OE nouns; declension

The OE noun had 2 gram. or morph. categories: number and case. In addition, nouns distinguished three genders, but this distinction was not a gram. category. The category of number: singular and plural. The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative. The Nom. can be defined as the case of the active agent. The Gen. case was primarily the case of nouns and pronouns serving as attributes to other nouns. Dat. was the chief case used with prepositions. The Acc. case was the form that indicated a relationship to a verb.

Declensions - a sort of morphological classification. The total number of declensions, including both the major and minor types, exceeded 25. All in all there were only ten distinct endings (plus some phonetic variants of these endings) and a few relevant root-vowel interchanges used in the noun paradigms; yet every morphological class had either its own specific endings or a specific succession of markers. In the first place, the morphological classification of OE nouns rested upon the most ancient grouping of nouns according to the stem-suffixes. Stem-suffixes could consist of vowels (a-stem, i-stem), of consonants (ii-stems), of sound sequences (ja-stems, -nd-stems). Some groups of nouns had no stem-forming suffix or had a " zero-suffix"; they are usually termed " root-stems" and are grouped together with consonantal stems, as their roots ended in consonants. The loss of stem-suffixes as distinct component parts had led to the formation of different sets of grammatical endings.

OE nouns distinguished three genders: Masc., Fem., and Neut. In OE gender was primarily a grammatical distinction; Masc., Fern. and Neut. nouns could have different forms, even if they belonged to the same stem (type of declension).

The majority of OE nouns belonged to the a-stems, s-stems and n-stems. Morphological Classification of Nouns in Old English Division according to stem:

Division according to gender

Division according to length of the root-syllable

A-stems included Masc. and Neut. nouns.

The other vocalic stems, i-stems and u-stems, include nouns of different genders.

The most numerous group of the consonantal stems were n-stems. N-stems included many Masc. nouns, many Fern. nouns, and only a few Neut. nouns.

27. OE adj. & pronoun.

The adjective in OE could change for number, gender and case: three genders and two numbers. The category of case in adjectives differed from that of nouns: in addition to the four cases of nouns they had one more case, Instr. It was used when the adjective served as an attribute to a noun in the Dat. case expressing an instrumental meaning.

Weak and Strong Declension. The difference between the strong and the weak declension of adjectives was not only formal but also semantic. The weak form was employed when the adjective was preceded by a demonstrative pronoun or the Gen. case of personal pronouns. A few adjectives were always declined strong while several others were always weak: adjectives in the superlative and comparative degrees, ordinal numerals, and the adjective ilca 'same. The strong forms were associated with the meaning of indefiniteness, the weak forms - " definiteness ".

Degrees of Comparison: positive, comparative and superlative - suffixes -ra and -est/ost. Sometimes suffixation was accompanied by an interchange of the root-vowel.

OE pronouns fell roughly under the same main classes as modern pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. Relative, possessive and reflexive pronouns were not fully developed and were not always distinctly separated from the 4 main classes. The grammatical categories of the pronouns were either similar to those of nouns or corresponded to those of adjectives. Some features of pronouns were peculiar to them alone. OE personal pronouns had 3 persons, 3 numbers in the 1st and 2nd p. (2 numbers - in the 3rd) and 3 genders in the 3rd p.