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LECTURE 5.

OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR. THE NOMINAL SYSTEM

List of principal questions

1. General survey of the nominal system

2. The noun

2.1. Gender

2.2. Number

2.3. Case

2.4. Homonymity of forms in Old English and its influence on the further development of noun forms

3. The pronoun

3.1. Personal pronouns

3.2. Other pronouns

4. The adjective

4.1. Declension of adjectives

4.2. Degrees of comparison of adjectives

Literature

1. R.V. Reznik, T.C. Sorokina, I.V. Reznik A History of the English language. M., 2003.

2. T.A. Rastorguyeva History of English. M., 1983.

3. А.И. Смирницкий Лекции по истории английского языка. М., 2000.

4. К. Бруннер История английского языка. Т.1 М., 2001.

5. И. Чахоян, Л. Иванова, Т. Беляева. История английского языка. СПб., 1998.

6. А.И. Смирницкий Древнеанглийский язык. М., 1955.

1. Old English grammar

The Old English language was a synthetic language which means that all the principal grammatical notions were expressed by a change of the form of the world in the narrow meaning of the term.

The grammatical means that the English language used were primarily

1. suffixation

2. vowel gradation

3. suppletive forms.

Old English was a highly inflected language. The abundance of inflections resulted from the fact that the paradigm of declension and the paradigm of conjunction were formed by many grammatical categories and there was more than one declension in the system of declension and more than one conjugation in the system of conjugation due to the splitting of the once uniform paradigm in accordance with the original structure of the word.

2. General survey of the nominal system

There were five declinable parts of speech in Old English (among the non-finite forms of the verb the infinitive was also declined): the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the numeral, the participle. The nominal paradigm in Old English was characterized by the following grammatical categories.

As we can see, the paradigms of different parts of speech had the same number of grammatical categories but theses parts of speech were different in the number of categorical forms composing a given grammatical category. Hence the system of forms of each part of speech requires special consideration.

Grammatical categories of declinable parts of speech

2. The noun

The Old English noun paradigm was composed by the following grammatical categories: gender, number, case.

2.1. Gender

The category of gender was formed by the opposition of three gender-forms: masculine, feminine and neuter. All nouns, no matter whether they denote living beings, inanimate things or abstract notions belonged to one of the three genders.

The subdivision of Old English nouns in accordance with their grammatical gender is traditional, the correspondence between the meaning of the word and its grammatical gender being hard to trace.

Some nouns denoting animals were also treated as neuter, such as cicen (chicken), hors (horse), etc.

The grammatical gender did not always coincide with the natural gender of the person and sometimes even contradicted it (thus, for instance, the noun wifman (woman) was declined as masculine).

Compare stān (stone, masculine), bān (bone, neuter), cwen (queen, feminine) which belong to different genders but have similar forms.

More examples:

Masculine

male beings lifeless things abstract notions

fæder (father) hlāf (bread) stenc (stench)

sunu (son) stān (stone) fǽr (fear)

cyning (king) hrōf (roof) nama (name)

dōm (doom)

Feminine

female beings lifeless things abstract notions

Mōðor (mother) tunge (tongue) trywðu (truth)

Dohter (daughter) meolc (milk) huntinз (hunting)

Cwēn (queen) lufu (love)

Зōs (goose)

Neuter

living being lifeless things abstract notions

cicen (chicken) ēaзe (eye) mōd (mood)

hors (horse) scip (ship) riht (right)

mæзden (maiden)

2.2. Number

The grammatical category of number was formed by the opposition of two categorical forms: the singular and the plural.

Nominative Singular Nominative Plural

Fisc (fish) fiscas

Ēaзe (eye) ēaзan

Tōð (tooth) tēð

Scip(ship) scipu

2.3. Case

The old English noun formed its paradigm by the opposition of three genders, two numbers and four cases. Thus, presumably, the noun had twenty-four word-forms.

On the whole the same phenomenon could be observed in Common Germanic. In the course of the development of Old English, however, the original paradigm had undergone great changes due to the fusion of the original stem suffix and the original grammatical ending into one element which from the point of view of Old English is to be regarded as a grammatical ending. As a result of that fusion nouns that are known to have had different stem suffixes originally in Old English acquired materially different endings in the same case, for example:

Nominative plural

a-stem ō-stem n-stem

stān-as (stones) car-a (care) nam-an (names), etc.

