Old English grammar
The grammar of Old English is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more inflected. As an old Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system that is similar to that of the hypothetical Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as the umlaut.
Among living languages, Old English morphology most closely resembles that of modern Icelandic, which is among the most conservative of the Germanic languages. To a lesser extent, it resembles modern German.
Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners were fully inflected with four grammatical cases, and a vestigial instrumental, two grammatical numbers and three grammatical genders. First- and second-person personal pronouns also had dual forms for referring to groups of two people, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms.
The instrumental case was somewhat rare and occurred only in the masculine and neuter singular. It was often replaced by the dative. Adjectives, pronouns and participles agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, number and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subject in person and number.
Nouns came in numerous declensions. Verbs came in nine main conjugations, all with numerous subtypes, as well as a few additional smaller conjugations and a handful of irregular verbs. The main difference from other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, is that verbs could be conjugated in only two tenses, and they have no synthetic passive voice although it still existed in Gothic.
In common with other members of the Indo-European family, Old English has grammatical gender: a given noun does not necessarily correspond to its natural gender, even for nouns referring to people. For example, sēo was feminine, se was masculine, and þæt was neuter. Pronominal usage usually reflected natural gender rather than grammatical gender when the two conflicted.
Verbs
Verbs in Old English are divided into strong and weak verbs. Strong verbs form the past tense by changing a vowel, while weak verbs add an ending.Strong verbs
Strong verbs use the Germanic form of conjugation known as ablaut. In this form of conjugation, the stem of the word changes to indicate the tense. Verbs like this persist in modern English; for example sing, sang, sung is a strong verb, as are swim, swam, swum and choose, chose, chosen. The root portion of the word changes rather than its ending. In Old English, there were seven major classes of strong verb; each class has its own pattern of stem changes. Learning these is often a challenge for students of the language, though English speakers may see connections between the old verb classes and their modern forms.The classes had the following distinguishing features to their infinitive stems:
The first past stem is used in the past, for the first- and third-person singular. The second past stem is used for second-person singular, and all persons in the plural. Strong verbs also exhibit i-mutation of the stem in the second- and third-person singular in the present tense.
The third class went through so many sound changes that it was barely recognisable as a single class. The first was a process called 'breaking'. Before, and + another consonant, turned into, and to. Also, before + another consonant, the same happened to, but remained unchanged.
A second sound change turned to, to, and to before nasals.
Altogether, this split the third class into four sub-classes:
Regular strong verbs were all conjugated roughly the same, with the main differences being in the stem vowel. Thus stelan "to steal" represents the strong verb conjugation paradigm.
Weak verbs
Weak verbs are formed by adding alveolar endings to the stem for the past and past-participle tenses. Examples include love, loved and look, looked.Originally, the weak ending was used to form the preterite of informal, noun-derived verbs such as often emerge in conversation and which have no established system of stem-change. By nature, these verbs were almost always transitive, and even today, most weak verbs are transitive verbs formed in the same way. However, as English came into contact with non-Germanic languages, it invariably borrowed useful verbs which lacked established stem-change patterns. Rather than inventing and standardizing new classes or learning foreign conjugations, English speakers simply applied the weak ending to the foreign bases.
The linguistic trends of borrowing foreign verbs and verbalizing nouns have greatly increased the number of weak verbs over the last 1,200 years. Some verbs that were originally strong have become weak by analogy; most foreign verbs are adopted as weak verbs; and when verbs are made from nouns the resulting verb is weak. Additionally, conjugation of weak verbs is easier to learn, since there are fewer classes of variation. In combination, these factors have drastically increased the number of weak verbs, so that in modern English weak verbs are the most numerous and productive form, although occasionally a weak verb may turn into a strong verb through the process of analogy, such as sneak, where snuck is an analogical formation rather than a survival from Old English.
There are three major classes of weak verbs in Old English. The first class displays i-mutation in the root, and the second class none. There is also a third class explained below.
Class-one verbs with short roots exhibit gemination of the final stem consonant in certain forms. With verbs in, this appears as or, where and are pronounced. Geminated appears as, and that of appears as. Class-one verbs may receive an epenthetic vowel before endings beginning in a consonant.
Where class-one verbs have gemination, class-two verbs have or, which is a separate syllable pronounced. All class-two verbs have an epenthetic vowel, which appears as or.
In the following table, three verbs are conjugated. Hǣlan "to heal" is a class-one verb exhibiting neither gemination nor an epenthetic vowel. Swebban "to put to sleep" is a class-one verb exhibiting gemination and an epenthetic vowel. Sīþian "to travel" is a class-two verb.
During the Old English period, the third class was significantly reduced; only four verbs belonged to this group: habban 'have', libban 'live', seċġan 'say', and hyċġan 'think'. Each of these verbs is distinctly irregular, though they share some commonalities.
