This volume presents ten Old English texts, beginning with three treatises by Ælfric of Eynsham (c.950–c.1010): his letters to Sigeweard and to Wulfgeat, and his Preface to Genesis. Following these, the five books of Moses are given (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) along with the first two of the historical books, Joshua and Judges. Together with these is presented a complete index ver­borum listing each wordform and its location in the corpus. Twenty-five illustrations from five different manu­scripts are pres­ented, some showing the manuscript text, and eleven with beautiful vignettes from Genesis and Exodus. Corpus Textuum Anglicorum is a series which presents editions of texts in Old English and in Middle English, as well as works in related languages. The series also includes thematic studies of early English literature, and linguistic and lexical resources.

Forshall and Madden’s 1850 edition of Wycliffe’s Bible has long been out of print. It is very scarce and those rare copies that are available from antiquarian booksellers tend to vary both in condition and in cost. This facsimile edition contains the entire text in a sturdy binding and will be suitable for students of Middle English as well as those interested in the history of the English bible.

Forshall and Madden’s 1850 edition of Wycliffe’s Bible has long been out of print. It is very scarce and those rare copies that are available from antiquarian booksellers tend to vary both in condition and in cost. This facsimile edition contains the entire text in a sturdy binding and will be suitable for students of Middle English as well as those interested in the history of the English bible.

Forshall and Madden’s 1850 edition of Wycliffe’s Bible has long been out of print. It is very scarce and those rare copies that are available from antiquarian booksellers tend to vary both in condition and in cost. This facsimile edition contains the entire text in a sturdy binding and will be suitable for students of Middle English as well as those interested in the history of the English bible.

Forshall and Madden’s 1850 edition of Wycliffe’s Bible has long been out of print. It is very scarce and those rare copies that are available from antiquarian booksellers tend to vary both in condition and in cost. This facsimile edition contains the entire text in a sturdy binding and will be suitable for students of Middle English as well as those interested in the history of the English bible.

Cockney Rhyming Slang, as anyone who has stood at the till in a London souvenir shop could tell you, is a set of slang expressions based on taking the original word (say, “stairs”) and rhyming it with the final word of a short phrase (“apples and pears”), and then, in some cases, shortening the new expression (“apples”). This can lead to a sentence such as: “Careful you don’t slip and fall down the apples”. While the slang is often cited as the “secret language” of the Cockney population of London, many of its expression have entered into general usage, not just in the UK, but throughout the English-speaking world. This is not a translation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in the purest sense. It is, rather, the result of a linguistic game—another sort of translation. What Charles Dodgson would have loved most about Cockney Rhyming Slang, and what makes it suited for application to “Alice”, is that it is, as John Ayto writes in his introduction to “The Oxford Dictionary of Rhyming Slang”, “all really part of a giant ongoing word game, whose product is much more droll artefact that linguists’ lexeme”. It is with this idea of Cockney Rhyming Slang as word game, and with the goal of creating “droll artefact”, that this translation has been approached.

Old English (or “Englisc”) is the English language as recorded from around the year 700 to 1100. Spoken by King Alfred the Great and Lady Godiva, the Venerable Bede and Edward the Confessor, it is the language of such classics as Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, and The Seafarer. After 1100 the language went through a period of change so rapid that, by the time two centuries had passed, few could read these old texts. For those interested in learning the oldest variety of English, this translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may provide a pleasurable study aid: just set the modern text and this one side by side and compare the two. But be careful! In this book, Lewis Carroll’s classic tale has been transported into the distant past, before the English had ever heard of tea, imagined a device as sophisticated as a watch, or even seen a rabbit (a later invasive species). Instead, they drank beer, mead, or (when they could get it) wine; an exceptionally learned scholar might have known how to tell time with an astrolabe; and the most familiar long-eared animal was the hare.

“Scouse” is the name of the unique dialect of English spoken in Liverpool. It is a relatively new dialect, dating to the 19th century, showing some influence of speakers from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The Beatles are perhaps the most famous speakers of Scouse, or at least the first speakers who came to public prominence outside the Liverpool region. This book contains a brief sketch of the orthographic principles used in presenting the Liver­pudlian dialect in this edition. The Scouse translation was first prepared by Marvin R. Sumner in 1990, and is now published for the first time in anticipation of the “Alice 150” celebra­tions being held this year.

Cornu-English is that form of English spoken by the majority of native residents in Cornwall. It has also spread overseas to be spoken in areas of the world where Cornish migrants lived and worked-in such diverse locations as Australia, the United States of America, New Zealand, Mexico and South Africa. It may be said to be one of three major linguistic groups operating within Cornwall, a Celtic territory in the west of the island of the Britain. The three are Cornish, English and Cornu-English. Within Cornu-English, it is necessary to point out that although the broad vocabulary and grammar remain the same there are some variations in accent. These can be graded from east to west, and from north to south. In general, the accent in the west of Cornwall (in West Penwith, in particular) has remained quite distinctive, with some observers believing this is because of the later persistence of the Cornish language there. This edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is translated with a nod towards the Cornu-English accent of mid Cornwall; in particular that found in the working-class china-clay mining villages to the north of St Austell. This accent and locate remain interesting because for many years there were perceived as not being as picturesque as others parts of Cornwall, and so received less immigration and loss of Cornu-English speakers.

Middle English is the name commonly given to the forms of English current from about 1100 to roughly 1500, between pre-Conquest Old English, which is hardly intelligible today without special study, and the early modern English of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Of course it changed considerably during that period, and different dialects existed in various geographical areas. The form of Middle English used in this translation is for the most part the East Midland and London dialect of writers like Chaucer in the fourteenth century, which is the direct ancestor of our modern standard form of English. It is not hard to read with a little practice, but an extensive glossary has been provided to assist the reader where necessary. Imagining what Londoners of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries might have made of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" provides a historical perspective not only on Chaucer's fourteenth century and Carroll's nineteenth, but on our own time as well.

Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into over a hundred languages, from French to Japanese to Esperanto. In this translation into the rich dialect of the Appalachian Mountains, the translators have treated the story as a folktale, in order to create the sense that the reader is listening as an adult tells the story to a child. The story has been transported from Victorian English to post-Civil-War West Virginia, into an Appalachian setting appropriate for the dialect. The spelling used aims towards a literary ortho­graphy, rather than towards a phonemic respelling of the language entirely, and so it avoids unnecessary “eye-dialect” (funkshun instead of function, and so forth). The sounds of the language used in Alice’s Adventures in an Appalachian Wonderland will certainly be familiar to most readers, but a short glossary has also been included.