The continental backgrounds of English and its insular development until 1154 / Hans Frede Nielsen.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-224) and index.

Quest for a Title -- 'Fascination is our Theme' -- The Importance of English Language History: A Practical Demonstration -- Studying English Language History -- Cultural history -- Access to early literature -- Marginal and competing forms -- Linguistic affinities -- 'Fascination is our theme'. An appetizer -- Foreign Borrowings and Other New Words -- Loan words -- Other lexical innovations -- Inherited Material -- Words of Germanic origin -- Morphological extension -- Some Factors Involved in Language Change -- Heritage and contact -- Principle of least effort -- Linguistic variation -- Coining new words -- The Continental Backgrounds of English -- The Emergence of Comparative and Historical Linguistics -- The Tower of Babel -- Bopp, Rask and Grimm -- Indo-European and Indo-Germanic -- Indo-European and Beyond -- The Indo-European language family -- Indian -- Iranian -- Armenian -- Hittite -- Phrygian -- Greek -- Thracian -- Illyrian -- Albanian -- Venetic -- Italic -- Celtic -- Germanic -- Baltic -- Slavic -- Tocharian -- The affinities of Indo-European with other language families: Nostratic -- The Indo-European homeland -- The diversification of Indo-European and the position of Germanic -- Tree diagram and wave theory -- 'Old European' river names -- The Germanic homeland -- The Old Germanic Languages -- Earliest attestation -- Germanic diagnostic features -- Early Germanic dialect geography -- Early emigrant languages -- Early dialect grouping: three models -- The dialectal position of the early runic language.

Print version record.

In conjunction with two other volumes, which are scheduled to appear later, The Continental Backgrounds of English and its Insular Development until 1154 aims at giving a comprehensive survey of what by the author is seen as the most interesting aspects of the long history of English from its embryonic stages to the language spoken today in England and America. The present volume spans the period up to A.D. 1154, the year inaugurating the Plantagenet era in England and the year of the last events to be recorded in the annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

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