1. Formation of the plural from the historical point of view

There are six principal ways of formation of the plural in Modern English:

1. The most productive suffix is –(e)s, which originates from the plural ending –as typical of masculine gender (strong declension, a-stem). Thus, OE –as > ME es >NE –(e)s.

2. The suffix –en (ox – oxen, child – children) originates from the plural ending, weak declension –an: OE –an > ME –en. In OE many nouns of all genders were declined according to weak declension. In ME there was a struggle between the plural endings –es and –en. In the South of the country the ending –en prevailed, whereas in the North the ending –es was mostly used. In the 15^th c. the ending –en fell out of use. In MnE there is only one noun which originally belonged to OE weak

declension, i.e. ox – oxen. Other nouns with the same suffix in Mod E, brethren and children, belonged to minor declension type, r-stem and es-stem, respectively, which had no ending –en in their paradigms. This ending appeared in MnE by analogy with the weak declension paradigm, because their plural ending OE –ru > ME –re > MnE –ren was not understood as the plural ending.

3. Changing the root vowel originates from the root-vowel declension, in which the root vowel of a noun was influenced by palatal mutation in the dative singular and nominative and accusative plural: Mod E foot – feet, man – men, etc.

4. Nouns ending in –f(e) do not always change –f(e) into –ves: some nouns mostly borrowed from other languages only add the ending –s: roof – roofs, chief – chiefs. Some nouns have parallel forms, e.g.: hoof – hoofs and hooves, scarf – scarfs and scarves. The prevailing tendency in Germanic languages is, however, changing –f(e) into –ves which can be accounted for by the pronunciation of the letter f as a voiced consonant [v] in the intervocal position. In ME the letter v was introduced by the French scribes, Thus, OE cnifas[v] > ME knives > NE knives.

5. Several nouns in Mod E have the same form both in the singular and in the plural, e.g. sheep, deer, swine. In OE there were many more nouns of this kind all of them belonging to a-stem declension, neuter gender. In OE these nouns had no plural inflexion.

6. A number of nouns having scientific, literary, political meaning, borrowed from Latin and Greek in the 17^th c. – 19^th c., kept their Latin or Greek plural inflexion, e.g. phenomenon – phenomena, stimulus – stimuli, genius – genii, etc. These nouns were used by a limited number of people, and due to their narrow usage they have preserved their original plural inflexions up to present.

The decline of the OE declension system lasted over three hundred years and revealed considerable dialectal differences. It started in the North of England and gradually spread southwards.

The other grammatical category of the noun, Number proved to be the most stable of all the nominal categories. In OE the category of number was interwoven with the category of case. Thus, in masc. a-stems the ending –as expressed simultaneously the category of case (nominative, accusative) and that of number (plural). The same applies to other case forms. There was no sign of the plural which might be found in every plural form. This was a feature typical of synthetic structure.

In ME there came a radical change in this respect: the expression of number was separated from that of case. So there is a great fundamental difference between the OE ending –as and the ME ending –es: while the OE –as expressed number and case simultaneously, ME –es expresses number alone and is not connected with any notion of case. This is an important innovation in ME.

The noun preserved the formal distinction of two numbers through all the historical periods. The plural forms in ME show obvious traces of numerous OE noun declensions. Some of these traces have survived in later periods. In Late ME the ending -es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the plural.