HISTORICAL CHANGES IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR: FROM INFLECTION TO WORD ORDER
Keywords:
historical grammar, Old English, Middle English, inflection, case system, grammatical gender, word order, analytic language, synthetic language, language change.Abstract
This article examines the major grammatical transformations that have shaped the English language across three principal historical periods: Old English (450–1100 AD), Middle English (1100–1500 AD), and Early Modern English (1500–1700 AD). The study focuses on the dramatic shift from a highly inflected, case-based grammatical system in Old English to the largely analytic, word-order-dependent grammar of Modern English. Drawing on the foundational theories of historical linguistics and the scholarship of leading philologists, the article analyses the erosion of the Old English case system, the loss of grammatical gender, the simplification of verb conjugation, and the stabilisation of Subject-Verb-Object word order as the primary grammatical mechanism. The research demonstrates that these changes were not isolated linguistic events but were systematically connected to broader socio-historical processes, including the Viking settlements, the Norman Conquest, and the rise of a standardized written language. Understanding these transformations provides essential insight into the structural logic of Modern English and its place within the Germanic language family.
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