Aput comments elsewhere, "I have always presumed, though I don't know if it's true, that the difference must have arisen in Middle English when verbs still had an inflectional suffix: importen, convicten, etc. Then a constant rule of penultimate stress would give noun IMport, verb imPORTen." (emph. added) (See note below, as to the terms.) My understanding, is that their use of those suffixes fell apart at the end of the Old English period, becoming very decayed and irregular, and was pretty much gone by about a century into the Middle English times.

But whenever it occured, it was a major and mysterious event.

A fundamental change in the structury of of English took place during the 11th and 12th centuries -- one without precedent in the history of the language, and without parallel thereafter. Grammatical relationships in Old English had been expressed chielf by the use oof inflectional endings. In Midddle English, they came to be expressed (as they are tody) chiefly by word order. Why did this change take place? Few subjects in the history of English have attracted so much speculation.

Help! I want to know more. I'd hope our scholars and researchers can teach us a bit?

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Note: The little I know about inflectional suffixes comes from The English Language by David Crystal (which provides my quotes here). Previously I had no clue what inflectional suffix is. Crystal explains, "Old English word order is much more varied than it would be in Modern English. The verb quite often appears before the subject, and also at the very end of the clause. In modern English, word order is relatively fixed. The reason Old English order could vary so much is that the relationships between the parts of the sentence were signalled by other means. Like other Germanic languages, Old English was inflected: the job a word did in the sentence was signalled by the kind of ending it had."

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The suffixes phonetically conflated at the end of OE: so -e -a -u all became -ə [schwa or -e if that doesn't show up], -en -an -um became -ən, -es -as became -əs. However they remained as pronounced syllables until about 1400 in the south: Chaucer, for example, requires the extra syllable in the metre in some places, though often his -e is silent.

There weren't only suffixes; prefixes were used too. For instance, Chaucer uses yronne as the past participle of to run.

Uh, may I back-track a bit?

We can talk about when it happened, but to me, probably the most interesting question is why inflectional endings (or prefixes) dropped from English. And of course, to address that we'd have to consider how it happened, looking at the details of time and place.

But at the moment, the discussion is beyond me, because I don't understand what is meant by an "inflectional" suffix. Apparently it indicates the function of a word in a sentence. But exactly what did in indicate? On verbs, did it indicate tense (past, present, future or whatever), or what? For nouns, did it indicate whether the noun was a subject, direct object, indirect object, or prepositional object, etc.; or what?

And whatever it indicated, why do we call it "inflectional"?

Can someone bring me up to speed?

Here are some examples of English inflectional endings (not really suffixes like -ize or -ling which tend to be derivational rather than inflectional): -s to mark the plural in nouns, -s to mark the third personal singular present indicative in a verb, -ed to mark the past tense in a verb, -ing to mark the present participle in a verb. Some languages, like Latin, German, Russian, and Greek have lots more inflectional endings. For example, they decline nouns for case. Case shows the syntactic relationship between words by case endings instead of word order. Latin has five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative. (With a total of 5 endings per number (i.e., singular and plural) that's 10 endings per noun. But wait, their are 5 different declensions with slightly differing endings in Latin, so that's about 50 (different endings). Each case has a main use and a bunch of minor ones, e.g., the nominative is used on the noun which is the grammatical subject of a sentence and the accusative is used for the direct object. In Latin puella is 'girl' in the nominative, but puellam is 'girl' in the accusative. If I write "puella amat" it would probably be translated "the girl loves (him or her)", but if I write "puellam amat" it would mean "She or he loves the girl". Same word order, but totally different sentences or meanings. Latin is not exceptional in this. Sanskrit has 7 cases and 3 numbers (singular, dual, and plural).

And, it wasn't all prefixes, in fact y- marking the past participial form a verb (< OE ge-, cf. German ge-). And not all inflectional endings either, though the ones for case did disappear. Some verbal endings, e.g., -s, -ed, and -ing survived. One problem is there is about a two hundred year gap between 1066 and 1250 in which there is very little English recorded, and during which English was not the language of the royal court, upper classes, and nobles.

There's some more info here and here.

Addendum: it just occurred to me in another thread (medical abbreviations in Latin) that K. is familiar with inflectional case endings, but didn't know what they were called. Day in Latin is dies which is in the nominative form, in per diem 'per day' the form is the accusative because the preposition per is used with a noun in the accusative case. (It is said that per governs the acc.) And then in die 'in a day' the noun is in the ablative. (Hope that helps a little.)

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I've a blue-sky theory that will probably be shot down by anyone with any real knowledge of the subject, but here goes, anyway.

After the Norman Conquest in 1066 the ruling classes spoke Old French among themselves, Their serfs spoke Old English. Obviously, the two sets of peoples needed to communicate from time to time. I suspect that a pidgin language evolved for this purpose. As with most pidgins, it would have had a restricted vocabulary and only a rudimentary grammar.

With the passing of time, and greater contact between the two classes, the early pidgin evolved into a language in its own right, becoming Middle English. The new language used many French words, often in addition to the OE version, and kept the simpler inflexions from the putative pidgin.

I know even less about Old French than Old/Middle English; was the addition of "s" to indicate a plural in use then? It seems likely that our ancestors borrowed that from the French.

