An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press
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part of speech, as in hæbbend ‘owner’ from habban ‘have’. Morphological classification accounts for the variation between bodung ‘preaching’ from class 2 bodian and c . yping ‘trade’ from class 1 c . ypan ‘sell’. There are also sometimes differences between dialects. For example female agentive 106 AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH 02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 106 nouns in West Saxon regularly use the suffix -estre (equivalent to -ess in present-day English), and hence we find huntig . estre ‘huntress’, but in more northern dialects the usual form is with -ic . g . e, giving huntic . g . e, both from huntian ‘hunt’. 8.4 Compounds In §8.3 I have given an outline of how prevalent and how varied is the extent of affixation in Old English. In comparing Old English and present-day English there is not much difference in the amount of affix- ation used, but only in the actual affixes involved. By quite early in the Middle English period many of the original Germanic affixes were lost – this is particularly true of prefixes where replacement by the verb + particle found in Scandinavian became dominant – but they were quickly replaced by new affixes from Latin and French. On the other hand, an even more striking feature about Old English vocabulary is the number of compounds used, for, as I shall show, the number of compounds used in Old English far exceeds the number used in any later period (notwithstanding the fact that the last century or so has seen a considerable rise in the use of compounds). As we shall see in the next chapter, the distribution of compounds in Old English is rather skewed. It is certainly true that every genre of Old English demonstrates compounding, and hence it is true that it is a native and productive process. Nevertheless, compounding is particu- larly frequent in poetry, where there is a large demand for alternative synonyms or near synonyms, for reasons I shall discuss later. In the 3,182 lines of Beowulf, for example, there are 903 distinct compounds, that is to say, there is a new compound in, approximately, every third line of the poem. What makes something a compound? If we examine a present-day word such as railway, how can we tell that this is a compound rather than either a simple word or word plus an affix? The answer to that lies in the fact that this word itself contains two independent words, namely rail and way. That is to say, a compound is formed from existing words, two, or even more, as in railway station. Note that this last example shows that spelling, including, although not here, hyphenation, is not a reliable guide. The same holds for Old English. A second issue of definition is important, namely what is the relation between the two words which are compounded? If we look at railway it clearly refers to a kind of way, and similarly railway station refers to a kind of station. This points to the view that the second element is the head of the compound which the first element modifies. You may have thought VOCABULARY 107 02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 107 of examples which apparently contradict this, for example a paperback is not a kind of back, but a book with paper covers. Such examples, where neither the head of the compound nor the modifier is the referent of the compound, are called bahuvrihi compounds, a term originating with the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India. Bahuvrihi compounds are at least as common in Old English as today. Let us now move on to Old English compounds themselves. The most common examples involve noun+noun compounds, such as bo¯ccræft ‘book-craft’ = ‘literature’ and wı¯fmann ‘woman’. The latter example serves to show why the compound is masculine in gender, because it is the head noun, here mann, which determines the gender of the compound noun. Sometimes the first noun is in the genitive case, as in Download 1.93 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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