Lecture 7

The Old English Morphology

1. The Old English Noun.

Nouns in Old English had the categories of number, gender, and case.
Gender in OE is grammatical, not logical or natural. This means that nouns and
pronouns followed different patterns of declension as a function of linguistic
characteristics of the words. Thus wif ‘wife’ is a neuter noun and mann ‘man’ is a
masculine noun, and wifmann ‘woman’ is therefore masculine also, as dictated by the
second element of the compound. The switch to logical gender occurred partly
because of the attrition of the system of inflections, though it actually began in the
OE period and was complete by the end of Middle English. It has been suggested on
the basis of recent work in corpus linguistics that feminine nouns kept their gender
longer than masculine or neuter nouns, and this is perhaps the reason why in Modern
English ‘she’ is occasionally still used to refer to inanimate nouns such as names of
countries, ships and the like.
There are two numbers: singular and plural.
There are four cases in the noun systems depending on the grammatical
function of the noun. The nominative case was used primarily for subjects, the
accusative case for direct objects, the genitive case for possessives; and the dative
case was used primarily for indirect objects, but had other functions as well.
Nouns in OE are divided into either vocalic or consonantal stems, depending
on the element in which the noun-stem originally ended. There are four vocalic stems
-a, -o, -u and -i, though the vowel itself was often lost in OE, the declension being
actually inherited from an earlier form of Germanic. The largest group of consonantal
stems was marked by the presence of n in Indo-European; then comes the group of
root stems; other minor groups of nouns included r-, s- and nd- stems. It has become
traditional to call the declensions of stems ending in a vowel strong, of n-stems
weak, and to designate all other declensions as minor.
2. The Old English Pronoun
There are several types of pronouns in OE: personal, possessive, demonstrative,
interrogative, definite, indefinite, negative, and relative.
In OE, as in Gothic, there are besides singular and plural personal pronouns,
also dual pronouns for the 1st and 2nd persons, which are used to refer to a pair of
people, e.g. a married couple. All three persons and genders are preserved in the
singular. OE has also four cases in the pronouns, still distinguishing the dative and
accusative forms, which fell together by Middle English, producing what is in
Modern English often referred to as the ‘objective case’.
As for possessive pronouns, these are derived from the genitive case of the
personal pronouns of all persons and numbers. The possessive pronouns mīn, þīn,
uncer, incer, ūre, ēower are declined in the same way as strong adjectives. The
possessive pronouns his, hire, and hiera are unchanged. Besides, there is the reflexive
possessive pronoun sin, which is also declined in the way of strong adjectives.
There are two demonstrative pronouns in OE: sē ‘that’ and þes ‘this’. The
meaning of this pronoun is often weakened, so that it approaches the status of an
article, e.g. sē mann ‘the man’, sēo sǣ ‘the sea’, þæt lond ‘the land’.
The interrogative pronouns hwā ‘who’ and hwæt ‘what’ have only singular
forms. The interrogative pronoun hwilc ‘which’ is declined as a strong adjective.
As for definite pronouns, here we find the pronouns ȝehwā ‘every’, ȝehwilc
‘each’, ǣȝþer ‘either’, ǣlc ‘each’, swilc ‘such’ and sē ilca ‘the same’.
The negative pronouns nān and nǣnig, both meaning ‘no’, ‘none’, are also
declined as strong adjectives.

3. The Old English Adjective

The OE adjective is especially interesting for a variety of reasons. First, there
are two sets of forms, termed ‘strong’ and ‘weak’: the strong endings are used when
the adjective is not accompanied by a marker of definiteness – in this case an article
or a demonstrative or possessive pronoun; the weak endings occur when the adjective
is preceded by a determiner.
 Second, the cases of the adjective preserve a greater degree of formal
differentiation than do the cases of the noun; this is especially true of the strong
adjective, in both numbers. In addition, the adjective preserves five distinct cases
(i.e., preserving a separate instrumental, something that is no longer obvious in the
noun).
The so-called qualitative adjectives were inflected for the degrees of
comparison. The ending of the comparative degree was usually –ra, of the
superlative –ost.
E.g. heard – heardra – heardost.
A few adjectives had comparative and superlative forms from a different root
from that of the positive (suppletivity).
E.g. gōd – betera – betst
sēlra – sēlest
yfel – wyrsa - wyrst
mycel – mara – mæst
lytel – læssa – læst

