القشربه
12-23-2005, 07:58 PM
English language history
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• The Lawgiver of English Usage: Henry Watson Fowler
(Language history)
Educated at Rugby and Oxford's Balliol College, H.W. Fowler began his career by teaching English grammar for seventeen years at a Yorkshire secondary school for boys. When offered a promotion to housemaster, he quit and move to London. There, while proving to himself that it was possible to live on 100 pound sterling a year, he was a freelance journalist. Fowler made his real mark on the English language only after moving to the remote island of Guernsey in 1903. He and his brother, Francis George Fowler, proposed to write "a sort of English composition manual, from the negative point of view, for journalists & amateur writers." The outcome, The King's English, was published by the Oxford University Press and quickly became a de facto standard. Exposing the shortcomings of eminent writers, the tome offering but five basic commandments:
1. Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
2. Prefer the concrete to the abstract.
3. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
4. Prefer the short word to the long.
5. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
The majority of "Old English" words are lost to modern usage and have no descendants. Of the small core of survivors, most are readily familiar and seldom have abstract meanings. The roots are typically short and often contain a single syllable. Some have taken on meanings only indirectly related to those in Saxon times. And, others are downright awkward in contemporary usage. Fowler addressed these point in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, first published in 1926 and still in print. He warns that:
"...conscious deliberate Saxionism is folly, that the choice or rejection of particular words should depend not on their descent but on considerations of expressiveness, intelligibility, brevity, euphony, or ease of handling, & yet that any writer who becomes aware that the Saxon or native English element in what he writes is small will do well to take that fact as a danger-signal."
(extract from "The Fowler Collection" site)
http://www.ibiblio.org/lineback/words/hwf.htm
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• "Ow we spake" (the dialect of the Black Country)
(Language history)
The dialect of the area remains perhaps one of the last examples of early English still spoken today. The word endings with 'en' are still noticeable in conversation as in 'gooen' (going), callen (calling) and the vowel A is pronounced as O as in sond (sand), hond (hand) and mon (man).Other pronunciations are 'winder' for window, 'fer' for far, and 'loff' for laugh - exactly as Chaucer's English was spoken.
This "dictionary" is Black Country in general and not particularly Sedgley in origin. Local dialect was (and probably still is to a lesser degree) quite distinctive between the different towns and villages of the Black Country. My Grandmother reckoned that she could tell which village that a person came from by the way they spoke. This has probably changed today due to the greater mobility of people.
(extract from the Sedgley Manor site)
http://www.sedgleymanor.com/dialect.html
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• Earliest English cookbook rediscovered
(Language history)
A cookbook thought to be the earliest printed in English has been unearthed at the Marquis of Bath's ancestral seat.
It dates from 1500 and includes recipes for the likes of chopped sparrow and roasted swan.
The Daily Telegraph says it offers an invaluable culinary and cultural insight into the life of England's wealthiest and most influential people, including kings and archbishops.
A British Library spokesman described the book, entitled A Noble Book of Royal Feasts, as an extraordinary find.
He said recipe books from the medieval period are in existence, but this is the earliest known copy of a printed cook book in English.
...
"One feast listed was that served for George Nevill, who became Archbishop of York in 1465. It is a huge list of birds, including curlews, gannets, gulls, dotterels, larks, redshanks, peacocks, partridges, woodcocks, knots and sparrows.
"Henry V's coronation feast is also recorded and it included cygnets, trout, fried roach, perch, carp and lamprey. During the meal the King would have had swan, but everybody else would have eaten conger eel."
(extract from the "Ananova" site, referencing the Daily Telegraph
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_616598.html?menu=news.latestheadlines
________________________________________
• What is "Hiberno-English"? Is it a dialect of English?
(Pondial differences)
Bob Cunningham: Recalling Padraig's recent remarks about whether or not Hiberno-English should be considered to be a dialect of English, I've done a Google search and have come up with some remarks that seem to be pertinent.
University College Dublin has a Web site at www.ucd.ie. On a page of that site, at Staff Publications, there appear the following remarks:
===== Begin remarks =====
Hiberno-English is the name given to the Irish dialect of English. It differs from Standard English on two principal counts. First, it is a hybrid dialect, full of borrowings from the Irish language, with words or phrases imported directly or in anglicised form ('meas', 'rawmaish', 'galore', and so on). Thus 'galore' is an anglicisation of the Irish 'go leor', meaning 'in abundance'. Galore has now passed into Standard English usage, but Hiberno-English is full of such formations which remain unique to Ireland. Irish also influences the grammar, as in 'I'm after writing a letter'.
The second strand in Hiberno-English comprises words obsolete in Standard English but still commonly used in Ireland. Thus a word like 'oxter', meaning an armpit, is still in general use in Ireland but passed out of Standard English around 1800. Similarly, words such as 'cog', to cheat in an exam, 'crack', 'bowsey' and 'delph' have retained their currency in Ireland.
In this pioneering work, Professor Dolan has prepared an accessible one volume dictionary of Hiberno-English.
===== End remarks =====
So far as I've seen, the page doesn't give an explicit reference to Professor Dolan's book. However, I happen to have a book called _A Dictionary of Hiberno-English_, subtitled "The Irish Use of English"; compiled and edited by Terence Patrick Dolan, published by Gill & Macmillan Ltd, Goldenbridge, Dublin 8; copyright Terence Patrick Dolan 1998. It seems reasonable to assume it's the book the UCD Web page is referring to.
