The PGmc lexicon

The main focus of this book is the ‘internal’ history of Old English, the structural history of the language itself, rather than the sociopolitical or cultural history of the communities that spoke it. Indeed, the primary focus of linguistic history is always internal in this sense. But languages have ‘external’ histories too: speech-communities live social and political lives, come into contact with speakers of other languages and their cultures and institutions, are conquered by them or conquer them. Such contacts may also have their linguistic reflections. In the normal way of things, it is mainly vocabulary that reflects, if anything does, a language's external history. Contacts with other languages can easily lead to the transfer (‘borrowing’) of words: less easily (though not that uncommonly) of other structural materials like morphology, syntactic constructions, etc. Historically if not synchronically lexicons tend to be stratified, with every major contact episode leaving some traces.

The OE lexicon is no exception; it consists of a large (majority) stock of items directly inherited from PGmc and its daughters NWGmc and WGmc; as well as items borrowed from other IE dialects (especially Latin), and many new formations. The first part of this chapter (§§8.1–2) will be concerned with the reflections of external history in the OE lexicon; the rest with word-formation processes of various degrees of productivity that reflect the IE and PGmc heritage.