Lecture 5. OE Vocabulary

1. NATIVE WORDS

2. WORD FORMATION IN OE

1. SUFFIXATION

2. PREFIXATION

3. COMPOSITION

3. LOAN WORDS

Many words that existed in Old English did not survive into Modern English. There are also many words in Modern English that bear little or no resemblance in meaning to their Old English etymons.

1. Native Words

English has been no stranger to lexical borrowing throughout its history. OE, however, was much more conservative: its vocabulary was primarily Germanic, with comparatively smaller amounts of loans from Latin, Celtic and Old Norse, and a heavy reliance on compounding and affixation (mainly with native elements) as productive processes of lexical augmentation.

Among native words we can distinguish the following etymological layers:

1. Indo-European – these mainly were words meaning natural phenomena, plants and animals, agricultural names, parts of the body, kinship, basic activities. Many of these have naturally quite alike-sounding corresponding words in modern Russian and Ukrainian.

1. Substantives: fæder, mōdor, nama, tunʒe, fōt, niht, heorte;

2. Adjectives: neowe, ʒeonʒ, riht, lonʒ;

3. Verbs: sittan, licʒan, beran, teran;

4. Numerals: 1-100;

5. Pronouns: ic, ðu, sē.

2. Common Germanic

1. Substantives: hand, finger, cealf, eorƀe, land, sæ, sand, earm;

2. Adjectives: earm, ʒrēne;

3. Verbs: findan, sinʒan.

3. West Germanic: bi, be, macian, to.

4. Specifically OE: wimman, scirʒerēfa (sheriff), hlāford (lord), clipian (call).

We will now briefly consider each in turn, beginning with compounding.

OE compounds comprised mainly nouns and adjectives and as in modern English, their final element typically acted as the head. Thus, a compound such as he̅ah-clif ‘high-cliff’ (adjective +noun) would have been treated as a noun. Examples from the vast range of OE compounds include formations such as bo̅ccraftig ‘book-crafty’ ˃ ‘learned’, god-spellere ‘good-newser’˃ ‘evangelist’ and he̅ahburg ‘high city’ ˃ ‘capital’.

These compounds are transparent in that their separate elements are discernible. Modern English has, however, inherited a few amalgamated compounds from OE; that is, words which were once transparent compounds but which, through pronunciation and spelling changes, have fallen together into a seemingly indivisible whole. Examples include daisy (dages + e̅age ‘day’s eye’), garlic (ga̅r + le̅ac ‘spear leek’) and nostril (nosu + ƥyrel ‘nose hole’). Many place names are also the result of

such amalgamations: Boston (Botulph’s stone), Sussex (su̅ƥ + Seaxe ‘south Saxons’)

and Norwich (norƥ + wı̅c ‘north village’).

Compounding in OE appears to have been an extremely useful device in poetic composition. The alliterative patterns used in the genre necessitated the availability of a variety of synonyms for the same concept, hence the creation of oft-quoted compounds such as swanra̅d ‘swan-road’, hwalra̅d ‘whale-road’ and ganetes baƥ ‘gannet’s bath’ for the sea. These compounds are known as kennings.

Overall, many OE compounds were replaced by loanwords after the Anglo-Saxon period but compounding has remained a productive process of word-formation in English.

In terms of affixation OE, like modern English, made productive use of prefixes and suffixes. One of the most productive suffixes is –ly in; others include –dom, as in ƥeowdom ‘slavery’; –ig (modern English –y), which was used to form adjectives from nouns, as in mo̅dig ‘valiant’ (mo̅d ‘heart’, ‘mind’, ‘power’); and –ha̅d (modern –hood), which formed abstract nouns, as in cildha̅d ‘childhood’. Prefixes include for-, which generally had a negating quality, as in forwyrcan ‘to forfeit’ (wyrcan ‘to do’), or an intensifying one, as in forniman ‘to destroy’, ‘consume’ (niman ‘to capture); mis-, which also negated the sense of the attached word, as in misda̅d ‘evil deed’ (da̅d ‘deed’); un- (also still used as a negator), as in una̅ele ‘not noble’ (a̅ele ‘noble’), and wiƥ- ‘against’, as in wiƥcwe̅an ‘to refuse’.