Old English vocabulary (2007)

Main outline

• characteristics of OE prose vocabulary
• core vocabulary from IE & Germanic
• few loanwords
• mostly word-formation
• how it’s different from PDE vocabulary
• few loanwords (3% vs ca. 70%)
• characteristics of OE poetic vocabulary

Characteristics of OE vocabulary I

• core from IE/Gmc
• sea an example of a distinctively Gmc word
• I’ve pasted in from the OED the etymology field for a distinctively Germanic word, sea.
• why did I choose this word?

[Common Teut.: OE. s str. masc. and fem. corresponds to OFris. sê masc., OS. sêo, sêu, dat. sêwa masc. (MLG. sê, MDu. see masc. and fem., Du. zee fem.), OHG. sêo, sê, dat. sêwe masc., sea, lake, pond (MHG. sê masc. and fem., sea, lake, mod.G. see masc., lake, see fem., sea), ON. s-r, sjá-r, sjó-r masc. (Sw. sjö, Da. sø), Goth. saiw-s masc., sea, also marsh:OTeut. *saiwi-z.
The word has no certain affinities, and it is doubtful whether the w represents a pre-Teut. w or (by Verner's Law) a pre-Teut q^u (or kw).

Characteristics of OE vocabulary II (cont.)

• some loanwords
• mostly from Latin
• continental borrowings found in both OE and OHG
• longstanding contacts; some Gmc tribes in Roman army
• examples: pound, dish
• why pound?
• notice /š/
• other examples:
• more units of measurement: inch, mile,
• edibles: kitchen, wine,
• religious terms: priest, bishop
• not all Christian borrowings from OE period
• why are these good exx?
• some from the Christian period
• mass, abbot
• a very few from Celtic
• mostly place names, e.g. London, Kent, Thames, Avon
• or topographical terms (avon “river”)
• some Latin words w/ Irish forms: staer, cros
• influence of Celtic Christianity

How do people know whether Latin loans were early or late?

You can sometimes tell how long a word from Latin has been around: a long time, if it shows sound changes that happened in early OE

• e.g., /sk/ to /š/: dish, fish, bishop
• e.g., palatalization of /k/ to /č/: church, kitchen (form of Latin coquina)
• e.g., mutation of /u/ to /y/: uncia to ynce, monasterium to mynster, coquina -> kukina -> cycene

Characteristics of OE vocabulary III

OE tended to use its own resources for expressing new concepts

Extended meanings of existing words

· god (etymology disputed – read OED): “in the original pre-Christian sense ... a superhuman person (regarded as masculine) who is worshipped as having power over nature and the fortunes of mankind)

· heofon “sky, abode of warriors who died in battle”

· hell from Gmc; verb helan “to cover, conceal”: noun must have meant “the abode of the dead” extended to mean “the abode of the dead who didn’t embrace Jesus and repent of their sins”

· synn “fault, misdeed, crime” against human law; extended to mean “crime against the laws of the Christian church”

· dryhten “ruler, lord, prince” -> the supreme ruler

Compounding

• leorning-cniht for discipulus “disciple”
• frum-sceaft “first making” for creatio

Compounding showing loan-translations/calques

• heah-faeder for Latin patri-arch
• god-spell for Latin ev-angelium
• well-willend-ness for Latin bene-volent-ia
• do any of these words survive?
• what have we replaced them with?

Affixation showing loan-translation/calques

Prefixation

· pro-videntia = fore-sceaw... (1)

Suffixation

· Salvat-or = Hael-end

o human-itas = menn-isc-ness

o trinitas = þry-ness

o ad-ventus = to-cyme

· do any of these words survive?

· what have we replaced them with?

Suffixation or zero-derivation?

o munuc-ian “to make a person into a monk”

o bisceop-ian “to confirm”

· comment on the base forms?

Practice

o look for these trends in story of the origin of Caedmon’s hymn

· traditionally the first vernacular poem on religious themes

o “adaptation of a form and poetic language traditionally for heroic subjects to the subjects of Christianity”

o specifically, creation: about beginnings!

o found in the (Latin) History of the English Church and People by Bede (AD 673-735)

o presents “the origin of religious poetry in OE in a miraculous light, as the product of an angelic visitation” to a cowherd

· old Caedmon had always avoided singing to a harp at feasts

· but when he avoids it this time an angel commands him to sing of beginnings

o convenient

· Caedmon quite explicitly dissociated from the secular oral tradition

o and therefore unsullied by it

· poetry a convenient form for the mass dissemination of a faith that had so far been mostly aristocratic

o it’s got a really complicated textual history

· there’s a Latin shorter version in the Latin MSS of Bede

· different dialects: Northumbrian, West Saxon

· look at MS: relative status of prose and verse?

Caedmon story

Loanwords – hard to find

o what would you look for?

o religious terms

o words beginning with /p/ (not all of which are loanwords)

Affixations

Prefixes

• ge- a common and meaningless prefix
• geseted, gelyfd-re, geleornode, geseah, gedemed
• gebeor-scip
• prefix for-: for-let
• prefix be-: be-boden
• prefix on-: on-slepte, on-feng, on-gon
• comment on the un/familiarity of these?

Suffixes

• abstract noun suffix -ness: here-nesse

• adjective suffix -lice: ge-limp-lice
• noun suffix –hād (though it was a free morpheme in OE): weoruld-hāde
• comment on the un/familiarity of these?
• agent noun suffix -end: Scypp-end

Compound words

weoruldhade, gebeorscip, nea-lec-an, frumsceaft

How is OE vocabulary different from PDE vocabulary?

• some words have been replaced by loanwords: PDE has more
• some words have survived but with semantic change

How do you illustrate this?

• look at words that are unfamiliar
• would you translate them with a native word? a French/Latin word?
• look at words whose forms you recognize
• have their meanings changed?

Profile of Caedmon’s hymn

• little change from OE to PDE

o man, harp, sing, rest, house, learned, night etc.

o he, was, and, never, and other grammar words

• some change of distribution (e.g. register)
• tide now archaic for time
• replaced with native word time
• gedemed: now archaic for “decided”
• aras “arose”
• replaced with Latinate decided?
• replaced with native got up?
• sum “a certain” (or is this meaning?)
• replaced with Latinate a certain
• can we draw any conclusions about replacements?
• some native
• some Latinate
• remember that you can often choose native or Latinate words
• some words have gone completely
• e.g. leoð
• replaced with poem (Greek through French)
• frumsceaft
• replaced with French or Latin creation
• intinga
• replaced with French occasion
• symble
• replaced with French feast
• onfeng
• replaced with French received
• swefn
• replaced with dream: OE? ON?
• some words have been replaced, though the elements remain
• weoruld-hád
• replaced with Latinate secular
• gebéorscip
• replaced with Latinate banquet, here, but you might think of how else you’d translate it: company, crowd

Advanced enquiries

• e.g. forms of words
• some borrowed into English more than once
• e.g. fers “verse” has a complicated history
• how do we know verse is a loanword?
• semantic change
• some resulting from competition within a semantic field
• e.g. bliss, tide have a different distribution now
• joy loanword, but bliss is still around
• e.g. sona “immediately” -> “in a while”
• productivity or analyzability of morphemes,
• e.g. –hood, for-

Observations about PDE

• core vocabulary of OE
• layers of loanwords
• to what can we attribute many of them?
• but we can often choose to use native or borrowed word for different effect
• when he received / heard / got the answer