In Proto-Germanic the morphological structure of a noun was very transparent and consisted of three elements: a root, a stem formative, and an inflectional ending. The stem formative characterised the noun as belonging unambiguously to one of many nominal declensions.
By the time of Old English, however, stem formatives were no longer distinguishable, suffering the fate of other medial unstressed syllables. In no nominal paradigm of Old English can one find any morphological element that would unambiguously serve as its characteristic feature. Therefore, there is no synchronic motivation for preserving the Proto-Germanic descriptive framework when classifying Old English nouns. And yet, this perspective is widely adopted even in very recent publications; Old English nouns can be classified into three groups which include words with:
- vocalic stems, ending in -a-, -o-, -i-, -u- (...);
- consonantal stems, ending in -n-, -r-, -o-, -nd-, -iz/az-;
- and root-consonant stems;
all forming the respective declension types.
Welna's approach is probably the clearest example of using non-existent criteria to classify Old English nouns, but by no means an isolated one.
