21 April 2021
This week’s CLCR seminar will include two presentations from our visiting PhD students.
Marina Asián (Universidad de Almeria): Dialectal Variation in the Lexis of Middle English: Norse-Derived Terms in Havelok the Dane and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
and
Eneas Caro (Universidad de Sevilla): In Turkish, but not at all: two instances of the Sabir language in 17th century France and England.
Abstracts …
Dialectal Variation in the Lexis of Middle English: Norse-Derived Terms in Havelok the Dane and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
The close relationship between Old English and Old Norse and the influence and impact of the latter on the native language has been widely acknowledged. The Danelaw, established in the north-east of England, gave rise to cohabitation between the neighbouring communities of Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, which is evidenced by the significant amount of Norse loans that remain prevalent in the English language today. This led to dialectal differences in Middle English due to the higher use of Norse terms in the areas where the Danelaw had been established before the Norman Conquest.
My research focuses on the Norse-derived terms recorded during the Middle English period through the study of two texts belonging to different dialect areas. The first is Havelok the Dane, an anonymous work written in the dialect of Lincolnshire, which was one of the territories formerly part of the Danelaw; the second is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (my project focuses exclusively on three tales) featuring a London dialect. The aim of my work is to provide a detailed assessment of the evidence, scant or strong, for the Norse origin of each word after a thorough analysis of its history and etymology. Given the obvious similarities between Old English and Old Norse, it is problematic to determine with certainty the origin of every word, so my work consists in detailing as clearly as possible the reasons for the Norse input of this lexicon.
My dissertation will also include a lexico-semantic study of some of these words in order to evaluate their semantic and stylistic relationship with the other terms in their lexico-semantic field, and possible dialectal difference in this respect. The findings will be helpful to establish the impact and scope of this set of words, not only within these texts, but also in different dialectal areas.
After a brief introduction on the sociohistorical and linguistic context and the overall structure of the dissertation, this presentation will focus on the etymological analysis of some of the Norse-derived terms in my corpus. To do so, I will follow the typology for the etymological classification of possible Norse-derived terms put forward by the Gersum Project. The Gersum Project has made it possible to classify the Old Norse loans in English and study them with unprecedented systematicity. The Gersum typology aims to establish a possible Norse input after an exhaustive study of the word, in order to classify each term within levels of probability of Scandinavian derivation according to established parameters (see The Gersum Project online). I will first refer to the terms in my data that have already been analysed by the Gersum Project and will then briefly discuss some terms not included in the project’s database so as to give an indication of the difficulties that one faces when trying to analyse and classify Norse-derived terms in English.
In Turkish, but not at all: two instances of the Sabir language in 17th century France and England.
From the 11th to the 19th centuries, a linguistic revolution took place in the Mediterranean: the Sabir language ruled the seas as a lingua franca. Much is unknown about how it truly sounded like, but some traces are to be found in our modern languages.
This study will focus on two testimonies of Sabir found in the 17th century English stage: Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), and, more importantly, its adaptation to the English stage, Edward Ravenscroft’s The Citizen Turn’d Gentleman (1672).Both use Sabir as mock-Turkish in order dupe the play’s fool into becoming an Ottoman noble. Notwithstanding, this instance of the lingua franca may be the closest thing to a bona fide testimony on the stage, and through these two plays, perhaps some light can be shed on the presence of Sabir in the collective mind of 17th century England and what its uses might have been.
REFERENCES
Bruni, F. Gli scambi linguistici nel Mediterraneo e la lingua franca. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20090328135757/http://www.italica.rai.it/principali/lingua/bruni/lezioni/f_lll5.htm
Castellanos, C. (2007). La lingua franca, una revolución lingüística mediterrània amb emprenta catalana. Presented at the 12th International NACS Colloquium in Halifax, Nova Scotia (March 11-13, 2007).
Cifoletti, G. (2004). La lingua franca barbaresca. Roma: Il calamo.
Foltys, C. (2006). La lingua franca, consideracions crítiques: traducció del document (Vol. 1). Barcelona: Documenta Universitaria.
Gaines, J. (2002). The Molière Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Schuchardt, H. (1909). “Die Lingua franca.” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie (Vol 33: 441-461). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Wagner, E. M., Beinhoff, B., & Outhwaite, B. (Eds.). (2017). Merchants of innovation: The languages of traders (Vol. 15). Berlin: De Gruyter.