The historical development of English compounds

Compounding is among the oldest methods of wordbulding, occurring in practically all the European languages. However, compounding is especially well-developed in modern Germanic languages.

English has built compound words during all periods and stages of its development. The two most productive types of English compounds have been the following:

1) noun stem + noun stem (rainbow, snowflake, headache), derived from free combinations of words,

2) adjectival stem + noun stem (holiday, sweetmeat).

One interesting historical example is manslaughter (человекоубийство), derived from old English mann slæht with the diverbal noun stem as its second element.

Some of the older historical compounds preserve this type in present-day English. Others have undergone significant phonetic changes, so that their compound nature is not perceived anymore, because they long turned into root words.

Russian linguists call this latter process simplification of stem (опрощение основы), while English grammarians name these words disguised compounds. E.g. daisy (derived from old English dagas eye meaning “day’s eye”), woman (from OE wifman meaning “woman person”), gossip (from OE God siepbe).

Demotivation of compounds is in many cases connected with simplification but not identical to it. Demotivation may be viewed as etymological isolation, when the word loses its former ties with other words with which it was originally connected and associated, e.g. to kidnap originally meant “to cease a yeanling (козленок)”.

The word lady originated from hlefdige with hlef meaning “bread” and dige “to knead”; lord from hleflord (“breadkeeper”).

Дата добавления: 2015-08-27