Ancient English
The early North Germanic language spoken by the Vikings
What is Old Norse?
The phenomenon of words sounding the same but spelt differently.
What is homophony?
What parts of multiple words are combined to form new words
What is a blend or portmanteau?
Insertion of an adverb between the to-infinitive and the infinitive verb
What is a split infinitive?
When "sinister" used to mean favourable or fortunate
What is semantic pejoration or degradation?
The person who set up the printing press, thus standardising the English language
Who is William Caxton?
The name for the unstressed central vowel, represented by 'ə'
What is a schwa?
When two free morphemes combine to form a new word
What is compounding?
The linguistic term given for repetition of lexis within a phrase, e.g. go walk walk (VP), the white white (AP) one
What is reduplication?
The coexistence of many possible senses for a word or phrase
What is polysemy?
The oldest known alphabet system used by the Anglo-Saxons in their writing
What are runes or futhorc?
A group of consonants which have no intervening vowel within a syllable
What is a consonant cluster?
Grammatical suffixes that include -s, -ed, and -ing
What are inflectional morphemes?
The Middle English form of the 2nd person singular nominative personal pronoun
What is "thou"?
A group of two or more words that are almost always put together to create a specific meaning
What is collocation?
A word that has the same linguistic derivation or origin as another word.
What is a cognate?
The process by which a sound is produced with the lips pouted in a small circle
What is rounding?
A word loaned from another language by word-for-word translation
What is a calque?
A morphosyntactic process in which a lexical item denies or inverts the meaning of another lexical item or construction
What is negation?
A listing of each occurrence of a word in a corpus, presented with the words surrounding it
What is a concordance?
A dialect spectrum of varieties of a creole language between those most and least similar to the superstrate language.
What is the post-creole continuum?
The voiceless labio-dental fricative phoneme
What is /f/?
A kind of word formation involving the creation of a word from an existing word without any change in form but change in part of speech
What is conversion?
The marking of a word with a grammatical morpheme (or affix).
What is inflection?
A phrase that describes how euphemisms themselves become taboo words over time
What is the euphemism treadmill?