Old English Grammar

Where do you start?

Personally, I soon realised that the more I tried to learn all the rules and principles of Old English grammar, the harder it became and the more I discovered there was to learn!

I should make it clear that I am not an Old English scholar or a grammar expert. My interest developed largely through writing the Old English Translator software and trying to understand how the language works. What follows is simply my best understanding of some of the basics, explained in a way that I hope will help people who, like me, are not experts. You can read a little more about how the project began in the project history.

There is a great deal of information on the web about Old English, including grammar explanations, tutorials and videos. Many of the resources I originally used when developing the translator explained how word endings could be worked out when they weren't available in the source material. Unfortunately, a number of those resources have since disappeared, which is disappointing.

However, Wikipedia – Old English Grammar remains a useful and increasingly comprehensive reference.

Some useful resources

I'll continue to update this list as I discover useful resources.

• Old English Online – funded by University College Cork – A particularly good place to start, with lessons and exercises for beginners.
• Wikipedia – Old English Grammar – A comprehensive reference covering nouns, verbs, adjectives and other aspects of the language.
• A Short Description of Old English – University of Glasgow – A clear explanation of the language, with useful examples of how Old English grammar works.

These resources go into considerably more detail than I intend to cover here.

My limited contribution

When reading comments from people using this website, I've noticed that quite a few visitors have little or no understanding of Old English grammar.

One question that comes up is what terms such as Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative actually mean.

These words can look rather intimidating, but the basic ideas aren't too difficult to understand.

I'll attempt to explain them in straightforward terms, without getting too involved in the many rules and exceptions.

Why is Old English grammar different?

Modern English relies quite heavily on word order to tell us who is doing something and who is receiving the action.

For example:

• The king killed the soldier.
• The soldier killed the king.

The same words are used in both sentences, but changing their order completely changes the meaning.

Old English could indicate much of this information through changes to the words themselves, particularly their endings. These changes are called inflections.

We still do something similar in Modern English. For example:

• king becomes kings when there is more than one.
• king becomes king's when something belongs to the king.
• he becomes him or his, depending on how the word is being used.

In Old English, these sorts of changes occur much more frequently.

The four grammatical cases

Old English nouns generally have four grammatical cases. The case tells us something about the job a word is doing in a sentence.

Nominative – the subject

The person or thing doing the action.

The king killed the soldier.

Here, the king is the subject, so 'king' is nominative.

Accusative – the direct object

The person or thing directly affected by the action.

The soldier killed the king.

Here, the king is receiving the action, so 'king' is accusative.

Genitive – possession or association

Usually indicates that something belongs to, or is associated with, someone or something.

The king's sword was sharp.

Here, 'king' is genitive.

Dative – often the indirect object

Frequently used when something is given or done to or for someone, and also after certain prepositions.

The soldier gave the king a horse.

Here, 'king' is dative because the king is receiving the horse.

These descriptions are simplified. The cases have other uses, but they are a good starting point.

An example using the Old English word for king

The Old English word for king is cyning.

Depending on how the word is being used, its ending may change.

The following table shows the usual forms for this particular noun.

Notice that the nominative and accusative singular forms of cyning are identical. The preceding word, meaning 'the', changes instead.

Also notice that the plural forms have different endings.

This is just one example. Other nouns follow different patterns, which is where things start to become more complicated!

What about masculine, feminine and neuter?

Old English nouns also belong to one of three grammatical genders:

• Masculine
• Feminine
• Neuter

These don't necessarily correspond to whether something is male, female or neither.

For example, the Old English word wīf, meaning woman, is grammatically neuter.

The grammatical gender of a noun affects the forms of words such as 'the' and certain adjectives used with it.

So, even when you know the meaning of a noun, you may still need to know its gender to use it correctly.

Understanding Old English verbs

Verbs describe actions or states, such as run, sing, love, have or be.

In Modern English, most verbs are fairly straightforward. We say 'I love', 'you love' and 'they love', with the word remaining unchanged. We make a small change when we say 'he loves'.

In Old English, verbs often change much more than this.

The form of a verb can depend on who is doing the action, whether we're talking about one person or several, whether the action is happening now or happened in the past, and whether we're making a statement, giving a command or expressing a possibility.

These changes are known as conjugation. It's another grammatical word that sounds more complicated than the basic idea really is.

Strong and weak verbs

Old English has two main groups of verbs, known as strong verbs and weak verbs.

These names don't refer to how powerful the action is. They simply describe different patterns of changing the verb, particularly when forming the past tense.

Strong verbs – changing a vowel

Strong verbs generally form the past tense by changing a vowel within the word.

For example, the Old English verb singan means 'to sing'.

Notice how the vowel changes from i to a and then to u.

