Old English Mock Exam

18 points total, 9 = pass

1. Concepts and Terminology
Briefly comment on the following terms and concepts
(6 points)
- Old English
A: [Germanic language spoken between ~6th - 11 century in what is now
England]
- Alliteration
A: [Germanic well-formedness condition in poetry: The first phoneme of a number
of stressed syllbles in a verse must be identical. Exceptions: All vowels may
alliterate with each other. Velars and palatals may alliterate with each other
(because they were allophonic in OE)]
- The comparative method
A: A method to extrapolate from the present to the past: By comparing
languages, we (1)look for regular correspondences. (2) We set up relationships,
i.e. innovations and retentions in the sound system. (3) We work out the sound
changes in each lineage and (4) sub-group the languages accordingly.
- V2 rule
A: A syntactic operation in a number of Germanic languages including OE and
German (but not Modern English!) where the subject and the verb undergo
inversion if the sentence begins with an adverbial.
cf. German. "ich habe heute..." vs. " Heute habe ich ..."
- Isolating (analytic) language
A: Languages which code grammatical relation lexically rather than
morphologically.
- West Saxon
A: A dialect of Old English spoken in the South of england (Wessex), later
became a quasi-literary standard
2. Looking at different levels of linguistic structure, what are the main
differences between Old English and Modern English?
A:
(3 points)
OE

ModE
Morphology and Syntax

V2 rule
Satzklammer
rich morphology on nouns, adjectives and verbs
Phonology

Short and long diphthongs

Front round vowels
Full vowels in inflectional endings
No phonemic voicing in fricatives
velar fricative
Lexis
Fewer Latin words, no Scandinavian words except
at the end of the OE period
3. German and English are generally regarded as "related" languages
3.1 What does "linguistic relatedness" mean?
A: [That the languages in question descend from a common ancestor]
3.2 Are French and English related in the same way as German end English
are? And if so, are the frequent borrowings of French words into English relevant
in this regard?
A: English and French are related, but more distantly so than English and German
are. The heavy borrowings from French into Middle English are irrelevant in this
regard since borrwoing has nothing to do with genetic relatedness.
4. In Modern English spelling, there are frequent mismatches between
orthographic form and phonetic realisation, i.e. pronunciation. We find situations
where one grapheme corresponds to different sounds (cf. <u> in pull, but, hurt)
as well as one sound being spelled with different symbols (cf. the NURSE vowel in
bird, hurt, her, scourge).
Do we find similar mismatches between spelling and pronunciation in Old
English?
(3 points)
A: Overall, the relationship between graphemes and phonemes/allophones is a lot
more transparent in OE compared to Modern English. The only mis-matches
inlcude:
-lack of length distinction on vowels
- palatals and velars spelled identically c- and g-, respectively
- grapheme <e> has two interpretations: Either as a vowel or as an indicator of
palatality of the preceding element, as in <gear> = [jr], i.e. "year"
5. Analyse the below excerpt from the Peterborough Chronicle (text 1 below),
which represents late Old English / Early Middle English (11th century).
Identify at least one innovative and one conservative feature relative to the
overall developments in the transition from Old English to Middle English.
(3 points)

6. It is frequently claimed that the far-reaching changes in the phonology,

morphology, and syntax from the late Old English period onwards are in fact
interrelated.
Comment on the nature of this interaction!
(3 points)
A: The idea is that the changes are functionally connected: In OE, a lot of
grammatical distinctions were cued by vowel quality differences in the
inflectional morpheme, e.g. stanes (genitive singular) as opposed to stanas
(nominative/accusative plural). Towards the end of the OE period, these vowels
were increasingly neutralised to schwa so that the relevant categories were no
longer phonologically distinct -> morphological paradigms collapsed. In turn,
English increasingly relied on word order in order to cue parts-of-speech in a
given utterance.