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instrumental case besides. Present day English has only two case for nouns- common case and possessive case. Adjectives now have no case system at all. On
the other hand, we now use a more rigid word order and more structure words prepostions, auxilieries, and the like to express relationships than Old English
did.
2.2 Middle English
The invaders from the northern regions of France brought a form of French with them. The new language became the official languabge of the
government, trade and the rulling class. The division of the classes began to include linguistics, with the upper or noble classes speaking French, while the
lower classes spoke Middle English. This contiuned until the 14th century when English once more became the common language. Middle English changed
considerably over the centuries to include a number of French words in the vocabulary.
2.2.1 Early Middle English
Early Middle English 1100 –1300 has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary
with many Norse borrowings in the northern parts of the country, but a greatly simplified inflectional system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in
Old English by the dative and locative cases are replaced in Early Middle English with prepositional constructions. This replacement is, however, incomplete: the
Old English genitive -es survives in the modern Saxon genitive —it is now
called the possessive: e.g., the form dogs for the longer of the dog. But most of the other case endings disappeared in the Early Middle English period,
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including most of the roughly one dozen forms of the definite article the. The dual grammatical number expressing exactly two of a thing also disappeared
from English during the Early Middle English period apart from personal pronouns, further simplifying the language.
Deeper changes occurred in the grammar. Gradually, the wealthy and the government Anglicised again, although Norman and subsequently French
remained the dominant language of literature and law until the 14th century, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the English
monarchy. The new English language did not sound the same as the old; for, as well as undergoing changes in vocabulary, the complex system of inflected
endings Old English had, was gradually lost or simplified in the dialects of spoken Middle English. This change was gradually reflected in its increasingly diverse
written forms as well. The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages,
and therefore cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population: English did, after all, remain the language of the vast
majority. It is also argued
[7]
that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that,
although Norse- and English-speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other, the Norse-speakers inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English
words influenced Middle Englishs loss of inflectional endings. Another argument is that the morphological simplifications were caused by Romano-Britons who
were bilingual in Old English and either Brittonic which lacks noun case or
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British Latin which may have lacked noun case, like most modern Romance languages.
2.3 Modern English
