31. Old English. General characteristics. Means of enreaching vocabulary. Internal means. External means.

General characteristics

The vocabulary of Old English was rather extensive. It is said to have contained about 50 000 words. These words were mainly native words. They could be divided into a number or strata. The oldest stratum was composed of words coming from the Common Indo-European parent tongue.

Compare:

Old English New English Latin Russian

modor mother mater мать

neowe new novus новый

Another layer, relatively more recent, was words inherited by English and other Germanic languages from the same common Germanic source.

Old English New English German

land land Land

grene green grim

The third stratum, and that not very extensive, was made up of words that existed only in English, for instance, the word clypian (to call), the root preserved in the now somewhat obsolete word yclept (named).

There are two principal ways of enriching the vocabulary of a language: internal means — those that are inherent in the language itself, and external means, which result from contacts between peoples.

Means of enriching vocabulary

Internal means: word derivation, primarily affixation and vowel interchange, and word composition.

— Word derivation

In Old English affixation was widely used as a wordbuilding means.

There were very many suffixes, with the help of which new nouns, adjectives, adverbs and sometimes verbs were formed, for instance:.

noun suffixes of concrete nouns: -ere fisc+ere (fisher) , denoting the doer of the action

noun suffixes of abstract nouns: -dom freo+dom. (freedom) , -had cild+had (childhood)

adjective suffixes: -isc Engl+isc (English), Frens+lSC (French), -ful car+ful (careful)

Prefixes were used on a limited scale and they generally had a negative meaning: mis- mis+ded (misdeed)

Vowel interchange:

Noun verb

dom (doom) deman (to deem)

Word composition

Nouns: Engla+land (land of the Angles, England)

Adjectives: Ic+ceald (ice-cold)

External means of enriching vocabulary

(Old English borrowings)

The main borrowings that we can single out in Old English were Latin and Celtic borrowings.

— Latin borrowings

The first Latin borrowings entered the language before the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians invaded the British Isles. The first stratum of borrowings are mainly words connected with trade. Many of them are preserved in Modern English, such as: pound, inch, pepper, cheese, wine, apple, pear, plum, etc.

The second stratum of words was composed of loan Latin words that the Germanic tribes borrowed already on British soil from the romanized Celts, whom they had conquered in the 5 century. Those were words connected with building and architecture, as the preserved nowadays: tile, street, wall, mill, etc.

The third stratum of Latin loan words was composed of words borrowed after the introduction of the Christian religion. They are generally of a religious nature, such as the present-day words: bishop, devil, apostle, monk.

As Latin was the language of learning at the time, there also entered the language some words that were not directly connected with religion, such as: master, school, palm, lion, tiger, plant, astronomy, etc.

— Celtic borrowings

The Celtic language left very few traces in the English language, because the Germanic conquerors partly exterminate the local population. The Celtic-speaking people who remained on the territory occupied by the Germanic tribes were slaves, and even those were not very numerous. Among the few borrowed words we can mention: down (the downs of Dover), binn (bin - basket, crib, manger).

Some Celtic roots are preserved in geographical names, such

as: kil (church — Kilbrook), ball (house — Ballantrae), esk (water —river Esk) and some others.