12. The oe noun system & its further changes.

OE was a synthetic language with a complex nominal system.

The Indo-European noun had a three-element structure, namely root – stem-building-suffix – ending cud – n – y. In Germanic the stem-building suffixes generally disappeared, falling together either with the root or with the inflexion. The Germanic structure of n. includes 2 elements: root and ending. The OE noun fell into several types of declension, called stems:a-(M.N[hus-house), o-(jo,wo,F), u-(M,F), i-(M,F,N) stems make up stong dec. & are called vocalic stems; n-stem & root-stem( ending in other consonants) are considered to be consonant stems & represent weak dec. The absence of the stem-building suffixe means that the endings were joned immediately to the root & the inflexion included the i-element it caused mutation in this class of words; manis – men. The a-stem made the largest group 7 served as a model for the whole class system as time went on. The ME plural comes from plural N –as inflexion which turned into NE – (e) s.G. singular –es turned into’s (possessive), the forms children, oxen, brethren comes from the OE n-steem. Gender was short lived because it wasn’t supported either semantically or formally. It disappeared in the first half of the ME period widuwa-widowe-widow. Number has proved to be the most. stable gram. category .in NE noun has –es, while in OE it depended on the stem of the noun. ME changes: the division into stems & gender disappear, the four-case system is simplified to a two-case: OE – Nom, Dat, Acc, Gen. ME – Common case, Genitive or Possessive. Starting with the late ME the noun system resembles the ME system to a very great extent.

13.The oe adjectives & its further development in me

The adj in OE could change for number, gender & case. Those were dependent grammatical categories or forms agreement of the adj-s with the noun it modified or with the noun it modified or with the subject of the sentence-of the Adj-ve was a predicate. Like nouns, adj-s had 3 genders & 2 numbers. The category of case in adj-s differed from that of nouns: in addition to the 4 cases of nouns they had 1 more case, Instrumental. It was used when the adj-s served as an attribute to a noun in the Dat case expressing an instrumental meaning. Most adj. in OE could be declined in 2 ways: according to the weak & to the strong declension. The formal difference between the declension, as well as their origin, were similar to those of the noun declensions. The strong & weak declensions arose due to the use of several stem-forming suffixes. There developed a set of endings of the strong declension mainly coinciding with the endings of a-steam of nouns for adj-s in the Masc & Neut & of o-steam- in the Fem. Some endings in the strong declension of adj-s have no parallels in the noun paradigms; they are similar to the endings of pronouns. As for the weak declension, it uses the same markers as n-stem of nouns except that in the Gen pl the pronominal ending –ra is often used of the weak –ena. The choice of the declension was determined by a number of factors: the syntactic function of the adj, the degree of comparison & the presence of noun determiners. The adj. had a strong form when used predicatively & when used attributively without any determiners. The weak form was employed when the adj was preceded by a demonstrative pronoun or the Gen case of personal pronouns.

In the course of the ME period the adj underwent greater simplifying changes than any other part of speech . It lost all its grammatical categories with the exception of the degrees of comparison. By the end of the OE period the agreement of the adj with the noun had become looser & in the course of early ME it was practically lost. Though the grammatical categories of the adj reflected that of the noun, most of them disappeared even before the noun lost the reflexive distinctions. The 1^st category to disappear was Gender , which ceased to be distinguished by the adj in the 11^th . The instr. case had fused with the Dat by the end of OE , distinctions of other cases in Early ME was unsteady, as many variant forms of different cases, which arose in Early ME, coincided. In the 13^th case could be shown only by some variable adj-ve endings in the strong declension, towards the ehd of the century all case distinctions were lost. The strong & weak forms of adj were often confused in Early ME texts. The use of a strong form after a demonstrative pronoun was not common, though according to the existing rules, this position belonged to the weak form. In the 14^th the difference between the strong & weak form is sometimes shown in the sg with the help of the ending –e.