Old English Vocabulary
The full extent of the Old English vocabulary is not known to present-day scholars. There is no doubt that many words have not been recorded in the extant texts at all. The evidence of the records has been supplemented from other sources: from the study of the words of closely related Old Germanic languages and from later, more extensive Middle English texts. Modern estimates of the total vocabulary of Old English range from about thirty thousand words to almost one hundred thousand – the latter figure being probably too high and unrealistic. Despite the gaps in the accessible data, philological studies in the last centuries have given us a fairly complete outline of the Old English vocabulary as regards its etymology, word structure, word-building and stylistic differentiation. Examination of the origin of words is of great interest in establishing the interrelations between languages and linguistic groups. Word etymology throws light on the history of the speaking community and on its contacts with other peoples. The Old English vocabulary was almost purely Germanic. Except for a small number of borrowings, it consisted of native words inherited from Proto Germanic or formed from native roots and affixes. Native Old English words can be subdivided into a number of etymological layers coming from different historical periods. The tree main layers in the native Old English words are: - common Indo-European words; - common Germanic words; - specifically Old English words.
Although borrowed words constituted only a small portion of the Old English vocabulary, they are of great interest for linguistic and historical study. The borrowings reflect the contacts of English with other tongues resulting from diverse political, economic and cultural events in the early periods of British history. Old English borrowings come from two sources – Celtic and Latin. In the course of the Old English period the vocabulary grew. It was mainly replenished from native sources, by means of word formation.
According to their morphological structure Old English words (like Modern English words) fell into three main types:
simple words (root-words) or words with a simple stem, containing a root-morpheme and no derivational affixes: land;
derived words consisting of one root-morpheme and one or more affixes:
be- innan, e-met-in ;
compound words, their stems were made up of more than one root- morpheme: mann-cynn.
In late Proto Germanic the morphological structure of the word was simplified. By the age of writing many derived words had lost their stem-forming suffixes and had turned into simple words. The loss of stem-suffixes as means of words derivation stimulated the growth of other means of word-formation, especially the growth of suffixation.