Old English grammar

The grammar of Old English is quite dierent fromthat of Modern English, predominantly by being muchmore inected. As an old Germanic language, Old En-glish has a morphological system that is similar to that ofthe hypothetical Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retain-ing many of the inections thought to have been commonin Proto-Indo-European and also including characteristi-cally Germanic constructions such as the umlaut.Among living languages, Old English morphology mostclosely resembles that of modern Icelandic, which isamong the most conservative of the Germanic languages;to a lesser extent, the Old English inectional system issimilar to that of modern High German.Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners werefully inected with ve grammatical cases (nominative,accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), twogrammatical numbers (singular and plural) and threegrammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter).First- and second-person personal pronouns also had dualforms for referring to groups of two people, in additionto the usual singular and plural forms.[1] The instrumentalcase was somewhat rare and occurred only in the mascu-line and neuter singular; it could typically be replaced bythe dative. Adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) par-ticiples agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, num-ber and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subject inperson and number.Nouns came in numerous declensions (with deep paral-lels in Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Verbs camein nine main conjugations (seven strong and two weak),each with numerous subtypes, as well as a few additionalsmaller conjugations and a handful of irregular verbs.The main dierence from other ancient Indo-Europeanlanguages, such as Latin, is that verbs can be conju-gated in only two tenses (vs. the six tenses reallytense/aspect combinations of Latin), and have no syn-thetic passive voice (although it did still exist in Gothic).Gender in nouns was grammatical, as opposed to thenatural gender that prevails in modern English. That is,the grammatical gender of a given noun did not necessar-ily correspond to its natural gender, even for nouns refer-ring to people. For example, so sunne (the Sun) was fem-inine, se mna (the Moon) was masculine, and t wfthe woman/wife was neuter. (Compare modern Ger-man die Sonne, der Mond, das Weib.) Pronominal usagecould reect either natural or grammatical gender, whenit conicted.

1 Morphology

1.1 VerbsVerbs in Old English are divided into strong and weakverbs. Strong verbs indicate tense by a change in the qual-ity of a vowel, while weak verbs indicate tense by the ad-dition of an ending.

1.1.1 Strong verbs

Further information: Germanic strong verb

Strong verbs use the Germanic form of conjugationknown as ablaut. In this form of conjugation, the stemof the word changes to indicate the tense. Verbs like thispersist in modern English; for example sing, sang, sung isa strong verb, as are swim, swam, swum and choose, chose,chosen. The root portion of the word changes rather thanits ending. In Old English, there were seven major classesof strong verb; each class has its own pattern of stemchanges. Learning these is often a challenge for studentsof the language, though English speakers may see con-nections between the old verb classes and their modernforms.The classes had the following distinguishing features totheir innitive stems:

1. + one consonant.2. o or + one consonant.3. Originally e + two consonants. By the time of writ-

ten Old English, many had changed. If C is used torepresent any consonant, verbs in this class usuallyhad short e + lC; short eo + rC; short i + nC/mC; or(g +) short ie + lC.

4. e + 1 consonant (usually l or r, plus the verb brecan'to break').

5. e + 1 consonant (usually a stop or a fricative).6. a + 1 consonant.7. Other than the above. Always a heavy root syllable

(either a long vowel or short + two consonants), al-most always a non-umlauted vowel e.g. , , a,a (+ nC), ea (+ lC/rC), occ. (the latter with pastin instead of normal o). Innitive is distinguish-able from class 1 weak verbs by non-umlauted root

1

2 1 MORPHOLOGY

vowel; from class 2 weak verbs by lack of sux -ian. First and second preterite have identical stems,usually in o (occ. ), and the innitive and the pastparticiple also have the same stem.

The rst preterite stem is used in the preterite, for therst- and third-person singular. The second preterite stemis used for second-person singular, and all persons in theplural (as well as the preterite subjunctive). Strong verbsalso exhibit i-mutation of the stem in the second- andthird-person singular in the present tense.The third class went through so many sound changes thatit was barely recognisable as a single class. The rst wasa process called 'breaking'. Before h, and r + anotherconsonant, turned into ea, and e to eo. Also,before l + another consonant, the same happened to ,but e remained unchanged (except before combinationlh).The second sound change to aect it was the inuence ofpalatal sounds g, c, and sc. These turned precedinge and to ie and ea, respectively.The third sound change turned e to i, to a, ando to u before nasals.Altogether, this split the third class into ve sub-classes:

1. e + two consonants (apart from clusters beginningwith l).

