📄 Fulk, R. D. 2014: An Introductory Grammar of Old English with an Anthology of Texts

Summary

This item is not a research article. It is Thijs Porck's book review, in SELIM 20, of R. D. Fulk's 2014 textbook, an introductory Old English grammar that comes paired with an anthology of readings. Porck asks who the textbook serves. Recent introductions such as McGillivray, Baker, and Mitchell & Robinson aim at beginners with no grammatical training and lean toward culture and history. Fulk instead writes for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who care about linguistics. Following the model of Marckwardt & Rosier (1972), the book mixes several topics in each chapter rather than giving each chapter one grammatical area. Each chapter includes exercises and ends with a reading. The book also explains in detail how Old English developed from Proto-Germanic.

Porck praises the clarity of the explanations, the appendices and the large annotated anthology. He notes that the interleaved structure makes the book weaker as a reference grammar. His conclusion is that it works best as a second-stage text. It bridges the gap between a first undergraduate course and the standard reference grammars: Campbell (1959), Hogg (1992), and Hogg & Fulk (2011).

Key points

• Book details: MRTS Texts for Teaching 8 (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 463), ACMRS, xii + 332 pages, priced at $40.
• Structure: 21 chapters, each mixing topics and adding short exercises. Every chapter closes with a reading from the Gospels or Apollonius of Tyre. The seven strong verb classes are spread across four consecutive chapters.
• Appendices: three of them, covering
  • sound changes in English history and prehistory,
  • non-Saxon dialects, with text samples,
  • a short introduction to Old English poetry.
• Anthology: 16 selections, including the "Life of Caedmon", The Vision of Leofric, and 30 Exeter Book riddles (ten times as many as Marckwardt & Rosier). The texts carry diacritics for vowel length and palatalisation, plus notes and a glossary.
• Extras and gaps: a companion website offers printable paradigms and a bibliographic guide. Anglo-Saxon culture gets less than two pages.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Spreading one big topic (the strong verb classes) over several chapters mixed with other material encourages gradual, cumulative learning instead of overload.
• I2. The edited texts mark hidden properties (vowel length, palatalisation) with diacritics, so readers see information the original spelling hides.
• I3. A separate appendix lists sound changes as an ordered history, which explains why each form looks the way it does.
• I4. The review notes a tension: an order that suits teaching makes the same material a poor reference unless a good index exists.
• I5. The book is positioned as a deliberate bridge between beginner textbooks and expert reference works, a middle tier for learners.

For Mova

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

• I1 (learn): Training batches and self-play curricula could interleave phenomena such as coordination, passives and relative clauses, rather than drilling one construction at a time.
• I2 (tokens): The morphology layer could attach explicit, inspectable features for ambiguities the surface form hides, keeping later decisions explainable.
• I3 (tokens): Lemmatization of irregular English forms could rely on ordered, named rule derivations instead of opaque lookup, so each lemma comes with its reason.
• I4 (world): Compiled knowledge (verb classes, ontology) could be stored once but exposed both as a lookup index and as a graded learning sequence.
• I5 (answer): School-course test sets could include an intermediate difficulty tier, showing where reading ability breaks down between easy fables and hard texts.