26. The evolution of the English Noun.

OLD ENGLISH NOUNS Grammatical categories are usually subdivided into nominal categories, found in nominal parts of speech (Noun, Pronoun, Adjective, numerals) and verbal categories found chiefly in the finite verb. There were 5 nominal grammatical categories in Old English: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness. The noun had only 2 grammatical categories proper. They are inflected for number and case. In addition nouns distinguished 3 genders. It’s interesting to know that sometimes male beings need not necessarily be denoted by nouns of the masculine gender. The same applies to nouns denoting female beings. Old English word wĪf is Neuter and wĪfman is Masculine. Sometimes a word could be in two genders Very often however Old English gender corresponds to natural sex division In late Old English the gender of nouns tended to adjust in most cases: for example, wĪfman began to be treaded as Feminine instead of Masculine. The category of number consisted of 2 members: singular and plural, which were well distinguished in all declensions with very few homonymous forms. The noun had 4 cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative). The Nominative case is the case of an active agent. Nouns in the Genitive case served as attributes to other nouns. Dative could convey an instrumental meaning, indicated the means and manner of the action. The Accusative case was used with nouns as direct object denoting the recipient of an action The most remarkable feature of Old English nouns was their elaborate system of declensions, which is a sortal morphological classification. The total number of declension exceeded 25. There were two respective principal groups of declensions in Old English: the vowel declension (“strong” declension) and consonant declension (“weak” declension). The vowel declension comprises 4 main paradigms a-stem, ō-stem, u-stem and i-stem. The consonant declension comprises nouns with the stem originally ending in –n, -r, -s. The majority of the nouns of consonant declension ended in –n, that’s why it is sometimes called ndeclension. And besides by the end of Old English period r, s-stems were declined by analogy of a-stems. In some cases the new form is constructed by adding the ending directly to the root. These words formed the so-called root-declension. In Old English there was also a group of -es-stems denoting children. NOUN IN MIDDLE ENGLISH The grammatical category of gender was lost in Middle English. In Chaucer’s time gender was a lexical (semantic) category, like in Modern English.(nouns are referred to as “he” or “she” if they denote human beings and as “it” if they denote animals and inanimale thing). The categories of case and number were presented in a modifical shape. In Middle English the number of cases reduced from 4 to 2. The syncretism of cases (when one and the same form denotes different cases) lasted for many years. In Middle English the system of declension became more regular and uniform. Homonymous forms in Old English noun paradigms caused neutralization of the grammatical oppositions; similar endings, employed in different declensions, disrupted the group of nouns into morphological classes. Even in Old English the endings used in ā-stems, ō-stems, and nstems were added to the same gender. This is how the noun declension tended to be re-arranged on basic of gender. The grammatical category of Number proved to be the most stable of all nominal categories. Two numbers have been preserved through all historical periods. MODERN ENGLISH NOUNS In late modern English the ending –es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the plural. In early New English it extended to more nouns- to the new words appearing in English vocabulary, to many words of other way of plural formation or which employed –es as just of the variant endings. Thus, we see that the complicated noun paradigm that existed in Old English was greatly simplified in Middle English, which is reflected in the following: 1. reduction of the number of declensions. 2. reduction of the number of grammatical categories 3. reduction of the number of categorial forms within one of two remaining grammatical categories- the category of number. The plural ending –es underwent several phonetic changes: the voicing of fricatives and the loss of unstressed vowels in the final syllables. The Middle English plural ending –en lost its former productivity and is found nowdays10 only in oxen, children and brothren, poetic kine (cow). (Children and brothren in Old English belonged to the es-stems with –ru in the plural.) The small group of Middle English nouns with homonymous forms of the singular and plural has been reduced to three “exceptions” in Modern English: deer, sheep, and swine. The group of former root-stems has survived as exceptions man, tooth and the like. The nouns wife-wives and the like have retained consonant interchange. Now a few words about exception tooth- teeth. In Old English plural ending was –i: tōptōp+i. Letter ō compared to the ending –i: top > tēp > tēth > teeth Also the words foot- feet, goose- geese. All modern irregular noun forms are according to their origin