Old English
Grammar and Grammar Generally
Grammatical Properties of NOUNS:
All nouns have…
Number
Singular (dog,
mouse)
Plural (dogs,
mice)
[Dual: two and
only two]
Gender (“type”)
“Grammatical
gender” rarely has anything to do sex, or manliness or girliness
It is a
grammatical category:
“The boat, she is
sinking”
Nouns have a
single gender, which does not change
Masculine
Feminine
Neuter
(“neither”)
[Common
(“either”)]
For human beings natural
gender and grammatical gender usually match up, but:
OE cild “child”
neuter
OE wifmann “woman”
masculine
German Mädchen and Fraulein, “girl,” neuter
Irish cailín “girl”
masculine
Irish stail “stallion”
is feminine
For non-humans,
grammatical gender bears no logical connection to biological gender
Case (“form”)
In an inflected
language, every noun (and noun-friend: Pronoun, Adjective) can appear in one of
a variety of forms, or cases, which
reflect the noun’s role in a given sentence.
For Indo-European
languages, these cases are expressed through a variety of inflectional
suffixes, or endings. What exactly these suffixes look like depends
on a number of factors, including the noun’s gender and class (another set of
types). But the different CASES all
express the same grammatical function.
For Old English,
there are 5 cases (reduced from PIE’s 8):
Nominative (“naming”)
Subject or subject complement (subject “filler”)
“Tommy eats a lot.”
“Tommy is king.”
Accusative (“hitting”)
Direct object:
the thing that is hit (or receives any other action from the verb
“Pooh loves honey.”
“Grendel eats Danes.”
“They eat Grendel.”
“They eat him.”
“He eats them.”
Also used for the
object of certain prepositions, usually expressing motion towards
“Grendel went into the
hall.”
“He charged towards them.”
Dative (“giving”)
Indirect object: the person to whom something is given, shown, told,
etc. Can usually be expressed with “to”
or “for”
“Kanga gives Roo hugs.”
“Kanga gives hugs to Roo.”
“Kanga made a scarf for
Roo.”
Also used for the
object of certain prepositions
“Grendel lives in a
swamp”
Genitive (“what type?” “whose?”)
Possessive (who owns
it): “of” case
“Tigger’s
tail is striped”
“Tigger’s
bouncing has become a problem.”
“Pooh is a bear of very
little brain.”
“The book’s ending
is sad.”
“The ending of the book
is brief.”
Instrumental
by
means of what?
“Pooh rescued Piglet with
his umbrella.”
“Beowulf gave Grendel’s
head to Hrothgar with a spear.”
PRONOUNS (“in place of a noun”)
All the same
categories as a noun (person, number, gender)
The most
inflected forms in OE and Modern English
The paradigm has
hardly changed at all
(in Modern English, the Accusative and the Instrumental have been
completely lost: absorbed into Dative)
ADJECTIVES (“additions”)
Adjectives modify
or describe nouns
“The bloody spear”
“The sick dog”
“The rotten cheese”
Adjectives are
just like nouns, except they can change gender
every
adjective can be Masculine, Feminine, or Neuter
which
means each every adjective will have three separate sets of inflectional
endings
Adjectives must
agree in number, gender, and case with the noun they modify
“Cruel Unferth gave the sick dog some
rotten cheese before hitting its mangy head with the butt of the bloody spear.”
VERBS
Person (“actor’s mask”)
The doer of the
verb (hence the subject of the sentence)
First (I or We)
Second (You, sing
or pl)
Third (He, She,
It or They)
Inflected
languages have different forms of the verb, depending on the PERSON
In many highly
inflected languages, this means that a subject of a sentence does not need to
be stated, because it is implied in the verb form itself
LATIN:
amo,
“I love”
amas,
“you (sg) love”
amat,
“he, she, it loves”
amamus,
“we love”
amatis,
“you (pl) love”
amant,
“they love”
In Modern
English, there is only one inflectional
affix which differentiates person,
for the third person singular (and this is only in the present tense)
Old English has a
much more complicated verbal system, but not nearly as complex as Latin or
Romance language. In prose, the subject
is almost always stated.
