About Old English

I. Background Knowledge of Old English Nouns

Grammatical gender (grammatical gender), divided into masculine (masculine), feminine (feminine) and neuter (neuter).

There are five cases in Old English: subject, object, subordinate, medium and other grammatical relations.

The first case: the subject case (nominative case), which indicates being the subject of the sentence.

The second case: genitive case, also known as possessive case, indicates subordination.

The third case: the dative case, indicating the indirect object of the verb.

Fourth case: object case, also known as dative case, the direct object of the verb (direct object).

Fifth case: instrumental case (instrumental case), indicating a mediated relationship.

Old English had two numbers: singular (singular) and plural (plural).

1, the first English plural form: the origin of the noun + s

Masculine noun variant, such as hund 'dog dog' variant as follows, the singular and plural subject object form is exactly the same, so they are different from Ancient Greek and Latin, you must rely on word order (word order) to distinguish between subject and object.

This type of masculine noun declension: strong declension, or a-stem noun declension. Characterized by large word-final changes, also because in Early Germanic these nouns ended with the vowel a. Early Germanic *hundaz (main single)> Old English hund.

Noun singular stem ending -es, plural main and object ending -as, these two word endings in Old and Middle English, due to the cutback of the word-final change form, both become -es, pronounced as /?z/. This ending appears as -s in modern English. For example, boys ('boys') denotes the plural, while boy's and boys' ('boy's') denote the singular and the plural in the singular and plural in the raw case (all cases).

2. The second English plural form: oxen,children from

Another class of English masculine nouns belongs to the weak declension, or n-declension, because it doesn't change much at the end of the word, and also because most of its endings end with n. See the variant form of the masculine noun oxa (ox bull).

Singular plural

Principal: oxa oxan

Biomorphemic: oxan oxena

Versus: oxan oxum

Objective: oxan oxan

As you can see above, there are five different grammatical functions for the same form of oxan. Other variants belonging to this category are mona, 'moon moon', hunta 'hunter hunter', nama 'name name' and so on. And this type of case is not limited to masculine nouns, but also feminine nouns,

e.g. sunne 'sun', eor?e 'earth', heorte 'heart', etc., which are not only masculine, but also feminine. heart', etc., and the neuter nouns eage 'eye eye' and eare 'ear ear'. Traces of this type of conjugation can also be seen in modern English, such as the plurals oxen and children of ox and children.

3. The origin of the third English plural form: foot-feet,mouse-mice

The sound-variable conjugation (umlaut declension or mutation declension), see the declension of the masculine noun fōt 'foot foot':

This type of declension is characterized by a vowel change in the stem of the noun's singular and plural subjects and objects, called a sound change (umlaut). This sound change refers to the change of the back vowel of the first syllable to the corresponding front vowel as a result of the influence of the front vowel i/i/ or semivowel j/j/ in the second syllable of the word, i.e., the early form of the singular with the case, fōti, which undergoes a sound change to become the Old English fēt.

Masculine nouns belonging to this type of inflection also include tō?, 'tooth teeth ', and the feminine nouns gōs 'goose' and bōc 'book'.

Other Old English nouns belonging to the sound-change variant are the masculine noun man(n) 'man person', and the feminine nouns lūs 'louse' louse, and mūs 'mouse '. According to the i-sound change, the a/a/ sound becomes the Old English e/ε/ sound, and the ū/u:/ sound becomes the Old English y/y:/ sound.

The plural subject and object forms mys of the Old English feminine noun mūs, which underwent phonetic and other changes, came from the earlier forms *mūsiz and *mūkunz, respectively. modern English mouse preserves the plural form mice. this form comes from Old English mys. in Middle English, the Old English long vowel /y:/ changed to the northern and central Middle English long vowel /i :/.

In Early Modern English the long vowel /i:/ became the diphthong /?i/ and finally the modern English diphthong /ai/. mice evolved from mys through these processes. Similarly, the plural form of modern English louse, lice/lais/, evolved from Old English lys.

4. The fourth English plural form: sheep,deer unvaried origin

Old English common nouns, less than one-third of the nouns are feminine nouns, most of which belong to the strong variant, or called ō-variant (ō-declension), which is characterized by the following: when the stem of the singular main case is short-syllabic (short), it is not a strong variant, but a strong variant. This type of variant is characterized by the fact that when the stem of the singular main case is short-syllable, the word ends with the vowel u(o), e.g. giefu (giefo) 'gift', lufu 'love love' etc.

When the stem of a singular main case is a long syllable, the word does not have any vowels at the end of the word, e.g. lār 'learning learning', glōf 'glove glove'. hand 'hand hand', wund 'wound wound etc.'. See the inflection of giefu and lār:

About a quarter of the common nouns in Old English were neuter nouns, and almost all of these belonged to the a-stem inflection type.

But the neuter a-stem case differs from the masculine a-stem case. The difference lies in the endings of the plural subject and object cases. Masculine nouns have -as (e.g., the aforementioned hundas 'dog'), while neuter nouns have the vowel u or no word-final vowels.

This type of noun inflection is also called strong neutral noun inflection. See the strong conjugation of the neuter nouns hof and hors:

[When the stem is short-syllabic, the word ends with the vowel u; when the stem is long-syllabic, there is no word-final vowel].

In Middle English, the plural form of the noun hors is still hors, for example, the description of the knight in the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which reads "His hors were good. From the plural form of the verb were, it can be inferred that hors is plural. In modern English, however, the plural form of horse is horses, apparently the result of an analogy with the Old English masculine noun plural hundas.

On the other hand, Modern English still preserves some Old English neuter nouns in strongly inflected plural forms, which are mostly animal nouns, such as sheep (sheep) (<OE sceap), neat 'cattle herd' (<OE neat). swine 'pig pig' (<OE swin), deer (<OE deor 'wild animal beast'), etc.