OE vocabulary. Word formation.

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 texts that perished; some might not have been used in written texts as they belonged to some I spheres of human life which were not of great interest (some colloquial words, for instance).

Modern estimates of the total vocabulary (recorded and preserved in written documents) range from 30 000 words (some even say 100 000 -Smirnitsky, Pei).

It is mainly homogeneous. Loan words are fairly insignificant, and are grouped around some specific spheres of life.

Native words, in their turn can be subdivided into: Common Indo-European words, which were inherited from the common Indo-European language. They belong to the oldest layer and denote the names of natural phenomena, plants and animals, agricultural terms, names of parts of the human body, terms of kinship; verbs belonging to this layer denote the basic activities of Old English man, adjectives indicate the basic qualities; personal and demonstrative pronouns and most numerals are of this origin too.

For.ex: -fxder (father), modor (mother), sweostor (sister); etan (to eat), sittan (to sit), slepan (to sleep), beran (to bear), cnawan (to know), ceald (cold), dor (door), stan (stone), wxter (water), fot (foot), heorte (heart) etc. Some contained more stable sounds and in common Germanic were closer to their Indo-European counterparts. They changed only in the course of the Old English assimilative changes: sunu (son), swine (sun), earm (arm) etc.

These words belong to the sphere of everyday life, and denote vital objects, qualities, and actions. Other words of common Indo-European origin are fisc (fish), foda (food; Lat. panis - bread), freond (friend; comp. Ukr. npиятель), fyr (fire; Greek pyr; in Ukr. nipomexitiкa), jeoc (yoke), heorte (heart), noma (name), sittan (sit), standan (stand), weorcan (work), willan (will); heard (hard), mere (sea), lippa (lip; Lat. labium, Rus. yльібкa), treow (tree).

The majority of pronouns and numerals also spring mainly from the same source: two (two), dreo (three), fif (five), tien (ten);

Common Germanic words are the words than can be found in all Giermanic languages, old and new, eastern, western and northern. Here belong such words, for instance, as

eorde (earth - Goth, airda, OHG erda, OSax ertha, Olcel jord, Mn Germ. Erde);

heall (hall), hors (horse), hand (hand), hleapan (leap), sand (sand), wicu (week)

Some linguists tend to treat common West-Germanic words separately, but mainly they are not so numerous.

Finally, hypothelically there are specifically Old English words, that is the words not found in any of the known old texts. These are to be taken for granted - no one knows what other texts might have been lost and the words might have existed in some other language. But we can still say that bridda (bird), terorian (to tire, to be tired etc) so far are treated as specifically English. Lord, Lady may be used in other meanings in other variants of the language, and have different metaphorically extended meanings: warlords, first lady) but everyone feels that it belongs to English culture. The parts of these compounds are not specifically English, but such combinations of morphemes are.

Old English vocabulary consisted also from loan-words, or borrowings which were not so frequent in Old English. They are: Celtic and Latin.

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

Morphological - morphological word- building is the way of adding morphemes to make words, know as affixation. Here we distinguish two major groups of affixes – prefixes and suffixes, infixes being non-characteristic for the English language.

Syntactic – building new words from syntactic groups;

Semantic – developing new meanings of the existing words.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1550