The subject of history of English

21. Old English vocabulary

The vocabulary of Old English (OE) is relatively small. It contains almost 34,000 different word forms, whereas a modern desk dictionary might contain 80,000. Some of these words have more than one meaning, i.e. they are polysemous: it contains just over 50,000 meanings altogether. An example of multiple meaning or polysemy is OE ecg, pronounced in the same way as its Modern English (Mod. E.) descendant ‘edge’. In addition to meaning ‘edge’, it also means ‘blade’, the part of an object that has a sharp edge, and ‘sword’, an object distinguished by having a sharp edge or blade. This is an example of metonymy, the identification of an object by one of its attributes, as when the Prime Minister is referred to as ‘No. 10’. ‘Edge’ in Mod. E. also has a metaphorical sense, where an abstract idea is conveyed by referring to something concrete, as in ‘her voice had an edge to it’.Much of the vocabulary of Mod. E. derives from Old English. This applies particularly to our core vocabulary: common words in everyday use for fundamental concepts. Examples include the natural world (earth, sea, wind, fire, water; sun, moon, star); people (man, woman, child, father, mother, brother, daughter); the body (hand, arm, elbow, finger, foot, nose, mouth); and other basic concepts such as food, drink; heaven, hell; friend, neighbour; love, good, evil; hot, cold; after, over, under. However, not all words which look alike necessarily refer to the same thing – such misleading words are often called false friends. An example pair is OE bēor / Mod. E. beer. Although both refer to alcoholic drinks, the nature of the drink is quite different.The examples above are all typical of OE words in being one or two syllables in length. Where there are two syllables, the stress is on the first. Initial stress is a characteristic feature of the Germanic languages as a group and remains the most common type of word structure in Mod. E. We have also retained from OE many of the ways of making new words, but at the same time English has borrowed numerous words from other languages, notably French and Latin. Thousands of French words were brought into English after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which ended the rule of the Anglo-Saxon kings and introduced considerable social change. New words occur especially in fields where Norman influence was strongest, such as Law, Literature and Fashion. These loan words from other languages often exhibit different stress patterns from the basic Germanic vocabulary, as with anatomy and cagoule from French, armada and potato from Spanish, kamikaze from Japanese, anathema from Greek and flamingo from Portuguese.