VL 6 - Old English Pronunciatoon, Spelling and Grammar PDF

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Old English Pronunciatoon, Spelling and Grammar...

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VL_6_Old English Pronunciatoon, Spelling and Grammar 1. Pronunciation and sound changes - our knowledge of OE pronunciation can only be approximate - there was regional, social, and individual variation in language use 1.1 The Old English vowel system - pronunciation = spelling = pronunciation - most dialects of OE had 7 vowels (each with a long and a short variant)+

vowel quantity: - usually not marked in spelling - was meaning-distinguishing: go:d (good) – god (God) - the consonant graphemes in OE were: - and were interchangeable graphemes - doubling of consonants indicated a long consonant (e.g., in fyllan) 1.3 Important sound changes - In Pre-Old English: I-mutation (I-umlaut): a change in a vowel sound brought about by an ior j-sound in the following syllable - In Old English: Split of /k/ and /g/ due to palatalisation (the process of sound change in which a non-palatal consonant changes to a palatal consonant) /k/  [k] & [tsch] ; /g/  [g] & [j] - In High German, but NOT in Low German and English: 2nd Germanic Sound shif

2. Nominal inflection / Verb inflection / Syntax 2.1 Synthetic character of Old English - predominantly synthetic marking of grammatical categories - many nominal and verbal inflections - flexible word order 2.2 Nominal Morphology - nouns, adjectives, and pronouns were inflected to express a number of grammatical categories: case: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative number: singular, plural gender: masculine, feminine, neuter

nouns - inflected for number (sg., pl.) and case (N, G, D, A; Instrumental merged with Dative) - different types of declension: vowel declension (strong: a, ō, i, u in Germanic) and consonant declension (weak) adjectives - congruency of case, number and gender with the related noun - strong and weak declension 3. Verb morphology - verbs were inflected to express 4 grammatical categories: person (1st, 2nd, 3rd person), number (SG, PL), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), and tense (present, past) Strong and weak verbs - strong verbs make use of a regular change of the stem vowel (Ablaut) for the encoding of 1st past, 2nd past and past participle - 7 classes of strong verbs in Old English (=7 Ablautreihen) - weak verbs make use of a dental suffix to encode past (participle) forms 4. Syntax Word order: SVO, SOV, VSO...