19

Module 3

OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Part 1

The Nominal System

Outline

1. General survey of the nominal system

2. The noun

2.1. Gender

2.2. Number

2.3. Case

2.4. Declension

2.5. General features of the noun declension

3. The pronoun

3.1. Personal pronouns

3.2. Possessive pronouns

3.3. Reflexive pronouns

3.4. Demonstrative pronouns

3.5. Interrogative and relative pronouns

3.6. Indefinite, definite and other pronouns

4. The adjective

4.1. Declension of adjectives

4.2. Degrees of comparison of adjectives

5. Conclusions

The Old English language was a synthetic language which means that all the principal grammatical notions were expressed by a change of the form of the word.

The grammatical means that the English language used were primarily a) suffixation, b) vowel gradation and c) use of suppletive forms.

1. General survey of the nominal system

There were five declinable parts of speech in Old English: the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the numeral, the participle. The nominal paradigm in Old English was characterized by three grammatical categories: gender, number and case. Of these three, gender is a lexico-grammatical category, i.e. every noun with all its forms belongs to one gender (masculine, feminine or neuter). The other two are purely grammatical categories: nouns are inflected for number and case. There are two numbers: singular and plural, and four cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative. Demonstrative pronouns and adjectives agreeing with a noun sometimes take the form of the instrumental case.

2. The noun

The OE noun paradigm was composed by the grammatical categories of gender, number and case.

2.1. Gender

The category of gender was formed by the opposition of three gender forms: masculine, feminine and neuter. All nouns, no matter whether they denoted living beings, inanimate things or abstract notions belonged to one of the three genders. While nouns designating males are generally masculine and females feminine, those indicating neuter objects are not necessarily neuter. Stān ‘stone’ is masculine, mōna ‘moon’ is masculine, but sunne ‘sun’ is feminine, as in German. In French the corresponding words have just the opposite genders: pierre ‘stone’ and lune ‘moon’ are feminine, while soleil ‘sun’ is masculine. Often the gender of OE nouns is quite illogical. Words like mæden ‘girl’, wīf ‘wife’, bearn and cild ‘child’, which we should expect to be feminine or masculine, are in fact neuter, while wīfmann ‘woman’ is masculine because the second element of the compound is masculine.

More examples:

Masculine

Male beings Lifeless things Abstract notions

fæder ‘father’ hlāf ‘bread’ nama ‘name’

sunu ‘son’ stān ‘stone’ fǽr ‘fear’

Feminine

Female beings Lifeless things Abstract notions

mōdor ‘mother’ tunge ‘tongue’ trywðu ‘truth’

dohter ‘daughter’ meolc ‘milk’ lufu ‘love’

Neuter

Living beings Lifeless things Abstract notions

cicen ‘chicken’ ēae ‘eye’ mōd ‘mood’

mæden ‘maiden’ scip ‘ship’ riht ‘right’

2. Number

The grammatical category of number was formed by the opposition of two categorial forms: the singular and the plural.

Nominative Singular Nominative Plural

fisc ‘fish’ fiscas

ēae ‘eye’ ēaan

tōð ‘tooth’ tēð

scip ‘ship’ scipu

The singular and plural forms were well distinguished formally in all the declensions, there being very few homonymous forms.

2. Case

The OE noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accu­sative. The endings of these cases vary with different nouns, but they fall into certain broad categories or declensions. There is a vowel declension and a consonant declension, also called the strong and weak declensions, according to whether the stem ended in Germanic in a vowel or a consonant, and within each of these types there are certain subdivisions.