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The greatVowel Shift

The Great vowel shift was a series of consistent changes of longvowels accounting for many features of the ME vowel system and also of themodern spelling system. During this period all the long vowels became closer orwere diphthongised. Some of the vowels occupied the place of the next vowel; [e:]> [i:], [o:] > [u:], while the latter changed to [au].Vowel length was an inherited feature: OE short vowels had developedfrom short vowels, while long ones usually went back to Common Germanic longvowels or vowel combinations.In later OE and in early ME many vowels became long or short dependingon phonetic conditions and irrespective of their origin.The earliest of the positional quanitative changes was the reajustment ofquantity before some consonant clusters:1) A sequence of two homorganic consonants, a sonorant and a plosive,brought about a lengthening of the preceding vowel; consequently allvowels occuring in this position remained or became long, e.e. OE wild >ME wild [wi:ld], NE wild.2) All other sequences of two or more consonants produced the reverseaffect: they made the preceding long vowels short, and thus all vowelsin this position became or remained short, e.g. OE cepte> ME kepte[`keptý], NE kept.3) The short vowels [e], [a] and [o] (that is, the more open ones of shortvowels) became long in open syllables, e.g. OE nama> ME name[`na:mý], NE name.

29. What were the main differences between the strong and weak verbs?

The majority of OE verbs fell into two great divisions: the strong verbs and the weak verbs. Besides these two main groups there were a few verbs which could be put together as “minor” groups. The main difference between the strong and weak verbs lay in the means of forming the principal parts, or “stems” of the verb. The strong verbs formed their stems by means of ablaut and by adding certain suffixes; in some verbs ablaut was accompanied by consonant interchanges. The strong verbs had four stems, as they distinguished two stems in the Past Tense – one for the 1st and 3rd p. sg Ind. Mood, the other – for the other Past tense forms, Ind. and Subj. the weak verbs derived their Past tense stem and the stem of Participle II from the Present tense stem with the help of the dental suffix -d- or -t-; normally they did not interchange their root vowel, but in some verbs suffixation was accompanied by a vowel interchange. Minor groups of verbs differed from the weak and strong verbs. Some of them combined certain features of the strong and weak verbs in a peculiar way (“preterite-present” verbs); others were suppletive or altogether anomalous.

Strong Verbs

The strong verbs in OE are usually divided into seven classes. Classes from 1 to 6 use vowel gradation which goes back to the IE ablaut-series modified in different phonetic conditions in accordance with PG and Early OE sound changes. Class 7 includes reduplicating verbs, which originally built their past forms by means of repeating the root-morpheme; this doubled root gave rise to a specific kind of root-vowel interchange.



The principal forms of all the strong verbs have the same endings irrespective of class: -an for the Infinitive, no ending in the Past sg stem, -on in the form of Past pl, -en for Participle II.

Weak Verbs

The number of weak verbs in OE by far exceeded that of strong verbs.

The verbs of Class I usually were i-stems, originally contained the element [-i/-j] between the root and the endings. The verbs of Class II were built with the help of the stem-suffix -ō, or -ōj and are known as ō-stems. Class III was made up of a few survivals of the PG third and fourth classes of weak verbs, mostly -ǽj-stems.


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1100


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Old English noun. | Enlargement of the vocabulary in the OE period.
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