Historical Background of Modern English Spelling. Old English Morphology
| Almaty College of Communication
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Subject: English language history
Academic year: 2013-2014
Lecture 7
Theme: Historical Background of Modern English Spelling. Old English Morphology
Teacher: Zhakipbekova D.K
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Historical Background of Modern English Spelling. Old English Morphology
OE Spelling
based on phonetic principle;
employed Latin characters;
one letter = one sound;
Exceptions: ζ, f, s, ð (1 letter = 2 or more sounds).
more ambiguous and less stable (printing was not introduced yet and the manuscripts contained numerous variants of spelling – practically each… digraphs (2 letters = 1 sound) appear + 1 letter = several sounds, several…
new digraphs appeared (indicated borrowings from other languages) – ph, ps, ch;
spelling became fixed.
There reasons for such stabilisation were as follows:
Old English Morphology
Old English was a synthetic language, i.e. there were a lot of inflections.
changeable
1. Noun
Nominal Categories:
Number, Case, Gender, Degrees of Comparison, Determination
2.…
Below all notional parts of speech will be discussed, their categories described and the meanings of these categories…
In OE there were 25 declensions of nouns. All nouns were grouped into declensions according to:
stem-suffix;
Gender. We will mention only the most numerous declensions/stems here:
Strong Vocalic Stems
Weak…