Reflexes of older words

Older forms may still be found in fixed expressions. In English there is an expression" to wend one's weary way" (taken from a line in Thomas Grey’s Elegy in a Country Courtyard), which contains the verb 'wend' (cf. German wenden), which is an older verb meaning ‘to go’. This verb has died out but the past form of the present verb 'go' derives from this source. This process is known as suppletion, the appearance of a form from one paradigm in another paradigm in which it did not originally occur.

Reflexes of older words may be available in different word classes. For instance the only reflex of Old English "wyrd" (‘destiny’) is the present-day adjective "weird". A reflex may also be contained in a compound as with Old English"wer" (a common Indo-European word, cf. Latin virus) does not exist anymore but is found in the compound "werewolf" (‘man-wolf’). Another Old English word for ‘man’, "guma", is contained in"bridegroom" (originally 'brydguma') but by folk etymology the second element was re-interpreted as 'groom'.

Remnants of processes involving vowels are also to be found in Modern English. Take the alternation 'keep : kept' which has a long : short vowel alternation because in Old English there was a general shortening of vowels before double consonants: 'cēpan : cēpte' became 'cēpan : cepte'. This also applied to cases of gemination as with 'blēdan : bledde (< blēdde)' which with the later loss of geminates resulted in' bleed : bled'.

WORKING BACKWARDS: UNRAVELLING SOUND CHANGES The techniques illustrated above all involve the undoing of changes in order to arrive at any original form of some earlier stage of a language. This working backwards is a common method for gaining knowledge of former periods. It consists basically of reversing known changes in order to gain time depth in one’s investigation. A complete example of this technique is offered here to show that useful results can be achieved here. The goal of the present exercise is to show what the original singular ~ plural alternation was for a word pair which shows an irregular alternation in Modern English, mouse ~ mice.

Original alternation	/mu:s/-sg : /mu:si/-pl
Singular:
/mu:s/ + vowel shift	/maus/
Plural:
/mu:si/ + i-umlaut	/my:si/
/my:si/ + inflectional loss	/my:s/
/my:s/ + unrounding	/mi:s/
/mi:s/ + vowel shift	/mais/

Source: www.uni-due.de

The older noun system

The noun system of Old English was quite complex with 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and 4 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative). In the history of English this was simplified considerably. The cases were reduced to nominative and genitive and the phenomenon of grammatical gender was lost.

In addition to gender and case Old English had a variety of plural types just like Modern German. The number of these has steadily declined throughout the centuries. This demise can be documented quite clearly and the reduction in diversity shows a definite sequence which can be summarised as follows:

umlaut plurals	man ~ men
/r/-plurals	child ~ childer
/n/-plurals	ox ~ oxen
/s/-plurals	stone ~ stones

It is clear from Old English that the umlaut plurals declined quite rapidly. We have words like 'cu' with an original plural 'cy' (compare German 'Kuh ~ Kühe') which later becomes 'cyne' (cf. the Early Modern English form 'kine'. /r/ plurals are replaced by nasal plurals in the early Middle English period as the present-day form 'children' shows which has a nasal ending added to an original 'childer' (/r/-plural). The nasal plurals themselves pass into decline by the late Middle English period (Chaucer still has 'eyen' for modern 'eyes').

The effects of the above changes on the morphology of Middle English were very considerable. They led to a loss of distinctiveness among grammatical endings so that the various declensional classes of Old English collapsed, with the dative plural remaining for a while the only case — with a final nasal /-n/ — which was distinctive, but even that was reduced in the course of the Middle English period. A direct consequence of this was that the more common declensions were generalised and used productively. The two main ones are the s-type and the nasal type as seen in the Old English words "stān" (stone) : "stānas" (stones) and "ēage" (eye) : "ēagan" (eyes) respectively. For a while the nasal declension was productive as is seen in its addition to the old r-plural"child : childer > child(e)ren" to give the doubly marked plural which has survived to the present day. The north of the country was as always innovative and by about 1200 nouns are commonly found with a plural and a genitive singular in /-s/, this then spreading to the south somewhat later and with time it replaced virtually all nasal plurals. There are a few remainders into the time of Shakespeare — e.g. eyen, shoon, housen — but these have been brought into line with the universal s-plural so that nowadays there are only three nasal plurals remaining: oxen, children and brethren (a double plural with an umlaut of 'brother' and a nasal ending).

There are a few other plural types of which reflexes still exist in English. Most noticeable are umlaut plurals which are the forerunners to the modern word pairs 'foot : feet', 'goose : geese', 'man : men', 'mouse : mice'. These nouns are part of the core of English vocabulary and are nearly all terms for humans, parts of the body or familiar animals. Still less significant are the few examples of zero plurals, all terms for animals as in 'sheep : sheep', 'deer : deer', 'fish : fish' (an analogical plural form 'fishes' also exists).

Be careful to distinguish these instances of inherited plural types from cases which are derived from direct imports from Latin or Greek. Hence in Modern English one has pairs like 'formula : formulae', 'criterion : criteria' which are direct loans from Latin and Greek respectively and show the plural endings typical of these languages.

The reduction in morphological variation which is found with nouns applied to other word-classes as well. Adjectives lost their endings so that the previous distinction between a strong and weak declension — as with Modern German 'dichter Nebel' and 'der dichte Nebel' — was lost.

Equally one can notice a loss in grammatical gender in the transition from Old to Middle English. The older stage of the language showed three genders as in Modern German, masculine, feminine and neuter, distributed on arbitrary grounds, e.g. the word 'wīf' was neuter (cf. German 'das Weib'). There were three forms of the definite article: þe, sē and sēo. By the end of the Middle English period there was only one form, the modern 'the' (which derives from Old English 'þe'). The consequence of the loss of grammatical gender is that it was replaced by natural gender in most instances. There are examples in Modern English in which another gender is used — for instance, a feminine reference is used for technical objects such as cars, planes or ships — but this is more an analogical extension of natural gender rather than a survival of grammatical gender.

Source: www.uni-due.de

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