3.8.2.3. Decay of Noun Declensions

The OE system of noun declensions was undergoing a constant process of simplification and unification during the ME period. It was a slow process, which covered several centuries.

That process was much more intensive in the North than in the South.

The variety of types of declension found in OE no longer existed. With a few exceptions, the nouns had all gone over to the former masculine a-declension. In the South, however, the n-stem declension remained almost intact for a long time.

In Early ME in Northern and Midland dialects the endings of the nominative, dative and accusative cases, singular fell together, giving rise to the Common case. The genitive case survived, but its usage decreased compared to OE. It gradually narrowed its meaning to that of possession, hence the name Possessive case. However, unlike ModE, the possessive case was not restricted to nouns denoting living beings.

Old English	Middle English
Cases	Cases
Nominative	Common
Dative
Accusative
Genetive	Genetive (Possessive)

In Late ME, the two case system was established everywhere.

Cases The form of the Common case mostly goes back to the OE nominative and accusative cases, sometimes – to the OE dative case. Cf. OE Nominative, Accusative hwæl – Dative hwæle. In ModE, the form of the Dative case remained: whale < OE hwæle. Sometimes two different case forms of the same word split into 2 words, e.g. OE Nominative, Accusative sceadu > ME shāde (shade), OE Dative sceadwe > ME shadwe (shadow). Cf. ModE mead – meadow.

Genetive The singular ending -es spread to all numbers, so that, in fact, there were no distinctions between singular and plural (The inflexional word-form derivation was replaced by agglutination). So it became possible to join es to a group of words.

In 14-th c. literary texts (Midland dialect) the predominant type of declension is:

Case	Singular number	Plural number
Common	stǭn dǭr	stǭnes dǭres
Possessive	stǭnes dǭres	stǭnes dǭres

Several nouns with a root-stem, which had mutation in the nominative and accusative plural had the following system of declension:

Case	Singular number	Plural number
Common	man, fōt	men, fēt
Possessive	mannes, fōtes	mennes, fētes

In the XIII c. a specific possessive construction appeared, containing a possessive pronoun Arthur his men > Arthur’s men; the painter’ys name, where ’ys is regarded as a shortened form of his – literally «the painter his name». The initial h- of the pronoun his (due to its usually unstressed position) was often lost and coincided with the genitive endings -es, -is, -ys, promoting the use of the inflectional Genetive with animate nouns. In the XVII – XVIII cc. a new graphic marker of the Genetive came into use: the apostrophie, e.g. man’s, children’s.

In ME the Genetive case was not used in the function of an object to a verb or to an adjective. It was used only attributively. However, even in this function it had a rival – phrases with the preposition «of». In some texts there appears a certain differentiation: the inflectional Genetive is preferred with animate nouns, while the of-phrase is more widely used with inanimate ones.

With the loss of case endings, the role of prepositions grew even more important. Many prepositional phrases came to denote the relations formerly expressed by case forms. Some meanings of the preposition of were akin to those of the ME possessive case, e.g. the droghte of March (the drought of the March). Phrases with the preposition to replaced the Dative case in expressing the indirect object, e.g. Frenssch of Paris was to hire unknowe (Chaucer) (The French of Paris was unknown to her).