3.Linguistic Features of Old English
Old English Phonetics
Old English is so far removed from Modern English that one may take it for an entirely different language. This is largely due to the peculiarities of its pronunciation. The survey of Old English phonetics deals with word stress, the system of vowels and consonants and their origin. The Old English sound system developed from the Proto Germanic system. It underwent multiple changes in the pre-written periods of history, especially in Early Old English. The system of word stress inherited from Proto Germanic underwent no changes in Early Old English. Word stress was fixed. It remained on the same syllable in different grammatical forms of the word and, as a rule, did not shift in word building either. The development of vowels in Early Old English consisted of the modifications of separate vowels, and also of the modification of entire sets of vowels.
Old English Vowels:
Monophongs Diphtongs
Short: i, e, (œ), æ, a, o, u, y (ie), ea, eo
Long:i:, e:, (œ:), æ:, a:, o:, u:, y: (ie:), ea:, eo:
The Old English vowel system displayed an obvious tendency towards a symmetrical, balanced arrangement since almost every long vowel had a corresponding short counterpart. On the whole, consonants were historically more stable than vowels, though certain changes took place in all historical periods. The system of Old English consonants consisted of several correlated sets of consonants. All the consonants fell into noise consonants and sonorants. The noise consonants were subdivided into plosives and fricatives. Plosives were further differentiated as voiced and voiceless, the difference being phonemic. The fricative consonants were also subdivided into voiced and voiceless. In this set, however, sonority was merely a phonetic difference between allophones. The most universal distinctive feature in consonant system was the difference in length. During the entire Old English period long consonants are believed to have been opposed to short ones on a phonemic level. They were mostly distinguished in intervocal position.
Old English Grammar
Old English was a synthetic, or inflected type of language. It showed the relations between words and expressed other grammatical meanings mainly with the help of simple (synthetic) grammatical forms. In building grammatical forms Old English employed grammatical endings, sound interchanges in the root, grammatical prefixes, and suppletive formation. Grammatical endings (inflections) were certainly the principle form-building means used. They were found in all the parts of speech that could change their forms. They were usually used alone but could also occur in combination with other means. Sound interchanges were employed on a more limited scale and were often combined with other form-building means, especially endings. Vowel interchanges were more common than interchanges of consonants. The use of prefixes in grammatical forms was rare and was confined to verbs. Suppletive forms were restricted to several pronouns, a few adjectives and a couple of verbs.
The parts of speech to be distinguished in Old English are as follows: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral, the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction and the interjection. Inflected parts of speech possessed certain grammatical categories. They displayed in formal and semantic correlations and oppositions of grammatical forms. Grammatical categories are usually subdivided into nominal categories, found in nominal parts of speech, and verbal categories found chiefly in the finite verb. There were five grammatical categories in Old English: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison, and the category of definiteness / indefinitness. Each part of speech had its own peculiarities in the inventory of categories and number of members within the category. The noun had only two grammatical categories proper – number and case. The adjective had the maximum number of categories – five. Verbal grammatical categories were not numerous: tense and mood – verbal categories proper – and number and person, showing agreement between the verb-predicate and the subject of the sentence. The distinction of categorical forms by the noun and the verb was to a large extent determined by their division into morphological classes – declensions and conjugations.
The syntactic structure of Old English was determined by two major conditions: the nature of Old English morphology and the relations between forms of the language. As Old English was largely a synthetic language it possessed a system of grammatical forms which could indicate the connection between words. Consequent ly, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech – unless the texts were literal translations from Latin or poems with stereotyped constructions. So the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple. Coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination. Complicated syntactical constructions were rare.