Dieter Kastovsky ic's vocabulary foreign, strange martyr dare prepare, supply church in the sense of community of people Lat virtus = virtue aslfremed 21 geaelfremod cyptie gedyrstlaecan 17 (ge)gearcian 121 gearcung gelafmng 223 — fremde martir 113 martirdom 53 dyrstigness 30 — — — cirice — — miht" 38 maegen" 40 — heafodnuegen heahmsegen Lat virtus = power, might, heavenly powers terror, fright miht- 94 — msgen" oga 37 egesa gryre correct, mend one's way regret, repent proud (ge)rihtl£ecan 57 rihtlaecung |behreowsian|103 |modig| 133 broga ege71 fyrhto 25 gerihtan 18 rihting 12 — pryte crown |wuldorbeag|15 cynehelm" 25 helm ws prudens superbus Alfred Wulfstan wsr{scipe) n>a>r(scipe) ofermod/-mtttu ofermod/-mettu ofermodigness gleaw(mss) ghawiness) gleaw{scipe) snotetiness) (snyttru) snotoriness) ofermod{nets) ofermod{ness) ofermodig(ness) Bible-translations early late Orosius Benedictine group 348 ofermodigl -mettu modig{ness) — — oferhygdig ofermod cynehelmb Semantics and vocabulary Seebold (1974:320) suggests that the difference between the Benedictine group and the other three groups is almost certainly due to dialectal variation, and not just a matter of diachrony within a single dialect Thus the Benedictine group must have relied rather heavily on a local southern dialect when establishing their written norm, which also spread to the area of the Bible translations (possibly Canterbury) This conclusion basically agrees with the findings of Gneuss (1972), except that the latter regards the 'Winchester standard' not as a dialectal phenomenon but as an instance of language planning, involving 'a specific and planned vocabulary, prevalent in one school and restricted to a certain area, and not just a modern trend in general usage' (Gneuss 1972:78) Hofstetter (1987:545), on the other hand, following Seebold, also thinks that the local dialect of Winchester and/or its surroundings had some decisive influence In any case, it is obvious that West Saxon was no homogeneous dialect but must be seen as a set of (more or less overlapping) subdialects sharing common features that distinguished them from the various Anglian sub-dialects To the examples of ' Winchester words' listed as part of iElfric's vocabulary can be added: undergytan 'understand' instead of ongietan (Alfred, and Anglian), understandan (Wulfstan) (Ono 1986), leorningcniht 'disciple', rveofod 'altar' (vs alter, altare), sunu ' s o n ' (vs beam), cnapa ' boy' (vs cniht),gylt' guilt' (vs scyld), (ge)blissian' rejoice' (vs gefsegnian), and others, see Hofstetter (1987:16), Gneuss (1972:76-7) Other, general Late West Saxon words that are not restricted to the 'Winchester school' include angsum 'narrow, anxious', besargian 'lament', eornostlice 'therefore, indeed', gedeorf 'labour', msersian 'praise', scrudnian 'examine, consider', pxslic 'suitable', wxfels 'dress, cloak' (Gneuss 1972:80), behatan 'promise', hundfeald 'hundredfold', wipxftan 'from behind', tima 'time', wiperwinna 'opponent' (Wenisch 1978:21) 5.3.1.5 Dialects tend to differ not only at the level of the individual lexeme, but also at the more general level of word-formation, in that they select or at least favour certain patterns over other functionally equivalent ones This is corroborated by a number of observations, although a systematic investigation of this aspect of OE word-formation does not yet exist One clear-cut difference between Anglian and non-Anglian dialects is the employment of -icge vs -estre for the formation of female agent nouns (von Lindheim 1958, 1969; Schabram 1970) For example, byrdicge 'embroideress', dryicge 'sorceress', hunticge 'huntress', scernicge 349 Dieter Kastovsky 'actress', synnicge 'sinner', a-, ge-, sunu-cennicge 'mother' occur only in texts whose Anglian origin is certain or at least highly likely (Schabram 1970:97), and not in WS texts On the other hand, bepzcestre 'whore', berpestre 'female carrier', cempestre 'female warrior', forgifestre 'female giver', hearpestre 'female harper', huntigestre 'huntress', lufestre 'female lover', etc., occur only in WS texts Similarly, the suffixoids (Sauer 1985:283) -berende and -bxre acting as equivalents of Lat -fer/-ger (cf Lat lucifer,floriger)seem to occur in complementary dialectal distribution (von Lindheim 1972) Thus -berende (in adlberende 'carrying illness', mppelberende 'apple-bearing', atorberende' poisonous', blostmberende'flower-bearing',etc.) is practically exclusively Anglian; only deapberende 'death-bearing' CP 280.7, leohtberende 'light-carrying' Hept Gen XV 17, wxstmberende 'fertile' are attested in WS texts On the other hand, -bxre (in atorbsere, blostmbsere, cornbzre, etc.) seems to be WS; it was particularly productive in LWS and was a favourite with iElfric While these cases of dialectal word-formation patterns can be taken as definitely established