Earlier Englishes

preceded by a demonstrative pronoun or a possessive adjective., Endings of weak adjectives are less varying because a demonstrative/possessive fulfills a certain function.

stand alone, Their ending has to do more ''work" to show the function of the adjective.


verb that forms its past tense by add a suffix (e.g. -de) to the stem.

e.g. fremman: ic fremme (present), ic fremmede (past) e.g. want, wanted, wanted

the systematic alteration of a root vowel in order to indicate the meaning or grammatical function of a word.

verb that forms its tenses by changing its root vowel (Ablaut).

e.g Sing, sang , sung

s a class of nouns or adjectives sharing the same inflections

OE nouns fall into one of several declensions, within which they are inflected for case and number

Some patterns:

- –um is the universal marker of the dative plural.

- General Masculine and General Neuter run parallel.

- Some endings can have more than one meaning, e.g. –e and –a.

a grammatical distinction of quantity, typically between between “one” (singular) and “more than one” (plural). Old English also has the 'dual'.

a means of classifying nouns, often with little correspondence to the biological sex of the objects referred to.

the form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective defining its relationship with other words in a sentence, typically by means of inflection, as in the book’s cover, where ’s signals the genitive (possessive) case

an ending of a word that is attached to show inflection (e.g. plural -s}


the change in the form of a word to show e.g. case, gender, number, person. In OE, inflection is usually accomplished by the addition of a suffix, or word-ending.

(OE dem. pron. is inflected for case, grammatical gender, and number.) e. .g. stan (Nom. Singular) – stanes (Gen. Singular) , ‘s

Consonants