The Stories of English Quotes

“Of all the Latin words that came into Old English, only a hundred or so remain in modern Standard English.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Synaloepha? A Latin term for the coalescence of two syllables into one (as when you are becomes y’are).”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Byrhtferth, master of Ramsey school in the early eleventh century, employed a style which made copious use of learne`d words in both Old English and Latin, as in this observation on writing from his Manual of ecclesiastical computation, composed in 1011:”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“many prose writers of the period seemed to avoid the use of Latin words, as part of an apparently conscious effort to develop an indigenous style.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“When Alfred began his revival, this was the first time (apart from in a few legal documents) that English had been used for prose exposition, and certainly there are no surviving precedents for prose writings of any length.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Alfred sent a copy of the Pastoral Care to every diocese in his kingdom. That alone would impose serious restrictions on any tendency to idiosyncrasy that a writer might have.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“in Old English poetry: the human body is described as a banhus or bancofa ‘bone-house, bone-coffer’; a sword as a beadoleoma ‘battle-light’; thunder as wolcna sweg ‘sound of the clouds’; the eye as a heafodgim ‘head-gem’.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“A ship, for example, might be described straightforwardly as a scip or ceol ‘keel’, but in addition will be found described using a variety of short phrases or compound words – some fairly literal, such as wægflota ‘wave floater’, sægenga ‘sea goer’, and brimwudu ‘water wood’, some more imaginative, such as merehus ‘sea-house’, sæhengest ‘sea steed’, and ypmearh ‘wave horse’.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Modern poetry, too, uses words (usually archaisms) that are rarely or never found in prose – such as morn ‘morning’, ere ‘before’, and oft ‘often’.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Taper-æxe seems to be a quite separate development, entering the language from Old Norse. But where did the Danes get it from? The most likely candidate is an Old Slavic word, toporu. Modern Russian has it still, in topor ‘axe’. If so, it is the first example of an originally Slavic word in English.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“The everyday flavour of the Scandinavian loans can be seen in these two dozen words, all of which survived into modern Standard English: anger, awkward, bond, cake, crooked, dirt, dregs, egg, fog, freckle, get, kid, leg, lurk, meek, muggy, neck, seem, sister, skill, skirt, smile, Thursday, window”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“from around 1200, shows thousands of Old Norse words being used, especially in texts coming from the northern and eastern parts of the country,”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“The second main source of lexical variation in Old English was Scandinavia;”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“The greatest vernacular prose writer of his time, he is often called Ælfric Grammaticus (‘The Grammarian’).”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Ælfric (pronounced alfritch) became a monk and then abbot”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“One of the best examples is the most famous text of all, Beowulf, which displays evidence of all four Old English dialects, and moreover of these dialects as they existed at different times,”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“The scribes’ different auditory preferences would stem from their different dialect backgrounds.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“the early part of the Chronicle was written by a Mercian, who left some dialect fingerprints on the West Saxon text.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“a distinctive Northumbrian dialect existed by the beginning of the eighth century.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“The third category comprises the poetry of the period, mainly found in four collections dating from around 1000 – the Vercelli, Exeter, Beowulf, and Junius texts – and including the major poems: Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Battle of Maldon, and The Dream of the Rood.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“glossaries of Latin texts, where scribes added Old English equivalents to the Latin words between the lines or in the margins.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“the names of the four Old English dialects recognized in philological tradition: West Saxon, Kentish, Mercian, and Northumbrian, with the last two sometimes grouped together as a northern variety, Anglian.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Old English dialectology.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“The spelling England emerged in the fourteenth century, and soon after became established as the norm.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“It was some fifty years before the first waves of Angles and Jutes arrived (449, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), another twenty-five before the South Saxons came (477), and nearly twenty years later before the West Saxons did (495). A lot can happen to pronunciation in a hundred years.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“we now know that Hengist and Horsa were by no means the first Germanics to arrive in Britain from the European Continent.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“When the invaders arrived in England, they did not bring with them three ‘pure’ Germanic dialects – Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish – but a wide range of spoken varieties, displaying different kinds of mutual influence.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“fifth-century north-west Europe must have been a salad-bowl of languages and dialects.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“A leafdi wes mid hire fan biset al abuten, hire lond al destruet, & heo al poure, inwið an eorðene castel.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English