The vocabulary of Old English has strong Germanic characteristics. This is mainly manifested in the fact that compound words are an important word-formation method, and compound words occupy an important position in old English vocabulary. According to statistics, there are 1069 compound words in line 3 183 of the epic Beowulf. The unstressed parts of some compound words gradually lost their independent status and evolved into affixes, such as for-, in- and -ful, which were also widely used in Old English. * * There are 24 noun suffixes and 15 adjective suffixes, -dom, -hood, -ship, -the, -ful,-. There is a special rhetorical device in old English poetry, namely alliteration, from which many phrases have been preserved to this day, such as power and justice, friends and enemies, and labor of love.
There are two important historical events in Old English, which have a great influence on English vocabulary. The first thing is to introduce Christianity into English. In 597 AD, a priest named Augustine came to England from Rome to preach. Roman culture was introduced into England with Christianity. At the same time, some Latin words entered English.
The second thing is the Nordic invasion of Britain. Since 790 AD, a large number of Scandinavian navies have settled in Britain, and King Knut of Denmark once became the British monarch. Scandinavians have frequent contact with the British, so many Scandinavian words have entered English.
Old English nouns are divided into numbers and cases. Numbers are divided into singular and plural; Case is divided into nominative case, possessive case, dative case and objective case. So a noun adds up to * * * with eight variants. In addition, nouns can be divided into masculine, neuter and feminine. These gender differences are not judged by gender, for example, women are masculine.
The morphological changes of adjectives are strong and weak, and the number and case of adjectives also change 10.
Verbs have only two tenses, the present tense and the past tense, but they are inflected differently according to different people. In contrast, modern English only retains the inflectional changes of -s/-es in the third person singular, and the past tense has the suffix of -ed.
I hope it can help you solve the problem.