6 Nouns

6.1. Quick Start

6.1.1. Strong nouns

Table 6.1 shows the basic endings of the strong nouns. Notice how much duplication there is in this table.

Often one cannot tell the gender of a noun from its ending: strong masculines and neuters differ only in the nominative/accusative plural, and gender is never distinguished in the dative singular or in the genitive and dative plural. Further, one cannot always tell the case: nominative and accusative singular are not distinguished in masculine and neuter nouns, accusative, genitive and dative singular are not distinguished in feminine nouns, and nominative and accusative plural are never distinguished at all.

Feminine nouns (table 6.3) look much less familiar than masculines or even neuters. The feminines do not have the masculine/neuter genitive -es or the masculine plural -as, which give us the dominant Modern English noun endings, and so the strong feminine declension seems to be furnished with none of the comforts of home. The good news, on the other hand, is that the strong feminines have relatively few endings, so you have less to memorize.

Like the strong neuters, the strong feminines come in short and long varieties. The ending -u appears in the nominative singular after short syllables, but is dropped after long ones. Sometimes, however, the ending gets restored, for example, in lenġu 'length', iermðu beside iermð 'misery', and brǣdu beside brǣd 'breadth'.

Among the strong feminine nouns are a great many that represent abstract concepts, made from adjectives and other nouns. These include nouns ending in -þ such as strengþ 'strength' and hǣlþ 'health', those ending in -ness such as clǣnness 'cleanness' and ġīferness 'greed', and those ending in -ung such as leornung 'learning' and ġeōmrung 'groaning'.

6.1.2. Weak nouns

Table 6.4 shows the endings of the weak declension, ancestor of the Modern English nouns with anomalous plural -en.

6.1.3. Athematic nouns

Several nouns that end in -nd, especially frēond 'friend', fēond 'enemy', are declined like the athematic nouns, though they are not, technically speaking, members of this declension. Several of these have partly or entirely gone over to the strong declension; for example, you are about as likely to encounter the plural frēondas as frīend.

6.2. More about strong nouns

6.2.1. Two-syllable nouns

6.2.2. Nouns with changes in the stem syllable

Feminines like sacu 'strife' should have -æ- rather than -a- in the root syllable before the ending -e: accusative singular sæce, etc. Such forms do occur, but one frequently finds -a- before -e as well.

Old English does not permit h to fall between voiced sounds; it is always dropped in that environment, and the preceding vowel is lengthened. The loss of h produces nouns like those in table 6.9.

6.2.3. Nouns with -w- or -ġ- before the ending

Words like here are quite rare, and nouns with -w- are usually neuter or feminine. These nouns will cause you little trouble if you remember that the headword form in your glossary or dictionary lacks the -w-.

• Sometimes what is rather unattractively called a "parasite vowel" gets inserted before ġ or w, and we then end up with forms like heriġas and beaduwa.

6.3. Minor declensions

The minor declensions contain relatively few nouns, but the ones they contain tend to be common. As a declension is disappearing from a language, the nouns it contains move into the major declensions. The last nouns to leave these minor declensions are usually the ones in daily use, like Modern English man/men, tooth/teeth and child/children, for the familiarity of the words keeps their inflections from coming to seem strange. So although the minor declensions contain few nouns, you are likely to encounter most of them in the course of your reading.

6.3.1. u-stem nouns

Often u-stem nouns use a mix of forms, some of them being from the strong declensions. For example, winter was originally a u-stem, but one frequently sees strong genitive singular wintres.

6.3.2. Nouns of relationship

The feminines here are exceptions to the rule that the genitive and dative singular must always be the same in feminine words. Fæder and mōdor have partly gone over to the strong declensions, in that the nominative/accusative plurals are fæderas and mōdra. Fæder and sweostor lack mutated vowels in the dative singular.

6.3.3. Nouns with -r- plurals

The -r- of Modern English children shows that it once belonged to this declension, and in fact we find a plural ċilderu or ċildra in early West Saxon and similar forms in some other dialects. But in late West Saxon the word ċild has gone over to the strong neuters. Several neuter nouns remain in this declension, though, even in late West Saxon (table 6.13). Like lamb are ċealf 'calf' and ǣġ 'egg'. Scattered instances of other words (including ċild in early texts) show that this declension was once somewhat larger.

6.3.4. Nouns with -þ- endings

The genitive/dative singular and all plural forms of these nouns contain the element -þ-, as you can see in table 6.14, which shows poetic words for 'man, warrior' and 'maiden'.

In these nouns the -þ- element is in the process of being re-analyzed as part of the word itself rather than as part of the inflectional ending; that is why we find -þ- in the nominative singular (often for hæle, always for mæġþ). Other nouns belonging to this declension are ealu 'ale' (genitive/dative singular ealoþ) and mōnaþ 'month', which has entirely gone over to the strong nouns except in the nominative/accusative plural, where we find mōnaþ as well as mōnþas.

6.4. On-line exercises