Theme: The main features of the Noun and the Adjectives in the Middle English period Contents: Introduction

Singular

Plural

Nominative	stõn	stõnes
Genitive	stõne	stõnes
Dative	stõn(e)	stõnes
Accusative	stõn	stones

The weak declension of nouns lost its characteristic feature - the suffix «n». In Middle English there remained only two cases -the Nominative and Accusative: singular, plural.

Singular

Plural

Nominative	nãme	nãmen
Genitive	nãmes	nãmen(e)
Dative	name	nãmen
Accusative	nãme	nãmen

Only the suffix «-es» of the Genitive case of masculine nouns of the stõn -type and the ending «-es» of plural of Nominative and Accusative of masculine nouns didn’t undergo any changes. In the 12th century all the nouns belonging to strong or weak declension systems also gained this suffix in the Genitive singular and plural. Thus we see that the English language in the Middle English period lost most of the flexions that existed in Old English. The Old English case inflections were ousted by prepositions and prepositional phrases to express various relations between the words in a sentence. There appeared such prepositions as to, of, with.⁴
Middle English – a period of roughly 300 years from around 1150 CE to around 1450 – is difficult to identify because it is a time of transition between two eras that each have stronger definition: Old English and Modern English. Before this period we encounter a language which is chiefly Old Germanic in its character – in its sounds, spellings, grammar and vocabulary. After this period we have a language which displays a very different kind of structure, with major changes having taken place in each of these areas, many deriving from the influence of French following the Norman Conquest of 1066.⁵
The Old English Gender, being a classifying feature, disappeared together with other distinctive features of the noun declensions. Division into genders played a certain role in the decay of the declension system: in Late Old English and Early Middle English nouns were grouped into classes or types of declension according to gender instead of stems. In the 11^th and 12^th c. the gender of nouns was deprived of its main formal support – the weakened and leveled endings of adjectives and adjective pronouns ceased to indicate gender. Semantically gender was associated with the differentiation of sex and therefore the formal grouping into genders was smoothly and naturally superseded by a semantic division into inanimate nouns, with a further subdivision of the latter into males and females.
The grammatical category of Case was preserved but underwent profound changes.
The number of cases in the noun paradigm was reduced from four to two in Late Middle English. Even in Old English the forms of the Nominative and Accusative. were not distinguished in the plural, and in some classes they coincided in the singular. In Early Middle English they fell together in both numbers. In the strong declension the Dative. was sometimes marked by -e in the Southern dialects; the form without the ending soon prevailed in all areas, and three Old English cases, Nominative, Accusative and Dative fell together. Henceforth they are called the Common case in present-day English. The Genitive. case was kept separate from the other forms, with more explicit formal distinctions in the singular than in the plural. In the 14^th c. the ending -es of the Genitive singular had become almost universal, there being only several exceptions – nouns which were preferably used in the uninflected form (some proper names, names of relationship). In the plural the Genitive case had no special marker – it was not distinguished from the Common case plural or from the Genitive singular. Several nouns with a weak plural form in -en or with a vowel interchange, such as oxen or men, added the marker of the Genitive case -es to these forms: oxenes, mennes. In the 17^th and 18^th c. a new graphic marker of the Gen. case came into use: the apostrophe.

The other grammatical category of the noun, Number proved to be the most stable of the nominal categories. The noun preserved the formal distinction of two numbers through all the historical periods. In Late ME the ending –es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the pl. It underwent several phonetic changes: the voicing of fricatives and the loss of unstressed vowels in final syllables: 1) after a voiced consonant or a vowel, e.g. ME stones [΄sto:nəs] > [΄stounəz] > [΄stounz], NE stones; 2) after a voiceless consonant, e.g. ME bookes [΄bo:kəs] > [bu:ks] > [buks], NE books; 3) after sibilants and affricates [s, z, ∫, t∫, dз] ME dishes [΄di∫əs] > [΄di∫iz], NE dishes. The Middle English plural ending – en, used as a variant marker with some nouns lost its former productivity, so that in Standard Mod E it is found only in oxen, brethren, and children. The small group of ME nouns with homonymous forms of number has been further reduced to three exceptions in Modern English: deer, sheep, and swine. The group of former root-stems has survived also only as exceptions: man, tooth and the like.^6