What can you say about the features of the Noun in old English?

1. 
   What can you say about the features of the Noun in old English?
   

Nouns are words which indicate a person, place, animal, thing, or idea, like "thing", "rabbit", "Samuel", and "Buddhism" in Modern English.In Old English they have 3 genders (masculine, neuter, feminine), 2 numbers (singular, plural), and 5 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental). Note that the so-called "genders" were purely grammatical genders - they very often did not correspond to natural gender. For example the word ƿīf - "woman" is actually of the neuter (grammatical) gender, not the feminine (natural gender).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). Although learning a language with three different genders might seem hard, it isn't really very hard - it can easily enough be done if you just make sure to memorize nouns along with their definitive articles, because the definitive articles for each grammatical gender are unique. For example, don't just remember the word "ġiefu" - remember "sēo ġiefu", so you'll always know it's a feminine noun - you can easily just not say the article if you don't need to; on the other hand, if you don't know the gender of a noun, it might be annoying.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"). All those other words within a noun phrase had to have the same number, grammatical gender, and case as the noun that they were modifying. In addition, most adjectives (but not most numerals) could either be declined strong or weak depending on what other words were used with them. For more information on adjective declension, please see the page about Old English adjectives.

2. 
   What types of stems in nouns do you know?]
   

The Difference Between a Base and a Stem

"Base is the core of a word, that part of the word which is essential for looking up its meaning in the dictionary stem is either the base by itself or the base plus another morpheme to which other morphemes can be added. [For example,] vary is both a base and a stem; when an affix is attached the base/stem is called a stem only. Other affixes can now be attached."The Difference Between a Root and a Stem "The terms root and stem are sometimes used interchangeably. However, there is a subtle difference between them: a root is a morpheme that expresses the basic meaning of a word and cannot be further divided into smaller morphemes. Yet a root does not necessarily constitute a fully understandable word in and of itself. Another morpheme may be required. For example, the form struct in English is a root because it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts, yet neither can it be used in discourse."A stem may consist of just a root. However, it may also be analyzed into a root plus derivational morphemes ... Like a root, a stem may or may not be a fully understandable word. For example, in English, the forms reduce and deduce are stems because they act like any other regular verb--they can take the past-tense."So some roots are stems, and some stems are roots. ., but roots and stems are not the same thing. There are roots that are not stems (-duce), and there are stems that are not roots (reduce). In fact, this rather subtle distinction is not extremely important conceptually, and some theories do away with it entirely." Irregular Plurals "Once there was a song about a purple-people-eater, but it would be ungrammatical to sing about a purple-babies-eater. Since the licit irregular plurals."The theory of word structure explains the effect easily. Irregular plurals, because they are quirky, have to be stored in the mental dictionary as roots or stems; they cannot be generated by a rule. Because of this storage, they can be fed into the compounding rule that joins an existing stem to another existing stem to yield a new stem. But regular plurals are not stems stored in the mental dictionary; they are complex words that are assembled on the fly by inflectional rules whenever they are needed. They are put together too late in the root-to-stem-to-word assembly process to be available to the compounding rule, whose inputs can only come out of the dictionary."

3. 
   What grammatical categories did adjectives have in ancient English
   

A language whose nouns show their grammatical function in the sentence by changes in the noun itself, and not by position, is called an inflected language. The different grammatical functions a language recognizes are called cases. In Modern English, there are three cases. They are the subjective, the possessive, and the objective. In Old English there are four cases. They are the nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases. In Latin, there are six: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative. Thus Old English is more inflected than Modern English, but less so than Latin. Because it is less inflected than Latin, some of the information about the function of a noun has to be given in some other way than case marking. In general, this is done by using word order, but this will be covered later. For now, let's just consider the cases and how they govern the inflections of nouns and adjectives.

