Masculine and Neuter Strong Nouns

The masculine and neuter "strong" nouns, so called because they change their form depending on their role in a sentence more than do the "weak" nouns, form a large group of words in the core of the Old English vocabulary; once you have learned these patterns, you will be able to tell the grammatical function of a large number of common words, so that even if you don't know the meaning of a word you will know the role it is playing in a sentence.

Before we start, remind me, what is a noun anyway?

OK, I know what a noun is, but what is this business about masculine and neuter?

One last thing--what do these words mean: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative.

Strong Masculine Nouns

Many masculine nouns follow the basic paradigm of stán:

Strong Neuter Nouns

There are two basic patterns for strong neuter nouns:

Tips for learning:

These three inflexional patterns share a number of elements:

• the nominative and accusative singular are identical
• the nominative and accusative plural are identical
• the genitive singular ends in -es
• the dative singular ends in -e
• the genitive plural ends in -a
• the dative plural ends in -um

The last two of these are common to most noun declensions, so they will be easy for you to remember soon, if not at first. The genitive singular in -es is the origin of our Modern English possessive (spelled with an apostrophe s). The -as ending of the strong masculine plural nominative and accusative is the origin of our Modern English plural in -s and -es.

About the demonstrative pronouns (which sometime act like Modern English articles, sometimes like Modern English demonstratives) note how similar the neuter and masculine forms really are: the distinction is only in the nominative and accusative singular, so by the time you've learned one, you've learned almost all of the other.

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Contact: Murray McGillivray at mmcgilli@acs.ucalgary.ca or the Listserv at mailto:eg401-m@acs.ucalgary.ca