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Historical development of English vocabulary

 

The historic development of the vocabulary of the English language is traditionally divided into the Old, Middle and Modern English periods. Each of them had its own contribution to the development of the lexis of the language.

 

3.1.1. The Old English period (450-1066)

 

The first Old English inscriptions were written around the fifth and sixth centuries in the runic alphabet brought by the Anglo-Saxons. These are, however, short texts which do not yield much information on the structure of old Germanic languages. The literary age began only after

the arrival of Christianity in Britain, which is associated with the mission of Augustine in 597 AD. The first manuscripts were glossaries of Latin words translated into Old English. The most important literary work, known since that period was an old English epic ‘Beowulf’, written around 1000. This heroic poem consisting of 3182 alternative long lines is commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.

Most OE texts were written in the reign of King Alfred (849-899), who arranged for many Latin words to be translated, but the total corpus is considered to be relatively small. D. Crystal points out that “the number of words in the corpus of Old English compiled at the University of Toronto, which contains all the texts, is only 3.5 million – the equivalent of about 30 medium-sized novels.” [The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, p.10].

The OE alphabet was very similar to the one we use today, but the distinctive feature of it was the absence of capital letters. A few letters were shaped differently and some modern letters were missing, while the numbers were only Roman. There was a great deal of variation in spelling and the same word could be spelled differently on the same page. A marked difference between poetic and prosaic texts is noticed: while the majority of words in prose are close to Modern English, words in poetic texts are different.

OE lexicon looks quite familiar and modern English speaker can easily recognize singan as sing , drinkan as drink, stod as stood and so on. But at the same time some words, thought look familiar, have a different meaning in Modern English; e. g. wif refers no only to female spouse, but to any woman; sona meant ‘immediately’ rather than ‘in a little while’; and meat was used in the meaning ‘food’ rather than ‘the flash of animals used for food’.

Grammatical relations in OE were expressed by the use of inflectional ending. Only in Middle English the inflections were lost and the word order came to express grammatical relations. This crucial change in the structure of the language took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and is explained by the fact, that it became increasingly difficult to hear and pronounce them.

During the Old English period there was the Viking invasion of the VII-IX centuries, which had a significant impact on the development of the vocabulary, but we are going to dwell upon it later.

 


Date: 2015-04-20; view: 4230


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