An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

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
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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
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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