because of the scope of the material covered, other instances need reinvestigation Jordan (1906:103) mentions the Anglian, especially Northumbrian employment of the adjectival suffix -ig also for deriving deadjectival adjectives, e.g druncenig 'drunk' < druncen 'drunk', untrymig 'infirm' < untrum, piostrig/Pystrig 'obscure, dark' < peostor 'dark', gesyndig 'sound' herung 'praise', styring > styrung 'motion', bytling > by flung 'building', gebicning > gebicnung 'beckoning', etc But as in the previous case, only an analysis of the whole OE corpus can show whether this is a diachronic or a diatopic phenomenon 5.3.2 Diaphasic variation 5.3.2.1 As pointed out in §5.1.2, there are various dimensions of variation besides ' region' that affect the structure of the OE vocabulary Of these, ' social group' (or ' diastratic variation') and ' medium' are necessarily monostratal because of the nature of the OE texts, which all come from the same type of social group and represent only the written language At the same time this limits the dimension of' attitude' to the formal level There have been some attempts to discover OE colloquialisms in vocabulary and meaning on the basis of the OE Riddles and of native words that appear for the first time in early ME Thus, von Lindheim (1951/2) suggests that wamb 'womb', neb 'nose', Pyre/ 'hole', steort 'tail', all typical riddle-words with possibly obscene connotations and not occurring in other types of poetry, as well as the meaning 'lust' oiwlonc and^a/ might have been colloquial in OE But both the method and the available material have strong limitations, and the conclusion must necessarily remain rather tentative Within the formal level, however, there are remarkable differences between poetry and prose, and even within these categories, e.g between heroic and Christian poetry, or between didactic, legal or scientific prose, see also chapter below 5.3.2.2 There are basically three categories of lexemes in O E : (1) those that are common OE and occur both in prose and poetry, e.g man ' man', bus ' house', blod' blood', heofon ' heaven'; (2) those that only or predominantly occur in poetry, e.g hselep, beorn, freca, rinc, secg, 'hero, warrior, man', pengel, fengel, brego, eodor, rxswa 'prince, king', ides 'woman, queen'; (3) those that only or predominantly occur in prose, Dieter Kastovsky e.g abbod 'abbot', borg 'surety', ege 'fright', hopa 'hope', nouns in -ere, verbs in -Isecan, loan-translations, later loans from Latin, etc (cf Stanley 1971) Purely poetic words have always received special attention and are usually also given specific labels in dictionaries (cf Clark Hall 1960) or editions (cf Klaeber 1950:lxiii, 293ff.) But, as Schabram (1966:85, 1969:101) has pointed out, such indications are far from reliable, because they are usually not based on a complete survey of the prose texts The existence of specifically prosaic words has also been known for quite a long time, but the first systematic study was Stanley (1971), who investigated those specifically prosaic words that occasionally also occur in strict verse (cf also Gneuss 1982:158) 5.3.2.3 The existence of specifically poetic words as such is not too surprising, because poetry not infrequently tries to use a diction that differs from everyday language, for example, by employing rare, frequently archaic words The same is of course true of OE, and many poetic words seem to be archaisms, e.g heoru, mece 'sword', gup, hild 'battle' (possibly originally Valkyrie-names, cf Marquardt 1938:119), orgamo/'old',Jiras'men' (Schiicking 1915:6) Others are, or originated as, metonymic or metaphorical expressions, e.g ceo/'keel',flota 'floater' for ' ship' (instead of scip, bat) or lind ' shield', xse ' spear' (referring to the material they consist of), otfreca 'warrior' {free adj 'eager, bold, daring') This may have the effect that the meanings of such poetic words are not always completely clear, which is why Schiicking (1915:6) speaks of 'thick veils' obscuring what is described in these poems Another source of the semantic problem of meaning-specification is intimately related to 'the most important rhetorical figure, in fact the very soul of the Old English poetical style' (Klaeber 1950:lxv), variation Variation can be defined as 'a double or multiple statement of the same concept or idea in different words, with a more or less perceptible shift in stress' (Brodeur 1959:40) For example, in Beowulf we find the lines frean Scyldinga beaga bryttan )?eoden maerne Ic )?ses wine Deniga, frinan wille, swa \>u bena eart ymb )?inne si6 'I shall ask the lord of Danes, the ruler of the Scyldings, giver of rings, as you make petition, ask the famous prince concerning your visit ' 35* Semantics and vocabulary Here, wine Deniga 'lord of the Danes', frean Scyldinga 'ruler of the