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Old English vocabulary

The full extent of the old English vocabulary is not known to present day scholars. There is no doubt that there existed more words in it. Surely, some old English words were lost altogether with the text that perished; some might no have been used in written texts as they belonged to some spheres of human life which were no of great interest. f

Modern estimates of the total vocabulary range from 30 000 words (some even say 100 000)

Loan words are fairly insignificant, and are grouped around some specific spheres of life.

Loan-words, or borrowings were not so frequent in Old English. They are: Celtic, which are not very significant, and Latin wordsin Old English are usually classified into two layers. To the first layer refer the place names containing Latin stems – Chester, Manchester, Winchester, York-shire, Wool-wich, Green-wich…. The second layer of the Latin borrowing is connected with the introduction of Christianity, and denotes religious notions plus some notions connected with the cultural and social phenomena: apostle, bishop, devil, anthem…

 

Native words,in their turncan be subdivided into: Common Indo-European words. They belong to the oldest layer and denote the names of natural phenomena, plants and animals, agricultural terms, names of part of the human body; verbsbelonging to this layerdenote the basic activitiesof Old English man, adjectives indicate the basic qualities…. (mother, father, brother, sister, to eat, to sit, to sleep, cold, door, stone….) these words belong to the sphere of everyday life, and denote vital objects, qualities, and actions….

Common Germanic words are the words that can be found in all Germanic languages. Here belong such words as (earth, green, horse, small, week, hand…)

There are words that are treated as specifically English....

 

 

Word-building in Old English

Apart from taking words from other languages, there were internal ways of enriching the vocabulary – word-building techniques.

These were:

Morphological – creating new words by adding new morphemes;

Syntactic – building new words from syntactic groups;

Semantic - developing new meanings of the existing words;

Morphological word-building is the way of adding morphemes to make new words, know as affixation. Here we distinguish how major group of affixes – prefixes and suffixes.

Suffix is a morpheme that is added to the root-morpheme and which modifies its lexical meaning. They will be classified according to the principle of what part of speech is formed by means of this or that suffix. Hence, in Old English there were:

Noun-Suffixes

-ere was used to form masculine nous

-estre, -end, inz – were feminine suffixes

Semi- or half-suffixes: they originated from nouns and still preserve to some extent their meaning.

-dom – freedom, … friendship,… childhood…, policeman, sportsman,

Adjective-forming suffixes – form adjectives that represent some quality…

-ede – hooked



-en – golden, woolen

-full – sorrowful, carful

-iz – holy, misty, busy,


Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1743


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