Words of native origin consist for the most part of very ancient elements - Indo-European, Germanic and West Germanic cognates. The bulk of the Old English word-stock has been preserved, although some words have passed out of existence. The Anglo-Saxon stock of words makes 25-30% of the English vocabulary.
Almost all of them belong to very important semantic groups, among them form-words:
- auxiliary and modal verbs: shall, will, should, would, must, can, may;
- pronouns: I, you, he, my, your, his, who, whose;
- prepositions: in, out, on, under;
- numerals: one, two, three, four, etc.;
- conjunctions: and, but, till, as.
Notional words of Anglo-Saxon origin:
- parts of the body: head, hand, arm, back;
- members of the family and closest relatives: father, mother, brother, son,
wife;
- natural phenomena and planets: snow, rain, wind, frost, sun, moon, star;
- animals: horse, cow, sheep, cat;
- qualities and properties: old, young, cold, hot, heavy, light, dark, white,
long;
- common actions: do, make, go, come, see, hear, eat.
Native words are highly polysemantic, stylistically neutral, enter a number of phraseological units.