Singular Old English Middle English Modern English

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 599.

Plural

The loss of case

Old English had a complex system of case and gender marking. Nouns were divided into three classes – masculine, feminine, and neuter. Assignment to a gender class was not based simply on sex (natural gender); for example, the word for stone was masculine and the word for sun, feminine. Each gender class was associated with a different set of case endings.

Table 8.22Old English case affixes

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Masculine Feminine Neuter

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Singular

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hund 'dog' gief 'gift' dēor 'wild animal'

Nominative hund gief-u dēor

Accusative hund gief-e dēor

Genitive hund-es gief-e dēor-es

Dative hund-e gief-e dēor-e

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Nominative hund-as gief-a dēor

Accusative hund-as gief-a dēor

Genitive hund-a gief-a dēor-a

Dative hund-um gief-um dēor-um

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The following Old English sentence contains all four case categories.

2)

Se cniht geaf geif-e s hierd-es sun-e.

The youth-Nom gave gift-Ac the shepherd-Gen son-Dat

'The youth gave a gift to the shephered's son'.

By the fifteenth century, English case endings had changed radically. The /m/ of the dative plural suffix had been lost, and unstressed vowels in the case endings had all been reduced to the short, lax vowel [ ], thus obliterating many of the earlier case and gender distinctions. (The following examples also include changes to the stem-internal vowels as the result of various processes, including the Great Vowel Shift.)

Table 8.23 The loss of case affixes in the English word hound

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Nominative /hund/ /hu:nd/ /hawnd/ 'hound'

Accusative /hund/ /hu:nd/ /hawnd/ 'hound'

Genitive /hund-es/ /hu:nd- s/ /hawnd-z/ 'hound's'

Dative /hund-e/ /hu:nd- / /hawnd/ 'hound'

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Plural

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Nominative /hund-as/ /hu:nd- s/ /hawnd-z/ 'hounds'

Accusative /hund-as/ /hu:nd- s/ /hawnd-z/ 'hounds'

Genitive /hund-a/ /hu:nd- / /hawnd-z/ 'hounds'

Dative /hund-um/ /hu:nd- / /hawnd-z/ 'hounds'

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In the loss of case endings, we have an example of how a modification to the morphological component of the grammar was probably triggered by phonological change (final consonant loss and vowel reduction).

2.