Grammar

Old English was a synthetic language (the lexical and grammatical notions of the word were contained in one unit). It was highly inflected, with many various affixes. The principal grammatical means were suffixation, vowel interchange or ablaut and supplition.

Suffixation:

Ic cēре (I keep) — þu cēpst (you keep) — he cēрð (he keeps)

Vowel interchange:

wrītan (to write) — Ic wrāt (I wrote)

Suppletive [sə'plitɪv ], ['sʌplətɪv] (супплетивный) forms (suppletivism, i.e. use of different roots for different forms — (cупплетивизм - образование форм одного и того же слова от разных основ): "я - меня", "иду - шел", "хороший - лучше", хороший—лучше—лучший, английский am — is):

ʒān (to go) — ēode (went)

bēon (to be) — Ic eom (I am) – þu eart (you are) - he is (he is)

There was no fixed word-order in Old English, the order of the words in the sentence was relatively free.

Vocabulary.

When we look at Anglo-Saxon culture, we're looking primarily at verbal artifacts, at the OE vocabulary.

The Anglo-Saxon speakers of Old English tended to resist importing words, they tended not to borrow words from Latin, they prefered coining (создавать слова и выражения) words based on their own root stock. But it does not mean that there were no borrowed words at all.

Scholars have identified two broad periods of borrowing in OE known as continental and insular.

The continental period of borrowing took place during the first centuries A.D., before the Germanic peoples split up, while they were still situated on the European continent and had contact with a living Roman imperial and cultural presence. Words that came into the Germanic languages at this point survive in all modern Germanic languages and we have to look at them to see how they have survived in Modern English as well.

To start, there is the word “strata”. As we know, the Romans were famous for their roads – a common expression is “All roads lead to Rome”, and all roads lead to Rome because it was the Romans who built the roads. And the Latin word strata, meaning street, appears in virtually every language that the Romans came into contact with. We might think that such words as street, strasse, stratum and strada are cognates (that is, they all descended from an original shared Indo-European root) but, in fact they descend from a Latin word that was consciously borrowed into the Germanic and other European languages.

The Romans built roads to move their armies, and thus words for war are among the earliest borrowings from Latin into the Germanic languages. These include such words as camp (which originally meant fortification), wall, mile and pit (яма).

Latin words for trade also entered the Germanic languages. For example, the Latin word caupo means a tradesman; this entered the Germanic languages as cheap in English or kaufen in German. In Scandinavian languages, a tradesman was a kaupmann, and his haven (гавань) or port was a kaupmannhofen. This would later become the name for the city of Copenhagen.

Such words as wine, pound, and mint (монетный двор) were also Latin loan words that entered the Germanic languages during the continental period, along with words for specialty foods (cheese, pepper, butter, plum, prune (чернослив), pea) and words for architecture (chalk, copper (медь), pitch (смола), tile). These are the distinctive features of high Roman culture.

Word for rulership: the Latin Caesar pronounced [kaizer] gave words for political control in many languages, such as German Kaiser and Russian tsar [zɑː].

In the early 4^th century the Roman emperor Constantine declared Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. So by the time the pagan Anglo-Saxons came to the British Isles, they were coming to the Roman imperial culture that had been Christian for about a century and a half. During the 6^th and 7^th centuries, missionaries from Rome were sent to northern Europe and the British Isles to convert the Germanic peoples. During this insular or island period, a) Latin loan words for newer religious concepts, b) older Celtic terms from the indigenous[ɪn'dɪʤɪnəs] (местный) Celtic peoples living in the British Isles, and c) words from the Scandinavian languages of Viking and Danish raiders in England came into the Germanic languages.

Words from Celtic and Latin Christianity borrowed in the 6^th – 7^th centuries include cross, priest, shrine (гробница, усыпальница, склеп; храм, церковь), rule, school, master, and pupil.

Words from Scandinavian Germanic languages were borrowed after contact with the Vikings and the Danes during their raids on England in the 8-9^th centuries. These words were distinguished by special sounds in the Scandinavian languages, in particular, the sounds "sk~” and “k-“, which corresponded to the sounds “sh” and "eh-" in Old English. Thus, Scandinavian skirt, kirk, skip and dike have Germanic family cognates in Old English shirt, church, ship, and ditch.

Scandinavian languages also had a hard ‘g” sound that was not present in Old English: the words muggy (сырой и тёплый), ugly, egg, and rugged are Scandinavian borrowings; certain words with the “ll” sound, such ill were also borrowed.

In the 10^th and 11^th centuries, more elaborate and learned ['lɜːnɪd] Latin words came into Old English, including Antichrist, apostle [ə'pɔsl], canticle ['kæntɪkl] (церковный гимн), demon, font (купель - сосуд, из камня или дерева, на подставке; используется для обряда крещения), nocturne ['nɔktɜːn] (ноктюрн), Sabbath ['sæbəθ] (суббота, шабат (священный день отдохновения у иудеев) воскресенье (священный день отдохновения у христиан) пятница (священный день отдохновения у мусульман), synagogue ['sɪnəgɔg], accent, history, paper, and so on.