I. Old English period. Nouns.
Preliminary remarks
Hypotheses. Some scholars suppose that at first very vague part of speech “nomina” existed. In the course of time it split into the noun, the adjective and the pronoun. The noun was the most important part. OE was syntactical. It means that the relations between the words were denoted by grammatical flexions. The original structure of a noun in Germanic, as well as in other Indo-European languages presents itself as follows. A noun consists of three elements:
(1) the root,
(2) a stem-building suffix,
(3) a case inflexion.
The meaning of the root is clear: it is the lexical meaning of a noun. The original structure of the case inflection is also clear: it expresses the relation between the thing denoted by noun and other things or actions, and also the category of number. The stem-building suffix is much more difficult to define, because this suffix has lost its meaning long before the written texts appeared.
The categories of OE nouns
In OE period the nouns had the category of gender, the category of number and cases (падежей). As for the category of gender, the nouns have a masculine gender, a feminine gender and a neuter gender. The cases of nouns in OE period were: Nominative Case, Genitive Case, Dative Case, and Accusative Case. The peculiarity of OE nouns was the availability of several types of declension. The type of declension depended on the stem-building suffix. In some words the stem-building suffix was combined with the root morpheme, in other words the stem-building suffix was combined with an ending. That’s why this stem-building suffix was not an individual or separate morpheme. It’s possible to find out the stem-building suffix, if one compares the forms of nouns in different Germanic languages. Let’s analyze the examples of Gothic words:
Wulf gast gib sunu
D. c. wulfam gastim gibon sunum
Ac. c. wulfans gastins gibōs sunus
As you can see from these examples, the ending of Dative case -is, -m and the ending of Accusative case is -ns. But stem-building suffix is not the same in these words. (The place of a stem-building suffix is between the root of the word and the ending of the word). The stem-building suffix in the word wulf is - a-; in gast – i; in gib - o; sunu - u -.
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Let’s compare the Gothic word “wulf” and the Latin word “lupus” (and its earlier form was “lupos”). Between the root “lup” and ending “s” there is a stem-building suffix -o-. The stem-building suffix -o- in Gothic languages corresponds to the stem-building -a- in Germanic language. The fact is that Germanic stem-building suffix is a reflex of stem-building suffixes in Indo-European languages.
That is: Indo-European stems with -o- correspond to Germanic stems with -a-; and Indo-European stems with -a- correspond to Germanic stems with -o-.
Analyzing the examples which were given earlier, we can understand that word “wulf” is a noun with a stem-building suffix -a-, “gast” is a noun with stem-building suffix -i- and “gib” is a noun with a stem-building suffix -“u”-.
The category of declension
According to the traditional view OE nouns had strong declension, weak declension and root declension. The strong declension includes nouns with vocalic stems (-a-, -o-, -i-, -u-). The weak declension includes -n- stems only.
The first of declension was called -strong declension. The following nouns belonged to this type of declension.
a) nouns of masculine and neuter gender with a stem-building suffix -a-;
b) nouns of feminine gender with a stem-building suffix -o-;
c) nouns of all genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) with stem-building suffix -i-.
The second type of declension of nouns was called weak declension. The nouns with stem-building consonant -n- belonged to this type of declension.
The third type of declension was called root declension. The nouns without any stem-building suffix belonged to this group.
The category of Gender. OE nouns had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). As a rule, the grammatical gender of nouns depended on the stem-building -o- (but in Germanic -a-) shows that the noun belongs to masculine gender and neuter gender: e. g1. woulf (OE); 2. lupus (Lat.); 3. волк (Rus.).
The stem-building suffix -a- shows that the noun belongs to feminine gender: e. g. aqua (Lat.) – вода; caru (OE) – забота. But more often, the form of a noun didn’t show the grammatical gender. This information had adjectives and pronouns.
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