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The Northumbrian Old English glosses
Edited by Elly van Gelderen
[NOWELE 72:2] 2019
► pp. 192–219

Verbal prefixes in Old Northumbrian

Evidence from the Lindisfarne glosses

| Arizona State University

In late Old English dialects, adverbial elements are frequently morphologically ambiguous (independent words, clitics, verbal prefixes, etc.), and an important facet of the proper treatment of these items is the quality of source-data in different texts. This paper examines the usage of three adverbial/prepositional elements in the Northumbrian Lindisfarne Glosses: eft ‘again, after’, ymb ‘around’, and ofer ‘over’. Skeat (1871–87), whose transcription of the original manuscript is the primary reference for research on the Glosses, frequently transcribes these items as prefixes, alongside other OE prefixes like ge-, a-, for-, and be-. However, Skeat also deviates from this pattern in many cases, leaving their proper analysis uncertain. Nevertheless, various works (e.g., Cook 1894; Bosworth 2011), have indeed taken these items to be prefixes. I follow Fernández-Cuesta (2016) in revisiting the original Lindisfarne manuscript to determine the correct treatment of these items, concluding that eft and ofer should not be analyzed as prefixes in the manuscript, while ymb should have prefix status.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Distribution of eft
    • 2.1Data
    • 2.2Word spacing of eft
    • 2.3Intervening morphemes with eft
    • 2.4Doublets with eft
    • 2.5Intermediate summary
  • 3.Distribution of ymb
    • 3.1Word-spacing of ymb
    • 3.2Intervening morphemes with ymb
    • 3.3Doublets with ymb
  • 4.Distribution of ofer
    • 4.1Word spacing of ofer
    • 4.2Intervening morphemes with ofer
    • 4.3Doublets with ofer
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 December 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/nowele.00027.kru
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Cited by (1)

Cited by 1 other publications

Fernández-Cuesta, Julia & Nieves Rodríguez-Ledesma
2020. Reduced forms in the nominal morphology of the Lindisfarne Gospel Gloss. A case of accusative/dative syncretism?. Folia Linguistica 54:s41-s1 ► pp. 37 ff. DOI logo

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