Tracing the origins of ESP in Old English Ælfric's Colloquy and Cosmology

Abstract

The present paper will analyse two different pieces by Ælfric, perhaps one of the leading prose-writers of the Old English period. These are, namely, his Cosmology –which may have been completed towards the year 993 (Burnley, 1992)–, and his Colloquy on the Occupations –composed a few years afterwards. These stand for two of the few writings that may be regarded as scientific prose in Old English, at a time when most of the prose works –not only scientific– were rendered in Latin, and when the greatest prose genres in Old English corresponded to history, philosophy or oratory. These two pieces are admittedly heterogeneous: on the one hand, the Cosmology may be said to combine aspects of both a religious and a scientific register; on the other hand, Ælfric’s Colloquy must have been intended as a companion to his Latin Grammar (Mitchell and Robinson, 1964/2007). Yet, as these authors also note, the work also offers us an overall panorama of the social structure of that time. Concretely, this means that certain characters speak about the main aspects of their trades. It is this feature that makes us approach this text as a kind of forerunner of a text in the sphere of “English for Specific Purposes”. In any case, it may be expected that many of the characteristic traits of Present Day English ESP texts will not apply, among other things, because of the differences in morphology and sentence structure between the two diachronic varieties. The two texts will be studied, with a view to offering a contrastive analysis of their characteristic features with those recurrent traits of Present-day English professional texts.