Preterite-present verbs
The preterite-present verbs are a class of about a dozen verbs which have a present tense in the form of a strong preterite and a past tense like the past of a weak verb. These verbs derive from the subjunctive or optative use of preterite forms to refer to present or future time. For example, witan, "to know" comes from a verb which originally meant "to have seen". The present singular is formed from the original singular preterite stem and the present plural from the original plural preterite stem. As a result of this history, the first-person singular and third-person singular are the same in the present.Few preterite-present verbs appear in the Old English corpus. Not all of the inflections listed below are attested: some have been reconstructed by comparison with cognates in other languages and with similar verbs in Old English.
In spite of heavy irregularities, there are four groups of similarly-conjugated verbs:
- Āgan, durran, mōtan, and witan
- Cunnan, ġemunan, and unnan
- Dugan, magan, and ġenugan
- Sċulan and þurfan
Anomalous verbs
Additionally, there is a further group of four verbs which are anomalous: "want", "do", "go" and "be". These four have their own conjugation schemes which differ significantly from all the other classes of verb. This is not especially unusual: "want", "do", "go", and "be" are the most commonly used verbs in the language, and are very important to the meaning of the sentences in which they are used. Idiosyncratic patterns of inflection are much more common with important items of vocabulary than with rarely used ones.Dōn 'to do' and gān 'to go' are conjugated alike; willan 'to want' is similar outside of the present tense.
The verb 'to be' is actually composed of three different stems: one beginning with w-, one beginning with b-, and one beginning with s-. These are traditionally thought of as forming two separate words: wesan, comprising the forms beginning with w- and s-, and bēon, comprising the forms beginning with b-.
In the present tense, wesan and bēon carried a difference in meaning. Wesan was used in most circumstances, whereas bēon was used for the future and for certain kinds of general statements.
Nouns
Old English is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners must be declined for case, number and gender 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, Old English declensions include 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 were also in the nominative.
- The accusative case indicated the direct object of the sentence, for example: Æðelbald lufode þone cyning means "Æðelbald loved the king", where Æðelbald 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 sċip is "the king's ship". It also indicated partitive nouns.
- The dative case indicated the indirect object. For example: hringas þǣm cyninge means "rings for the king" or "rings to the king". Here, the word cyning is in its dative form: cyninge. 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.
In addition to inflection for case, nouns take different endings depending on whether the noun was in the singular or plural. Also, some nouns pluralize by way of Umlaut, and some undergo no pluralizing change in certain cases.
Nouns are also categorized by grammatical gender – masculine, feminine, or neuter. In general, masculine and neuter words share most of their endings, while feminine words have their own subset of endings.
Furthermore, Old English nouns are divided as either strong or weak. Weak nouns have their own endings. In general, weak nouns are less complex than strong nouns, since they had begun to lose their system of declension. However, the various noun classes are not totally distinct from one another, and there is a great deal of overlap between them.
Descriptions of Old English language grammars often follow the NOM-ACC-GEN-DAT-INST case order.
Regular nouns
Here are the regular declensional endings and examples for each gender:For the '-u/–' forms above, the '-u' is used with a root consisting of a single short syllable or ending in a long syllable followed by a short syllable, while roots ending in a long syllable or two short syllables are not inflected.
There is a syncope of a vowel in an unstressed second syllable with two-syllable strong nouns, which have a long vowel in the first syllable and a second syllable consisting of a short vowel and single consonant. However, this syncope is not always present, so forms such as engelas may be seen.
Some strong masculine and neuter nouns end in -e in their base form. These drop the -e and add normal endings. Neuter nouns in -e always have -u in the plural, even with a long vowel.
Nouns whose stem ends in -w change this to -u or drop it in the nominative singular.
Irregular nouns
Masculine and neuter nouns whose main vowel is short æ and end with a single consonant change the vowel to a in the plural. In some cases, a consonant change may also take place:Nouns ending in -h lose this when an ending is added, and lengthen the vowel in compensation :
A few nouns follow the -u declension, with an entirely different set of endings. The following examples are both masculine, although feminines also exist, with the same endings. The '-u/–' distinction in the singular depends on syllable weight, as for strong nouns, above.
There are also some nouns of the consonant declension, which show i-umlaut in some forms, which may change a c or g into a ċ or ġ:
Other such nouns include :
Masculine: tōþ, tēþ 'tooth'; mann, menn 'person'; frēond, frīend 'friend'; fēond, fīend 'enemy'
Feminine: studu, styde 'post' ; hnitu, hnite 'nit'; āc, ǣċ 'oak'; gāt, gǣt 'goat'; brōc, brēċ 'leg covering' ; gōs, gēs 'goose'; burg, byrġ 'city'; dung, dynġ 'prison'; turf, tyrf 'turf'; grūt, grȳt 'meal' ; lūs, lȳs 'louse'; mūs, mȳs 'mouse'
Feminine -h stems: furh, fyrh 'furrow' or 'fir'; sulh, sylh 'plough'; þrūh, þrȳh 'trough'; wlōh, wlēh 'fringe'.
