Table 4

Note should be taken of the inflections -es of the Gen. sg, -as of the Nom. and Acc. Masc. Towards the end of the OE period they began to be added to an increasing number of nouns, which originally belonged to other stems. These inflections are the prototypes and sources of the Mod E pl and Poss. case markers -(e)s and -s.

Neut. a-stems differed from Masc. in the pl of the Nom. and Acc. cases. Instead of -as they took -u for short stems (that is nouns with a short root-syllable) and did not add any inflection in the long-stemmed variant – see Nom. and Acc. pl of scip and deor in the table. Consequently, long-stemmed Neuters had homonymous sg and pl forms: dēor – dēor, likewise scēap – scēap, pinʒ – pinʒ, hūs – hūs. This peculiarity of Neut. a-stems goes back to some phonetic changes in final unaccented syllables which have given rise to an important grammati­cal feature: an instance of regular homonymy or neutralisation of number distinctions in the noun paradigm. (Traces of this group of a-stems have survived as irregular pl forms in Mod E: sheep, deer, swine.)

wa- and ja-stems differed from pure a-stems in some forms, as their endings contained traces of the elements -j- and -w-. Nom. and Acc. sg could end in -e which had developed from the weakened -j- (see ende in Table 2), though in some nouns with a doubled final consonant it was lost – cf. OE bridd (NE bird)] in some forms -j- is reflected as -i- or –i -, e. g, Nom. sg here, Dat. herie, her e, or heri e ('army'). Short-stemmed wa-stems had -u in the Nom. and Acc. sg which had developed from the element -w- but was lost after a long syllable (in the same way as the plural ending of neuter a-stems described above); cf. OE beary, (NE bear) and cneo; -w- is optional but appears regularly before the endings of the oblique cases (see the declension of cneo in Table 2).

ō-stems were all Fem., so there was no further subdivision according to gender. The variants with -j- and -w- decline like pure o-stems except that -w- appears before some endings, e. g, Nom. sg sceadu, the other cases – sceadwe (NE shadow). The difference between short- and long-stemmed ō-stems is similar to that between respective a-stems: after a short syllable the ending -u is retained, after a long syllable it is dropped, cf. wund, talu in Table 3. Disyllabic ō-stems, like a-stems, lost their second vowel in some case forms: Nom. sg ceaster, the other cases ceastre ('camp', NE -caster, -chester – a component of place-names). Like other nouns, o-stems could have an interchange of voiced and voiceless fricative consonants as allophones in intervocal and final position: lōf – lōfe [f~v] (NE glove). Among the forms of o-stems there occurred some variant forms with weakened endings or with endings borrowed from the weak declension – with the element -n- – wundena alongside wunda. Variation increased towards the end of the OE period.

The other vocalic stems, i-stems and u-stems, include nouns of different genders. Division into genders breaks up i-stems into three declensions, but is irrelevant for u-stems: Masc. and Fem. u-stems decline alike, e. g. Fem. duru (NE door) had the same forms as Masc. sunu shown in the table. The length of the root-syllable is important for both stems; it accounts for the endings in the Nom. and Acc. sg in the same way as in other classes: the endings -e, -u are usually preserved in short-stemmed nouns and lost in long-stemmed.

Comparison of the i-stems with a-stems reveals many similarities. Neut. i-stems are declined like Neut. ja-stems; the inflection of the Gen. sg for Masc. and Neut. i-stems is the same as in a-stems– -es; along-side pl forms in -e we find new variant forms of Masc. nouns in -as, e. g. Nom., Acc. pl – winas 'friends' (among Masc. i-stems only names of peoples regularly formed their pl in the old way: Dene, Еn lе_, NE Danes, Angles). It appears that Masc. i-stems adopted some forms from Masc. a-stems, while Neut. i-stems were more likely to follow the pattern of Neut. a-stems; as for Fem. ί-stems, they resembled o-stems, except that the Acc. and Nom. sg were not distinguished as with other i-stems.

The most numerous group of the consonantal stems were n-stems or the weak declension. n-stems had only two distinct forms in the sg: one form for the Nom. case and the other for the three oblique cases; the element -n- in the inflections of the weak declension was a direct descendant of the old stem-suffix -n, which had acquired a new, grammatical function. n-stems included many Masc. nouns, such as bo a, cnotta, steorra (NE bow, knot, star), many Fem. nouns, e. g. cirice, eorpe, heorte, hl efdi e (NE church, earth, heart, lady) and only a few Neut. nouns: ea a (NE eye).

The other consonantal declensions are called minor consonantal stems as they included small groups of nouns. The most important type are the root-stems, which had never had any stem-forming suffix. In Early OE the root-vowel in some forms was subjected to pho­netic changes: if the grammatical ending contained the sound [i], the vowel was narrowed and/or fronted by palatal mutation. After the ending was dropped the mutated vowel turned out to be the only marker of the form. Cf. the reconstructed forms of Dat. sg and Nom., Acc. pl of fot (NE foot): *feti, *fetiz (from earlier *foti, *fotiz) and their descendants in OE – - fet, fet. The interchange of root-vowels had turned into a regular means of form-building used similarly with inflections (see the forms of fot and mus in Table 4). This peculiarity of the root-stems is of considerable consequence for later history and has left traces in Mod E. (Irregular pl forms – men, women, teeth and the like come from the OE root-stem declension.)

Among the other consonantal stems we should mention a small group of nouns denoting family relationship with the stem-suffix –r, e. g. bropor, f eder, modor (NE brother, father, mother). They commonly had a mutated vowel in the Dat. sg: breper, lost the second vowel in some forms like other disyllabic nouns: broprum, modra and employed some endings adopted from other stems, e.g. f ederas – Nom., Acc. pl (cf. -as in a-stems).

Another small group of nouns is known as s-stems, though in OE, as well as in other West and North G languages this [s] had long changed into [r]. Only a few Neut. nouns remained in that group in OE, e.g. lamb, cealf, cild (NE lamb, calf, child). In the sg they were declined like Neut. a-stems, but in the pl had a specific inflection, not to be found outside that group: their stem-suffix -s, transformed into -r, had survived as part of the inflection: Nom. pl lambru, Gen. lambra, Dat. lambrum, Acc. lambru. ([r] in the pl form of children in Mod E is a trace of the stem-suffix -r).

It may be concluded that for all its complicated arrangement the system of noun declensions lacked consistency and precision. There were many poly-functional and homonymous markers in the paradigms. The distinction between morphological classes was not strict. Some forms were alike in all the declensions (namely, -a and -um for the Gen. and Dat. pl), many forms acquired new analogical variants under the influence of the more numerous classes or variants with phonetically weakened endings, which eliminated the differences between the declensions and between the forms within the paradigm. Towards the end of the OE period formal variation grew and the system tended to be re-arranged according to gender on the basis of the most influential types: a-stems, n-stems and o-stems.

The distinction of forms in the paradigms was inconsistent. None of the declen­sions made a distinction between eight forms – for two numbers and four cases; some declensions distinguished between five forms, others – between three or even two. Nom. and Acc. pl had the same form in all the declensions. In the sg there were two main ways of case differentiation: one common form for the Nom. and the Acc. and two distinct forms for the Dat. and Gen.; or else – one common form for the three oblique cases, distinct from the Nom. The difference between the two numbers – sg and pl– was shown with greater precision.