Grammatical gender can be divided into masculine, feminine and neuter.
There are five cases in old English: they represent grammatical relations such as subject, object, subordination and mediator respectively.
The first case: nominative, which means to be the subject of a sentence.
The second case: the possessive case is also called the possessive case, indicating the affiliation.
The third case: and case, which indicates the indirect object of verbs.
The fourth case: the objective case, also called the objective case, is the direct object of the verb.
The fifth case: instrumental case, representing media relations.
Old English has two numbers ($ number): singular and plural.
1, the first English plural form: the origin of the noun +s
The case of masculine nouns, such as hund'dog, is as follows. Singular and plural nominative accusative forms are exactly the same, so different from ancient Greek and Latin, we must rely on word order to distinguish subject and object.
This masculine noun morpheme: strong degeneration, or a stem noun morpheme. It is characterized by a great change in suffix, and also because in early Germanic languages, such nouns end with vowel A, such as early Germanic *hundaz (main menu) >: old English hund.
Noun singular case suffix -es, plural nominative case suffix and object case suffix -as, these two suffixes in Middle English, due to the reduction of suffix forms, became -es, pronounced/? The suffix z/. is shown as -s in modern English. For example, boys' ('boys') stands for plural, while boys' s and boys' ('boys') stands for singular and plural possessive cases.
2. The origin of the second plural form of English: bull, child
Another English masculine noun belongs to weak displacement, or n- displacement, because its suffix changes little, and because most of its suffixes end in N. Look at the suffix changes of masculine noun oxa(ox bull).
Singular or plural
Nominative case: oxa oxan
Brother sheng: oxan? Oksena
Co-case: oxan? oxum
Bingo: oxan? Oksan
As shown in the above figure, the same oxan form has five different grammatical functions. There are Mona,' Moon', Hengda' Hunter', Nama' Name' and so on. Moreover, this change is not limited to masculine nouns, but also includes feminine nouns.
For example: sunne Sun', eor? E is earth, heorte is heart, neutral noun eage is eye, ear is ear. In modern English, you can also see traces of this variation, such as the plural of bull and child, bull and child.
3. The origin of the third plural form in English: foot-foot, mouse-mouse.
For vowel displacement or abrupt displacement, please refer to the displacement of the masculine noun f not t' foot:
This case change is characterized by vowel changes in the stems of singular and case, plural nominative and objective cases of nouns, which is called vowel tone sandhi. This phonetic change means that the second syllable of a word is influenced by the pre-vowel i/i/ or semi-vowel j/j/, so that the post-vowel of the first syllable becomes the corresponding pre-vowel, that is, the early form of singular and case F ē ti, and after the phonetic change, it becomes old English F ē t.
The masculine noun belonging to this variation is t, isn't it? ,'' teeth' and the feminine noun g! S' Goose' and B! C' book'.
Old English nouns belonging to tone sandhi also include masculine nouns man (n)' Man Ren' and feminine nouns l' s' Louse' Louse, m' s' mouse. According to the change of I sound, a/a/ sound becomes Old English e/ε/ sound, and \u:/U:/ sound becomes Old English y/y:/ sound.
In old English, the plural subject and the accusative form of the female noun ms come from the early forms of * mū siz and * mū kunz, respectively, through phonetic changes and other changes. Modern English mouse retains the plural form of mouse. This form comes from old English my. In Middle English, the old English long vowel /y:/ became the northern and central Middle English long vowel /i:/.
In early modern English, the long vowel /i:/ became diphthongs/? I/, and finally become modern English diphthongs /ai/. Rats evolved from me through these processes. Similarly, the plural form of lice in modern English, lice/lais/, also evolved from old English lys.
4. The fourth plural form of English: the origin of unchangeable sheep and deer.
Less than one third of the commonly used nouns in Old English are feminine nouns, and most of these nouns belong to strong inflectional changes, or suffix changes. The characteristic of this kind of inflectional change is that when the stem of the singular nominative case is a short syllable, the suffix of this word is the vowel u(o), such as: giefu (giefo)' gift'.
When the stem of singular nominative case is a long syllable, there is no vowel at the end, such as lār 'learning knowledge', GL not f' glove', hand'hand, wund 'wound, etc. Look at the changes of Gifford and lār:
About a quarter of common nouns in Old English are neutral nouns, almost all of which belong to the type of stem change.
However, the neutral noun a- stemchange is different from the masculine noun a- stemchange. The difference lies in the suffixes of plural nominative and accusative cases. The masculine noun is -as (as mentioned above, hundas' dog'), and the neutral noun is vowel U or vowel without suffix.
This kind of noun modification is also called neutral noun strong modification. Look at the strong variants of neutral nouns hof and hors:
[When the stem is a short syllable, the suffix is vowel U; When the stem is a long syllable, there is no vowel at the end. ]
In Middle English, the plural form of the noun hors is still hors. For example, in the preface of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the knight is described as "his horse is very good". Hors can be inferred from the plural form of the verb were. But in modern English, the plural form of horse is horses, which is obviously the result of analogy with the masculine noun plural hundas in old English.
On the other hand, there are still some inflected plural forms of old English neutral nouns in modern English, most of which are animal nouns, such as sheep (