State the role of the Wessex dialect of Old English.
Wessex (/ˈwɛsɨks/; Old English: Westseaxna rīce, "kingdom of the West Saxons") was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the south of Great Britain, from 519 until England was unified by Æthelstan in the early 10th century. The four main dialectal forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon.(wessax) [7] Mercian and Northumbrian are together referred to as Anglian.
were then integrated into Wessex under Alfred the Great. From that time on, the West Saxon dialect (then in the form now known as Early West Saxon) became standardized as the language of government, and as the basis for the many works of literature and religious materials produced or translated from Latin in that period.
The later literary standard known as Late West Saxon (see History, above), although centred in the same region of the country, appears not to have been directly descended from Alfred's Early West Saxon. For example, the former diphthong /iy/ tended to become monophthongised to /i/ in EWS, but to /y/ in LWS
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1. The evolution of West Germanic languages.
Around the beginning of our era the would-be West Germanic tribes dwelt in the lowlands between the Oder and the Elbe bordering on the Slavonian tribes in the East and the Celtic tribes in the South. On the eve of their “great migrations” of the 4th and 5th c. the West Germans included several tribes. The Franconians occupied the lower basin of the Rhine. The Angles and the Frisians, the Jutes and the Saxons inhabited the coastal area of the modern Netherlands, Germany and the southern part of Denmark. A group of tribes known as High Germans lived in the mountainous southern regions of Germany. Hence the name High Germans contrasted to Low Germans – a name applied to the West Germanic tribes in the low-lying northern areas. The Franconian dialects were spoken in the extreme North of the Empire; in the later Middle Ages they developed into Dutch – the language of the Low Countries and the Flemish – the language of Flanders. The modern language of the Netherlands, formerly called Dutch, and its variant in Belgium, known as the Flemish dialect, are now treated as a single language, Netherlandish. About three hundred years ago the Dutch language was brought to South Africa by colonists from Southern Holland. Their dialects in Africa eventually grew into a separate West Germanic language, Afrikaans. This language has combined elements from the speech of English and German colonists in Africa and from the tongues of the natives. The High German dialects consolidated into a common language known as Old High German (OHG). Towards the 12th c. High German (known as Middle High German) had intermixed with neighboring tongues, esp. Middle and High Franconian, and eventually developed into the literary German language. Yiddish, an offshoot of High German, grew from the High German dialects which were adopted by numerous Jewish communities scattered over Germany in the 11th and 12th c. These dialects blended with elements of Hebrew and Slavonic and developed into a separate West Germanic language with a spoken and literary form. At the later stage of the great migrations period – in the 5th c. – a group of West Germanic tribes started out on their invasion of the British Isles. The invaders came from the lowlands near the North Sea: the Angles, the Saxons, Frisians and the Jutes. Their dialects in the British Isles developed into the English language.
2. Encyclopedic and Linguistic Dictionaries. Explanatory dictionaries.
we start with the degree of the inclusion of lexical (i.e. linguistic) and non-lexical (i.e. encyclopaedic) information in the dictionary as also the treatment of each individual item in it.
The lexical or linguistic information pertains to linguistic characteristics of the lexical unit viz., pronunciation, definition, etymology, grammatical category, etc. the encyclopaedic information has the following features.
(a) the inclusion of names of persons, places, and literary works,
(b) coverage of all branches of human knowledge,
(c) extensive treatment of facts.
The dictionaries, giving information of the former type, are called linguistic or general dictionaries and those giving information of the latter type, the encyclopaedic dictionaries. But before these are described it would be useful to make a distinction between an encyclopaedia and an encyclopaedic dictionary. The encyclopaedia are more concerned with the concepts and objects of extra linguistic would, that is the things and in a narrow sense they may be called 'thing books'. Information presented in them is under few general topics. Their aim is to present information, as noted earlier, on all aspects of human knowledge. The items presented are more of denotational character including names of plants, animals, diseases. They also give historical events, geographical features, biographical sketches of important personalities. Many items found in linguistic or general dictionaries do not find place in them. Such items are function words, verbal forms, and variety of other words e.g. Eng. he, she, Hindi jaanaa, 'go' agar 'if' Eng. father, mother etc. The information provided is more detailed and relates to the history and the description of the item.
The encyclopaedic dictionary is a combination of an encyclopaedia and a linguistic dictionary. It also includes items that are generally characteristic of an encyclopaedia in addition to the items of a linguistic dictionary. In the amount of the information and the manner of its presentation, again, it combines the features of both. As a matter of fact, there can be no division like a linguistic dictionary and non-linguistic dictionary equating the latter with encyclopaedic dictionary. As already stated any dictionary combines the features of both. The bigger dictionaries like The Century Dictionary, The Oxford English Dictionary, Malayalam Lexicon, Tamil Lexicon, Hindi Sabda Sagar etc., are encyclopaedic but all of them are linguistic dictionaries.
The linguistic dictionary deals with only the lexical stock i.e. words as speech material and may be roughly called 'word book'. The linguistic dictionary usually attains the status of the encyclopaedic dictionary in different ways, given below:-
(a) when a linguistic definition becomes inadequate to describe the lexical item, especially when it is a culture bound word, the lexicographer has to include encyclopaedic information e.g. Malto kud ko:la-n. 'an earthen pot in which the umbilical cord is preserved'. Hindi baghnakh, baghnakhaa n. ek aabhuuÀan?a jisme N baagh ke naakhuun caaNdii yaa sone meN mar?he hote hEN. 'a type of ornament in which the nails of a tiger are studded in gold or silver'.
(b) In the definition of certain words the encyclopaedic definition determines the underlying concept':
Coal n. 1. Hard opaque black or blackish mineral or vegetable matter found in seams or strata below earth's surface and used as fuel and in manufacture of gas, tar etc., (COD) cf. this definition with coal n. a black, hard substance that burns and gives off heat. (Ladder Dictionary)
(c) when we give different meanings of a polysemous word and mark them with labels, we give a hint that the meaning belongs to a particular branch of human knowledge like botany, astronomy, medicine etc,. impliedly indicating the encyclopaedic information there. The same thing happens to the quotations in illustrative examples with citations. Again, when we just refer to some work for further details about any type of cultural information, we give indirectly encyclopaedic information.
From the point of view of time the dictionaries can be either diachronic (dynamic) or synchronic (static), the former dealing with words across time and the latter at a particular point of time.
As a matter of fact, it is very difficult to draw a line between diachronic and synchronic dictionaries. Bigger dictionaries of synchronic/descriptive character, for that matter even the smaller ones, have to include at least some amount of historical information. When a dictionary gives the derivative source of a word in form of the origin tag, usually appended to the head word in the lemma, there is an attempt to give, however superficial it may be, the etymology of the word and in this way the dictionary presents elements of diachronic nature.