(extract from the aue archives, article by Bob Cunningham, follow the link below for the complete thread)
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&selm=9ck4du43scf6j1ig3s4me832u8hb4jcomg%404ax.com
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________________________________________
• The Lawgiver of English Usage: Henry Watson Fowler
(Language history)
Educated at Rugby and Oxford's Balliol College, H.W. Fowler began his career by teaching English grammar for seventeen years at a Yorkshire secondary school for boys. When offered a promotion to housemaster, he quit and move to London. There, while proving to himself that it was possible to live on 100 pound sterling a year, he was a freelance journalist. Fowler made his real mark on the English language only after moving to the remote island of Guernsey in 1903. He and his brother, Francis George Fowler, proposed to write "a sort of English composition manual, from the negative point of view, for journalists & amateur writers." The outcome, The King's English, was published by the Oxford University Press and quickly became a de facto standard. Exposing the shortcomings of eminent writers, the tome offering but five basic commandments:
1. Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
2. Prefer the concrete to the abstract.
3. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
4. Prefer the short word to the long.
5. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
The majority of "Old English" words are lost to modern usage and have no descendants. Of the small core of survivors, most are readily familiar and seldom have abstract meanings. The roots are typically short and often contain a single syllable. Some have taken on meanings only indirectly related to those in Saxon times. And, others are downright awkward in contemporary usage. Fowler addressed these point in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, first published in 1926 and still in print. He warns that:
"...conscious deliberate Saxionism is folly, that the choice or rejection of particular words should depend not on their descent but on considerations of expressiveness, intelligibility, brevity, euphony, or ease of handling, & yet that any writer who becomes aware that the Saxon or native English element in what he writes is small will do well to take that fact as a danger-signal."
(extract from "The Fowler Collection" site)
http://www.ibiblio.org/lineback/words/hwf.htm
________________________________________
• "Ow we spake" (the dialect of the Black Country)
(Language history)
The dialect of the area remains perhaps one of the last examples of early English still spoken today. The word endings with 'en' are still noticeable in conversation as in 'gooen' (going), callen (calling) and the vowel A is pronounced as O as in sond (sand), hond (hand) and mon (man).Other pronunciations are 'winder' for window, 'fer' for far, and 'loff' for laugh - exactly as Chaucer's English was spoken.
This "dictionary" is Black Country in general and not particularly Sedgley in origin. Local dialect was (and probably still is to a lesser degree) quite distinctive between the different towns and villages of the Black Country. My Grandmother reckoned that she could tell which village that a person came from by the way they spoke. This has probably changed today due to the greater mobility of people.
(extract from the Sedgley Manor site)
http://www.sedgleymanor.com/dialect.html
________________________________________
• Earliest English cookbook rediscovered
(Language history)
A cookbook thought to be the earliest printed in English has been unearthed at the Marquis of Bath's ancestral seat.
It dates from 1500 and includes recipes for the likes of chopped sparrow and roasted swan.
The Daily Telegraph says it offers an invaluable culinary and cultural insight into the life of England's wealthiest and most influential people, including kings and archbishops.
A British Library spokesman described the book, entitled A Noble Book of Royal Feasts, as an extraordinary find.
He said recipe books from the medieval period are in existence, but this is the earliest known copy of a printed cook book in English.
...
"One feast listed was that served for George Nevill, who became Archbishop of York in 1465. It is a huge list of birds, including curlews, gannets, gulls, dotterels, larks, redshanks, peacocks, partridges, woodcocks, knots and sparrows.
"Henry V's coronation feast is also recorded and it included cygnets, trout, fried roach, perch, carp and lamprey. During the meal the King would have had swan, but everybody else would have eaten conger eel."
(extract from the "Ananova" site, referencing the Daily Telegraph
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_616598.html?menu=news.latestheadlines
________________________________________
• What is "Hiberno-English"? Is it a dialect of English?
(Pondial differences)
Bob Cunningham: Recalling Padraig's recent remarks about whether or not Hiberno-English should be considered to be a dialect of English, I've done a Google search and have come up with some remarks that seem to be pertinent.
University College Dublin has a Web site at www.ucd.ie. On a page of that site, at Staff Publications, there appear the following remarks:
===== Begin remarks =====
Hiberno-English is the name given to the Irish dialect of English. It differs from Standard English on two principal counts. First, it is a hybrid dialect, full of borrowings from the Irish language, with words or phrases imported directly or in anglicised form ('meas', 'rawmaish', 'galore', and so on). Thus 'galore' is an anglicisation of the Irish 'go leor', meaning 'in abundance'. Galore has now passed into Standard English usage, but Hiberno-English is full of such formations which remain unique to Ireland. Irish also influences the grammar, as in 'I'm after writing a letter'.
The second strand in Hiberno-English comprises words obsolete in Standard English but still commonly used in Ireland. Thus a word like 'oxter', meaning an armpit, is still in general use in Ireland but passed out of Standard English around 1800. Similarly, words such as 'cog', to cheat in an exam, 'crack', 'bowsey' and 'delph' have retained their currency in Ireland.
In this pioneering work, Professor Dolan has prepared an accessible one volume dictionary of Hiberno-English.
===== End remarks =====
So far as I've seen, the page doesn't give an explicit reference to Professor Dolan's book. However, I happen to have a book called _A Dictionary of Hiberno-English_, subtitled "The Irish Use of English"; compiled and edited by Terence Patrick Dolan, published by Gill & Macmillan Ltd, Goldenbridge, Dublin 8; copyright Terence Patrick Dolan 1998. It seems reasonable to assume it's the book the UCD Web page is referring to.
(extract from the aue archives, article by Bob Cunningham, follow the link below for the complete thread)
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&selm=9ck4du43scf6j1ig3s4me832u8hb4jcomg%404ax.com
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