The subject of history of English

36. Nominal Parts of Speech in Early Modern English

In late modern English the ending –es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the plural. In early New English it extended to more nouns- to the new words appearing in English vocabulary, to many words of other way of plural formation or which employed –es as just of the variant endings.

Thus, we see that the complicated noun paradigm that existed in Old English was greatly simplified in Middle English, which is reflected in the following:

1. reduction of the number of declensions.

2. reduction of the number of grammatical categories

3. reduction of the number of categorial forms within one of two remaining grammatical categories- the category of number.

The plural ending –es underwent several phonetic changes: the voicing of fricatives and the loss of unstressed vowels in the final syllables.
The Middle English plural ending –en lost its former productivity and is found nowdays only in oxen, children and brothren, poetic kine (cow). (Children and brothren in Old English belonged to the es-stems with –ru in the plural.)
The small group of Middle English nouns with homonymous forms of the singular and plural has been reduced to three “exceptions” in Modern English: deer, sheep, and swine.
The group of former root-stems has survived as exceptions man, tooth and the like.
The nouns wife-wives and the like have retained consonant interchange.
Now a few words about exception tooth- teeth. In Old English plural ending was –i: tōp- tōp+i. Letter ō compared to the ending –i: top > tēp > tēth > teeth
Also the words foot- feet, goose- geese.
All modern irregular noun forms are according to their origin.