The original stem suffixes were formed both by vowels and by consonants. Thus there were two respective principal groups of declensions in Old English: the vowel declension (“strong” declension) and the consonant declension (“weak” declension).

The vowel (strong) declension comprises four principal paradigms: the a-stem, the ō-stem, the u-stem and the i-stem paradigm.

The consonant declension comprises nouns with the stem originally ending in –n, -r, -s and some other consonants.

In rare cases, however, the new form is constructed by adding the ending directly to the root. It is these words that formed the so-called root-stem declension.

Declensions in Old English

Vowel-stems. Declension of a-stem nouns

This type of declension consists of the masculine and the neuter genders of Old English nouns. As a rule those are common everyday words that formed the very core of the word-stock, such as:

hlāf (bread), hwǽrte (wheat), hors (horse), fisc (fish), scip (ship), etc.

As seen from the table, the paradigm of the a-stem nouns is characterized by the homonymity of the Nominative and Accusative case-forms. The rest of the forms retain their endings. The difference between the genders of the nouns is clearly seen from the different endings in the Nominative and the Accusative plural, i.e. -as for the masculine and -u for the neuter. Nouns which had a long stem syllable had the zero ending in the Nominative and the Accusative Plural (such as scēap (sheep), land (land), etc.).

Consonant stems. Declension of n-stem nouns

The consonant declensions consisted of nouns with the stem originally ending in –n, -r, -s and other consonants. Declensions of the stems other than –n are not analyzed here as nouns belonging to them are few and show a tendency to fall under other declensions.

Declension of a-stem nouns

The n-stem class was formed by nouns of all the three genders, such as nama (name) – masculine, tunge (tongue) – feminine, eaзe (eye) – neuter.

Declension of n-stem nouns

The n-stem was the most important among all the consonant stem declensions. This class of nouns was composed of common words. The group was very extensive in Old English and like the a-stem declension it exhibited a tendency to spread its forms over other declensions.

The original stem-suffix –n may be observed in the majority of case forms, but very often the grammatical ending had been dropped in the pre-written period; this phenomenon gave rise to a well-marked homonymity of the noun forms of the declension. Five case forms of the masculine and the feminine genders – all the Singular with the exception of the Nominative and the Nominative and the Accusative plural are homonymous, in case of neuter nouns only four forms are homonymous, as the Accusative case of neuter nouns is homonymous to the Nominative.

Gender oppositions in this declension are also not distinct, the masculine nouns being different from the feminine only in the Nominative and the Accusative Singular.

Declension of root-stem nouns

Root-stems require special consideration. This class was not extensive and stood apart among other Old English nouns due to peculiarities of form-building which was partly retained in Modern English.

Unlike other classes the root-stem nouns such as man (man, masculine), mūs (mouse, feminine) originally had no stem-suffix and the grammatical ending was added directly to the root. As the result of that in the Dative Singular and the Nominative and the Accusative Plural the root-vowel had undergone palatal mutation due to the [i] – sound in the grammatical ending of theses forms. Later the ending was dropped and vowel interchange remained the only means of differentiating the given forms in the paradigm. The feminine nouns with the short root had the ending -u in the Nominative and the Accusative Singular, and -e in the Nominative and the Accusative Plural. The endings of the rest of forms are built up on analogy with those of the a-stems, hence the difference between genders can be observed only in the Genitive Singular – -es for the masculine, -e for the feminine.

Declension of root-stem nouns

2.4. Homonymity of forms in Old English and its influence on the further development of noun forms

In the prehistoric period of the development of the English language each case had an ending typical of its uninflected form. In the course of the development of the English language, however, due to various semantic and phonetic changes different cases began to develop similar endings within one and the same paradigm; this phenomenon gave rise to the well-marked homonymity of case-forms in English. The twenty four word-forms which built up the noun paradigm had but nine materially different endings. The most distinct among them are:

-es – genitive singular, masculine and neuter

-a/ena – genitive plural, all genders

-um – dative plural, all genders

-as – nominative and accusative plural, masculine

As for the rest of the forms their mutual homonymity is considerable. For example, nouns with the stem originally are ending in –a show gender differences only in the plural, all the forms in the singular but the nominative being homonymous, irrespective of gender and case differences.

The existence of different endings of nouns grammatically alike and homonymous ending of nouns grammatically different testifies to a certain inadequacy of the morphological devices of the Old English noun to show the relation of the noun to other words in the sentence and a need for the development of new means to denote the grammatical meanings formerly denoted morphologically.

