Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Modern East Anglia as a dialect area
- 2 Old East Anglian: a problem in Old English dialectology
- 3 East Anglian places-names: sources of lost dialect
- 4 Language in contact: Old East Saxon and East Anglian
- 5 Socielects in fourteenth-century London
- 6 Some morphological feautures of the Norfolk guild certificates of 1388/9: an excersise in variation
- 7 Eloboratio in practice: the use of English in mediaval East Anglian medicine
- 8 Third-person singular zero: African-American English, East Anglian dialects and Spanish persecution in the Low Countries
- 9 Chapters in the social history of East Anglian English: the case of the third-person singular
- 10 The modern reflexes of some Middle English vowel contrast in Norfolk and Norwich
- 11 Welcome to East Anglia!: two major dialect ‘boundaries’ in the Fens
- 12 Syntactic change in north-west Norfolk
- Index Of Names
3 - East Anglian places-names: sources of lost dialect
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Modern East Anglia as a dialect area
- 2 Old East Anglian: a problem in Old English dialectology
- 3 East Anglian places-names: sources of lost dialect
- 4 Language in contact: Old East Saxon and East Anglian
- 5 Socielects in fourteenth-century London
- 6 Some morphological feautures of the Norfolk guild certificates of 1388/9: an excersise in variation
- 7 Eloboratio in practice: the use of English in mediaval East Anglian medicine
- 8 Third-person singular zero: African-American English, East Anglian dialects and Spanish persecution in the Low Countries
- 9 Chapters in the social history of East Anglian English: the case of the third-person singular
- 10 The modern reflexes of some Middle English vowel contrast in Norfolk and Norwich
- 11 Welcome to East Anglia!: two major dialect ‘boundaries’ in the Fens
- 12 Syntactic change in north-west Norfolk
- Index Of Names
Summary
In one of her articles entitled ‘Historical Linguistics – Linguistic Archaeology’ the late historical linguist Cecily Clark says that ‘linguistic phenomena can be to socio-cultural historians much as artefacts are to archaeologists’ and adds that especially rich testimony to socio-cultural history is offered by name-material.I In her comments on the use of place-names as historical evidence she remarks that some place-names are seemingly transparent like Ashford and Blackheath, but being unintelligible today like London and York does not disable names. In fact freedom from sense is a characteristic of their onomastic function. Nevertheless they were once created out of elements taken from ordinary language.
East Anglia has been submerged by several linguistic invasions, as is testified for instance by river-names of British and settlements-names of Scandinavian origin. Still the majority of the settlement-names are English, although in some cases the word behind a name may have died out long ago. Then the Old English form and meaning can usually be established through etymological research. Many words used in the creation of names, which do not occur in modern Standard English, may have survived for a long time in the local dialect. The historical study of place-names can also be used for throwing light on the extent of linguistic and cultural affiliations such as the French and other continental impacts.
The late O.K. Schram published an excellent brief survey of the place-names of Norfolk in 1961. This was based on a selection of the major names, i.e. those of parishes, villages and some of the larger hamlets, as representative as possible. The present survey will also have to be selective, but nevertheless different, for a lot has happened in toponymic research since 1961. New theories have been put forward concerning the oldest English settlement names and the Scandinavian names, there has been a re-appraisal of some evidence for Celtic survival, and field-names have been explored for some areas to an extent which they had not thirty-nine years ago.
Celtic or Pre-Celtic
Let us look at the linguistic invasions in chronological order. The oldest about which something meaningful can be said is usually the Celtic impact, noticeable mainly through a number of Celtic river-names.
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- East Anglian English , pp. 39 - 62Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2001