Synonyms for ‘Man, Warrior’ in Laȝamon’s "Brut" and Old English Alliterative Poetry

Volkonskaya Maria Andreevna

Working paper

Synonyms for ‘Man, Warrior’ in Laȝamon’s "Brut" and Old English Alliterative Poetry

Literary Studies. WP BRP. Высшая школа экономики, 2017. No. WP BRP 22/LS/2017.

Laȝamon’s Brut is well-known for being a transitional stage between Old English and Middle English alliterative poetry. On the one hand, it preserves some traces of the Old English poetic tradition, such as, for instance, certain poetic words. On the other hand, even those traces that seem to be similar to Old English undergo significant, though subtle, changes. To trace these changes, this paper explores Middle English predominantly poetic lexemes for ‘man, warrior’ in the Caligula manuscript of the Brut, namely, Middle English simplexes hæleð, kempe, scalk, seg, rink, as well as their Old English counterparts hæleð, cempa, scealc, secg, rinc in the verse section of the DOE Corpus.

Priority areas: humanitarian

Language: English

Full text (PDF, 575 Kb)

Keywords: Laȝamon Layamon Lawman Brut alliterative verse alliterative poetry synonyms Middle English Old English

Publication based on the results of: Синонимы в среднеанглийской и древнеанглийской аллитерационной поэзии: группа обозначений мужчины, воина(2016)

Rev. of Miller, D. G. (2012). External influences on English: From its beginnings to the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Volkonskaya M. A. Journal of Language and Education. 2015. Vol. 1. No. 4. P. 81-84.

The paper reviews D.G. Miller's recent book, "External influences on English: From its beginnings to the Renaissance".

Added: Oct 20, 2015

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Volkonskaya M. A. Literary Studies. WP BRP. Высшая школа экономики, 2015. No. WP BRP 10/LS/2015 .

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an English poem written in the latter half of the 14th century, constitutes an important part of Tolkien’s life as a scholar and translator. The complex language of the poem attracted his attention from the moment Tolkien first encountered it as the Gawain-poet used some native words that were characteristic of Old and Middle English alliterative poetry. On the other hand, more than one third of his vocabulary is not derived from Old English: approximately one tenth of a total of 2650 words has Scandinavian etymologies (although at the time they were no longer considered borrowings, but rather northern dialect words) and about a third is of French origin. In his translation of the poem, Tolkien was primarily interested in special verse words, which resulted in his use of archaic diction such as capadoce ‘a short cape’ or carl ‘man’. However, this study focuses on the second important feature of the vocabulary of the poem: the combination of French and dialect (Scandinavian) words, which are not distributed evenly in the original text. As the author uses the stylistic contrasts between borrowed and native words; he carefully loads some of his lines with French loanwords while others are devoid of them. This paper discusses the stylistic effect thus created by the Gawain-poet and whether Tolkien managed to preserve it in his translation

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The twelfth-century renaissance was a new stage in European intellectual life. This paper examines the works of two distinguished medieval phonologists and spelling reformers of the time, namely Orm’s Ormulum and the so-called First Grammatical Treatise, which mark a significant step in medieval grammatical theory and show a number of similarities in the intellectual background, governing principles, and sources of their orthography.

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The article considers the development of word semantics during the Old- and Middle English periods and reflects the notion of DWELLING representing the onomaseological field of the aforementioned notion.

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Added: Sep 9, 2015

"Концепт "пространство" в древнеанглийский период (в лексикографическом освещении)".

Растворова Ю. С. В кн.: Международной научной конференции "Классическое лингвистическое образование в современном мультикультурном пространстве - 2". Пятигорск: 2006.

The paper considers the Old English concept SPACE represented by language means. The characteristic features of space as well as people’s ideas about it are reflected in the Old English language.

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Parina E., Volkonskaya M. A. In bk.: Transmission of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2019. P. 87-99.

The aim of this article is to trace the paths of transmission to and within medieval and early modern Wales of traditions concerning the Virtues of the Mass, the benefits accruing from attending Holy Mass. These benefits are found both as lists and as parts of poems in Middle Welsh manuscripts, and correspond to a wealth of similar material in Latin, English, Irish, and other European vernaculars. Since the texts are products of popular religion rather than part of the canonical teaching of the Church, they are extremely fluid, which, in combination with their wide dissemination, would make the exact mapping of their genesis and distribution in Europe a long-term research project in itself. However, even a more limited consideration of these texts can significantly improve our understanding of Middle Welsh religious texts and the patterns of knowledge transfer across borders. In this contribution we shall present the relevant Middle and Early Modern Welsh texts in section I and some corresponding Latin texts in section II, then Middle English and Late Medieval Irish traditions in sections III and IV, before providing some tentative conclusions.

Added: Jan 31, 2019

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In this article we present the results of research into discourse features characterising a lexico-semantic group of synonyms denoting a human being: human being, person, individual, personality and man. The main tool for analysis was language corpora, which made it possible not only to determine more precisely the functional styles the lexemes tend to be used in, but also to describe thematic characteristics of the texts in which the analysed lexical units show the highest frequency of use

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Социальный капитал и экономические представления российских и китайских студентов

Татарко А. Н. Психология образования в поликультурном пространстве. 2012. Т. 17. № 1. С. 47-55.

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Императорская Россия

Анисимов Е. В. СПб.: Питер, 2008.