Lecture Morphology of Roman-German languages

• Lecture 3. The morphology of Roman-German languages

1. Previous lesson review

• Plan

• 1. Previous lesson review
• 2. What is morphology?
• 3. Morphology of Old English

geographically—as a language spoken by the Germanic settlers in the British Isles;

• What is Old English?

• geographically—as a language spoken by the Germanic settlers in the British Isles;
• historically—as a language spoken from the time of the Germanic settlement in the 5th century until the Norman Conquest in 1066
• genetically—as a Lowlands branch of the West Germanic group of languages (in other words, it is a branch of the Germanic languages that emerged from languages spoken in what are now Holland, northern Germany, and Denmark);
• typologically—as a language with a particular sound system (phonology), grammatical endings (morphology), word order patterns (syntax), and vocabulary (lexis).

morphology

• What is morphology, really?

• morphology
• is the study of words
• Independently

much closer in nature to Proto-Germanic than modern English is

• Old English morphology

• much closer in nature to Proto-Germanic than modern English is
• First, it means that Old English had retained five grammatical cases:
• Nominative (noun as subject)
• Accusative (noun as direct object)
• Genitive (noun with preposition –of or –’s)
• Dative (She gave the postman a letter)

categories of number, gender and case

• Old English Noun. Categories of of Noun

• categories of number, gender and case
• Three grammatical genders in nouns: Masculine, Feminine, Neuter
• two grammatical numbers: Singular, Plural

 se cyning ‘the king’ in the nominative form

• Cases

•  se cyning ‘the king’ in the nominative form
•  þæs cyninges ‘the king’s’ in the genitive
•  þǣm cyninge in the dative ‘for/to the king’.

Doesn’t exist in modern English

• Grammatical gender

• Doesn’t exist in modern English
• Old English had grammatical gender like German articles die, der, das

Singular

• Number

• Singular
• Plural- s
• man, men; goose, geese; foot, feet.

Strong verbs formed the past tense by changing a vowel – like in sing, sang, sung, while weak verbs formed it by adding an ending – like walk – walked.

• Strong and weak verbs

• Strong verbs formed the past tense by changing a vowel – like in sing, sang, sung, while weak verbs formed it by adding an ending – like walk – walked.
• the strong verbs were divided into seven (!) different classes, each depending on how the verb’s stem changed to show past tense.

• the grammatical forms were built by means of: sound interchanges, inflections and suppletion.