Morphological Classification of Nouns. Declensions

The most remarkable feature of OE nouns was their elaborate system of declensions, which was a sort of morphological classification. The total number of declensions, including both the major and minor types, exceeded twenty-five. All in all there were only ten distinct endings (plus some phonetic variants of these endings) and a few relevant root-vowel interchanges used in the noun paradigms; yet every morphological class had either its own specific endings or a specific succession of markers. Historically, the OE system of declensions was based on a number of distinctions: the stem-suffix, the gender of nouns, the phonetic structure of the word, phonetic changes in the final syllables.

In the first place, the morphological classification of OE nouns rested upon the most ancient (IE) grouping of nouns according to the stem-suffixes. Stem-suffixes could consist of vowels (vocalic stems, e. g. a-stems, i-stems), of consonants (consonantal stems, e. g. n-stems), of sound sequences, e. g. -ja-stems, -nd-stems. Some groups of nouns had no stem-forming suffix or had a "zero-suffix"; they are usually termed "root-stems" and are grouped together with consonantal stems, as their roots ended in consonants, e. g. OE man, bōc (NE man, book).

The loss of stem-suffixes as distinct component parts had led to the formation of different sets of grammatical endings. The merging of the stem-suffix with the original grammatical ending and their phonetic weakening could result in the survival of the former stem-suffix in a new function, as a grammatical ending; thus n-stems had many forms ending in -an (from the earlier -*eni, -*enaz, etc.); u-stems had the inflection -u in some forms.

Sometimes both elements — the stem-suffix and the original ending — were shortened or even dropped (e. g. the ending of the Dat. sg -e from the earlier -*ai, Nom. and Acc. pl -as from the earlier -os; the zero-ending in the Nom. and Acc. sg) in a-stems.

Another reason, which accounts for the division of nouns into numerous declensions is their grouping according to gender. OE nouns distinguished three genders: Masc., Fem. and Neut. Though originally a semantic division, gender in OE was not always associated with the meaning of nouns. Sometimes a derivational suffix referred a noun to a certain gender and placed it into a certain semantic group, e. g. abstract nouns built with the help of the suffix -ðu were Fern. — OE lenðu, hyhðu (NE length, height), nomina agentis with the suffix -ere were Masc. — OE fiscere, bōcere (NE fisher, 'learned man'). The following nouns denoting human beings show, however, that grammatical gender did not necessarily correspond to sex: alongside Masc. and Fem. nouns denoting males and females there were nouns with "unjustified" gender, cf:

OE widuwa, Masc. ('widower') — OE widow, Fem. (NE widow);

OE spinnere, Masc. (NE spinner) — OE spinnestre. Fem. ('female spinner'; note NE spinster with a shift of meaning) and nouns like OE wīf, Neut. (NE wife). OE mægden, Neut. (NE maiden, maid), OE wīfman, Masc. (NE woman, originally a compound word whose second component -man was Masc.).

In OE gender was primarily a grammatical distinction; Masc., Fem. and Neut. nouns could have different forms, even if they belonged to the same stem (type of declension).

The division into genders was in a certain way connected with the division into stems, though there was no direct correspondence between them: some stems were represented by nouns of one particular gender, e. g. o-stems were always Fem., others embraced nouns of two or three genders.

Other reasons accounting for the division into declensions were structural and phonetic: monosyllabic nouns had certain peculiarities as compared to polysyllabic;

monosyllables with a long root-syllable (that is, containing a long vowel plus a consonant or a short vowel plus two consonants — also called "long-stemmed" nouns) differed in some forms from nouns with a short syllable (short-stemmed nouns).

The majority of OE nouns belonged to the a-stems, o-stems and n-stems. Special attention should also be paid to the root-stems which displayed specific peculiarities in their forms and have left noticeable traces in Mod E.

a-stems included Masc. and Neut. nouns. About one third of OE nouns were Masc. a-stems, e. g. cniht (NE knight), hām (NE home), mūð (NE mouth); examples of Neut. nouns are:

lim (NE limb), hūs (NE house), ðing (NE thing). (Disyllabic nouns, e. g. finger, differed from monosyllables in that they could drop their second vowel in the oblique cases: Nom, sg finger, Gen. fingres, Dat. fingre, NE finger.

The forms in the a-stem declension were distinguished through grammatical endings (including the zero-ending). In some words inflections were accompanied by sound interchanges: nouns with the vowel [æ] in the root had an interchange [æ>a], since in some forms the ending contained a back vowel, e. g. Nom. sg dæge Gen. dæges — Nom. and Gen. pl dagas, daga. If a noun ended in a fricative consonant, it became voiced in the intervocal position, cf. Nom. sg muð, wulf— [0], [f] — and Nom. pl muðas, wulfas — [o], [v]. (Note that their modem descendants have retained the interchange: NE mouth — mouths [0>ð], wolf-wolves, also house—houses and others.) These interchanges were not peculiar of a-stems alone and are of no significance as grammatical markers; they are easily accountable by phonetic reasons.

