The inflection of Latin masculine proper names in The Old English Martyrology

This paper focuses on the inflectional morphology of Latin masculine proper names in Old English. Most common Latin loans are perfectly integrated into the Old English system. Latin proper names, however, like late scholarly loans, show both Latin and Old English inflectional endings in an apparently chaotic distribution. By analysing a selection of 833 tokens from The Old English Martyrology, this paper shows that despite variation, a clear pattern resulting from a combination of the Latin and Old English systems can be detected. While the inflectional endings of one language dominate in some cases, e.g. Latin in the nominative and Old English in the dative, other inflections, e.g. the genitive thematic vowel + ‑s, result from a combination of both languages based on phonetic or spelling similarities. The result is a mixed paradigm predominantly modelled after Old English a-stem nouns.