3. What Happened to English Grammar?

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 3.

What Happened to English Grammar?

Where did English cases and grammatical genders go?

People who learn English soon notice something pleasant: unlike in Spanish, they do not have to decide whether table is masculine or feminine (la mesa). They do not have to think about whether house takes el or la. And with the adjective good they do not worry whether it describes a good man, a good woman or good children (bueno, buena, buenos).

It might seem that English has always been a language that did not care much about grammar. But if we went back to England a thousand years ago, we would be surprised. The English of that time had cases, grammatical genders, many verb endings and a system of word forms that would remind today's student more of German than of modern English.

A journey in time: stone was once stān

In Old English (roughly the 5th to the 11th century), nouns had different forms depending on their job in the sentence. Let us look at the word stān, today's stone. The pattern below is not the only Old English type of declension, but it shows the principle well.

Besides its basic form, today's stone has mainly the plural stones and the possessive form stone's. A lot of information that was once carried by an ending is now expressed differently: by word order, prepositions or articles. For example, of the stone can express a meaning that used to be expressed by the genitive.

Old English also had declined adjectives and articles. In a phrase with a noun, the form of the article and the adjective could change. Students of today's English have kept an advantage: a good house and a good book have the same good.

Surprise: the sun was feminine

Old English had three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. But they were not a simple label for biological sex. For example, sunne (sun) was feminine and mōna (moon) was masculine. Even more surprising is wīf – a word for a woman that was grammatically neuter.

Compare the old forms of the demonstrative, which also worked a bit like today's definite article: se with masculine nouns, sēo with feminine nouns and þæt with neuter nouns. In most situations they were all eventually replaced by our familiar, unchanging the.

Modern English no longer has a system of genders for nouns. It still distinguishes he, she and it in some pronouns. But that is not the same thing: it is mainly about meaning and reference, not a compulsory grammatical category of every noun. That is why the table can always simply be the table.

How did the endings become history?

Language change does not have one "simplify" button. In the case of English, several processes worked together for centuries. Some unstressed vowels in endings became weaker, started to sound alike and gradually disappeared. When you can no longer hear the difference between two forms, it is easier to stop using the grammatical distinction they carried.

The second part of the story was language contact. The Vikings brought Old Norse to England – a language closely related to Old English, but with different endings. Long years of living together may have supported some changes; how big a part it played is still being researched. After 1066, Norman French strongly influenced the vocabulary and the social position of English. But it would be too simple to say that "the Vikings removed the cases" or that "the Normans are to blame for everything".

By the late Middle Ages, English had moved a long way from a language that attached a lot of information to words as endings towards a language that more often expresses it with separate words and their order. Linguists call these types synthetic and analytic languages. But they are two extremes rather than fixed boxes.

When endings disappear, order matters more

In Spanish you can say "El perro mordió al hombre" and also "Al hombre lo mordió el perro". Thanks to the little word a (the "personal a") and the pronoun lo, both sentences mean practically the same. In English, a similar change of word order would change who bit whom.

Old English did not have completely free word order; it had its usual sentence patterns. But because endings also marked the relations, it could be more flexible in some structures. In modern English, the basic order subject – verb – object (SVO) has become much more important. When the language lost one way of expressing relations, other ways became stronger.

We carry the remains of old cases in our pockets every day

Cases did not disappear from English completely. They survived mainly in personal pronouns. That is why we say I saw him, not Me saw he. And the difference between who and whom recalls the old case contrasts, even though whom is now giving way in everyday speech.

Another leftover is the possessive 's: the teacher's book. Its distant relative is the Old English genitive ending -es. But the modern 's behaves much more freely than the old declension: it can be attached at the end of a whole phrase, for example the King of England's crown.

Why do we have children, mice and oxen?

Imagine that most of the old ways of forming the plural disappeared, but a few common words refused to leave. That is exactly what happened in English. Today -s/-es dominates, but older grammatical patterns still survive in a few frequent words.

We see a similar "museum" effect in verbs: sing – sang – sung, drink – drank – drunk, drive – drove – driven. Irregularity is often not a fault in the system but a leftover of old Germanic verb classes. Not every irregular form has the same history, though.

Fewer endings, but more helpers

The story does not end there. Modern English has built a very detailed system of auxiliary verbs. It can combine be, have, do and modal verbs to express time relations, ongoing actions, the passive, negation, questions or the speaker's attitude.

The auxiliary do in questions and negatives is not a usual European pattern. Its present use spread mainly in late Middle English and Early Modern English. That is why Shakespeare could use structures that look like today's English next to others that sound unusual to us.

So is today's English "simpler"?

Only in some ways. Compared with Old English, it has fewer word endings and most nouns have lost their compulsory grammatical gender. On the other hand, its word order, articles, auxiliary verbs and aspect differences make other demands. In the same way, Spanish is not "more difficult in everything" just because its verbs have dozens of forms. Languages share out grammatical information differently; we cannot rank them from primitive to advanced.

Conclusion: grammar did not disappear. It moved.

Today's English is the result of more than a thousand years of rebuilding an old language system. It lost a large part of its declension, its grammatical genders and many verb endings. At the same time, it kept fossils of ancient rules and developed new tools – a firmer word order, prepositions and auxiliary verbs. So you do not have to learn seven cases of the word table, but you do have to learn the difference between I work, I am working and I have been working.

So next time someone tells you that English has no grammar, you can answer: it has plenty. It just keeps it in different places today.