Lexicon

The vocabulary of OE was small (20 000 – 30 000 words).

Most of the words were of Indo-European and Germanic origin. Indo-European nouns belonged to lexical semantic groups of:

• natural phenomena: day, snow, moon, water;

• plants and animals: mouse, fish, swine, tree;

• kinship: father, mother, brother, sister, sun;

• parts of a human body: foot, heart, arm, nose.

Adjectives – fast, cold, far, full, hard, many, new; numerals – two, three, five, eight, ten; pronouns – I, me, we, thou (ти), who, what, which.

Verbs denoted vital actions: to eat, to sit, to sleep, to bear, to know, to beat, to float, to heal.

Words of Germanic origin had parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic. They were mostly of general character denoting such concepts:

• time, natural phenomena, objects: month, time, week, summer, winter, earth, land, ice, rain, sand, storm, sea;

• animals, plants, parts of a human body: hand, horse;

• artefacts and materials: hall, house, room, hat;

• feelings: hope, need, rest, life;

• verbs denoting vital actions: arise, bake, burn, buy, drive, hear, keep, learn, make, meet, see, shoot;

• adjectives denoting essential qualities: bright, broad, dead, deaf, good, long, small, green.

Words of Anglo-Saxon origin (native words) were not numerous but they frequently occur in present-day English. They embrace a great number of strong verbs – be, come, go, have, run, speak, write; some weak verbs – ask, answer, help, treat, wonder, to be tired; auxiliaries and modals – shall, will, can, may, must; nouns – bread, bird, heaven, hell, lord, lady, world; pronouns – you, he, she, it; adverbs and prepositions – here, there, at, by, for, from, in, of, with.

Aside from a small number of geographical names, like Kent, Avon, Devon, Thames, Porthia (= St.Ives), possibly London, proper names, like Arthur, Donald, Kennedy, and some everyday words, like clan, kilt, dun (hill), clay, kill (forest), druid, Celtic borrowings were negligible.

Some OE words mostly of religious character were borrowed from Latin: monk, abbey, altar, creed, church, cross, martyr, monastery, priest, psalm, hymn, bishop, candle, magister, also silk, beet, box, camp, castle, chalk, cheese, cherry, copper, kitchen, dish, mile, mill, pound, street, school, theatre, tower, wall, wine, ounce.

From the language of Danes OE acquired many common words now in use: sky, skirt, shirt, skill, scrape, band, egg, call, race, give as well as place names: Grimsby, Derby, Lowestoft.

3. The Middle English Period

After the Norman Conquest in 1066, the English language was deprived of many duties in the affairs of court, government, and learning as these activities were carried out by French-speaking and Latin-writing Normans. So, under the influence of the Norman Conquest ME revealed dramatic variation.

Orthography and Phonology

French graphic tradition was introduced, all letters became Latin. Specifically English sounds marked by specific English letters were replaced by Latin letters or diagraphs:

þ (thorn), ð (eth) → th: ðæt → that, ðū → thou, ðrēo → three;

þ (wynn) → uu, → w;

ʒ (jogh) → g, j, y: ʒod → god, ʒreʒ → grey, or a diagraph gh;

cʒ /dʒ/ → dg: bridge.

The letter æ (ash) was fully dropped and substituted by a.

Letters k, q, v, z were introduced: knight, queen, viage (voyage), veyn (vein), zeal.

Long sounds were doubled to show their length:

ē → ee: metan – mete, meete (to meet) or turned into ie, like in field;

ō → oo: fōt → foot;

ū → ou: hūs → hous, mūs → mous, ūt → out.

Sibilant /t∫/ rendered by letter c was replaced by a digraph ch: cild → child.

The /∫/ rendered by sc was transformed into combination sh: scip → ship.

The /k/ rendered by c before consonants was marked by letter k: cnāwan → knowen, cniht → knight.

OE long vowels remained unchanged, except that /a:/ (bān, stān, bāt) became /o:/, as in bone, stone, boat.

Short vowels in unstressed syllables merged in neutral e /ə/.

The initial consonant clusters hl-, hn-, hr-, cn- lost their initials, as in hlāf (loaf), hnecca – (neck), hrōf (roof).

The final consonants m, n were pronounced undistinctly and merged into m in unstressed position. By the end of ME, even this final m had dropped: stānum → stone.