 Old English was more synthetic than present-day English. Its inflectional system was in many ways more elaborate. In this lecture, the central aspects of Old English inflection will be discussed. We will look at the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and determiners. We will deal with the conjugation of verbs, but prior to that we will discuss some general tendencies of Old English morphology and beyond that were already underway. So let us start here. Like its ancestor languages, Old English was synthetic with numerous agglutinating tendencies. It inherited most morphological aspects from Germanic, for example the system of tenses, but carried out some simplifications to the proto-Germanic system, for example the reduction of cases. Compared to present-day English, Old English looks wealthy in its inflections, but this wealth is only relative. In comparison with classical Greek or Latin, the Old English system seems relatively meager. Furthermore, the Old English system already exhibited a number of inherent tendencies that would contribute to its weakening. The most well-known of these are the minimization of paradigms through paradigmatic, leveling and the shifting of the primary stress to root syllables. As a result, Old English had already developed a relatively fixed word order. Thus, syntax provided a kind of backup system for assuring intelligibility when inflections were lost. Hence, syntax, though not necessarily a cause and definitely not the focus of this e-lecture, was a contributing factor for the weakening of Old English inflections. And since in Old English the necessity arose to adopt thousands of loanwords from two other synthetic languages, namely Old Norse and Old French, a further effect could be seen. Since loanwords have to be made compatible with the inflectional system of the borrowing language, the simplest solution was to drop the inflections altogether, a procedure that had already been used to some extent with Latin words in Old English. Let us look at the first two aspects in more detail. Most paradigms in Old English did not contain the maximum amount of differentiation and some paradigms had so few distinctions as to make the entire group virtually useless in distinguishing function in sentences. The standard inflectional categories associated with nouns are gender, number and case. And Old English used three genders, masculine, feminine and uter, two numbers, singular and plural, and five cases. This would mean that theoretically nouns of a particular gender could have ten distinct endings. Well, let us check whether this is really the case. Here is the noun which represents present-day English name. And as you can see, we have the following distinct forms, the nominative singular, nama, then the genitive singular, the rest is identical. Namina, the genitive plural, and namam, the dative plural. So out of the ten possibilities, only four are used in this particular paradigm. The loss of a number of distinctions during Old English had already considerably reduced the entire system. An important weakening of the Old English system resulted from a suprasegmental effect. Root syllables were heavily stressed and they occurred primarily in the initial position of words. Now, the stressing of the root syllables leads of course to a weakening of the remaining syllables. Now here are some examples that illustrate what happened. There are several stages. At stage one, or step one, the final vowel of a word is reduced to schwa. Namum became naman, naman became naman, fulcum became fulcum, erdan became erdan and erdum became erdum. The second step merges the two nasals, the bilabel and the alveolar nasal to an alveolar nasal. So now we have naman, fulcum and erdan. And finally, the nasal at the end of words is lost. So this is then a schematic representation of what happens. Stage one, vowel reduction to schwa. Stage two, merger of the two nasals to an alveolar nasal. Stage three, loss of the final nasal. So these and many other changes had already been underway within the Old English period. Let us now look at some selected aspects of Old English declension. Compared to present day English, Old English had a complex system of declensions. And this system can be subdivided into noun declension, adjectival declension, the declension of determiners and the declension of pronouns. Let us start with nouns. With four distinct cases, which by and large integrate number distinctions and three distinct grammatical genders, the morphology of Old English nouns was far more complex than in present day English, where the gender distinction has been lost and only two cases, the genitive case and the oblique case, have survived. The declension of nouns can be subdivided into several groups. The general masculine declension, the general neuter declension, the general feminine declension, A and declension and irregular declensions. It does make any sense to present them all in an e-lecture like this and just look at these paradigms. You can do that in the unit Old English morphology on the virtual linguistics campus. Let us take one example here to illustrate the shape of such a paradigm. The masculine declension of the present day English item, the king. As you can see, we have six different forms underlined in green. If you look at the determiners that are inherently case-marked, we even have seven different forms in the paradigm. Note that the distinction between the nominative plural and the accusative plural has already been fused. They both have the same case ending. So in representing this morphologically, we can say, well, the affix us stands or has fused two meanings. It stands for the nominative and the plural on the one hand and for the accusative and the plural on the other. Let us look at adjectives next. The adjective was the most highly inflected category of Old English. It followed the noun in terms of gender, case, and number. Here are three examples that illustrate this effect. We have Setila kuning, the good king, where kuning is masculine and consequently the determiner and the adjective are masculine too. So Tila talu, the good tail is feminine and again we have a feminine form of the adjective Tila and a feminine form of the determiner and fat Tila ship. Ship is neuter and here again the two other items are marked with the neutral gender form that is inherently contained in these items. Furthermore, adjectives can also take comparatives and superlative endings and, and this is the most remarkable thing in Old English, adjectives preserve the Germanic principle of two separate declensions. The so-called weak declension, which you can see already over here, where the adjective occurs in the context of a determiner. And then there is the so-called strong declension where adjectives can occur without the terminus and then special forms have to be used. So Setila kuning is weak, Tila kuning, good king, which is a little bit awkward here because kuning is not a mass noun, but Tila kuning would be good king, Tila talu would be good tail and Tila ship would be good ship. So this is the distinction between the strong and the weak adjectival declension. Of all categories of present day English by far the most conservative are the personal pronouns. They have retained three cases, subject, object and genitive and have lost only some of the inflectional distinctions made in Old English. Let us look at these losses right now. The first loss concerns the so-called dual. Now the dual existed in two variants in Old English. We have the first person dual, which is jit. Now jit means we too. And then there is the second person dual, which is or which was to be precise, which was wit and that means YouTube. However, this was not an obligatory category in Old English. In most texts the regular plural, we and us, etc. is used to refer to the speaker and one other person. And the dual wit, for example, is reserved to emphasize the two-ness of a particular situation. The second person number distinction, thu and je. This distinction, however, was retained until the end of the early modern English period, well into the 18th and even the 19th century. In present day English, this distinction was neutralized everywhere except in the system of reflexive pronouns yourself and yourselves, where you still have a singular plural distinction. Needless to say that all pronouns in Old English were fully inflected. That is, they were case marked. However, as you can see here, the two main object marking cases, the dative and the accusative, had already been merged in Old English. Old English had no relative pronouns as such. Instead, it used an indeclinable particle fe as a relative pronoun or as a personal pronoun. The class of determiners subsumes the following traditional categories, and you all know that, numerals such as one, two, three, demonstratives such as this and that, and articles like A and B. Unlike present day English, Old English had no separate definite article. Instead, the element corresponding to present day English that served not only as a demonstrative pronoun, but also as a marker of definiteness. That is, as an equivalent of present day English, the. Now, in these three examples, a masculine one, the king, a feminine one, tail and the neuter one, ship, we see the determiner in each of the cases in which it could be represented. Now, the Old English demonstrative, as you see, was used for five different cases. C, F, Fem, Thu and Thona, five different cases. And then we had three different genders. In some forms, they had already merged, for example, in the neuter noun in ship. In both the nominative and accusative case, we have the same determiner. In fact, this form became present day English that. But it's quite remarkable that none of the Old English forms is the direct ancestor of the present day English definite article the. In the plural, by the way, this merger of nominative and accusative case could also be seen. Here we have the identical determiner Tha in both cases. Let's now continue with the discussion of verbs, that is the conjugation of Old English. In its verbal system, Old English inherited from Germanic a two tense system. The two tenses were the present and the past tense. Depending on the realization of the past tense, Old English verbs are subdivided into two broad groups. Strong verbs, where the past formation was carried out via a vowel change. And weak verbs, which form the past tense through the addition of D.E., the so-called dental suffix. Let us look at two examples. Now here the examples are of course present day English drive driven and present day English perform fremen. Now in the infinitive and in the first person singular present tense, both verbs are fully regular. And they are inflected by means of the affix an for the infinitive and the affix a, a or a phonologically in the first person. In the past tense, we see the difference. Whereas driven forms the past tense by means of a vocali change. Drive, the past tense form in fremen is fully regular by adding the Germanic past tense affix d. And in the past participle, we have minor differences, je driven versus je fremen. Old English verbs also had different forms for the indicative and the subjunctive mood. But the inflectional properties for the passive voice that Germanic had did not survive in old English. Fused with the system of tense and mood was the conjugation for person and number, which was far more elaborate than in later versions of English. Again, it doesn't make sense to show all forms of several selected verbs in an e-lecture of this kind. In the VLC unit, you have access to several interactive examples like these. Now here you see one of the screens where the verbal paradigm in this case of fremen is represented, move the cursor over the forms and you get more information. And now this is not the only one. You have access to several of these paradigms on the virtual English campus in the e-learning unit, Old English morphology and then you can retrieve the relevant information via mouse rollover. Well, let's summarize. Apart from the phonological differences between Old English and later stages of English, the most significant difference between Old English and present day English was the much higher degree of morphological complexity of Old English. But even though the degree of synthesis of Old English was much higher than that of present day English, there were already signs of Old English becoming increasingly analytic. These tendencies became more and more apparent through the Middle English period, whose morphology will be in the focus of a follow-up e-lecture. So see you there.