SOME FEATURES OF OLD ENGLISH GRAMMAR

To modern eyes and ears, Old English grammar provides a fascinating mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The word order is much more varied than it would be in Modern English, but there are several places where it is strikingly similar. Adjectives usually go before their nouns, as do prepositions, articles, and other grammatical words, just as they do today. Sometimes, whole sentences are identical in the order of words, or nearly so. The main syntactic differences affect the placing of the verb, which quite often appears before the subject, and also at the very end of the clause. In Modern English, word order is relatively fixed. The reason Old English order could vary so much is that the relationships between the parts of the sentence were signaled by other means. Like other Germanic languages, Old English was inflected: the job a word did in the sentence was signaled by the kind of ending it had. Today, most of these inflections have died away, leaving the modern reader with the major task of getting used to the word endings, in order to understand the Old English texts.

Old English prose provides the clearest way in to analyzing the grammar of the language.

This extract is from an Old English translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. It tells the story of Cædmon, the unlettered cowherd who became England's first Christian poet, sometime in the late 7th century. The translation dates from the late 9th century.

The verb “to be”

The past tense of the verb “be” has changed little since Old English times, apart from the loss of the plural ending.

wæs wære wæs wæron wæron wæron

The present tense forms, however, show several differences. To begin with Old English had two sets of words expressing the notion of 'be', one parallel to Latin esse (OE wesan) and the other to Latin fui (OE beon).

wesan beon
eom eart is sind(on) sind(on) sind(on) beo bist bið beoð beoð beoð
       

There were also subjunctive, imperative, and participial forms of both verbs. There seem to have been several differences in the way the two sets of verbs were used, though there is insufficient evidence to draw up hard-and-fast rules. The beon forms were preferred in habitual and repetitive contexts, and especially when there was a future implication. There is a dear example of this difference in one of the Homilies, where the speaker addresses the Holy Trinity.

ðu ðe æfre wære, and æfre bist, and nu eart, an ælmihtig God… you who always were, and ever will be, and now…

 

 

The Pronouns

The personal pronoun system had more members than we find in Modern English. But one should bear in mind that Old English pronouns were not always used in the same way as they are now for in Old English the gender was grammatical: for example bōс “book” is feminine, and would be referred to as heo'she', whereas mægden 'girl' is neuter, and would be referred to as hit.

 

Personal pronouns (nom. case) + dual number
ic “I” wē “we” / wit    
þū “you” ȝē “you” / ȝit
hē, hēō, hit “he, she, it” hi, hēō “they”    

 

Personal pronouns (acc./dat. case)
mē “me” ūs “us” / unc
þē “you” ēōw “you” / inc
hine (acc.)/him(dat.) “him/(to) him”, hi (acc.)/hire (dat.) “her/(to) her”, hit (acc.)/him (dat.) “it/(to) it” nom (acc.) “them” him (dat.) “(to) them”

 

Personal pronouns (gen. case)
min “mine” ūre “ours” /uncer
þin “yours” ēōwer “yours” / incer
his, hire, his “his, her, its” hira “theirs”

 

In addition, the language showed the remains of a 'dual' personal pronoun system, but only in the 1st and 2ndpersons. The 1st person form meant 'we two' (nom. wit, acc/dat. unc, gen. uncer; the 2nd person form 'you two' (nom. ȝit, acc./dat. inc, gen. incer). This disappeared by the 13th century.

OLD ENGLISH ARTICLES

Old English nouns may be masculine, feminine, or neuter, regardless of the biological sex of the referents. They also appear in nominative, accusative, dative and genitive forms depending on their function in the clause. The nominative masculine form of the definite article, se, is seen here with mon (a common spelling for man); the equivalent feminine form, sēō, would be found with hearpe 'harp'; and the equivalent neuter form, þæt, would be found with hūs.

OLD ENGLISH VERB

There are three main kinds of modern English verbs and all three can be traced back to old English.

1. Those forms their past tense by adding -ed to the root form of the present tense: jump/jumped. Then as now the majority of verbs are of this type.

2. Those forming their past tense by changing the vowel in their root form of the present tense: see/saw. These are called vocalic or “strong” verbs in Old English grammars, and the patterned changes in the vowel quality which they display are described as vowel gradation or ablaut.

3. Wholly irregular verbs such as can, will and be.

Verb inflections The modern verb has very few inflectional endings. Past tense for regular verbs is marked by the -ed suffix in all persons; and in the pre- sent tense only the 3rd person singular is distinctive (-s). Old English made far more distinctions, as can be seen from the following paradigm:

Present tense

ic lufie “I love” wē lufiað “we love”
þū lufast “you love” ȝē lufiað “you love”
hē, hēō, hit lufað “he, she, it loves” hi lufiað “they love”

Past tense

ic lufode “I loved” wē lufodon “we loved”
þū lufodest “you loved” ȝē lufodon “you loved”
hē, hēō, hit lufode “he, she, it loved” hi lufodon “they loved”

Some of the present tense endings weakened and disappeared soon after the Old English period. But the 2nd and 3rd person singular forms stayed on, developing into the familiar -est and -eth forms of Middle English (lovest, loveth). There were several other distinctive inflectional features of the Old English verb: The infinitive: -an or -ian was added to the root. Examples are singan 'to sing' and nealecan'(to) approach'. The infinitive of 'love' was lufian. The use of a suffix to mark the infinitive was lost after the Old English period, and the particle to came to be used instead.

The -ing form: the equivalent form was -end(e). Examples are gongende 'going' and sprecende 'speaking'. This form hardly survives the beginning of the Middle English period, being replaced by the -ing(e) ending which in Old English had been restricted to nouns.

The -ed form: this shows the same kind of vowel changes and endings we see today, but it also had a special prefix, ȝe-(as in all other West Germanic Languages the form is well represented in the Cædmon text, being a past narrative see ȝeseted 'settled', geleornode 'learned', etc. It stays well into Middle English, but is lost by c.1500, apart from in archaisms (such as yclept “called”).

The subjunctive: unlike in Modern English, this mood was systematically used, but it had far fewer endings than the indicative. It can be seen especially in subordinate clauses expressing a subjective attitude. Plural forms in both present and past tenses have a distinctive -en ending. An example is sceolden 'should'.

 


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