2. eo + r or h + another consonant.

3. e + l + another consonant.

4. g, c, or sc + ie + two consonants.

5. i + nasal + another consonant.

Regular strong verbs were all conjugated roughly thesame, with the main dierences being in the stem vowel.Thus stelan 'to steal' represents the strong verb conjuga-tion paradigm.

1.1.2 Weak verbs

Further information: Germanic weak verb

Weak verbs are formed by adding alveolar (t or d) endingsto the stem for the past and past-participle tenses. Someexamples are love, loved or look, looked.Originally, the weak ending was used to form the preteriteof informal, noun-derived verbs such as often emerge inconversation and which have no established system ofstem-change. By nature, these verbs were almost alwaystransitive, and even today, most weak verbs are transi-tive verbs formed in the same way. However, as Englishcame into contact with non-Germanic languages, it in-variably borrowed useful verbs which lacked established

stem-change patterns. Rather than inventing and stan-dardizing new classes or learning foreign conjugations,English speakers simply applied the weak ending to theforeign bases.The linguistic trends of borrowing foreign verbs and ver-balizing nouns have greatly increased the number of weakverbs over the last 1,200 years. Some verbs that wereoriginally strong (for example help, holp, holpen) have be-come weak by analogy; most foreign verbs are adopted asweak verbs; and when verbs are made from nouns (for ex-ample to scroll or to water) the resulting verb is weak.Additionally, conjugation of weak verbs is easier to teach,since there are fewer classes of variation. In combina-tion, these factors have drastically increased the numberof weak verbs, so that in modern English weak verbs arethe most numerous and productive form (although occa-sionally a weak verb may turn into a strong verb throughthe process of analogy, such as sneak (originally only anoun), where snuck is an analogical formation rather thana survival from Old English).There are three major classes of weak verbs in Old En-glish. The rst class displays i-mutation in the root, andthe second class none. There is also a third class explainedbelow.Class-one verbs with short roots exhibit gemination ofthe nal stem consonant in certain forms. With verbsin r, this appears as ri or rg, where i and g arepronounced [j]. Geminated f appears as bb, and thatof g appears as cg. Class-one verbs may receive anepenthetic vowel before endings beginning in a conso-nant.Where class-one verbs have gemination, class-two verbshave i or ig, which is a separate syllable pronounced[i]. All class-two verbs have an epenthetic vowel, whichappears as a or o.In the following table, three verbs are conjugated. Sweb-ban 'to put to sleep' is a class-one verb exhibiting gemi-nation and an epenthetic vowel. Hlan 'to heal' is a class-one verb exhibiting neither gemination nor an epentheticvowel. Sian 'to journey' is a class-two verb.During the Old English period, the third class was signif-icantly reduced; only four verbs belonged to this group:habban 'have', libban 'live', secgan 'say', and hycgan'think'. Each of these verbs is distinctly irregular, thoughthey share some commonalities.

1.1.3 Preterite-present verbs

The preterite-present verbs are a class of verbs whichhave a present tense in the form of a strong preterite and apast tense like the past of a weak verb. These verbs derivefrom the subjunctive or optative use of preterite forms torefer to present or future time. For example, witan, toknow comes from a verb which originally meant to haveseen (cf. OE wise manner, mode, appearance"; Latin

1.2 Nouns 3

videre to see from the same root). The present singu-lar is formed from the original singular preterite stem andthe present plural from the original plural preterite stem.As a result of this history, the rst-person singular andthird-person singular are the same in the present.Few preterite-present verbs appear in theOld English cor-pus, and the forms marked with an asterisk are unattestedreconstructions, formed by analogy.In spite of heavy irregularities, there are four groups ofsimilarly-conjugated verbs:

1. gan, durran, mtan, and witan

2. Cunnan, gemunan (outside the past tense), and un-nan

3. Dugan, magan, and genugan

4. Sculan and urfan

Note that the Old English meanings of many of the verbsare signicantly dierent from that of the modern de-scendants; in fact, the verbs can, may, must, and to alesser extent thurf, durr appear to have chain shifted inmeaning.

