An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

inum le¯odum mic
.
c
.
le la¯
t
re spell
where I have italicised the indirect object in (4) and the original dative
object in (5).
Now examine the following paradigm for sc
.
ip ‘ship’:
Singular
Plural
Nom.
sc
.
ip
sc
.
ipu
Acc.
sc
.
ip
sc
.
ipu
Gen.
sc
.
ipes
sc
.
ipa
Dat.
sc
.
ipe
sc
.
ipum
As you will see, it is almost identical to the paradigm for sta¯n, the only
differences being in the nominative and accusative plural. But why is
there such a difference there? The answer comes with the third obli-
gatory feature I mentioned above, namely gender. For whereas sta¯n is a
noun of masculine gender, sc
.
ip is neuter. Being neuter it has its own set
of neuter endings, although admittedly they are only slightly different
from the masculine endings.
16
AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH
02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 16

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Those of you who are familiar with a language such as German or
French will have come across the concept of grammatical gender in
those languages. But others of you may find the concept very new.
Grammatical gender is found in many, but by no means all, of the world’s
languages. In the Germanic languages it is a longstanding historical
feature, which has persisted everywhere except in English. Although its
origins are complex, for our purposes it is best to assume that every noun
belongs to one of three genders: masculine, neuter and feminine (I place
them in that order deliberately and for reasons that will become clear
shortly; it is not a piece of sexism!). Although there is sometimes a corre-
spondence between grammatical and natural gender, there are too many
examples of the opposite for that correspondence to be widely helpful.
For example, three common words meaning ‘woman’ in Old English are:
wifmann, hlæfdig
.
e and wı¯f. The first is masculine, the second feminine, the
third neuter.
You may have spotted earlier, in examples (1) and (2), that the word
guma changed its shape, to guman, when it appeared in object position
rather than as subject. That variation cannot, obviously, be contained in
the paradigm associated with sta¯n, in contrast to the case of wyrm. This
brings in another concept, namely that of declension. If any particular
noun has the same set of endings as any other noun, then we can say that
the two nouns share the same paradigm. Thus sta¯n and wyrm share the
same paradigm. All nouns which share that paradigm are said to belong
to a particular declension. We can give a name to this declension for
ease of reference. Let us call it the General Masculine declension.
Similarly, sc
.
ip belongs to the General Neuter declension.
The problem with guma ~ guman arises because it belongs to another
declension, which we can call the N declension. The reason it has this
name will be obvious when you consider the paradigm:
Singular
Plural
Nom.
guma
guman
Acc.
guman
guman
Gen.
guman
gumena
Dat.
guman
gumum
Unlike the other two declensions we have seen, this declension contains
nouns of all three declensions, although there are few neuter nouns;
the only ones you are likely to see are e¯are ‘ear’ and e¯ag