The subject of history of English

13 Old English paradigm of the Noun and its reflection in Present-day English forms of the noun.

In Old English they have 3 genders (masculine, neuter, feminine), 2 numbers (singular, plural), and 4 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative).The so-called "genders" were purely grammatical genders - they very often did not correspond to natural gender. For example the word wīf- "woman" is actually of the neuter (grammatical) gender, not the feminine (natural gender) and nouns that refer to inanimate objects are very often masculine or feminine (for example, masculine stān ‘stone’, feminine benċ ‘bench’). In Modern English we do not think of nouns as having gender; rather, the things they refer to have gender (or they do not, in which case they are “neuter”).In Old English, nouns were inflected (they changed how they were written and spoken) to add little bits of extra information to communicate their function within the sentence and the number of the noun (whether singular or plural). Nouns were the essential element to a noun phrase (either a noun or a pronoun had to be in a noun phrase), which is an important part of most sentences. Also in the noun phrase you could put noun modifiers, like numbers, adjectives (words that describe, like "cool" or "special"), articles ("the" or "a/an), and demonstratives ("this" and "that"). In Old English different endings were added to nouns of different gender (for example, the nominative plural of masculine wer ‘man’ is weras, of neuter scip ‘ship’ scipu, and of feminine cwēn ‘queen’cwēna).In Modern English almost all nouns are declined in pretty much the same way: we add -s to make plurals and -’s to make possessives. There are notable exceptions, however. The plural of ox is not oxes, but oxen. And of course several very common nouns make plurals by changing their vowels: for example,tooth/teeth and mouse/mice.The nouns with -s plurals, nouns with -en plurals, the noun with -r-, and the nouns that change their vowels belong to different declensions—classes of nouns that are declined in similar ways. Though we have just one major declension in Modern English and a few minor ones, in Old English there were several major declensions and several more minor ones.