Old English grammar


The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected. As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as the umlaut.
Among living languages, Old English morphology most closely resembles that of modern Icelandic, which is among the most conservative of the Germanic languages. To a lesser extent, it resembles modern German.
Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners were fully inflected, with four grammatical cases, and a vestigial instrumental, two grammatical numbers and three grammatical genders. First and second-person personal pronouns also had dual forms for referring to groups of two people, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms.
The instrumental case was somewhat rare and occurred only in the masculine and neuter singular. It was often replaced by the dative. Adjectives, pronouns and participles agreed with their corresponding nouns in case, number and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subjects in person and number.
Nouns came in numerous declensions. Verbs were classified into ten primary conjugation classes seven strong and three weak each with numerous subtypes, alongside several smaller conjugation groups and a few irregular verbs. The main difference from other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, is that verbs could be conjugated in only two tenses, and the absence of a synthetic passive voice, which still existed in Gothic.

Nouns

Old English nouns are grouped by grammatical gender, and inflect based on case and number.

Gender

Old English retains all three genders of Proto-Indo-European: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Each noun belongs to one of the three genders, while adjectives and determiners take different forms depending on the gender of the noun they describe. The word for "the" or "that" is sē with a masculine noun, sēo with a feminine noun, and þæt with a neuter noun. Adjectives change endings: for instance, since hring is masculine and cuppe is feminine, a golden ring is gylden hring, while a golden cup is gyldenu cuppe.
In Old English the words for "he" and "she" also mean "it". Hē refers back to masculine nouns, hēo to feminine nouns, reserving the neuter pronoun hit for grammatically neuter nouns. That means even inanimate objects are frequently called "he" or "she". See the following sentence, with the masculine noun snāw:
Compare this parallel sentence, where the neuter noun fȳr is referred to with hit :
Only a few nouns referring to people have a grammatical gender that does not match their natural gender, as in the neuter word mæġden. In such cases, adjectives and determiners follow grammatical gender, but pronouns follow natural gender: Þæt mæġden sēo þǣr stent, canst þū hīe?.
When two nouns have different genders, adjectives and determiners that refer to them together are inflected neuter: Hlīsa and spēd bēoþ twieċġu.

Gender assignment

In Old English, each noun's gender derives from morphophonology rather than directly from semantics. In other words, the gender of a noun derives as much or more from its structural form than any properties of the referent.
The gender of a given Old English noun is partly predictable, based on a combination of semantic and historical morphophonological grounds. What follows are some general principles in assigning noun gender in Old English.
In general, a thing that has biological sex will have that same gender; masculine fæder and feminine mōdor, masculine cyning and feminine cwēn, masculine munuc and feminine nunne, etc. The three major exceptions are neuter wīf and mæġden, and masculine wīfmann.
Animal names that refer only to males are masculine, and animal names that refer only to females are feminine. The only exception is drān, which is feminine even though it refers to male bees.
General names for animals could be of any gender: for example, ūr is masculine, fifalde is feminine, and swīn is neuter.
If a noun could refer to both males and females, it was usually masculine. Hence frēond and fēond were masculine, along with many other examples such as lufiend, bæcere, hālga, sċop, cuma, mǣġ, cristen, hǣðen, āngenġa, selfǣta, hlēapere, and sangere. The main exceptions are the two words for "child", ċild and bearn, which are both neuter.
It is not easy to predict the gender of a noun that refers to a thing without biological sex, such as neuter seax, feminine gafol, and masculine cucler. The gender of nouns with inanimate referents is usually determined by historical morphophonological principles:
  • Nouns ending in -a are almost all masculine. The exceptions are a small number of learned borrowings from Latin, such as Italia and discipula.
  • Compound words always take the gender of the last part of the compound. That is why wīfmann is masculine, even though it means "woman": it is a compound of wīf plus the masculine noun mann.
  • Similarly, if a noun ends in a suffix, the suffix determines its gender. Nouns ending in the suffixes -oþ, -dōm, -end, -els, -uc, -ling, -ere, -hād, and -sċipe are all masculine, nouns ending in -ung, -þu, -nes, -estre, -rǣden, and -wist are all feminine, and nouns ending in -lāc, -et, -ærn, and -ċen are all neuter. Mæġden is neuter because it ends in the neuter diminutive suffix -en.
  • Letters of the alphabet are all masculine.
  • Metals are all neuter.
  • Adjectives used as nouns, such as colors, are neuter unless they refer to people. When they do refer to people, they are masculine by default unless the person is known to be a female, in which case they duly follow the feminine inflections: fremde, fremdu ; dēadlīċ, dēadlīcu.
  • Verbs are neuter when used as nouns.
Since gender is noun-specific and ultimately a feature of morphophonology rather than semantics, it goes without saying that any "thing" might be referred to as a different name of a different gender: a "mountain" could be denoted by the masculine beorg or feminine dūn, a "star" could be denoted by masculine steorra or neuter tungol, a "window" could be denoted by neuter ēagþȳrel or feminine ēagduru, a "tree" could be denoted by neuter trēo or masculine bēam, a "shield wall" denoted by masculine sċieldweall or feminine sċieldburg.

Feminizing suffixes

Old English has two nouns for many types of people: a general term which can refer to both males and females, like Modern English "waiter", and a separate term which refers only to females, like Modern English "waitress". Several different suffixes are used to specify females:
  • -en is added to miscellaneous words such as god → gyden, ielf → ielfen, þeġn → þiġnen, þēow → þiewen, and nēahġebūr → nēahġebȳren.
  • -estre is the female equivalent of -ere and -end, both meaning "-er". It is used on many nouns such as sangere → sangestre, lufiend → lufestre, bæcere → bæcestre, tæppere → tæppestre, and forspennend → forspennestre.
  • -e is the female equivalent of -a, which was sometimes a regular noun ending with no meaning and sometimes yet another suffix meaning "-er". Examples include wyrhta → wyrhte and foregenġa → foregenġe.
Sometimes the female equivalent is a totally separate word, as in lārēow ~ lǣrestre, lǣċe ~ lācnestre, and hlāford ~ hlǣfdiġe.

Case

As in several other old Germanic languages, Old English declensions include five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and instrumental.
  • Nominative: the subject of a sentence, which carries out the action. Hē lufode hīe, þæt mæġden rann. Words on the other side of "to be" also take this case: in the phrase wyrd is eall, both "destiny" and "all" are nominative.
  • Accusative: the direct object, that which is acted upon. Hē lufode hīe, sē ridda ācwealde þone dracan.
  • Genitive: the possessor of something. Ġesāwe þū þæs hundes bān?. The genitive in Old English corresponds to 's in present-day English and to "of" in present-day English. Hence, "The fall of Rome" was Rōme hryre, literally "Rome's fall", and "the god of thunder" was þunres god, literally "thunder's god". Old English has the preposition "of" but the genitive was the main way of indicating possession. The genitive case could be used partitively, to signify that something was composed of something else: "a group of people" was manna hēap, "three of us" was ūre þrī, and "a cup of water" was wætres cuppe.
  • Dative: the indirect object. Iċ sealde hire þone beall.
  • Instrumental: something that is being used. Hwæl mē meahte mid āne sleġe besenċan oþþe ofslēan. This case can be used without prepositions when the meaning is clear, as in ōðre naman, which means " another name": Ūhtred sē Godlēasa æt Bebban byrġ, ōðre naman sē Deneslaga. During the Old English period, the instrumental was falling out of use, having mostly merged with the dative. It was distinguished from the dative only in the masculine and neuter singular of strong adjectives and demonstratives, and even then the dative was often used instead.