Glossary

Old English, Middle English, New English, Early New English

Pre-written / prehistorical period

Loan-word (a French loan-word)

Borrowing (a borrowing from Latin)

To borrow a word

To adopt a word

To penetrate into English

International word

Productive

Conversion

Native root and borrowed affix

The prefix dis- with a negative meaning

The suffix -ess used to derive names of female beings

This word is characterised as a late borrowing by some peculiarities of pronunciation

A digraph

Double letters

To be respelt

To introduce sh to indicate the new sibilant

The two-fold use of c which has survived today owes its origin to French: this letter usually stood for [s] before front vowels and for [k] before back vowels

The spelling of the word changed under Scandinavian influence.

The spelling of the word was brought closer to its Latin source.

The sound [u:], which was represented by the letter u in O.E., came to be spelt ou, the way it was spelt in French.

Mute e

The letter e was preserved in words having a long root vowel

An -e appeared in words which had not had it in ME

Strong verbs

Vowel gradation / ablaut

Quantitative ablaut

Qualitative ablaut

Weak verbs

Dental suffix

Preterite-present verbs / past-present verbs

Anomalous verbs

Strong declension

Weak declension

Vocalic stems (a-stems)

Consonantal stems (n-stems)

Root stems

Gender

Number

Case

Pronouns (personal, demonstrative, possessive)

Consonants

Plosive voiceless [k]

Voiced [g’]

Fricative voiceless dental [f]

Fricative voiced dental [v]

Fricative mediolingual palatal [x’], [γ ’]

Fricative back lingual velar [x], [γ ’]

Affricate [t]

Palatalization

To be / become palatalized

The consonant is voiced intervocally and voiceless finally or initially

A positional variant of the phoneme

To become a separate phoneme

Consonant cluster / consonant sequence

[x] before t is lost and the preceding short vowel is lengthened

the digraph gh came to denote the consonant [f]

thus the word came to be pronounced [to:k]

in Early New English the clusters [sj, zj, tj, dj] changed into [∫], [з], [t∫], [dз] (sibilants changed into affricates)

to be simplified

the consonant [r] was vocalised finally and before consonants / vocalisation of r

sonorants

nasal sonorants were regularly lost before fricative consonants

West Germanic lengthening of consonants

The First Consonant Shift

Verner’ Law

Vowels

Levelling of the unstressed vowels

To be weakened and reduced to a neural vowel something like [ə]

To be lengthened

To be shortened

Open syllables

Closed syllables

Monophthong

Diphthong

Diphthongization

To develop into a diphthong

The Great Vowel Shift

Short vowels became long in open syllables

The vowel [ə] of unstressed endings was lost

[I:] has remained unchanged

[I:] took part in the vowel shift

The root-vowel interchange

I-umlaut/ palatal mutation/I-mutation

The vowel was fronted and made narrower

2.2. Grammar How to Analyze Grammar Phenomena

I. As I fumbled around for the matches, knocking things down with my quaking hands, I wished the sun would rise in the middle of the day, when it was warm and bright and cheerful, and one wasn't sleepy.

The sentence is complex with several subordinate clauses and is full of interesting and important grammar phenomena. But those specially underlined concern the following:

1) ....knocking things down with my quaking hands… is a participial construction used in the function of an adverbial modifier of attendant circumstances (or manner); another participle used in the construction is quaking which is a prepositional attribute to the noun hands.

2) ... I wish the sun would rise in the middle of the day…is one of the sentence patterns with Subjunctive II. What differs this sentence pattern from a more habitual one – smb wishes/wished/will wish smb did smth, was doing smth, smth was done is its emphatic character. According to the rule to make the sentence more emphatic one can use would + Infinitive after the expression of wish, but only if the subjects in both clauses are different and if the wish refers to the present or future – I wish/ wished, shall wish he/it would do/would not do it.

II. It was one of the saddest sights I ever saw.

Here we observe the superlative degree of the adjective sad – saddest where the letter d is doubled according to the formation rule. The noun sight is used in its plural form – sights showing that it is one of those numerous sights. Very often the speakers make a mistake using the singular form of the noun instead of the plural form because the word one misleads them as if it were pointing to a singular form.