A History of English Language

Middle english 149
is clear that the -e ending of the weak and plural forms was available for use in poetry in
both the East and West Midlands until the end of the fourteenth century, it is impossible
to know the most usual status of the form in the spoken language. Certainly adjectival
inflections other than -e, such as Chaucer’s oure aller cok, were archaic survivals by the
close of the Middle English period. 5 115. The Pronoun.
The decay of inflections that brought about such a simplification of the noun and the
adjective as has just been described made it necessary to depend less upon formal
indications of gender, case, and (in adjectives) number, and to rely more upon
juxtaposition, word order, and the use of prepositions to make clear the relation of words
in a sentence. This is apparent from the corresponding decay of pronominal inflections,
where the simplification of forms was due in only a slight measure to the weakening of
final syllables that played so large a part in the reduction of endings in the noun and the
adjective. The loss was greatest in the demonstratives. Of the numerous forms of sē, sēo,
þæt (cf. § 44) we have only the and that surviving through Middle English and continuing
in use today. A plural tho (those) survived to Elizabethan times. All the other forms
indicative of different gender, number, and case disappeared in most dialects early in the
Middle English period. The same may be said of the demonstrative þēs, þēos, þis 6 (this).
Everywhere but in the south the neuter form þis came to be used early in Middle English
for all genders and cases of the singular, while the forms of the nominative plural were
similarly extended to all cases of the plural, appearing in Modern English as those and
these.
In the personal pronoun the losses were not so great. Most of the distinctions that
existed in Old English were retained (see the paradigm given in § 45). However the forms
of the dtive and accusative cases were early combined, generally under that of the dative
(him, her, [t]hem). In the neuter the form of the accusative (h)it became the general
objective case, partly because
5
In context oure aller cok is translated ‘the cock who wakened us all,’ where the r of aller ‘of us
all’ indicates the genitive plural of al. Today we have what may be considered an inflected
adjective in such combinations as men students, women soldiers.
6
In Old English it had the following inflection: