Noun (4th lecture)

The morphology of Old English is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more highly inflected.

Without knowing the original structure of the nouns in the language we can hardly explain the exceptions in the formation of plural of Present-day English too. For example, why foot-feet but boot – boots.

Nouns had categories of number, gender and case. Gender is not actually a grammatical category in a strict sense of the word (except for the notions mann, fæder, brōðor – masculine and modor, sweostor – feminine; wīfman is masculine because the send element of the compound is masculine.) for every noun with all its forms belongs to only one gender; but case and number had a set of endings. There are 2 numbers – singular/plural – There were five major cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and instrumental.

• The nominative case indicated the subject of the sentence, for example se cyning means 'the king'. It was also used for direct address. Adjectives in the predicate (qualifying a noun on the other side of 'to be') were also in the nominative.

• The accusative indicated the direct object of the sentence, for example Æþelbald lufode þone cyning means "Æþelbald loved the king", where Æþelbald is the subject and the king is the object. Already the accusative had begun to merge with the nominative; it was never distinguished in the plural, or in a neuter noun.

• The genitive case indicated possession, for example the þæs cyninges scip is "the ship of the king" or "the king's ship". It also indicated partitive (разделительный) nouns.

• The dative case indicated the indirect object of the sentence, for example hringas þæm cyninge means "rings for the king" or "rings to the king". There were also several verbs which took direct objects in the dative.

• The instrumental case indicated an instrument used to achieve something, for example lifde sweorde, "he lived by the sword", where sweorde is the instrumental form of sweord. During the Old English period, the instrumental was falling out of use, having largely merged with the dative. Only pronouns and strong adjectives retained separate forms for the instrumental.

There were different endings depending on whether the noun was in the singular (for example, hring 'one ring') or plural (for example, hringas 'many rings').

In traditional historical studies the nouns are divided into classes according to the former stem-forming suffixes which determined what inflections (флексия, окончание) were taken by the nouns. The nouns in OE are commonly classified as belonging to strong and weak declension, within each of these groups there are several subgroups.

The strong declension.

The strong noun paradigm declines for case, gender and singular/plural.

	Masculine		Neuter		Feminine
	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Nominative	--	-as	--	-u / --	-u / --	-a, -e
Genitive	-es	-a	-es	-a	-e	-a
Dative	-e	-um	-e	-um	-e	-um
-Accusative	--	-as	--	-u / --	-e	-a, -e

Stone- stān (m) Ship – scip (n) tale – talu (f)

	Masculine		Neuter		Feminine
	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Nominative	stān	stānas	scip	scipu / scip	talu	tala,
Genitive	stānes	stāna	scipes	scipa	tale	tala
Dative	stāne	stānum	scipe	scipum	tale	talum
Accusative	stān	stānas	scip	scipu / scip	tale	tala

Of course there were some peculiarities in this declension. If you want to find them out you should bury yourself in the books.