Morphological Classification

Lexico-Grammatical Categories

The OE NOUN

OE Morphology

OE GRAMMAR

1. Noun.

2. Pronoun.

3. Adjective.

4. Adverb.

5. Numeral.

6. Verb

The Old English noun had following grammatical categories – gender, number, case. Gender was a lexico-gramatical category. Every noun with all its forms belonged to one gender. In OE there existed several nouns, referring to different genders.

- ere: fisca – fiscere “ fisherman”

- estre: family nouns: spinestre – “ пряха”

- þa / þu: for abstract nouns:

gender was treated according to semantics of a noun – mann, cwene. But some nouns were with unjustified gender forms:

wif (n) “wife” wifman “ woman” (f)

mægden (n) cyld (n)

The category of case was represented by 4 cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative.

Nouns were divided into several types of declensions of stems. There were strong and weak declensions. They were distinguished according to the type of their stems.

Strong Declension:

– a-stems (with their variants ja-stems and wa-stems)

– o-stems (with their variants jo-stems and wo-stems)

– i-stems

– u-stems

A-stems – included masc. and neut. nouns.

1/3 of OE nouns were Masc. a-stems. The difference between the two genders is only seen in the nominative and accusative plural, where masculine nouns had the ending –as, whereas the ending of en-noun depends on the umber of syllable contained a short vowel + a consonant.

scĭp (корабль), deor (олень)

A long syllable contains a long vowel + a consonant, or a short vowel + 2 consonants.

In monosyllabic words with a short root syllable the neuter nouns in the nominative and accusative plural had the ending –u.

Scipu → ships

In monosyllabic neuter words with a long root syllable these cases had zero ending. In disyllabic nouns with a long vowel if had -u- ending.

The modern irregular plural forms sheep, swine, gees are traced to the neuter nouns of a-stem declension (they were used more often). There were two variants of a-stem:

ja-stems: nom. case, sg., masc. – ende; pl. -endas

wa-stems: nom. case, sg., masc. – cneo(w); pl. – cneo(w)

O-stems: they are all feminine.

They were very numerous in OE. The variants with –j and –w decline like pure o-stems except that –w appears before some endings, e.g.: Nom. sg. sceadu, the other cases — sceadwe. Disyllabic o-stems, like a-stems, lost their second vowel in some case forms: Nom. sg. ceaster, the other cases ceastre.

I-stems and U-stems include nouns of different genders. Masc. and Fem. u-stems decline like Fem. duru (NE door). The masculine and neuter I-stems didn’t much differ in their declension from the a-stems, because root vowel had undergone mutation. Neuter. i-stems are declined like Neut. ja-stems. Among Masc. i-stems only names of peoples regularly formed their pl. in the old way: Dene, Engle. Fem. i-stems resembled o-stems.

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