Scyldings', beaga bryttan 'giver of rings', peoden mserne 'famous prince' all refer to King Hrothgar, but describe him from different points of view, attributing different properties to him This rhetorical figure obviously requires a large number of synonyms, either simple or complex, especially in those areas that form the central topics of the OE poetic literature It is not surprising, therefore, that there are so many (partial) synonyms for notions such as 'sea' (see Buckhurst 1929) (e.g sse, geofon, heafu, mere, lagu, wxter, flod, holm, sund, brim, Jam, sxstream, sxwxg, sxholm, lagustreamas, brimstreamas, lagoflodas, drencflod, wsegpreat, jPa wylm), ' s h i p ' (scip, ceol, wsegflota, hringed-stefna, sxgenga, brimwudu, merehus, smhengest,yf>mearb, sundhengesf), 'hall, house' (bus, earn, reced,flet, heall, sxl, sele, bold, burh,geard, hof, wic), 'man, warrior' (monn, eorl, ceorl, wer, guma, rinc, beorn, secg, hxkp, firas, nippas,jlde, landbuend, grundbuend, foldbuend, sawlberend) and many others And this is also the reason why the determination of the precise shade of meaning of those synonyms is so difficult, at least as far as simple lexical items are concerned Items such as brimwudu, sxhengest at the same time represent another phenomenon characteristic of Germanic poetry in general and also directly related to the principle of variation: the systematic use of simple and complex metaphorical expressions called heiti and kenningar (cf Marquardt 1938; Brodeur 1959:247-59) Following Snorri Sturluson's categorisation in Skdldskaparmdl (see Brodeur 1952; 1959:247ff.), three categories may be distinguished The o'kend heiti ('uncharacterised terms') are simple, unqualified nouns with a literal (e.g scip, bat) or a metaphorical/figurative (e.g flota 'that which floats = ship', ceol 'keel = ship') interpretation; the kend heiti and the kenningar are complex expressions serving as metaphorical periphrases of the referent in question, replacing the lexical item that would normally be used They are nominal in structure, i.e nominal compounds or groups, for example, a noun modified by a genitive, which is functionally equivalent to a compound (e.g ydgewinn —jida gewinn 'wave strife = strife of the waves = sea') They differ in that the kend heiti ('characterised terms') identify the referent as something which it is by emphasising a certain quality, aspect or function of it, while in the kenningar 'the base word identifies the referent with something it is not, except in relation to the concept expressed in the limiting word' (Brodeur 1959:250) Thus, a ship really is a sxgenga ' seagoer', or wxgflota 'wave-floater', but it is not a wxghengest 'sea-steed' or brimwudu' sea-wood'; the sun really is a heofonleoma or swegles leoht' light 353 Dieter Kastovsky of heaven', but it is not a rodores candel' heaven-candle' or beofnes gim 'heavenly gem', except in a metaphorical sense (but cf Marquardt 1938:116fF., who rejects this distinction and treats both types as kenningar) In the kennings, there is thus 'a tension between the concept and the base-word; the limiting word partially resolves the unreality of that relation it depends on the hearer's ability and willingness to see likeness within unlikeness' (Brodeur 1959:150-1) Both types of periphrasis, typically associated with variation structures, are extremely frequent in OE poetry Further examples of kend heiti are expressions for earth (hxlepa epel 'home of men', feeder ealdgeweorc ' ancient work of the Father'), the sea (fisces epel' home of the fish', seolhbxp ' seal-bath', jpa geswing ' surge of the waves'), thunder {wolcna sweg 'sound of the clouds'), dragon {lyftfloga 'flier in the air', goldweard, hordes hyrde' keeper of gold, treasure'), or the many expressions for lord, prince, king (ealdor pegna ' lord of the warriors', hselepa brego 'ruler of men', folces weard 'protector of the people', beaggifa 'ringgiver', etc.) The following are genuine kennings: beadoleoma, hildeleoma 'battle-light = sword', mere-hrsegl 'sea-dress = sail', gupwine 'battlefriend = sword', banhus, bancofa 'bone-coffer, bone-chamber = body' (all in Beowulf), or hildenxdre 'battle-adder = javelin, arrow', garbeam 'spear-tree = warrior', heafodgim 'head-gem = eye' These latter come from religious poems such as Genesis, Exodus, Elene or Andreas, and are regarded as 'riddle-like and far-fetched' by Brodeur (1959:35), who sees in these more extravagant formations a typical feature of the later religious poems, i.e there seems to be a difference in this respect between the traditional heroic and the later religious poems which have adopted but also modified the format of heroic poetry The phenomenon in question highlights a property of OE repeatedly mentioned already, the prolificness of its word-formation patterns, because many, although by no means