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The Old English Genesis B poet: Bilingual or interlingual?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Irmengard Rauch
Irmengard Rauch
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720
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Abstract

Although the celebrated 1875 conjecture of Sievers hypothesizing an Old Saxon Genesis source for the translation of the Old English Genesis B (or Later Genesis) was confirmed by the 1894 find of Zangemeister, the question of the native language of the translator of the Old Saxon Genesis remains. The Genesis B evidence is reconsidered here from the viewpoint of contemporary empirical data to ascertain whether the translator was bilingual or interlingual, the former putatively associated with a native (Old Englishman in this case), the second with a second language learner (of Old English). The Old English data contrasted with the character of Old Saxon and configurated with extrapolations from differing cognitive strategies argue for an Anglo-Saxon provenance of the Genesis B poet.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , July 1993 , pp. 163 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 1993

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References

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