Old English Basics
three grammatical categories characterized the Old English nominal paradigm
gender, number, and case
In Middle English, noun cases were reduced to....
Common case and Genitive case
What grammatical category disappeared in ME?
grammatical gender
Old English adjectives agreed with nouns in these three categories: ________
gender, number, and case
Old English verbs had these two main tenses.
Present and Past
three genders in Old English
masculine, feminine, and neuter
How many cases did OE nouns have?
four cases
Which plural ending became dominant in LATE Middle English
-s / -es
two types of adjective declension in OE
strong and weak declensions
the three moods in Old English.
indicative, imperative, and subjunctive
Explain the difference between synthetic and analytical language. Which one does OE fall into?
Synthetic – mainly expresses grammatical meaning through word endings
Analytical – employs word order and auxiliaries to express grammatical meaning.
OE is synthetic
Name OE noun cases
nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative
What is leveling?
the reduction of inflectional endings
Which type of pronouns had three numbers in OE?
personal pronouns
This type of verb formed past tense using vowel change
strong verbs
This rare number category existed in Old English pronouns but disappeared later
dual
two main types of noun declensions in Old English
strong and weak declensions
In ME period, the English became the _______
analytical language
In Middle English, these two cases merged into one in pronouns
dative and accusative
This type of verb formed past tense using suffixes like -d or -ed.
weak verbs
These were the five declinable parts of speech in Old English.
noun, pronoun, adjective, numeral, and participle
What is the strong (vowel) declension?
This declension type originally used vowel stems like a-stem, o-stem, i-stem, and u-stem.
Which factors caused the loss of inflections (leveling) in Middle English?
phonetic changes and analogy
Which methods formed comparative and superlative degrees in Old English?
suffixation, suppletive forms
non-finite forms in Middle English
infinitive, participle, and gerund