Фани бўйича ўҚув-услубий мажмуа

The Morphological Structure of Old English

1. 
   The Noun
   
2. 
   Grammatical Gender
   
3. 
   The Adjective
   
4. 
   The Definite Article
   
5. 
   The Personal Pronoun
   
6. 
   The Verb
   

Key words: OE grammatical categories of number, case, gender, tense, mood; twofold declension: vowel and consonant declensions; dual number, complete system of inflections, classes of verbs, conjugation of OE verbs.

The inflection of the OE noun indicates distinctions of number (sing. or pl.) and case. The case system is somewhat simpler than that of Russian and some of the other Indo-European languages. There is no ablative (творительный, ўрин-пайт), and generally no locative or instrumental case, these having been merged with the dative (дательный, жўналиш). In the some way, the vocative of direct address is generally identical with the nominative form. Thus, OE noun has only four cases – nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. Ex :

Singular
N. stān (stone)
G. stān-es (of stone)
D. stān-e (to, on, from stone)
A. stān (stone, object)

Plural N. stān-as (stones)

G. stān-a (of stones)
D. stān-um (to, on, from stones)
A. stān-as (stones, object)
The endings of these cases vary with different nouns, but they fall into certain broad categories or declensions. There is a vowel declension and a consonant declension, also called the strong and weak declensions, according to whether the item ended in Germanic in a vowel or a consonant and within each of these types, there are certain subdivisions. The stems of nouns belonging to the vowel declension ended in one of four vowels in Germanic (although these have disappeared in OE): a, ō, i or u and the inflection varies accordingly. Their nature may be gathered from two examples of the strong declension and one of the weak: stān (stone) – a masculine, a - stem (given above)