- •Pre-Roman Britain
- •The Roman Period
- •The Dark Ages
- •The Anglo Saxon Period
- •Lecture 2. Old english phonetics
- •Word Stress
- •Changes of Stressed Vowels in Early Old English
- •Independent Changes. Development of Monophthongs
- •Development of Diphthongs
- •Assimilative Vowel Changes: Breaking and Diphthongisation
- •Palatal Mutation
- •Changes of Unstressed Vowels in Early Old English
- •Old English Vowel System (9th-10th c.)
- •Consonant Changes in Pre-Written Periods
- •Treatment of Fricatives. Hardening. Rhotacism. Voicing and Devoicing
- •West Germanic Gemination of Consonants
- •Velar Consonants in Early Old English. Growth of New Phonemes
- •Loss of Consonants in Some Positions
- •Lecture 3. Old english grammar Preliminary Remarks
- •The noun. Grammatical Categories. The Use of Cases
- •Morphological Classification of Nouns. Declensions
- •The pronoun
- •Personal Pronouns*
- •Demonstrative Pronouns
- •The adjective. Grammatical Categories
- •Weak and Strong Declension
- •Degrees of Comparison
- •Lecture 4. Old english grammar
- •Grammatical Categories of the Finite Verb
- •Grammatical Categories of the Verbals
- •Morphological Classification of Verbs
- •Strong Verbs
- •Weak Verbs
- •Minor Groups of Verbs
- •Oe syntax
- •Lecture 5. Middle english grammar Evolution of the grammatical system
- •The noun. Decay of Noun Declensions in Early Middle English
- •The pronoun. Personal and Possessive Pronouns
- •The adjective. Decay of Declensions and Grammatical Categories
- •Lecture 6. Middle english grammar
- •Verbals. The Infinitive and the Participle
- •Strong Verbs
- •Weak verbs
- •New Grammatical Forms and Categories of the Verb
- •The Future Tense
- •Passive Forms. Category of Voice
- •Perfect Forms
- •Continuous Forms
The pronoun
OE pronouns fell roughly under the same main classes as modem pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. As for the other groups — relative, possessive and reflexive — they were as yet not fully developed and were not always distinctly separated from the four main classes. The grammatical categories of the pronouns were either similar to those of nouns (in "noun-pronouns") or corresponded to those of adjectives (in "adjective pronouns"). Some features of pronouns were peculiar to them alone.
Personal Pronouns*
OE personal pronouns had three persons, three numbers in the 1st and 2nd p. (two numbers—in the 3rd) and three genders in the 3rd p. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p. had suppletive forms like their parallels in other IE languages. The pronouns of the 3rd p., having originated from demonstrative pronouns, had many affinities with the latter.
In OE, while nouns consistently distinguished between four cases, personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions: the forms of the Dat. case of the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p. were frequently used instead of the Acc.; in fact the fusion of these two cases in the pi was completed in the WS dialect already in Early OE: Acc. eowic and usic were replaced by Dat. eow, us; in the sg usage was variable, but variant forms revealed the same tendency to generalise the form of the Dat. for both case's. This is seen in the following quotation:
Se ðe me gehælde, se cwæð tō me 'He who healed me, he said to me' — the first me, though Dat. in form, serves as an Acc. (direct object); the second me is a real Dat.
*See a table of personal pronouns declension at p.103 in “History of English” by Rastorguyeva.
Demonstrative Pronouns
There were two demonstrative pronouns in OE: the prototype of NE that, which distinguished three genders in the sg and had one form for all the genders in the pi. and the prototype of this with the same subdivisions: ðes Masc., ðeos Fem., ðis Neut. and ðas pl. They were declined like adjectives according to a five-case system:
Nom., Gen., Dat., Acc., and Instr. (the latter having a special form only in the Masc., Neut.sg).
Declension of sē, sēo, ðæt
Case |
Singular |
Plural |
|
M N F |
All genders |
Norn. |
sē, se ðæt sēo |
ða |
Gen. |
ðæs ðæs ðære |
ðāra, ðæra |
Dat. |
ðæm, ðām ðæm, ðām ðære |
ðām, ðæm |
Acc. |
ðone ðæt ðā |
ðā |
Instr. |
ðy, ðon ðy, ðon ðære |
ðæm, ðām |
The paradigm of the demonstrative pronoun se contained many homonymous forms. Some case endings resembled those of personal pronouns, e.g. –m – Dat. Masc. and Neut. and Dat. pl;
the element -r- in the Dat. and Gen. sg Fem. and in the Gen. pl. These case endings, which do not occur in the noun paradigms, are often referred to as "pronominal" endings (-m, -r-, -t).
The adjective. Grammatical Categories
As stated before, the adjective in OE could change for number, gender and case. Those were dependent grammatical categories or forms of agreement of the adjective with the noun it modified or with the subject of the sentence — if the adjective was a predicative. Like nouns, adjectives had three genders and two numbers. The category of case in adjectives differed from that of nouns: in addition to the four cases of nouns they had one more case, Instr. It was used when the adjective served as an attribute to a noun in the Dat. case expressing an instrumental meaning — e.g.: lytle werede 'with (the help of) a small troop'.