THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC WORLD VIEW ON THE BASIS OF THE OLD ENGLISH SUBSTANTIVES WITH THE STEM-BUILDING SUFFIX -S-

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC WORLD VIEW ON THE BASIS OF THE OLD ENGLISH SUBSTANTIVES WITH THE STEM-BUILDING SUFFIX -S-

Author:  N.S. Kovalenko

Affiliation:  Tomsk Polytechnic University

Abstract: 
In ancient times, s-stems were of great importance in the Indo-European protolanguage. The traces of substantives with the stem-building suffix -s- can be found in most Indo-European languages. However, the further development of this group of nouns varies from language to language. In Old English nouns with -s were not numerous. Actually, they are the relics of ancient Indo-European state. This is proved by the fact that the consonantal stem-building suffix -s- primarily marked nouns naming animate objects.
In Old English the stem-building formant -s- was a word-formative suffix serving as the marker of animateness. The belonging of the Old English s-stems to the neuter (inanimate) gender does not indicate that these nouns were inanimate as the division of the substantives according to gender took place much later than their division into stems according to stem-building suffix. The function of the stem-building formant -s- was not to indicate the gender of the noun but to mark its animateness.
Thus, the complex analysis proves that the Old English s-stems analysed were animated. These are nouns possessing active denotates or having an active past. They denote living beings, parts of the plants, socially important objects of the surrounding reality, things that played an important role in economy, cult, and religion of ancient people.
The research gives the opportunity to reconstruct a small piece of the ancient world view when all the objects of reality fell into animate and inanimate ones. In fact, these relics with -s reflect the attitude of the ancient people to the world around them.

Keywords:  linguistic world view, stem-building consonantal suffix -s-, category of animateness, gender differentiation, etymological analysis, semantic principle, ethnocultural importance

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Pages:  109-114