The path from Old English (the language of Beowulf and the Arthurian legends) through Middle English (the language of Chaucer) to the English of today is a story of collapsed distinctions and lost endings.
But the sheer scale of erosion in English becomes clearer when we look further back in time. The path from Old English (the language of Beowulf and the Arthurian legends) through Middle English (the language of Chaucer) to the English of today is a story of collapsed distinctions and lost endings. Old English, like Latin, had a relatively free word order, and nouns had a complex system of case markings (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental) to signal who was doing what to whom. It had three grammatical genders that applied not just to nouns but to demonstratives and adjectives. So, the Old English equivalent of that good woman would have the neuter gender (not feminine, as it happens, because wif [woman] is neuter) signaled for each word.