An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

declension. The paradigm of the word sunu ‘son’ is representative:
Singular
Plural
Nom.
sunu
suna
Acc.
sunu
suna
Gen.
suna
suna
Dat.
suna
sunum
Another masculine example is wudu ‘wood’, whilst duru ‘door’ and nosu
‘nose’ are feminine. In addition the feminine noun hand ‘hand’, which
also belongs to the as-plurals, has the same paradigm as above except
that the nominative-accusative singular has no final -u. Perhaps you have
worked out for yourself that this lack of final -u here has the same cause
as the lack of final -u we have already seen in, for example, word. There
are a few other words which originally belonged to the same declension,
but in general these all follow the general masculine or general feminine
declension according to their gender. This, of course, is quite a natural
development, given my earlier comments.
Beyond these two minor declensions there are further nouns which
originate from other older declensions. Thus although the neuter nouns
æ¯g
. ‘egg’, c.ealf ‘calf ’, c.ild ‘child’ and lamb ‘lamb’ appear by their singular
forms to be normal general neuter nouns, in the plural they show r
after their stem, so that we find, for example, c
.
ildru, c
.
ildru, c
.
ildra, c
.
ildrum
although again, naturally, they sometimes align fully with the general
neuter declension. Another, rather more numerous, group, which is
related to the present participle -end, is composed of masculine agentive
nouns such as rı¯dend ‘rider’. They also appear in their singular forms to
be identical to the general masculine declension. However, the usual
plural forms at the time of Ælfric are: rı¯dendras, rı¯dendras, rı¯dendra,
rı¯dendum, thus rather like c
.
ildru. At an earlier stage it was more common
to find rı¯dend, rı¯dend, rı¯denra, rı¯dendum, but the extension of -r- elsewhere
perhaps here, and more certainly still in the case of c
.
ildru, seems to
prefigure the later form children, also seen in brethren. It is sometimes
claimed that children has a ‘double inflection’, with -r- followed by -en,
but this may not be the best analysis, given that the -r- in brethren does
not have an inflectional source, at least in terms of Old English.
The third minor declension is associated with the names of peoples
and tribes. These words only appear in the plural, and therefore we can
MORE NOUNS AND ADJECTIVES
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talk about the plural declension. The paradigm can be exemplified by
Engle ‘the English’:
Plural
Nom.
Engle
Acc.
Engle
Gen.
Engla
Dat.
Englum
Typical other examples include: Dene ‘Danes’, Myrc
.
e ‘Mercians’, Seaxe
‘Saxons’, as well as the collectives le¯ode ‘people’, ylde ‘men’ and ylfe ‘elves’.
There is some variation in forms of the genitive, most notably in Myrc
.
na,
Seaxna. Early in the period there were rather more nouns in this declen-
sion; note particularly that the declension originally contained words
with a full singular and plural paradigm. Perhaps the most frequent of
these ‘ordinary’ words was wine ‘friend’ with plural wine. But these words
adopt the paradigm of the general masculines, so that we find plurals
such as winas ‘friends’.
Why should this have occurred? Is it merely a symptom of the general
tendency towards simplification in the set of paradigms? That can hardly
be the case, because, after all, there is no reduction in the total number
of different declensions. There seems to be a better motivation available.
If wine had remained as it was earlier, then it would have continued to
have identical nominative and accusative singular and plural forms. Even
if it is true that we have seen other words where the same happens, for
example in word, such a situation in a language for which the singular ~
plural contrast is important is clearly undesirable. Especially when, as
here, there was an easy remedy, namely to shift a word such as wine to a
different declension. Evidence that this is exactly what happened comes
precisely from the nouns which were only plural: they did not shift
declension, for they did not have a singular ~ plural contrast.
3.3 Adjectives
There are a few other scattered noun forms, but they are rather varied
and also tend to assimilate to an appropriate more general declension
so that we need not spend further time on them. Instead I want now to
consider adjectives. Like the nouns, adjectives were inflected in Old
English, and in doing so they agreed in case, number and gender with the
noun they modified, just as they do in present-day languages such as
French and German.
However, there is a major difference between adjective declension in,
say, French on the one hand and Old English on the other. In this respect
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the behaviour in Old English is similar to that of present-day German.
But for anyone unused to a system such as the latter, what happens in
Old English will undoubtedly seem strange. For in both German and
Old English the situation is that each adjective may follow two declen-
sions and the declension to which an adjective conforms is determined
by syntactic features.
What happens is as follows. Adjectives in Old English, as in present-
day language, may be preceded by a demonstrative, such as se or
†
es, or
a possessive, such as mı¯n, or a possessive noun or noun group. Taken
together, these contexts may be defined as definite contexts. Of course,
adjectives do not need to have a defining definite context. This is most
obviously, but not only, the case when they follow a verb, as in present-
day English John is happy. We can describe any such context as an