Prof. Carol Percy
HELL!--a website with resources
office: New College, Wetmore Hall 125
tel: 416-978-4287
email: cpercy@chass.utoronto.ca
hours: Tuesdays and Wednesdays (except June 20^th) 4:15-5

Course objectives:

This is an introductory course in the structure of Old English and Middle English. By August, you will not be able to translate Beowulf at sight, but you will be familiar with some good resources and methods for the historical study of English and will, I hope, have already applied them to topics of interest to you. And I hope that you will be able to apply what you have learned – in other courses, when teaching ESL, or during and after odd conversations. If somebody ever asks you whether the lock in wedlock has sinister implications , or why things that are flammable and inflammable are equally likely to burst into flame, or why adjectives like asleep and aloft can’t premodify their nouns (*the asleep students), you will know where and how to look f or the answers.

Each class will consist of a lecture from me, and then of a collective analysis of the texts of the day. I’ll be expecting you to find specific examples in the texts of whatever I’ve been lecturing about most recently. For the first few weeks of the co urse, I’ve indicated on the syllabus what I expect you to be looking for.

There are also 4 short assignments. Indeed, the workload for this course is notoriously heavy, but each of the brief assignments has been selected in order to introduce and to exercise specific content and skills.

This is what you will get out of the course:

• A knowledge of basic concepts and terms for describing (1) language structure, variation, contact, and change, and (2) the English language, past and present
• An overview of the most significant linguistic changes between Old English and Early Modern English
• Familiarity with basic reference works (print and electronic) for the English language and its history
• With the aid of dictionaries and grammars, a basic reading knowledge of Old English and Middle English
• The ability to identify details of linguistic interest in OE and ME texts
• The opportunity to survey historical-linguistic scholarship in an area of interest to you
• Irrelevant but compellingly memorable information

This summer I am experimenting with new textbooks. There are two course textbooks. Freeborn’s From Old English to Standard English contains a range of OE and ME texts for us to talk about: it’s got word-for-word translations of O E texts, commentaries on some of the texts, and engaging facsimiles of some of the texts. Smith’s Essentials of Early English is a good introduction to the structure of OE and ME, as well as to terms and concepts used when describing PDE. There’s a copy of Smith on short-term loan.

This summer’s texts don’t feature clear and/or comprehensive overviews of changes between OE and ME. You’ll find it very helpful to supplement them with occasional visits to the short-term loan department, now on the 9^th floor of Robarts. But for getting a focussed overview of the most important concepts, I strongly recommend David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (PE 1072 C68 GENR, 4^th floor Robarts—please reshelve!). If you’d like more than the page or two in Crystal, I recommend supplementing him with the relevant sections of any of the standard "histories of the English language" (PE 1075) by Barber, Baugh and Cable, Blake, Millward, Pyles and Algeo, Strang.

You may wish for more advanced information at some times during the course. The Cambridge History of the English Language, vols. 1 (OE) and 2 (ME) (PE 1072 C36) is usually your best bet for leads on further research. The e-index to conjure with is Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, though the MLA and ABELL aren’t too bad. There’s an online booklist for the course if you get really hooked

http://cpercy.artsci.utoronto.ca/courses/6361book.htm

as well as some good bibliographies on the web, for instance the "Lowlands-L" bibliographies at

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1615/rhahn/lowlands/english_offline.htm

The individual assignments will come with their own mini-bibliographies.

Methods of evaluation:

• Regular, accurate, courteous participation (5%)

• Semantic change: (1) Tell a plausible tale about semantic change between OE and ME within a specific/very limited semantic field (e.g. the interaction between the ME loanwords hi/story and the native word tale) or about semantic v ariation and/or change within ME (the differentiation of cattle and chattel, which are loanwords from different dialects of French), and (2) assess the usefulness for this assignment of such reference works as the Oxford English Dictionar y, the Dictionary of Old English, Bosworth-Toller’s OE dictionary, the Middle English Dictionary (Assignment #1 due Tuesday July 10^th: 20%)
• Transliteration of and commentary on an OE passage: your commentary on the passage will outline the extent to which it exemplifies the similarities and differences between OE and PDE vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and orthography (Assignmen t #2 due Tuesday July 24^th: 25%)

• Take-home test: You may be asked to (1) translate some Old English, (2) put some OE and ME passages in chronological order and rationalize your choice and/or find examples in passages of OE and ME of some of the linguistic changes that we have charted, (3) find relics of OE and/or ME in a short passage of PDE, (4) tell a plausible tale about how a specific grammatical change spread through the language, and evaluate the resources that you have used for this part of the test (Assignment #3 du e Thursday August 16th: 25%)

• Contribution to HELL, my web site & the Class Encyclopedia: a survey of existing scholarship on a particular HEL topic, in no more than 1000 words + bibliography. Think of it as an encyclopedia entry that you are writing for The Next Generation – and as your cha nce to work on a topic that acknowledges the intersection between the "internal" and "external" history of English (Assignment #4 due Thursday August 23^rd (THIS IS FLEXIBLE): 25%)