Talk:Old English declension

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See also previous discussions at Old English pronouns and Old English morphology. —Preceding unsigned comment added by FilipeS (talk • contribs) 18:15, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Interrogative Pronouns

The chart under the heading "Old masculine/feminine to the modern person" indicates that the instrumental and accusative cases of "who" have blended into the dative case. If this be so, how can "why" and "whence" be classified? "Why" is still used in an instrumental sense in constructions like "The reason why I called was to say that I'm sorry", and "whence" is explicitly and exclusively used in the accusative sense as the phrase is always "whence he came" and not "what/who he came". Also, isn't it somewhat of a generalization to say that the difference between "who" and "what" is simply the difference between persons and things. "What", as the interrogative of "that", may refer to persons as well as things and in some fairly visible dialects does e.g. "It was Susie what told him about the surprise party".--Jr mints 20:59, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

"Hwy, hwon" were neuter instrumentals and belong under "hwæt." I'm moving them there. "Hwi" is most likely an alternate spelling of "hwy"--Jr mints 21:18, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Was this page copied and pasted from <http://www.answers.com/topic/english-declension>?

I guess you didn't scroll to the bottom of the page to see that the page is a form of a mirror site. It hosts a version of the W/P site. Ozdaren 17:16, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

instrumental case?

Old English did not have an instrumental case. Latin and many Slavic languages have/had 5-7 cases, including an instrumental. Nouns in Old English, as in all other medieval Germanic languages, had four cases: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative, as I learned when I took Old English and Old Norse in college. This page does indeed look copied from Answers.com, which is apparently incorrect on this point. Unless someone can find an actual grammar book that claims some recent re-analysis of Old English grammar with an instrumental case (or even traces of one), I am deleting this reference to the instrumental case. Unfortunately I am in the process of moving and cannot find my reference books now, but I will watch this page and try to add citations soon. Mccajor 22:23, 3 June 2007 (UTC) Some searching shows that some scholars do in fact see traces of instrumental case remaining in Old English, but there are suggestions it may even have been only in some dialects, and was at most restricted to some adjectives and pronouns. I have added a parenthetical mention of instrumental and flagged it for a citation; this needs attention from an expert in History of English Language.Mccajor 22:44, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Answers is a mirror of W/P. Ozdaren 17:15, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Mccajor 18:13, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

A linguist friend of mine confirms that Old English had traces of an instrumental case, but it was continuing to disappear throughout the period of extant OE literature. Stating that OE "had five cases" is therefore somewhat misleading. Mccajor 18:16, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I believe that the problem has nothing to do with "recent re-analysis", but rather with the opposit. I have not studied OE at college (whence there you have the advantage of me); but I have a small collection of older language books (partly originnaly from my parents, partly found in "used bookstores"). These older books (often in German) have more of a diachronical than a synchronical perspective; i.e., they put emphasis more on from where, how, and to what the languages developed, than on how it actually was used at some fixed period of time. This may be both an advantage and a disadvantage.

I picked up the following two books from my shelfs:

• Eduard Sievers: Angelsächsische Grammatik, dritte Auflage, Halle 1898 (Max Niemeyer), seemilngly number 3 in a series named Sammlung kurzer Grammatiken germanischer Dialekte. (Ref. as AGr infra.)
• Prof. Dr. Hans Krahe: Germanische Sprachwissenschaft. II. Formenlehre, Berlin 1942, Walter de Gruyter & Co., number 780 in Sammlung Göschen. (Ref. as GSII infra.)

(Note year and place. Actually, the academic linguistic tradition seemed to be able to continue under nazi rule, and even in the firt years of the war. The Sammlung Göschen contained a lot of nice, quite small but content rich books, of which I have a handful. It continued to be produced after Hitler's grip of power, even including a comparative study of semitic languages! To judge from the lists of other titles and advertisments at the end of some of the books, there were also some clearly nazistical books issued in the series, concernsed with "cleansing" the German language from "Jewish influence" or the like; but I haven't seen any of these, and I suspect that scolars in general were able to distinguish gold from rubbich easily enough. I suppose that the scolarly philologists simply used the nazi obsession with the indo-european heritage in order to be able to continue their scientific work relatively unhindered; except of course for the scolars persecuted for being Jews or belonging to any other of the nazi hate objects. I may be wrong. If anyone knows any criticism against the German philologists of the time for sneaking Nazi lies into their work, I'd very much appreciate to hear about it.)