1.1.4 Anomalous verbs

Additionally, there is a further group of four verbs whichare anomalous: want (modern will), do, go andbe. These four have their own conjugation schemeswhich dier signicantly from all the other classes ofverb. This is not especially unusual: want, do, go,and be are the most commonly used verbs in the lan-guage, and are very important to the meaning of the sen-tences in which they are used. Idiosyncratic patterns ofinection are much more common with important itemsof vocabulary than with rarely used ones.Dn 'to do' and gn 'to go' are conjugated alike; willan 'towant' is similar outside of the present tense.The verb 'to be' is actually composed of three dierentstems:The present forms of wesan are almost never used.Therefore, wesan is used as the past, imperative, andpresent participle versions of sindon, and does not havea separate meaning. The bon forms are usually used inreference to future actions. Only the present forms ofbon contrast with the present forms of sindon/wesan inthat bon tends to be used to refer to eternal or perma-nent truths, while sindon/wesan is used more commonlyto refer to temporary or subjective facts. This seman-tic distinction (made only during the present tense) waslost as Old English developed into modern English, sothat the modern verb 'to be' is a single verb which takesits present indicative forms from sindon, its past indica-tive forms fromwesan, its present subjunctive forms from

bon, its past subjunctive forms from wesan, and its im-perative and participle forms from bon. In late OE andME, the form earon/earun, from the Old Norse erun, re-placed bo and sind (See also List of English words ofOld Norse origin).

1.2 NounsOld English is an inected language, and as such its nouns,pronouns, adjectives and determiners must be declined inorder to serve a grammatical function. A set of declinedforms of the same word pattern is called a declension.As in several other ancient Germanic languages, there areve major cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitiveand instrumental.

The nominative case indicated the subject of thesentence, for example: se cyning means 'the king'.It was also used for direct address. Adjectives in thepredicate (qualifying a noun on the other side of 'tobe') were also in the nominative.

The accusative case indicated the direct object ofthe sentence, for example: elbald lufode onecyning means "elbald loved the king, whereelbald is the subject and the king is the object.Already the accusative had begun to merge with thenominative; it was never distinguished in the plural,or in a neuter noun.

The genitive case indicated possession, for example:the s cyninges scip is the ship of the king or thekings ship. It also indicated partitive nouns.

The dative case indicated the indirect object of thesentence; To whom or for whom the object wasmeant. For example: hringas m cyninge meansrings for the king or rings to the king. Here, theword cyning is in its dative form: cyninge. Therewere also several verbs that took direct objects inthe dative.

The instrumental case indicated an instrumentused to achieve something, for example: lifde swe-orde, he lived by the sword, where sweorde is theinstrumental form of sweord. During the Old En-glish period, the instrumental was falling out of use,having largely merged with the dative. Only pro-nouns and strong adjectives retained separate formsfor the instrumental.

The small body of evidence available for Runic texts sug-gests that there may also have a been a separate locativecase in early or Northumbrian forms of the language (e.g., on rodi on the Cross).[2]

In addition to inection for case, nouns take dierentendings depending on whether the noun was in the singu-lar (for example, hring one ring"') or plural (for exam-ple, hringas many rings). Also, some nouns pluralize by

4 1 MORPHOLOGY

way of Umlaut, and some undergo no pluralizing changein certain cases.Nouns are also categorized by grammatical gender mas-culine, feminine, or neuter. In general, masculine andneuter words share their endings, while feminine wordshave their own subset of endings. The plural of some de-clension types distinguishes between genders, e.g., a-stemmasculine nominative plural stanas stones vs. neuternominative plural scipu ships and word words"; or i-stem masculine nominative plural sige(as) victories vs.neuter nominative plural sifu sieves and hilt hilts.Furthermore, Old English nouns are divided as eitherstrong or weak. Weak nouns have their own endings. Ingeneral, 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 distinctfrom one another, and there is a great deal of overlap be-tween them.Descriptions of Old English language grammars oftenfollow the common NOM-ACC-GEN-DAT-INST caseorder used for the Germanic languages.

1.2.1 Strong nouns

Here are the strong declensional endings and examples foreach gender:For the '-u/' forms above, the '-u' is used with a rootconsisting of a single short syllable or ending in a longsyllable followed by a short syllable, while roots ending ina long syllable or two short syllables are not inected. (Along syllable contains a long vowel or is followed by twoconsonants. Note also that there are some exceptions; forexample, feminine nouns ending in -u such as strengu'strength'.)Note the syncope of the second e in engel when an endingfollows. This syncope of the vowel in the second syllableoccurs with two-syllable strong nouns, which have a longvowel in the rst syllable and a second syllable consistingof a short vowel and single consonant (for example, engel,wuldor 'glory', and hafod 'head'). However, this syncopeis not always present, so forms such as engelas may beseen.

