"Bide nu æt gode þæt ic Grecisc cunne": Attitudes to Greek and the Greeks in the Anglo-Saxon period
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Date
2016
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
The Greeks were one of those outgroups to whom the Anglo-Saxons had reasons to look up to,
because of the antiquity of their culture and the sanctity of their language, along those of the
Hebrews and the Romans. Yet as a language Greek was practically unknown for most of the
Anglo-Saxon period and contact with its native speakers and country extremely limited.
Nevertheless, references to the Greeks and their language are not uncommon in the Anglo-Saxon
sources (both Latin and vernacular), as a little less than 200 occurrences in the Dictionary of Old
English (s.v. grecisc) testify.
This paper uses these data, supplementing them with searches in the Dictionary of Old
English Web Corpus, Brepolis Library of Latin Texts – Series A, monumenta.ch and Medieval
Latin from Anglo-Saxon Sources, and analyses lexical and syntactic strategies of the Greek
outgroup construction in Anglo-Saxon texts. It looks at lexemes denoting ‘Greek’ and their
derivatives in Anglo-Latin and Old English, examines their collocates and gleans information on
attitudes towards Greek and the Greeks, and on membership claims indexed by Latin—Greek or
English—Greek code-switching, by at the same time trying to establish parallels and influences
between the two high registers of the Anglo-Saxon period.
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Old English, Anglo-Latin, outgroup construction, flagged code-switching, etymology, Greek
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 51.2(2016), pp. 5-29
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ISBN
ISSN
0081-6272