The subject of history of English

11. 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 (compare in Ukrainian хлоп’я, дівча). 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».

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.

In traditional historical studies the nouns are divided into classes according to the former stem-forming suffixes, which were hardly visible even in Gothic, the language separated in time from the Old English by centuries. The remnants of these suffixes are even more vague in Old English. Still, these stem-forming suffixes determined what inflections were taken by the nouns. Though lost in Old English they still worked in the way the case and number forms were made.

Without knowing the original structure of the nouns in the language we can hardly explain the exceptions in the formations of plural of the present-day English nouns. Why goose -pl. geese, but moose -pl. moose, foot - feet but boot — boots, sheep — pl. sheep, but sheet – sheet.
12) The nouns in Old English are commonly classified as belonging to strong and weak declension, within each of these groups there are several subgroups.