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Verbs and Expressions of Calling a Person/Place/Thing in Old and Early Middle English Chronicles and Homilies

Paper · 2023 · Michiko Ogura

Summary

The study surveys how Old and early Middle English writers expressed the act of naming a person, place, or thing. The author asks whether text type shapes the choice of construction. Candidates include forms of hatan, such as the old synthetic passive hatte, the periphrastic be (ge)haten, and the impersonal man hateð. They also include cigan, cleopian, cweðan, namnian and nemnan, plus the phrase (his) nama is/wæs. The author collects examples from chronicles and related histories, and from homiletic and devotional prose. Corpus hits from DOE(C) were checked against printed editions, and frequencies for each text are given in tables. The comparison shows a clear genre split. Chronicles mostly state names plainly. Homilies often use the same verbs to explain what a name means or how it translates, and Bede sits between the two. Each text has its own favourite forms, yet even identical passages do not keep a fixed verb. This matters for historical lexicology and for tracking how the native naming verbs gave way, with "called" first attested around 1250.

Key points

  • Texts surveyed.
    • Chronicle side: Parker Chronicle, Peterborough Chronicle, Orosius, and Laʒamon's Brut, which survives in two manuscripts, Cotton Otho C. xiii and Cotton Caligula A. ix.
    • Homily side: Vercelli, Blickling, Ælfric (Catholic Homilies, Pope's edition, Lives of Saints), Wulfstan, Lambeth, Trinity, Ancrene Wisse (CCCC 402) and Ancrene Riwle (Nero A. xiv).
    • Bede is treated as an in-between text.
  • Manuscript differences in the Brut. The two Brut manuscripts mostly agree on naming expressions, but diverge in 20 listed contexts. In these, one copy may use hatan where the other uses cleopian or nemnan, or an active form where the other has a passive.
  • Text-by-text preferences.
    • ChronA favours be (ge)cweden and be (ge)nemned for places, while ChronE mostly uses be (ge)haten.
    • Wulfstan prefers namnian and be genamod, with be genemned appearing only once.
    • The Ancrene texts favour cleopien and spe(a)len.
  • "Translated" senses in homilies. Homilies, especially Ælfric's, use be gecweden and be gereht to mean "is interpreted / signifies," as in glosses of Cherubim and Seraphim.
  • Origin of "call." Modern call comes from Old Norse kalla. Native OE ceallian occurs only once, in the Battle of Maldon. The earliest "be called" cited comes from the a1250 Wooing of our Lord.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Many surface constructions realise one naming act: synthetic passive, periphrastic passive, impersonal "one calls," "we call X," and "his name is X." Grouping them as a single function helps any system that must recognise naming regardless of form.
  • I2. The author separates true naming ("a city called Joppa") from glossing ("Seraphim is interpreted burning"), even when the same verb is used. This split avoids treating a definition or translation as an alias.
  • I3. Two copies of the same text that differ only in wording act as a ready-made set of paraphrases. The 20 diverging Brut contexts show which constructions can stand in for each other.
  • I4. Construction preferences shift by genre (chronicle versus homily) and by individual author. Statistics therefore need to be reported per text rather than pooled.
  • I5. The author found no fixed rule linking the same referent to the same verb across texts. Variation in naming verbs is natural rather than meaningful.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): A single Naming frame (named entity, name, optional namer) could be triggered by passive, impersonal, first-person active, and "name is" patterns alike.
  • I2 (world): When building entities, "X is called Y" should add a name alias only in naming contexts; in explanatory contexts it should become a meaning or equivalence statement.
  • I3 (learn): Parallel versions of one text (retellings, editions) could supply paired sentences whose frames must match, giving a cheap consistency check and paraphrase silver data.
  • I4 (learn): Evaluation of parsing and frame extraction could be broken down by genre (fables, school texts, news) so that a weak spot in one style is not hidden by an average.
  • I5 (back): When generating text from the meaning graph, a Naming frame could be realised with varied constructions ("called," "named," "whose name is") without changing meaning, which helps produce natural output.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Chiba UniversityChiba · Japan3 works · 10 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksClassics · 116 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Michiko Ogura. 2023. Verbs and Expressions of Calling a Person/Place/Thing in Old and Early Middle English Chronicles and Homilies. SELIM 28.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.28.2023.57-77

@inproceedings{ogura2023verbs,
  title = {{Verbs and Expressions of Calling a Person/Place/Thing in Old and Early Middle English Chronicles and Homilies}},
  author = {Michiko Ogura},
  booktitle = {SELIM 28},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.28.2023.57-77},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.28.2023.57-77}
}

