Old English Grammar Questions for discussion

Old English Grammar

Questions for discussion § General survey of the nominal system of OE § The Noun 2. 1) Gender 2. 2) Number 2. 3) Case § 2. 4) Homonymity of forms in Old English and its influence on the further development of noun forms § The Pronoun 3. 1) Personal pronoun 3. 2) Other pronouns

Further reading Расторгуева, Т. А. История английского языка: учебник / Т. А. Расторгуева. – 2 -е изд. , стер. – М. : Астрель : АСТ, 2003. – 348 с. ; P. 92– 93 (General survey of the system); P. 93 -101 (The Noun); P. 102 -105 (The Pronoun).

Key words § Nominal system – именные части речи (существительное, прилагательное, местоимение, числительное) § Synthetic § Inflected § Grammatical means of OE – suffixation; vowel gradation; use of suppletive forms § Gender-forms: masculine, feminine and neuter § Declensions: a) General masculine; b) General feminine; c) General neuter; d) The -(a)n declension; e) Minor declensions § Strong declensions (=the vowel declensions) § Weak declension (=the consonant declension)

General survey of the nominal system § The Old English language was a synthetic language which means that all the principal grammatical notions were expressed by a change of the form of the word. § The grammatical means that the English language used were primarily: a) suffixation; b) vowel gradation; c) use of suppletive forms. § Old English was a highly inflected language. There were five declinable parts of speech in Old English: the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the numeral, the participle.

The noun The Old English noun paradigm was composed by the following grammatical categories: gender, number, case. The Old English noun formed its paradigm by the opposition of a) three genders, b) two numbers and c) four cases. Thus, the noun had twenty-four word-forms. In the course of the development of Old English, however, the original paradigm had undergone great changes due to the fusion of the original stem suffix and the original grammatical ending into one element which from the point of view of Old English is to be regarded as a grammatical ending.

2. 1. Gender The category of gender was formed by the opposition of three gender-forms: masculine, feminine and neuter. The subdivision of Old English nouns in accordance with their grammatical gender is traditional, the correspondence between the meaning of the word and its grammatical gender being hard to trace. The grammatical gender did not always coincide with the natural gender of the person, animal, ect. and sometimes even contradicted it (ex. : the noun wifman (woman) was declined as masculine).

2. 2. Number The grammatical category of number was formed by the opposition of two categorial forms: the singular and the plural.

2. 3. Case § OE nouns can be classified into five declensions: a) General masculine; b) General feminine; c) General neuter; d) The -(a)n declension; e) Minor declensions. § The first three declensions are often referred to as the strong declensions (=the vowel declensions), while the fourth is the weak declension (=the consonant declension). § The vowel (strong) declension comprises four principal paradigms: the a-stem, the o-stem, the u-stem and the i-stem paradigm. The consonant (weak) declension comprises nouns with the stem originally ending in -n, r, -s and some other consonants. In minor declensions some new forms are constructed by adding the ending directly to the root.

Vowel-Stems Declension of a-stem nouns This type of declension consists of the masculine and the neuter genders of Old English nouns. As a rule those are common everyday words that formed the very core of the word-stock, such as hlāf ‘bread’, hors ‘horse’, scip ‘ship’, hund ‘dog’, wer ‘man’.

Nominative Singular Plural stān ‘stone’ stānas stānes stāna Accusative stānas Dative stānum Genitive

The paradigm of the a-stem nouns is characterised by the homonymity of the Nominative and Accusative case-forms. The rest of the forms retain their endings. The difference between the genders of the nouns is clearly seen from the different endings in the Nominative and the Accusative plural, i. e. -as for the masculine and -u for the neuter.

Some nouns follow this pattern with some variation in the paradigm caused through sound-change. Ex. : dæg ‘day’ has the same inflexions as stān but changes the vowel of its root to a in the plural – dagas, daga, dagum. Nouns ending in -h lose this ending when an inflexion is added, e. g. mearh ‘horse’, mēares (genitive singular). In disyllabic words, the unstressed vowel of the second syllable is lost when an inflexion is added, as in engel ‘angel’, engles (genitive singular), englas (nominative/accusative plural).

