The history of the language lecture 3 Morphology

THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE LECTURE 3 Morphology

Plan of the lesson:
1. OE Morphology
2. Category of Noun
3. Flexion
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 differs from that in the Romance languages. Generally, -r and -st endings are added: long, longer, longest.  

Old English Noun. Categories of OE Noun

Old English Noun. 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; but case and number had a set of endings. Nouns used to denote males are normally masculine - mann, fæder, abbod (man, father, abbot). Those denoting females should be all feminine, - modor, sweostor, abbudissa (mother, sister, abbess). Yet there are curious exceptions, such words as mæʒden (maid), wīf (wife) are neuter. And wīfman (woman) is masculine, because the second element of the compound is masculine. The gender of the other nouns is unmotivated. The same form may have two different meanings distinguished by gender, for example lēod masc. “man”, but lēod (fem.), «people».