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OE noun, its grammatical categories. Weak declension.

Nouns in OE had the categories of number, gender and case. Gender is actually not a gram. Category in a strict sense of the word, for every noun with all its forms belongs to only one gender; but case and number had a set of endings. Nouns used to denote males are normally masculine Рmann, ľder (man, father). Naturally, those denoting females should be all feminine, - modor, sweostor (mother, sister).

There are two numbers – sing. and pl., and 4 cases – nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. The number proved to be a stable category, relevant for rendering the meanings and expressing the true state of things in reality. Case is supplanted by other means to express the relations between words in an utterance, whereas gender disappeared altogether.

All the nouns can be classified according to the different principles. In traditional historical studies the nouns are divided into classes according to the former stem-forming suffixes. These stem-forming suffixes determined what inflections were taken by the nouns.

The nouns in OE are commonly classified as belonging to strong and weak declension, within each of these groups there are several subgroups.

This class of nouns consists of a rather numerous group of nouns originally having – n-stems; the suffix is well-preserved in declension of nouns in OE, but disappeared in the nom. Case n-stem nouns may be of all three genders. But actually no difference in declension of nouns of different genders can be found.

e.g.: masculine: wita (wise man), steorra (star),

neuter: cofa (chamber)

feminine: heorte (heart), sunne (sun).

Root stems. This group comprises the nouns that never had a stem suffix.

e.g.: wimman (woman), tōð (tooth), mūs (mouse).

The nouns belonging to r-stems were of masculine and feminine gender, the group is a closed system. It included only the terms of kinship. The endings here are scarce, a distinctive feature is that the dative case sing. had a mutated vowel.

e.g.: dohtor (daughter), sweostor (sister).

Less numerous and less significant for the development of the present-day nominal system are the nouns that had other consonants as a stem-forming suffix. S-stems had this suffix in older times, they changed it into occasional appearance of r-sound in indirect cases. They are all neuter.

e.g. lamb (lamb), cealf (calf), cild (child).

-nd-stems are all masculine and their declension combines the peculiarities of the declension of a-stems and, to some extent, r-stems as they all denote persons.

e.g. frēond (friend), fēond (accuser).

· Explain the Modern English pronunciation of the underlined words from a historical point of view.

(OE namen/nama [nama/ namen] ME nama [na:mә] NE name) natural- Due to vowel shift.

· State the evolution of the definite article “the” from a historical point of view. (the development of the demonstrative pronoun se, seo led to the formation of the definite article. In OE these pronouns were used as noun determiners. In ME there arose an important difference between demonstrative pronoun “that” and definite article “the” which was uninflected. In the 14th c. article had lost all traces of inflection and became short unaccented form-word )



The last Celtic arrivals from Europe were the Belgic tribes. It was natural for them to settle in the southeast of Britain, probably pushing other Celtic tribes northwards as they did so. At any rate, when Julius Caesar briefly visited Britain in 55 BC he saw that the Belgic tribes were different from the older inhabitants. “The interior is inhabited, he wrote, “by peoples who consider themselves indigenous, the coast by people who have crossed from Belgium. Nearly all of these still keep the names of the [European] tribes from which they came.”


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1352


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Card 15 | Latin Influence on OE
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