References

30 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Dictionaries DOE(C) = diPaolo Healey, Antonette, et al. 2009–. Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. Eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Accessed November 11, 2021. http://www.doe.utoronto.ca.9 The OED (name, v. under Etymology) tells that “[i]n Old English the prefixed form genamnian, genomnian are also attested; … However, the usual word in Old and Middle English is NEMN (v.). Cf. †nemn, v.” 10 OED call, v. and MED callen. ↗
  2. MED = Kurath, Hans , Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis, eds. 1952– 2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Accessed November 11, 2021. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary. ↗
  3. OED = Proffitt, Michael, ed. 1990–in progress. The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Accessed November 11, 2021. http://www.oed.com. ↗
  4. Editions Bately, Janet, ed. 1980. The Old English Orosius. EETS, s.s. 6. London: Oxford University Press. find
  5. Bately, Janet, ed. 1986. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A Collaborative Edition. Vol.3. MS A. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. find
  6. Bethurum, Dorothy, ed. 1957. The Homilies of Wulfstan. Oxford: Clarendon Press. find
  7. Clemoes, Peter, ed. 1997. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, The First Series. EETS, s.s. 17. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  8. Day, Mabel, ed. 1952. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle Edited from Cotton Nero A. XIV. EETS, o.s. 225. London: Oxford University Press. find
  9. Godden, Malcolm, ed. 1979. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, The Second Series, EETS, s.s. 5. London: Oxford University Press. find
  10. Irvine, Susan, ed. 2004. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A Collaborative Edition. Vol. 7. MS E. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. find
  11. Madden, Frederic, ed. 1847; rpt. 1970. Laʒamon’s Brut, or Chronicle of Britain. 3 vols. London: The Society of Antiquaries; New York: AMS. find
  12. Miller, Thomas, ed. 1891; rpt. 1959. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, EETS o.s. 95, 96. London: Oxford University Press. find
  13. Millett, Bella, ed. 2005–2006. Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts. EETS, o.s. 325, 326. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  14. Morris, Richard, ed. 1868. Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. First Series. EETS, o.s. 29. rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1988. find
  15. Morris, Richard, ed. 1873. Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century. Second Series. EETS, o.s. 53. rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1981. find
  16. Morris, Richard, ed. 1967. The Blickling Homilies. EETS, o.s. 58, 63 and 73 in one volume. London: Oxford University Press. find
  17. Plummer, Charles, ed. 1892. Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel. 2 vols. rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press. find
  18. Pope, John C, ed. 1967–1968. Homilies of Ælfric. A Supplementary Collection. 2 vols. EETS, o.s. 259, 260. London: Oxford University Press. find
  19. Scragg, Donald G., ed. 1992. The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts. EETS, o.s. 300. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  20. Skeat, Walter W., ed. 1966. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints. EETS, o.s. 76 and 82 (Vol. I), 94 and 114 (Vol. II). London: Oxford University Press. find
  21. Thorpe, Benjamin, ed. 1844. Aelfric. Sermones Catholici in the Original Anglo-Saxon with an English Version. 2 vols. rpt. [1983] Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Georg Olms. find
  22. Translations Garmonsway, G. N. 1953. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. London: Dent & Sons. find
  23. Nicholson, Lewis E. 1991. The Vercelli Book Homilies. Translations from the Anglo-Saxon. Lanham: University Press of America. find
  24. Salu, Mary B. 1955. The Ancrene Riwle (The Corpus MS.: Ancrene Wisse). London: Burns & Oats. find
  25. Studies Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press. find
  26. Kaita, Kousuke. 2020. “Emergence of Middle English hōten, Meaning ‘to Promise’.” The Bulletin of Art and Science 549: 1–20. find
  27. Laing, Margaret. 1993. Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. find
  28. Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. find
  29. Ogura, Michiko. 2013. Words and Expressions of Emotion in Medieval English (Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 39). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. find
  30. Strite, Vic. 1989. Old English Semantic-Field Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Appendix. Tables for summarising the results of the investigation of verbs and expressions of calling. Table 1. Chronicles A and E, Orosius, Laʒamon (C) and (O). ChronA ChronE person place other person place other be (ge)haten hatan hatte man hateð be (ge)cweden be (ge)cleped clipian man cleopeð be (ge)nemn ed nemnan man nemneð be nama be (ge)ciged nemnan & cigan Or Laʒ(C) Laʒ(O) person place other person place other person place other Table 2. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies I and II, and Homilies of Ælfric. ÆCHomI place other 15 11 2 person 33 4 6 1 13 be gehaten hatan hatte X gehaten be gecweden cweðan be geciged gecigan X geciged be genemned be gereht be gereht & gehaten nama is/wæs 1 21 4 1 1 Table 3. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints (prose part and verse part). ÆLS(p) person place be gehaten hatan mon hateð hatte X (ge)haten be (ge)cweden cweðan be (ge)ciged gecigan X geciged be (ge)nemned nemnan mon nemneð nama is/wæs be gereht ÆCHomII place other 21 8 4 2 ÆHom place 2 person 22 2 5 11 7 person 31 8 8 14 2 other 1 3 2 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 ÆLS(v) other person place other 25 45 9 1 Table 4.1. Lambeth Homilies and Trinity Homilies. LambHom place 1 person 5 be ihaten haten me hat be (i)cleped clepen be nemned nemnen be icweðen 2 2 Table 4.2. Vercelli Homilies and Blickling Homilies. VercHom place 4 3 1 person 5 1 be (ge)haten hatte hatan man hateð be (ge)nemned nemnan nama is/wæs be (ge)cweden be gereht 2 4 2 Table 5. Ancrene Wisse and Ancrene Riwle (Nero) AW place person be ihaten haten me hateð hatte be icleopet cleopien me cleopeð be iseid seggen me seið be inempnet nempnin me nempneð be ispe(a)let spe(a)len 3 3 1 2 TrinHom place other 10 person 1 1 other 13 3 17 1 1 5 BlHom place 2 5 person 1 1 other other 1 2 8 2 8 3 4 1 AR (Nero) place other 3 person other 5 1 2 3 5 10 4 2 5 2 2 8 3 3 7 2 2 7 1 1 1 4 1 1 11 Table 6. Homilies of Wulfstan. person 4 8 1 1 5 1 1 be gehaten hatte hatan be genemned be genamod namnian clypian ד namnian Table 7. Bede. person 44 1 6 4 1 1 1 8 2 be haten mon hateð hatte X haten be cweden cweðan be geciged be nemned nemnan mon nemneð nama is/wæs WHom place other Bede place 3 3 5 other 18 36 1 4 3 1 1 find

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