Nouns

Old English nouns show their different cases by infection: they add additional letters to the end of the basic form of the word. This basic form that does not change throughout a word's inflection is called the stem. There are, consequently, two parts of a Old English word that you must note: the stem and the case ending. The stem contains the meaning of the word and its gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter). The case ending will tell you (1) how the noun is being used in its sentence, and (2) whether the noun is singular or plural. Let's watch the Old English noun stān (stone) as it inflects through its different cases:

SingularOld EnglishApproximate English TranslationNominativestānstoneAccusativestānstoneGenitivestānesof the stoneDativestāneto/for the stonePluralOld EnglishApproximate English TranslationNominativestānasstonesAccusativestānasstonesGenitivestānaof the stonesDativestānumto/for the stones

The stem of the Old English word is clearly visible. It's stān to which different endings are being attached. The case endings are:

SingularPluralNominative--asAccusative--asGenitive-es-aDative-e-um

There are many other nouns in Old English which follow this same pattern of case endings when they inflect, in fact some 35% of all Old English nouns follow this pattern. This pattern of endings is called the masculine a-declension. There are four other common declensional patterns in Old English, but a noun will belong to only one of them. Hence we can say that stan is a masculine a-declension noun

4. What were the forms of personal pronouns in ancient English?

Now that we've reviewed basic grammatical concepts we can finally get to translating actual Old English sentences.

We'll begin with personal pronouns. Since we can find many simple sentences that use them, and since they are so common, it makes sense to memorize them right away.

Personal pronouns stand in for nouns. In Modern English the personal pronouns include: "I," "you," "he," "she," "it," "we," "they," "them," "us," "him," "her," "his," "hers," "its," "theirs," "our," "your."

Personal pronouns are used in statements and commands, but not in questions; interrogative pronouns (like "who," "whom," "what") are used there.

Like Modern English, Old English has both singular and plural forms for the personal pronouns. But Old English also has a dual form, used to indicate two closely associated persons -- two people working or fighting together, husband and wife, or lovers.

There are three persons for pronouns in Old English (first person = speaker; second person = person being addressed; third person = third party being spoken about) , and the third person has masculine, neuter, and feminine forms.

The case of pronouns indicates how they function in a sentence. Nominatives are subjects, genitives are possessive modifiers, accusatives are direct objects, and datives are objects of prepositions and indirect objects.

5. What grammatical categories did OE demonstrative pronouns have?

There were two demonstrative pronouns in OE: the prototype of NE that, which distinguished three genders in the sg. And had one form for all the genders in the pl. and the prototype of this. They were declined like adjectives according to a five-case system: Nom., Gen., Dat., Acc., and Instr.

Demonstrative pronouns were frequently used as noun determiners and through agreement with the noun indicated its number, gender and case 2 types: the 1st with the demonstrative meaning considerably weakened. And have 5-th case –Instrumental (творительный). 2nd – with a clear demonstr. meaning..

The articles have to do with the category of Determination (definiteness/indefiniteness). Causes for Rise of Articles:

In OE the there were two declensions of adjectives – strong (definite) and weak (indefinite) – and the inflections of these declensions indicated whether the noun that followed the adjective was definite or indefinite. At the end of the ME Period the declensions of the Adjective disappeared and there was a necessity to find another way to indicate the definiteness/indefiniteness of a noun. Thus the articles appeared.

In OE the word-order was free because inflections were employed to show the relations of the words in a sentence. In ME and NE the majority of the inflections disappeared and the word-order became fixed. This meant that the first place in a sentence was usually occupied by the theme (information already known  marked with the definite article) and the second place – by the rheme (new information  marked with the indefinite article).

Definite Article. As it was mentioned above, the definite article appeared from the OE demonstrative pronoun se (M, Sg, Nom) from the paradigm of the OE demonstrative pronoun “that” because it was often used to indicate a definite object or notion.

Indefinite Article. The indefinite article appeared from the OE numeral ān (one) and had the meaning of “oneness” (it still indicates only nouns in Sg, i.e. nouns indicating one object or notion).

In OE ān had 5-case paradigm that was lost in ME and only one form was left – oon/one. Later it was employed in the building of the indefinite article a/an

6. What are the groups of verbs in OE?

OE verbs have two tenses (present and past) and three moods (indicative, subjunctive and imperative). There are also the verbals – the infinitive, the first (present) and the second (past) participles. The verbs agree with the subject in person and number.

Germanic is distinguished among the branches of the Indo-European family by several unique features which were developed by internal progress of the Common Germanic language. One of such features was the formation of the weak verbs, which did not exist in the Proto-Indo-European language.

