THE PRONOUN 3 страница

pe him aht sceoldon 'what they owed him'.)

§ 209. Among the verbs of the minor groups there were several anomalous verbs with irregular forms.

OE willan was an irregular verb with the meaning of volition and desire; it resembled the preterite-presents in meaning and function, as it indicated an attitude to an action and was often followed by an Infinitive. Cf.:

pa 3e mil lab mines forsiSes faejnian 'those who wish to rejoice in my death' and

hyt moten habban eall 'all could have it'.

Willan had a Past tense form wolde, built like sceolde, the Past tense of the preterite-present sculan, sceal. Eventually willan became a modal verb, like the surviving preterite-presents, and, together with sculan developed into an auxiliary (NE shall, will, should, would).

. Some verbs combined the features of weak and strong verbs. OE don formed a weak Past tense with a vowel interchange: and a Parti­ciple in -n: don — dyde — se-don (NE do). OE biian 'live' had a weak Past — bade and Participle II, ending in -n, ze-Ьйп like a strong verb.

§210. Two OE verbs were suppletive. OE 30л, whose Past tense was built from a different root: $an — eode — 3^-3йп (NE go); and beon (NE be).

Beon is an ancient (IE) suppletive verb. In many languages — Ger­manic and non-Germanic — its paradigm is made up of several roots. (Recall R быть, есть, Fr Иге, suis, fut.) In OE the Present tense forms were different modifications of the roots *wes- and *bhii-, 1st p. sg — eom, beo, 2nd p. eart, bist, etc. The Past tense was built from the root *wes- on the pattern of strong verbs of Class 5. Though the Infinitive and Par­ticiple II do not occur in the texts, the set of forms can be reconstructed as: *wesan — wees — w& ron — *weren (for the interchange of conso­nants in strong verbs see § 203; the full conjugation of beon is given in § 494 together with its ME and NE forms).

SYNTAX

§ 211. The syntactic structure of OE was determined by two major conditions: the nature of OE morphology and the relations between the spoken and the written forms of the language.

OE was largely a synthetic language; it possessed a system of gram­matical forms which could indicate the connection between words; consequently, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connec­tion was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the written forms of the language resembled oral speech — unless the texts were literal translations from Latin or poems with stereotyped constructions. Consequently, the syntax of the sentence was relatively simple; coordination of clauses prevailed over subordination; complicated syntactical constructions were rare.

The Phrase. Noun, Adjective and Verb Patterns

§ 212. The syntactic structure of a language can be described at the level of the phrase and at the level of the sentence. In OE texts we find a variety of word phrases (also: word groups or patterns). OE noun pat­terns, adjective patterns and verb patterns had certain specific features which are important to note in view of their later changes.

§ 213. A noun pattern consisted of a noun as the head word and pronouns, adjectives (including verbal adjectives, or participles), nu­merals and other nouns as determiners and attributes. Most noun modi­fiers agreed with the noun in gender, number and case, e.g.:

on p& m oprum prim dagum... 'in those other three days' — Dat. pi Masc.

Ohthere ssede his hlaforde, JE If ride cynin$e 'Ohthere said to his lord, king Alfred' — the noun in apposition is in the Dat. sg like the head noun.

Nouns which served as attributes to other nouns usually had the form of the Gen. case: hwales ban, deora fell 'whale's bone, deer's fell'- Some numerals governed the nouns they modified so that formally the relations were reversed: iamra deora... syx hund 'six hundred tame deer"; twenty sceapa 'twenty sheep' {deora, sceapa — Gen. pi).

| 214. An adjective pattern could include adverbs, nouns or pronouns in one of the oblique eases with or without prepositions, and infinitives, e. g.:

ha lap «кв seifum waes td zelsestenne eawre abas 'how loath it was for you to keep your oaths'

him waes manna t> earf 'he was in need of men

hiora hvd bi5 s\vI6e jod id sciатйоип 'their hide is very good for ship ropes*.

§ 215. Verb patterns included a great variety of dependant compo­nents: nouns and pronouns in oblique cases with or without preposi­tions, adverbs, infinitives and participles, e.g.: brins Pv Pⁱⁿb 'bring those things' (Acc.)

He... sealde hit hys mader 'he... gave it to his mother' {Acc., Dat.) he бжг bad westanuiindes 'there he waited for the western wind' (Gen.)

