27. Oe adj. & pronoun.

The adjective in OE could change for number, gender and case: three genders and two numbers. The category of case in adjectives differed from that of nouns: in addition to the four cases of nouns they had one more case, Instr. It was used when the adjective served as an attribute to a noun in the Dat. case expressing an instrumental meaning.

Weak and Strong Declension. The difference between the strong and the weak declension of adjectives was not only formal but also semantic. The weak form was employed when the adjective was preceded by a demonstrative pronoun or the Gen. case of personal pronouns. A few adjectives were always declined strong while several others were always weak: adjectives in the superlative and comparative degrees, ordinal numerals, and the adjective ilca 'same. The strong forms were associated with the meaning of indefiniteness, the weak forms - "definiteness".

Degrees of Comparison: positive, comparative and superlative - suffixes -ra and -est/ost. Sometimes suffixation was accompanied by an interchange of the root-vowel.

OE pronouns fell roughly under the same main classes as modern pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. Relative, possessive and reflexive pronouns were not fully developed and were not always distinctly separated from the 4 main classes. The grammatical categories of the pronouns were either similar to those of nouns or corresponded to those of adjectives. Some features of pronouns were peculiar to them alone. OE personal pronouns had 3 persons, 3 numbers in the 1st and 2nd p. (2 numbers- in the 3rd) and 3 genders in the 3rd p.

28. Oe verbs

Verbs in Old English are divided into strong or weak verbs. Strong verbs indicate tense by a change in the quality of a vowel, while weak verbs indicate tense by the addition of an ending.

Strong verbs use the Germanic form of conjugation known as ablaut. In this form of conjugation, the stem of the word changes to indicate the tense. Verbs like this persist in modern English, for example sing, sang, sung.

stelan: stele – stilst – stilth – stelath

Weak verbs are formed by adding alveolar (t or d) endings to the stem for the past and past-participle tenses. Originally, the weak ending was used to form the preterite of informal, noun-derived verbs such as often emerge in conversation and which have no established system of stem-change, but borrowed verbs – no system of vocal change.

29. Etymological survey of oe vocab.

Word etymology throws light on the history of the speaking community. The OE vocab. was almost purely Germanic.

Native words can be subdivided into some etymological layers coming from different historical periods: 3 main layers in the native words:

1) common Indo-European words. They constitute the oldest part of the OE vocab. Among these words: natural phenomena, plants, animals, agricultural terms, verbs denoting men’s activities, pronouns, numerals. E.g. ђæt, bēon, mōna, mōdor, ic.

2) Common Germanic words include words, which are shared by most Germanic languages, but do not occur outside the group. Semantically these words are connected with nature, sea and everyday life. E.g. OE sand, OHG sant, O Icel sandr, NE sand. OE findan, OHG findan, GT finђan, O Icel finna, NE find.OE fox, OHG fuhs, GT -, O Icel -, NE fox.

3) Specifically OE words do not occur in other Germanic or non-Germanic languages. These words are few, if we include here only the words whose roots have not been found outside English: OE clipian (“call”), brid (“bird”), swapian (“swathe”). But we can also put into consideration OE compounds and derived words formed from Germanic roots in England. E.g. hlāford, made of hlāf (NE loaf, R хлеб). O Icel deigja “knead” – lit. “bread-kneading”, NE lady.