Parts of speech in old english

The parts of speech in Proto-Germanic were divided only into Substantives and Verbs. In OE substantives had already differentiated into distinct parts of speech: noun, adjective, pronoun and numeral. The other parts of speech in OE were verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection and even participles and infinitives. OE did, however, lack some parts of speech; there were no articles and no gerunds, and some classes of pronouns hadn’t developed yet.

Morphological Categories of Nouns in OE

The OE noun was characterized by case and number. Nouns had masculine, feminine and neuter gender, and there were several types of declensions. Already within the OE system of declensions there existed many homonymous case forms. There were 25 declensions but only 10 distinct endings. The type of the declension was dependent upon the following features:

- stem-suffix

- noun gender

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

The system included the following declensions:

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

As stem suffixes were lost, a new set of grammatical endings were sometimes either shortened or lost. Grouping according to noun-stems was not very strict. The greatest distinction existed between the masculine and feminine genders, while the nouns of the neuter gender were similar to the masculine nouns. The difference among the declensions was realized through the presence and/or absence of the masculine/neuter ending -e, or the feminine ending -u in the Nominative singular case.

Declension of Nouns in OE

OE had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative. The Nominative case was the case of the subject and the predicative, and it denoted the active agent, or the doer of the action. The Genitive case showed that a noun was attributed to another noun. The Genitive case was divided into the Subjective Genitive and the Objective Genitive, where the first had possessive meaning or the meaning of origin (hiora scipu – ‘their ships’, Beowulf ʒēata - ‘Beowulf of the Geats’ ) and the latter had what is called partitive meaning (sum hund scipa – ‘a hundred ships’). It could be also used as an object to the verb, but in this instance it was interchangeable with other cases.

The Dative case could be used with prepositions (on morʒenne –‘in the morning’); it could also denote the passive subject of a state expressed by the predicate (him ʒelicode heora þeawas- ‘he liked their customs’). It also denoted means or manner of an action (hit haʒolade stānum - ‘it hailed (with) stones’).

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

According to grammatical gender, nouns were separated into Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Some derivational suffixes placed nouns into a certain gender and semantic group. Nominal gender was a purely grammatical convention in OE, that is, Grammatical gender didn’t always correspond to sex; OE nouns wif (wife) and mæʒden (maiden) were Neuter, while wifman (woman) was Masculine.

Gender was dependent upon the stems:

a- stems: Masculine and Neuter

ō - stems: Feminine

i- stems: Masculine, Feminine, Neuter

u- stems: Masculine and Feminine nouns

n – stems: Masculine, Feminine, Neuter

root stems: Masculine and Feminine

Other consonantal stems included nouns of all three genders.

According to phonetic structure, monosyllabic and polysyllabic words formed different declensions.

Vocalic Stems

a – stems:

CASE	SINGULAR		PLURAL
	Masculine	Neuter	Masculine	Neuter
Nom.	fisc	scip	fisces	scipu
Gen.	fisces	scipes	fisca	scipa
Dat.	fisce	scipe	fiscum	scipum
Acc.	fisc	scip	fiscas	scipu
NE	fish	ship	fish, fishes	ships

ō – stems (Feminine):

CASE	SINGULAR	PLURAL
Nom.	talu	tala. -e
Gen.	tale	tala
Dat.	tale	talum
Acc.	tale	tala, -e
NE	tale	tales

Consonantal stems

CASE	n - stems :				root – stems
	Masc.	Neuter	Fem.	Masc.		Fem.
	SINGULAR
Nom.	hunta	ēare	sunne	fōt		mūs
Gen.	huntan	ēaran	sunnan	fōtes		mūse
Dat.	huntan	ēaran	sunnan	fōt		mūs
Acc.	huntan	ēare	sunnan	fōt		mūs
NE	hunter	ear	sun	foot		mouse
	PLURAL
Nom.	huntan	ēaran	sunnan	fōt		mūs
Gen.	huntan	ēaran	sunnan	fōta		mūsa
Dat.	huntan	ēaran	sunnan	fōtum		mūsum
Acc.	huntan	ēaran	sunnan	fōt		mūs
NE	hunters	ears	suns	feet		mice

The Characteristics of Pronouns

Pronouns are not distinguished only by their lexical meaning, but also by their use. Some pronouns are used only in the conjunction with a noun, others are used similar to adjectives. Pronouns of a third group are used in both functions.

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

Peculiarities of OE Pronouns

OE pronouns fall into the following groups: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite.

OE pronouns are characterized by the following:

1. The forms of the Genitive and Dative cases for masculine and neuter pronouns are the same (this rule applies to OE nouns as well)

2. In the Genitive and Dative singular different classes of pronouns exhibit a common feature: the forms of the Genitive case have the ending ‘-s’ and the forms of the Dative case end in ‘-m’.

3. Interrogative pronouns have neither feminine or plural forms.

Personal Pronounsin OE

Personal Pronouns in OE were characterized by the following morphological categories: person, number, case and gender, though not every personal pronoun had all the categories.

OE personal pronouns had some peculiarities. Personal pronouns of the 1st person singular and plural followed a suppletive paradigm like pronouns in other Indo-European languages. Their form in the nominative case was formed differently from that of the objective cases (compare such examples in Russian and Latin: я-меня, ego- mihi ). 1st and 2nd person plural pronouns had corresponding forms only observed in Germanic languages.

The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons had three numbers – singular, dual and plural. Personal pronouns of the 3rd person singular and plural originated from demonstrative pronouns (compare the same development in the Russian language: он - оный , она - оная ).

The categoryof gender was only present in the 3rd person singular. As discussed above, this category was not grammatical as the gender of the pronoun depended upon the object referred to and not to the grammatical gender of the noun. For example, the noun “wifmann” (woman) was masculine, but its corresponding pronoun was the feminine ‘heo’.

Declension of Personal Pronouns in OE

PERSON	CASE / NUMBER	SINGULAR	DUAL	PLURAL
1st	Nom.	ic	wit	wē
	Gen.	mīn	uncer	ūre, ūser
	Dat.	mē	unc	ūs
	Acc .	mec, mē	uncit	ūsic, ūs
2nd	Nom.	þū	ʒit	ʒē
	Gen.	þin	incer	ēower
	Dat.	þē	inc	ēow
	Acc.	þēc, þē	incit, inc	ēowic, ēow
		SINGULAR	PLURAL
3rd		M F N	ALL GENDERS
	Nom.	hē hēo, hīo hit	hīe, hī hў, hēo
	Gen.	his hire, hiere his	hire, heora, hiera, hyra
	Dat.	him hire, hiere him	him, heom
	Acc.	hine hīe, hī, hў hit	hīe, hī, hў, hēo

Demonstrative PronounsinOE

OE had two demonstrative pronouns. They distinguished three genders in the singular and had only one plural form for all the genders. The pronoun forms for the masculine and feminine were suppletive. Demonstrative pronouns were used as noun determiners and indicated the number, gender and case of the noun they modified. The pronouns sē, þæt, sēo, þā (modern ‘that’) had a very weak demonstrative meaning. The use of these pronouns was close to that of the modern definite article, but these pronouns can not be regarded as proper articles because they could be used anaphorically. As a consequence they would develop into the definite article in ME.

CASE	SINGULAR				PLURAL
	M	F	N
Nom.	sē, se	sēo	þæt	þā
Gen.	þæs	þǣre	þæs	þāra, þǣra
Dat,	þǣm, þām	þǣre	þǣm, þām	þām, þǣm
Acc.	þone	þā	þæt	þā
Instr.	þў, þon	þǣre	þy, þon	þǣm, þām