Carole Hough

Towards an explanation of phonetic differentiation in masculine and feminine personal names

Recent research has identified characteristic differences between the phonetic structures of names and of ordinary nouns, with particularly distinctive patterns being exhibited by feminine personal names. No explanation has yet been found. This paper suggests that the solution lies not in the English sound system, as has previously been assumed, but in differences between the linguistic origins of the various types of material.

Place-name evidence for an Anglo-Saxon animal name: OE * pohha /* pocca "fallow deer"

It is well known that the extant corpus of Old English literature preserves only a proportion of the vocabulary that once existed. In some instances, terms for concepts that must have been familiar to the Anglo-Saxons have been lost without trace; in others, they may be reconstructed from non-literary forms of evidence such as the place-names coined by early settlers in the areas now known as England and southern Scotland. The main dictionary of place-name terminology, Smiths English Place-Name Elements of 1956, includes many entries for words which are otherwise either unattested, or attested only with other meanings. Animal names in particular constitute an area of vocabulary which is under-represented in literary sources but common in place-names, and for which toponymic evidence often proves crucial. Old English animal names unattested in the extant literature but included in English Place-Name Elements are *bagga ‘badger’, *bula ‘bull’, *ean ‘lamb’, *gæten ‘kid’, *galt ‘pig, boar’, *græg ‘badger’, *hyrse ‘mare’, *padde ‘toad’, *padduc ‘frog’, *pigga ‘young pig’, *stedda ‘horse’, *tacca and *tagga ‘teg, young sheep’, *tige ‘goat’, *todd ‘fox’ and *wiðer ‘ram, wether’. Those identied more recently include *brun ‘pig’ and *wearg ‘wolf ’. As the English Place-Name Survey progresses, providing detailed coverage of the countrys toponyms in a series of annual volumes inaugurated in the 1920s, further examples may be expected to come to light. The aim of this article is to offer a new addition to the corpus.

Deer in Sussex Place-Names

Recent evidence for fallow deer at the first-century AD Roman palace at Fishbourne, Sussex, is supported by place-names identifying a nearby deer park and testifying to the presence of fallow deer in Anglo-Saxon Sussex.

Onomastic Evidence for an Anglo-Saxon Animal Name: OE *Pur ‘Male Lamb’

The first element of the English place-names Purbeck in Dorset, Purleigh in Essex and Purley in Berkshire is generally taken to be OE p‚r ‘bittern’ or ‘snipe’, a derivation first proposed by Johnston and Ekwall. The second element of Purbeck (pars telluris Purbicinga 948[15th], Porbi 1086, Hundret Porbiche 1086, Purbica 1100–35) is OE *bic, *bica ‘a bill or beak’, presumably used in a topographical sense, and the place-name has plausibly been interpreted as ‘ridge which resembles a bittern’s (or snipe’s) beak’ or ‘beak-shaped ridge frequented by the bittern (or snipe)’. Purleigh (Purlea 998, Purlai 1086), Purley (Porlei, Porlaa 1086, Purleia c.1180[c.1200], Pirlai 1194), and probably also the minor name Pursley Farm in Shenley parish, Hertfordshire (Puresle 1208, Poresle 1345), as suggested by the editors of the English Place-Name Survey for

Scots in the community: place-names and social networking

This paper reports on the project Scots Words and Place-names (SWAP), which is designed to explore the innovative potential of integrated online community engagement methods in the study of language and of placenames. Funded from March to November 2011 by JISC (Joint Information Systems Network), it is a collaboration between the University of Glasgow Enroller Project, Scottish Language Dictionaries and the Scottish Place-Name Society. The project aims to engage the public in an exploration of language use in present-day Scotland, focusing on the Scots vernacular.

Namenwechsel und Namenwandel in der Nordsee

This paper deals with the onomastic representation of the Northern Ocean (encompassing the North Sea as well as the Baltic Sea) and its development during Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the present account, Pytheas and Adam of Bremen will serve as beginning and end points, respectively. It will be demonstrated that names and their dynamics play a central role in the shaping of the mental landscape. The article focuses on the early island names Thule, Scandiae and Scadinavia, whose metamorphosis clearly coincides with a change of cartographic perception. This raises the question of a causal connection. In particular, the history of the island name Scandia appears in a new light against the background of Ptolemy’s cartography of Britain.

Engaging Users of Scottish Online Language Resources

This chapter presents an overview of some of the recent language and linguistics projects which have been developed at the University of Glasgow, and focuses in particular on the ways in which these projects have engaged with a wide community of users at different stages of resource creation and completion. The main projects discussed are: (1) the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech; (2) its sister resource, the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing; (3) Scots Words and Place-names; and (4) Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus. We draw out a number of themes which emerged in the creation and exploitation of these resources and others like them. These include: establishing and maintaining contact with users, supporting users in resource exploitation (including through metadata provision) and sustaining resources.

