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Old English Grammar.Noun. The noun paradigm consisted of gender, number and case in OE period. - gender.All OE nouns carried three gender: Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. The division of OE nouns in accordance with the grammatical gender was traditional, so it is hard to trace the correspondence between the meaning of a word and its gender. Besides the grammatical gender did not always coincide with a natural gender of a person and sometimes even contradicted it. Thus, for instance, the noun mæiden and wif are neuter, the noun wifman was declined as masculine. - number.The grammatical category of number was formed by the opposition of two forms: the singular and the plural. Since OE was an inflected language it had a variety of paradigms for nouns, each one of which had separate ways of forming a plural. In most of the paradigms the plurals were inflectad 9fisc – fiscas, eage – Eagan), some nouns made plural by vowel gradation (man – men, boc – bec). Sometimes the singular and the plural forms coincided (deor – deor). -caseOe nouns were inflected for 4 cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative. The case form was marked by a certain ending the choice of which depended on the type of declension, the noun belonged to. Historically the OE system of noun declension is based on the division of nouns in accordance with a stem suffix. The original stem-suffix which was attached to the root served for word building (eg. Stem-suffix survived in òåëåíîê – òåëÿòà, âðåìÿ – âðåìåíà, did not survived in English). But in proto-germanic stem-suffixes became either a part of a stem or a part of an ending, though the division of nouns into different types according to the stem-suffix remained. There were vocalic (-a, -o, -u, -i) and consonant (-n, -r, -s, -nd) stem-suffixes after which the declensions were called. The majority of OE nouns belonged to the a-stem and the n-stems. A-stems included Masculine, Neuter nouns. As a rule those are common every day words that formed the very core of the OE vocabulary: eg. Cniht, hors, ham, etc. the distinclive features of the paradigm of the a-stem nouns are the flexion –s\ – es for singular genitive, -as for nominative and accusative plural. Another most numerous group of nouns formed the n-stem declension. This class of words was composed of common words of all the genders. The original stem-suffix may be odserved in the majority of case forms.
| 3 âîïðîñ Special consideration should be given to the root-stems. This class was not extensive but due to its peculiarities it partly retained in NE. unlike the other classes the root-stem nouns originally had no stem-suffix and the grammatical ending was directly added to the root. As the result of that in the Dat sg and the Nom and Acc pl the root vowel underwent palatal mutation due to the sound [i] in the ending. Later the ending was dropped and the vowel under change remained the only means of differentiating the given forms from the rest of the paradigm. (cf. mus, Dat. Mγse, Nom. Pl. mγs). Moreover in many paradigms of Oe nouns the nominative and Accusative had fallen together in both singular and plural. In the plural all nouns had identical endings for the genitive and another for the dative. So the difference between the various case forms blurred even in OE. Due to the weakening and the loss of unstressed syllables the noun paradigm was greatly simplified in ME and NE. 1. the category of gender disappeared because the unstressed syllables were leveled in the endings which were the only markers of the gender. 2. the number of declension was reduced. The loss and the weakening of unstressed endings destroyed many distinctive inflections of OE. As a result the whole inflexional system became simplified in English. The two major types of declensions (a- and n-stems) with the most distinctive flexions tended to attract al the other nouns to themselves. This led to the rearrangement of the types of declensions. One was the a-stem, which had –es for the plural, and the other was the n-stem, with the ending –en for the plural. The first one became dominant and by the 15th c it was almost universal. 3. the number of cases was reduced in ME. There remained only two cases: common and genitive. The OE Nominative, Dative and Accusative fused into the common case due to homonimy of the endings. | |||||||
| 4. MAIN CHANGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH VERB SYSTEM Old English Grammar. OE was a synthetic language in which all principle grammatical notions were expressed by the change of the form of the word. The grammatical means OE used were a) grammatical endings which were the primary form-building means; b) vowel gradation; c) suppletive formation, different roots were used in form building of a word, eg. Good – better – best. Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1455
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