Dr. Manar Almanea. The History of English. Old English Part 3

Transcription

1 Dr. Manar Almanea The History of English Old English Part 3

2 The linguistic aspects of Old English (OE)

3 Nouns in Old English OE noun inflection is less complex than Indo-E, Germanic languages, but is more complex than modern English. The maximum number of forms of OE nouns is six forms, while that are merely two (singular, plural) or three (if the possessive is considered) in Modern English. OE nouns can be divided into almost 6 groups based on the type of inflection they require.(look at the table at p.95) These are a- stems, r-stems, n-stems, ō-stems and rootconsonant stems.

4 Nouns in Old English

5 Nouns in Old English a. a-stems: most than half of all commonly used nouns in OE were a-stem nouns. Later, it was applied to all nouns. Modern English possessive singular and general plural s actually developed from the genitive singular es and mas. Acc.pl. as. The e and a were reduced with time into a schwa before they were totally lost except in a few cases. It is the only living declension in Modern English.

6 Nouns in Old English c. n-stems: the nouns which followed this pattern were masculine as in oxa ox, feminine as in tongue or neuter as ēage (eye). At a specific stage of history, this stem was very frequent as in eyen (eyes), housen (houses), shoen (shoes), treen (trees). Oxen survived until today. N- stem is called weak declension of nouns, while a-stem is called strong declension.

7 Nouns in Old English c. ō-stems: most feminine nouns of OE are ō-stem nouns. In nominative singular forms they have u after a short syllable as in lufu love, but there are no ending after a long syllable as in lār learning.

8 Nouns in Old English c. root-consonant stems: the case endings of these nouns were attached directly to their roots without an intervening stem-forming suffix. This affects the change o the vowel in several forms as in fōt foot and fīt feet. The vowel of the root word fōt changed into ī because several forms of this root had an i in their endings, e.g. dative * fōti. Anticipation of the i-sound caused mutation of the root vowel (a process called i-umlaut). Many words were affected by this process: man, men, goose, geese, tooth, teeth, mice, lice, etc. Old English had no device for indicating plurality alone, apart from case. Only in Middle English (-es) developed from OE (-as) to indicate plurality.

9 Modifiers 1.Demonstratives: OE had 2 demonstratives standing for this/that. That is the most frequent one, and is used as a definite article. It can be translated as either the, that, or those. Gender is only distinguished in the singular. Masculine and Neuter are alike in the genitive, dative and instrumental.

10 Modifiers Masculine Nominative Sē/se/sēo were replaced in later OE with þē/þe/þēo. It later developed into Modern English the. ME that developed from the neuter nom/acc þæt. The second demonstrative this had nom sing mas, Þēs, neu Þis, and fem Þēos. The nom acc plural Þās developed into those. In Middle English a new plural was formed which is these.

11 Modifiers 2.Adjectives: Like Latin, OE adjectives agree with the nouns in gender, number, and case. a. weak declension: occurs if the adjective is preceded by a demonstrative or a possessive pronoun which makes the following noun definite. An example of weak declension se dola cyning (that foolish king). (table p.97).

12 Modifiers 2.Adjectives: b. strong declension: when the adjective was not preceded by a demonstrative or a possessive pronoun (indefinite noun), and when it is predicative. e.g. dol cyning a foolish king. (table p.98). Comparative adjectives were regularly made by adding ra e.g. hear-dra (harder) The superlative form adds ost e.g. heardost (hardest). A few words used the alternative suffixes *-ira *-ist (which had mutated their vowels) e.g. lang (long) lengra, lengest/ eald (old), yldra, yeldest and in the Anglican dialect ald/eldra/eldest.

13 Modifiers 2.Adjectives: Some other adjectives have comparatives and superlatives from a different root than that of the adjective: gōd/ betra/ betst (good, better, best) and micel/ māra/ mǣst (great/ more/ most). Another group of superlatives were formed by (u)ma suffix as in forma (before). With time, other adjectives adopted this form and the form est by analogy, so we have foremost, utmost, inmost.

14 Modifiers 3.Adverbs: The great majority of OE adverbs were formed from adjectives by adding the suffix e e.g. wrāp, (angry), wrāpe (angrily). The e was lost along with all other final e s in the 14 th c. The result of this loss is that many modern adverbs and adjectives are identical as: deep and slow. Other case forms of nouns and adjectives were used adverbially mainly (the genitive and the dative): he hwearf dæges and nihtes. (he works days and nights). Similarly, the genitive singular es is used in adverbs like hāmweardes (homewards) tōweardes (towards) and besides. It is the source of these forms as well: once, twice, hence and since.

15 Pronouns 1.Personal pronouns: Except for the loss of the dual number and the old 2 nd person forms, others are as complex as they are today. 1 st person pronouns:

16 Pronouns 1.Personal pronouns: 2 nd person th-forms and 2 nd person plural ye survived well until modern period, especially in religious and poetic language, although they are seldom used today. Gender only appeared in 3 rd person singular forms, as in modern English:

17 Pronouns The masculine acc. hine survived only in southwestern dialects of British English. She has no clear history. Probably, it is a development of the demonstrative sēo. The h in the neuter hit has survived when stressed, notably at the beginning of sentences in some types of non-standard modern English. The loss of [h-] in other places was due to the lack of stress as in ME: Give er the book/ raise im up. This is the source of modern (it). In 3 rd person plural, only the dative has survived. Modern them, they, there are of Scandinavian origin.

18 Pronouns 2.Interrogative pronouns: Table p.100 Hwā (who) Hwām (whom) Hwæt (what) Hwæs (whose) hwȳ (why) Hwā (and its forms) was exclusively interrogative in OE. Later, they became relative pronouns as well.

19 Verbs Like their modern counterparts, OE verbs were either weak (adding d or t to form preterits and past participles) or strong (changing their stressed vowels: sing, sang, sung). Strong verbs in OE were of a larger number than strong verbs in Modern English. There were several kinds of weak verbs and 7 groups of strong verbs. It has also a fair number of irregular verbs. Accordingly, grammatical irregularity is frequent at all periods in the history of language, rather than a recent corruption. Table p.101

20 Verbs Weak verbs: are regular verbs as shown in the table:

21 Verbs Strong verbs: depended on vowel change in a process called gradation or umlaut (by Grimm). It is due to Indo-European shift in stress and pitch as in modern English ride, rode, ridden. It is different from mutation as it is not affected by neighboring sounds. There are 7 classes of strong verbs as in the table p. 104.

22 Syntax 1. In OE there are some impersonal verbs which can be written without a subject. OE allows omitting the subject if it was implied in the context (pro-drop feature). In addition, the subject can be mentioned twice in the sentence if it is composed of two clauses/ phrases. 2. OE word order was less fixed that that of Modern English, but it was mainly SVC. In interrogatives however, it is VSC where no Auxiliary is needed. The verb is the main verb of the sentence. Despite all these differences, OE and ME are much more united by their similarities than divided by their differences.