Nominal Parts of Speech in Ancient Germanic languages

The general characteristic Germanic languages morphological system

The oldest Germanic languages have the typical complex inflected morphology of old Indo-European languages, with four or five noun cases (the nominative, dative, accusative, genitive, and instrumental.); verbs marked for person, number, tense and mood; multiple noun and verb classes; few or no articles; and rather free word order. The old Germanic languages are famous for having only two tenses (present and past). There were three moods: indicative, subjunctive and imperative. Gothic verbs had a number of archaic features inherited from PIE that were lost in the other Germanic languages with few traces, including dual endings, an inflected passive voice, and a class of verbs with reduplication in the past tense.

Among the primary innovations in Proto-Germanic are the preterite present verbs, a special set of verbs whose present tense looks like the past tense of other verbs and which is the origin of most modal verbs in English; a past-tense ending (in the so-called "weak verbs", marked with -ed in English) that appears variously as /d/ or /t/, often assumed to be derived from the verb "to do"; and two separate sets of adjective endings, originally corresponding to a distinction between indefinite semantics and definite semantics.

Вопрос 16

Nouns

Nouns were declined -- that is, the ending of the noun changed to reflect its function in the sentence.

Cases

n The nominative case indicated the subject of the sentence (eg "cyning" means "king").

n The genitive case indicated possession (eg the "cyninges scip" is "the ship of the king" or "the king's ship").

n The dative case indicated the indirect object of the sentence (eg "hringas cyninge" means "rings for the king" or "rings to the king").

n The accusative indicates the direct object of the sentence (eg "Æþelbald lufode cyning" means "Æþelbald loved the king", where Æþelbald is the subject and the king is the object).

n The instrumental case indicates the agency whereby something was done, eg "lifde sweorde", "he lived by the sword", where "sweorde" is the instrumental form of "sweord").

Gender and Number

There were different endings depending on whether the noun was in the singular (eg "hring", one ring) or plural ("hringas", many rings).

Nouns are also categorized by grammatical gender – masculine (cyning), feminine (cwene), or neuter (maegden). Masculine and neuter words generally share their endings. Feminine words have their own subset of endings

There were 9 classes of noun stems in Germanic languages according to the stem-forming suffix. These suffixes were lost long ago, so this division is a historical one. There were the following classes:

· with the stem in –o-, e.g. daeg (day);

· with the stem in -a-, e.g. giba (give);

· with the stem in -i- , e.g. gasts (guest);

· with the stem in -u –, e.g. handus (hand);

· with the stem in -n- , e.g. nama (name);

· with the stem in -r- , e.g. fadar (father);

· with the stem in -s- , e.g. agis (awe);

· without suffixes – , e.g.nahts (night);

· with the stem in -nt- , e.g. freond (friend);

Here we can see one example of Noun declension:

Wuldor ('glory', n.)

Nominative wuldor(s) wuldor(pl)

Genitive wuldres wuldra

Dative wuldre wuldrum

Accusative wuldor wuldor

Вопрос 17

Adjectives

Old Germanic Adjectives were declined like nouns.

They fall under the same categories (strong or weak, masculine or feminine or neuter, singular or plural) and have the same number of cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and instrumental).

Degrees of comparison were formed by means of suffixes -iz, oz; -ista, osta, e.g. Long – lengra – longest.

The difference between the Nouns and the Adjectives was as follows: every Adjective is declension both according to the strong and to the weak declension. Weak declension forms are used when the Adjective is preceded by a demonstrative pronoun or the definite article; they are associated with the meaning of definiteness. In all other contexts forms of the strong declension are used.

Degrees of comparison were formed by means of suffixes –iz, oz; -ista, osta, e.g., long – lengra – longest. The comparatives were declined as strong adjectives; the superlatives rarely took the forms of strong declension and mostly follow the weak declension. Several adjectives have suppletive forms of comparison or were derived from adverbs.

Examples of Adjectives and how they were declined in Gothic (Masculine Gender):

o Strong

Nom. midjis (middle)

Gen. midjis

Dat. midjamma

Instr. midjana

o Weak

Nom. blinda

Gen. blindins

Dat. blindin

Instr. Blindan

Вопрос 18

PRONOUNS

Most pronouns are declined by number, case and gender.

In the plural form most pronouns have only one form for all genders.

Germanic pronouns reserve the dual form (which is specifically for talking about groups of two things, eg "we two" or "you two»).

There were such classes of Pronouns as personal, interrogative, indicative and reflexive in some languages. They had the same categories as Nouns.

For example

1st person

Sing./ Pl. /Dual

Nom. ic, íc/ Wé/ wit

Gen. mín/ Úre/ uncer

Dat. mé/ Ús/ unc

Acc. mec, mé/ úsic, ús/ uncit, unc

Many of the forms above bear strong resemblances to their contemporary English language equivalents: for instance in the genitive case eower became «your», ure became «our», min became «mine».

Вопрос 19

Numerals

Numerals were also a part of nominal group. They were divided into such types as cardinal and ordinal.

We can illustrate them by the examples from Old English: an, twegen, thrie, feower, fif, siex, seofon, eahta, nigon, tien, endleofan, twelf + 10 feower-tien; ty-+ tegund.

Some Numerals had the forms of cases – Nominative, Genitive and Dative.

In Gothic the word AINS (1) was declined as a strong Adjective. Numerals from 4 had no changes.

Ordinary numerals were derived from cardinals with the help of suffixes tjo-to.

The numeral FIRST derived from the preposition fore and got the form fyrst; the number SECOND derived from the word ander.

The cardinal numerals were declined as weak adjectives.

Вопрос 20

The main grammar categories of Germanic verbs were:

l Tense (Present and Past);

The Germanic verb system carried two innovations over the previous Proto-Indo-European verb system:

Simplification to two tenses: present (also conveying future meaning) and past (sometimes called "preterite" and conveying the meaning of all of the following English forms: "I did, I have done, I had done, I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing").

Development of a new way of indicating the preterite and past participle, using a dental suffix.

l Person – the 1st, 2nd, 3rd

l Number – Singular and Plural (+ Dual in Gothic);

l Voice – Active, Passive, (Medio-passive in Gothic);

l Mood – Indicative, Optative and Imperative.

l Non-Finite Forms – Infinitive and Participles.

Types of Verb

All verbs were divided into:

l Strong,

l Weak,

l Preterite-present,

l Atypical.

Вопрос 21

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: “scriban - screib – scribum - giscrban."

The root portion of the word changes rather than its ending. In Old Germanic there were 7 major classes of strong verb; each class has its own pattern of stem changes.

Stem Changes in Strong Verbs

Class/Infinitive/1st Preterite/2nd Preterite/Past Participle

I i: writan a: wrat writon writen (E)

II e:o or u: krjupa e:a kraup U krupum O kropinn (Icel.)

III e: Helpan e:a healp

u: hulpon o: holpen

IV E niman A nam A: nemum O numans

V E giefan Æ geaf æ: gaefon E giefen

VI A faran o: for o: forum A farans

VII –a(e) hatan e: or e:o het e: or e:o heton - a(e) haten

Вопрос 22

Weak verbs

Weak verbs are formed principally by adding endings to past and participles.

There were only 3 classes of weak verbs:

1) –j- stem – nerian – nerede – nered;

2) - o- stem – endian – endode – endod;

3) – ai– stem – habban – haefde – haefd

4) na/no fulls – fullnan gafullan (Goth).

In Gothic there were 4 classes of weak verbs.

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