1.2.2 Weak nouns

Here are the weak declensional endings and examples foreach gender:

1.2.3 Irregular strong nouns

In addition, masculine and neuter nouns whose mainvowel is short and end with a single consonant changethe vowel to a in the plural (a result of the phonologicalphenomenon known as Anglo-Frisian brightening):

Some masculine and neuter nouns end in -e in their baseform. These drop the -e and add normal endings. Notethat neuter nouns in -e always have -u in the plural, evenwith a long vowel:Nouns ending in -h lose this when an ending is added,and lengthen the vowel in compensation (this can resultin compression of the ending as well):Nouns whose stem ends in -w change this to -u or dropit in the nominative singular. (Note that this '-u/' dis-tinction depends on syllable weight, as for strong nouns,above.)A few nouns follow the -u declension, with an entirely dif-ferent set of endings. The following examples are bothmasculine, although feminines also exist, with the sameendings (for example duru 'door' and hand 'hand'). Notethat the '-u/' distinction in the singular depends on sylla-ble weight, as for strong nouns, above.

1.2.4 Mutating strong nouns

There are also some nouns of the consonant declension,which show i-umlaut in some forms.Other such nouns include (with singular and plural nom-inative forms given):Masculine: t, t 'tooth'; mann, menn 'man'; frond,frend 'friend'; fond, fend 'enemy' (cf. 'end')Feminine: studu, styde 'post' (cf. 'stud'); hnitu, hnite 'nit';c, c 'oak'; gt, gt 'goat'; brc, brc 'leg covering' (cf.'breeches); gs, gs 'goose'; burg, byrg 'city' (cf. 'bor-ough', '-bury' and German cities in -burg); dung, dyng'prison' (cf. 'dungeon' by way of French and Frankish);turf, tyrf 'turf'; grt, grt 'meal' (cf. 'grout'); ls, ls'louse'; ms, ms 'mouse'; neaht, niht 'night' Femininewith loss of -h in some forms: furh, fyrh 'furrow' or 'r';sulh, sylh 'plough'; rh, rh 'trough';wlh,wlh 'fringe'.Feminine with compression of endings: c, c 'cow' (cf.dialectal plural 'kine')Neuter: In addition, scrd 'clothing, garment' has the um-lauted dative-singular form scrd.

1.2.5 Nouns of relationship

1.2.6 Neuter nouns with -r- in the plural

Other such nouns: g, gru egg (ancestor of the archaicor dialectical form ey, plural eyren; the form egg is a bor-rowing from Old Norse); bread, breadru 'crumb'; cealf,cealfru 'calf'; cild 'child' has either the normal plural cildor cildru (cf. 'children', with -en from the weak nouns);hmed, hmedru 'cohabitation'; speld, speldru 'torch'.

51.3 Adjectives

Adjectives in Old English are declined using the samecategories as nouns: ve cases (nominative, accusative,genitive, dative, and instrumental), three genders (mascu-line, feminine, neuter), and two numbers (singular, plu-ral). In addition, they can be declined either strong orweak. The weak forms are used in the presence of a def-inite or possessive determiner, while the strong ones areused in other situations. The weak forms are identical tothose for nouns, while the strong forms use a combinationof noun and pronoun endings:For the '-u/' forms above, the distinction is the same asfor strong nouns.Note that the same variants described above for nounsalso exist for adjectives. The following example showsboth the /a variation and the -u forms in the femininesingular and neuter plural:The following shows an example of an adjective endingwith -h:The following shows an example of an adjective endingwith -w:

1.4 Denite articles and demonstratives

Old English had two main determiners: se, which couldfunction as both 'the' or 'that', and es for 'this.Modern English 'that' descends from the neuter nomina-tive/accusative form,[3] and 'the' from themasculine nom-inative form, with 's replaced analogously by the 'th' ofthe other forms.[4] The feminine nominative form wasprobably the source of Modern English 'she'.[5]

1.5 Pronouns

Most pronouns are declined by number, case and gender;in the plural form most pronouns have only one form forall genders. Additionally, Old English pronouns preservethe dual form (which is specically for talking aboutgroups of two things, for example we two or you twoor they two). These were uncommon even then, butremained in use throughout the period.Many of the forms above bear strong resemblances totheir contemporary English language equivalents: for in-stance in the genitive case ower became your, re be-came our, mn became mine.

