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Ewa Ciszek
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Email: ewac at ifa dot amu dot edu dot pl
The aim of the present paper is to analyse the semantic development and productivity of the OE suffix -isc in Middle English. The data used for the study come from the Dictionary of Old English (A-F) based on the Toronto Corpus, the Toronto Corpus itself, Bosworth and Toller (1898-1921) and Hall (1894 [2000]) for Old English and from the Middle English Dictionary online for Middle English.
The OE suffix -isc was used to derive adjectives from nouns and had the sense ‘a quality’. More specifically, most of the -isc words had the meaning ‘ of a certain nationality/origin’ and were coined from place-names. The same adjectives could quite often function as nouns (usually in the plural) and then refer to ‘a group of people of a certain nationality/origin’. Also, in a few derivatives such as, e.g., brittisc ‘British’, denisc ‘the Norse language’, ebrēisc (hebrēisc) ‘Hebrew’ or egyptisc ‘Egyptian’ one can find the sense ‘the language of a certain nationality’. Additionally, the suffix could be attached to personal names, e.g., arrianisc ‘Arian, adhering to the doctrine of Arius of Alexandria’ and davidisc ‘of or by David, (referring to the psalms)’ as well as common nouns, e.g., cildisc ‘of a child; of tender age’, cristallisc ‘of crystal’ and laurisc ‘of laurel’.
The suffix -isc is quite frequent in Old English. It has been attested in almost 190 derivatives. More than 20 of them do not occur either in Bosworth and Toller (1898-1921) or in Hall (1894 [2000]). Almost 50 -isc words survived into Early Middle English. However, the information provided by the MED for one fifth of them indicates that we deal with new coinages. As regards actual new EME formations, there are not even 20 of them. The suffix enjoys a real revival only in Late Middle English, for which I have found about 120 newly formed derivatives.
The suffix has lower productivity in Early Middle English. The possible reasons may have been: (1) the frequent replacement of -isc by the constructions with of + ‘noun’, (2) most of the -isc words were rather restricted to biblical context and (3) some competing suffixes (also French) which started to be successfully applied instead of -isc.