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Mercian was a dialect spoken in the Anglian kingdom of Mercia (roughly speaking the Midlands of England, an area in which four kingdoms had been united under one monarchy). Together with Northumbrian, it was one of the two Anglian dialects. The other two dialects of Old English were Kentish and West Saxon. [1] Each of those dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. Part of Mercia and all of Kent were successfully defended but were then integrated into the Kingdom of Wessex. Because of the centralisation of power and the Viking invasions, there is little to no salvaged written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred the Great's unification, until the Middle English period. [2] [3] [4]
The Mercian dialect was spoken as far east as the border of the Kingdom of East Anglia and as far west as Offa's Dyke, bordering Wales. It was spoken in an area that extended as far north as Staffordshire, bordering Northumbria, and as far south as South Oxfordshire/ Gloucestershire, where it bordered on the Kingdom of Wessex. The Old Norse language also filtered in on a few occasions after the foundation of the Danelaw. This describes the situation before the unification of Mercia.
The Old English Martyrology is a collection of over 230 hagiographies, probably compiled in Mercia, or by someone who wrote in the Mercian dialect of Old English, in the second half of the 9th century. Six Mercian hymns are included in the Anglo-Saxon glosses to the Vespasian Psalter; they include the Benedictus and the Magnificat. [5]
In later Anglo-Saxon England, the dialect remained in use in speech but rarely in written documents. Some time after the Norman conquest of England, Middle English dialects emerged and were later found in such works as the Ormulum and the writings of the Gawain poet. In the later Middle Ages, a Mercian or East Midland dialect seems to have predominated in the London area, producing such forms as are (from Mercian arun).
Mercian was used by the writer and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien to signify his fictional Rohirric language. [6]
Modern Old English orthography adds additional diacritics above certain letters to show specific phonological features. These distinctions largely were not shown in Old English. Such diacritics include macrons for vowel length and overdots for palatalization. Sound approximations from various European languages have been given, but it is best to learn by the International Phonetic Alphabet transcriptions for more precise pronunciation.
Mercian grammar has the same structure as other West Germanic dialects.
Nouns have three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter; and four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. These, in addition, all have singular and plural forms. They can also be strong or weak.
Personal pronouns (I/me, you, he, she, we, you (pl.) and they) come in all the above cases and come in three numbers: singular, dual ('you/we two'), plural.
Demonstrative pronouns vary in the same way described below for the indefinite article, based on 'ðes' only for this. That and Those are the same as the definite article.
Relative pronouns (who, which, that) are usually 'ðe' and 'ðet.'
The definite article is equally complex, with all genders changing in the singular in all cases, based on variations of 'ðe.' In the plural all genders take the same word. The indefinite article was often omitted in Mercian.
Adjectives are always declined, even with some verbs (which means they can double up as adverbs), e.g. I am cold. Having split into weak and strong declensions (depending on the strength of the noun), these split again into all four cases, both singular and plural.
Comparative adjectives (e.g. bigger) always add 're.' Example: Æðelen (noble), æðelenre (nobler).
Verbs can be conjugated from the infinitive into the present tense, the past singular, the past plural and the past participle. There exist strong and weak verbs in Mercian that too conjugate in their own ways. The future tense requires an auxiliary verb, like will (Mercian wyllen). There are three moods: indicative, subjunctive and imperative. Like most inflected languages, Mercian has a few irregular verbs (such as 'to be' bēon and 'have' habben). For basic understanding, the four principal parts must be known for each strong verb: weak verbs are easier and more numerous, they all form the past participle with -ed.
Mercian vocabulary is largely inherited from Proto-Germanic, with Latin loanwords coming via the use of Latin as the language of the Early Church, and Norse loanwords that arrived as part of the Norse incursions and foundation of the Danelaw which covered much of the midlands and north of England.
Some morphological differences between the Mercian and West Saxon include:
In grammar, the genitive case is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can also serve purposes indicating other relationships. For example, some verbs may feature arguments in the genitive case; and the genitive case may also have adverbial uses.
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.
Middle English is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the High and Late Middle Ages.
Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun acting as a single unit or in unison. Verbs can also have dual agreement forms in these languages.
Northern Bavarian is a dialect of Bavarian, together with Central Bavarian and Southern Bavarian. Bavarian is mostly spoken in the Upper Palatinate, although not in Regensburg, which is a primarily Central Bavarian–speaking area, according to a linguistic survey done in the late 1980s. According to the same survey, Northern Bavarian is also spoken in Upper Franconia, as well as in some areas in Upper and Lower Bavaria, such as in the areas around Eichstätt and Kelheim. Few speakers remained in the Czech Republic, mostly concentrated around Aš and Železná Ruda, at the time of the survey, but considering the time which has passed since the survey, the dialect may be extinct in those places today. If it still exists there, it would include the ostegerländische Dialektgruppe. Ethnologue estimates that there were 9,000 speakers of Bavarian in the Czech Republic in 2005, but does not clarify if these were Northern Bavarian speakers.
Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German. It is a West Germanic language, closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages. It is documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it gradually evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken throughout modern northwestern Germany, primarily in the coastal regions and in the eastern Netherlands by Saxons, a Germanic tribe that inhabited the region of Saxony. It partially shares Anglo-Frisian's Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law which sets it apart from Low Franconian and Irminonic languages, such as Dutch, Luxembourgish and German.
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Hindustani, the lingua franca of Northern India and Pakistan, has two standardised registers: Hindi and Urdu. Grammatical differences between the two standards are minor but each uses its own script: Hindi uses Devanagari while Urdu uses an extended form of the Perso-Arabic script, typically in the Nastaʿlīq style.
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