An introduction to Old English.

An introduction to Old English. (Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language) By Richard Hogg. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Pp. ix, 163.

A mere half a century ago knowledge of the history of English was considered one of the basic requirements for someone graduating in English studies. Karl Brunner's two-volume Die Englische Sprache (1960-1962) was intended as a standard university textbook, and Alistair Campbell in the preface to his Old English Grammar (1959) pointed out with almost palpable regret that the scope of his book is clearly limited. Since that day historical linguistics in its classical, philological form has been ever on the defense (cf. Frank 1997 on the more general issue of the face of philology as such), and its revival in the 1980s was in fact birth of a new historical linguistics, variationist, sociolinguistic, speaker-oriented. Campbell and Brunner would probably be appalled at the very thought of a textbook on the history of English, even an introductory one, with virtually no phonological content. Today such an idea not so much as falses an eye-brow; in fact, it is looked upon as a most welcome development. Such is signum temporis in an age when not just historical linguistics but linguistics itself fights for curricular survival at many universities.

Richard Hogg's An introduction to Old English (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), consists of ten chapters, followed by an Old English glossary, a glossary of linguistic terms used in the book, and an index. However, despite this traditionally-looking table of contents the layout of the book is all but traditional. It is determined by its intended readership, "students for whom this is the first experience of the language of the earliest period of English" (Hogg 2002: viii). To this specification one may safely add "and for whom linguistics is to a large extent an uncharted territory". Hogg's idea is to equip the reader with just enough information to start him on his way, and to do this in a relatively short time (the book is designed to serve a one-semester introductory course).

The first chapter of the book (pp. 1-12) introduces basic facts about the history of the Anglo-Saxons, as well as a very brief discussion of the pronunciation of Old English. The next two chapters (pp. 13-38) deal with the inflection of noun phrase constituents, while Chapters Four and Five (pp. 39-67) discuss verbal conjugations together with a short phonological aside. Syntactical issues are covered in Chapters Six and Seven (pp. 68-101), vocabulary--which includes word-formation--constitutes Chapter Eight (pp. 102-114), while in Chapter Nine (pp. 115-127) the aspects of linguistic variation in Old English are presented. The main body of the book closes with Chapter Ten (pp. 128-137), where Hogg points out developments which were to change the structure of Old English in the Middle English period.

To a traditionalist such a layout may seem outrageous, however, if the principal objective of the book is understanding written Old English at the lower-intermediate level, detailed phonological analyses are not necessary, unlike issues of word order or affixation, usually ignored or glossed over in standard textbooks. Reading Hogg's Introduction ... Alcuin would probably mutter approvingly, "Quid fractura cum Christo ...?" Nevertheless, as if is intended as a starting point for a more detailed study of Old English, at least in some places the author seems to have gone a bit too far in his attempts at making if as user-friendly as possible. The discussion of Old English pronunciation gives the impression of being somewhat hasty and disorganised. From personal experience I have repeatedly seen that students do appreciate, and indeed demand, straightforward, precise lists of graphophonemic correspondences, and Chapter One would definitely benefit largely from such a summary, even if in the form of an optional appendix.

Similarly, the closing chapter seems a little out of synch with the rest of the book. Its main focus is on the evolution of inflectional systems in the post-Old English period. It is necessarily rather succinct, compressing onto a few pages a lot of information, and may therefore be confusing for a beginner. Moreover, the discussion of Middle English developments falls beyond the scope of this book. A welcome replacement would be a chapter on the survival of Old English forms and constructions in Modern English, both standard and dialectal. Emphasis on such items as whilom or always, on one hand, and northern thou or southwestern en on the other, on dialectal and obscure words of Old English origin, would help underline the essential continuity of development between such seemingly alien language states as Old and Modern English respectively.

Hogg in his book adopts a purely synchronic perspective on Old English, which is very commendable. After all, a beginner will have enough trouble mastering the intricacies of Old English inflections (not to mention the concept of all inflectional system in the first place, if his native tongue is English). He will not need information about Proto-Germanic, let alone Proto-Indo-European origin of the constructions he is being introduced to. Yet Hogg makes one departure from this principle, and this departure clashes visibly with the rest of the book. It concerns Old English strong verbs, where Hogg felt it necessary to go back all the way to Proto-Indo-European ablaut, introducing concepts such as quantitative and qualitative gradation in an attempt to show the reader the underlying--and diachronic--unity of the strong verb group. One may wonder if going to such lengths is really necessary. Do students really need the knowledge of Proto-Indo-European ablaut series to understand Old English strong verbs? Would not the appeal to diachronic systemicity confuse readers in the face of the obviously non-systemic nature of strong verbs in Old English? I am certain that for a beginner it would be more than enough to draw his attention to the most frequent recurring patterns and explain the general underlying mechanism, perhaps with a few examples from the area of word-formation (sing vs. song, etc.). If phonology can wait, so can Proto-Indo-European ablaut.

Unfortunately, for a textbook of introductory character the number of misprints and errors is probably slightly too high. Thus one could mention "declensions" instead of "genders" (p. 17), ridenra instead of ridendra (p. 31), [section]4.2 instead of [section]4.3 (p. 57), [thorn]earfan instead of [thorn]earf (p. 64), a missing "is" (p. 99), or "la" instead of "lb" (p. 120). One can also wonder whether the claim that wita "wise man" is based on the present tense of witan "know" (p. 103) is perhaps not too general, or if the statement that "[i]n comparing Old English and present-day English there is not much difference in the amount of affixation used, but only in the actual affixes involved" (p. 107) is really accurate, bearing in mind for instance the demise of nominal prefixation after the Old English period. There is also an apparent contradiction on page 104, where lufu "love" is said to be derived from lufian "love", while three paragraphs later lufian is claimed to be derived from lufu.

Notwithstanding all that, Richard Hogg's An introduction to Old English is a welcome publication, by far surpassing the Teach yourself Old English-style textbooks offered to beginners with little linguistic background, and as such it can be a very useful book in an introductory Old English course.

REFERENCES

Branner, Karl

1960-1962 Die Englische Sprache: Ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung. 2 vols. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

Campbell, Alastair

1959 Old English grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Frank, Roberta

1997 "The unbearable lightness of being a philologist", Journal of English and Germanic Philology 1997: 486-513.

Marcin Krygier, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland