Types of declensions in oe:

vocalic stems strong declension

n-stems weak declension

zero stems root declension

other consonantal stems minor declensions

Old English had four major types of vocalic nouns, inherited from Germanic. These were the a-stems, the ō-stems, the i-stems and the u-stems.

a-stem (masculin and neuter)

a-stems masculine

Singular Plural

stān stānas

stānes stāna

stāne stānum

stān stānas

The a-stems form the most important declension for the later history of the language. Thus, as PDE stones indicates, the plural inflexion -as is the antecedent of the modern standard plural marker. Even in Old English it was probably the most important declension, containing about one-third of the nouns in the language.

o-stems (feminin)

Let us now turn to the ō-stems, which formed the principal vocalic declension of feminine nouns, parallel to the a-stem masculines and neuters, and also accounted for the vast majority of feminine nouns in the language.

Singular Plural Nom. lufu lufa Gen. lufe lufa Dat. lufe lufum Acc. Lufe lufa

i-stems (all genders)

The i-stem declension can only be recognised as original i-stems by the i-mutation of the stem vowel, and there are no relic forms with the original inflexions.

N. mete mete

G. metes meta

D. mete metum

Acc. mete mete

u-stems (masculin and feminin)

There is one other vocalic declension, the u-stems. There were only a few such nouns in Old English, all either masculine or feminine. These nouns were, however, often of high frequency, e.g. sunu ' son feld 'field', nosu 'nose', hand 'hand'. A typical light base paradigm is that of sunu, heavy bases apocopated final /u/:

Singular Plural

Nom. sunU suna

Gen. suna suna

Dat. suna sunum

Acc. sunU suna

Weak declension = n-stems

The n-stems was an important consonant declension in Old English. This declension gave the later -en plural, fairly common in Early Middle English but now, in the standard language, existing only in oxen ( < OE oxan) and the double plurals children.

Root declension

The most obvious and important characteristic of root declension nouns is that they should have shown i-mutation in the dative singular and in the nominative and accusative plural, where in proto-Old English there was an inflexional -i-. These nouns were either masculine or feminine.

Singular Plural

Nom. fōt fēt

Gen. fōtes fōta

Dat. fēt fōtum

Acc. fōt fēt

The importance of this declension lies partly in the fact that to it belonged a number of very common nouns, e.g. mann 'person', partly in that it is the source of irregular plurals such as PDE foot ~ feet, man ~ men, goose ~ geese.

There were, as we have said, several minor consonantal declensions, some containing important words;

• the r-declension, for instance, the kinship terms fæder father', modor 'mother', bro‏ðor 'brother', dohtor 'daughter', sweostor ‘sister';

• the nd-declension: freond, frynd ' friend, friends' ind feond, fynd fiend, fiends' were members of.