An introduction to Old English.(Book Review)

Publication: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Adam Mickiewicz University Press

An introduction to Old English. (Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language) By Richard Hogg. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Pp. ix, 163.

A mere half a century ago knowledge of the history of English was considered one of the basic requirements for someone graduating in English studies. Karl Brunner's two-volume Die Englische Sprache (1960-1962) was intended as a standard university textbook, and Alistair Campbell in the preface to his Old English Grammar (1959) pointed out with almost palpable regret that the scope of his book is clearly limited. Since that day historical linguistics in its classical, philological form has been ever on the defense (cf. Frank 1997 on the more general issue of the face of philology as such), and its revival in the 1980s was in fact birth of a new historical linguistics, variationist, sociolinguistic, speaker-oriented. Campbell and Brunner would probably be appalled at the very thought of a textbook on the history of English, even an introductory one, with virtually no phonological content. Today such an idea not so much as falses an eye-brow; in fact, it is looked upon as a most welcome development. Such is...

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