all of the kend heiti and kenningar are compounds It is certainly no accident that, for example, in Beowulf about one third of the entire vocabulary consists of compounds In the 3,182 lines of the poem, Brodeur (1959:7) has counted 903 distinct substantive compounds, 518 of which occur only in Beowulf, and 578 are found only once in the poem; there are 86 Adj -f Adj or Advb + Adj compounds (e.g brunfag 'brown-hued', gramhydig 'hostile-thinking'; feorrancund' come from afar'), of which 36 occur only here; 164 items are N + Adj compounds (e.g lagu-crxftig 'skilled in seafaring', morgenceald 'morning-cold'), of which 86 are unique; and 36 are bahuvrihicompounds of the structure Adj + N (e.g blodigtod ' bloody-toothed', 354 Semantics and vocabulary blondenfeax ' grizzly-haired \famigheals 'foamy-necked'), of which 15 are pecular to Beowulf Beowulf certainly is an extreme, but it is nevertheless representative of the O E poetic diction and its vocabulary and thus demonstrates, perhaps most clearly, how strongly poetic diction is based on a specific type of vocabulary 5.3.2.4 Compared to poetic diction, the prose vocabulary is less striking According to the subject matter dealt with in the existing texts, we will of course come across differences, e.g between legal terminology in the Anglo-Saxon laws (cf Liebermann 1903-16), medical and biological terminology in the Leecbbook (cf Bierbaumer 1975/6) or grammatical terminology in iElfric's Grammar One feature which must have had a considerable influence on the formation of the O E vocabulary should be mentioned again in this connection, namely the dependence of many O E texts on a Latin original In §5.2.1.5 the phenomena of semantic loans, loan-translations and loan-creations have already been discussed extensively, and it is quite obvious that they play a much greater role in the prose vocabulary (and even more so in the glosses) than in poetry Unfortunately, besides Gneuss' (1955) investigation of the Vespasian Psalter there has been no further large-scale attempt at describing this area One domain that would profit greatly from further studies of loan-translations is O E word-formation, because it is quite clear that many O E formations were prompted by Latin originals And even if many O E translations may have had a rather esoteric status - cf e.g the grammatical terminology in ^Elfric's Grammar - they still provide clues as to the productivity of O E wordformation patterns But there again, a comprehensive description has still to be written 5.4 Word-formation 5.4.1 General aspects 5.4.1.1 Every language requires patterns according to which new lexemes can be formed on the basis of already existing lexical material The most basic property of such new formations is their transparent, motivated status: on the basis of their structure and the meaning of the constituents their meaning can be computed Thus, wxter-berere 'waterbearer', pening-mangere 'money-dealer', lagu-swim mend 'sea-swimmer = fish', «/>-swerung 'oath-swearing' are easily interpreted on this basis even when coming across them for the first time This, certainly, was one 355 Dieter Kastovsky reason why loan-translations were preferred to loans in the earlier OE period Word-formations are lexical syntagmas based on a determinant (modifier)/determinatum (head) relation (Marchand 1969:3); in the Germanic languages, the determinant always precedes the determinatum This holds for compounds as well as for prefixations and suffixations, cf dt wseter winter forf sin feond / dm / berere setl faran cald scipe / / / / ' bearer of water' ' winter-quarters' 'go forth, depart' ' perpetually (sin-) cold' 'hostility = state (-scipe) of being an enemy (feond-)' l*r / end ' teacher = someone (-end) who teaches (Isr-)' The principle of transparency/motivation can be impaired by the process of lexicalisation: once formed, a lexeme may adopt additional semantic properties that are not predictable from the meanings of the constituents and the pattern underlying the combination Thus morgengifu is not simply a gift given at some morning, but a gift given to the bride by her husband after the wedding-night; cyningeswyrt is not simply a herb that has something to with a/the king, but refers to marjoram; and forpfaran does not only mean ' go away' in the literal, but also the figurative sense, 'die' Lexicalisation is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but a scale, and lexemes may move along this scale in the course of time When dealing with an historical period, therefore, it is not always easy to determine whether a given formation is lexicalised or not Sometimes lexicalisation itself may be pattern-forming, when some element of a series of formations loses its original meaning (usually by a process of meaning generalisation) and is only employed with this new