1.6 Prepositions

Prepositions (like Modern English words by, for, andwith) often follow the word which they govern, in whichcase they are called postpositions. Also, if the object of apreposition was marked in the dative case, a preposition

may conceivably be located anywhere in the sentence.The following is a list of prepositions in the Old En-glish language. Many of them, particularly thosemarked etc., are found in other variant spellings.Prepositions may govern the accusative, genitive, dativeor instrumental cases - the question of which is beyondthe scope of this article.

2 SyntaxOld English syntax was similar in many ways to thatof modern English. However, there were some impor-tant dierences. Some were simply consequences of thegreater level of nominal and verbal inection e.g., wordorder was generally freer. But there are also dierencesin the default word order, and in the construction of nega-tion, questions, relative clauses and subordinate clauses.In addition:

The default word order was verb-second and morelike modern German than modern English.

There was no do-support in questions and negatives. Multiple negatives could stack up in a sentence, andintensied each other (negative concord).

Sentences with subordinate clauses of the typeWhen X, Y did not use a wh-type word for theconjunction, but instead a th-type correlative con-junction (e.g. X, Y in place of When X, Y).

2.1 Word orderThere was some exibility in word order of Old En-glish, since the heavily inected nature of nouns, adjec-tives and verbs often indicated the relationships amongclause arguments. Scrambling of constituents was com-mon, and even sometimes scrambling within a constituentoccurred, as in Beowulf line 708 wrum on andan:Something similar occurs in line 713 in sele m han inthe high hall (lit. in hall the high).Extraposition of constituents out of larger constituentsis common even in prose, as in the well-known tale ofCynewulf and Cyneheard, which begins

Hr Cynewulf benam Sigebryht his rces ondWestseaxna wiotan for unryhtum ddum, b-ton Hamtnscre; ...(Literally) Here Cynewulf deprived Sigebryhtof his kingdom and West Saxons counselorsfor unright deeds, except Hampshire(translated) Here Cynewulf and the WestSaxon counselors deprived Sigebryht of his

6 2 SYNTAX

kingdom, other than Hampshire, for unjust ac-tions

Note how the words ond Westseaxna wiotan and theWest Saxon counselors (lit. and (the) counselors of(the) West Saxons) have been extraposed from (movedout of) the compound subject they belong in, in a waythat would be totally impossible in modern English.Case marking helps somewhat: wiotan counselors canbe nominative or accusative but denitely not genitive,which is the case of rces kingdom and the case gov-erned by benam deprived"; hence, Cynewulf can't pos-sibly have deprived Sigebryht of the West Saxon coun-selors, as the order suggests.Main clauses in Old English tend to have a verb-second(V2) order, where the verb is the second constituent in asentence, regardless of what comes rst. There are echoesof this in modern English: Hardly did he arrive when ...,Never can it be said that ..., Over went the boat, Everonward marched the weary soldiers ..., Then came aloud sound from the sky above. In Old English, however,it was much more extensive, much as in modern German.If the subject appears rst, there is an SVO order, but itcan also yield orders such as OVS and VSO.In subordinate clauses, however, the word order is com-pletely dierent, with verb-nal constructions the norm,again as in modern German. Furthermore, in poetry, allthese rules were frequently broken. In Beowulf, for ex-ample, main clauses frequently have verb-initial or verb-nal order, and subordinate clauses often have verb-second order. (However, in clauses introduced by ,which can mean either when or then, and where wordorder is crucial for telling the dierence, normal word or-der is nearly always followed.)Those linguists who work within the Chomskyantransformational grammar paradigm often believe thatit is more accurate to describe Old English (and otherGermanic languages with the same word-order patternslike modern German) as having underlying subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering. According to this theory,all sentences are initially generated using this order, butin main clauses, the verb is moved back to the V2 position(technically, the verb undergoes V-to-T raising). This issaid to explain the fact that Old English allows inversionof subject and verb as a general strategy for forming ques-tions, while modern English uses this strategy almost onlywith auxiliary verbs and the main verb to be, requiringdo-support in other cases.

2.1.1 Questions

Because of its similarity withOldNorse, it is believed thatmost of the time the word order of Old English changedwhen asking a question, from SVO to VSO. While manypurport that Old English had free word order, this is notquite true, as there were conventions for the positioning

of subject, object and verb in clause.

I am... becomes Am I...Ic eom... becomes Eom ic...

