History of the English language

What do you know about OE morphology?

Old English morphology was that of a typical inflected if somewhat simplified Indo-European language. Parts of speech included noun, pronoun adjective, numeral and verb; all of which formed their paradigmatic forms by inflections, suffixes, and sound interchange. There were no analytical, formations. Nouns in Old English retained only four of the Indo-European 8 cases, adjectives, partly pronouns and numerals agreed with the nouns they modified in number, gender and case. The Old English had two adjective declensions, a strong and a weak. The weak forms were used generally after demonstrative pronouns, and possessive adjectives; the strong were used independently. The comparison of adjectives and adverbs in Germanic languages differs from that in the Romanic languages.
Generally, -r and -st endings are added: long, longer, longest

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    What can you say about the categories of OE Noun?
    

Nouns in Old English had the categories of number, gender and case. Gender is actually not a grammatical category in a strict sense of the word for every noun with all its forms belongs to only one gender (the other nominal parts of speech have gender forms), so this category was formal; but case and number had a set of endings. Nouns used to denote males are normally masculine - maim, faeder, brodor, abbod (man, father, brother, abbot). Naturally, those denoting females should be all feminine, - modor, sweostor, cwene, abbudissa (mother, sister, queen, abbess). Yet there are curious exceptions, such words as masjden (maid), wif (wife) are neuter (compare in Ukrainian хлоп‘я, дівча). And unfinan (woman) is masculine, because the second element of the compoulnd is masculine. The gender of the other nouns is unmotivated, the same as in Ukrainian. Still in Ukrainian nouns have endings that can indicate the gender of the noun - степ (чол.), вікно (сер.) вода (жін.). In Old English there are no such endings, and words very similar in form may be of different genders. The same form may have two different meanings distinguished by gender, for example lood masc. "man", but leod (fem.), "people", secj (masc) - man, but secj (fem) - "sword".
There are two numbers - singular and plural, and four cases - nominative, genitive, dative and accusative. Comparing with what we have now we can see that number proved to be a stable category, relevant for rendering the meanings and expressing the true state of things in reality. Case is supplanted by other means to express the relations between the words in an utterance, whereas gender
disappeared altogether

25.