Nominal parts of speech

When speaking about the nominal parts of speech, that is noun, adjective, pronoun and numeral, we should say that the tendency of their development was simplification. It means that the paradigms of these parts of speech were simplified. They lost some of the categories and those which remained consist of fewer members.

THE NOUN: The OE noun had the category of case and number. Besides they had masculine, feminine and neuter gender and there were several types of declension. Already in the OE period there were many homonymous case forms within each declension and through the whole system of declensions.

There were 25 declensions but only 10 distinct endings. The type of the declension depended upon the following features:

• the stem-suffix,

• the gender of nouns,

• the phonetic structure of the word, the phonetic changes in the final syllable.

The system included the following declensions:

Vocalic stems (strong declension):	a - stems, ja - stems, wa - stems; ō - stems, jō - stems, wō - stems; i - stems; u - stems;
Consonantal stems:	n - stems (weak declension); root - stems; r - stems, s - stems, nd - stems

Declension of Nouns in oe

The category of case consisted of 4 cases – Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative.

The Nominative case was the case of the subject and the predicative. It denoted the active agent – the doer of the action.

The Genitive case showed that a noun was an attribute to another noun. According to its use the Genitive case was divided into Subjective Genitive and Objective Genitive. Subjective Genitive had possessive meaning or the meaning of origin (Ʒrendles dǣda- Grendel’s deeds). Objective Genitive had partitive meaning (sum hund scipa - a hundred of ships). It could be also used as an object to the verbs but then it was interchangeable with other cases.

The ending -es of the Genitive singular and -as of the Nominative and Accusative Masculine began to be added to the nouns of different stems and were the basis of the modern plural form and Possessive Case.

The Dative case was used with prepositions (on morʒenne); it could also denote the passive subject of a state expressed by the predicate (him ʒelicode heora peanas- he liked their customs).

The Accusative case indicated a relationship to a verb; it was used as a direct object of the verb and denoted the object of an action the result of an action.

According to the gender nouns divided into masculine, feminine and neuter. Some derivational suffixes referred nouns to a certain gender and semantic group. Grammatical gender didn’t always correspond to sex. Thus OE nouns wif (wife) and mæʒden (maiden) were Neuter, while wifman (woman) was Masculine. That’s why we can say that gender was a grammatical and not a semantic distinction. It was connected with the stems: nouns with a - stems were Masculine and Neuter; nouns with ō - stems were Feminine; i - stems included nouns of all three genders; u - stems included Masculine and Feminine nouns; n - stems included nouns of all three genders; root - stems were Masculine and Feminine; other consonantal stems included nouns of all three genders.

According to the phonetic structure there were monosyllabic and polysyllabic words which formed different declensions.