Morphology (or more specifically, inflectional morphology) refers to the way words in a language change in order to convey grammatical information so that the word can be understood fully in the context of the sentence in which it appears.
In Present-day English (PDE), there is a lot less morphology than there was in Old English (OE), but we still have inflections, or small morphemes which we can add to words to help them to make sense in the sentence they are in. As an example, consider the verb pull. We refer to this as a lexeme: a word which you can find in any dictionary in its ‘root’ form, but which has a number of word forms in which it can appear in a sentence. Here’s some examples of the different word forms of the lexeme pull:
The train pulls the carriages up the hill (-s = simple present tense, third person singular)
The train pulled the carriages up the hill (-ed = simple past tense)
The train is pulling the carriages up the hill (-ing = present participle)
The train had to pull the carriages up the hill (to + root = infinitive)
In each example, a different morpheme is added to the root form of the verb, in order to convey some grammatical information related to the context in its particular sentence, as indicated in the brackets after each example. So, the PDE verb pull has four different word forms, plus its root form, which is used in a range of other contexts (I pull, you pull, they might pull, and so on). The OE word with the same meaning is teon ‘pull’. It has fifteen different word forms in addition to its root form, including tīehþ ‘he pulls’, teonde ‘pulling’, and tuge ‘you pulled’, which is the earliest recorded form of the PDE verb tug.
As well as verbs having a range of word forms in OE, nouns and adjectives also have far more than in PDE. Where modern nouns have only a plural inflection (usually, but not always -s in word forms like girls) and two genitive forms represented by an apostrophe (singular e.g. girl’s, plural e.g. girls’), or else by putting of in front of the possessor noun (e.g. the name of the girl), OE nouns have a whole range of different word forms. Similarly, while PDE adjectives often only have one word form (e.g. peaceful), OE adjectives are far more morphologically variable.
The following sections set out in detail all the parameters for variation in OE word forms, beginning with nouns, adjectives and verbs, then following on with other smaller word classes, such as conjunctions. The information in these pages should provide you with all the information you need to use the translator on this page to select the right word forms for each word in any sentence you wish to translate into Old English.
Enjoy!