The inflection of Latin masculine proper names in The Old
English Martyrology
This paper focuses on the inflectional morphology of Latin
masculine proper names in Old English. Most common Latin loans are perfectly
integrated into the Old English system. Latin proper names, however, like late
scholarly loans, show both Latin and Old English inflectional endings in an
apparently chaotic distribution. By analysing a selection of 833 tokens from
The Old English Martyrology, this paper shows that despite
variation, a clear pattern resulting from a combination of the Latin and Old
English systems can be detected. While the inflectional endings of one language
dominate in some cases, e.g. Latin in the nominative and Old English in the
dative, other inflections, e.g. the genitive thematic vowel +
‑s, result from a combination of both languages based on
phonetic or spelling similarities. The result is a mixed paradigm predominantly
modelled after Old English a-stem nouns.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Latin loanwords in Old English and their inflections
- 3.Data and methodology
- 3.1
The Old English Martyrology
- 3.2Corpus design and analysis of the data
- 4.Results of the analysis
- 4.1Nominative
- 4.2Accusative
- 4.3Dative
- 4.4Genitive
- 5.Conclusions and further research
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References