Isaac cwgeS to his suna 'Isaac said to his son' (preposition plus Dat.); b\ раеге ёа simian 'sail past that river' (preposition plus Dat. in an adverbial meaning).

Hu mihtest рй hit swa hr& diice findan? 'how could you find it so quickly' (adverb)

Infinitives and participles were often used in verb phrases with verbs of incomplete predication (some of these phrases were later transformed into analytical forms): mihtest findan 'might find' in the last example, he wolde fandian 'he wanted to find out', hie on$unnon ma repian 'they began to rage more' (see also § 192).

The Simple Sentence

§ 216. The following examples show the structure of the simple sentence in OE, its principal and secondary parts:

Sofllice sum mann hmfde tw§3en suna (mmn — subject, hefds — Simple Predicate) 'truly a certain man had two sons'. Predicates could also be compound: modal, verbal and nominal:

Н%да5ге pQ meaht sin^an 'nevertheless you can sing'. He whs swy3e spedt3 mann 'he was a very rich man'. The secondary parts of the sentence are seen in the same examples: twe^en suna 'two sons' — Direct Object with an attribute, spedis 'rich' — attribute. In the examples of verb and noun patterns above we can find other secondary parts of the sentence: indirect and prepositional objects, adverbial modifiers and appositions: hys meder 'to his mother' (Indirect Object), to his suna 'to his son' (Prep. Object), htshldforde, JEl- frede cyninie 'his lord king Alfred' (apposition), etc. The structure of the OE sentence can be described in terms of Mod E syntactic analysis, for the sentence was made up of the same parts, except that those parts were usually simpler. Attributive groups were short and among the parts of the sentence there were very few predicative constructions (" syntactical complexes"). Absolute constructions with the noun in the Dat. case were sometimes used in translations from Latin in imita­tion of the Latin Dativus Absolutus. The objective predicative con­struction " Accusative with the Infinitive" occurred in original OE texts:

... За liSende land 3esawon, _ brimclifu blican, beorjas steape (BEOWULF)

'... the travellers saw land, the cliffs shine, steep mountains'. Predicative constructions after habban (NE have) contained a Past Participle (see the examples in § 198).

§ 217. The connection between the parts of the sentence was shown by the form of the words as they had formal markers for gender, case, number and person. As compared with later periods agreement and government played an important role in the word phrase and in the sentence. Accordingly the place of the word in relation to other words was of secondary importance and the order of words was relatively free (see §223 ff).

The presence of formal markers made it possible to miss out some parts of the sentence which would be obligatory in an English sentence now. In the following instance the subject is not repeated but the form of the predicate shows that the action is performed by the same person as the preceding action:

pa com he on тогзеппе to Ржгп tun-jerefan se pe his ealdorman wss; sse^de him, hwylce sife he onfeng 'then in the morning he came to the town-sheriff the one that was his alderman; (he) said to him what gift he had received'.

The formal subject was lacking in many impersonal sentences (though it was present in others); cf.:

Nor pan snywde 'it snowed in the North';

him piihte 'it seemed to him';

Hit bajolade stanum 'it hailed with stones'.

§ 218. One of the conspicuous features of OE syntax was multiple negation within a single sentence or clause. The most common negative particle was ne, which was placed before the verb; it was often accom­panied by other negative words, mostly naht or noht (which had devel­oped from ne plus a-wiht 'no thing'). These words reinforced the mean­ing of negation:

Ne con Ic noht sinjan... ic naht sin3an ne сийе 'I cannot sing' (lit. " cannot sing nothing"), 'I could not sing* (noht was later shortened to not, a new negative particle).

Another peculiarity of OE negation was that the particle ne could be attached to some verbs, pronouns and adverbs to form single words:

...he ne mihte nan ping зезёоп 'he could not see anything" (nan from ne an 'not one*)

hit na buton 3ewinne nses 'it was never without war' (nses from ne wa> s 'no was'; NE none, never, neither are traces of such forms).

Compound and Complex Sentences. Connectives

§ 219. Compound and complex sentences existed in the English lan­guage since the earliest times. Even in the oldest texts we find numerous instances of coordination and subordination and a large inventory of subordinate clauses, subject clauses, object clauses, attributive clauses, adverbial clauses. And yet many constructions — especially in early original prose — look clumsy, loosely connected, disorderly and wanting precision, which is natural in a language whose written form had only begun to grow.