2.2 Relative and subordinate clauses

Old English did not use forms equivalent to who, when,where in relative clauses (as in The man whom I saw)or subordinate clauses (When I got home, I went tosleep).Instead, relative clauses used one of the following:

1. An invariable complementizer e

2. The demonstrative pronoun se, so, at

3. The combination of the two, as in se e

Preposition-fronting (The man with whom I spoke) didnot normally occur.Subordinate clauses tended to use correlative conjunc-tions, e.g.

ic hm ode, slp ic.(word-for-word) Then I home went, then sleptI.(translated) When I went home, I slept.

The word order usually distinguished the subordinateclause (with verb-nal order) from the main clause (withverb-second word order).The equivalents of who, when, where were used onlyas interrogative pronouns and indenite pronouns, as inAncient Greek and Sanskrit.Besides ... ..., other correlative conjunctions oc-curred, often in pairs of identical words, e.g.:

r X, r Y : Where X, Y anon X, anon Y : Whence (fromwhere/wherefrom) X, Y

ider X, ider Y: Whither (to where/whereto) X,Y

ah (e) X, ah Y : Although X, Y enden X, enden Y : While X, Y onne X, onne Y: Whenever X, Y s X, s Y : As/after/since X, Y X, Y : The more X, the more Y

73 PhonologyMain article: Old English phonology

The phonology of Old English is necessarily somewhatspeculative, since it is preserved purely as a written lan-guage. Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of OldEnglish, and the written language apparently indicatesphonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not dif-cult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of OldEnglish phonology.

4 See also Middle English Old English phonology

5 Notes[1] Peter S. Baker (2003). Pronouns. The Electronic Intro-

duction to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell.

[2] Page, An Introduction to English Runes, Boydell 1999, p.230

[3] That. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 28 June2010.

[4] The. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 28 June2010.

[5] She. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 28 June2010.

6 References Moore, Samuel, and Thomas A. Knott. The Ele-ments of Old English. 1919. Ed. James R. Hulbert.10th ed. Ann Arbor, Michigan: George Wahr Pub-lishing Co., 1958.

The Magic Sheet, one page color PDF summariz-ing Old English declension, from Peter S. Baker, in-spired by Moore and Marckwardts 1951 HistoricalOutlines of English Sounds and Inections

J. Bosworth & T.N. Toller, An Anglo-Saxon dictio-nary: Germanic Lexicon Project

7 Further reading Brunner, Karl (1965). Altenglische Grammatik

(nach der angelschsischen Grammatik von EduardSievers neubearbeitet) (3rd ed.). Tbingen: MaxNiemeyer.

Campbell, A. (1959). Old English Grammar. Ox-ford: Clarendon Press.

Mitchell, Bruce & Robinson, Fred (2001) A Guideto Old English; 6th ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publish-ing ISBN 0-631-22636-2

Quirk, Randolph; & Wrenn, C. L. (1957). An OldEnglish Grammar (2nd ed.) London: Methuen.

8 8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

8 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses8.1 Text

Old English grammar Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar?oldid=661744023 Contributors: Michael Hardy, Kw-ertii, Phil Boswell, Benwing, Jimpaz, Smjg, Quiensabe, Kwamikagami, Anthony Appleyard, Angr, Woohookitty, StradivariusTV, RuudKoot, Steinbach, Doric Loon, DavidFarmbrough, Mandarax, Koavf, RussBot, TEB728, Hayden120, Derek Andrews, Ealdent, Keith-264,Iridescent, RekishiEJ, Bruinfan12, Jonathan W, FilipeS, LaFoiblesse, JamesAM, Redline2200, JaGa, Amitchell125, Robertgreer, Jr mints,Maximillion Pegasus, AlleborgoBot, DasEnde, Fratrep, Mr. Granger, Mild Bill Hiccup, Jtle515, Lotteraner~enwiki, FlavianusEP, Jed20012, Avoided, Felix Folio Secundus, Addbot, Legobot, Yobot, AnomieBOT, Eisfbnore, Walshie79, FrescoBot, Leasnam, Shabidoo,Reviewer23, Socialservice, ClueBot NG, Stardsen, Anumiru, Lugia2453, Zontas, Jan Kaninchen, Latinamnonvoco and Anonymous: 28

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MorphologyVerbsStrong verbsWeak verbsPreterite-present verbsAnomalous verbs

NounsStrong nounsWeak nounsIrregular strong nounsMutating strong nounsNouns of relationshipNeuter nouns with -r- in the plural

AdjectivesDefinite articles and demonstrativesPronounsPrepositions

SyntaxWord orderQuestions

Relative and subordinate clauses

PhonologySee alsoNotesReferencesFurther readingText and image sources, contributors, and licensesTextImagesContent license