6.1 Male stones and female doors
In PDE we follow a system of ‘natural gender’. This means we use she/her for female entities only, and he/him for males. For the rest we have a neuter pronoun, it. There are just a few exceptions. Some people like to make ships feminine – Steady as she goes, they may say. They might also refer to animate objects using it, where they do not know the gender, or where it is not important. So we would mostly call a rat or a mosquito it, even though all rats and mosquitoes are either males or females. If, on the other hand, we know the animal as a pet (a dog or cat, for example), we may well use he or she. As far as PDE nouns are concerned, we do not in general show different inflections for gender. Again, there are some exceptions: if a noun ends in -ess, for example (as in stewardess), it is likely to refer to a female. But there are no masculine, feminine and neuter declensions, using different inflections. In fact, it does not mean much to talk about masculine, feminine and neuter nouns in PDE.
In OE it was different. It used a system of ‘grammatical gender’. All nouns were marked masculine, feminine or neuter, and this had almost nothing to do with whether a noun was referring to a female, male or non-animate entity. Nouns had different declensions according to gender, and you could mostly tell what gender a noun was by looking at its inflections. So Table 6.1’s ēage, with the -e inflection, is neuter, giefu with the -u suffix is feminine, even though it refers to an non-animate object (a gift).
In OE, as in other languages that use a grammatical gender system, there is some correspondence with natural gender. As we saw in the ‘lettuce story’, the word for nun (nunne) is feminine, and nuns are, indeed, female. Also, devil (deōfol) is masculine, and we all know him to be male! Look through the story and find the pronouns used to describe each. The devil is a he, and the nun is a heo (‘she’).
There were a few odd conflicts in OE between grammatical and natural gender. Wīf, meaning ‘woman’ was a neuter noun. Another word for ‘woman’ – wīfmann – was masculine. This was because compound nouns took the grammatical gender of the last element. So wīf (neuter) plus mann (masculine) gave masculine wīfmann. Such conflicts were relatively rare, but it was not at all rare that non-animate objects should be masculine or feminine, and certainly not anything like always neuter. So a stone (stān) in OE was masculine, while a door (dūru) was feminine. You would refer to a door as she and a stone as he – not it. You can see this in the ‘lettuce story’ with the noun leāhtric (‘lettuce’). The noun is masculine, so the pronoun used is he/him, not it. Find the point in the story which shows this.
In other languages that use a grammatical gender system, the situation is the same. In German, for example, Mädchen is a neuter noun, even though it means ‘girl’, and so too is Fräulein, meaning ‘young lady’. Also, you may well have come across languages, like French, where there are two genders – masculine and feminine – and no neuter. In these languages, all non-animate objects, like stones and doors must be he or she: in French they are in fact both she (la pierre and la porte).
In an article about gender in OE, Platzer (2001) confirms that in general human animates correlate with natural gender, so that neuter wīf and masculine wīfmann are very much the exception. He also confirms that as far as non-animates are concerned, they are indeed often masculine and feminine. But in the OE period there was strong movement towards the natural gender system that we have today. You can sometimes see clear signs of this. Thus, there are cases where a neuter noun referring to a person takes neuter inflections, but is given an animate pronoun – he or she, rather than the grammatically required it. Mitchell and Robinson’s (2011) examples include the neuter noun wīf. Grammatically the genitive should be its, but sometimes her is found. Another example is the pronoun it being used for wīsdom. The noun is grammatically masculine, so it should be a he.
According to Platzer, grammatical gender was well on the way out by late OE.
6.2 A strong OE adjective
Here are the strong forms of the adjective dol (‘silly’), with a masculine, feminine and neuter noun (stān, ‘stone’, giefu, ‘gift’, and ēage, ‘eye’). Compare the adjectival forms with the weak ones found in Chapter 6’s Table 6.1.
