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Old English Grammar
When reading the comments people make about this site probably the most common is that some users have no understanding of Old English Grammar and the most common question is, for nouns, what does Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative mean?
The following is an attempt to explain in simple terms what these words mean. There are many books written on this subject and they provide a much greater depth of accuracy and understanding than I can here.
Having said that, here goes:
Nouns.
Nouns are things - like King, sword and horse. In modern English we usually only change (inflect) the endings of nouns to indicate
possession and for the plural case. EG.
The King's crown ( 's indicates possession)
The Kings came to London (s on the end implies plural - IE many kings)
In Old English there are four cases for nouns and these occur for both singular and plural. In simplistic terms:
Nominative: The nominative case is used for the subject of a sentence.
Accusative: The accusative case is used for the object of the sentence.
Genitive: The genitive case is used to indicate possession.
Dative: The dative case is used for the indirect object of the sentence.
So - to examine these concepts for the noun 'king' or Old English cyning
|
cyning
Strong Masculine Noun king ruler |
||
| cyning | Singular | Plural |
| Nominative | (the/that se) cyning | (the/those þá) cyningas |
| Accusative | (the/that þone) cyning | (the/those þá)cyningas |
| Genitive | (the/that þæs) cyninges | (the/those þára) cyninga |
| Dative | (the/that þæm) cyninge | (the/those þæm) cyningum |
The King killed the slave. King is the subject of the sentence - therefore
nominative case and would be translated cyning.
The slave killed the King. King is the object of the sentence - therefore
accusative case and would be translated cyning. (Note for the noun 'King' -
there is no difference in the inflections for Nominative or Accusative).
The King's crown was red. King is in a possessive sense and therefore genitive
case and would be translated cyninges.
The slave rode his horse with the King. King is the indirect object of the
sentence - therefore dative case and would be translated cyninge
There are many ways in which the nouns change their endings (inflect) for each of these cases and it is beyond the scope of this page to explain them all. Trying to encapsulate them in a computer program was hard - trying to explain them would be even harder!
Also note that the Old English equivalents to the words we use for the / that also inflect.