Modern English makes a distinction between regular and irregular verbs. This distinction goes back to the Old English system of strong and weak verbs. Strong verbs use the Germanic form of conjugation (known as Ablaut). In this form of conjugation, the stem of the word changes to indicate the tense. Verbs like this persist in modern English, for example "sing, sang, sung" is a strong verb, as are swim/swam/swum and choose/chose/chosen. The root portion of the word changes rather than its ending. In Old English, there were seven major classes of strong verb; each class has its own pattern of stem changes.

OE strong verbs are traditionally divided into seven classes, each having a distinct pattern of the root vowels in its principal parts, different from any other class. There were four basic forms of strong verbs in OE: the Infinitive, the Past singular, the Past plural, Participle II.

INFINITIVE

PAST SINGULAR

PAST PLURAL

SECOND PARTICIPLE

Class I

­ī

ā

i

i

wrītan (write)

wrāt

writon

writen

Class II

ēo

ēa

u

o

bēodan (offer)

bēad

budon

boden

Class III

(a) before nasal + consonant

i

a (o)

u

u

drincan (drink)

dranc

druncon

druncen

(b) before l + consonant

helpan (help)

healp

hulpon

holpen

(c) before r + consonant, h + consonant

eo

ea

u

o

steorfan (die)

stearf

sturfon

storfen

Class IV

e

æ

ǣ

o

stelan (steal)

stæl

stǣlon

stolen

Class V

e

æ

ǣ

e

tredan (tread)

træd

trǣdon

treden

Class VI

a

ō

ō

a

faran (go)

fōr

fōron

faren

Class VII

feallan (fall)

feioll

feollon

feallen

The classes had the following distinguishing features to their infinitive stems:

ī + one consonant.

ēo or ū + one consonant.

Originally e + two consonants (This was no longer the case by the time of written Old English).

e + one consonant (usually l or r, plus the verb brecan 'to break').

e + one consonant (usually a stop or a fricative).

a + one consonant.

No specific rule – first and second have identical stems (ē or ēo), and the infinitive and the past participle also have the same stem.

Weak verbs are formed principally by adding dental endings (containing –d- or –t-) to past and participles. Ever weak verb is characterized by three forms: infinitive, past tense and second participle. There are three major classes of weak verbs.

The first class displays i-mutation in the root. It also includes several subdivisions.

7. What verbs are called suppletive verbs?

Suppletion is where the word-forms of the same lexeme have phonologically distinct stems. A study of thirty languages shows it to be surprisingly widespread, suggesting resistance to the pressure of paradigmatic levelling. While a major factor in its preservation appears to be the high frequency of the items that display it, two other factors are in operation, the type of inflectional category involved and the nature of the distribution of stems. 1 Introduction Suppletion, where the set of morphosyntactic forms of a lexeme contains phonologically unrelated stems, is surprisingly pervasive. Although in a given language it typically involves a very small proportion of the lexicon, in most cases the items that display it have unusually high token frequencies. Moreover, based on a survey of thirty unrelated or distantly related languages, suppletion was found to occur in the overwhelming majority. As such, suppletion impacts on theories of the lexicon, language change and language acquisition, and for this reason "is of considerable interest" (Mel´čuk 2000: 511). The usual observation about suppletion is that it affects high frequency items. We wish to extend this characterisation of suppletion by identifying two additional properties. We shall show how this yields a more robust account that may help to explain why suppletion is maintained in the lexicons of so many languages, even in those cases where there is clearly no frequency effect. In addition to frequency (property A), property B involves the inflectional categories that provide the suppletion context, and property C concerns the paradigmatic distribution of the stems. Our argument is that these three properties combine in a particular way to preserve suppletion in the lexicon. Cases of suppletion apparently uncharacteristic for one property can be accounted for by showing them to be entirely characteristic for the two other properties. In section 2 we give a working definition of suppletion. Section 3 is an overview of our suppletion database, a repository of analyses of thiry languages. In section 4 we present the first of the three properties identified with suppletion, high token frequency. The second property, discussed in section 5, concerns the inflectional categories that participate in suppletion.