§ 220. Coordinate clauses were mostly joined by and, a conjunc­tion of a most general meaning, which could connect statements with various semantic relations. The ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES abound jp successions of clauses or sentences all beginning with and, e.g.:

Л/idpa onjeat secynin3 paetondhe.onpaduru eode, and'pa unbeanllce hine werede, 0$ he on pone aepeling locude, and pa Qt reesde on hine, and hine miclum 3ewundode; and hie alle on pone сушпз w£ ron feoh- tende, op pset hie hine ofslaesennehaefdon, 'and then the king saw that, and he went to the door, and then bravely defended himself, until he saw that noble, and then out rushed on him, and wounded him severely, and they were all fighting against that king until they had him slain* (from the earliest part of the CHRONICLES A.D. 755).

§ 221. Repetition of connectives at the head of each clause (termed " correlation") was common in complex sentences:

pa he par to sefaren wees, pa eodon hte to hiora scipum 'then (when) he came there, then they went to their ship."

Attributive clauses were joined to the principal clauses by means of various connectives, there being no special class of relative pronouns. The main connective was the indeclinable particle pe employed either alone or together with demonstrative and personal pronouns:

and him cypdon paet hiera m^as him mid watron, pa pe him from noldon 'and told him that their kinsmen were with him, those that did not want (to go) from him'.

The pronouns could also be used to join the clauses without the par­ticle pe:

Hit 5elamp 5I0 pastte an hearpere waes on ржге 3iode бе Dracia hatte, sio wis on Сгёса rice; se hearpere w®s swi5e unjefr^lice jod, dws nama w®s Orfeus; he hsefde an swiSe aenlic wif, sio wa; s haten Eur yd ice 'It happened once that there was a harper among the people on the land that was called Thrace, that was in the kingdom of Crete; that harper was incredibly good; whose name (the name of that) was Orpheus; he had an excellent wife; that was called Eurydice' (see also § IS2 for the use of pronouns).

The pronoun and conjunction p& t was used to introduce object clauses and adverbial clauses, alone or with other form-words: oS ctaef 'until', реет pe 'before', pait 'so that' as in:

Isaac ealdode and his ёазап pystrodon, pset he ne mihte nan ping aeseon 'Then Isaac grew old and his eyes became blind so that he could not see anything'.

§ 222. Some clauses are regarded as intermediate between coordi­nate and subordinate: they are joined asyndeticaJly and their status is not clear:

Pa waes sum consul, Boethius waes haten 'There was then a consul, Boethius was called' (perhaps attributive: '(who) was called Boethius' or co-ordinate '(he) was called Boethius'),

In the course of OE the structure of the complex sentence was con. siderably improved. ^Elfric, the greatest writer of the late 10th— early 11th c., employed a variety ol connectives indicating the relations between the clauses with greater clarity and precision.

Word Order

§ 223. The order of words in the OE sentence was relatively free. The position ol words in the sentence was often determined by logical and stylistic factors rather than by grammatical constraints. In the following sentences the word order depends on the order of presentation and emphasis laid by the author on different parts of the communication: pa Finnas, him puhte, and pa Beormas spraicon neah an 3epeode 'the Finns, it seemed to him, and the Permians spoke almost the same language' — direct word order

Fela spella him saedon pa Beormas «зрег зе of hiera азпит lands 5e of pffim landum pe ymb hie utan wieron 'many stories told him (lit. " him told") the Permians either about their own land or about the lands that were around them' — the objects spella, him are placed at the beginning; the order of the subject and predicate is inverted and the attention is focussed on the part of the sentence which describes the content of the stories,

§ 224. Nevertheless the freedom of word order and its seeming in­dependence of grammar should not be overestimated. The order of words could depend on the communicative type of the sentence — question versus statement, on the type of clause, on the presence and place of some secondary parts of the sentence.

Inversion was used for grammatical purposes in questions; full in­version with simple predicates and partial—with compound predi­cates, containing link-verbs and modal verbs:

Hwanon }eri$eap зё faette scyldas? 'From where do you bring (lit. " bring you") ornamented shields? '

Earl pa Esau, mm sunu? 'Are you Esau, my son? ' Hwajt sceat tc sin^an? 'What shall I sing? ' '

If the sentence began with an adverbial modifier, the word order was usually inverted; cf. some common beginnings of yearly entries in the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES:

Нёг сидт se here to Readin3um... 'In this year came that army to Reading'.

