Old English Grammar

OE was a synthetic, or inflected type of language. There were five grammatical categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison, and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness.

The Noun had only two grammatical categories proper: number and case. Noun had four cases, Nominative, Genetive, Dative, and Accusative, three numbers – Singular, Plural and dual.

Sing.	Plural
Nom. Ac. daeg	dagas
Gen. daeges	Daga
Dat. daege	dagum

Parts of speech: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun the numeral.

System of declensions was based on a number of suffixes: the stem-suffix, the gender of nouns, the phonetic changes in the final syllables.

gender -- suffixes’a’ and ‘ere’ were suffixes of the masculine gender: hana – (a cock)

ester – expressed feminine gender: webestre – woman

The Number.

Singular	Plural
daeg	dagas
scip	scipu
sceap	sceap
sunu	suna
Nama	Naman

The Adjective. The Old English adjective possessed the category of gender, number, case, and the strong and weak declensions. The adjective ending represented the gender, number, case and declension simultaneously. The comparative degree was formed by adding the suffix -ra and the superlative by adding-ost or –est.

lang lengra lengest

eald ieldra ieldest

1. The Adverb. Adverbs are words which modify the verb or the adjective.

Old English -adverbs were also formed by word сcomposition or by the isolation of certain case-forms of nouns or adjectives, e.g. the noun nyd (need) formed the adverb nyde (necessarily) the latter being the form of the instrumental case of the noun in question, which was frozen -in out "of the paradygm of “nyd” and thus turned into an adverb.

“The Old English derivative adverbs were formed out of adjectives, nouns and sometimes other adverbs by means of the suffixes –ing –a and –ung -a: dearnunga –secretely;

Subsequently -like was reduced to -ly, and even new remains in the language as a very productive adverb forming suffix.

Me period

Changes in the language did not take place by leaps, they were gradual. The new form usually existed along with the old one. Middle English period the infinitive could have an “n” in the ending “en” or “n” could be absent, “taken” and “take”. Then gradually the first form began to be used more rarely and then dropped out entirely, the second becoming universal. The same happened to ‘ich’ and ‘i’.

The Noun.

1. Gender: In Old English the noun was characterized by gender, number, case and declension. In the Middle English period this basis of the grammatical gender disappeared. In the modern language the noun has no gender, although certain groups of nouns are defined by the pronouns ‘he, she, it’.

The following phenomena contributed to the disappearance of gender in the noun:

• reduction of non-stressed vowels in the endings,

• the loss of declension by articles and adjectives,

• the Scandinavian influence

2. Case: Great changes occurred in the system of declension. The nominative, dative and accusative cases were no longer distinguished from each other.

Due to the reduction Genitive Singular coincided with the Nominative and Accusative Plural.

OE -as

ME -es;

OE -es

ME -es

All the types of vowel declension (o, i, u) became leveled down to the masculine a-stem type. This process took place first in the northern dialects. In the Northumbrain dialect the plural ending ‘es’ for all the cases, the genitive singular ‘es’, and zero ending for other cases took the place of all other endings

3. Definite Article. In Old English the article, which developed from the demonstrative pronoun ‘sē’ – ‘that’ was declined - it varied is form according to gender, case and number.

In the course of ME there arose an important formal difference between the demonstrative pronoun and the definite article; as a the demonstrative pronoun that preserved number distinctions whereas as a definite article – usu. in the weakened form the [Өe] – it was uninflected.

4. Indefinite Article. The Old English numeral ‘ān’ began to be used as an article at the very end of the Old English period.

ān-numeral

an-indefinite article

5. Adjective in ME. , all differences between the cases disappeared. By the end of the XV century the final ‘e’ was no longer pronounced and the adjective in the English language became unchangeable.

Degrees of comparison in the adjective were now formed not only with the suffixes (e)re, este, (O.E.ra, ost), but also with the words – more, most.

6. Personal Pronouns. hēo(related to all other pronouns of the 3^rd p. – hē, hit, hie) was replaced by a group of variants – he, ho, sce, sho, she.

1. The OE pronoun of the third person pl hie was replaced by the Scand. loan-word they.

2. ye, you, your – were applied more and more generally to individuals.

3. In Early NE you and it lost all case distinctions.

7. Demonstrative pronouns. In OE they agreed in case, number and gender and had well-developed morphological paradigm. se, seo, þet and þes, þeos, þis – lost most of their inflected forms