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Celtic influence on Old English and West Germanic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2009

ANGELIKA LUTZ
ANGELIKA LUTZ*
Affiliation:
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Bismarckstraße1, 91054 Erlangen, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article concentrates on the question of language contact between English and Celtic in the period between the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britannia (?AD 449) and the Norman conquest of England (AD 1066) but in some places reaches out to West Germanic times and to the period after the Norman conquest. It focuses on a certain region, that of the Southern Lowlands, mainly Anglo-Saxon Wessex, and deals with evidence that has been mentioned before: (1) the twofold paradigm of ‘to be’ and (2) the Old English designations for Celts that refer to their status as slaves. The article demonstrates that both the syntactic and the lexico-semantic evidence is particularly concentrated in West Saxon texts. Together, both types of evidence are shown to support the assumption that a very substantial Celtic population exerted substratal influence on (pre-)Old English by way of large-scale language shift in one of the early heartlands of England. This substratal Insular Celtic influence on Old English is contrasted with the adstratal Celtic influence on continental West Germanic.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 13 , Issue 2: Re-evaluating the Celtic hypothesis , July 2009 , pp. 227 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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