Declension of Nouns in me and ne

In ME the number of cases reduced to 2. The Genitive case was no longer used as an object; it was used attributively to modify a noun. Together with the Genitive case noun phrases with the preposition ‘of’ were widely used, the former was used with animate nouns, the latter with inanimate. The decay of the grammatical endings began in the 10^th century and spread from north to south. In the 11-12^th centuries the category of gender was lost. It became purely lexical and was defined with nouns denoting animate beings, while inanimate things were referred to as ‘it’. As for the number the ending ‘-es’ became the most common marker. The ending ‘-en’ was also used but less and less often. The number of nouns having homonymous forms of the singular and plural reduced (horse, thing).

In NE the plural number marker ‘-es’, which had already dominated in ME, extended to more nouns and underwent some phonetic changes. Other ways of building plural forms became exceptions: oxen, brethren, children. From the words having the same form in singular and plural only three remained: sheep, deer, swine. Vowel gradation remained in a very small group of words: man, tooth and several others. Some nouns had plural forms built in a different way, but these were borrowed nouns which were not completely assimilated and retained their original forms:

Lat: datum - data; nucleus - nuclei

Gr: phenomenon - phenomena; formula - formulae -> formulas.

The Genitive case in ME was expressed by the ending ‘-es’ which coincided with the plural form. So very often a possessive pronoun was put after the noun in the Common case to show the meaning of possessiveness: Noun (common case) + Possessive Pronoun + Noun. As the possessive pronoun of the 3d person singular, masculine and neuter were homonymous (his) it was used more often than others. The sound [h] was often lost and the Genitive case sounded the same way as the Common noun + possessive pronoun. In the second half of the 17^th century the apostrophe began to be used, probably, instead of the vowel and to distinguish it from the plural form. In the 18^th century the apostrophe became the regular marker of the genitive case for plural too. Those nouns which had plural forms other than with the ending ‘-es’, built the form of the Genitive case with the apostrophe and the ending ‘-s’.

The Mod E noun consists of two sets:

1) those which have homonymous case forms;

2) and those which have distinctive case forms.

The pronoun

The characteristic feature of pronouns as a separate group of words is not only their lexical meaning but also their use. Some are used only in the function of a noun; others are used similar to adjectives, the pronouns of a third group are used in both functions.

In the course of time some pronouns turned into form words, i.e. they practically lost their own meaning and serve to define other words in a sentence. Possessive and some indefinite pronouns are often used as noun determiners.

In OE there were the following groups of pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. They had some peculiarities:

1. The forms of Genitive and Dative masculine and neuter are the same (the same is characteristic of nouns as well)

2. In these cases singular there is particular likeness between different classes of pronouns:

Gen - -s;

Dat. - -m.

3. Interrogative pronouns have no forms of feminine gender or plural.

Personal Pronouns in OE had the following morphological categories: the category of person, the category of number, the category of case and the category of gender. Not every personal pronoun had all the categories. Besides OE personal pronouns had some peculiarities. Personal pronouns of the 1st person singular and plural had suppletive paradigm: the nominative case is formed from the root different from that of the objective cases (The same phenomenon is observed in Russian and Latin: ego-mihi). The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons singular have correspondences in IE languages while plural pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person have correspondences only in Germanic languages. The pronouns of the 1^st and 2^nd persons had 3 numbers – singular, dual and plural. Personal pronouns of the 3rd person singular and plural originated from demonstrative pronouns The category of gender was manifested only in the 3^rd person singular. This category was not grammatical, because the gender of the pronoun depended upon the object referred and not the grammatical gender of the noun – the noun “wifmann” was masculine, but it was replaced by the feminine pronoun ‘heo’, while inanimate objects were replaced by the neuter pronoun.