Feminine with compression of endings: cū, cȳ 'cow'
Neuter: Sċrūd 'clothing, garment' has the umlauted dative-singular form sċrȳd.
Five nouns of relationship have an irregular declension:
A few neuter strong nouns have -r- in the plural, from proto-Germanic -z stem nouns:
The other nouns of this type are ǣġ, ǣġru 'egg'; ċealf, ċealfru 'calf'; and ċild 'child', which has either the a-stem plural ċild or the inherited plural ċildru.
Adjectives
Adjectives in Old English are declined using the same categories as nouns: five cases, three genders, and two numbers. 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:The suffix -u can variably be -o, and the feminine nominative plural suffix -a can variably be -e.
W-stem adjectives use -w- before a vowel, -o- before a consonant, and -u word-finally. H-stem adjectives remove the final "-h" before a consonant and drop the vowels of a given ending.
The same stem-changing variants described above for nouns also exist for adjectives. The following example shows both the æ/ a variation of the stems:
Comparatives and superlatives
Comparative adjectives are fairly regular, but do often cause i-mutation.| Stem | Compartive | Superlative |
| Regular adjectives | -ra | -st |
| Ġeong "young" | Ġingra | Ġinġest |
| Gōd "good" | Betera | Betst |
| Yfel "bad" | Wyrsa | Wyrrest |
Pronouns
Demonstrative Pronouns/Determiners
Old English had two main determiners: se, which could function as both 'the' or 'that', and þes for 'this'.Modern English 'that' descends from the neuter nominative/accusative form, and 'the' from the masculine nominative form, with 's' replaced analogously by the 'th' of the other forms. The feminine nominative form was possibly the source of Modern English 'she'.
Interrogative Pronouns
Personal 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 preserve the dual form, which was specifically used for groups of two things, as in "we both" and "you two"). These were common, but could optionally be substituted with the ordinary plural forms.Many of the forms above bear strong resemblances to their contemporary English language equivalents: for instance in the genitive case ēower became "your", ūre became "our", mīn became "mine". However, the h- in plural forms such as hīe was eventually replaced with þ- under Norse influence, yielding "they," "them," and "their."
Prepositions
Prepositions sometimes follow the word which they govern, in which case they are called postpositions.The following is a list of prepositions in the Old English language. Prepositions may govern the accusative, genitive, dative or instrumental cases.
| Old English | Definition | Notes |
| æfter | after | Related to Frisian efter, Dutch achter, Icelandic eftir. Ancestor of modern after. |
| ǣr | before | Related to German eher and Icelandic áður. Ancestor of modern ere. |
| æt | at | Related to Icelandic að. Ancestor of modern at. |
| andlang | along | Related to German entlang. Ancestor of modern along. Governs the genitive. |
| bæftan | behind | Ancestor of modern abaft. |
| be, bī | by, about | Related to West Frisian by, Low German bi, Dutch bij, German bei. Ancestor of modern by. |
| beforan | before | Related to German bevor. Ancestor of modern before. |
| beġeondan | beyond | Ancestor of modern beyond |
| behindan | behind | Ancestor of modern behind. Related to German hinter. |
| binnan | in, within | Related to German and Dutch binnen |
| benēoðan | beneath | Ancestor of modern beneath. |
| betwēonum | between | Ancestor of modern between |
| bufan | above | Ancestor of modern above through compound form onbufan |
| būtan | without, except | Related to Dutch buiten. Ancestor of modern but. |
| ēac | also | Related to Frisian ek, Low German ook, Dutch ook, and German auch. Ancestor of modern eke |
| for | for, because of, instead of | Ancestor of modern for, related to modern German für |
| fram | from, by | Ancestor of modern from |
| ġeond | through | Ancestor of modern yonder through comparative form ġeondra. Related to Dutch ginds and ginder |
| in | in | Ancestor of modern in, related to German and Latin in |
| innan | within | Related to modern German innen |
| intō | into | Ancestor of modern into |
| mid | with | Related to modern German mit |
| nēah | near | Ancestor of modern nigh. German nah |
| of | from, out of | Ancestor of modern of and off |
| ofer | over | Ancestor of modern over |
| on | on, in | Ancestor of modern on |
| onbūtan | around | Ancestor of modern about |
| onġēan | opposite, against; towards; in reply to | Ancestor of modern again. Related to German entgegen |
| oþ | until | |
| samod | together | Related to German samt |
| tō | to | Ancestor of modern to, related to German zu |
| tōeācan | in addition to, besides | |
| tōforan | before | Related to Dutch tevoren, German zuvor |
| tōgeagnes | towards, against | Related to Dutch tegen |
| tōweard | toward | Ancestor of modern toward |
| þurh | through | Ancestor of modern through. Related to German durch. |
| under | under | Ancestor of modern under, related to German unter |
| undernēoðan | underneath | Ancestor of modern underneath |
| uppon | upon, on | Not the ancestor of modern upon, which came from "up on". |
| ūtan | without, outside of | Related to modern Swedish utan, German außen. The adverbial form ūt is the ancestor of modern out. |
| wiþ | against | Ancestor of modern with |
| wiþinnan | within | Ancestor of modern within |
| wiþūtan | outside of | Ancestor of modern without |
| ymb | around | Related to modern German um and Latin ambi |
Syntax
Old English syntax was similar in many ways to that of Modern English. However, there were some important differences. Some were simply consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection, and word order was generally freer. There are also differences in the default word order and in the construction of negation, questions, relative clauses and subordinate clauses.- The default word order was verb-second and more like German than Modern English.
