An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

umlaut or mutation, rather obscure. This declension, therefore, is
usually known, both in Old English and today, as the mutation declen-
sion. I realise that at this point I have not properly explained the
process of umlaut. However, I shall return to the issue in more detail in
Chapter 4.
The mutation declension tells us quite a lot about the historical
development of the language, for we can learn two opposing principles
from that development. The first of these is that when a paradigm
becomes obscured, most often because of phonological changes, then the
members of the paradigm tend to attach themselves instead to another,
more regular, paradigm. We can see that this has happened in, for
example, the case of Old English bo¯c compared with present-day book. On
the hand, the second principle states that if a word is very frequent, as in,
say, fo¯t, then perceived irregularities may be preserved because of high
frequency. The first principle can be seen at work in Old English. Thus
some of the mutation nouns begin already in the Old English period
to acquire the inflexions of a regular declension, so that we find fe¯ondas,
fre¯ondas for earlier fy
¯
nd, fry¯nd. The second principle, of course, can only
operate over a long period of time and is only seen in terms of preser-
vation, that is to say it can only be confirmed by the fact that, for
example, present-day man has kept the mutation vowel alternation.
There were three further minor declensions which are important
because they each include some nouns which belong to core vocabulary,
rather like those in the mutation declension. This is most obvious of all
in what we may term the kinship declension. This declension consists
of the four nouns mo¯dor ‘mother’, bro¯
´
or ‘brother’, dohtor ‘daughter’ and
sweostor. These nouns are, to an even greater extent than the mutation
declension, subject to considerable variation, but the following paradigm
is perhaps the most usual:
Singular
Plural
Nom.
mo¯dor
mo¯dru, mo¯dra
Acc.
mo¯dor
mo¯dor, mo¯dra
Gen.
mo¯dor
mo¯dra
Dat.
me¯der
mo¯drum
Sometimes in all of these nouns the nominative-accusative plural shows
a zero inflection, e.g. mo¯dor ‘mothers’. Exceptionally sweostor always has
that uninflected form in the dative plural, but it will be clear that the
other kinship nouns have, like the nouns of the mutation declension, an
umlauted form there. The other word which might be expected to follow
the kinship declension is, of course, fæder ‘father’. In the singular this
word does indeed usually follow the above paradigm, except that it is
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almost always not umlauted in the dative, and thus is uninflected
throughout the singular. In the plural, however, at an early stage it
appears to have shifted to the general masculine declension, so that its
nominative-accusative plural becomes fæd(e)ras.
The second declension which must be mentioned is the a-plural