- •1. Germanic languages: history, classification.
- •2. The common features of Gl.
- •6. The dialectal situation of English from a historical p.
- •7. Principal oe and me written records.
- •8. Spelling ch-s in me.
- •9. O e sound s-m. Vowel and consonant changes.
- •10. Monophthongs.
- •11. Dipthongs.
- •12. Consonant changes.
- •13. Form-building means.
- •14. Oe noun s-m.
- •15. The simplification of noun declension.
- •16. The development of Personal pronouns.
- •17. Adjective.
- •18. Demonstr. Pronoun.
- •19. Oe Verbal s-m
- •20. Weak verb.
- •21. Strong V-s.
- •22. Preterite-present, anomalous.
- •23. Changes in the verb conjugation.
- •24. Analytical forms.
- •25. Verbals.
- •27. Oe Syntax.
- •28. The main trends in the development of e s-X.
- •29. Oe vocabulary
- •30. The main trends in word-formation.
- •31. Borrowings in me, ne.
8. Spelling ch-s in me.
The correspondence b-n vowels and letters isn’t observed in OE. Under the French influence many digraphs appeared: ea, ee, oa, oo ou. Affricates ch, th, sh, gh qu. To avoid vertical lines in letters the letter u was replaced by o in the words containing n, m, v. (cuman - come, sunu - son). Long vowels except u were indicated by double letters, short – by doubling consonants. The letter e which indicated the length of the route vowel, was added at the end of the words to indicate the open syllable. (ham – home). The final short vowel [Ι] was indicated by letter y at the end of the word – ornamental usage
9. O e sound s-m. Vowel and consonant changes.
Before breaking there were 12 phonemes. The phonemes are opposed according to their length, labialization, position of the tongue (high, medium, low). The 1t OE vowel change – breaking (paradigmatic-new). Affected short vowels → appearance of diphthongs (r, l, h, rr, ll followed by another consonant). Ĭ-ĭo, ě-ěo, æ-æa.
Long diphthongs were formed from G diphthongal biphonimic
Combinations (eu-ēo, au-æa, ia-īo). Palatal mutation ( i-Umlaut) happened in the 6th -7th c. and was shared by all Old Germanic Languages, except Gothic-fronting and raising of vowels under the influence of [i] and [j] in the following syllable.
a>e-sandian>sendan æ>e-tælian>tellan
ā>æ-larian>læran o, ō> e
u>y-fullian>fyllan ū>y
ea>ie ; ēa>īe ; eo>ie ; ēo>īe
Traces of i-Umlaut in Modern English: irregular Plural of nouns (man – men; tooth – teeth); irregular verbs and adjectives (told ←tell; sold ←sell; old – elder); word-formation with sound interchange (long – length; blood – bleed).
E consonant s-m didn’t undergo such changes. Its peculiarity is the presence of the geminated consonants. The long consonants were used in the intervocalic position. It’s proved by the existence of consonant pairs (sunum – sunnum). plosives, fricatives, sonorants. The back plosives which aren’t found today: |k’| |gg’|. The OE fricatives possess peculiarities: the back fricative consonant could be voiced (gg’; хх'). The velar allophones stood after back vowels (scoh), the palatal – after or before front vowels (nicht, dag).
The phoneme |gg’| developed into vowel; хх' disap. In the 5th c. – vocalization (niх’t – niit-nait). The position of other fricatives: f-v-f, Ө-đ-Ө, s-z-s. the voiceless and voiced fr. Didn’t occur in the same position. The traces of this complementary distribution can be found in ME (irregular plurals: life-lives). The phoneme |sh| appeared in 9th c. from sc: |zh| from |zj| - nsion. There also took place the loss of consonants: sonorants before fricatives (e.g. fimf (Gothic) – fīf (OE) (five)); fricatives between vowels and some plosives (e.g. sæζde (early OE) – sæde (late OE) (said)); loss of [j] – as a result of palatal mutation (see examples above); loss of [w] (e.g. case-forms of nouns: sæ (Nominative) – sæwe (Dative) (OE) (sea).