6. Nouns

6.1. Quick Start

In Modern English almost all nouns are declined (their forms listed) in pretty much the same way: we add ‑s to make plurals and ‑’s to make possessives. There are notable exceptions, however. The plural of ox is not oxes, but oxen, and the plural of child has the same ending, but preceded by ‑r-. And of course several very common nouns make plurals by changing their vowels: for example, tooth/teeth and mouse/mice.

Our nouns with -s plurals, nouns with -en plurals, the noun with -r-, and the nouns that change their vowels belong to different declensions—classes of nouns that are declined in similar ways. Though we have just one major declension in Modern English and a few minor ones, in Old English there were several major declensions and several more minor ones. You must learn the forms for each of the major declensions, and you should acquire enough knowledge of the minor ones to enable you to be on the lookout for them.

In Modern English we do not think of nouns as having gender; rather, the things they refer to have gender (or they do not, in which case they are “neuter”). But gender is an attribute of every Old English noun, and the grammatical gender of a noun does not necessarily correspond to the natural gender of the thing it refers to. For example, wīf ‘woman’ is neuter and wīfman ‘woman’ is masculine; and nouns that refer to inanimate objects are very often masculine or feminine (for example, masculine stān ‘stone’, feminine benċ ‘bench’). Further, different endings are added to nouns of different gender (for example, the nominative plural of masculine wer ‘man’ is weras, of neuter scip ‘ship’ scipu, and of feminine cwēn ‘queen’ cwēna).

Most nouns fall into one of two major declensions, conventionally called “strong” and “weak.” There are also several minor declensions; we’ll look at one of these (the “athematic” nouns) in the Quick Start section and save the others for later.

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.

Table 6.2 adds these endings to several common masculine and neuter nouns. It also shows that the neuter nominative/accusative plural ending -u appears only after short syllables; neuters with long syllables have no ending.

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.

These nouns make even fewer distinctions of gender and case than the strong nouns do: the rule that neuter words do not distinguish between nominative and accusative accounts for its having accusative singular -e where the masculine and feminine have -an;[1] otherwise, the only difference among the genders is that the masculine nominative singular ends in -a while the neuter and feminine end in -e. Most case endings are simply -an. Table 6.5 adds these endings to three common nouns.

6.1.3. Athematic nouns

The athematic nouns are those that sometimes have i-mutation of the root vowel instead of an ending.[2] They are the ancestors of Modern English nouns like man/men and tooth/teeth (see table 6.6).

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.

6.1.4. The noun phrase

The simplest noun phrase (§3.2) consists of one of the pronouns that can be used as modifiers (usually a demonstrative or possessive) followed by a noun; the pronoun must agree with the noun in gender, case and number (see further §11.4). It is therefore possible to think of gender, case and number as properties of the whole phrase. Thinking of the noun phrase in this way will make reading significantly easier. It is often impossible to be sure of the case and number of a noun, but even a simple noun phrase consisting of pronoun and noun will rarely be ambiguous. For example, when the noun cyning ‘king’ has no ending, you may be in doubt whether to take it as the subject of a verb (nominative singular) or the object (accusative singular). But a demonstrative pronoun will resolve the ambiguity:

Þā sende se cyning Lēofsiġe ealdorman tō þām flotum.
[Then the king sent the nobleman Leofsige to the seafarers.]

The nouns cyning, Lēofsiġe and ealdorman are ambiguous: from them alone you can’t tell whether the king sent Leofsige or Leofsige sent the king to the vikings. But the noun phrase se cyning contains the unambiguously nominative singular pronoun se (§5.1.3), so it is the subject of sende: the king sent Leofsige. Here is another example:

Þā ġeflīemde Ælfred cyning þone here.
[Then King Alfred put to flight the (viking) army.]

The nouns Ælfred, cyning and here are all ambiguous, but the noun phrase þone here contains the accusative singular pronoun þone and so must be the object of the verb ġeflīemde. Strong feminine nouns are often ambiguous because three singular forms end in -e and three plural forms in -a. But you can often resolve the ambiguity by looking at the rest of the noun phrase:

Hē worhte þā healle ǣrest on ēastdǣle and þā ōþre ġebytlu beæftan þǣre healle.
[He built the hall first, in the eastern part, and then the other buildings behind the hall.]