Her on pyssum zeare for se micla here... 'in this year went that big army'

with a relatively rare instance of direct word order after her:

her Cynewulf benam Si3ebryht his rices ond Westseaxna wiotan for unryhtum daedum, biiton Hamtiinsclre 'In this year Cynewulf and the councillors of Wessex deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom for his wicked deeds, except Hampshire (note also the separation of the two coordinate subjects Cynewulf and wiotan).

§ 225. A peculiar type of word order is found in many subordinate and in some coordinate clauses: the clause begins with the subject fol­lowing the connective, and ends with the predicate or its finite part, all the secondary parts being enclosed between them. Recall the quo­tation:

Ohthere saede hishiaforde, /Elfrede сушпзе paet he ealra NorSmonna norpniest bade {see the translation in § 113.) But the very next sentence jn the text shows that in a similar clause the predicate could be placed next to the subject:

He cwgep paet he bude on paim lande, norpweardum wip pa Wests® 'He said that he lived on the land to the North of the Atlantic ocean'.

In the following passage the predicate is placed in final position both in the subordinate and coordinate clauses:

/Efter ржт pe Ьё hie oferwunnen hsefde, he for on Bretanie past i3lond, and wi3 pa Brettas 3efeaht, and 5eflietned wearQ 'After he had overcome them, he went to Britain, that island, and against those Brit­ons fought and was put to flight'. (Note also the place of the object hie — objects were often placed before the predicate or between two parts of the predicate.)

§ 226. Those were the main tendencies in OE word order. They can­not be regarded as rigid rules, Eor there was much variability in syntactic patterns. The quotations given above show that different types of word order could be used in similar syntactical conditions. It appears that in many respects OE syntax was characterised by a wide range of varia­tion and by the co-existence of various, sometimes even opposing, tend­encies.

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

1. Explain why OE can be called a " synthetic" or " inflected" lan­guage. What form-building means were used in OE?

2. Speak on the differences between the categories of case, number and gender in nouns, pronouns and adjectives.

3. Why are noun declensions in OE referred to as " stems"? Point out relics of the stem-suffixes in the forms of nouns.

4. Explain the difference between the grouping of nouils into declen­sions and the two declensions of adjectives.

5. Which phonetic changes account for the alternation of consonants jn the following nouns: тйр — тйра (Nom. sg, Gen. pi N. -a); ftfls — hUsum (Nom. sg, Dat. pi N. -a); wif — wife (Nom., Dat. sg N. -a); (NE mouth, house, wife). Were these consonant interchanges confined to cer­tain declensions? Decline 3lof (F. -0) and 30s (F. -root-stem) according to the models to confirm your answer (NE glove, goose).

6. Account for the vowel interchange in favsel — hwalas (Nom. sg and pi, M. -а); рзер — papum (Nom. sg, Dat. pi, M. -a) (NE whale. Path).

7. Determine thfe type of noun declension and supply the missing forms:

^ " W: -m 129

(NE word, arm, book, cup)

8. Point out instances of variation in the noun paradigms. From which stems were the new variants adopted?

9. Which forms of the nouns originated due to palatal mutation? Describe their history in Early OE.

10. Prove that suppletion is an ancient way of form-building that can be traced to PIE.

11. Which forms of adjectives, weak or strong, should be used in the following contexts? Fill in the blanks with appropriate endings:

and pa pone hals — mann atuson 0t of his huse 'and they drove that holy man out of his house...'; Ic eom god — hierde *I am a good shepherd'.

12. Account for the interchange of vowels in the forms of the degrees of comparison:

smalost hlehst bradost brsedest

17. Find instances of " breaking" in the principal forms of strong and weak verbs.

16. How was gemination of consonants and the loss of -/- reflected in the forms of weak verbs?

19. What traces of palatal mutation can be found in the weak verbs?

20. Prove that the non-finite forms in OE had more nominal fea­tures than they have today.

21. Define the form and class of the verbs and nouns in the follow­ing phrases and reconstruct their initial forms: Nom. sg of nouns and the Infinitive of the verbs:

... wlcia6 Finnas... for he... pa Beormas spraecon... Ohthere raette...he bad... his ёазап pystrodon... he clypode... we willaS secjan...

