C. Alphonso Smith

“ A syllable is usually a vowel, either alone or in combination with consonants, uttered with a single impulse of stress; but certain consonants may form syllables: oven (= ov-n) , battle (= bæt-l) ; (cf. also the vulgar pronunciation of elm) .
A syllable may be (1) weak or strong, (2) open or closed, (3) long or short.
(1) A weak syllable receives a light stress. Its vowel sound is often different from that of the corresponding strong, or stressed, syllable. Cf. weak and strong my in “I want my lárge hat” and “I want mý hat.”
(2) An open syllable ends in a vowel or diphthong: dē-man, to deem ”

“ The syllabic environment will usually compel the student to give these letters their proper values. When occurring between vowels, they are always voiced: ōðer, other; ofer, over; rīsan, to rise.
Note.—The general rule in Old English, as in Modern English, is, that voiced consonants have a special affinity for other voiced consonants, and voiceless for voiceless. This is the law of Assimilation. Thus when de is added to form the preterit of a verb whose stem 8 ends in a voiceless consonant, the d is unvoiced, or assimilated, to t: sęttan, to set, sętte (but tręddan, to tread, has trędde) ”

“ It is the object of this book to give an elementary knowledge of Early West Saxon, that is, the language of King Alfred. With this knowledge, it will not be difficult for the student to read Late West Saxon, or any other dialect of the Old English period. Such knowledge will also serve as the best introduction to the structure both of Middle English and of Modern English, besides laying a secure foundation for the scientific study of any other Germanic tongue. ”

“ These compounds are usually nouns, or adjectives and participles used in a sense more appositive than attributive.
It is evident, therefore, that this abundant use of compounds, or periphrastic synonyms, grows out of the desire to repeat the idea in varying language. It is to be observed, also, that the Old English poets rarely make any studied attempt to balance phrase against phrase or clause against clause. Theirs is a repetition of idea, rather than a parallelism of structure. ”

“ A noun is said to belong to the Vowel Declension when the final letter of its stem is a vowel, this vowel being then known as the stem-characteristic; but if the stem-characteristic is a consonant, the noun belongs to the Consonant Declension. There might have been, therefore, as many subdivisions of the Vowel Declension in Old English as there were vowels, and as many subdivisions of the Consonant Declension as there were consonants. All Old English nouns, however, belonging to the Vowel Declension, ended their stems originally in a, ō, i, or u. ”

“ The Old English long vowels have shifted their phonetic values with such uniform regularity that it is possible in almost every case to infer the Modern English sound; but our spelling is so chaotic that while the student may infer the modern sound, he cannot always infer the modern symbol representing the sound.
(2) Analogy. 24.
But more important than vowel shifting is the great law of Analogy, for Analogy shapes not only words but constructions. It belongs, therefore, to 24 Etymology and to Syntax, since it influences both form and function. ”

“ Class I contains the remaining weak verbs; that is, those with infinitive in -r-ian and those with infinitive in -an (not -ian) .
Class I. 124.
The preterit singular and past participle of Class I end in -ede and -ed, or -de and -ed respectively.
Note.—The infinitives of this class ended originally in -jan (= -ian) . This accounts for the prevalence of i-umlaut in these verbs, and also for the large number of short-voweled stems ending in a double consonant (§ 115, Note 2) . The weak verb is frequently the causative of the corresponding strong verb. ”

“ Old English literature has no love poems. The central themes of its poets are battle and bereavement, with a certain grim resignation on the part of the hero to the issues of either. The movement of the thought is usually abrupt, there being a noticeable poverty of transitional particles, or connectives, “which,” says Ten Brink, “are the cement of sentence-structure.”
(b) Beowulf.
The greatest of all Old English poems is the epic, Beowulf.2 It consists of more than three thousand lines, and probably assumed approximately its present form in Northumbria about A.D. 700. ”

“ Gender will be indicated in the vocabularies by the different gender forms of the definite article, sē for the masculine, sēo for the feminine, and ðæt for the neuter: sē mūð, sēo tunge, ðæt ēage = the mouth, the tongue, the eye.
All nouns ending in -dōm, -hād, -scipe, or -ere are masculine (cf. Modern English wisdom, childhood, friendship, worker) . Masculine, also, are nouns ending in -a.
Those ending in -nes or -ung are feminine (cf. Modern 12 English goodness, and gerundial forms in -ing: seeing is believing) . ”

“ Either mood, indicative or subjunctive, would be legitimate. As to the tense, the narrator is identifying himself in time with the hero, whose wonder was “how the stone-arches ... sustain the ever-during earth-hall”: the construction is a form of oratio recta, a sort of miratio recta. The singular healde, instead of healden, has many parallels in the dependent clauses of Beowulf, most of these being relative clauses introduced by þāra þe (= of those that ... + a singular predicate) . ”

“ The Weak Declension of adjectives, whether monosyllabic or polysyllabic, does not differ from the Weak Declension of nouns, except that -ena of the genitive plural is usually replaced by -ra of the strong adjectives. ”

“ The following paradigm of mūð, the mouth, illustrates the several cases (the article being, for the present, gratuitously added in the Modern English equivalents) :
11 Gender. 13.
The gender of Old English nouns, unlike that of Modern English, depends partly on meaning and partly on form, or ending. Thus mūð, mouth, is masculine; tunge, tongue, feminine; ēage, eye, neuter.
No very comprehensive rules, therefore, can be given; but the gender of every noun should be learned with its meaning. ”

“ The digraph th is represented in Old English texts by ð and þ, no consistent distinction being made between them. In the works of Alfred, ð (capital, Ð) is the more common: ðās, those; ðæt, that; bindeð, he binds.
The consonant c had the hard sound of k, the latter symbol being rare in West Saxon: cyning, king; cwēn, queen; cūð, known. When followed by a palatal vowel sound,—e, i, æ, ea, eo, long or short,—a vanishing y sound was doubtless interposed (cf. dialectic kyind for kind) . In Modern English the combination has passed into ch: cealc, chalk; cīdan, to chide; lǣce, leech ”

“ But in the case of compound nouns, adjectives, and adverbs the first member of the compound (unless it be ge- or be-) receives the stronger stress: héofon-rīce, heaven-kingdom; ǫ́nd-giet, intelligence; sṓð-fæst, truthful; gód-cund, divine; éall-unga, entirely; blī́ðe-līce, blithely. But be-hā́t, promise; ge-béd, prayer; ge-fḗalīc, joyous; be-sǫ́ne, immediately.
Compound verbs, however, have the stress on the radical syllable: for-gíefan, to forgive; of-línnan, to cease; ā-cnā́wan, to know; wið-stǫ́ndan, to withstand; on-sácan, to resist. ”

“ The verbs of the Weak Conjugation (the so-called Regular Verbs of Modern English) form their preterit 17 and past participle by adding to the present stem a suffix6 with d or t: Modern English love, loved; sleep, slept.
The stem of the preterit plural is never different from the stem of the preterit singular; hence these verbs have only three distinctive tense-stems, or principal parts: viz., (1) the present indicative, (2) the preterit indicative, and (3) the past participle. ”

“ Double consonants are also made single in the imperative 2d singular and in the past participle. Stems long by nature take no final -e in the imperative: dǣl, hīer, dēm.
Class II. 130.
The infinitive of verbs belonging to this class ends in -ian (not -r-ian) , the preterit singular in -ode, the past participle in -od. The preterit plural usually has -edon, however, instead of -odon:
Note.—These verbs have no trace of original umlaut, since their -ian was once -ōjan. Hence, the vowel of the stem was shielded from the influence of the j (= i) by the interposition of ō. ”

“ The u-Declension, corresponding to the group of u-stems in the classical Third Declension, contains no neuters, and but few (a) masculines and (b) feminines. The short-stemmed nouns of both genders (sun-u, dur-u) retain the final u of the N.A. singular, while the long stems (feld, hǫnd) drop it. The influence of the masculine a-stems is most clearly seen in the long-stemmed masculines of the u-Declension (feld, feld-es, etc.) ”

“ The dative and instrumental are alike in all nouns.
27.
The student will observe (1) that nouns whose nominative ends in -e (fiscere) drop this letter before adding the case endings; (2) that æ before a consonant (hwæl) changes to a in the plural;1 (3) that h, preceded by r (mearh) or l (seolh, seal) , is dropped before an inflectional vowel, the stem diphthong being then lengthened by way of compensation; (4) that dissyllables (finger) having the first syllable long, usually syncopate the vowel of the second syllable before adding the case endings.2
28. ”

