The Thesaurus of Old English contains the surviving vocabulary of the earliest stage of the English language arranged in categories according to the meanings of the words. It started life as two hefty paper volumes, and then became an electronic resource. Now, thanks to a grant from the English Subject Centre, it has been repurposed as a unique interactive learning resource, allowing students to explore aspects of Old English language and culture.
The project covers ten topic areas: Clothing, Colour, Death, Families, Farming, Food and Drink, Landscape, Plants, Time, and the Universe. The units have a cultural slant, focusing on what we can learn about people by studying the vocabulary of their language, and can be used by both classes and individuals. Each unit has three sections. Section 1 offers a guided tour through the material, interspersed with questions inviting the user to make a voyage of discovery into the database. Questions have click-box answers and there is also a clickable glossary covering technical terms and background information. Section 2 is a short essay on the topic, reinforcing and giving more detail on points raised in Section 1. Section 3 consists of suggestions for reading, relevant websites, and ideas for essays or projects based on the topic. Projects in particular invite the student to explore TOE further.
The project is aimed at undergraduates who are studying Old English, History of the English Language, and, to a lesser extent, Semantics and Lexicography. Although it draws on Old English, it assumes very little knowledge of the language: units normally work backwards from Modern English, building on what students already know, primarily Modern English vocabulary derived from Old English. Those who wish to know more can consult general essays entitled ‘A Short Description of Old English’, ‘Life in Anglo-Saxon England’ and ‘The Vocabulary of Old English’. Linguistic themes covered in particular units include word formation, semantic change, metaphor, and style.
The project was put together by a team of academics and postgraduate students at Glasgow University under the leadership of Jean Anderson, Carole Hough and Christian Kay. It has been an enjoyable learning experience for all of us. If readers have any comments or suggestions, we would be pleased to hear from them via the form in the Links section of the website. These will inform our next English Subject Centre funded project, which will extend the approach to later periods of the language.
We are currently working on a new English Subject Centre funded project, ‘Word Webs: Exploring Vocabulary’ that aims to demonstrate how a knowledge of vocabulary, and of the ways words develop and interrelate, can illuminate the study of texts and the cultures in which they are embedded. Through the use of electronic resources, we will explore two major linguistic areas of relevance to students of English Language and Literature: (1) The growth of the English vocabulary, and (2) The vocabulary of literature. These will be followed by two case studies: (3) Shakespeare’s vocabulary, and (4) The vocabulary of gender. Our main source material will be the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus of English, but reference will also be made to online text databases and corpora, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech. The project will draw as appropriate on techniques developed in Stylistics and Discourse Analysis, sub-branches of linguistics which provide a meeting ground for language and literature. It will be presented as an interactive web-site designed to engage student interest through content, tasks and suggestions for project work. For a fuller description and more information please follow the link: www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/archive/language/lang2.php
Notes
1 Jane Roberts and Christian Kay with Lynne Grundy, A Thesaurus of Old English, King’s College London Medieval Studies XI, 1995, 2 vols., xxxv + 1555. Second edition, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.
2 Online version 2005, http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/oethesaurus/
