The old English words 'erst' and 'erstwhile' mean?
Old English grammatical gender when those conflicted, as in the case of , a neuter noun referring to a female person. In Old English's verbal compound constructions are the beginnings of the compound tenses of Modern English. Old English verbs include strong verbs, which form the past tense by altering the root vowel, and weak verbs, which use a suffix such as . As in Modern English, and peculiar to the Germanic languages, the verbs formed two great classes: weak (regular), and strong (irregular). Like today, Old English had fewer strong verbs, and many of these have over time decayed into weak
Changes to Old English vocabulary were brought on by the introduction of Old Norse and Norman French words, while others fell away due to the natural processes of language evolution. Modern English has no Germanic words left that mean 'animal' in its most generic sense of 'non-human creature'. Old English "dēor", "gesceaft", "gesceap", "nēat" and "iht" were all eclipsed by 'animal', 'beast', 'creature' and 'critter', all of which are of Latin origin. Changes to Old English vocabulary Many words that existed in Old English did not survive into Modern English. There are also many words in Modern English that bear little or no resemblance in