In the Diachronic Substantive Declension

The Plural of Nouns in Modern English as Resulting

A substantive in Old Germanic languages consisted of three elements: the root, the stem-building suffix, the case inflection. Though in OE the stem-building suffix could not be identified any more it had affected the elaborate system of declensions, each of which had its own plural ending. Besides, the OE system of declensions was based on the gender of nouns, the phonetic structure of the word.

There were four types of noun declension: the strong declension with vocalic stems –a, -o, -i, -u, the weak declension with –n stems, the consonant declension with –r/-s stems and the root declension without any stem-forming suffix. Traces of all types of declension survived in Modern English plural forms.

About one third of OE nouns were masculine –a stems: cniht –cnihtas “knight”. In ME –as was reduced to -es. Neutrum –a stems had another ending: scip – scipu “ship”. If the noun was long-stemmed its Singular was homonymous to Plural: deor “animal”, sceap “sheep”, þinZ “thing”. Modern English sheep, deer, swine go back to this type of declension.

In the weak declension the plural forms of all genders contained the ending -an: nama – naman “name”, eara – earan “ear”, tunge – tungan “tongue”. The ending reduced to –en in MEand is preserved in oxen.

Consonant stems were presented by the stem suffix –r: fxder –fxdras, modor – modra. A small group of nouns used to contain –s stems, though in OE it had undergone rotacism and changed into –r which was found in the plural:

Cild “child” – cildru, lamb – lambru.

The root-stem nouns originally ended in –iz in the plural, the so called i-umlaut affected the narrowing of the root vowel: man – men, boc “book” - bec.

In ME simplification of noun morphology is revealed in the category of number, though it proved the most stable of all the nominal categories. The ending –es became the marker of most nouns: ships, names, mothers, lambs, books. The ending –en lost its productivity though it marked chlidren, brethren originally not belonging to the weak declension.

It follows that the majority of English nouns have preserved and even reinforced the formal distinction of number.

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