An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

ing, that is to say introducing non-native words into the language in
exactly the way we have already seen. Such words are often called loan
words, although neither the term ‘borrowing’ nor the term ‘loan word’
has exactly the correct meaning. The second and third types, i.e. affix-
ation and compounding, can be taken together as word-formation.
8.2 Core vocabulary
It might be thought entirely reasonable to assume that there is nothing
to be said about core vocabulary other than the simple fact that this
set consists virtually entirely of items shared with all or some of the
other Germanic languages. However, it is appropriate to consider in this
context a number of types of word formation which are essentially
historical in nature and which were already in Old English, to a greater
or lesser extent, no longer productive processes.
What I mean by this is that there appears to have been a wealth of
word-formation processes in earlier Germanic and even more so in
Indo-European. In the course of time most of these fell into disuse.
However the words so formed naturally remained in the language and
therefore the process remains recognisable. It can be quite difficult to
decide whether or not some particular word-formation process remains
synchronically active, especially when we are dealing with an ancient
language such as Old English where, what is more, the textual evidence
is patchy. Therefore some of the cases I discuss below might easily be
taken under the heading of affixation.
Perhaps the most obvious of these older formations concerns Ablaut.
So far my discussion of Ablaut has been restricted to verb types, but
originally Ablaut was a more widespread phenomenon by which nouns
could be formed from strong verbs, so that we find bite ‘a bite’ formed
from the verb bı¯tan, using the ablaut variant normally associated with the
past plural of verbs. Other examples are based on the present tense, for
example wita ‘wise man’ from witan ‘know’.
There are more complex examples than these, for in many cases the
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word-formation interacts with historical sound changes. The most
important concern Verner’s Law, which I discussed in Chapter 5 and
i-mutation (see the discussion in §4.5). But these changes can obscure
the relation between the original verb and its derived noun. A typical
example of the former is cyre ‘choice’ from c
.
e¯osan ‘choose’, and cyme
‘arrival’ from cuman ‘come’ is typical of the latter. It is even possible to
find examples where both changes have occurred, as in hryre ‘fall’ from
hre¯osan ‘fall’. It is also possible to find more than one noun derived from
a single verb. Thus alongside cyme ‘arrival’ we also find cuma ‘guest’.
Strong verbs are not the only verbs from which nouns can be derived.
Weak verbs too can be used to form new nouns. This happens both with
weak class 1 verbs, so that we find do¯m ‘judgement’ from de¯man ‘judge’,
and class 2 verbs, so that we find lufu ‘love’ from lufian ‘love’.
As I said earlier, this derivation type largely belongs to an early stage
in Germanic, and begins to be lost as the relationship between verb and
noun becomes obscured. This is least true of weak class 2 verbs, where
few historical changes intervene in the way that Verner’s Law and
i-mutation do. This remains, therefore, an active word-formation pro-
cess in Old English. It may, indeed, be the source of the Ø-formative or