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The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected. As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the 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.[1]
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 (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), and a vestigial instrumental,[2] two grammatical numbers (singular and plural) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). 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.[3] 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 (sometimes) participles agreed with their corresponding nouns in case, number and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subjects in person and number.
Nouns came in numerous declensions (with many parallels in Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Verbs came in ten main conjugations (seven strong and three weak), 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 (compared to the six "tenses", really tense/aspect combinations, of Latin), and the absence of a synthetic passive voice, which still existed in Gothic.
- ^ Cercignani, Fausto (1980). "Early 'Umlaut' Phenomena in the Germanic Languages". Language. 56 (1): 126–136. doi:10.2307/412645. JSTOR 412645.
- ^ Quirk, Randolph; Wrenn, Charles Leslie (1957). An Old English Grammar. London: Methuen and Co.
- ^ Peter S. Baker (2003). "Pronouns". The Electronic Introduction to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell. Archived from the original on September 11, 2015.