An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

.
ip, we also find
nouns such as word ‘word’ and ba¯n ‘bone’. For the most part they decline
in the same way as sc
.
ip, except that they have a different nominative-
accusative plural. In these cases such nouns have shapes identical to
the corresponding singulars, that is to say, the nominative-accusative
singular of word is word and so too is the nominative-accusative plural;
exactly the same parallel holds in the case of ba¯n.
Of the two points that arise in this context, let me deal with the
trickier one first. How can this type be held to be members of the general
neuters? The answer to this is that it is possible to work out that these
nouns must have at one time had a final -u just like sc
.
ip but that there was
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an historical change by which final -u was dropped after a heavy syllable,
that is to say, after either a long vowel and a consonant or a short vowel
and two consonants. So at an early stage in the history this must have
been no more than a normal sound change; but later, certainly before the
time of Ælfric, the sound change had become an inflectional property,
i.e. a morphological feature. We can tell that this is the case because final
-u was retained in the verbal paradigm even although it was lost every-
where else, both in nouns and adjectives.
There are two other important points to be made here. Firstly, what
you will have noticed is that the result of the change, as I have said, is to
make the nominative-accusative singular and the nominative-accusative
of these neuters identical. Now given that the distinction between singu-
lar and plural is one of the very few persisting and vital distinctions in
English noun morphology, you would expect – indeed you know – that
such neuter nouns would switch to having to the clearer ending -as. This,
of course, is how they end up: present-day bones, words. But it should
be noted that this development only takes place after the Old English
period, for until then the grammatical gender system is strong enough to
withstand an otherwise tempting change.
The second point refers back to the morphological status of this vowel
loss, for it is not only neuters that are affected by the loss. Recall the
feminine noun talu, which we used in Chapter 2 for the paradigm of
general feminines. As you can see, this noun has a final -u in the nomi-
native singular and its stem syllable is short. Therefore we should expect
that there would be corresponding heavy-stemmed nouns without -u.
That is indeed what happens, so that we find nouns such as glo¯f ‘glove’
and ec
.
g
. ‘edge’.
There are quite a number of other departures from the declensions
given in Chapter 2. For the most part we don’t have to worry ourselves
with these at this stage, but I shall mention two of them which are quite
common and therefore worth knowing immediately. The first of these
concerns masculine and neuter nouns with the stem vowel æ, as in dæg
.
‘day’ and fæt ‘vessel, vat’. In the plural of these nouns we find, instead
of æ, the vowel a, thus dagas ‘days’, fatu ‘vessels’. There is therefore a
consistent contrast between the singular and plural forms which goes
right through the paradigm. The second case is a matter of inflection in
the general feminine declension, for there, and particularly with short-
stemmed nouns, the genitive plural is often -ena rather than -a, e.g. talena
rather than tala. I mention this simply because it can be confusing,
since it can lead to the belief that the noun belongs not to the general
feminines but to the N declension.
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3.2 Minor declensions
I made a distinction earlier on between irregular declensions and minor
declensions. Essentially that difference is between, on the one hand,
unexpected variations within one of the standard paradigms, and, on
the other hand, paradigms which, although they are internally regular
and self-contained are nevertheless not productive in the Old English
period.
In order to better understand what characterises a minor declension,
I want to start this part of the discussion by looking at a minor declen-
sion which is not only important in Old English, but actually remains
in present-day English. The most frequent example today is man, but
of course we can add to that foot, goose, louse, mouse, tooth and woman. The
distinguishing feature of them all is that they show a different vowel in
the plural from that in the singular. In fact this doesn’t quite fit as an
expression of the alternation in woman ~ women, but here the spelling
might help you to see that originally this word was a compound of the
two Old English words wı¯f ‘woman’ and man ‘person’ (there was once
also another, corresponding, compound carl ‘man’ plus man).
In Old English equally, all the above nouns belonged to this same
declension, but there a few further members, most notably a¯c (fem.)
‘oak’, bo¯c (fem.) ‘book’, burg (fem.) ‘castle’, cu¯ (fem.) ‘cow’, fe¯ond (masc.)
‘foe’, fre¯ond (masc.) ‘friend’ and hnutu (fem.) ‘nut’. Of the nouns which
survive today, fo¯t, man, to¯
´
and wı¯fman were masculine in Old English,
go¯s, lu¯s and mu¯s feminine. There were never any neuter nouns in this
declension. There are some minor variations between the masculine and
feminine paradigms, but we need only present a single paradigm with
the alternative feminine form in the genitive singular noted in brackets:
Singular
Plural
Nom.
fo¯t
fe¯t
Acc.
fo¯t
fe¯t
Gen.
fo¯tes (bo¯c
.
e)
fo¯ta
Dat.
fe¯t
fo¯tum
The most obvious and the most important point to note is that the
variation in stem vowel does not, as in present-day English, correlate
directly with singular vs. plural. Instead, the vowel variation occurs in
the dative singular and the nominative-accusative plural. Sometimes it is
also found in genitive singular of feminines, so that we can find be¯c
. along-
side bo¯c
.
e. This variation was due to an earlier sound change which caused
a vowel to be fronted when there was an i in the next syllable. Sub-
sequently that i was lost, which makes the process, normally known as
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