Me pleases the snow because he does the city quiet. Mē līcaþ sē snāw for þon þe hē dēþ þā burg stille. That means even inanimate objects are frequently called 'he' or 'she.' See the following sentence, with the masculine noun snāw:

In Old English the words for 'he' ( hē) and 'she' ( hēo) also mean 'it.' Hē refers back to masculine nouns, hēo to feminine nouns, reserving the neuter pronoun hit for grammatically neuter nouns. Adjectives change endings: for instance, since hring ('ring') is masculine and cuppe ('cup') is feminine, a golden ring is gylden hring, while a golden cup is gylden u cuppe. The word for 'the' or 'that' is sē with a masculine noun, sēo with a feminine noun, and þæt with a neuter noun. Old English retains all three genders of Proto-Indo-European: masculine, feminine, and neuter.Įach noun belongs to one of the three genders, while adjectives and determiners take different forms depending on the gender of the noun they describe. Old English nouns are grouped by grammatical gender, and inflect based on case and number. The main difference from other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, is that verbs could be conjugated in only two tenses (compared to the six 'tenses', really tense/aspect combinations, of Latin), and the absence of a synthetic passive voice, which still existed in Gothic. Verbs came in ten main conjugations (seven strong and three weak), all with numerous subtypes, as well as a few additional smaller conjugations and a handful of irregular verbs. Nouns came in numerous declensions (with many parallels in Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Finite verbs agreed with their subjects in person and number. Adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) participles agreed with their corresponding nouns in case, number and gender. The instrumental case was somewhat rare and occurred only in the masculine and neuter singular. First- and second-person personal pronouns also had dual forms for referring to groups of two people, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners were fully inflected, with four grammatical cases ( nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), and a vestigial instrumental, two grammatical numbers ( singular and plural) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter).

To a lesser extent, it resembles modern German. Īmong living languages, Old English morphology most closely resembles that of modern Icelandic, which is among the most conservative of the Germanic languages. As an old Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system that is similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as the umlaut. The grammar of Old English is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more inflected.

I in old english