So, with the reservations for age and politics, this is what the books state:

When AGr treats the OE nouns, it consistently names six cases in singularis, including vocative and instrumentalis. Vocative is always enumerated together with nominative, and sometimes with accusative; but instrumentalis is listed as a separate item. However, the given instrumental case form almost always coincides completely with the dative case form. The few exceptions I found are a few alternative forms enlisted under the dative but not under the instrumentlis heading; and may be due to some variants (say, Northumbrian as distinct from the other OE dialects) accidentally may have been found only in dative usage.

For adjectives and pronouns the situation is completely different. Again, there are no separate vocative forms, but in the strong declination of adjectives the dative and instrumental masculine and neutral singingular case forms almost always are completely different. The same holds for a small group of very common demonstrative and interrogative pronouns; and also (quite naturally) for perfect particips, when they are declined strongly. The short summary of the differences is that the dative forms ultimately end in -m (often with the full case ending -um), while the instrumental don't (for adjectives normally ending -e). An example: masc. sing. of ʒód (good):

   N. V. ʒód

G. ʒódes

D. ʒódum

A. ʒódne

I.  ʒóde

GSII confirms these forms, and indirectly yields some explanation, I think. It turns out that if all old samples of Germanic languages are considered, we indeed may distinguish six cases in the singular, also for nouns; but not the same everywhere. In fact, a consistent separate vocative is found only in the East Germanic (Gothic), where the masc. nom. sing. -s always is dropped in vocative. There doesn't even seem to be traces of it found in West or North Germanic. A separate instrumental case form is found more or less consistently in the older West Germanic languages; but only a few traces of it otherwise. (In plural, and a fortiori in the few examples of dual, instrumental is inseparable from dative, and vocative from nominative.) In Old High German (Althochdeutsch) and Old Saxon, the instrumental also is clearly distinguished from the dative of "strongly declined" masculine and neuter nouns, since like in OE the dative here ends in -e, but the instrumental in -u. Example from Old High German, "day":

   N. V. tag

G. tages

D. tage

A. tag

I.  tagu

Thus, I suspect that either your books simplified matters slightly, Mccajor, or possibly the Old High German and Old Saxon texts are so old that they were considered "earlier than medieval".

This, and the diachronical perspective, does explain the paradigms in AGr. Sixs cases are named, since OE evolved from a proto-germanic dialect where (as far as the 19'th century scolars could decide) these six case forms were distinct; and in order to make it easy to compare with e.g. Gothic paradigms. The vocative always is grouped with the nominative, since it wasn't a separate case form in OE - not in any reasonable sense of the word. The instrumental is separated, even in the noun, and for several reasons. One is that the final -e in dat. sg. dæʒe (day) was "different" from the -e in instr. sg. dæʒe, since the latter in fairly recent time had evolved from -u or something similar. More important: The instrumental case was clearly distinguishable by adjective endings, and therefore conceptually a separate case.

I'll clarify the latter point by an invented exampe. (In other words, I don't know if the actual combination "good day" is found in dative or instrumentalis in the preserved OE texts.) ʒódum dæʒe would be immediately discernible from ʒóde dæʒe, and the speaker or reader would not stop to exclaim "hey, how queer, why is the attribute declined differently, when the nouns are indistinguishable?".

We may compare with modern (Hochdeutsch) German. Rhetoric question: Would you say that it has four separate cases? But, in fact, in modern German there is very little case declension in the noun. E.g. dative and accusative in the singular sometimes may be distinguished by an ending -e in the dative (Hause vz. Haus), and certainly is in some fixed phrases (nach Hause); but this is not the reason why undisputedly modern German is considered to distinguish these cases. German seldom uses nouns without articles, and the articles are declined differently. The main actual distinction depends almost entirely on the distinctions einem/einen, einer/eine, einem/ein and in dem/den, der/die, dem/das respectively. One could claim that thus "only remnants" are left of a case distinction in German, but that would be ridiculous. The extremely frequent articles are declined, and so are the strong adjecttives. By the same kind of reasoning, I think it is quite proper to write that OE had five distinct cases (but of course also mention that the case forms often coincided, especially the dative and intrumental ones).

A further question: Do you think I should try to scan some of my old language books; and, if so, where should I put the files? JoergenB 15:19, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Proposed move: English declension → Evolution of English pronouns

Seems like a more suitable title. FilipeS (talk) 20:40, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I was bold, moved some text to and fro, and moved this article to Old English declension instead. Seems to make more sense. FilipeS (talk) 18:14, 28 December 2007 (UTC)