Adjective In Old English

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Introduction:

Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, was the West Germanic language spoken in England from the 5th to 11th centuries. Old English is closely related to other older West Germanic languages, such as Old Saxon, and Old German, and it shares Germanic ancestry with Old Norse and Gothic as well. As the language of the earliest recorded English, Old English survives in written form in medieval manuscripts and inscriptions from the Anglo-Saxon literary period (ca. 650-1066 AD). Old English texts preserve a variety of genres, including heroic poetry such as Beowulf, elegy, riddles, proverbs, homilies, translations of Latin works, and historical records such as the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Nouns:

- The inflections of Old …show more content…

If I speak of "a car," I could be referring to any car in the world. But if I speak of "a green car," I have modified the meaning of "car" and limited the set of objects to which I am referring.
In Indo-European languages generally, the inflection of the adjective changes to reflect the grammatical characteristics (gender, case and number) of the noun it is modifying. Thus the ending we find on the adjective will be different depending on whether it is modifying a masculine nominative singular noun, a feminine nominative singular, a neuter accusative plural, a neuter genitive plural, and so on. As a result, even though the adjective system of Old English is much simpler than that of many other Indo-European languages, the number of endings that can be applied to an Old English adjective is larger than the number that can be applied to an Old English …show more content…

An adjective will have the endings of the "strong" declension (so called because the number of "strong" endings is relatively large) when no pronoun or possessive adjective precedes it. It will have the endings of the "weak" declension (so called because the number of "weak" endings is relatively small) when it is preceded by a pronoun or possessive adjective. For example, here are two paradigms for the adjective god "good" with the feminine noun cwen "queen." First the strong: god cwen. The weak seo gode

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