4. The Old English Adverb

The adverb in Old English was inflected only for comparison. The comparative
was regularly formed with –or and the superlative with –ost.
E.g. hearde ‘severely’ – heardor – heardost
The most productive adverb-forming suffix was –e. By origin it was the ending
of the instrumental case, neuter of the strong declension of adjectives. The
adverbialization of this case form produced many adverbs of adjectival nature.
E.g. deop – deope, lang – lange
OE adjectives formed from nouns with the help of the suffix –lic (E.g.
freondlic ‘friendly’, cræftlic ‘skillful’) could further form adverbs by adding –e
(freondlice, cræftlice).
Gradually a great number of adverbs in –lice were formed, and –lice was
regarded as an adverbial suffix which could be used beside or instead of –e. E.g.
hearde and heardlice. Later –lice developed into –ly.
5. The Numeral in Old English

Old English had a system of numerals of common Indo-European origin.

Derived numerals have suffixes that, in phonetically modified form, are found in
present-day English, the numerals twā and ðrīe had three genders, cardinal numerals
from 1 to 4 might be declined and numerals from 20 to 100 were formed by placing
units first and then tens.

6. The Old English Verb.

The inflection of the verb in the Germanic languages is much simpler than it was in
Indo-European times. A comparison of the Old English verb with the verbal
inflection of Greek or Latin will show how much has been lost. Old English
distinguished only two simple tenses by inflection, a present and a past, and except
for one word, it had no inflectional forms for the passive as in Latin or Greek. It
recognized the indicative, subjunctive, and imperative moods and had the usual two
numbers and three persons.
A peculiar feature of the Germanic languages was the division of the verb into
two great classes, the weak and the strong, often known in Modern English as regular
and irregular verbs. These terms, which are so commonly employed in modern
grammars, are rather unfortunate because they suggest an irregularity in the strong
verbs that is more apparent than real. The strong verbs, like sing, sang, sung, which
represent the basic Indo-European type, are so called because they have the power of
indicating change of tense by a modification of their root vowel. In the weak verbs,
such as walk, walked, walked, this change is effected by the addition of a “dental”,
sometimes of an extra syllable.
The apparent irregularity of the strong verbs is due to the fact that verbs of this
type are much less numerous than weak verbs. In Old English, if we exclude
compounds, there were only a few over 300 of them, and even this small number falls
into several classes. Within these classes, however, a perfectly regular sequence can
be observed in the vowel changes of the root. Nowadays these verbs, generally
speaking, have different vowels in the present tense, the past tense, and the past
participle. In some verbs the vowels of the past tense and past participle are identical,
as in break, broke, broken, and in some all three forms have become alike in modern
times (bid, bid, bid). In Old English the vowel of the past tense often differs in the
singular and the plural; or, to be more accurate, the first and third person singular
have one vowel while the second person singular and all persons of the plural have
another. In the principle parts of Old English strong verbs, therefore, we have four
forms: the infinitive, the preterite singular (first and third person), the preterite plural,
and the past participle. In Old English the strong verbs can be grouped in seven
general classes. While there are variations within each class, they may be illustrated
by the following seven verbs:
I. driīfan (‘drive’) drāf drifon (ȝe)drifen
II. cēosan (‘choose’) cēas curon coren
III. helpan (‘help’) healp hulpon holpen
IV. beran (‘bear’) bǣr bǣron boren
V. sprecan (‘speak’) spræc sprǣcon sprecen
VI. faran (‘fare, go’) fōr fōron faren
VII. feallan (‘fall’) fēoll fēollon feallen
The origin of the dental suffixes by which weak verbs form their past tense and
past participle is strongly debated. It was formerly customary to explain these as part
of the verb do, as though I worked was originally I work – did (i.e., I did work). More
recently an attempt has been made to trace these forms to a type of verb that formed
its stem by adding -to- to the root. Here it is sufficient to note that a large and
important group of verbs in Old English form their past tense by adding –ede, –ode,
or –de to the present stem, and their past participles by adding –ed, –od, or –d. Thus
fremman (to perform) has a preterite fremede and a past participle gefremed; lufian
(to love) has lufode and gelufod. It is to be noted, however, that the weak conjugation
has come to be the dominant one in the English language. Many strong verbs have
passed over to this conjugation, and practically all new verbs added to English are
inflected in accordance with it.