Old English

The Development of the Noun

Lecture 15

Anomalous Verbs

Preterite-Present Verbs

Finite

Verbs

Classification:

They had the following categories:

· Tense – Present and Past (NB no Future! – future actions were expressed by the Present Tense forms);

· Mood – Indicative, Imperative, Superlative;

· Person – 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd;

· Number – Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl);

· Conjugation – strong and weak.

2. Non-finite:

v Infinitive resembled the Noun and had the category of:

· Case – Nominative (Nom) and Dative (Dat)

e.g. Nom beran (uninflected) – Dat to beren ne (inflected, indicated direction or purpose);

v Participles 1, 2 resembledthe Verb, the Noun and the Adjective and had the following categories:

· Tense – Present (Participle 1) and Past (Participle 2);

· Number – Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl);

· Gender – Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N);

· Case – Nominative (Nom), Genitive (Gen), Dative (Dat), Accusative (Acc);

· Voice – Active (Part. 1, 2) and Passive (Part 2).

Finite and Non-finite Verbs will be discussed more precisely in Lecture 18.

There were 12 of these verbs and most of them later turned into Modal Verbs. They will be discussed more precisely in Lecture 18.

They were irregular verbs that combined the features of the weak and strong verbs. There were 4 of them – willan (will), bēon (to be), ζān (to go), dōn (to do). They will be discussed more precisely in Lecture 18.

As it has been mentioned in Lecture 14, the Noun had the following categories in OE:

Number – Singular (Sg) and Plural (Pl).

Case – Nominative (Nom), Genitive (Gen), Dative (Dat), Accusative (Acc).

Gender – Masculine (M), Feminine (F), Neuter (N):

· Originally (in PG) it was a semantic division (he/she/it – associated with the lexical meaning of a noun), but in OE this principle did not work any more (e.g. wīf (wife) = Neuter);

· In OE the nouns started to grouped into genders according to the suffix:

- -þu (F) – e.g. lenζþu (length);

- -ere (M) – e.g. fiscere (fisher).

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