Lecture 7 changes in the nominal system in middle english and new english

foot – feet (OE fōt – fēt)
tooth – teeth (OE tōð – tēð)

5. 
   “foreign plurals” – words borrowed in early New English from Latin. These words borrowed were borrowed by learned people from scientific books who alone used them, trying to preserve their original form and not attempting to adapt them to their native language. Among such words are:
   

Datum – data, automaton – automata, axis – axes, etc.
It should be noted that when in the course of further history these words entered the language of the whole people, they tended to add regular plural endings, which gave rise to such doublets as:
molecula – moleculae and moleculas,
formula – formulae and formulas,
antenna – antennae and antennas,
the irregular form being reserved for the scientific style.

2.2.3. Grammatical categories

The category of gender is formal, traditional already in Old English: in Middle English and New English nouns have no category of gender.
The category of number is preserved, manifesting the difference between singular and the plural forms.
The category of case, which underwent reduction first to three and then to two forms, in New English contains the same number of case-forms as in Middle English, but the difference is the number of the nouns used in the Genitive (or Possessive) case – mainly living beings, and the meaning – mainly the quality or the person who possesses something.
The boy’s book
A women’s magazine
A two mile’s walk
Inanimate nouns are not so common
The river’s bank
The razor’s edge
In Modern English, however, we observe a gradual spreading of the ending -s of the Possessive case to nouns denoting things, especially certain geographical notions, such cases as “England’s prime minister” being the norm, especially in political style.

3. The adjective

Only two grammatical phenomena that were reflected in the adjectival paradigm in Old English are preserved in Middle English: declension and the category of number.
The difference between the Indefinite (strong) and the Definite (weak) declension is shown by the zero ending for the former and the ending –e for the latter, but only in the singular. The forms of the definite and the indefinite declension in the plural have similar endings.
For instance: