Практикум по истории языка (древнеанглийский период). Пятышина Т.Г - 30 стр.

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30
UNIT III. OLD ENGLISH VOCABULARY
I. General characteristics
The OE dictionary contains about 20 000 words, of which only a few
hundred are not Germanic. The others may be classified into 3 groups:
1. Words of I. – E. origin. E.g. fæder "father", nāma "name",
fót foot, niht "night", riht "right", sittan "sit", beran "to bear", etc.;
2. Words of Germanic origin. E.g. eorþe "earth", earm "arm",
eald "old", fīndan "find", sinʒan "to sing", slǣpan "to sleep", etc.;
3. Specifically English words (not to be found in other languages).
E.g. clipian "to call, to speak". They are very rare in number.
Old English vocabulary is almost purely germanic, but about 85% of
it has gone out of use: many of the OE words that have already
disappeared belong to the highly poetic vocabulary.
Nowadays, although more than half of the words to be found in an
English dictionary are of Romanic origin, the basic word stock of the
language has remained mostly Germanic. Indeed, it is quite obvious that
the names of the nearest family relations, of most parts of the body, of
many common plants, animals, tools, weapons, colors, shapes, of the
simplest moral qualities are of Germanic origin (see the examples above).
It is well illustrated by the following analysis of the origin of the 1 000
most frequently used words in Modern English of:
Old English origin------------61.7%
French---------------30.9%
Latin-----------------2.9%
Scandinavian-------1.7%
Mixed---------------1.3%
Dutch----------------0.3%
Uncertain-----------1.3%
Although OE did not contain most of the numerous Romanic elements
(they appeared only in ME period), it was far from being a poor language:
on the one hand they were not necessary, for they named things and
notions, which were to appear much later, on the other hand, one of the
main characteristics of OE was its great resourcefulness.

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