Sēo byrðen ðissa eorðlicena sorga hine ġeswenċte.
[The burden of these earthly sorrows afflicted him.]

In the first sentence, the ending of healle marks it as accusative, dative or genitive singular. But the pronoun þā shows that the first instance is accusative, while þǣre shows that the second instance is either genitive or dative (in this case dative is more appropriate for the object of the preposition beæftan). In the second sentence, sorga could be nominative, accusative or genitive plural, but the pronoun þissa marks it as genitive (so does the ending of the adjective eorðlicena—see §§8.1, 8.3, and especially §8.5).

Careful attention to the noun phrase can also help you resolve the ambiguity of the endingless neuter plural, discussed above:

Þā ġeseah hē þā wīf and hira lȳtlingas, and cwæð, ‘hwæt synd ðās?’
[Then he looked at the women and their children, and said, ‘what are these?’]

Wīf might be singular or plural, but the context signals its number in two ways: first þā in the noun phrase þā wīf (singular would be þæt), and then the genitive plural pronoun hira referring backward to it (for the singular most writers would use feminine hire ‘her’ even though wīf is neuter).

6.2. More about strong nouns

6.2.1. Two-syllable nouns

Two-syllable nouns have syncopation (loss of a vowel) in the second syllable when the first syllable is long and an ending follows, as table 6.7 shows. The syncopated vowel often gets restored, so you should not be surprised to see enġeles or hēafodes.

• Notice that the nominative/accusative plural of hēafod ends in -u even though the first syllable is long. Two-syllable neuters follow the rule that if the first syllable is short, the ending -u is dropped; if it is long, the ending remains (syncopation in the second syllable does not affect this rule). Thus you will see the plurals hēafdu ‘heads’ and reċed ‘halls’. But two-syllable feminines generally lack -u in the nominative singular, whatever the length of the first syllable.

6.2.2. Nouns with changes in the stem syllable

The consonant that ends a noun may change if an ending follows. A simple example of this kind of change is Modern English wolf, plural wolves. The same change, from an unvoiced to a voiced spirant ([f] to [v], [s] to [z], [θ] to [ð]), takes place in Old English whenever a voiced sound precedes and an ending follows, though this change is rarely reflected in the spelling.

In addition, as mentioned earlier, c alternates with ċ and g with ġ depending on whether the inflectional syllable contains a back vowel, and the sc pronounced [ʃ] (like Modern English sh) alternates with the sc pronounced [sk].

When an ending begins with a back vowel (a, o, u), æ or ea in a short root syllable becomes a. That is why dæġ ‘day’ alternates with dagas ‘days’ and ġeat ‘gate’ with gatu ‘gates’ in table 6.8. The a of the plural is sometimes changed back to æ or ea by analogy with the singular, so you will see æscas as well as ascas and hwælas ‘whales’ as well as hwalas.

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.

A vowel at the beginning of an ending is always dropped when no consonant remains after the loss of h; so you’ll see forms like dative singular fēo. We expect the genitive plural to look exactly like the dative singular, but Old English resolves the ambiguity by borrowing the ending -ena from the weak declension.

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

Some nouns add -w- or -ġ- before the ending; but when there is no ending the w appears as -u or -o (lost after a long syllable) and the ġ as -e. These nouns are illustrated in table 6.10.

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

This declension contains only masculines and feminines, and they are declined alike. There is, on the other hand, a distinction between short stems and long stems in the nominative singular, so table 6.11 illustrates one short stem and one long stem without regard to gender.

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 nouns of relationship that end in -r belong here: fæder ‘father’, mōdor ‘mother’, brōðor ‘brother’, sweostor ‘sister’, dohtor ‘daughter’. These have endingless genitive singulars and usually i-mutation in the dative singular (table 6.12).

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.