When did English lose inflection?

At the end of the Old English period (end of the 11th century), the word endings (containing inflectional markers) became less articulated: Inflection vowels such as -a, -e, -u, and -an appeared to be uniformly reduced (weakened) to -e, (pronounced [ə] , or schwa).

Why did England lose inflection?

The reason why English lost most of its inflection actually has very little to do with grammar at all – it is caused by sound change. English heavily reduced all non-accented syllables, which, given the IE inflection being based on suffixes and endings, resulted in mergers and loss of most of these endings.

Is English an inflected language?

Modern English is considered a weakly inflected language, since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals, the pronouns), and its regular verbs have only four forms: an inflected form for the past indicative and subjunctive (looked), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative (looks).

What was the cause of losing inflectional endings in early English?

It is known that the Celtic languages which were in England before the arrival of the continental Germanic tribes showed considerable weakening in the articulation of consonants — a phonetic process known as lenition — and that this led to the ultimate loss of many inflections in these languages (Modern Welsh and …

Was Old English inflected?

Old English was a highly inflected language which means that nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners were inflected to indicate case, gender and number. Hence, the Old English grammar is much more closely related to modern German than the English we currently speak.

Was Middle English inflected?

The Middle English period was an era of great inflection reduction. As a result, the inflectional system of nouns was radically simplified. Old English endings -a, -u, -e all merged into the only ending -e surviving in Middle English.

Is Russian an inflected language?

Russian is an inflected language. This means that the meaning of the word changes depending on the stress placed on a particular syllable.

Is German an inflected language?

German is an inflected language with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and strong and weak verbs. High German, the language of the southern highlands of Germany, is the official written language.

What is the most inflected language?

Hungarian is a highly inflected language in which nouns can have up to 238 possible forms.

What language was Old English?

Old English language, also called Anglo-Saxon, language spoken and written in England before 1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. Scholars place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages.

When did Old English stop being used?

Old English – the earliest form of the English language – was spoken and written in Anglo-Saxon Britain from c. 450 CE until c. 1150 (thus it continued to be used for some decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066).

Did Old English have articles?

Article. The and that are common developments from the same Old English system. Old English had a definite article se (in the masculine gender), sēo (feminine), and þæt (neuter). In Middle English, these had all merged into þe, the ancestor of the Modern English word the.

Why has English lost most of its inflection?

The reason why English lost most of its inflection actually has very little to do with grammar at all – it is caused by sound change. English heavily reduced all non-accented syllables, which, given the IE inflection being based on suffixes and endings, resulted in mergers and loss of most of these endings.

Why is the history of the English language of significance?

Rewritten August. 2, 1999 The history of the English language is of significance because English is spoken more frequently than any other language except Chinese, according to the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (410).

When did English become a separate language from German?

It is impossible to say just when English became a separate language, rather than just a German dialect, although it seems that the language began to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental Germanic languages, by around 600 AD.

Why are there so few non-accented syllables in English?

English heavily reduced all non-accented syllables, which, given the IE inflection being based on suffixes and endings, resulted in mergers and loss of most of these endings. Note that when the inflection is stressed, it is typically also preserved, i.e. the shortest words like the various forms of verb to be or the pronouns.