Old English Noun

Old English Grammar. General characteristics.

OE was а synthetic language - this means that relations between words in a phrase were expressed through their forms rather than their position in the sentence or auxiliaries. Mainly simple grammatical forms were employed - grammatical endings, prefixes, sound interchange in the root, suppletive [sə'plitɪv ], ['sʌplətɪv] супплетивный form-building. OE was a highly inflected language - prefixes, suffixes and endings were the chief word-formation means and could be found in all changeable parts of speech. Sound interchange was employed on a more limited scale and was often combined with other form-building means, especially endings. Also it is important to note that vowel interchange was more common than the interchange of consonants. Suppletion [sə'pliʃ(ə)n] супплетивизм (changing the whole root of a word in order to express a different grammatical quality) was restricted to several pronouns, a few adjectives, a couple of numerals and some verbs.

We distinguish the following parts of speech in OE: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the verb, the adverb, the verbals (Infinitive and Participle I and П), the preposition, the conjunction союз, the interjection междометие (ah — а! ах! (согласие, узнавание, симпатия) alas — увы! (сожаление) hey — эй! (невежливое обращение) hush — тс! (просьба соблюдать тишину) oh — о! ох! (в составе возвышенного обращения; удивление, досада)). Grammatical categories were divided into nominal and verbal and served for agreement between different parts of speech.

OE nominal system included the noun, the adjective, the pronoun and the numeral. OE had a synthetic grammar structure which meant that the nominal system was by far more complicated than today. This complexity is explained by the fact that OE noun had three categories:

- Number;

- Gender;

- Case.

Number. Number was well expressed for­mally with all nouns. The typical plural endings were -es, -en, -ru. By the end of the OE period these three endings came to the overall conformity and accepted the form -es (s).

Gender. There were three genders: masculine ['mæskjulɪn], feminine ['femɪnɪn], and neuter ['njutə]. Gender distinction was not grammatical, but semantic. It means that it was not expressed formally. However a suffix could sometimes refer a noun to a certain gender: -þu was a feminine suffix for abstract noun (lenʒþu - length, hyhþu - height), -ere was a masculine suffix showing the doer of the action (fiscere – NE fisher – learned man). But normally it was quite difficult to determine the gender by formal features. Very often gender was controversial – the grammatical gender did not always coincide with the natural gender of the person; Sometimes grammatical gender even contradicted real gender: the noun wifman (wife) was declined as masculine.

Moreover there were cases when one word could have different meanings with different genders.

se ar (masc.) - a messenger.

seo ar (ferm.) - an oar.

Þæt ar (neut.) - ore, copper.

All the above mentioned features of gender led to the early disappearance of this category as part of the process of simplification in the language and by the end of the OE period “he” or 'she' for inanimate objects were replaced by 'it'.

Case. OE nouns had four cases: Nominative, Genetive, Dative, Accusa­tive. In most cases two or even three forms were homonymous [hə'mɔnɪməs] 1) омонимический, омонимичный 2) одинаковый, один и тот же (о названии).

Nominative case served as the subject, the predicate or the address.

Genetive case had two main meanings: the idea of origin and the idea of possession.

Dative was the chief case to be used with prepositions and it possessed instrumental meaning.

Accusative case represented the direct object or showed time and dis­tance; its form often fell together with the form of the Nominative case.

The system of case inflexions was complex and it was further complicated by the division of nouns into declensions. There were three groups of declensions in OE. 1) The vowel or ‘strong’ declension, which comprised four principal paradigms - the a-, o-, u-, i –stem paradigm). The paradigm is the set of all phones (фона-звуковая единица, рассматриваемая вне связи с функцией смыслоразличения) of a word within one part of speech. 2) The consonant or “weak” declension (n - stems). 3) The declension of root-stem nouns (the grammatical ending was added directly to the root; as a result of this in the Dative sing and the Nominative and the Accusative plural the root-vowel had undergone palatal mutation due to the [i]-sound in the grammatical ending of these forms; later the ending was dropped and vowel interchange remained the only means of differentiating the given forms of the paradigm). The set of case endings was predetermined by the type of declension.

Sing. A-stem	Plur.
N.	Stan (stone)	stanas
G.	stones	stana
D.	stane	stanum
Ace.	stān	stanas
Sing. N-stem	Plur.
N.	Nama (name)	naman
G.	naman	namena
D.	noman	namum
Ace.	naman	naman
Sing. Root-stem	Plur.
N.	man	men
G.	manes	mana
D.	menn	manum
Ace.	man	men

Thus the paradigm of OE nouns was very complicated and could present a great problem for newcomers trying to learn the language. That is why changes (especially simplifying) were unavoidable.

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