Content introduction chapter I peculiar use of noun in middle english

in vocabulary, English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the stylistic register of those words which survived from Old English. Eventually, various new stylistic layers emerged in the lexicon, which could be employed for a variety of different purposes.
One other factor marks out the bulk of our Middle English evidence from the bulk of our Old English or early modern English evidence, although it is less directly a matter of change in the language than in how it is represented in writing:³
the surviving Middle English material is dominated by regional variation, and by (sometimes extreme) variation in how the same underlying linguistic units are represented in writing. This is not because people suddenly started using language in different ways in different places in the Middle English period, but because the fairly standardized late Old English literary variety broke down completely, and writing in English became fragmented, localized, and to a large extent improvised.
Middle English retains only two distinct noun-ending patterns from the more complex system of inflection in Old English:

Middle English nouns
Nouns	Strong nouns		Weak nouns
	Singular	Plural	Singular