The OE Adjective

Questions.

Grammatical Gender.

As in the other IE languages the gender of OE nouns is not dependent upon consideration of sex.

Nouns denoting males are masculine, and female- feminine, those nouns indicating neuter objects aren’t always neuter. E.g. words mægden “girl”, wif “wife”, cild “child”, which we should expect to be feminine or masculine, are in fact neuter. At the same time wifmann (woman) is masculine (because the second element of the compound is masculine). Often the gender in OE is rather illogical.

Today, the gender of every noun in the dictionary is known instantly. Gender in English is determined by meaning. All nouns naming living creatures are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and all other nouns are neuter.

In Later OE we can observe some attempts to adjust the gender of nouns to semantics: thus, wimman began to be treated as feminine instead of masculine.

However, there existed another kind of connection between the gender and the meaning of nouns. Sometimes the word-building suffixes were used to form a noun and to refer it to a certain gender. E.g. OE abstract nouns, built with the help of suffix -þ; -þu were of the feminine gender: mærðu (glory), lenjðu (length).

Slide 11.

1. What category did the Noun have in OE?

2. How many cases was the category of case in OE substantives represented by?

3. Why was the category of gender in OE called rather grammatical than semantic?

4. What is declension?

5. What types of declension were there in OE?

6. What stems of nouns belonged to weak (strong) declension?

7. What stems did the majority of OE nouns belong to?

8. What is the original structure of a substantive in Germanic as well as in other IE languages?

9. What did the case inflexion express?

10. What type of OE substantives never had a stem-building suffix?

11. What is the structure of OE nouns? How did it change?

Slide 12.

The Adjective in OE could change for case, number and gender. It agreed with the noun it modified in all these categories.

It had 2 types of declension: weak and strong. Most adjectives are declined as a-stems for the masculine and neuter, and o-stems for feminine (strong declension); n-stem – weak declension. The difference between the two types of declension is similar to that between the corresponding noun declension.

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Weak declension forms are used when the adjective is preceded by a demonstrative pronoun or the definite article; they are associated with the meaning of definiteness. In all other contexts forms of the strong declension are used.

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