The Noun

Root vs. stem, thematic vs. athematic

Traditional Germanistic discourse is often ‘historical’ in a rather opaque way (cf. the discussion of ablaut grades in chapter 5). Categories from older (even reconstructed) Indo-European are treated as ‘still there’, even if their traces are invisible to any but a well-trained eye. This is particularly true of the morphology sections of older handbooks, which refer to nouns for instance as a-stems, i-stems or ō-stems. It's not easy however for the student to see why OE stān ‘stones’, lār ‘learning’, dæd ‘deed’ respectively should be said to belong to these classes. Such terms are not directly descriptive, but rather invoke characters of ancestral IE nouns or those in more ancient dialects, certainly not (generally) of attested Germanic ones. The same is true for descriptions of verbs: e.g. of gān ‘go’, dōn ‘do’ as ‘athematic root-verbs’, or ‘to be’, with its present forms eam, eart, is as a ‘-mi-present’. This chapter and the next aim to clarify such matters, and make the handbooks more usable (as well as making OE morphology more historically transparent).

The point of departure is IE word-structure, at least the structure of major-category words like nouns and verbs. We have already introduced (§5.4) the IE root: an element assumed to carry the lexical sense of a word-form, and in its oldest and perhaps commonest form a /CVC-/ structure with possible extensions of uncertain semantic function.