ME Word Formation – Lecture 4 Any healthy language must have ways of creating new

lexical items without resorting exclusively to borrowing loan-translation. By the time of

written OE, the earlier devices of ablaut and umlaut were no longer productive and OE relied
primarily on compounding and affixing to form new words, both devices inherited from
Indo-European and still widely used in PDE. Very noticeable changes appear in the lexicon
as thousands of loans are introduced into the language.
Compounding-An occasional compound can be found among all parts of speech of OE, but
the great majority of compounds are nouns and adjectives. Many OE compounds have
disappeared and new ones have been created. From Middle English texts, however it is
obvious that the process of compounding is not as frequent at this stage I the development of
the language as it was in OE and Early Modern English. This may be due to the wealth of
loans in ME.
The most common type of compound noun consists of two nouns; usually, the first noun is
not inflected. a)noun + noun= noun: sunbēam ‘sunbeam’ luftācen ‘love token’ b)adjective +
noun = noun hēahsynn ‘high sin, crime’ c)adverb + noun = noun eftbōt ‘again-healing
OE was innovative among Germanic languages in its occasional use of triple
compounds: winterrǣdingbōc ‘lectionary for the winter’; biterwyrtdrenc ‘drink of bitter
herbs’ Some types of compound nouns found in PDE, however, did not occur in OE. For
example, OE did not have: verb + adverb compounds (hangover,) noun + verb compounds
(sunshine); verb + verb compounds (hearsay, look-see, lend-lease)
Compound adjectives in OE most often had an adjective as the second element. The first
element was usually a noun or an adjective, less often an adverb. One type of compound
adjective rare in PDE, the adjective + noun combination, was relatively common in OE.
a)noun + adjective = adjective: īsceald ‘ice-cold’ b)adjective + adjective = adjectiv
:hēahstēap ‘high-steep’ (very high) c)adverb + adjective = adjective :uplang ‘upright’
d)adjective + noun = adjective
Among the infrequent compound adverbs of OE are the adjective + adjective combination
eallmǣfst ‘almost’ and the adverb + adverb combination nǣfre (ne + cefre) ‘never’. OE did
have some compound verbs, but they usually were derived from preexisting nouns or
adjectives. Examples are līchamian ‘to clothe with flesh’ from līchama (body + covering),
meaning simply ‘body’, and goldhordian ‘to hoard treasure’, from the compound noun
goldhord. One common type of OE verb resembled a compound, but it is probably better
treated as a derived verb consisting of a prefix plus a verbal stem. This type of verb consisted
of an adverbial particle plus a verb. Examples are numerous: æfterfolgian ‘pursue’,
ofercuman ‘overcome’, on/on ‘take in, receive’, and underetan ‘undermine’. PDE preserves
this type of verb formation, though it is no longer especially productive.
2.Affixing Despite the extensive borrowing of words from French, the continued
productiveness of compounding, and the loss of a number of native prefixes and suffixes,
affixing continued to be one of the chief ways of creating new words in ME. A few OE
affixes were totally lost, not even surviving in already-formed words (or not being recognized
as affixes if they did). Among these were ed- ‘again’ (replaced by French/Latin re-); el-
‘foreign’; ymb- ‘around’; to- ‘motion toward’; and –end, which was used in OE to form
agentive nouns. Other native affixes survived in preexisting words, but lost most of their
productiveness. Examples include with- as in withstand; for- as in forsake, forswear; and –
hood as in motherhood, childhood. Among the new prefixes borrowed from French during
ME are counter-, de-, in- ‘not’, inter-, mal- and re-. Suffixes from French include –able, -age,
-al, -ery, -ess, -ify, -ist, -ity, and –ment. Some of them, such as re-, were freely attached to
native words and loanwords alike. Others have always retained their association with French
or Latin; for example, despite the hundreds of words in English ending in –ment, we would
hesitate to form an abstract noun by attaching –ment to a native root. In other words,
although we are thoroughly comfortable with discernment which received its – ment after
entering English, we find *understandment or *knowment decidedly unacceptable and prefer
to use the native gerund suffix –ing instead (understanding, knowing).
3.Minor sources of new words .PDE has a number of minor sources of new vocabulary
items, sources for which we have no evidence in surviving OE texts. However, in the more
extensive and more diversified texts from ME, a number of these processes make their first
appearance. Clipping, the process whereby one or more syllables are subtracted from a word,
became common in ME with words of French origin. This is not surprising. Native English
words usually have their major stress on the first syllable; hence the native speaker hearing a
French word would tend to interpret it as beginning with the onset of the major stress. Often
both the clipped and the full forms have survived in English, usually with a differentiation in
meaning. A few of the many possible examples from ME are fray (< affray), squire (<
esquire), stress (< distress), peal (<appeal), and mend (< amend). Somewhat similar to
clipping in result, though not in principle, is the back formation, a new word formed by
mistakenly interpreting an existing word as having been derived from it. Thus English
speakers interpreted the final –s of French orfreis as a plural suffix and created the new word
orphrey. Similarly, asp is a back formation of the (singular) Latin aspis, fog a back
formation from the Scandinavian loan foggy, and dawn from earlier English dawning.
Blends, also called portmanteau words, are combinations of two existing words to form a
new word. In PDE, the process is often deliberate (sexational from sex + sensational; smog
from smoke + fog), but it was probably still an unconscious process in ME. Particularly for
earlier periods, it is not always easy to be sure precisely what the original components of a
blend were, or even whether a particular item should be considered a blend or an echoic
word. However, among the numerous probable blends from ME are scroll from escrow +
roll; scrawl from sprout + crawl; and quaver from quake + waver.
Common nouns that originated as proper nouns also begin to appear in ME. These could
be from a person’s name, like jay from Latin Gaius and jacket from French Jacques; or they
could be from place names, like magnet from Magnesia, scallion from Ascalo, and damson
(plum) from Damascus. Among the fairly numerous onomatopoetic (echoic) words first
recorded in ME are blubber, buzz, and the now archaic and dialectal word dush ‘to crash’.
One of the more famous echoic words from the period is tehee, representing the sound of a
giggle, first recorded in Chaucer.
Old English does not provide us with clear-cut examples of folk etymology, primarily
because folk etymologies normally originate as attempts to make semantic sense of
unfamiliar words or parts of words. By ME, many OE words had become obsolete; when
these appeared in compounds still in use, the compounds were often restructured with more
familiar elements. One example is earwig from OE earwicga, originally a compound of ēar
‘ear’ and wicga ‘insect’. After wicga fell into disuse as an independent word, the earlier
compound was altered to earwig. Similarly, OE hlēapwince (from hlēapan ‘jump’ and wince
‘wink’), the name of a plover-like bird, was altered in ME to lapwing.