OE vocabulary, its volume and etymological structure

The history of words throws light on the history of the speaking community and its contacts with other people.

According to some rough counts OE vocabulary had between 23 000 and 24 000 lexical units. About only 15% of them survived in ModE.

In OE there were an extremely low percentage of borrowings from other Ls (only 3% as compared to 70% in ModE). Thus OE from the point of view of its vocabulary was a thoroughly Germanic L.

Native OE words can be subdivided into 3 following layers:

1. Common IE words – the oldest and the largest part of the OE vocabulary that was inherited by the PG, and later by all the GLs, from the Common IE L.

Semantic fields: family relations (father, mother, daughter, brother, etc.(except aunt, uncle – words of the Gorigin)); parts of human body (eye, nose, heart, arm, etc.); natural phenomena, plants, animals (tree, cow, water, sun, wind, etc.).

Parts of speech: nouns (eye, brother, etc.); verbs (basic activities of man) (to be, can, may, to know, to eat, to stand, to sit, etc.); adjs (essential qualities) (new, full, red, right, young, long, etc.); pronouns (personal and demonstrative) (I, my, this, that, those, these, etc.); numerals (most of them) (1-10, 100, 1000, etc.); prepositions (for, at, of, to, etc.).

2. Common Gwords – the part of the vocabulary that was shared by most GLs. These words never occurred outside the Ggroup of Ls. This layer was smaller than the IE layer.

Semantic fields: nature, plants, animals (earth, fox, sheep, sand, etc.); sea (starve, sea, etc.); everyday life (hand, sing, find, make, etc.).

Parts of speech: nouns (horse, rain, ship, bridge, life, hunger, ground, death, winter, evil, etc.); verbs (to like, to drink, to bake, to buy, to find, to fall, to fly, to make, etc.); adjs (broad, sick, true, dead, deaf, open, clean, bitter, etc.); pronouns (such, self, all, etc.); adverbs (often, again, forward, near, etc.).

3. Specifically OE words – native words that occur only in E. and do not occur in other G and non-G Ls. They are very few and are mainly derivatives and compounds (e.g. fisher, understand, woman, etc.).

4. Borrowed words – this part of OE vocabulary, as it has already been mentioned above, was a small portion of words that remained on the periphery of OE vocabulary. The words were mainly borrowed from: Latin (around 500 words only) (abbat, anthem, alms, etc.); Celtic dialects:-common nouns (bin, cross, cradle, etc.) – most of them died out, some survived only in dialects;-place names and names of waterways: Kent, London, York, etc.;-Ouse, Avon, Evan, Thames, Dover – all with the meaning “water”;-comb (“deep valley”) – Duncombe, Winchcombe, etc.;-torr (“high rock”) – Torr, Torcross, etc.;-llan (“church”) – Llandoff, Llanelly, etc.;-pill (“creek”) – Pylle, Huntspill, etc; hybrids:

Celtic element + Latin element Celtic element + Germanic element

Man-chester York-shire

Corn-wall Devon-shire

Lan-caster Salis-bury