In addition to the Latin and the French (which was itself principally of Latin origin), there was, thirdly, the Anglo-Saxon, to which the middle and the lower classes of the English stubbornly adhered.  The Loss of Inflections.—­Anglo-Saxon was a language with changing endings, like modern German.  If a Saxon wished to say, “good gifts,” he had to have the proper case endings for both the adjective and the noun, and his expression was g=ode giefa.  For “the good gifts,” he said eth=a g=odan giefa, inflecting “the” and at the same time changing the case ending of “good.”

The Norman Conquest helped to lop off these endings, which German has never entirely lost.  We, however, no longer decline articles or ordinary adjectives.  Instead of having our attention taken up with thinking of the proper endings, we are left free to attend to the thought rather than to the vehicle of its expression.  Although our pronouns are still declined, the sole inflection of our nouns, with the exception of a few like ox, oxen, or mouse, mice, is the addition of ’s, s, or es for the possessive and the plural.  Modern German, on the other hand, still retains these troublesome case endings.  How did English have the good fortune to lose them?

Whenever two peoples, speaking different languages, are closely associated, there is a tendency to drop the terminations and to use the stem word in all grammatical relations.  If an English-speaking person, who knows only a little German, travels in Germany, he finds that he can make himself understood by using only one form of the noun or adjective.  If he calls for “two large glasses of hot milk,” employing the incorrect expression, zwei gross Glass heiss Milch, he will probably get the milk as quickly as if he had said correctly, zwei grosse Glaeser heisse Milch.  Neglect of the proper case endings may provoke a smile, but the tourist prefers that to starvation.  Should the Germans and the English happen to be thrown together in nearly equal numbers on an island, the Germans would begin to drop the inflections that the English could not understand, and the German language would undergo a change.

If there were no books or newspapers to circulate a fixed form of speech, the alteration in the spoken tongue would be comparatively rapid.

Such dropping of terminations is precisely what did happen before the Norman Conquest in those parts of England most overrun by the Danes.  There, the adjectives lost their terminations to indicate gender and case, and the article “the” ceased to be declined.

Even if the Normans had not come to England, the dropping of the inflections would not have ceased.  Many authorities think that the grammatical structure of English would, even in the absence of that event, have evolved into something like its present form.  Of course the Norman Conquest hastened many grammatical changes that would ultimately have resulted from inherent causes, but it did not exercise as great an influence as was formerly ascribed to it.  Philologists find it impossible to assign the exact amount of change due to the Conquest and to other causes.  Let us next notice some changes other than the loss of inflections.