Old English grammar

Uncommon card · No. 197769

The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected. As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as the umlaut. Among living languages, Old English morphology most closely resembles that of modern Icelandic, which is among the most conservative of the Germanic languages. To a lesser extent, it resembles modern German. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners were fully inflected, with four grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), and a vestigial instrumental, two grammatical numbers (singular and plural) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). First and second-person personal pronouns also had dual forms for referring to groups of two people, in...

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