Declension of nouns: a-stem*

*For more examples, consult “History of English” by Rastorguyeva, pp.98-99

Neut. a-stems differed from Masc. in the pl of the Nom. and Acc. cases. Instead of-as they took -u for short stems (that is nouns with a short root-syllable) and did not add any inflection in the long-stemmed variant — see Nom. and Acc. pl of scip and dēor in the table. Consequently, long-stemmed Neuters had homonymous sg and pl forms: dēor — dēor, likewise sceap—sceap, ðing - ðing, hus—hus. This peculiarity of Neut. a-stems goes back to some phonetic changes in final unaccented syllables which have given rise to an important grammatical feature: an instance of regular homonymy or neutralisation of number distinctions in the noun paradigm. (Traces of this group of a-stems have survived as irregular pl forms in Mod E: sheep, deer, swine.)

wa- and ja-stemsdiffered from pure a-stems in some forms, as their endings contained traces of the elements -j- and -w-. Nom. and Acc. sg could end in -e which had developed from the weakened -j-, though in some nouns with a doubled final consonant it was lost — cf. OE bridd (NE bird); in some forms -j- is reflected as -i- or -ig- e.g. Nom. here, Dat. herie, herige or herge ('army'). Short-stemmed wa-stems had -u in the Nom. and Acc. sg which had developed from the element -w- but was lost after a long syllable (in the same way as the plural ending of neuter a-stems described above); cf. OE bearu (NE bear) and cnēo; -w- is optional but appears regularly before the endings of the oblique cases (see the declension of cnēo in Table 2).

o-stems were all Fem., so there was no further subdivision according to gender. The variants with -j- and -w- decline like pure o-stems except that -w- appears before some endings, e.g. Nom. sceadu, the other cases — sceadwe (NE shadow). The difference between short-and long-stemmed o-stems is similar to that between respective a-stems: after a short syllable the ending -u is retained, after a long syllable it is dropped: wund, talu. Disyllabic o-stems, like a-stems, lost their second vowel in some case forms: Nom. ceaster, the other cases ceastre ('camp'), NE -caster, -Chester—a component of place-names). Like other nouns, o-stems could have an interchange of voiced and voiceless fricative consonants as allophones in intervocal and final position: glof—glofe [f>v] (NE glove). Among the forms of o-stems there occurred some variant forms with weakened endings or with endings borrowed from the weak declension — with the element -n- wundena alongside wunda. Variation increased towards the end of the OE period.

The other vocalic stems, i-stems and u-stems, include nouns of different genders. Division into genders breaks up i-stems into three declensions, but is irrelevant for u-stems: Masc. and Fem. u-stems decline alike, e.g. Fem. duru (NE door) had the same forms as Masc. sunu shown in the table. The length of the root-syllable is important for both stems; it accounts for the endings in the Nom. and Acc. in the same way as in other classes: the endings -e, -u are usually preserved in short-stemmed nouns and lost in long-stemmed.

Comparison of the i-stems with a-stems reveals many similarities. Neut. i-stems are declined like Neut. ja-stems; the inflection of the Gen. for Masc. and Neut. i-stems is the same as in a-stems -es; alongside pl forms in -e we find new variant forms of Masc. nouns in -as, e. g. Nom., Acc. pl —winas 'friends' (among Masc. i-stems only names of peoples regularly formed their pl in the old way: Dene, Engle, NE Danes, Angles). It appears that Masc. i-stems adopted some forms from Masc. a-stems, while Neut. i-stems were more likely to follow the pattern of Neut. a-stems; as for Fem. i-stems, they resembled o-stems, except that the Acc. and Nom. were not distinguished as with other i-stems.

The most numerous group of the consonantal stems were n-stems or the weak declension, n-stems had only two distinct forms in the sg: one form for the Nom. case and the other for the three oblique cases; the element -n- in the inflections of the weak declension was a direct descendant of the old stem suffix -n, which had acquired a new, grammatical function, n-stems included many Masc. nouns, such as boga, cnotta, steorra (NE bow, knot, star), many Fem. nouns, e. g. cirice, eorðe, heorte, hlæfdige (NE church, earth, heart, lady) and only a few Neut. nouns: ēaga (NE eye).

The pronoun

OE pronouns fell roughly under the same main classes as modem pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. As for the other groups — relative, possessive and reflexive — they were as yet not fully developed and were not always distinctly separated from the four main classes. The grammatical categories of the pronouns were either similar to those of nouns (in "noun-pronouns") or corresponded to those of adjectives (in "adjective pronouns"). Some features of pronouns were peculiar to them alone.

Personal Pronouns*

OE personal pronouns had three persons, three numbers in the 1st and 2nd p. (two numbers—in the 3rd) and three genders in the 3rd p. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p. had suppletive forms like their parallels in other IE languages. The pronouns of the 3rd p., having originated from demonstrative pronouns, had many affinities with the latter.

In OE, while nouns consistently distinguished between four cases, personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions: the forms of the Dat. case of the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p. were frequently used instead of the Acc.; in fact the fusion of these two cases in the pi was completed in the WS dialect already in Early OE: Acc. eowic and usic were replaced by Dat. eow, us; in the sg usage was variable, but variant forms revealed the same tendency to generalise the form of the Dat. for both case's. This is seen in the following quotation:

Se ðe me gehælde, se cwæð tō me 'He who healed me, he said to me' — the first me, though Dat. in form, serves as an Acc. (direct object); the second me is a real Dat.

*See a table of personal pronouns declension at p.103 in “History of English” by Rastorguyeva.