s

History of the English Language

A. General overview

B. Guides to specific periods

C. Specific texts / authors

Beowulf
Canterbury Tales
Shakespeare
- First Folio (U VA)
- Concordance
etc etc

D. Corpora

EEBO-LION Corpus (700 million words, 1500s-1800s)
TIME Corpus (American English, 1920s-1990s)
OED Corpus of Historical English
Helsinki corpus (1.6 million words)
Other ICAME corpora of historical English
Old English texts (Georgetown)
Old English texts (Royal Holloway)
Middle English texts (U VA)
Middle English texts (U MI)
Middle English texts (Georgetown)
Early English Books Online (best for 1500-1700)
Early Modern English materials (U MI)
Renascence Editions
Literature Online (best for 1700-1900)
Early American Periodicals (1741-1900)
19th Century Books (Library of Congress)
19th Century Periodicals (Library of Congress)
New York Times (1850-2000)
Project Gutenberg

E. Pronunciation / audio files

Old English: Beowulf
- U VA (several selections)
Middle English: Chaucer
- Chaucer metapage audio files
- Chaucer studio (BYU)
  - General prologue: audio text
  - Wife of Bath's prologue: audio text
  - Miller's tale -- prologue: audio text
- Other links
Early Modern English: Shakespeare
- Romeo and Juliet (prologue) (text)
- Short snippets

F. Morphological and syntactic change

Morphology
- roots: *heart*, *head*, *light*, *hand*, *room*
- inflectional
  - present 3sg: it *eth
  - strong verbs: has/hath *en
- derivational
  - *hood
  - *dom
  - in* vs un*
  - dis*al
- Syntax
  - experiencer verbs: him liketh the house (= the house is pleasing to him)
  - * modals: will/shall
  - must / should / ought to / has to
  - perfect: is/has intransitive: is come into the city, is born unto you
  - progressive/perfect + passive: being/been Ved
  - * "dummy do": knows not, does not know, doesn't know (chart)
G. Lexical and semantic change
- Lexical (words entering into or leaving the language)
  - Oxford English Dictionary (Advanced search): Words entering the language during a given historical period period, but no way to find those that disappear. Can also search by part of speech, e.g.:
    - verbs between 1750 and 1800 (disconnect, edit, gamble, gawk)
    - nouns between 1880 and 1885 (hand-out, hide-out, high-roller, hubris)
    - adjectives between 1920 and 1930 (behavioral, bouncy, Chaplinesque, chewy)
  - Corpus of Historical English: both those entering and leaving the language, but no parts of speech, e.g.:
    - *ness between 1700s and 1900s
    - land* between 1700s and 1900s
    - All words (= *) between 1800s and 1900s
  - Test the OED data against the following:
    - EEBO-LION
    - TIME Corpus
    - Literature Online (1700-1900), Early American Periodicals (1741-1900), 19th Century Books, 19th Century Periodicals, New York Times (1850-2000)
- Semantic (change in word meaning)
  - Lot harder to pin down
  - Look for verb [vvi] in top 500 in VIEW/BNC (e.g. mind, care, wish, check). Use Oxford English Dictionary to find which meanings have died out in last 100-200 years, and which have entered the language
  - Another clue: shift in collocates. Example -- Corpus of Historical English for meat, market
- (Experimental) General Conference corpus: frequency and use of words and phrases in an LDS context, 1850-2005 (free agency, less active, celestial marriage, necking, worlds, Christendom, opposition, watchmen, tithing, Word of Wisdom; others??)
OED/ EEBO-LION / Non-structured
TIME (Frequency / collocates / grammar)
General Conference
American Corpus: Recent changes