Table 1. a-stems included Masc. and Neut

a-stems included Masc. and Neut. nouns. About one third of OE nouns were Masc. a -stems, e. g. cniht (NE knight), hām (NE home), mūp (NE mouth), examples of Neut. nouns are: lim (NE limb), hūs (NE house), pinʒ (NE thing). (Disyllabic nouns, e.g. finʒer, differed from monosyllables in that they could drop their second vowel in the oblique cases: Nom. sg finʒer, Gen. finʒres, Dat. finʒre, NE finger.)

As seen from Table 2 the forms in the a -stem declension were distinguished through grammatical endings (including the zero-ending). In some words inflections were accompanied by sound interchanges: nouns with the vowel [æ] in the root had an interchange [æ~a], since in some forms the ending contained a back vowel, e. g. Nom. sg d æ ʒ, Gen d æ ʒes – Nom. and Gen. pl daʒas, daʒa. If a noun ended in a fricative consonant, it became voiced in an intervocal position, cf. Nom. sg mūp, wulf – [θ], [f] – and Nom. pl mūpas, wulfas – [ð], [ν]. (Note that their modern descendants have retained the interchange: NE mouth – mouths θ ~ð], wolf – wolves, also house – houses and others.) These interchanges were not peculiar of a -stems alone and are of no significance as grammatical markers; they are easily accountable by phonetic reasons.

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