To North Germanic belong the modern Scandinavian languages Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese(West) and Swedish, Danish, Gutnish(East) (the language of the island of Gotland). The earliest recorded form of North Germanic (Old Norse) is found in runic inscriptions from about AD 300
Nominal parts of speech in Old Germanic languages, their morphological categories.
In PIE the adjective together with noun made one morphological part of speech the Name. Progressively the difference between noun and adj was in the gender declension of adjective. Just like in Ukranian and Russian were the endings of adj marcs the grammatical categories of gender.
Gender of adjectives depends on gender of noun, whereas the gender of noun is a stable morphological category.
Noun had such categories:
- gender (masc, fem, neut)
- number (singular, plural)
- case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental)
- declension (strong, weak, minor/root)
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Adjective
- declension (weak, strong)
- degrees of comparison (positive, comparative, superlative)
- gender (masc, fem, neut)
- case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative,instumental)
Sabo p.75
..Old===== 19. Old Germanic noun and its morphological categories.
The noun in Old German had 4 categories:
- Gender (masc, fem, neut) This distinction was not a grammatical category, it was merely a classifying feature. The gender
i. regulates the forms of adj and articles accompanying nouns
ii. regulates which specific forms of the case and number endings appear on the nouns.
Progressively, due to the dissapearane of stem-classes, nouns could change the type of their gender or declension. For instance, the category of gender disappeared in English, Scandinavien l-ges but German has still 3 gender.
- Number (singular, plural and dual) The dual number of noun had preserved only in pronouns and verbs Both case and number were expressed by one morpheme.
- Case. There exist 8 cases in IE: Nominative, Accus, Genitive, Dative, Ablative, Instrumental, Locutive and Vocative. Progressively, this system changed, because of transfusion of some case forms, so in Common Germanic there existed 6 cases:
Nominative Accusative Genitive Dative Vocative
Instrumental is used to dentify the instrument of an action. Was preserved only in OSax, OHG.
- Declension (strong, weak, minor or root)
Old English literary monuments.
SABO. P.45
Old Germanic strong declension of nouns. P. 73
Traditionally, the vocalic stems (stems with the stem-suffix containing a vowel) are called strong nouns or strong declension.
a-declension, masculine and neuter nouns the most numerous
Nominative | Singular | Plural |
dags day | dagōs | |
Accusative/Vocative | Dag | dagans |
Genetive | Dagis | dagē |
Dative | Daga | dagam |
There were 2 variants of a-stems nouns. The first type was preceded by j- and made up ja- stems, another was preceded by w- and made up wa- stem.
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The ō-declension include feminine nouns only and correspond to IE ā-declension
Singular | Plural |
Nom.Acc. giba gift | gibōs |
Gen. gibōs | gibō |
Dat. Gibái | gibōm |
Like giba are declined a very large number of feminine nouns, as bida request, bōka book, kara care, fēra country, mōta custom-house, rūna mystery, háirda etc.
The i-declension contains only masculine and feminine nouns and correspond to the Latin and Greek i-declension.
Singular | Plural |
Nom. gasts guest | gasteis |
Acc. gast | gastins |
Gen. gastis | gastē |
Dat. gasta | gastim |
Voc. Gast | - |
Like gasts are declined arms, arm, balgs wine-skin, barms bosom, gards house, saggws song, sáiws sea etc.
u-stems nouns contained the nouns of all gender.
Sunus, sunjus
Sunaus suniwe
Sunau sunum
Sunu sununs