| Masculine | Feminine | Neuter | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sing | N | dol stān | dolu giefu | dol ēage |
| A | dolne stān | dole giefe | dol ēage | |
| G | doles stānes | dolre giefe | doles ēagan | |
| D | dolum stāne | dolre giefe | dolum ēagan | |
| Plur | N | dole stānas | dole giefa | dole ēagan |
| A | dole stānas | dole giefa | dole ēagan | |
| G | dolra stāna | dolra giefa | dolra ēagena | |
| D | dolum stānum | dolum giefum | dolum ēagum |
6.3 ge-, a ‘completive prefix’
If you know German you will be familiar with its past participle suffix, ge-, mentioned in 6.2.2. It is sometimes called the completive prefix, because it indicates that some action has been completed. Sometimes it carries that meaning of ‘perfectivity’ or ‘result’. One of Kastovsky’s (1992) examples is geascian, meaning ‘to learn by asking’ (though here the prefix comes in the word’s infinitive). What happened to the ge- prefix? Over time it became a- or y-; we will come across this latter form in Middle English. There are a few examples of each form later, in Shakespeare. In Othello, the hero came a-wooing his future wife, and in Love’s Labour’s Lost an actor playing the part of Judas Maccabeus says I am yclept Maccabeus. Subsequently, the prefix disappeared completely.
6.4 PDE ‘strong’ verbs
There are irregular verbs in PDE showing vowel gradation, though not so many as in OE. Sing, sang, sung is an example we have seen showing the sequence ‘i’–
‘a’–‘u’. This particular sequence is, in fact, a common one.
Sometimes, PDE irregular verbs have the same forms in the past and the past participle. An example is hang, hung, hung. Others have the same vowel in these forms, but show some other difference; invariably an ‘n’ on the past participle, as in break, broke, broken. Yet, others are irregular because they have no gradation at all, with the same form in all parts. An example is burst, burst, burst. So, there are the following categories:
- different vowels for each part
- exactly the same forms for the past and past participle
- the same vowels for the past and past participle, and some other difference
- all parts the same.
Think of some more examples of PDE verbs in each of these categories. If your ideas run dry, there are some in the list below; put them into the various categories:
drink |
cost |
kneel |
forget |
bite |
get |
let |
fly |
drive |
steal |
ring |
speak |
cut |
put |
buy |
|
read (think in terms of pronunciation not spelling for this one) |
|||
6.5 To be: a ‘badly mixed-up verb’
You will not be surprised to learn that be is the most frequently found verb in English. But you may be surprised that such a common verb is also such an irregular one. To appreciate just how irregular it is, write down (or go through in your head) the PDE conjugations for its present and past tenses. Think also of the infinitive, imperative and participial forms. This may suggest just why Pyles and Algeo (1964) call it a ‘badly-mixed up verb’.
It was badly mixed-up in OE too. In the present there were two patterns involved:
| 1st person singular | eom | bēo |
| 2nd | eart | bist |
| 3rd | is | bið |
| plural | syndon, aron | bēoð |
It is the pattern on the left that gave us our modern present forms. But, notice the alternative plurals. Syndon was West Saxon, and if you know German you will see a similarity with the German form sind. Aron was the Anglian dialect form, and gives us our are. It quite often happens that Anglian rather than West-Saxon forms come into PDE.
Sometimes, there were differences between when the two paradigms were used in OE, but these were not very distinct, and the left-hand paradigm became the more accepted one. However, the right-hand paradigm did not entirely disappear. The OE infinitive bēon became PDE be, and the imperative (be quiet, don’t be silly) keeps the form. There are some dialects of PDE, particularly the British south-western one, where be is sometimes used throughout the present, as in I be going there tomorrow.
As if all this were not complex enough, the OE verb had no past forms, so it took them from yet another verb: wesan. This gave wæs (for first and third persons singular), wǣre (second person) and wǣron – very similar to the forms we use today.
In etymological terms, all this is truly mixed-up. Eom, is and syndon come from one PIE root, while eart and aron (are) are from other sources. Then there are the bēo, bið forms, and the wesan-derived ones. There are four historically unrelated forms involved.
Why is such a common verb so irregular? A major process for linguistic change is standardization, where anomalies become ‘normalized’. But very frequently used forms often fail to standardize; people use them so much that the forms resist change. It is true that some people do sometimes try to ‘standardize’ the verb be, for example, using was in all past persons – I was, he was, they was and so on. But this is regarded as substandard. For most speakers, the verb be acts in its old, mixed-up way, and we use the verb so often that we do not even notice its strangeness.