On homonymy and polysemy in place-names

The linguistic term homonymy is used within toponomastics to refer to place-names with the same modern form but different origins. Examples include Oxton, Newton and Maryburgh in various parts of the British Isles, and Cambridge in various parts of the world. However, homonymy is random, whereas place-name doublets are motivated in a variety of ways, some of them closer to the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy. The four examples cited above each illustrates a different process of development. Recent work within linguistics has focused on the interface between homonymy and polysemy, leading to new insights that may also be relevant to onomastics. The broad terms homonymy and polysemy are inadequate to express the range of relationships represented by place-name doublets.

Bibliography for 2010

This bibliography is meant to include all signifi cant books, articles and reviews published in any branch of Anglo-Saxon studies during 2010, as well as entries omitted from previous bibliographies. It excludes reprints unless they contain new material. The year of publication of a book or article is 2010 unless otherwise stated. The arrangement and the pages on which the sections begin are as follows:

Language Contact in the Place-Names of Britain and Ireland. Edited by Paul Cavill and George Broderick. 247mm. Pp ix + 183, ills. English Place-Name Society, Extra Series, Volume 3. Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2007. ISBN 9780904889789. £25 (hbk).

Härke, Nick Higham, Gale R Owen-Crocker, Damian J Tyler, Martin Grimmer, Alex Woolf, C P Lewis and David E Thornton. The second, ‘Linguistic perspectives’, comprises five papers by Peter Schrijver, Richard Coates, Hildegard Tristram, O J Padel and Duncan Probert. The final two papers of each could well have formed a third part, ‘Onomastic perspectives’, as name evidence is central to Lewis’s discussion of the role of the Celtic inhabitants of late Anglo-Saxon England and Thornton’s examination of Welsh personal names in Domesday Book, as well as to Padel’s analysis of Brittonic and English place-name distributions in Devon and Cornwall and Probert’s attempt to map the transition from Brittonic to Old English in south-west England. An introduction by the editor goes far beyond the summary of papers usually prefaced to a volume of this kind, providing a chronological outline of developments in scholarly thinking together with an overview of the main points of contention. All papers are of high quality, and many provide genuinely new insights. Whereas linguistic evidence is usually taken to militate against the co-existence of Britons and AngloSaxons on the grounds that language contact would be expected to result in lexical borrowing from Brittonic to Old English – a position set out cogently by Coates – Tristram draws on recent work within contact linguistics and strata linguistics to make a case for substrate transfer in areas of morphosyntax, and Schrijver argues that the predominant language in the south and east of Britain prior to the Anglo-Saxon settlements was not Brittonic but Latin. Some contributors examine different types of evidence for the presence of Britons, ranging from RomanoBritish techniques in metalwork and textile fragments from Anglo-Saxon graves (Laing, Owen-Crocker), to signs of a British ecclesiastical structure in the West Midlands up until the late seventh century (Tyler) and separate provisions for Britons and Saxons in the laws issued by King Ine of Wessex c –c  (Grimmer, Woolf). Although most focus on post-Roman Britain, others deal with the late Anglo-Saxon period (Lewis, Thornton), or with the construction of national identities and the influence of ideological positioning on early and more recent scholarship (Higham, Hills, Williams). Härke looks to post-Soviet Russia as a contemporary model of culture change following empire collapse; and comparisons and contrasts are also drawn with the barbarian settlement of Gaul (Higham, Woolf), the European settlement of North America (Padel), the influence of Aboriginal languages on Australian English (Coates), the legacy of Imperial rule in India (Coates, Padel), Norse–Gaelic contacts in the Western Isles of Scotland (Coates) and the romanization of the Basque Country (Coates). If the success of an inter-disciplinary conference may be judged by the extent to which the participants allow their own views to be informed by the findings of specialists in other fields, this would appear largely to have been achieved. Several contributors engage directly and fruitfully with each other’s research, although it is disconcerting to find Tristram’s detailed case for phonological and morphosyntactic transfer from Late British to spoken Old English followed by a paper in which Padel dismisses ‘unconvincing attempts to suggest syntactic and other borrowings’ in the opening paragraph before turning to his own field of toponymy. A firmer editorial hand might have helped to maintain scholarly courtesy, and could also have avoided a curious error by Coates, who undermines his own arguments for the dispersal of the British population by claiming that Britons were identifiable to lawmakers as late as the time of King Alfred. In fact Britons appear only in the laws of Ine, which are appended to those of Alfred in extant manuscripts. No distinction is made between Britons and Saxons in Alfred’s own laws – a point made in the closing sentence of Grimmer’s paper, and indeed in one of the references cited by Coates himself. Otherwise there is little to fault in the volume except its index, which is flawed by inaccuracies, inconsistencies and omissions. In sum, this is a fine collection of papers that provides no conclusion to the ongoing debate concerning the presence – or absence – of Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, but makes a very substantial contribution to it.