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English historical linguists have often complained about the scholarly neglect of the phonology of the Late Modern English period; yet, the value of pronouncing dictionaries as rich and reliable evidence has been demonstrated (Beal, J. C., 1999, English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence's Grand Repository of the English Language (1775). Oxford: Clarendon Press; Jones, C., 2006, English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). This article presents a new electronic, searchable database of 'Eighteenth-Century English Phonology' (ECEP) which aims to facilitate research on the social, regional, and lexical distribution of phonological variants in 18th-century English, as documented in contemporary pronouncing dictionaries. Taking Wells' (1982, Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) lexical sets for the vowel system of present-day varieties of English as its reference, the database provides unicode IPA transcriptions for the relevant segment of each word given as an example of lexical (sub)set in his account of standard lexical sets, to which we have added some complementary consonant sets. These will be of use for comparative studies with 19th-century and present-day English. First, we describe the methodology and contents of ECEP: primary source selection, data input and annotation, the web-based interface. Second, we report on two case studies that demonstrate the value of evidence that can be systematically extracted from ECEP for the analysis of segmental and suprasegmental phonology; these are variations in the pronunciation of 'wh' in the set WHALE (/hw/~/w/~/h/), and the palatalization of alveolar consonants before /u:/. Thus, this article will demonstrate the viability of ECEP for historical phonology, dialectology, and sociolinguistics, and will help to promote the use of databases as key resources in historical linguistics.

MILES COVERDALE was among the leading contributors to the first modern English translations of the Bible, and his lasting influence on early modern bibles is widely known; however, his influence on these bibles’ paratexts has not been acknowledged. I have found that many of the 1537 Matthew Bible summaries derive from the 1535 Coverdale Bible.

The paper considers William Morris's belief that modern language was ‘degraded’, and explores how his late fiction tried to resist this degradation. Morris was influenced by the romantic philology of the mid-Victorian period which depicted languages as living organisms. Philologists such as Max Muller claimed that modern civilization had arrested this growth, mechanizing language into conventional signs; and Morris adapted the idea into a critique of industrial capitalism. He conceptualized modern English as manufactured external forms, sundered from organic history. His late prose fictions trace the ‘natural’ meanings of words which he imagined feudalism and capitalism had suppressed. However, this narrative of organic origins existed in tension with Morris's socialist ideals, which sought an objective language above local or national perspectives. The older Morris was writing at a time when romantic philology was coming under attack from a new generation of scholars. These proto-linguists regarded meaning as conventional and narratives of organic ‘roots’ in the distant past as mere mythology. Morris's struggles to reconcile the contradictions in his philosophy of language reflect wider tensions in romantic philology. His imaginary worlds in which everyone spoke the same relied upon myths of original linguistic unity and stasis which new research and theories were undermining. Ironically, Morris's attempts to re-organicize English inadvertently demonstrated the conventionality and perspectivism of language, relying upon common cultural frames of reference.

Evidence in Elizabeth Rogers hir virginal book suggests that Elizabeth Rogers herself received training in composition, transposition, and ornamentation—practices not heretofore associated with young women in England during the mid-seventeenth century. The manuscript also represents a trend towards blurring the line between professional and amateur sources: it is one of the earliest manuscripts in England that challenges modern assumptions about what constitutes an amateur's manuscript and what a professional's, and, by extension, what repertory belongs in a woman's manuscript. Elizabeth Rogers contains a diverse repertory that includes up-to-date foreign pieces, but not modern English music, characteristics that further mark it as atypical. Copied in the 1650s, the volume demonstrates a move towards a more current, competitive market in which, by the end of the century, amateur sources can no longer be easily distinguished from professional manuscripts.

Many fluent EFL speakers experience psychological problems after discovering gender-inclusive English during their first stay abroad, due to the unforeseen nature of this discovery. For example, most EFL students in Russia seem to be unaware of this linguistic phenomenon, even at upper-intermediate and advanced levels. They use and expect others to use exclusive language because they do not know other options. However, they have a right to know about gender-related changes in English and in Western society, and to make an informed decision as to what type of language to use. A case study and a mini-survey are presented here which show that major obstacles to teaching, learning, and using inclusive language seem to be the nature of the Russian language and the traditionalism of Russian society. Based on these results, a set of suggestions related to the teaching of inclusive language is proposed.

This paper discusses the application of algorithmic spelling-correction techniques to the identification of those words in databases of sixteenth-, seventeenth, and eighteenth- century English texts that are most similar to a query word in modern English. The experiments involved the n-gram matching, phonetic and non-phonetic coding, and dynamic-programming methods for spelling correction, and demonstrate the general effectiveness of this approach to the identification of historical word forms

Article extrait de Literary England : Versions of Englishness in Modern English Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

There are nowadays an abundance of books in public health, but to my knowledge there is no modern English textbook of Social Paediatrics. The book Child Public Health is consequently long awaited and the authors should be congratulated, being able to combine good theory with robust practical application. As soon as I got hold of the book I started to use it in my own education of students. I really agree with David Hall, who writes …

I. THE author of The Seafarer observed that it is uncertain which one of three things-disease, old age, or violence-will take a man's life. Even the most profound pessimist must take comfort in the fact that, in this respect at any rate, things have not got worse. But the most determined optimist needs all his resolution as he contemplates the three things which are certain about punctuation in manuscripts of Old English: there is often not much of it; there is little agreement about its significance; it is not the punctuation of modern English or of modern German. For the rest there is uncertainty, dispute, and difference of opinion, about its naturesyntactical and grammatical or rhythmical and rhetorical?and about how OE texts should be punctuated today. So we have scholarly disagreement, with each writer interpreting the same facts differently and too often believing that he or she alone is right-a dilemma in which Skeat and Murray once found themselves during and after a tandem tricycle ride to Eynsham and from which they were rescued only by the intervention of Mrs Murray." But is the intervention of modern editors of OE texts always helpful or necessary? It is clear that modern readers cannot always grasp the exact nuance an Anglo-Saxon author, reader, or reciter, conveyed to his hearers. Even if we assume that there is only one such nuance and that the modern editor has grasped it, he cannot always convey it to others by modern punctuation, which is concerned with modern English as a written rather than as a spoken language, whereas in Old English (one ventures to think) we may sometimes have to do with the rhythms and clause terminals of something closer to speech than to writing. We all know the interchange which runs 'X is his own worst enemy'. 'Not while I'm alive!' I am beginning to think that the worst enemy of those trying to appreciate OE prose and poetry is the unmodified use by editors of a system of punctuation designed for an entirely different language, either modern German (as in Klaeber's Beowulf) or modern English (as in Dobbie's Beowulf). I am increasingly coming to believe that the use of modern punctuationthe function of which is syntactical-is forcing editors into unnecessary