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Thou and thy, aye (yes) and nay (no) are certainly archaic
and long since rejected by –common usage, yet poets use them
even today. We also find the same four words and many –other
archaisms among dialectisms, which is quite natural, as dialects
are also conservative m and retain many archaic words and
structures. Further examples of archaisms are: morn (for
morning), eve (for evening), moon (for month), damsel (for girl),
errant (for wandering, e. g. errant knights), etc. steed /horse/, slay
/kill/, behold /see/, perchance /perhaps/, woe /sorrow/ etc.
Sometimes a lexical archaism begins a new life, getting a
new meaning, then the old meaning becomes a semantic archaism,
e.g. «fair» in the meaning «beautiful» is a semantic archaism, but
in the meaning «blond» it belongs to the neutral style.
It should be pointed out that the borderline between obsolete
and archaic is vague and and uncertain in many cases it is difficult
to decide to which of the groups this or that word belongs. There is
a further term for words which arc no longer in use: historisms. By
this we mean words denoting objects and phenomena which are,
things of the past and no longer exist. goblet, lute, vizor,
cataphract, childe.
At the present moment English is developing very swiftly
and there is so called «neology blowup». R. Berchfield who
worked at compiling a four-volume supplement to NED says that
averagely 800 neologisms appear every year in Modern English. It
has also become a language-giver recently, especially with the
development of computerization.
New words, as a rule, appear in speech of an individual
person who wants to express his idea in some original way. This
person is called «originater». New lexical units are primarily used
by university teachers, newspaper reporters, by those who are
connected with mass media.
Neologisms can develop in three main ways: a lexical unit
existing in the language can change its meaning to denote a new
object or phenomenon. In such cases we have semantic

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