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Old English Grammar.

OE was a synthetic language in which all principle grammatical notions were expressed by the change of the form of the word. The grammatical means OE used were a) grammatical endings which were the primary form-building means; b) vowel gradation; c) suppletive formation, different roots were used in form building of a word, eg. Good – better – best.

The evolution of the nominal system in the history of English.

There were six declinable parts of speech in OE: noun, pronoun, adjective, numeral, participle, infinitive. They were characterized by the following grammatical categories.

  gender Number case Degrees of comparison determinateness
Noun + + +    
Pronoun + + +    
Adjective + + + + +
Numeral + + +   +
Participle + + +   +
infinitive     +    

In OE nominal parts of speech had different number of grammatical categories and they were different in the number of categorical member compose a given category.

Pronoun

In OE all pronouns were declined and the pronominal paradigm was very complicated. There existed two sub-systems of the pronominal declension in OE.

a. the paradigm of the personal pronouns which was similar to those of nouns;

b. paradigm of the other pronouns which was similar to those of adjectives.

Some features of pronouns were peculiar to them alone.

a) personal pronouns. Besides the category of person the OE personal pronouns like nouns had gender, case and number. But the number differed from that of the noun. There were three numbers: singular, dual and plural (in the 1 and 2 person).

Ic - wit – we; pu – git – ge

Other distinctive features were the following:

c. 1 and 2 person paradigms were built up by suppletion. Ic – min – me.

d. There was the homonymy of the pronominal forms in the dative and accusative (me). All the other pronouns agreed in case,

6 โ๎๏๐๎๑

e. gender and number with the noun they referred to. All their declension was similar to the adjectival one. In ME and NE the system of pronouns was also simplified. Nowadays which remained of the pronominal declension is mainly represented by the personal pronouns. The other pronouns whose paradigms were similar to the adjectives became indeclinable.

As for the personal pronouns, the case system that existed in OE gave way to a two-case system in ME and NE and the dual number disappeared.

b) demonstrative pronounsit’s worth mentioning the evolution of the demonstrative pronouns, which is closely connected with the rise of the

 6 โ๎๏๐๎๑ article. In OE these pronouns were frequently used as noun-determiners with a weakened meaning of definiteness. In the course of ME the demonstrative pronouns lost the traces of their inflections and became a short unstressed word that became the definite article. The indefinite article developed from the OE numeral an. (one). The growth of the article is closely connected with the changes in the adjectival declension. Originally weak forms of adjectives were accompanied by demonstrative pronouns which became the only means of expressing determinateness with the decay of the declension system.
1 GERMANIC LANGUAGES, CLASSIFICATION AND MAIN FEATURES 1. Germanic languages 1.1. Proto-Germanic There are about 4,000 human languages spoken in the world today and they differ widely from one another. Various attempts have been taken to classify languages into one scheme which groups the languages according to their related origin from a common parent language. The English language belongs to the group of Germanic languages, a branch of Indo-European linguistic family. The common ancestor of these languages, proto-Germanic, is supposed to have been spoken in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany from perhaps as early as 2000BC. We have no written records of the language of this period. Aside from these, its forms have been reconstructed from written evidence in its daughter-languages and in the works of Roman writers as Julius Caesar, Tacitus and Pliny. About 300BC the Germanic speaking people began to extend in all directions, perhaps because of overpopulation and the poverty of natural resources. In the course of a few centuries they settled on the vast territory in Eastern Europe. In the result of this expansion there appeared different Germanic languages. Geographical decendensies of Proto-Germanic are divided into three groups: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic. 1.2. Germanic languages Proto-Germanic  
- East Germanic - North Germanic - West Germanic
The East Germanic languages were spoken by the tribes that expanded east of the Order around the shores of the Baltic. The group includes Gothic, Vandal, Burgundian. Gothic is represented by the translation of the four parts of the Bible made by the bishop Ulfilas in the middle of the 4th century. The translation is known under the name of THE SILVER CODEX. It is of a special value as it represents the language close to Proto-Germanic. Therefore we could learn a good deal of Proto-Germanic by comparing constructions with the forms found in Gothic and other daughter-languages of Proto-Germanic. The North Germanic group was composed of the tongues of the tribes who lived in Scandinavia and northern Denmark. The North Gothic peoples spoke Old Norse, a language that shows very little dialectical variation, until the Viking age, from about 800 to 1050 AD. In this period Old Norse began to break up into separate languages: Old Swedish, Old Danish, Old Norwegian, Old Icelandic. The latter is much the most important. The modern Icelander does not find it very difficult to read the medieval Icelandic sagas, because the rate of change in Icelandic has always been slow due to its geographical isolation. Modern Icelandic retained the archaic bulk of vocabulary and grammar system and therefore we can reconstruct a considerable extend of Old Norse by studying these Icelandic sagas. The West branch of Germanic tribes, who lived between the Elbe and the Order and along the North seacoast was linguistically diverse even at the beginning of our era. After the migrations of 3rd and 5th centuries there appeared the following Germanic languages: Old English, Old Frisian, Old High German, Old Saxon/ Old Low Franconian and Langobardic.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 2938

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