Конспект лекций по дисциплине «История языка (англ.)» для студентов специальности «Иностранная филология»

Most OE adjectives distinguished between three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative and superlative. The main means of form-building were suffixation, suffixation plus vowel interchange, suppletion. The regular means used to form the comparative and the superlative from the positive were the suffixes –ra and –est/ost.

Comparison of Adjectives

the following examples is with the suffixation as a mean of form-building:

Positive Comparative Superlative NE

earm earmtra earmost poor

læd lædra lædost glad

heard heardra heradost hard

The mutation of the root-vowel was caused by i-umlaut in Early OE. At that stage the suffixes were –ira, -ist. Later –i was lost or weakened to –e.

Positive Comparative Superlative NE

eald īeldra< eāldra īeldest < ēaldist old

rēat rīetra < rēatira rietest < rēatist great

hēah hīehra < hēahira hīehst < hēahist high

sceort scyrtra < sceortira scyrtest < sceorist short

Suppletion was a very old way of building the degrees of comparison. There were adjectives in all IE languages and in the Germanic group of languages which built the forms with the help of other roots differed from the positive form.

Positive Comparative Superlative NE

ōd betera betst good

yfel wiersa wierest bad

mycel māra mǽst big

lytel lǽssa lǽst little

OE verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and employed a variety of form-building means. In the sentence the verb agreed with the subject in number and person. Mood and tense were the specifically verbal categories. Finite forms distinguished between singular and plural numbers. The category of Person was made up of 3 forms: the 1^st, the 2^nd and the 3d. Person was shown only in the Present Tense of the Indicative Mood singular. In the Past Tense singular of the Indicative Mood the forms of the 1^st and the 3d person were the same. Person was not distinguished in the plural, but it was shown in the Subjunctive Mood.

The category of Mood was constituted by the Indicative, Imperative and Subjunctive

e.g. Ind. Mood: Swǽ clǽne hīo wæs ōpfeallenu on Anekynne (Оно было в упадке в Англии)

Imperative M.: Wes þu ūs lārena ōd (дай нам совет)

Subj. M.: if þu wǽre hēr, mǽre mīn brōþor dēad ( если бы ты был здесь, мой брат не был бы мёртв)

The category of tense in OE consisted of two categorical forms- Present and Past. The tenses were distinguished by all the verbs in the Ind. and Subj. Moods.