David Michael Benjamin Denison FBA (born 6 September 1950) [1] is a British linguist whose work focuses on the history of the English language.
He was educated at Highgate School [ citation needed ] and St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and then Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, [2] completing the latter tripos with an upper second-class degree in 1973. [3] He earned his doctorate at Lincoln College, Oxford on "Aspects of the History of English Group-Verbs, with Particular Attention to the Syntax of the Ormulum ". [2] [4] He was Smith Professor of English Language & Medieval Literature at the University of Manchester from 2008. Since March 2015 he has been Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics. [2] He is a past president of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE). [5]
Denison served from 1995 to 2010 as one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics . [6] In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University. [7] [8] In 2014 he was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. [9]
He is one of the contributors to The Cambridge grammar of the English language .
The Brittoniclanguages form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic language family; the other is Goidelic. It comprises the extant languages Breton, Cornish, and Welsh. The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython, meaning Ancient Britons as opposed to an Anglo-Saxon or Gael.
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a group of Ingvaeonic languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages that had previously been dominant. Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. A significant subsequent influence on the shaping of Old English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by the Scandinavian Vikings who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th centuries, which led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical simplification. The Anglian dialects had a greater influence on Middle English.
Hector Munro Chadwick was an English philologist. Chadwick was the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and the founder and head of the Department for Anglo-Saxon and Kindred Studies at the University of Cambridge. Chadwick was well known for his encouragement of interdisciplinary research on Celts and Germanic peoples, and for his theories on the Heroic Age in the history of human societies. Chadwick was a tutor of many notable students and the author of numerous influential works in his fields of study. Much of his research and teaching was conducted in cooperation with his wife, former student and fellow Cambridge scholar Nora Kershaw.
David Norman Dumville is a British medievalist and Celtic scholar. He attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; and received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1976, presenting the thesis "The textual history of the Welsh-Latin Historia Brittonum". He is professor emeritus of Celtic & Anglo-Saxon at the University of Aberdeen. He has previously taught or held posts at Swansea University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Cambridge,. Among other academic appointments, he was visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (1995).
Nora Kershaw Chadwick CBE FSA FBA was an English philologist who specialized in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Old Norse studies.
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Modern English is both the most spoken language in the world and the third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. It is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers.
Oliver James Padel is an English medievalist and toponymist specializing in Welsh and Cornish studies. He is currently Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic in the University of Cambridge. and visiting professor of Celtic at the University of the West of England
Richard Sharpe,, Hon. was a British historian and academic, who was Professor of Diplomatic at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. His broad interests were the history of medieval England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. He had a special concern with first-hand work on the primary sources of medieval history, including the practices of palaeography, diplomatic and the editorial process, as well as the historical and legal contexts of medieval documents. He was the general editor of the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, and editor of a forthcoming edition of the charters of King Henry I of England.
English Language and Linguistics is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering linguistics and published three times a year by Cambridge University Press.
Brittonicisms in English are the linguistic effects in English attributed to the historical influence of Brittonic speakers as they switched language to English following the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon political dominance in Britain.
The Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic is one of the constituent departments of the University of Cambridge, and focuses on the history, material culture, languages and literatures of the various peoples who inhabited Britain, Ireland and the extended Scandinavian world in the early Middle Ages. It is based on the second floor of the Faculty of English at 9 West Road. In Cambridge University jargon, its students are called ASNaCs.
Michael Lapidge, FBA is a scholar in the field of Medieval Latin literature, particularly that composed in Anglo-Saxon England during the period 600–1100 AD; he is an emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and winner of the 2009 Sir Israel Gollancz Prize.
Florence Elizabeth Harmer FBA was an English historian, specializing in the Anglo-Saxon period. Translating from Old English and Latin, she edited a number of primary sources for early English history, and her Anglo-Saxon Writs (1952) remains a standard text.
Julia Catherine Crick, is a British historian, medievalist, and academic. She is Professor of Palaeography and Manuscript Studies at King's College London.
Olga Fischer is a Dutch linguist and an expert on the English language. She is Professor Emerita of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and former president of the International Society for the Linguistics of English.
Prior to the 5th century AD, most people in Great Britain spoke the Brythonic languages, but these numbers declined sharply throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, when Brythonic languages were displaced by the West Germanic dialects that are now known collectively as Old English.
Stefan Brink is a Swedish philologist affiliated with the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge.
The Faculty of English is a constituent part of the University of Cambridge. It was founded in 1914 as a Tripos within the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. It could be studied only as a 'Part I' of a degree course, alongside a 'Part II' either in medieval languages or from another Tripos. In 1926, the course became a distinct Faculty.
Patrick Sims-Williams is Emeritus Professor of Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University and founding editor of the journal Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies.
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