Kennings
A kenning ( Icelandic: ) is a figure of speech in the type of circumlocution, a compound that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English poetry. They continued to be a feature of Icelandic poetry (including ''rÃmur'') for centuries, together with the closely related heiti. A kenning has two parts: a base-word (also known as a head-word) and a determinant. For example, the base-word of the kenning "Ãss rauðra randa" ('icicle of red shields' WORD Einarr Skúlason: ''Øxarflokkr'' 9) is ''Ãss'' ('ice, icicle') and the determinant is ''rÇ«nd'' ('rim, shield-rim, shield'). The thing, person, place or being to which the kenning refers is known as its referent (in this case a sword). Although kennings are sometimes hyphenated in English translation, Old Norse poetry did not require kennings to be in normal word order, nor do the parts of the kenning need to be side-by-side. The ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Heiti
A heiti (Old Norse ''heiti'' , Modern Icelandic , pl. ''heiti'' "name, appellation, designation, term") is a synonym used in Old Norse poetry in place of the normal word for something. For instance, Old Norse poets might use ''jór'' "steed" instead of the prosaic ''hestr'' "horse". Kennings In the modern sense, heiti are distinguished from kennings in that a heiti is a simple word, whereas a kenning is a circumlocution in the form of a phrase or compound word; thus ''mækir'' is a heiti for "sword" (the usual word in prose is ''sverð''), whereas ''grand hlÃfar'' "bane of shield" and ''ben-fúrr'' "wound-fire" are kennings for "sword". However, Snorri Sturluson, writing in the 13th century, understood heiti in a broader sense that could include kennings. Snorri termed simple words, poetic or otherwise, ''ókend heiti'' "unqualified terms". These he distinguished from circumlocutions, ''kend heiti'' "qualified terms" (i.e. kennings).Faulkes (1998 a), p. xxxiv. Types Some h ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Old Norse Poetry
Old Norse poetry encompasses a range of verse forms written in Old Norse, during the period from the 8th century (see Eggjum stone) to as late as the far end of the 13th century. Most of the Old Norse poetry that survives was preserved in Iceland, but there are also around 122 verses preserved in Swedish rune inscriptions, 54 in Norwegian and 12 in Danish. Poetry played an important role in the social and religious world of the Vikings. In ''Skáldskaparmál'' (1), Snorri Sturluson, recounts the myth of how Odin brought the mead of poetry to Asgard. Poetry is referred to in such terms as 'the drink of the raven-god (= Odin)' even in the oldest preserved poetry, which is an indicator of its significance within the ancient Scandinavian culture. Old Norse poetry developed from the common Germanic alliterative verse, and as such has many commonalities with Old English, Old Saxon, and Old High German poetry, including alliteration, poetic circumlocutions termed kennings, and an exp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Icelandic Language
Icelandic (; is, Ãslenska, link=no ) is a North Germanic language spoken by about 314,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where it is the national language. Due to being a West Scandinavian language, it is most closely related to Faroese, western Norwegian dialects, and the extinct language, Norn. The language is more conservative than most other Germanic languages. While most of them have greatly reduced levels of inflection (particularly noun declension), Icelandic retains a four- case synthetic grammar (comparable to German, though considerably more conservative and synthetic) and is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic vocabulary is also deeply conservative, with the country's language regulator maintaining an active policy of coining terms based on older Icelandic words rather than directly taking in loanwords from other languages. Since the written language has not changed much, Icelandic speakers can read classic ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dutch Language
Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives German and English. ''Afrikaans'' is a separate but somewhat mutually intelligible daughter languageAfrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , . Afrikaans was historically called Cape Dutch; see , , , , , . Afrikaans is rooted in 17th-century dialects of Dutch; see , , , . Afrikaans is variously described as a creole, a partially creolised language, or a deviant variety of Dutch; see . spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, evolving from the Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa. The dialects used in Belgium (including Flemish) and in Suriname, meanwhile, are all guided by the Dutch Language Union. In Europe, most of the population of the Netherlands (where it is the only official language spoken country ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Glymdrápa
''Glymdrápa'' ("''Drápa'' of din") is a skaldic poem composed by Þorbjörn Hornklofi, the court poet of King Harald I of Norway (''Haraldr hárfagri''). Composed toward the end of the 9th century, the poem recounts several battles waged by King Harald, mostly as he was uniting Norway. Composed in ''dróttkvætt'', only seven stanzas and two half-stanzas are preserved, chiefly in the ''Heimskringla'' (''Haralds saga hárfagra''). ''Glymdrápa'' is the oldest praise poem to a king (''konungsdrápa'') which has come down to us. The poem has few clear geographical or historical points of reference, and the two sagas which quote it, ''Heimskringla'' and ''Fagrskinna'' interpret it differently. In ''Heimskringla'', the poem is said to recount Harald's fight against the people of Orkdal at Oppdal forest (''Uppdalsskógr''), first against Huntiof, King of Nordmøre (''Húnþjófr''), his son Solve Klove (''Sölvi'') and his father-in-law King Nokkve (''Nökkvi''), king of Romsdal; ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Þorbjörn Hornklofi
ÞórbjÇ«rn Hornklofi (Modern Norwegian: ''Torbjørn Hornklove'') was a 9th-century Norwegian skald and one of the court poet of King Harald Fairhair. His poetry has sometimes been regarded as a contemporary source of information regarding King Harald, although it is only preserved embedded within 13th and 14th century king's sagas. A portion of two skaldic poems by him which are preserved are ''Hrafnsmál'' and ''Glymdrápa''. The first poem, which utilizes verse form málaháttr, describes life at Harald's court, mentions that he took a Danish wife, and that he won a victory at the Battle of Hafrsfjord. The second is a drápa A skald, or skáld (Old Norse: , later ; , meaning "poet"), is one of the often named poets who composed skaldic poetry, one of the two kinds of Old Norse poetry, the other being Eddic poetry, which is anonymous. Skaldic poems were traditionally ... which relates a series of battles Harald won during the consolidation of his rule of Norway. Translations ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Greek Language
Greek ( el, label=Modern Greek, Ελληνικά, Elliniká, ; grc, Ἑλληνική, HellÄ“nikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy (Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting impo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Proto-Indo-European Language
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Causative
In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument (the causer), A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O. All languages have ways to express causation but differ in the means. Most, if not all, languages have specific or ''lexical'' causative forms (such as English ''rise'' → ''raise'', ''lie'' → ''lay'', ''sit'' → ''set''). Some languages also have morphological devices (such as inflection) that change verbs into their causative forms or change adjectives into verbs of ''becoming''. Other languages employ periphrasis, with control verbs, idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verbs. There tends to be ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branches during the fifth century BC to fifth century AD: West Germanic, East Germanic and North Germanic, which however remained in contact over a considerable time, especially the Ingvaeonic languages (including English), which arose from West Germanic dialects and remained in continued contact with North Germanic. A defining feature of Proto-Germanic is the completion of the process described by Grimm's law, a set of sound changes that occurred between its status as a dialect of Proto-Indo-European and its gradual divergence into a separate language. As it is probable that the development of this sound shift spanned a considerable time (several centuries), Proto-Germanic cannot adequately be reconstructed as a simple node in a tree model but ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |