, though Canute in a sense 84 chapter 5 allied himself with that line by marrying Ethelred’s widow, Emma of Normandy. She thus became the mother of two English kings by different fathers: by E