Singular Old English Approximate English Translation

A language whose nouns show their grammatical function in the sentence by changes in the noun itself, and not by position, is called an inflected language. The different grammatical functions a language recognizes are called cases. In Modern English, there are three cases. They are the subjective, the possessive, and the objective. In Old English there are four cases. They are the nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases. In Latin, there are six: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative. Thus Old English is more inflected than Modern English, but less so than Latin. Because it is less inflected than Latin, some of the information about the function of a noun has to be given in some other way than case marking. In general, this is done by using word order, but this will be covered later. For now, let's just consider the cases and how they govern the inflections of nouns and adjectives. Nouns.Old English nouns show their different cases by infection: they add additional letters to the end of the basic form of the word. This basic form that does not change throughout a word's inflection is called the stem. There are, consequently, two parts of a Old English word that you must note: the stem and the case ending. The stem contains the meaning of the word and its gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter). The case ending will tell you (1) how the noun is being used in its sentence, and (2) whether the noun is singular or plural. Let's watch the Old English noun stān (stone) as it inflects through its different cases: