OE Grammar. 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, so it was inflected type of the language.

The grammatical means that the English language used were primarily

a) grammatical endings (suffixation),

b) sound interchange in the root (vowel gradation),

c) grammatical prefixes,

d) suppletive forms.

 

The parts of speech to be distinguished in OE are as follows:

* The Noun

* The Adjective

* The Pronoun

* The Verb

* The Participle

* The Adverb

* The Preposition

* The Conjunction

* The Interjection

 

There were five declinable parts of speech in Old English:

* The Noun,

* The Pronoun,

* The Adjective,

* The Numeral,

* The Participle.

The nominal paradigm in Old English was characterized by the following grammatical categories: gender, number, case.

The paradigms of different parts of speech had the same number of grammatical categories but these parts of speech were different in the number of categorical forms composing a given grammatical category. Hence the system of forms of each part of speech requires special consideration.

 

The Noun.

The Old English noun paradigm was composed by the following grammatical categories: gender, number, case.

Gender

The category of gender was formed by the opposition of three gender-forms: masculine, feminine and neuter. All nouns belonged to one of the three genders. Some nouns denoting animals were also treated.as neuter, such as cicen (chicken), hors (horse), etc.

The grammatical gender did not always coincide with the natural gender of the person and sometimes even contradicted it: wifman (woman) – Masculine.

 

                                    Masculine

Male beings                  Lifeless things         Abstract notions

faeder (father)               hlaf (bread)             stenc (stench)

sunu (son)                     stān (stone)              fǣr (fear)

cyning (king)                hrōf (roof)               nama (name)

 

                                     Feminine

Female beings               Lifeless things           Abstract notions

mōdor (mother)             tunge (tongue)            trywðu (truth)

dohter (daughter)          meolc (milk)               lufu (love)

cwēn (queen)

Ʒōs (goose)

 

                                       Neuter

Living beings               Lifeless things             Abstract notions

cicen (chicken)             ēаƷе (eye)                       mōd (mood)

hors (horse)                  scip (ship)                       riht (right)

mæƷden (maiden)

 

Number

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

Nominative Singular                Nominative Plural

fisc (fish)                                         fiscas

ēаƷе (eye)                                        ēаƷan  

scip (ship)                                     scipu

 

Case

The Old English noun formed its paradigm by the opposition of four cases.

The most remarkable feature of OE nouns was their elaborate system of declensions which was the sort of morphological classification.

There were two respective principle groups of declensions in OE:

1) The vowel declension (strong);

2) The consonant declension (weak).

The vowel (strong) declension comprises four principal paradigms: the a-stem, the o-stem, the u-stem and the i-stem paradigm.

The consonant declension comprises nouns with n-stem, r-stem, s-stem.

 

In rare cases the new form was constructed by adding the ending directly to the root. These words formed the so-called root-stem declension.

 

Declension of a-stem nouns (Masculine and Neuter gender)

hlāf (bread), hwǣrte (wheat), hors (horse), fisc (fish), scip (ship)

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.

 

Declension of n-stem nouns (all genders)

nama (name.) — masculine, tunge (tongue) — feminine, ēаƷе (eye) — neuter

The n-stem was the most important among all the consonant stem declensions. This class of nouns was composed of common words.

 

Gender oppositions in this declension are also 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.