Word Order and Cases Now that you h

Word Order and Cases

Now that you have made yourself familiar with the parts of speech and the way different types of words function in a sentence to make meaning, we are ready to move on to Old English itself.
Modern English is what is called an analytic language. For the most part, it uses the order of words in a sentence to indicate grammatical and logical relationships.

Thus
The dog ate the cat
Means something very different from
The cat ate the dog.
Both sentences are made up of the same words, but they mean totally different things. Why? Because we have used the arrangement of words in the sentence to specify which word is the subject and which is the direct object.
In the first example, we know that "dog" is the subject of the sentence because it comes before the verb. Likewise, we know that "cat" is the object of the sentence (it receives the action) because it comes after the verb ("ate").
Things didn't work exactly this way in Old English.
Old English (like Latin, Greek, Russian and many other languages) is an inflected language. Instead of relying on word order to indicate relationships, Old English attaches endings to each word to indicate relationships.
Different endings mark words as subjects (the thing performing an action), direct objects (things directly receiving the action), indirect objects (things indirectly receiving the action and objects of prepositions), objects of prepositions, and genitives (things possessed by other things).
(If you aren't sure you completely understand these different word functions, go back to the previous chapter of Grammar Review and look over the explanations. If you haven't already, you can do some practice exercises).
Because word endings indicate grammatical relationships, word order is not nearly as important in Old English as it is in Modern English. Therefore words in a sentence can be arranged in various ways without changing the meaning of a sentence (there are of course some limits in this flexibility. The study of these rules and regularities is the field of Old English syntax. In general, syntax in poetry is more flexible than syntax in prose).
Thus, in Old English
Dog+(subject ending) ate cat+(object ending).
means exactly the same thing as:
Cat+(object ending) ate dog+(subject ending).
and also the same thing as:
Ate dog+(subject ending) cat+(object ending).
and also the same as:
cat+(object ending) dog+(subject ending) ate.
On the other hand,
Dog+(object ending) ate cat+(subject ending)
means something entirely different.

You need not panic at this point: we do in fact use endings in Modern English to indicate grammatical function (think of "-ing", "-tion", "-ly", "-y" and others).
To understand Old English, you do not need to learn (very much) about word order. You do, however, need to learn your endings and their grammatical functions.
Endings for nouns, pronouns and adjectives in Old English are divided into five categories of grammatical function called cases. A list and brief description is given below. Click on each case for further information.

Nominative: The naming case; used for subjects.
Genitive: The possession case; used to indicate ownership.
Accusative: The direct object case; used to indicate direct receivers of an action.
Dative / Instrumental: The indirect object and prepositional case; used to indicate indirect receivers of action and objects of prepositions. Also used to indicate things that are being used ("instruments").
A list of all the possible endings for a word is called a declension. In Old English, nouns, pronouns and adjectives are all declined; that is, they change their endings based upon their grammatical function (or the grammatical function of the words they modify) in the sentence.