English, that it is now necessary to learn it systematically with
grammar and dictionary, in somewhat the same manner as one would learn a
foreign tongue. Most of the words, indeed, are more or less familiar, at
least so far as their roots are concerned; but the inflexions of the
nouns and verbs are far more complicated than those now in use: and many
obsolete forms occur even in the vocabulary. On the other hand the
idioms closely resemble those still in use; and even where a root has
now dropped out of use, its meaning is often immediately suggested by
the cognate High German word, or by some archaic form preserved for us
in Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton, as well as by occasional survival in
the Lowland Scotch and other local dialects.

English in its early form was an inflexional language; that is to say,
the mutual relations of nouns and of verbs were chiefly expressed, not
by means of particles, such as _of_, _to_, _by_, and so forth, but by
means of modifications either in the termination or in the body of the
root itself. The nouns were declined much as in Greek and Latin; the
verbs were conjugated in somewhat the same way as in modern French.
Every noun had gender expressed in its form.

The following examples will give a sufficient idea of the commoner forms
of declension in the classical West Saxon of the time of Ælfred. The
pronunciation has already been briefly explained in the preface.


SING. PLUR.

(1.) _Nom._ stan (_a stone_). _Nom._ stanas.
_Gen._ stanes. _Gen._ stana.
_Dat._ stane. _Dat._ stanum.