The place of the category of gender in the noun system of Old English

Abstract

Old English, or Anglo-Saxon English, belonged to the West Germanic group of the Indo-European language family and was a language rich in suffixes. In contrast to Modern English, syntagmatic relations within a sentence in Old English were expressed by morphological signs. The noun is distinguished by complex morphological features in the system of parts of speech: the noun has two number, four case and three gender categories, strong and weak  declensions, as well as parts of speech that define the noun in the sentence – that’s the article, adjective, numeral, pronoun, etc. formed a complete complex system with the agreement of person, number, case and gender. The presented article analyzes the grammatical features of the noun in Old English, the change of nouns by gender and case,  the characteristics of the lexico-grammatical category of gender in Old English, as well as the opinions of scientists on this issue.