Old English Vocabulary 1
Old English Vocabulary 2
Fundamental differences compared to Modern English:

Approx. 24,000 lexical items in OE corpus

Ab t 85% no llonger iin use
About

Only 3% words are loan words compared with over
70% today

OE profoundly of Germanic roots

Frequent use of prefixes, suffixes and compound
words to extend OE lexis
Crystal 2003: 22
Language
Contact 1
Lexical Borrowing 1
During Anglo-Saxon period, essentially two sources:
Norse

Latin


N
Norse
Latin

Borrowings resulting from Christianity, e.g. altar,
angel, font, mass, priest, psalm

Literacy
y and learning,
g, e.g.
g history,
y, school,, title

General (e.g. domestic), e.g. plant, lentil, mat, sock
Following Viking
raids
id and
dN
Norse &
Danish settlement
resulting in the
establishment of the
Danelaw
M D
McDowall
ll 1989
1989: 15
Language Contact 2
Language Contact 3


It is likely that the Danes (& Norsemen) did not displace the
One of the only examples of evidence of OE/ON code-mixing
English in the same way as the Celts.
is found in an 11th century runic inscription at Aldbrough

They probably lived close together with intermarriage.
(Yorkshire):

We don’t know whether OE and ON were entirely mutually
Ulf let aræran cyrice for hanum and for Gunwara saula
Ulf let build church for him and for Gunware soul
Ulf had (this) church built for him(self) and for Gunwaru’s soul
intelligible, but there must have been a certain amount of
bilingualism, which can account for the borrowing.
“The Norse influence on English
g
was p
pervasive,, in the sense

that its results are found in all parts of the language; but it was
p except
p in the lexicon.” ((Thomason & Kaufman 1988:302))
not deep
preposition
p
p
for is ON hanum rather than OE him.
Norse Place
Names
Norse Lexical Borrowings 1
Three main types of borrowings:

Pl
Place
names

Personal names

General words
Ulf is a Danish name (OE: Wulf) and the dative object of the

-by

-holm

-thorp

-thwaite

-toft
toft
Crystal 2003: 25
Crystal 2003: 26
Norse Personal
Names

-son vs. OE -ing
Results of Language Contact on
Lexis 1

Almost 1,000 general Norse words entered English

Yet only c. 150 appear in OE manuscripts,
e.g. landing, score, fellow, take

Most loanwords don’t appear in writing until early 12th century,
including many of our most common words,
e.g. both, same, get, give, take

Even the closed p
pronoun word class ((3rd p
person p
plural)) was
affected, spreading southwards in Middle English period from
), followed byy their vs.
Northern dialects;; theyy first ((C14th),
her(e)/hir(e) (C15th) and lastly them vs. hem (early C16th)
Results of Language Contact on
Lexis 2
Results of Language Contact on
Morphology
Through close contacts over a prolonged period, many duplicate words

It is generally thought that language contact between ON & OE
must have arisen with 3 possible developments:
speakers led to a swifter
f decay off the complex morphology off OE,
O

Survival of ON word, e.g. egg vs. OE ey, sister vs. OE sweostor
changing more quickly in the North, e.g.

Survival of OE word, e.g. path vs. ON reike

Both ON & OE words retained with different meanings:
e.g.
ON
OE
dike
ditch
raise
rise
skill
craft
skirt
shirt

Loss of grammatical gender (replaced by ‘natural’
natural gender)

Simplification of gender, number & case agreement e.g. in adjectives and
g the definite article))
demonstratives ((including

General loss of dative & genitive plurals
“The gap between the two is not great, but it may well have
encouraged speakers to replace inflections with a different
system. When all of these differing pronunciations are taken into
account, communication may have at times been difficult.”
(Blake 1996: 80)
Results of Language Contact on
Syntax
References
Likely influences of ON/OE language contact:
Blake, Norman Francis (1996) A History of the English Language. Houndsmill: Palgrave

C t l David
Crystal,
D id (2005) 2ndd edn.
d The
Th C
Cambridge
b id Encyclopedia
E
l
di off the
th English
E li h L
Language.
Relative pronouns

Instead of OE þe ‘who, which’, a competing as arose (cf. ON som also
meaning ‘as’),
‘as’) still found in northern dialects of English
English,
e.g. the man as came yesterday

Routledge
McDowall, David (1989) An Illustrated History of Britain. Harlow, Essex: Longman
Zero relative = object
j
((relatively
y rare in languages
g g of world),
),
e.g. the man [zero] I saw yesterday

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
y Stephan
p
((2012)) The History
y of English:
g
An Introduction. Abbingdon,
g
Oxon:
Gramley,
Preposition stranding (also relatively rare in languages of world),
e.g. the room I saw him in
Svartvik, Jan & Leech, Geoffrey (2006) English. One Tongue, Many Voices.
Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan
(
) A History
y of Britain: At the Edge
g of the World? 3000BC-AD1603.
Shamon,, Simon (2000)
London: BBC
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Kaufman, Terrence (1988) Language Contact, Creolization,
and
dG
Genetic
ti Linguistics.
Li
i ti
B k l
Berkeley:
U
University
i
it off C
California
lif i P
Press.