Consonant stems Declension of (a)n-stem nouns / The -(a)n declension The consonant declensions consisted of nouns with the stem originally ending in -n, -r, -s and other consonants.

Singular Plural Nominative nama ‘name’ (masculine) naman Genitive naman namena Accusative naman Dative naman namum

§ This declension includes masculine, feminine and neuter nouns (only two neuters, ēage ‘eye’, ēare ‘ear’). The feminine nominative singular ends in -e, as do the neuter nominative and accusative singular; otherwise, they do not differ from the masculine paradigm. § The n-stem was the most important among all the consonant stem declensions. This class of nouns was composed of common words. The group was very extensive in Old English and like the a-stem declension it exhibited a tendency to spread its forms over other declensions.

Gender oppositions in this declension were not distinct, the masculine nouns being different from the feminine only in the Nominative Singular and from the neuter — in the Nominative and the Accusative Singular.

Minor declensions There are several minor declensions, classified by their way of forming the nominative and accusative plural. The most important are a) the -a plurals, b) uninflected plurals, and c) ‘mutation’ plurals (=root-stem nouns). There also a few irregular nouns which do not fall into any other category.

The -a plurals, both masculine and feminine, decline as follows Nominative Singular sunu ‘son’ Plural suna Genitive suna Accusative sunu suna Dative suna sunum

These nouns derive from Proto -Germanic nouns with u, e. g. the masculine sunu ‘son’, wudu ‘wood’, medu ‘mead’; feminines are duru ‘door’, nosu ‘nose’.

Uninflected plurals decline like the general masculine, feminine and neuter declensions listed above, except for the nominative and accusative plural. The most important of these are the relationship nouns.

Singular Plural Nominative dohtor ‘daughter’ dohtor Genitive dohtor dohtra Accusative dohtor Dative dehter dohtrum

Mutation’ plurals (=root-stems declension) are still to be found in present-day English, e. g. foot, feet, man, men, mouse, mice.

Singular Plural Nominative fōt ‘foot’ fēt Genitive fōtes fōta Accusative fōt fēt Dative fēt fōtum

2. 4. Homonymity of forms in Old English and its influence on the further development of noun forms In the prehistoric period of the development of the English language each case had an ending typical of its uninflected form. In the course of the development of the English language due to various semantic and phonetic changes different cases began to develop similar endings within one and the same paradigm; this phenomenon gave rise to the well-marked homonymity of case-forms in English.

The most distinct among them are: § -es — genitive singular, masculine and neuter §-a/ena — genitive plural, all genders §-um — dative plural, all genders §-as — nominative and accusative plural, masculine.

The existence of different endings of nouns grammatically alike and homonymous endings of nouns grammatically different testifies to a certain inadequacy of the morphological devices or the Old English noun to show the relation of the noun to other words in the sentence and a need for the development of new means to denote the grammatical meanings formerly denoted morphologically.

The pronoun The following classes of pronouns were to be observed in Old English: personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, relative and indefinite pronouns.

The system of declension of the pronoun has at least two subsystems that should be singled out: 1) the declension of personal pronouns and 2) the declension of other pronouns. The grammatical categories of each subsystem were the same, i. e. gender, number, case but the number of the categorical forms composing those categories was different.

3. 1. The personal pronoun The Old English personal pronoun had the grammatical categories of gender, number and case.

Gender Three genders could be distinguished in the pronominal paradigm: masculine, feminine and neuter, but different forms for different genders were found only in the third person singular, the rest of the forms being indifferent to gender.

Number There were three categorial forms: singular, dual and plural, ex. : Ic ‘I’, wit ‘two of us’; wē (we).

Case The category of case is built up by the opposition of four categorial forms, similar to those of the noun: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative. The paradigm of the Old English personal pronouns is built up by suppletive forms and the homonymity of pronominal forms is not great. It is found only in the Dative and the Accusative cases.

3. 2. Other pronouns All Old English pronouns with the exception of personal pronouns were declined almost alike. They expressed the grammatical categories of a) gender (three forms: masculine, feminine and neuter), b) number (two forms: singular and plural) and c) case, which was built up by five categorial forms: the Nominative, the Accusative, the Dative, the Genitive and the Instrumental, different from the Dative only in the Singular. All the other pronouns unlike the personal pronoun and the noun had five cases.