A grammar of English

The last major level at which the English has changed considerably from the old English period to the modern is GRAMMAR. The heads are : (1) The dropping of inflections (2)  The discard of grammatical gender (3) The increase importance of word order. There have been many other changes too.

One of the great changes that have taken place in the grammar of English is the dropping of inflections. Inflections are changes in the form of a word, its ending or spelling. It is in order to show its grammatical functions in a sentence. Thus the plural endings of nouns, or the past tens endings of verbs, are inflections. Now old English was a highly inflected language. Not only nouns and verbs, but even adjectives and pronouns had inflectional endings which showed their grammatical relationship with the rest of the sentence.

Most of these inflections are not found in modern English. In fact, you find that most of them had disappeared even by the Middle English period. A present, nouns have only plural and genitive endings, though pronouns have different case-forms (e.g...I,me,my,mind ). The transition from Old English to Middle English  (and Modern English) is thus marked by a decay of inflections.

The second major change in English which is a consequence of the first, is the increased important of word order. There is difference between English and Hindi so far as dependence on word order is concerned.

The major change the Old English to Modern English is the loss of grammatical gender. Now gender is the term or system in grammar by which words are classify in to a few categories. Most language have a three way distinction; masculine, feminine and neuter gender. 

On the other hand, in a language which follows grammatical gender, the assignment to gender is generally arbitrary. However, even by the time of Middle English, the system of grammatical gender has almost been abandoned by the Modern English period it was completely gone. Gender distinction is now visible only the case of pronounce