История английского языка

Modern English has lost the endings but gained words such as to. To exists in Old English with a very specific locational meaning, but later becomes an (indirect) object marker. This process is called grammaticalization since the grammatical function is more important. In Old English, the verb occurs often at the end of the sentence, as in (8), whereas in Modern English it is in the middle, separating the subject and the object.  Equipped with this information, let’s examine the runic transcription we discussed earlier, repeated here as (9): A couple of endings that stand out: -don and -aþ, the former being the plural past tense and the latter the plural present tense. If we separate the words, you might find some words you recognize:

Folc corresponds to people, as mentioned earlier. Some other words can be guessed: arærdon matches Modern English reared; bec is similar to beacon, and biddaþ is similar to bid. The remaining words, fote and æþelmun, are trickier. Æþelmun is a name and there is probably a ‘typo’ in fote and it may be fore ‘for’ instead.

Comparing the many endings and few words of Old and Modern English, we see that the main change between the two stages is that of a language with free word order and many endings but no ‘small’ words such as the or to becoming a language with strict word order, few endings and many ‘small’ words. This change, involving the grammaticalization of prepositions to replace case endings, is formulated in: Synthetic > Analytic Case/Inflections > Word Order/Prepositions

We will discuss the actual syntax of Old English in Section 5; first, we examine endings in more detail.

Old English Morphology

This section will provide some paradigms for Old English. A paradigm is a list of forms, e.g. a list of all the cases of a pronoun. Use these paradigms as a reference and focus only on the most obvious parts.

The paradigm for pronouns is given in Table 4.8. Individual texts vary a great deal in orthography. For instance, hiene, hine, hyne are masculine singular accusatives, and hie, hi, and heo are third person plural nominative and accusative pronouns. There is a rare dual number (used for two people). Since the instrumental case is almost extinct in Old English, that form is left out. Note that þ and ð can be used interchangeably as the first consonant of second person pronouns as well as of demonstratives  and verbal endings.  Instances of some pronouns in Beowulf are given in  through (. In , ðec is an accusative because it is the object of oferswyðan ‘overpower’. Incidentally, notice that the object precedes the verb. show that the third person ending on verbs is -(e)ð or -(e)þ; this ending in shows that third person deaþ ‘death’ is the subject, not second person ðec ‘you’ (ðec would also be unlikely since it has accusative case):

Also observe the verbs in: eom is similar to Modern English am, and seah to saw;

sohton has the plural past ending -on, and you can see how it becomes Modern English

sought by losing this ending and by the h becoming silent. Note that Modern English spelling keeps the h even though it is no longer pronounced.

The word ombiht in the first line of is possibly a loan into Early Germanic from Latin or Celtic, and is later (in the 15th century) reborrowed as ambassador. The word ombudsman may be a cognate in Swedish, borrowed into Modern English from Swedish in the 20th century. Other words and endings you might recognize are the genitive -es on Hrothgar and the words for thus, many, and, that and men. These words stayed in the language and were never replaced by loans. Modern translations of are provided in and :

You can see a great deal of variation between the different translations. Not only are herald and officer in  and rendered as counselor and friend in, as a whole is almost unrecognizable in. However, has poetic terms such as waverolls and alliterating sounds such as wits and welcome that the other two versions lack.  The nominative feminine pronoun hio ‘she’ is present in. Hio is a variant of heo.  Muline, feminine, and neuter gender. Unlike Modern English, Old English also marks grammatical gender on demonstratives, adjectives, and nouns. The grammatical gender of the noun determines the gender of the demonstrative and the adjective. Thus, the masculine forms of the demonstrative and adjective are used before masculine nouns such as cyning ‘king’; the feminine forms are used before feminine nouns such as lufu ‘love’; and the neuter forms are used before neuter nouns such as godspel ‘gospel’. The grammatical gender need not correspond to the natural gender of a noun: wif ‘woman’ and cild ‘child’ are neuter. 

A History of the 60 English Language

The paradigm for demonstratives is presented in Table 4.9. Demonstratives are often translated by using the Modern English article the even though they are quite different.  Unlike Modern English articles, demonstratives are not generally required, as (15) and (17) show, and carry more information (e.g. location). The indefinite article a(n) is not used, but sometimes the numeral an ‘one’ or the adjective sum ‘some’ are. Again, be aware that the þ and ð are both used as the first consonant of the demonstrative, as well as the s in the nominative masculine and feminine.

An example of the demonstrative ða is shown in (19). It agrees with the plural nominative æþelingas. Notice also the -as plural nominative ending on the noun and the -don past ending on the verb:

The plural ending of stanas later becomes the general English plural -(e)s, and the Old English genitive -es becomes the possessive in the dog’s bone. Word has the same endings as stan, except in the nominative and accusative plural. We can still see the result of this lack of an ending in the plural of deer and sheep — deer and sheep. Note that even though lufu ‘love’ is feminine and sunu ‘son’ is masculine (and of a different class), they are very similar in endings.

Remember that the natural gender need not correspond to the grammatical gender or noun class. Thus, wif ‘woman’ is neuter in grammatical but not natural gender. To see other noun classes, consult an Old English Grammar (e.g. by Quirk & Wrenn 1958); look up the gender of the noun in a dictionary, such as the one by Clark-Hall or the more extensive Bosworth & Toller. The ending of the adjective is very intricate in Old English. As in other Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, and Swedish, its form depends on whether a demonstrative is present. This is different in the other Indo-European languages. If no demonstrative precedes the adjective in Germanic, the adjective gets a more distinctive (strong) ending to ‘make up’ for this lack; if the adjective is preceded by a demonstrative, it gets a less varied (weak) ending. The strong and weak endings are also referred to as indefinite and definite in some Old English grammars. Both strong and weak endings are listed in Table 4.13. Notice the similarities in the plural endings, even in the strong ones.