The PG is a dialect of PIE , a linguistic ancestor of Germanic group

To North Germanic belong the modern Scandinavian languages – Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese(West) and Swedish, Danish, Gutnish(East) (the language of the island of Gotland). The earliest recorded form of North Germanic (Old Norse) is found in runic inscriptions from about AD 300

Nominal parts of speech in Old Germanic languages, their morphological categories.

In PIE the adjective together with noun made one morphological part of speech – the Name. Progressively the difference between noun and adj was in the gender declension of adjective. Just like in Ukranian and Russian were the endings of adj marcs the grammatical categories of gender.

Gender of adjectives depends on gender of noun, whereas the gender of noun is a stable morphological category.

Noun had such categories:

- gender (masc, fem, neut)

- number (singular, plural)

- case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental)

- declension (strong, weak, minor/root)

ДИВ № 18

Adjective

- declension (weak, strong)

- degrees of comparison (positive, comparative, superlative)

- gender (masc, fem, neut)

- case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative,instumental)

Sabo p.75

…..Old===== 19. Old Germanic noun and its morphological categories.

The noun in Old German had 4 categories:

- Gender (masc, fem, neut) This distinction was not a grammatical category, it was merely a classifying feature. The gender

i. regulates the forms of adj and articles accompanying nouns

ii. regulates which specific forms of the case and number endings appear on the nouns.

Progressively, due to the dissapearane of stem-classes, nouns could change the type of their gender or declension. For instance, the category of gender disappeared in English, Scandinavien l-ges but German has still 3 gender.

- Number (singular, plural and dual) The dual number of noun had preserved only in pronouns and verbs Both case and number were expressed by one morpheme.

- Case.There exist 8 cases in IE: Nominative, Accus, Genitive, Dative, Ablative, Instrumental, Locutive and Vocative. Progressively, this system changed, because of transfusion of some case forms, so in Common Germanic there existed 6cases:

Nominative Accusative Genitive Dative Vocative

Instrumental is used to dentify the instrument of an action. Was preserved only in OSax, OHG.

- Declension(strong, weak, minor or root)

Old English literary monuments.

SABO. P.45

Old Germanic strong declension of nouns. P. 73

Traditionally, the vocalic stems ( stems with the stem-suffix containing a vowel) are called strong nouns or strong declension.

a-declension, masculine and neuter nouns – the most numerous

Nominative	Singular	Plural
dags “day”	dagōs
Accusative/Vocative	Dag	dagans
Genetive	Dagis	dagē
Dative	Daga	dagam

There were 2 variants of a-stems nouns. The first type was preceded by –j- and made up –ja- stems, another was preceded by –w- and made up –wa- stem.

The ō-declension include feminine nouns only and correspond to IE ā-declension

Singular	Plural
Nom.Acc. giba ‘gift’	gibōs
Gen. gibōs	gibō
Dat. Gibái	gibōm

Like giba are declined a very large number of feminine nouns, as bida “request”, bōka “book”, kara “care’, fēra “country”, mōta “custom-house”, rūna “mystery”, háirda etc.

The i-declension contains only masculine and feminine nouns and correspond to the Latin and Greek i-declension.