Old English noun.

Old English is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. As in several other ancient Germanic languages, there are five major cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive and instrumental.

* The nominative case indicated the subject of the sentence

*The accusative case indicated the direct object of the sentence

*The genitive case indicated possession,

*The dative case indicated the indirect object of the sentence,

*The instrumental case indicated an instrument used to achieve something, for example, lifdesweorde, "he lived by the sword", where sweorde is the instrumental form of sweord. During the Old English period, the instrumental was falling out of use, having largely merged with the dative. Only pronouns and strong adjectives retained separate forms for the instrumental.

In Late OE nouns were grouped into classes and types of declensions according to gender instead of stems.

26. Scandianavian borrowings in English.

There are a few words in English, that probably are of Scandinavian origin, other than Old Norse, but which are difficult to trace more exactly. Here follows a list:

cog

flense

flounder

hug

lug

maelstrom

midden

mink

nudge

rig

snug

spry

wicker

tage

Due to the fact that the Scandinavian invaders in England were in day-to-day contact with the native English population, the loanwords which are to be found in English are from everyday life. There is no split of vocabulary as there is with French loans. The following loans are grouped into word classes.

1) Nouns bank, birth, booth, brink, crook, dirt, egg, fellow, freckle, gap, guess, keel, kid, leg, link, race, reef, rift, scales, score, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, slaughter, snare, thrall (cf. ‘enthralled’), thrift, tidings, trust, want, window.

2) Adjectives awkward, flat, ill, loose, low, murky, odd, rugged, scant, seemly, sly, tight, weak.

3) Verbs bask, call, cast, clip, crave, crawl, die, droop, gape, gasp, get, give, kindle, lift, lug, nag, raise, rake, ransack, rid, scare, scout, scowl, screech, snub, sprint, take, thrive, thrust.

27. Phonetic changes of the ME and NE periods. Consonants(sibilants, voicing of fricatives, loss of cons)

1appearance of sibilants –phonetical assimilation of lexical borrowings.

2The fricatives were once again subjected to voicing .they were pronounced as voiced if they were preceded by an unstressed vowel followed by a stress one.

3.A number of cons.disappeared they were vocalized and gave rise to diphthongal glides or made the preceding short vowels long.

4.Some consonants were lost in consonant clusters as t was dropped between s and h 5.in Early NE h was lost initially before vowels

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1047