- There was no do-support in questions and negatives.
- Multiple negatives could stack up in a sentence and intensified each other.
- Sentences with subordinate clauses of the type "When X, Y" did not use a wh-type word for the conjunction but used a th-type correlative conjunction.
Word order
Something similar occurs in line 713 in sele þām hēan "in the high hall".
Extraposition of constituents out of larger constituents is common even in prose, as in the well-known tale of Cynewulf and Cyneheard, which begins
The words ond westseaxna wiotan "and the West Saxon counselors" counselors of have been extraposed from the compound subject they belong in, in a way that would be impossible in modern English. In Old English, case inflection preserves the meaning: the verb beniman "to deprive" needs a word in the genitive case to show what someone or something is deprived of, which in this sentence is rīces "of kingdom", whereas wiotan "counselors" is in the nominative case and therefore serves a different role entirely ; for this reason the interpretation that Cynewulf deprived Sigebryht of the West Saxon counselors was not possible for speakers of Old English. The Old English sentence still isn't in theory perfectly unambiguous, as it contains one more word in the genitive: westseaxna, and the form wiotan "counselors" may also represent the accusative case in addition to the nominative, thus for example creating the grammatical possibility of the interpretation that Cynewulf also took the West Saxons away from the counselors, but this would have been difficult to conceive.
Main clauses in Old English tend to have a verb-second order, where the finite verb is the second constituent in a sentence, regardless of what comes first. There are echoes of this in modern English: "Hardly did he arrive when...", "Never can it be said that...", "Over went the boat", "Ever onward marched the weary soldiers...", "Then came a loud sound from the sky above". In Old English, however, it was much more extensive, like the word order in modern Germanic languages other than modern English. If the subject appears first, there is an SVO order, but it can also yield orders such as OVS and others. In questions VSO was common, see below.
In subordinate clauses, however, the word order is markedly different, with verb-final constructions the norm, again as in Dutch and German. Furthermore, in poetry, all the rules were frequently broken. In Beowulf, for example, main clauses frequently have verb-initial or verb-final order, and subordinate clauses often have verb-second order.
Those linguists who work within the Chomskyan transformational grammar paradigm often believe that it is more accurate to describe Old English as having underlying subject-object-verb ordering. According to this theory, all sentences are initially generated using this order, but in main clauses, the verb is moved back to the V2 position. That is said to explain the fact that Old English allows inversion of subject and verb as a general strategy for forming questions, while modern English uses this strategy almost only with auxiliary verbs and the main verb "to be", requiring do-support in other cases.
Questions
Most of the time the word order of Old English changed when asking a question, from SVO to VSO. While many purport that Old English had free word order, this is not quite true, as there were conventions for the positioning of subject, object and verb in clause.Relative and subordinate clauses
Old English did not use forms equivalent to "who, when, where" in relative clauses or subordinate clauses.Instead, relative clauses used one of the following:
- An invariable complementizer þe
- The demonstrative pronoun se, sēo, þæt
- The combination of the two, as in se þe
The word order usually distinguished the subordinate clause from the main clause.
The equivalents of "who, when, where" were used only as interrogative pronouns and indefinite pronouns, as in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit.
Besides þā... þā..., other correlative conjunctions occurred, often in pairs of identical words, e.g.:
- þǣr X, þǣr Y: "Where X, Y"
- þanon X, þanon Y: "Whence X, Y"
- þider X, þider Y: "Whither X, Y"
- þēah X, þēah Y: "Although X, Y"
- þenden X, þenden Y: "While X, Y"
- þonne X, þonne Y: "Whenever X, Y"
- þæs X, þæs Y: "As/after/since X, Y"
- þȳ X, þȳ Y: "The more X, the more Y"
Phonology