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ЛЕКЦИИ ПО ИСТОРИИ ЯЗЫКА.doc
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Palatalization of consonants

At a very early time the consonant c before a front vowel, as in cild ‘child’, and occasionally in other conditions as well, became palatalized and approached the affricative [tʃ]. In a similar way, the cluster sc, as in scip ‘ship’, became palatalized and approached [ʃ].

An analogous development affected 3 and c3 before a front vowel and when final becoming palatalized, they approached and may have reached [d3], as in sin3ean ‘sing’.

Other changes and loss of consonants

OE shows the results of a common Germanic phonetic process, which may be expressed by the following formula:

any velar consonant + t > ht

any labial consonant +t > ft

any dental consonant +t > ss

e.g. sōcte > sōhte ‘sought’, witte > wisse ‘knew’. The [n] sound before the consonants h, f, s, p disappeared. The preceding vowel became lengthened and nasalized, but nasalization eventually vanished: bronhte > brōhte ‘brougth’;

h is lost between vowels: tīhan > tēon ‘accuse’.

Metathesis is a phenomenon whet two sounds standing near one another interchange their places. Most of all it happened with the sounds [i], [r]: OE rinnan > irnan > iernan > to run.

Stress

In OE like in all Germanic languages the stress is fixed on the first syllable of the root. If a word begins with a prefix the stress also falls on first syllable of the root. In adverbs consisting of a preposition and a noun the stress also falls on the first syllable of the root of the noun: on’ginnan - to begin; of ‘dune-“down”.

Lecture4 The Grammar Structure of Old English

  1. General characteristics of the OE grammar structure.

  2. Short characteristics of OE nouns.

  3. The strong declension of nouns.

  4. The weak declension of nouns.

  5. A separate group of nouns.

  6. OE adjectives and adverbs.

  7. OE pronouns.

OE was a synthetical language, it means a flectional language. In this respect it resembles MnE. The relations between the words in a sentence were reflected by means of flections, that’s why the order of words was not restricted. The place of a word in a sentence was not fixed and it was possible to move words from place to place without changing the meaning of a whole sentence.

Morphology. Nouns

OE nouns had the grammatical categories of gender, number and case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative). Besides nouns were divided into strong and weak. Nouns were considered to be strong if they had vowel stems and if nouns had consonant stems they were considered weak. A stem is a vowel or a consonant standing between the root and the flexion. The grammatical gender of OE nouns sometimes reflected the real gender of noun: mann, fæder, sunu - masc.;

mõdor, dõhtor, - fem. Sometimes when the inanimate objects were concerned the grammatical gender didn’t reflect any real gender at all: fot, ende, nama - masc.; tunze (tongue), burch (крепость) – fem.; scip, word - n.

Sometimes the grammatical gender contradicts the real gender, e.g wif - n.; wifman, wimman - masc.; mæzden - (das Mädchen) - n.; OE nouns had two numbers: singular and plural.