Changes in

Grammar

Turki Alenazi

Faisal Almalki

Mohammed Qasem

Main points

The reduction of inflections

The loss of grammatical gender

THE INFLECTION OF NOUNS

PRONOUNS

Demonstrative Pronouns

Interrogative and Relative pronouns

The Reduction of inflections as a result of the merging of unstressed vowels into a single

sound the number of distinct inflectional endings in english

was drastically reduced. Middle English became a language

with few inflectional distinctions, whereas Old English as

have seen ,was relatively highly inflected, though less so than

Germanic, which was about as fully inflected as Latin.

Changes resulting from this new identity of vowel in

unstressed syllables were considerably more far-reaching

than what has been shown in the declension of the

adjective

Old English middle English Modern

English

Findan(inf.) finden find

Fundon (pret.pl.) founde(n) found

Funden (past part.) founde(n) found

The loss of Grammatical

Gender

One of the important results of the unstressed vowels was the loss of grammatical gender. The grammatical gender had begun to break down in Old English (pronouns and adjectives had four cases, according to the words function in the sentence.

In old english , gender was readily distinguishable in most nouns: masculine nominative-accusative plurals typically ended as femminines

In middle english on the other hand all but a handful of nouns acquired the same plural ending.

The infelection of nouns The structure of english was affected by the

leveling of of unstressed vowles.

The old english distinctive fiminine singular form with the nominative plural form,that is singular ‘denu’ and the plural ‘dena’ witch means ‘valley’ became for a while middle english ‘dene’

Old english genitive singular ‘speres’ and nominative plural ‘speru’ became middle english ‘speres’ modern english ‘spears’

Old english genitive singular ‘tale’ and nominative plural ‘tala’ became middle english ‘tales’

Few nouns did not conform to the pattern of forming the plural by suffixing ‘es’ for example ‘oxen’ ‘deer’ and ‘feet’

During the middle english period ,then all nouns were reduced to two forms just as in modern english ,one without ‘s’ used as a genitive singular and general plural form

pronouns These words alone preserved distictive subject

and object case form,except for the neuter pronouns , it,that,this and what

The dialect of middle english differed in the forms they used for the pronouns,for example ‘ik’ was a northern form corresponding to ‘ich’or elsewhere

The old english third person masculine accusative ‘hine’ survived into middle englishonly in the south elswhere ‘him’ took over

Demonstrative Pronouns Old English se, þæt, sēo, and plural þā, with

their various oblique (non-nominative)forms, were ultimately reduced to the, that, and plural thǭ.

The, which at first replaced only the masculine nominative se, came to be used as an invariable definite article.

That and thǭ were thus left as demonstrative pronouns.

Thǭ ultimately gave way to thǭs (ModE those).

Interrogative and Relative

Pronouns

The Old English masculine-feminine interrogative pronoun hwā became in Middle English whō, and the neuter form hwæt became what.

In Middle English whō was customarily used only as an interrogative pronoun oran indefinite relative meaning‘whoever’.

The oblique forms whōs and whōm, however, were used as relatives with reference to either persons or things in late Middle English.

The most frequently used relative pronoun in Middle English is indeclinable that.