Abstract: Several of my arguments in this book rely on details in the linguistic form and history of aelf . Although aelf is mostly regular in its development in Old English, it was affected by a number of sound-changes, some of whose details have been the subject of debate, and this has led to frequent misunderstandings and misreportings. Fortunately, the relevant processes are clear enough for present purposes. As both an aid to the reader unfamiliar with linguistics or the history of Old English, and to the informed reader faced with mistaken accounts, I include here a history of elf up to early Modern English. The expected, regular sound-changes which aelf must have undergone according to standard accounts of Old English phonology are laid out as Figure 7. I use the International Phonetic Alphabet, except that as the phonetic value of the West Saxon spelling is unclear, I simply repeat the spelling where it is required. Reconstructing lost forms As Figure 7 shows, we must reconstruct the etymon of aelf as the long-stemmed masculine i -stem */AlBi-z/. The meanings of this statement and the underlying evidence are: Long-stemmed: this means that the root syllable contains a long vowel and/or ends in two consonants. In this case, it ends in two consonants, as all Germanic dialects attest. i -stem: most Germanic noun-stems consisted of a root syllable followed by a vowel, known as a stem-vowel . These stem-vowels were usually lost by the time of our attested Old English, but sometimes caused sound-changes elsewhere in the word which were retained. The root-vowels of prehistoric Old English i -stem nouns underwent a development known as i-mutation , which had different effects in different dialects. The i -mutation of */alC-/ (where C stands for any consonant) is the only way to explain the various attested Old English forms of elf through regular sound-changes. Old Norse alfr and some medieval German plurals do not show the expected i -mutation, demanding the reconstruction of early a -stem variants (*/Alβa-z/), but */Alβa-z/ is not an etymon of the English word. Masculine: this is a largely arbitrary grammatical category. AElf is never, in Old English, coupled with a determiner or adjective which might corroborate its gender.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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