The ways of the replenishment of the vocabulary

The bulk of the OE vocabulary were native words. The vocabulary grew and it was mainly replenished from native sources, by means of word – formation. According to their morphological structure OE words fell into 3 main types:

1) simple words with a simple stem, containing a root- morpheme and no affixes: land, sinan (land, sing)

2) derived words consisting of one root-morpheme and one or more affixes: be-innan,

e-met-in (begin, meeting)

3) compound words which stems were made up of more than one root-morpheme:

OE employed two ways of word-formation: derivation and word-composition. derived words were built with the help of affixes: prefixes and suffixes. The words were distinguished with the help of sound interchanges and word stress. Sound interchanges in the roots were frequent and were used to distinguish words built from the same root. The source of root-vowel interchanges was vowel gradation which was a distinctive feature between verbs and nouns:

Other sources were palatal mutation and breaking.

The role of word accentuation in OE word-building was the same as sound interchanges. The shifting of word stress helped to differentiate between some parts of speech being used with other means. The verb had unaccented prefixes while the corresponding nouns had stressed prefixes.

e.g. v ond-‘swarian - n ‘ond-swaru

Prefixation was a productive way of building new words in OE. Prefixes were used with verbs but were far less productive with other parts of speech.

e.g. ān - go

e-ān – go, go away

OE prefixes were ā, be, for, fore, e, ofer, un. The prefix modified the lexical meaning of the word: e-boren - uneboren (born, unborn)

spēdi - unspēdi (rich,poor)

With some verbs the meaning of the prefix was so weak that there was no difference between the verb with the prefix and without it: ābīdan – bīdan ( await)

Suffixes not only modified the lexical meaning of the word but could refer it to another part of speech. Suffixes were mostly applied in forming nouns and adjectives.

Word- composition was a highly productive way of developing the vocabulary in OE.

Compound nouns contained various first components - stems of nouns, adjectives and verbs; their second components were nouns.

e.g. hēafod - mann – leader

adjective + noun:

verb + noun (was very rare)

Compound adjectives were formed by joining a noun-stem to an adjective:

adjective + adjective: