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This might be the time for a brief aside on gender. Old English nouns had "grammatical gender." This concept is sometimes a hard one to grasp at first, but all it really means is that there are three different sets of noun types, and that modifiers (e.g. demonstratives, adjectives) and replacing pronouns have different sets of forms for each of the sets of noun types.
The sets of noun types are called masculine, feminine, and neuter, but there is not any absolute relation between these conventional labels for the word categories and the objects, persons, or animals that the nouns refer to. For example, "þæt wif," which means "the woman," is a neuter noun, and "se wifmann," which also means "the woman," is a masculine noun. It is especially common to see nouns that refer to inanimate objects but are grammatically "gendered" masculine or feminine.
This is only a hard concept to understand if you get too hung up on the idea of "gender." Modern English has "natural gender," so that we (by and large) use "she" to refer to people or animals who really are female, "he" to refer to people or animals who really are male, "it" to refer to inanimate objects or abstract concepts. Moreover, our nouns, most of them, do not have grammatical "gender," in the sense that all of the articles, adjectives, and so on, that modify them are unaffected by our perception of their genderedness. In Old English the situation is the opposite, almost. The gender of modifiers and of pronouns with noun antecedents is determined largely by the gender of the noun to which they refer, which does not necessarily have any implication about the sex of the object or person being referred to.
The paradigm for strong feminine nouns is giefu, 'gift.':
giefu | Singular | Plural |
---|---|---|
Nominative | séo giefu | þá giefa |
Accusative | þá giefe | þá giefa |
Genitive | þære giefe | þára giefa |
Dative | þære giefe | þæm giefum |
Things to notice:
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Contact: Murray McGillivray at mmcgilli@acs.ucalgary.ca or the Listserv at mailto:eg401-m@acs.ucalgary.ca