[6] In Old English (and Indo-European languages generally), each noun's gender derives from morphophonology rather than directly from semantics (word-meaning).
Animal names that refer only to males are masculine (e.g. hana "rooster", henġest "stallion", eofor "boar", fearr "bull", ramm "ram", and bucc "buck"), and animal names that refer only to females are feminine (e.g. henn "hen", mīere "mare", sugu "sow", cū "cow", eowu "ewe", and dā "doe").
General names for animals (of unspecified sex) could be of any gender (though determined by their historical ending): for example, ūr ("aurochs") is masculine, fifalde ("butterfly") is feminine, and swīn ("pig") is neuter.
Hence frēond ("friend") and fēond ("enemy") were masculine, along with many other examples such as lufiend ("lover"), bæcere ("baker"), hālga ("saint"), sċop ("poet"), cuma ("guest"), mǣġ ("relative"), cristen ("Christian"), hǣðen ("pagan"), āngenġa ("loner"), selfǣta ("cannibal"), hlēapere ("dancer"), and sangere ("singer").
However, it is not as easy to predict the gender of a noun that refers to a thing without biological sex, such as neuter seax ("knife"), feminine gafol ("fork"), and masculine cucler ("spoon").
As in several other old Germanic languages, Old English declensions include five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and instrumental.
This was caused by a sound change called high vowel apocope, which occurred in the prehistory of Old English.
They are exemplified by hund ("dog"), sċip ("boat"), and hūs ("house"): The ō-stems are by far the largest class after a-stems.
N-stems can be any gender, though there are only a few neuters: ēage ("eye"), ēare ("ear"), wange ("cheek"), and compounds ending in them, such as þunwange ("temple [of the head]").
They are all declined the same way, regardless of gender: There are few pure u-stem nouns, but some are very common: duru ("door"), medu ("mead"), wudu ("wood").
This is the source of nouns in Modern English which form their plural by changing a vowel, as in man ~ men, foot ~ feet, tooth ~ teeth, mouse ~ mice, goose ~ geese, and louse ~ lice.
In Old English, there were many more such words, including bōc ("book"), cū ("cow"), gāt ("goat"), āc ("oak"), hnutu ("nut"), burg ("city"), and sulh ("plow").
There are many variations even within classes, some of which include: Adjectives take different endings depending on the case, gender, and number of the noun they describe.
However, there are still a good number of differences and irregularities: Old English never uses the equivalents of "more" and "most" to form comparative or superlative adjectives.
A handful of words form the comparative and superlative with i-umlaut, namely eald ("old") → ieldra, ieldest; ġeong ("young") → ġingra, ġinġest; strang ("strong") → strengra, strenġest; lang ("long") → lengra, lenġest; sċort ("short") → sċyrtra, sċyrtest; and hēah ("high") → hīera, hīehst.
A few more become totally different words: gōd ("good") → betera, betst; yfel ("bad") → wiersa, wierrest; miċel ("much/a lot/big") → māra ("more/bigger"), mǣst ("most/biggest"); lȳtel ("little") → lǣssa ("less/smaller"), lǣsest ("least/smallest").
It comes in eleven different forms depending on case, gender, and number: sē, sēo, þæt, þone, þā, þæs, þǣre, þām, þon, þȳ, and þāra.
These include:[16][17][18] Note that those words still occur with "the" when they refer to a specific iteration, as in "the future that I want", "the woods behind my house", or "the law they just passed".
However, in stressed positions, the plural third-person personal pronouns were all replaced with Old Norse forms during the Middle English period, yielding "they", "them" and "their".
Many verbs that in Old English were strong verbs, such as: abide, bake, ban, bark, bow, braid, burst, carve, chew, climb, creep, delve, drag, fare, fart, flee, float, flow, gnaw, grip, help, laugh, leap, let, load, lock, melt, milk, mow, quell, read, row, shine, shove, slay, sleep, sneeze, spurn, starve, step, suck, swallow, sweep, swell, thresh, walk, wash, weep, wreak, and yield have become weak verbs in modern English.
Altogether, this split the third class into four sub-classes: Regular strong verbs were all conjugated roughly the same, with the main differences being in the stem vowel.
[20] Unlike weak class I, they never cause i-umlaut, so their stems are usually identical to the stem of the word they were derived from: lufu ("love") → lufian ("to love"), mynet ("coin") → mynetian ("to coin"), hwelp ("puppy") → hwelpian ("[of animals] to give birth").
Almost all weak class II verbs have precisely the same endings, completely unaffected by the makeup of the stem or the history of the word.
This resemblance is not coincidental, since they descend from Proto-Indo-European stative verbs, which normally developed into the past tense of Germanic languages.
They are magan ("can"), sċulan ("should/must/to owe"), mōtan ("may"), þurfan ("to need"), witan ("to know"), cunnan ("to know/know how"), ġemunan ("to remember"), durran ("to dare"), āgan ("to own"), dugan ("to be useful"), ġenugan ("to suffice"), and unnan ("to grant").
Some were simply consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection, and word order was generally freer.
There was some flexibility in word order of Old English since the heavily inflected nature of nouns, adjectives, and verbs often indicated the relationships between clause arguments.
"and (the) counselors of (the) West Saxons") have been extraposed from (moved out of) the compound subject they belong in, in a way that would be impossible in modern English.
There are examples of this in modern English: "Hardly did he arrive when ...", "Never can it be said that ...", "Over went the boat", "Ever onward marched the weary soldiers ...", "Then came a loud sound from the sky above".
In Beowulf, for example, main clauses frequently have verb-initial or verb-final order, recalling earlier stages of Old English syntax.