“ The nouns belonging to the foot Declension exhibit umlaut most consistently in the N.A. plural.
Note.—The dative singular usually has the same form as the N.A. plural. Here belong also sēo bōc (book) , sēo burg (borough) , sēo gōs (goose) , sēo lūs (louse) , and sēo mūs (mouse) , all with umlauted plurals. Mn.E. preserves only six of the foot Declension plurals: feet, men, teeth, geese, lice, and mice. The c in the last two is an artificial spelling, intended to preserve the sound of voiceless s. Mn.E. kine (= cy-en) is a double plural formed after the analogy of weak stems ”

“ If the unchanged stem contains the vowel e, this is changed in the 2d and 3d singular to i (ie) : cweðan to say, stem cwið-; beran to bear, stem bier-. But this mutation3 had taken place long before the period of O.E., and belongs to the Germanic languages in general. It is best, however, to class the change of e to i or ie with the changes due to umlaut, since it occurs consistently in the 2d and 3d singular stems of Early West Saxon, and outlasted almost all of the umlaut forms proper. ”

“ In dependent clauses it denotes uncertainty, possibility, or mere futurity.4 (a) Concessive clauses (introduced by ðēah, though) and (b) temporal clauses (introduced by ǣr, ǣr ðǣm ðe, before) are rarely found with any other mood than the subjunctive. The subjunctive is also regularly used in Alfredian prose (c) after verbs of saying, even when no suggestion of doubt or discredit attaches to the narration.5 “Whether the statement refer to a fact or not, whether the subject-matter be vouched for by the reporter, as regards its objective reality and truth, the subjunctive does not tell. ”

“ Sęcga ... cwidegiedda = But these comrades of warriors [= those seen in vision] again swim away [= fade away] ; the ghost of these fleeting ones brings not there many familiar words; i.e. he sees in dream and vision the old familiar faces, but no voice is heard: they bring neither greetings to him nor tidings of themselves.
65. Wita sceal geþyldig. Either bēon (wesan) is here to be understood after sceal, or sceal alone means ought to be. Neither construction is to be found in Alfredian prose, though the omission of a verb of motion after sculan is common in all periods of Old English. ”

“ Sweet, A New English Grammar, Part I., § 535.
5. As Skeat says (§ 22, (2) ) , Analogy is “fitful.” It enables us to explain many linguistic phenomena, but not to anticipate them. The multiplication of books tends to check its influence by perpetuating the forms already in use. Thus Chaucer employed nine en-plurals, and his influence served for a time to check the further encroachment of the es-plurals. As soon as there is an acknowledged standard in any language, the operation of Analogy is fettered.
27 PART II.
ETYMOLOGY AND SYNTAX.
The Strong or Vowel Declensions of Nouns. ”

“ The secondary stress in E1 falls frequently on a short syllable, as in D1.
(a) E1 –́ –̀ × | –́
As in D2, the thesis in the first foot is very rarely expanded.
134
Note.—Our ignorance of Old English sentence-stress makes it impossible for us to draw a hard-and-fast line in all cases between D2 and E1. For example, in these half-lines (already cited) ,
wyn eal gedrēas
feor oft gemǫn
Forð nēar ætstōp
if we throw a strong stress on the adverbs that precede their verbs, the type is D2. ”

“ Symle hē bið lōciende, nē slǣpð hē nǣfre, He is always looking, nor does He ever sleep.
Note.—In most sentences of this sort, the subject is masculine (singular or plural) ; hence no inference can be made as to agreement, since -e is the participial ending for both numbers of the nominative masculine (§ 82) . By analogy, therefore, the other genders usually conform in inflection to the masculine: wǣron þā ealle þā dēoflu clypigende ānre stefne, then were all the devils crying with one voice. ”

“ It would seem that in proportion as a past participle has the force of an adjective, the to relation may supplant the by relation; just as we say unknown to instead of unknown by, unknown being more adjectival than participial. Gesewen, therefore, may here be translated visible, evident, patent (= gesynelīc, sweotol) ; and gelufod, dear (= weorð, lēof) .
A survival of adjectival gesewen is found in Wycliffe’s New Testament (1 Cor. xv, 5-8) : “He was seyn to Cephas, and aftir these thingis to enleuene; aftirward he was seyn to mo than fyue hundrid britheren togidere ... ”