Orrin W. Robinson – författare

This accessible introductory reference source surveys the linguistic and cultural background of the earliest known Germanic languages and examines their similarities and differences. The Languages covered include:Gothic Old Norse Old SaxonOld English Old Low Franconian Old High German Written in a lively style, each chapter opens with a brief cultural history of the people who used the language, followed by selected authentic and translated texts and an examination of particular areas including grammar, pronunciation, lexis, dialect variation and borrowing, textual transmission, analogy and drift.

At first glance, there may seem little reason to think of English and German as variant forms of a single language. There are enormous differences between the two in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and a monolingual speaker of one cannot understand the other at all. Yet modern English and German have many points in common, and if we go back to the earliest texts available in the two languages, the similarities are even more notable.How do we account for these similarities? The generally accepted explanation is that English and German are divergent continuations of a common ancestor, a Germanic language now lost. This book surveys the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the earliest kown Germanic languages, members of what has traditionally been known as the English family tree: Gothic, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Low Franconian, and Old High German.For each language, the author provides a brief history of the people who spoke it, an overview of the important texts in the language, sample passages with full glossary and word-by-word translations, a section on orthography and grammar, and discussion of linguistic or philological topics relevant to all the early Germanic languaes but best exemplified by the particular language under consideration. These topics inclued the pronunciation of older languages; the runic inscriptions; Germanic alliterative pietry; historical syntax, borrowing, analogy, and drift; textual transmission; and dialect variation.

The fourteen papers in this volume Studies in Dutch Phonology were collected by the editors in the course of 1977 and 1978, at the request of the editorial board of Dutch Studies. In their opinion the collection represents a fair cross-section of current research done in the field of phonology both inside and outside the Netherlands, and therefore con- stitutes a very suitable starting point for the new series Dutch Studies of the Intemationale Vereniging voor Neerlandistiek. In the various contributions one will find treated several issues of current phonological interest, such as phonotactic constraints (by Brink), abstractness (by Goyvaerts, Robinson, Tiersma, Trommelen and Zonneveld), stress-assign- ment and vowel-reduction (by Van MarIe and Predota), the interaction between phonology and morphology (by Kooij, De Rooij-Bronkhorst, and Schultink), rule ordering (Taeldeman), and lexical diffusion (Gerritsen and Jansen, and Zonneveld).These issues are discussed in relation to a number of well-known traditional topics of Dutch phonology, such as: affIxal stress-attraction; constraints on consonant-clusters; separable and inseparable verb-forms; stress and vowel reduction in derived vs. non- derived, and 'native' vs. 'foreign' Dutch words; Auslautverhartung and assimilation of voice in obstruent-clusters; regularity and irregularity in open syllable lengthening, diminutive formation, plural formation, and the weakening of intervocalic d; and the properties and phonological represen- tation of diphthongs. (Frans van Coetsem's paper "Loan Phonology: the Example of Dutch", originally intended as a contribution to this volume, but not completed as it went to the press, will appear elsewhere.