1. Middle English period great change Middle English Verbal System

Loss of Grammatical Gender.

One of the consequences of the decay of inflections described above was the elimination of that troublesome feature of language, grammatical gender. As explained in 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. Our 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 hlāf (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.