 Three grammatical categories are represented in the OE substantives, just as in many other Germanic and Indo-European languages: gender, number, and case.

 Of these three, gender is a lexico-grammatical category, that is, every substantive with all its forms belongs to one gender (masculine, feminine or neuter). The other two are purely grammatical categories: substantives are inflected for number and case. There are two numbers: singular and plural, and four cases: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative.  In representing the system of OE substantive morphology, two approaches are possible, and both have been tried out.  One is, to regard the OE language as a stage in the historical development of Germanic languages. From this point of view, such types of substantives as a- stems, o-stems, i-stems, u-stems, n-stems, etc. are distinguished, although there is little in the OE forms themselves to show any traces of these stems. This is the traditional approach.

numbers plural singular

4 cases: genetive dative accusative nominative

 The other view takes the OE substantive forms as such, purely synchronically, and classifies them according to the facts immediately visible in the OE texts. This more modern view is to be found for example, in an old English Grammar by Randolph Quirk and C.L. Wrenn, published in London in Each of the two views has much to recommend itself, and it would be futile to try to disprove either one or the other. In this book we shall mainly follow the traditional (diachronic) view, but we shall also give a sketch of the classification resulting from the synchronic approach.

 According to the traditional view, then, we distinguish, in the first place, between strong declension and weak declension of substantive. The strong declension includes nouns with vocalic stems (-a,-o,-i,-u), and the weak declension comprises n-stems only. There are also some minor types, which shall consider after the strong and weak declensions. 

 a– stems may be either masculine or neuter. The difference between the two genders is only seen in the nominative, and accusative plural always had the ending –as. In the neuter substantives, the ending depends on two factors: on the number of syllables and on the quantity of the root syllable.

 Masculine n-stems end in the nominative singular in –a, feminine and neuter ones in –e; in the neuter substantives the accusative, in accordance with the general rule, is the same as the nominative. No other differences between the general is found. masculine feminine neuter Singular  Nom. nama cwene”woman” ēaℨe “eye”  Gen. naman cwenan ēaℨen  Dat. naman cwenan ēaℨen  Acc. naman cwenan ēaℨe

 Plural  Nom. nama cwene”woman” ēaℨe “eye”  Gen. naman cwenan ēaℨen  Dat. naman cwenan ēaℨen  Acc. naman cwenan ēaℨe