The Old English Complex Plant Names: a Linguistic Survey and a Catalogue

Here is a comprehensive analysis of the 900 names for plants, trees, shrubs, vegetables, shrubs, and all things that make up the names for plants in Old English. Krischke (English and American studies, Ludwig-Maximilians U.) discusses all interrelated words used to describe the early English landscape and to elucidate the scientific knowledge of the time. She also examines how words worked together and occurred in various combinations to make new words, describing plant forms or a new feature on the landscape. She provides a qualitative analysis of the etymological, the morphological and the semantic history of the Old English complex plant names as a lexical field and as an in depth study of the plant names as individual entities. She takes a linguistic survey, asks what is in a plant name, surveys previous scholarship, fixes the parameters of the plant world, notes plant names in the Anglo-Saxon medico-botanical texts notes the morphology and word-formation of the Old English complex plant names and of their semantics, and marks the diachronic stratification and the effects of language contact. This is followed by a complete catalogue of all the plant names. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Ulrike Krischke received her PhD in English Historical Linguistics and Literature of the Middle Ages at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in 2010. Since 2006, she has been a lecturer and research assistant at the Department of English and American Studies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich.