Lecture 4: Nouns

Key Takeaways

everybody uh go ahead and open up to uh chapter six um of Baker um nouns uh so the good news about nouns is that the strong noun endings um should have looked familiar at least um some ele uh from the pronoun uh paradigms that you memorized um for Monday um if we take a look at uh the top of page 51 um these this boxed section um is uh is helpful so patterns within the paradigms um the neuter and uh masculine genitive singular forms are are always going to be the same all dative singular forms are the same within each major declension um and then these next two are very helpful all generative plural forms end in a we started to see that just last time when we were doing um we're doing our our first mini text and Al dative plural forms end in u um and then as it says there are resemblances between the noun and pronoun um paradigms now Old English is uh different from Modern uh English and that it has two different kinds of nouns strong nouns and weak nouns as you discovered um for today the strong noun endings on table 6.1 that is right up there with um tables 5.3 and 5.4 um 6.1 is going to be on every single exam just like 5.3 and 5.4 so these are three of the four uh these are three of the four paradigms that are just it's just easy easy money easy points however you want to think of it um memorize this now um and you will never have to uh think of it um again um you do not need to uh you do not need to memorize the weak verb uh sorry the weak noun endings but you will need need to be able to recognize them I'll get back to or deal with them I suppose I should say um we'll get back to that um in a moment um but for strong nouns um this these are the endings that you need to that you need to know and 6.2 um and 6.3 put those nouns um or rather put those endings um onto specific nouns so that you can see them um sort of In the Flesh as it were as opposed to just disembodied um case endings um now one thing to note is that um neuter plural nouns very often look the same as neuter singular nouns um and as Baker points out um at the bottom of 52 and an ending plural may seem like a great inconvenience at first how will you be able to tell a plural if you see it um in practice you'll find that one of these one of the three one of three things will be true when you come across an ending lless neuter either a nearby pronoun will tell you what you need to know so that thing is singular that thing um th thing is plural and you know that because of the thaw again this is why the pronouns are so important because pronouns generally give you more information than nouns so you're often going to have to be using the pronoun pronouns as your guide all right um or Baker goes on the context will make it clear whether the noun is singular or plural or three it won't matter I not quite sure what that means one might suppose that it would always matter but you know whatever it's fine um if you stay alert to the likelihood that some plural nouns will lack endings you won't get into trouble um also because the masculine strong n and indeed the neuter strong noun um have look the same in the nominative and the accusative you'll need to you'll need to be flexible you'll need to keep your mind flexible in terms of um whether a given noun is accusative or nominative and again the pronoun is often going to help you so Sean versus th and we're going to come back to some Stones um later on when we get to the um when we get to the mini text um all right so that's strong that's strong nouns take a look at weak nouns on table uh on page 54 table 6.4 um so what do you notice just off the top of your uh what do you notice immediately about um the weak noun endings yeah Alyssa um they do follow our rules about like oh General alwayss an a data always ends in um things like that but um other than that there's like very few unique endings very few unique endings well put um so a an all over the place um and a an is going to be one of your um for that reason a an is going to be one of your uh most challenging frankly endings when you see an Old English word um because in addition to um it can be a an is the um as I think we we discussed last time a an is the typical ending for an infinitive that is to say a verb your your base verb form but it is also um accusative singular masculine accusative singular feminine genitive of any of them dative singular of any of them nominative or accusative plural of any of them um tons of things um so yeah a an is often going to be the puzzle a an words are often going to be the puzzle that you have to figure out that you have to use other parts of the sentence in order to um solve for as it were um the confusing a word in a sentence all right um and Baker goes into this a little bit on pages uh 54 and 55 um don't lose heart he says at the top of 55 writers of Old English when they wanted to be understood I like how he you know leaves open the possibility that they also perhaps did not sometimes want to be understood um did not write Clauses containing unresolvable ambiguities after you've puzzled out a few difficult instances of weak nouns you should start to get the hang of them um I realized that sounds like perhaps unhelpful reassurance at the moment um but my experience teaching Old English over the years suggests that this is indeed the case and that as long as you know as long as you're aware of the challenge going in um you should be able to figure it out um as you get more practice okay um all of these next um the the athematic nouns 6.1.3 you do not have to memorize any of these you don't have to memorize any of this but you do need to sort of be cognizant of the fact um that some nouns are going to change their internal vowel um as we as they get declined in various cases um so this means that if you're looking up uh the word um the genitive of the genitive singular of nut I just think that's a super adorable word um then you may need to you may need to look you may need to um be flexible in how you in how you look it up um this is something that um if you've studied an ancient language will not be uh unfamiliar to you but if you haven't it it may be that using the using the glossery using the dictionary involves a little bit of um uh trial and error shall we say in a way that is not true if you just look up a word in Modern English um and you can be confident of um of its spelling um so as we get into um reading you will um you will definitely get more experience with this um any questions about these these first few pages of of chapter 6 yeah faos how can we be sure that these are like IM mutations what we see and not of alternative spellings Ah that's a that's a very good question um the short answer is that alternate spellings are most common with pronouns um and you don't have it so it's less likely to be the case um you're less likely to have that for just a random noun um so in general um I mean the slightly longer answer is that you know Mis or not misspellings um alternate spellings aren't going to follow any particular aren't necessarily going to follow a particular rule whereas IM mutation is a is a particular uh set of sound changes that sort of always happen and you can go back to um table 2.2.2 which was back um on page back on page 17 table 2.1 um that gives you the that gives you the rules for how IM mutation Works um and if you say um if you say if you say aloud those shifts from unmutated to mutated you'll start to hear them in your in your um well you'll start to hear them um and that'll get um that'll start to give you a sense of the difference between IM mutation and other forms of um irregularity um but for the most part I wouldn't worry about it too much is uh yeah Alyssa just to be clear the despite the fact that eye mutation from a to a is also like the connection between those the stem changes of things like dog are distinct from that right that's correct yes it was a separate linguistic process yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's why like it's not the same places in the Paradigm that you're that you're looking now you're looking now you're looking further along like yeah 6.8 yeah exactly there was also like slly different treatment of like these different uh stem changes in like Baker versus just um Mitchell and Robinson and Robinson like how they like group them or like like a little bit different yeah yeah and since I'm not um I'm not deeply invested in all of the in all of the ins and outs of of these of these um of these sort of subsets of um of of of of of of nouns um but but yeah I mean to to the the short answer is don't worry about it too much frankly um just just let the just get take the measure well I'm actually just going to I'm actually just going to go in order we'll get to more strong nouns in in due course um so page 56 and 57 6.1.4 the noun phrase um so really all this is trying to do here is encourage you to um look at the noun in a in an Old English sentence in in its Fuller in its in its in its bigger picture the bigger context um so that means looking for the adjectives and the pronouns that go with the noun because often the noun itself is not going to tell you as much is not going to give you as much information as the pronoun or the adjective we haven't gotten to adjectives yet but trust me it's true um so for example um the demonstrative pronoun SE re uh resolves the ambiguity of who the subject of that sentences toward the bottom of page 56 um etc etc we always know that se is what Nom nominative singular masculine nominative singular masculine exactly very good um whereas thaa is always going to be accusative singular masculine um so the those um unambiguous pronoun forms are some of your best friends in the language because they are going to help you um parse uh the the the sentence um pretty readily [Music] um th let's take a look at page uh 57 the bottom of the um the the the bottom of that section careful attention to the noun phrase can help you resolve the ambiguities of the Endless sorry ending neuter discussed above um so then he looked at the women and their children so we because the Old English word for woman is grammatically neuter um we has no ending in the plural so you have so you know that but you know that it's plural because of the thaw since thaw is plural so if it so if it were then he looked at the woman in the singular what would that thaw be instead that exactly um that would be um that would be singular very good um all right so more about strong nouns on um on the following Pages uh 58 through um through UH 60 um these are again these are not um I'm not going to I'm not actually going to really go into this because they all still you'll see that they all still have um the strong noun endings um and that's the most important thing um the the the sh the other slight shifts um I'm not going to I'm not going to test you on all right um a few minor declensions um the for whatever reason the um the the the words for family relationships in Old English tend to be uh like brother and daughter um as you see on 612 they seem to be they're they're unusual in various ways um but other than that not much to see not much to see there um this is really just this is really just in the EMP in the interest of um uh fullness of of this is the completionist part of the uh part of the part of the chapter all right so the the long story short of this is you must know you must memorize table 6.1 with the strong noun endings um and you must be comfortable enough with the weak noun endings of table 6.4 that you are able to to um disambiguate them and work with them um when it comes to site translation on the um on the exam all right so that's those are your main um those are your main challenges and we're going to put those uh put those skills to the test um in uh in the next part of class at the bottom of page 62 um we're going to read uh a miracle of St Benedict from Bishop wer of worcesters Old English trans of the dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great um and what I love about Baker the reason I Ed this text instead of Mitchell and Robinson which is what I learned with what I love about Baker is that it starts us like really working with old English almost from the very beginning of our encounter with the language um because that's really I mean when I think back to How I Learned Old English and how I learned Latin and how I learned Greek and how I learned all of the Dead languages that I've learned um the reason that I'm not as good at knowing them um as I am at the Modern languages that I've learned is that I never had to use them actively I it was always passive it was always passive recognition of the forms for passive reading of the language um and it wasn't until I did this like living Latin course in Rome where we all had to speak Latin and the the class was in Latin and it was super fun um that I was like oh yeah like Latin is not an unspeakable language I mean the the the the professor was so great he was like people think Latin was Latin is hard he like stupid stupid stupid Romans spoke Latin totally fluently it is not an impossible language to learn to speak people did um it's just that we don't um and so and similarly with Old English um so although we're not learning to speak Old English um that's that's not yet a bridge I've I've tried to cross um uh we are going to be trying to learn it as ly as possible all right