25. Values of consonant letters in oe

In the majority of cases each of OE cons. letters represented a single phoneme, but a few of them had two or even more readings

Letter C stood for /k’/ before front vowels (cild, cæt); and for /k/ in all other positions (cnāwan)

Letter ʒ stood for

a) /Ɣ’/ before or after a front vowel

b) /Ɣ/ after r or between back vowels (sorʒian, draʒan)

c) for /g/ in other positions (gān, sinʒan)

Letters þ and ð indicated both /ð/ and /θ/

Letters f, s, þ, ð in the intervocal position all indicated the corresponding fricatives /v, z, ð/ In the initial or final position they all stood for corresponding unvoiced fricatives /f, s, θ/

// lufian, cēōsan, cweðan; þis, pāp, fif

26. Oe nouns; declension

The OE noun had 2 gram. or morph. categories: number and case. In addition, nouns distinguished three genders, but this distinction was not a gram. category. The category of number: singular and plural. The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative. The Nom. can be defined as the case of the active agent. The Gen. case was primarily the case of nouns and pronouns serving as attributes to other nouns. Dat. was the chief case used with prepositions. The Acc. case was the form that indicated a relationship to a verb.

Declensions - a sort of morphological classification. The total number of declensions, including both the major and minor types, exceeded 25. All in all there were only ten distinct endings (plus some phonetic variants of these endings) and a few relevant root-vowel interchanges used in the noun paradigms; yet every morphological class had either its own specific endings or a specific succession of markers. In the first place, the morphological classification of OE nouns rested upon the most ancient grouping of nouns according to the stem-suffixes. Stem-suffixes could consist of vowels (a-stem, i-stem), of consonants (ii-stems), of sound sequences ( ja-stems, -nd-stems). Some groups of nouns had no stem-forming suffix or had a "zero-suffix"; they are usually termed "root-stems" and are grouped together with consonantal stems, as their roots ended in consonants. The loss of stem-suffixes as distinct component parts had led to the formation of different sets of grammatical endings.

OE nouns distinguished three genders: Masc., Fem., and Neut. In OE gender was primarily a grammatical distinction; Masc., Fern. and Neut. nouns could have different forms, even if they belonged to the same stem (type of declension).

The majority of OE nouns belonged to the a-stems, s-stems and n-stems. Morphological Classification of Nouns in Old English Division according to stem:

Division according to gender

Division according to length of the root-syllable

A-stems included Masc. and Neut. nouns.

The other vocalic stems, i-stems and u-stems, include nouns of different genders.

The most numerous group of the consonantal stems were n-stems. N-stems included many Masc. nouns, many Fern. nouns, and only a few Neut. nouns.