Number
Singular
Plural
[Dual]
Tense (“time”)
Present
Past
[other languages have distinct forms for things like
Future
Perfect
Imperfect
Pluperfect
Future Perfect
Old and Modern English
express all these forms periphrastically]
Mood (“mode” “way”)
Indicative
(“showing”)
Statements of
fact
Imperative
(“commanding”)
Issuing commands
Subjunctive
(“subjoined,” “subordinate,” “underneath”)
A wide variety of
statement types, which are not facts, such as
wishes
(“I wish I were…”)
hypotheticals
(If only I were…”)
exhortations
(Let us go!)
mild
commands
Old English had
clearly inflected subjunctive; Modern English retains vestiges of it (as
above), but primarily expresses subjunctives through “modal” (“moodal") auxiliaries:
may, might, would, should, could
Voice
Active (subject
is doer)
“John hits
the ball”
Passive (subject
is done; only possible with transitive verbs)
“John is hit
by the ball”
In Old and Modern
English, passive voice is only expressed periphrastically
Old English Particulars
NOUNS
A variety of
different noun CLASSES, which have different inflectional endings
(Named after their
Primitive Germanic stems so they don’t seem to make much sense)
Masculine A-stem nouns:
Most important,
because this is where ModEng got her analogical inflectional endings
Genitive
singular:
–es > s >
's
(the apostrophe stands for the missing ‘e’)
“wulfes
toð”
Masculine Nom/Acc plural:
–as
> s
Analogy has
extended this pattern, which used to only apply to one class and one gender, to
almost every single English noun; anything which doesn’t conform is now known
as “irregular”
Neuter A-stems (long stem):
Have ZERO plural
Origin of “deer,”
“sheep”
(“fish” in OE is A-stem: fisc, fiscas/fixas)
Feminine O-stems
Feminine nouns
have own sets of endings, on own patterns
Have all been
analogically converted to A-stem pattern
Remnant: Lady day ladybug ladybird
(OED says gen was
hlafdigan)
N-stem: Weak Nouns
–an
oxen
(children; brethren)
Root-stem:
mutated
plurals
*-i for Dative
singular
*-iz for plural
i-mutation
and the ending dropped
Foot, goose, mouse, louse, man
Lost: book/beech;
freond/frynd; cow/cy (kine)
Z-stem:
Marked by an ‘r’in the plural
cild, pl. cildru >
children
PRONOUNS
se,
seo, þæt “that”
þes,
þeos, þis “this”
Highly inflected
acts
like article to reveal information about nouns
(gender, case, number)
Not really an
article
Nor was the
indefinite originally
Mod Eng a/an
> OE ane
“one,” “a certain”
ADJECTIVES
Must agree in
number, case, and gender with NOUN to which it refers
Comparative / Superlative
–ra, –ost
every
single ADJ would take these endings
(regardless of syllables)
Last line of Beowulf:
cwædon þæt
he wære wyruldcyninga
manna mildust ond monðwærust,
leodum liðost
ond lofgeornost.
Some irregular
Have suppletive forms
god / betra / betst
little
/ less / least
but
also analogical littler and littlest
neah
/ nearra / nyhst
Form ADJ from
NOUNS
add
–lic
eorðlic
heofonlic
Adverbs:
Add –e
deop
> deope
fast
> faste
ModEng
adverb affix –ly
is derived from “–lic-e”
Not all –ly are adverbs, nor do all adverbs need “-ly”
Quick, fast, slow, hard
VERBS
Weak verbs:
addition
of dental suffix to show past tense
Can be realized
as –d or –t
Some with vowel
changes (but still dental suffix)
Buy / bought / bought
Think / thought / thought
(the vowel change here is actually the result of i-mutation
in the present tense, but not in the past)
Show past tense
through internal vowel change:
ablaut,
vowel gradation
7 regular
patterns (Verb Classes), which often don’t appear regular because of other
vowel changes going on
Many strong verbs
remain:
drink,
drank, drunk
rise,
rose, risen
choose,
chose, chosen
Many have given
over to analogy
help
Preterit-present verbs
Funky conjugation
Have become modal
auxiliaries, though in OE had lexical meaning
Magan:
“be able” (may, might)
Sculan:
“must” ( > shall,
should)
Cunnan:
“know (how to)” ( > can, could)
Anomalous verbs
Suppletive
forms
Verb “to be”
highly
irregular, as always
Two complete
present tenses:
Gan: “go” + eode
(went
< wendan)
Willan:
“want to”
Periphrastic
forms
To express perfect tense and passive
voice
Impersonal verbs
No subject:
Seems to me
methinks
Pleases me
Thirsts me