An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

subjunctive – see mood.
subordination – where one syntactic unit is dependent upon another.
suffix – bound morpheme that follows the root or stem.
suffixoid – an element which shares the properties of a suffix and an indepen-
dent word, and whose morphological status is therefore uncertain.
suppletion – phenomenon whereby one lexeme is represented by two or
more different roots, depending on the context; for example, the verb ‘go’ is
represented by ‘went’ in the past tense and ‘go’ elsewhere.
syllable – consists of a vowel and its immediately preceding and following
consonants; hence onset describes the preceding consonant(s) and coda the
following ones, while the central vowel element(s) are the nucleus.
syncope – the loss of an unstressed vowel.
tense – grammatical category exhibited by verbs, closely associated with
time. In English, a distinction between present and past tenses is expressed
inflectionally, e.g. ‘give’ and ‘wait’ versus ‘gave’ and ‘waited’.
umlaut – an historical process by which back vowels were fronted and front
vowels raised; the change is most easily observed in nouns such as foot ~ feet.
velar – a sound produced by moving the back of the tongue against the soft
palate or velum.
verb, contracted – a verb where the final consonant of the stem (preceding any
inflection) has been lost.
verb, preterite-present – a verb where the past tense has acquired a new
present tense meaning, with the subsequent acquisition of a new set of past
tense forms.
verb, inseparable, separable – where a prefix may either always remain with
the stem against prefixes which may be separated from their stem by a variety
of elements and word order type.
verb, weak and strong – the two major morphological groups of verbs in Old
English; the former relate to present-day verbs such as love, the latter to verbs
like sing.
Verner’s Law – the series of changes in stops and fricatives which distinguish
Germanic from most of Indo-European languages, first discovered by Karl
Verner.