Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 275
Singular Plural
Nominative hund hund-əs
Accusative hund hund-əs
Genitive hund-əs hund-ə
Dative hund-ə hund-ə
Previous distinctions between dative singular and dative plural, genitive singular and
nominative plural, and so on, disappeared.
The distinction between singular and plural forms in Middle English was preserved by
the continuance of the phoneme /s/, which survived also to mark the genitive singular
forms. A genitive plural /s/ was added by analogy with the singular. The loss of case
endings also obliterated the gender distinctions that were found among Old English
forms. Sound change further modified the internal structure of morphemes such as hund,
subject to the result of the Great Vowel Shift, which diphthongized /u/ to /au/ and
resulted in:
Present-day English
Singular Plural
hound /haund/ hounds /haundz/
hound’s /haundz/ hounds’ /haundz/
Classical Latin contained six cases, which were reduced in the popular Latin speech of
the Empire, and finally disappeared altogether in the Romance languages with the
exception of Rumanian.
Increasing stress patterns in Popular Latin gradually neutralized the differences
between long and short vowels by creating long vowels in accented syllables and short
vowels in unaccented syllables regardless of the original arrangement. With the
concomitant loss of final -m in the accusative, the nominative, vocative, accusative, and
ablative forms merged. The genitive and dative conformed to the rest of the pattern by
analogy.
As in English, the loss of the case system brought on a more extensive and frequent
use of prepositions and a more rigid word order to designate the relationships formerly
employed by case functions.
Classical Latin Popular Latin French
Sing.
Nom. porta porta la porte
Voc. porta porta la porte
Acc. portam porta la porte
Gen. portae de porta de la porte