Old English Phonology, Morphology and Syntax.

The phonology of Old English is necessarily somewhat speculative, since it is preserved purely as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of Old English, and the written language apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not difficult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of Old English phonology.

OE is no far removed from ME that one may take it for an entirely different language, this is largely due to the peculiarities of its pronunciation.

The survey of OE phonetics deals with word accention the systems of voweks and consonants and their origins. The OE sound system developed from the PG system. It underwent changes in the pre-written periods of history, especially in Early OE. The diachronic description of phonetics in those early perods will show the specifically English tendencies of development and the immediate source of the sounds in the age of writing.

The system of word accentuation inherited from PG underwent no changes in Early OE.

In OE a syllable was made pronominent by an increase in the force of articulation, in other words, a dynamic or a force stress was employed. In Disyllabic and polysyllabicwords the accent fell on the root – morpheme or on the first syllable. Word stress was fixed, it remained on the same syllable in defferent grammatical forms of the word and, as a rule,did not shift in word-building either.

Polysyllabic words, espacially compounds, may have had two stresses, chief and secondary, the chief stress being fixed on the first root- morpheme e, g, the compound noun Norðmonna fromsame extract, received the chief stress upon its first component and the secondary stress on the second component, the grammatical ending –a was unaccented. In words with prefixes the position of the stress varied^ verb prefixes were unaccented, while in nouns and adjectives the stress was commonly thrown on to the prefix

risan (NE arise)

to-weard (NE toward)

If the words were deived from the same roor, word stress, together with other means, served tj distinguish the noun from verb

Forwyrd n – for-weorЂan v (destruction,perish)

OE Morphology. General characteristics.

Verbs

Verbs in Old English are divided into strong or weak verbs. Strong verbs indicate tense by a change in the quality of a vowel, while weak verbs indicate tense by the addition of an ending.

Nouns

Old English is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. As in several other ancient Germanic languages, there are five major cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive and instrumental.

· The nominative case indicated the subject of the sentence, for example se cyning means 'the king'. It was also used for direct address. Adjectives in the predicate (qualifying a noun on the other side of 'to be') were also in the nominative.

· The accusative case indicated the direct object of the sentence, for example Æþelbald lufode þone cyning means "Æþelbald loved the king", where Æþelbald is the subject and the king is the object. Already the accusative had begun to merge with the nominative; it was never distinguished in the plural, or in a neuter noun.

· The genitive case indicated possession, for example the þæs cyninges scip is "the ship of the king" or "the king's ship". It also indicated partitive nouns.

· The dative case indicated the indirect object of the sentence, for example hringas þæm cyninge means "rings for the king" or "rings to the king". There were also several verbs that took direct objects in the dative.

· The instrumental case indicated an instrument used to achieve something, for example, lifde sweorde, "he lived by the sword", where sweorde is the instrumental form of sweord. During the Old English period, the instrumental was falling out of use, having largely merged with the dative. Only pronouns and strong adjectives retained separate forms for the instrumental.

The small body of evidence we have for Runic texts suggests that there may also have a been a separate locative case in early or Northumbrian forms of the language (e.g., ᚩᚾ ᚱᚩᛞᛁ on rodi "on the Cross").^[2]

In addition to inflection for case, nouns take different endings depending on whether the noun was in the singular (for example, hring 'one ring') or plural (for example, hringas 'many rings'). Also, some nouns pluralize by way of Umlaut, and some undergo no pluralizing change in certain cases.

Nouns are also categorised by grammatical gender – masculine, feminine, or neuter. In general, masculine and neuter words share their endings. Feminine words have their own subset of endings. The plural of some declension types distinguishes between genders, e.g., a-stem masculine nominative plural stanas "stones" vs. neuter nominative plural scipu "ships" and word "words"; or i-stem masculine nominative plural sige(as) "victories" vs. neuter nominative plural sifu "sieves" and hilt "hilts".

Furthermore, Old English nouns are divided as either strong or weak. Weak nouns have their own endings. In general, weak nouns are easier than strong nouns, since they had begun to lose their declensional system. However, there is a great deal of overlap between the various classes of noun: they are not totally distinct from one another.

Old English language grammars often follow the common NOM-ACC-GEN-DAT-INST order used for the Germanic languages.

Adjectives

Adjectives in Old English are declined using the same categories as nouns: five cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and two numbers (singular, plural). In addition, they can be declined either strong or weak. The weak forms are used in the presence of a definite or possessive determiner, while the strong ones are used in other situations. The weak forms are identical to those for nouns, while the strong forms use a combination of noun and pronoun endings:

Pronouns

Most pronouns are declined by number, case and gender; in the plural form most pronouns have only one form for all genders. Additionally, Old English pronouns reserve the dual form (which is specifically for talking about groups of two things, for example "we two" or "you two" or "they two"). These were uncommon even then, but remained in use throughout the period.

Prepositions

Prepositions (like Modern English words by, for, and with) often follow the word which they govern, in which case they are called postpositions. Also, so that the object of a preposition was marked in the dative case, a preposition may conceivably be located anywhere in the sentence, even appended to the verb. e.g. "Scyld Scefing sceathena threatum meodo setla of teoh" means "Scyld took mead settles of (from) enemy threats." The infinitive is not declined.

The following is a list of prepositions in the Old English language. Many of them, particularly those marked "etc.", are found in other variant spellings. Prepositions may govern the accusative, genitive, dative or instrumental cases - the question of which is beyond the scope of this article.

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