13 Old English paradigm of the Noun and its reflection in Present-day English forms of the noun.

In Old English they have 3 genders (masculine, neuter, feminine), 2 numbers (singular, plural), and 4 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative).The so-called "genders" were purely grammatical genders - they very often did not correspond to natural gender. For example the word wīf- "woman" is actually of the neuter (grammatical) gender, not the feminine (natural gender) and nouns that refer to inanimate objects are very often masculine or feminine (for example, masculine stān ‘stone’, feminine benċ ‘bench’). In Modern English we do not think of nouns as having gender; rather, the things they refer to have gender (or they do not, in which case they are “neuter”).In Old English, nouns were inflected (they changed how they were written and spoken) to add little bits of extra information to communicate their function within the sentence and the number of the noun (whether singular or plural). Nouns were the essential element to a noun phrase (either a noun or a pronoun had to be in a noun phrase), which is an important part of most sentences. Also in the noun phrase you could put noun modifiers, like numbers, adjectives (words that describe, like "cool" or "special"), articles ("the" or "a/an), and demonstratives ("this" and "that"). In Old English different endings were added to nouns of different gender (for example, the nominative plural of masculine wer ‘man’ is weras, of neuter scip ‘ship’ scipu, and of feminine cwēn ‘queen’cwēna).In Modern English almost all nouns are declined in pretty much the same way: we add -s to make plurals and -’s to make possessives. There are notable exceptions, however. The plural of ox is not oxes, but oxen. And of course several very common nouns make plurals by changing their vowels: for example,tooth/teeth and mouse/mice.The nouns with -s plurals, nouns with -en plurals, the noun with -r-, and the nouns that change their vowels belong to different declensions—classes of nouns that are declined in similar ways. Though we have just one major declension in Modern English and a few minor ones, in Old English there were several major declensions and several more minor ones.

14 Old English pronoun. Classes.

Pronoun as a part of speech is a very specific class of words; it does not have meaning, it simply points to something mentioned earlier or situated within the range of visibility of the speakers.

There are several types of pronouns in Old English: personal, demonstrative, definite, indefinite, negative and relative.

Personal pronouns, that constitute a system of words replacing nouns; they are also called noun-pronouns.In Old English they had 3 persons: the first, the second and the third 3 numbers: singular, plural and the remains of the dual number in the second person 3 genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. The personal pronouns are Ic ,ðū ,hē ,hit ,hēo ,hῑo ,wit ,ʒit ,wē , ʒē ,hῑe, hῑ, hy, hēo

Demonstrative pronouns are sē (that) and ðēs (this), the first indicating something far and the second something near; occasionally in colloquial speech the third pronoun ʒeon - yonder, something still more distant and farther. They had three genders, two numbers and five cases in the singular and four in the plural and agree in number, gender and case with the nouns they modify.

Interrogative pronouns are nouns-pronouns hwā and hwæt and adjective-pronoun hwilc had the category of case, but did not change in number. Pronoun hwilc is decline like a strong adjective.

Definite pronouns include the following: ælc (each), ʒehwā(everyone) ʒehwæt(everything) ʒehwilc(each) swilc(such), sē ilca ( the same). All but the last decline likev a strong adjective., and

sē ilca is always declined weak.

Indefinite pronouns include such as sum, æniʒ .They are used in preposition to nouns and are declined like strong adjectives. Another indefinite pronoun is man, used as in this function in the meaning any individual,anyone, or people in general (compare the use of pronoun they in present-

day English, in combinations like they say or man sagt in German).

Negative pronouns are formed by fusion of a negative particle ne-with indefinite pronoun æniʒ and numeral ān in its pronominal function. They are nān and næniʒ, and are declined like the corresponding words without the particle ne.

Relative pronoun ðe is found fairly often in Old English texts, it introduced relative clauses and was later replaced by a group of pronouns and adverbs( that, which, where, when, how).