Old english grammar
Preliminary Remarks
OE was a synthetic, or inflected type of language; it showed the relations between words and expressed other grammatical meaning, mainly with the help of simple (synthetic) grammatical forms.
The parts of speech to be distinguished in OE are as follows: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral (all referred to as nominal parts of speech or nomina), the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection.
We shall assume that there were five nominal grammatical categories in OE: number, case, gender, degrees of comparison, and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness. Each part of speech had its own peculiarities in the inventory of categories and the number of members within the category (categorial forms). The noun had only two grammatical categories proper: number and case. The adjective had the maximum number of categories — five. The number of members in the same grammatical categories in different parts of speech did not necessarily coincide: thus в noun had four cases, Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Accusative, whereas the adjective had five (the same four cases plus the Instrumental case). The personal pronouns of the 1st and 2nd p., unlike other parts speech, distinguished three numbers — Singular, Plural and Dual.
Verbal grammatical categories were not numerous: tense and mood - verbal categories proper — and number and person, showing agreement between the verb-predicate and the subject of the sentence. The distinction of categorial forms by the noun and the verb was to large extent determined by their division into morphological classes: declensions and conjugations.
THE NOUN
The OE noun had two grammatical or morphological categories: number and case. In addition, nouns distinguished three genders, but this distinction was not a grammatical category; it was merely a classifying feature accounting, alongside other features, for the division if nouns into morphological classes. The category of number consisted of two members, singular and plural. The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative.
The most remarkable feature of OE nouns was their elaborate system of declensions, which was a sort of morphological classification. The total number of declensions, including both the major and minor types, exceeded twenty-five. All in all there were only ten distinct endings (plus some phonetic variants of these endings) and a few relevant root-vowel interchanges used in the noun paradigms
In OE gender was primarily a grammatical distinction; Masc, Fein, and Neut. nouns could have different forms, even if they belonged to the same stem (type of declension).
The division into genders was in a certain way connected with the division into stems, though there was no direct correspondence between them: some stems were represented by nouns of one particular gender, e. g. o-stems were always Fern., others embraced nouns of two or three genders.