meaning in new formations This may in time lead to the status of an affix, e.g with -scipe 'state, status', -bsere 'carrying', -wende 'conducing', or at least an affixoid, as with -dom, -lac, -rxden 'state, status' (Sauer 1985:283) A slightly different development took place with leod, peod ' people', which in leodcyning, Peodcyning ' king of the people = mighty king' have still preserved their original meaning, although with an additional intensifying function, whilst in peodloga 'arch-lier', peodwiga 356 Semantics and vocabulary 'great warrior', kodbealu 'terrible calamity', leodgryre 'general terror', the determinant has merely intensifying function But in view of the existence of combinations with a literal meaning, we should not treat leod, peodas prefixoids (with respect to Sauer 1985:284) The morpheme cyne-, alternant of cyning 'king', on the other hand, has probably progressed further in this direction, cf cynebmnd 'diadem', cynebot 'king's compensation', cynegierela 'royal robe', although a formation like cynescipe 'royalty, majesty' confirms that cyne- must still have had word-status, because -scipe in OE was definitely a suffix, and combinations of the type **prefix + suffix have never existed in English 5.4.1.2 Marchand (1969:2) defines word-formation as 'that branch of the science of language which studies the patterns on which a language forms new lexical units' Applying this definition to a language no longer spoken raises a number of serious problems Firstly, there is no way of testing productivity directly; all we have is circumstantial evidence such as the number of new formations occurring in texts of a given period, their semantic quality (i.e their semantic regularity, homogeneity, degree of lexicalisation), the correlation of morphophonemic alternations with the overall morphophonemic system operating also in inflexion (i.e the degree of morphological transparency, the type of conditioning, etc.) or continued productivity in subsequent periods Taken together, these factors will give us a reasonably good indication as to whether a pattern was productive or not, but no more than that Moreover, productivity is a cline, and we have to determine a cut-off point after which we should no longer include the respective formations Secondly, neither productivity nor transparency are static phenomena; they can vary diachronically, cf -nis, which apparently lost the ability to combine with verb-stems and came to be restricted to participles and adjectives in LWS (see §5.3.1.5) When one has to deal with a linguistic period such as OE, stretching over some 600 years, there are bound to have been many such changes, not all of which can be reconstructed because of our limited evidence, which covers only the last 200 to 250 years and is rather fragmentary at that Much of what would actually constitute various historical layers within a given pattern will therefore inevitably appear projected onto a two-dimensional plane, since only the output of the patterns as recorded in the later documents is available for study Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, even when a given pattern 357 Semantics and vocabulary 5.4.5.3 Adjectival derivatives Affixless deverbal adjectives are primarily, although not exclusively, derived from strong verbs, mainly from the reduced, sometimes also the lengthened, and with class VII from the basic grade, with and without /-umlaut The derivatives frequently occur as second members of compounds, see §5.4.2.3 Their meaning is typically 'prone to do, doing, being (ed)', as in twice ' deceitful', eapfynde ' easy tofind',xf>ryt 'troublesome', cweme 'pleasant, agreeable' The numerous simple and complex zero-derived denominal adjectives can be divided into two basic categories: those having the masc nom sg in -e, and those without an ending The former category is derived from a simple or a compound noun, with or without /-umlaut, e.g.fielde'field-like', anbieme' made of one trunk', aneage 'one-eyed', and is characterised by typically adjectival meanings such as 'having, being like, being characterised by, being made of The second category is endingless and consists of £aAwr//fo'-compounds proper, e.g bxrfot 'barefoot', langmod 'patient', blandenfeax 'grey-haired' 5.4.5.4 Verbal derivatives As has been mentioned, affixless derivation is the major source of new verbs in Old English, because all verbal suffixes are fairly unproductive The only really productive patterns in Old English are denominal deadjectival and deadverbial derivations; deverbal derivation (resulting in causatives) is no longer productive, although its results are still transparent The results are weak verbs Pilch (1970:132) lists the following strong class VII verbs as denominal: rxdan ' advise' < rxd 'advice', slsepan 'sleep' < sleep 'sleep', bland 'mix'