Archaisms and historisms

Archaisms are words which are no longer used in everyday speech, which have been ousted by their synonyms. Archaisms remain in the language, but they are used as stylistic devices to express solemnity.

Most of these words are lexical archaisms and they are stylistic synonyms of words which ousted them from the neutral style.

Some of them are: steed (horse), slay(kill), behold (see),perchance (perhaps), woe (sorrow), betwixt (between) etc. These lexical archaisms belong to the poetic style.

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.

Sometimes the roof of the word remains and the affix is changed, then the old affix is considered to be a morphemic archaism, e.g. beautious (-ous was substituted by - ful), bepaint (be- was dropped), darksome (–some wsa dropped), ofe (-en was added) etc.

When the causes of the word’s disappearance are extra-linguistic, e.g. when the thing is no longer used, its name becomes a historism. Historisms are very numerous as names for social relations, institutions, objects of material culture of the past. The names of ancient transport means, such as types of boats, or types of carriages, ancient clothes, weapons, musical instruments can offer good examples. Here belong such transport means as brougham, berlin, fly, gig, hansom, phaeton etc, also such vehicles as prairie schooner (a canvas-covered wagon used by pioneers crossing the North American prairies), also such boats as caravel, galleon etc. Historisms also include such weapons as breastplate, croosbow, arrow, vizor etc.