The Noun in OE

Types of Stems.

In Old Germanic languages there are the following types of substantive stems:

Vocalic stems: -a-, -o-, -i-, -u- stems. Declension of these substantives has been called strong declension.

n-stems. Declension of these is called weak declension.

Stems in other consonants: -s- and -r-stems.

Root-stems. This is a peculiar type: these substantives never had a stem-building suffix, so that their stem had always coincided with their root.

Slide 6.

Like in the otherIE languages the Noun, The Adjective, The Pronoun in OE had the categories of gender, number and case. These categories were independent in the noun, while in the adjective and pronoun they were dependent, that is they showed agreement with the correspondent nouns.

Old English can be called a synthetic or inflected language because it showed the relations between words with the help of grammatical forms.

Slide 7.

Gender is a lexico-grammatical category, that is, every substantive with all its forms belongs to one gender - masculine, feminine and neuter. The difference between them was grammatical rather than semantic.

Number and case are purely grammatical categories.

From the point of view of Number the noun, the adjective, the pronoun fell into two groups. They distinguished two numbers: singular and plural. But the personal pronouns of the 1 and 2 person had also special forms to denote two objects: dual number. The Dual number was confined (ограничиваться) to two pronouns and is regarded as an isolated archaic [a:`keiik] trace in the grammar system.

The category of case was represented by 4 cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. Sometimes instrumental case was distinguished, but it had fallen together with the dative case. Though the case forms were distinguished, there were many homonymous forms. Nominative was the case of the subject. The rest of the case forms were used as objects or adverbial modifiers.

Slide 8.

Ø The variation of the forms of a noun, pronoun, or adjective, by which its grammatical case, number and gender are identified is called declension.

Ø The inflections of OE nouns indicate distinctions of number (singular and plural) and case. The OE noun has only four cases. The endings of the 4 cases were different with different nouns, but they fell into certain declensions.

Ø There is a vowel declension and a consonant declension, also called strong and weak declensions, according to whether the stem ended in Germanic in a vowel or in a consonant, and within each of these types there are certain subdivisions.

Ø The stems of nouns belonging to the vowel declension ended in one of four vowels: o, u, i, a (their endings varied accordingly).

Slide 9.

Ø The nouns with the stems ended in consonants were divided into n-stems, nd-stems, r-stems. There was also a group of nouns called “root stems”, which had never had any stem-building suffix and whose root was equal to the stem.

Ø The division into stems didn’t coincide with that into genders. Thus, a - stems were only masculine and neuter, o- stems – feminine. Other types of stems included nouns of any gender.

Ø The importance of declensions was not the same. The majority of OE nouns belonged to -a-, -o-, -n- stems, nouns of other stems were less frequent.

Some endings of nouns were associated with one case only. E.g., -es was the ending of Masculine a -stems in the Genetive Singular. Some endings were alike: -a and –um in the Genetive and Dative Plural.

In all declensions the Nominative Plural and coincided with the Accusative Plural.

The inflections illustrate clearly the synthetic character of OE.

Slide 10.

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