(Hope that helps a little.)

It does, jheem, and thanks. It just takes a little for it to sink in. I think I am beginning to understand it.

aput said, "The suffixes phonetically conflated at the end of OE: so -e -a -u all became schwa or -e, -en -an -um became [schwa]n, -es -as became -[schwa]s. However they remained as pronounced syllables until about 1400 in the south: Chaucer, for example, requires the extra syllable in the metre in some places, though often his -e is silent." OK, that would explain why the inflectional suffixes would remain for purposes of pronunciation (the thrust of aputs "elsewhere" post I referred to in starting this thread), and yet, being conflated, would no longer serve the inflectional purpose of indicating parts of the sentence.

And jheem explains why it would be difficult to pinpoint the exact timing of the change. He notes, "One problem is there is about a two hundred year gap between 1066 and 1250 in which there is very little English recorded, and during which English was not the language of the royal court, upper classes, and nobles."

There remains the question of why inflection ceased to be used to indicate function in a sentence. On that question, although I'd imagine that there did in fact occur something very much like what arnie describes, that development was not related to the loss of infections, or at least was not the full cause of it. Why not? Because arnie's scenario would not take place until after the 1066 conquest, while the deterioration of inflections began earlier (aput: "The suffixes phonetically conflated at the end of OE").

If I'm correct, we're still groping for an explanation of why the inflections dropped -- or, as part of that, why the inflections first "conflated phonetically".

Now I admit that I'm cheating a bit here, because I have Crystal's book on my lap as I write. But his explanation is cursory, so let's keep the question open. Also, arnie's scenario raises another thought, for which I'll start a new thread.

First, in general linguists don't know causes of historical change. There is not much in the way of theories about it, and most of the famous changes are unexplained: we can't say it happened for such-and-such a reason, whereas we can explain phonetics or syntax in a lot of detail.

Second, there is no reason why there should be an external cause for a change. Languages change all the time, and it's virtually impossible to find any examples of a language being static over any length of time. Variant forms coexist and one gradually eases the other out. It might be a purely statistical fluctuation: there doesn't need to be a reason.

So I don't think we need to invoke contact with the Danes in the north to explain why OE began changing its type. A similar thing happened in Latin: prepositions like de took over from the cases, and about the same time the case endings were reduced to greater similarity. I haven't heard anyone postulate outside influence on Vulgar Latin. However, the two kinds of change, loss of case endings and use of prepositions to replace case endings, are clearly linked, and in theory we should be able to find evidence about which happened first and drove the other. But in neither English nor Latin is there (as far as I'm aware) clear evidence of one or other change coming first.

in general linguists don't know causes of historical change.

Yes, indeed. In fact, linguistic change may be basically random. One thing I think most linguists can agree on is that it's a very complicated process.

However, the two kinds of change, loss of case endings and use of prepositions to replace case endings, are clearly linked

One thing to remember is that not all cases were replaced by prepositions, e.g., nominative and accusative were replaced by word order in Romance languages and English. Three cases (i.e., genitive, dative, and ablative) were replaced in the Romance languages with prepositions. But it is important to remember that Latin had prepositions while it had case, and at least three cases were governed by prepositions (i.e., dative, accusative, and ablative).

There is an historical process of change studied in linguistics called grammaticalization which is concerned with how one grammatical process gets replaced slowly over time with another. An example would be the two ways to make a comparative or superlative in English (these are currently overlapping): one (the original) is by adding -er and -est to an adjective (mild, milder, mildest), the other (the more modern chronologically) is by using more and most with the adjective (e.g., perfect, more perfect, most perfect). Another example is how the future tense in some Romance languages is gradually being replaced with a periphrastic form literally read ~ I'm going to read.

A good example of the randomness of change at the supermarket today. Change is often presented as if languages make broad changes between types -- synthetic to analytic, inflectional to isolating, etc. So OE and Latin lost their complex case marking and changed to using separate words 'of', 'de' to do the same thing.

The trouble with that picture is that language has no 'memory'. Speakers in 1100 can't be aware that speakers in 1050 or 1000 were moving from inflectional to isolating. The change in 1100 is quite as likely to be back to inflectional. You get waves washing to and fro, and only sometimes do enough waves move in the same direction to make a big difference.

My example in the supermarket: the cashier offered to put my ice-cream in a freezer bag to keep it 'more colder'. I realized I've heard this construction a few times recently. Has it been underground since the 1600s ('most unkindest cut of all') or is it a new creation?

'more colder'

As you point out, aput, it's at least as old as Shakespeare who seems to use it unsarcastically.

I also neglected to mention suppletion in the comparative and superlative forms: e.g., good, better, best; bad, worse, worst; as well as the next grade: bestest and worstest.

Good point about language not having a memory. At best you get two generations speaking slightly different versions of the language. And the older one remembers its parent generation and maybe one further back but not at first hand. I've always pondered whether phonological change at the ends of words lead to morphological change (loss of case), or if prepositions and word order starting being used more and lead to case becoming redundant and dropping away.

We wonder if the use of "lead" for "led" will soon become acceptable due to its popularity.

We wonder if the use of "lead" for "led" will soon become acceptable due to its popularity.

It's possible. And then maybe lead will be spelled leed or lid so that people can distinguish between the different forms.