Chapter X

OLD ENGLISH VOCABULARY

Preliminary Remarks

§ 227'. The full extent of the OE vocabulary is not known to present- day scholars. There is no doubt that many words have not been recorded in the extant texts at all. The evidence of the records has been supple­mented from other sources: from the study of the words of closely related OG languages and from later, more extensive ME texts.

Modern estimates of the total vocabulary of OE range from about thirty thousand words to almost one hundred thousand (A. I. Smir- nitsky, M. Pei), — the latter figure being probably too high and unreal­istic. (Among other causes the differences in the estimates depend on the treatment of polysemy and homonymy. But even the lowest esti­mates show that OE had already developed about as many words as used by a present-day cultured English speaker.) Despite the gaps in the accessible data, philological studies in the last centuries have given us a fairly complete outline of the OE vocabulary as regards its etymology, word structure, word-building and stylistic differentiation.

ETYMOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE OLD ENGLISH VOCABULARY

§ 228. Examination of the origin of words is of great interest in establishing the interrelations between languages and linguistic groups. Word etymology throws light on the history of the speaking community and on its contacts with other peoples.

The OE vocabulary was almost purely Germanic; except for a small number of borrowings, it consisted of native words inherited from PG or formed from native roots and affixes.

Native Words

§ 229. Native OE words can be subdivided into a number of etymol­ogical layers coming from different historical periods. The three main layers in the native OE words are: a) common IE words, 2) common Germanic words, 3) specifically OE words.

§ 230. Words belonging to the common IE layer constitute the oldest part of the OE vocabulary. They go back to the days of the IE parent-language before its extension over the wide territories of Europe and Asia and before the appearance of the Germanic group. They were inherited by PG and passed into the Germanic languages of various subgroups, including English.

Among these words we find names of some natural phenomena, plants and animals, agricultural terms, names of parts of the human body, terms of kinship, etc.; verbs belonging to this layer denote the basic activities of man; adjectives indicate the most essential qualities; this layer includes personal and demonstrative pronouns and most nu­merals. In addition to roots, this portion of theOE (and Germanic) her­itage includes word-building and form-building elements. OE examples of this layer are: eolh, mere, топа, treow, sawan, nx^l, beard, brodor, modor, sunit, don, beon, mm, long, ic, min, peel, twa, etc. (NE elk, 'sea', moon, tree, sow, nail, beard, brother, mother, son, do, be, new, long, I, my, that, two). Some words of this oldest layer are not shared by all the groups of the IE family but are found only in certain areas. In the early days of their separate history the Germanic tribes were more closely connected with their eastern neighbours, the Baltic and Slavonic tribes, while later they came into closer contact with the Italic and Celtic groups. These facts are borne out by the following lexical paral­lels: OE beard (NE beard) is found in the Germanic group (OHG bart) and has parallels in Latvian barda and in R борода. OE Шп (NE town) belongs to the Germanic vocabulary (cf. О Icel tun) and is also found in Celtic: Old Irish dan: OE lippa (NE Up), and its OHG parallel leffur, appears in the Italic group as L labium-, other examples of the same type are OE.spere, NE spear, OHG sper, L sparus, OE 3em& ne 'common', OHG gimeini, L communus.

§ 231. The common Germanic layer includes words which are shared by most Germanic languages, but do not occur outside the group. Being specifically Germanic, these words constitute an important distinctive mark of the Germanic languages at the lexical level. This layer is cer­tainly smaller than the layer of common IE words. (The ratio between specifically Germanic and common IE words in the Germanic languages was estimated by I9th c, scholars as 1: 2; since then it has been discov­ered that many more Germanic words have parallels outside the group and should be regarded as common IE.)

Common Germanic words originated in the common period of Ger­manic history, i.e. in PG when the Teutonic tribes lived close together. Semantically these words are connected with nature, with the sea and everyday life. OE examples of this layer are given together with paral­lels from other OG languages (Table 1, see also Table в in §71).

Some of the words did not occur in all the OG languages. Their areal distribution reflects the contacts between the Germanic tribes at the beginning of their migrations: West and North Germanic languages (represented here by OE, OHG and О Icel) had many words in common,