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but it has lost a lot of the inflections that were present in English during the Old English period. A language is said to be "inflected" when changes in the form of the language's words alter their meaning.
For example, the difference between the following two sentences is because of the change in form of two of the words:
The trouble with Susan is that she steals things.
The trouble with Susan was that she stole things.
(In the case of this example, the change is from present tense to past tense, and the changes to the words are pretty dramatic. Notice that both the change from is to was and the change from steals to stole involve alteration of the central vowel of the word as well as to consonant sounds. But not all inflectional changes are so extensive--compare what happens to the sentence, "The trouble with Susan is that she lifts things," when you put it into the past tense.)
Modern English uses word order rather than inflectional change to get across a lot of its meaning:
The man on the bench dropped the cat.
The man dropped the cat on the bench.
Bob reprimanded Alice.
Alice reprimanded Bob.
Because word order is so important to Modern English, many combinations of words are meaningless. The following word orders would not usually be produced by English speakers, so these sentences are asterisked to show that they are impossible (or in one case merely extremely unlikely):
*The the the on cat man bench dropped.
*On the bench the cat the man dropped.
*Reprimanded Alice Bob.
*Bob Alice reprimanded.
The first of these is not possible in any language I know, but you may be surprised to hear that the second, third, and fourth examples have word orders that could well make sensible sentences in Old English. I don't want to give the impression that Old English is a completely chaotic language. It too has a standard word order, as we will be observing later in the course. But the fact is that the additional resource of more inflections made word order more flexible in Old English than it is in Modern English, which has lost many of those inflections.
Old English verbs, nouns, pronouns and adjectives are all inflected, and change their forms according to their position or meaning in a sentence. Learning Old English is going to entail learning the patterns of change in these groups of words. These patterns will be taught using various kinds of pattern exercises, in which you will learn through repetition and variation to produce and understand the different appropriate forms of words. Plain old-fashioned memorization can also be very helpful. Take a look at the tables of strong masculine and neuter nouns to see the pattern we will be learning first in the course.
For the present lesson, you only need to learn one small part of this particular pattern of variation, but you do need to understand the general principles involved. If you already know well a language that is more highly inflected than English, such as Latin, Icelandic, Hindi, or German, you will be well prepared for what you are about to learn. If not, don't worry--we'll take this is easy stages..
This group of words changes form not only for singular and plural but for sentence role, following something we call the "case system." The wonders of the case system will be gradually revealed to you in this course, but if you would like some idea of what the term means now, take a look at the brief explanation of the case system provided with the outline grammar.
An example of a change from plural to singular is swæse gesiþas (dear companions), which would become swæs gesiþ (a dear companion) in the singular. Likewise, eald mann (an old man) is ealde menn (old men) in the plural.
The example of change that depends on sentence role that we will be concentrating on in this lesson is the differentiation of subject and object in the strong masculine and neuter nouns and the demonstrative pronouns that go with them. Don't lose any sleep at this point over these terms ("strong," "masculine," "neuter," etc.); it's not important at this stage that you know what they imply. However, if you don't remember what a noun is, you'd better refresh your memory!
One concept that I do want you to get in this lesson is the "demonstrative pronoun," because these are very frequent little words in Old English, so you need a sense early on of what they are.
Old English did not have a word exactly like Modern English "the," the definite article. Instead, the Old English words which meant "that" or "those" could be used either with greater or lesser "demonstrative" (THAT one over there) force. Sometimes we have to translate them as "that" or "those," sometimes (most often, in fact) as "the."
For one very common group of nouns ("masculine nouns"--again, don't sweat it on the terminology) the demonstrative pronoun has the form sé if the noun it is associated with is singular and the subject of the sentence, and the form þone if the noun is singular and the direct object:
"Sé fæder lufode þone sunu," means "the father loved the son." Likewise, "sé sunu lufode þone fæder," means "the son loved the father."
It's very important to notice right away that it is NOT the position of the word in the sentence that makes it take the form sé or þone; it's the role that the word is playing in the sentence. To make this clear, take a look at the following sentences:
Sé sunu lufode þone fæder.
Lufode sé sunu þone fæder.
Þone fæder lufode sé sunu.
Þone fæder sé sunu lufode.
Sé sunu þone fæder lufode.
These sentences all mean exactly the same thing.
In other words, in this kind of simple sentence, þone tells us that the noun it's associated with is the object, sé tells us that the noun it's associated with is the subject.
Not all demonstrative pronouns change their form to indicate subject and object in this way. The "neuter nouns" are another common group of nouns, and very similar in many ways to masculine nouns, and these ones don't make any changes to either noun or demonstrative between subject and object.
Se fæder lufode þæt wíf," means, "the father loved the woman." "þæt wíf lufode þone fæder," means, "the woman loved the father." Whether it is subject or object, the phrase "þæt wíf" is the same.
Since the changes to personal pronouns for subjects and objects are so similar, we might as well learn them now, too. If you've read the "Abraham and Isaac" text, you will have noticed that the subject form of the masculine singular personal pronoun is "he"--which hasn't changed, except in pronunciation, for the last thousand years. The corresponding form for the object is "hine," which makes sense when you remember that the masculine demonstrative pronoun is þone. Actually, get used to associating the -ne ending with masculine things that are objects, because there are other important examples later in the course.
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Contact: Murray McGillivray at mmcgilli@acs.ucalgary.ca or the Listserv at mailto:eg401-m@acs.ucalgary.ca