We still use a very similar pattern in Modern English: sing, sang, sung.

Other familiar examples of vowel changes in Modern English include swim, swam, swum and drive, drove, driven.

These patterns are part of our language's inheritance from Old English and earlier Germanic languages.

However, Old English strong verbs are divided into several different groups, each with its own pattern. Trying to remember all those groups and their exceptions is where the subject becomes rather more complicated!

Weak verbs – adding an ending

Weak verbs generally form the past tense by adding an ending containing a d or t sound.

For example:

This is similar to the way we add -ed to many Modern English verbs, such as walk/walked and love/loved.

Not every weak verb follows exactly the same pattern, but the underlying principle is similar.

Verbs change depending on who is doing the action

One of the more interesting differences between Old English and Modern English is how much the ending of a verb can change.

Let's take the weak verb lufian, meaning 'to love'.

In the present tense, we find forms such as:

These are examples of the ordinary present-tense forms.

Notice how the verb ending changes even though we're still talking about loving something.

In Modern English, we mainly distinguish between 'love' and 'loves'. Old English makes more distinctions.

Also notice that Old English has the word þū, meaning 'you' when speaking to one person. This is related to the old English word 'thou', which survived much longer in some dialects and traditional expressions.

The same plural verb ending is generally used for 'we', 'you' (plural) and 'they'.

This is one reason why a single Old English verb can have quite a few entries in the translator's database.

Present and past tense

Old English has two basic inflected tenses: present and past.

For example:

The present tense can also refer to future events when the meaning is clear from the context. Old English could express future intentions in other ways too, rather than having a separate set of future-tense verb endings.

As you can see, the past-tense forms may change depending on whether the subject is singular or plural.

The patterns become more varied when different classes of strong and weak verbs are considered.

Statements, commands and possibilities

Old English verbs can also change depending on the kind of statement being made. Grammarians call this mood.

There are three main moods worth knowing about.

Indicative is used for ordinary statements and questions, such as 'the man sings' or 'does the man sing?'

Imperative is used for commands, such as 'Sing!' or 'Come here!'

Subjunctive is used in various situations involving wishes, possibilities, conditions or reported statements.

Modern English still has traces of the subjunctive. For example, we might say 'If I were king', rather than 'If I was king'.

In Old English, these distinctions were more noticeable in the forms of verbs.

I don't intend to go further into the rules here. It's simply worth knowing why you might encounter several apparently different forms of the same verb.

Irregular verbs

As if strong and weak verbs weren't enough, Old English also has some particularly irregular verbs.

The verbs meaning 'to be', 'to have' and 'to go' are good examples.

In Modern English, the verb 'to be' has forms such as am, is, are, was and were. Old English also had a complicated collection of related forms.

Old English used forms associated with bēon and wesan for 'to be', while habban meant 'to have' and gān meant 'to go'.

These are common verbs, so their different forms occur frequently in Old English writing.

Rather than trying to memorise all their variations immediately, I think it's more useful for a beginner simply to recognise that they exist.

Why does this matter when using the translator?

When you look up an Old English verb, you may encounter a form that looks quite different from the basic form given in a dictionary.

For example, you might encounter sang or sungon without immediately realising that both are forms of singan, meaning 'to sing'.

Similarly, a dictionary may list lufian, while the text you're reading contains lufast or lufode.

This is one of the difficulties I encountered while developing the Old English Translator.

A useful dictionary needs to recognise not only the basic words but also as many of their different grammatical forms as possible.

The translator attempts to handle many of these variations, but it isn't perfect. Different spellings, irregular forms and the many exceptions in Old English grammar mean that some words may not be recognised or may be interpreted incorrectly.

It is worth remembering that a word's grammatical form can sometimes tell you as much about its meaning in a sentence as the basic dictionary definition does.

Does word order matter?

Yes, but Old English word order is generally more flexible than Modern English word order.

Because word endings help identify the roles of nouns and other words, the language does not always need to follow the familiar English pattern of subject, verb and object.

That doesn't mean the words can be placed in absolutely any order. There are still conventions and grammatical rules.

It does mean that translating a sentence word by word, in exactly the order it appears, can sometimes produce rather strange Modern English.

A final word

This is only a brief introduction to a complicated subject. There are many more rules involving nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives and prepositions, and exceptions to almost everything I've described.

The Old English Translator attempts to recognise and translate many different forms of words. However, it shouldn't be treated as an authoritative source of grammatical information.

I'm a software developer with an interest in Old English, not a linguist. I have tried to understand the language well enough to build something useful, and I hope these explanations make it a little easier for others to understand the results.

For anyone wanting to study Old English seriously, I strongly recommend using the resources listed above.

And if you spot something I've misunderstood, I'm always happy to hear about it.