Echoes of the past

Abstract

Abstract Old English texts preserve a number of imitative words which give an intriguing insight into the sphere of sound-denotation of this ancient language. The study of Anglo-Saxon texts, however, reveals that many onomatopoeic words used there are non-existent in the Present-Day English. In this paper I argue that more than a half of these imitative lexemes have become extinct or have been replaced in the course of the following 1000-year history of the English language, and that such replacement was, at least partly, predetermined by the very nature of the imitative words. This study has been conducted using both poetic texts and etymological dictionaries.

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