On 2007-01-16 00:02, tgpedersen wrote:
> BTW where can one find on the net verbal paradigms of OE dialects
> other than West Saxon (I assume the standard is)?
I don't know of any online sources. As for books, Karl Brunner's
Altenglische Grammatik discusses all the "dialectal" (non-LWS) material;
Alistair Campbell's OE Grammar is also full of notes on dialectal forms.
Interestingly, while Brunner essentially accepts North. pl. (and only
pl.) <dedun> (in Lindisfarne Gospels and Rushworth Gospels 2) with /e:/,
Campbell goes to some lengths to explain it away.
Kent. dede/dedun must be left out of consideration, since in Kentish y >
e; the e-forms in Alfred's Cura Pastoralis may be Kentisms. The somewhat
aberrant form <deodan> in the Codex Aureus (with back umlaut proving
that the vowel is short), once believed to be Mercian, isn't so: the CA
is now considered "linguistically to be aligned with Kt." (Hogg 1992).
However, the Northumbrian forms cannot be accounted for in this way, and
the fact that in OE transcripts of poetry we find <dædon> with <æ>
(/æ:/) evidently means that the scribes assumed that Old Anglian <e>
stood for /e:/ in this word. So, while the evidence is not as solid as
one might wish, OAngl. /de:d-/ in the pret. ind./subj. pl. looks real
enough.
Piotr