37. Oe vocabulary

The surviving vocabulary of Old English (OE) is relatively small. The Thesaurus of Old English (TOE),contains almost 34,000 different word forms, whereas a modern desk dictionary might contain 80,000.

Much of the vocabulary of Mod. E. derives from OE. 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.

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. New words occur especially in fields where Norman influence was strongest, such as Law, Literature and Fashion.

38. Lingvist features of oe

The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as GrimmHYPERLINK "file:///wiki/Grimm%2527s_law"'HYPERLINK "file:///wiki/Grimm%2527s_law"s law. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic peoples moving down from northern Europe in the second century BC, to settle in northern central Europe, along the boundary of Celtic civilization, in the northerly lands of the future Roman Empire.

Germanic languages possess several unique features, such as the following:

The leveling of the Indo-European verbal system of tense and aspect into the present tense and the past tense (also called the preterite)

The use of so-called strong and weak adjectives:

The consonant shift known as GrimmHYPERLINK "file:///wiki/Grimm%2527s_Law"'HYPERLINK "file:///wiki/Grimm%2527s_Law"s Law (which continued in German in a second shift known as the High German consonant shift)

Some words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European families, but variants appear in almost all Germanic languages; see Germanic substrate hypothesis

The shifting of word stress onto word stems and later on the first syllable of the word (though English has an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless of what is added to them)

Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than do some other language families such as the Romance or Slavic languages. Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend toward analyticity.

39. The adjektive. degree of comparison

In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's referent. Collectively, adjectives form one of the traditional English eight parts of speech, though linguists today distinguish adjectives from words such as determiners that also used to be considered adjectives.

Not all languages have adjectives, but most, including English, do. (English adjectives include big, old, and tired, among many others.) Those that do not, typically use words of another part of speech, often verbs, to serve the same semantic function;

In most languages with adjectives, they form an open class of words; that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation

In English grammar the degree of comparison of an adjective or adverb describes the relational value of one thing with something in another clause of a sentence.

The degree of comparison may be expressed morphologically, or syntactically. morphological degrees of comparison: green (positive), greener (comparative), greenest (superlative); pretty, prettier, prettiest; while most polysyllabic adjectives use syntax: complex, more complex, most complex.

The positive degree is the most basic form of the adjective, positive because it does not relate to any superior or inferior qualities of other things in speech.

The comparative degree denotes a greater amount of a quality relative to something else. The phrase “Anna is taller than her father” means that Anna's degree of tallness is greater than her father's degree of tallness.

The superlative degree denotes the most, the largest, etc., by which it differs from other things.