Changes in Grammar in Middle and Early New English

The changes in English grammar may be described as a general reduction of inflections. Endings of the noun and adjective marking distinctions of number and case and often of gender were so altered in pronunciation as to lose their distinctive form and hence their usefulness. To some extent the same thing is true of the verb. This leveling of inflectional endings was due partly to phonetic changes, partly to the operation of analogy. The phonetic changes were simple but far-reaching. The earliest seems to have been the change of final m to n wherever it occurred, i.e., in the dative plural of nouns and adjectives and in the dative singular (masculine and neuter) of adjectives when inflected according to the strong declension. Thus, mūðum >mūðun, gōdum>gōdun. This n, along with the n of the other inflectional endings, was then dropped (*muðu, *gōdu). At the same time, the vowels a, o, u, e in inflectional endings were obscured to a sound, the so-called “indeterminate vowel”, which came to be written e (less often i,y, u, depending on place and date). As a result, a number of originally distinct endings such as a, u, e, an, um were reduced generally to a uniform e, and such grammatical distinctions as they formerly expressed were no longer conveyed. Traces of these changes have been found in Old English manuscripts as early as the 10th century. By the end of the 12th century they seem to have been generally carried out. The leveling is somewhat obscured in the written language by the tendency of scribes to preserve the traditional spelling, and in some places the final n was retained even in the spoken language, especially as a sign of the plural. The effect of these changes on the inflection of the noun and the adjective, and the further simplification that was brought about by the operation of analogy, may be readily shown [10; 20; 22; 46].

Middle English Noun

A glance at the few examples of common noun declensions in Old English will show how seriously the inflectional endings were disturbed. For example, in the London English of Chaucer in the strong masculine declension the forms muð, mūðe, mūðe, mūð in the singular, and mūða, mūða and mūðum, mūðas in the plural were reduced to three: mūð, mūðes, and mūðe. In such words the e, which was organic in the dative singular and the genitive and dative plural (i.e., stood for an ending in the Old English paradigm), was extended by analogy to the nominative and accusative singular, so that forms like stōne, mūðe appear, and the only distinctive termination is the s of the possessive singular and of the nominative and accusative plural. Because these two cases of the plural were those most frequently used, the s came to be thought of as the sign of the plural and was extended to all plural forms. We get thus an inflection of the noun identical with that which we have today. Other declensions suffered even more, so that in many words like giefu, sunu, the distinctions of case and even of number were completely obliterated.

In early Middle English only two methods of indicating the plural remained fairly distinctive: the s or es from the strong masculine declension and the en (as in oxen) from the weak. And for a time, at least in southern England, it would have been difficult to predict that the -s would become the almost universal sign of the plural that it has become. Until the 13th century the en plural enjoyed great favor in the south, being often added to nouns which had not belonged to the weak declension in Old English. But in the rest of England the s plural (and genitive singular) of the old first declension (masculine) was apparently felt to be so distinctive that it spread rapidly. Its extension took place most quickly in the north. Even in Old English many nouns originally of other declensions had gone over to this declension in the Northumbrian dialect. By 1200 s was the standard plural ending in the north and north Midland areas; other forms were exceptional. Fifty years later it had conquered the rest of the Midlands, and in the course of the 14th century it had definitely been accepted all over England as the normal sign of the plural in English nouns. Its spread may have been helped by the early extension of s throughout the plural in Anglo-Norman, but in general it may be considered as an example of the survival of the fittest in language.

One of the consequences of the decay of inflections described above was the elimination of that troublesome feature of language, grammatical gender. The gender of Old English nouns was not often determined by meaning. Sometimes it was in direct contradiction with the meaning. Thus woman (OE wīf-mann) was masculine, because the second element in the compound was masculine; wife and child, like German Weib and Kind, were neuter. Moreover, the gender of nouns in Old English was not so generally indicated by the declension as it is in a language like Latin. Instead it was revealed chiefly by the concord of the strong adjective and the demonstratives. These by their distinctive endings generally showed, at least in the singular, whether a noun was masculine, feminine, or neuter. When the inflections of these gender distinguishing words were reduced to a single ending for the adjective, and the fixed forms of the, this, that, these, and those for the demonstratives, the support for grammatical gender was removed. The weakening of inflections and the confusion and loss of the old gender proceeded in a remarkably parallel course. In the north, where inflections weakened earliest, grammatical gender disappeared first. In the south it lingered longer because there the decay of inflections was slower.

The present method of determining gender was no sudden invention of Middle English times. The recognition of sex that lies at the root of natural gender is shown in Old English by the noticeable tendency to use the personal pronouns in accordance with natural gender, even when such use involves a clear conflict with the grammatical gender of the antecedent. For example, the pronoun it in Etað þisne hlaf (masculine), hit is mīm līchama (Ælfric’s Homilies) is exactly in accordance with modern usage when we say, Eat this bread, it is my body. Such a use of the personal pronouns is clearly indicative of the feeling for natural gender even while grammatical gender was in full force. With the disappearance of grammatical gender sex became the only factor in determining the gender of English nouns [20; 28; 54].