Lecture 1 Introduction

Inversion was used only in questions and for emphasis.


Negation
In OE the common word for negation was ne (IE origin). It was simply placed before a word that was to be negated:
e.g. OE Ne can ic (“I don’t know”, or literally “Not know I”).
As a result of this position before a word the particle ne often fused with:

• 
  a verb (e.g. OE nis ← ne is; næs ← ne wæs; næfde ← ne hæfde (had), etc);
  
• 
  a numeral (e.g. OE nān ← ne an (none));
  
• 
  a pronoun (e.g. OE nic ← ne ic (not me));
  
• 
  an adverb (e.g. OE nēfre ← ne āfre (never)).
  

Multiple negation was perfectly normal:
e.g. OE Nis nān wisdom ne nān rēad naht onean God. – “There is no knowledge concerning God.”
Often the particle ne was strengthened by the particle naht.

In ME particle ne fell out of use and was replaced completely by the particle naht that later developed into not, stood manly after a verb (V + not) and negated it:

e.g. I fell to earth I knew not where.

In NE, during the Normalisation Period, no-double-negation rule appeared that prohibited more than one negative word in a sentence.

Lecture 20
Old English Vocabulary

The history of words throws light on the history of the speaking community and its contacts with other people.

According to some rough counts OE vocabulary had between 23 000 and 24 000 lexical units. About only 15% of them survived in ModE.
In OE there were an extremely low percentage of borrowings from other languages (only 3% as compared to 70% in ModE). Thus OE from the point of view of its vocabulary was a thoroughly Germanic language.