Reference table of the principal grammatical noun suffixes in Old English

3. The pronoun

The following classes of pronoun were to be observed in Old English: personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, relative and indefinite pronouns.

The system of declension of the pronoun was not the same for all the classes. It has at least two subsystems that should be singled out: the declension of personal pronouns on the one hand and the declension of other pronouns. Although the grammatical categories of each subsystem were the same, i.e. gender, number, case, the number of the categorical forms composing those categories was different.

3.1. The personal pronoun

The Old English personal pronoun similar to the Old English noun had the grammatical categories of gender, number and case.

Gender

Three genders could be distinguished in the pronominal paradigm: masculine, feminine and neuter, but different forms for different genders were found only in the third person singular, the rest of the forms being indifferent to gender.

Masculine feminine neuter

Nom. Sing. Hē (he) hēo (she) hit (it)

Nom. Plur. hī (they)

Number

The category of number differs from that of the noun as in the first and second person we find three categorical forms: singular, dual and plural, for instance:

Singular dual Plural

Ic (I) wit (two of us) wē (we)

Case

The category of case is built up the opposition of four categorical forms, similar to those of the noun: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative.

Unlike the Old English noun, the paradigm of which was composed of forms that mainly differed in the ending, the paradigm of the Old English personal pronouns is built up by suppletive forms and the homonymty of pronominal forms is not great. We find it only in the Dative and the Accusative cases.

Declension of the personal pronoun Ic

3.2. Other pronouns

All Old English pronouns with the exception of personal pronouns with the exception of personal pronouns were declined almost alike. They expressed the grammatical categories of gender (three forms: masculine, feminine and neuter), number (two forms: singular and plural) and case, which was built up by five categorical forms: the nominative, the Accusative, the Dative, the Genitive and the Instrumental, different from the Dative only in the singular.

If we compare the paradigm of these pronouns with those of the noun and the personal pronoun we cannot but take notice that they differed in number of the categorical forms composing the category of number.

The personal pronoun unlike the rest of the pronouns and the noun possessed three categorical forms composing the category of number.

All the other pronouns unlike the personal pronoun and the noun had five cases.

Declension of the demonstrative pronoun sē

2. The adjective

4.1. Declension of adjectives

The paradigm of the adjective is similar to that of the noun and the pronoun, i.e. it compromises Gender, Number, and Case.

The grammatical category of case was built up by five forms: the Nominative, the Accusative, the Dative, the Genitive and the Instrumental.

There were two ways of declining adjectives – the definite and the indefinite declension. The adjective followed the definite declension mainly if the noun if modified had another attribute – a demonstrative pronoun, and they were declined as indefinite otherwise.

The grammatical suffixes – forms of cases mainly coincided with those of nouns with the stem originally ending in a vowel or -n, yet in some cases we find pronominal suffixes example, in the Genitive Plural, in Dative Singular, etc.

Declension of adjectives

4.2. Degrees of comparison

The adjective in Old English changed its forms not only to show the relation of the given adjective to other words in the sentence which was expressed by the gender, number and case of the adjective, but also to show the degree of the quality denoted by the adjective, i.e. the forms of the adjective in Old English could expressed degrees of comparison.

The degrees of comparison were expressed, the same as all other grammatical notions, synthetically, namely:

1. by means of suffixation:

heard – heardra – heardost (hard)

2. by means of vowel gradation plus suffixation:

eald – ieldra – ieldest (old)

3. by means of suppletive forms

Зōd – bettra – betst (good)

the first means being unquestionably the most common.

Both suffixation and the use of suppletive forms in the formation of the degrees of comparison are original means that can be traced back to Common Germanic. But the use of vowel interchange is a feature which is typical of the English language only and was acquired by the language in the pre-historic period of its development.

The origin of vowel gradation in the forms

eald – ieldra – ieldest

is a result of the process of palatal mutation which the root-vowel ea underwent under the influence of the original stem-forming suffix –i, ie.

Positive Comparative Suppletive

degree degree degree

eald ieldra ieldest

ealdira ealdist

ealdira > ieldra ealdist > ieldest

A similar case is observed with strong (strong), long (long) etc.

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Summary

A careful study of the systems of declensions of nouns, pronouns and adjectives shows that the pronominal and adjectival paradigms are more developed, they are richer in the number of word-forms. The homonymity of forms although existing (especially in the declension of the definite adjective) is not so pronounced and the oppositions between word-forms are more evident.