Gram - SEAS

172 6 Clause-internal morphological changes
6.5 Loss
Table 6. 12 Old English stronga adjective
singular inflection
Masculine Neuter Feminine
Nominative god god god
Genitive godes godes godre
Dative godum godum godre
Instrumental gode gode godre
Accusative godne god gode
a The strong declension was used in the absence of a
demonstrative.
As we saw in connection with the Russian instrumental (Section 5.7),
and the Persian object marker (Section 6.4. 1 above), morphemes can often remain
stable for very long periods, shifting their function in broadly predictable ways
but persisting in their shape. Nonetheless, at the extreme end of the history of a
particular form as a grammatical marker we may find loss, either of form alone
or occasionally of both form and function. Examples of the loss of a form alone
occur whenever two or more competing forms exist for the same function, and one
is eventually selected at the expense of the others. We have cited many examples
of this phenomenon, including the specialization of the French negative pas from
among a wider set of possibilities, or the selection of periphrastic tenses and aspects
over inflectional ones in Late Latin and early Romance.
Similarly, whole inflectional paradigms can pass out of general use, as has
happened with the French "passe simple" such as elle s'evanouit 'she fainted.'
The same has almost happened with the German "imperfect" (i.e., preterit), where
er las 'he read' is fast receding. In both these instances the older paradigm remains
in written and formal registers, but is essentially dead in the colloquial registers.
"Renewal," that is, the replacement ofa dying form by a newer, usually periphrastic,
form with a similar meaning, is common in such cases. Thus the French "passe
simple" has been replaced as the ordinary past tense of the verb by the periphrastic
perfect (elle s'est evanouie 'she fainted'), and the German imperfect also is giving
way to the perfect (er hat gelesen 'he read').
More unusual is loss of both the morphological function that a form once served
and loss of the form itself (or absorption into the stem as a meaningless component).
In Old English, for example, adjectives still had case, number, and gender suffixes;
thus the singular of the adjective meaning 'good' was as shown in Table 6.12.