Evans, Jonathan
MWF 3 :00 PM
Park Hall 0250
This is a course in the Old English language; in many respects it is similar to courses in any modern foreign language, with vocabulary quizzes, grammar tests, and translation exercises. Students will be able to learn to pronounce, read, and translate Old English prose and, at the end of the semester, Old English poetry. The course is a prerequisite for follow-up Old English literature courses, including ENGL 4220-6220 Beowulf (Spring 2021), ENGL 4210/6210 Old English Literature (Spring 2022), and (for graduate students) an 8000-level seminar in Old English if this should ever be scheduled--which it hasn't for quite a while now. For undergraduate English majors, ENGL 4060 counts towards the Area I Medieval Literature requirement as well as for Area VII, English Language Studies. The typical follow-up OE literature courses also count towards Area I, Medieval Literature.
For the first 8 to 12 weeks, the course will be conducted like a course in any language: students will learn to pronounce Old English for reading aloud, memorize essential grammar and vocabulary, and take first steps in translating simple sentence in Old English prose. The bulk of class-time is spent reviewing essential points of grammar and vocabulary and translating -- first, sentences; later, paragraphs -- from Old English to Modern English. We will expend no effort on learning conversational Old English, however, and in this sense ENGL/LING 4060/6060 is less like a course in, e.g., modern German or Japanese, and more like a course in classical Greek or Latin. Most of the in-class activity is devoted to presentation and discussion of the functions of various categories of the Old English parts of speech, with students reading aloud their translations of sentences in the lessons and in-class discussion of translation difficulties encountered. Given the university's growing emphasis on online learning activities -- accelerated by the wholesale shift to online classes due to sequestering from the COVID-19 virus in Spring 2020 -- from time to timew there will be components of the course designed to be executed outside class-time or occasionaly in lieu of class meetings.
For the first time in many years, this course will not be cross-listed with its counterpart in the Linguistics curriculum (LING 4060) but will be taught exclusively to English majors and other non-Linguistics majors. As a result, less emphasis will be given to topics of strictly linguistic interest and more emphasis will be given to literary and cultural topics. It's still the case that non-Linguistics majors who have had a general linguistics course such as LING 2100, or more advanced courses in historical linguistics, or courses in more highly-inflected languages such as German, Latin, or Greek will have something of an advantage over those who have not; but, as suggested above, English majors should have no fear that they'll be required to become linguists in order to read Old English. We'll be learning enough Old English to translate some really interesting annals from the Peterborough Chronicle record of Anglo-Saxon history, along with passages of OE literary prose and some poetry.