The OE Gender, being a classifying feature (and not a grammatical category proper) disappeared together with other distinctive features of the noun declensions. In the 11th and 12th c. the gender of nouns was deprived of its main formal support - the weakened and leveled endings of adjectives and adjective pronouns ceased to indicate gender. Semantically gender was associated with the differentiation of sex and therefore the formal grouping into genders was smoothly and naturally superseded by a semantic division into inanimate and animate nouns, with a further subdivision of the latter into male; and females.
The category of case underwent changes. The number of cases was reduced from 4 to 2. In the strong declension the Dat. was marked with –e in the Southern dialects, though not in the North or in the Midlands. The form without the ending soon prevailed in all areas, and Nom., Ace. and Dat. fell together. Henceforth they can be called Common case, as in present-day English. Only the Gen case was kept separate from the other forms, with more, explicit formal distinctions in the singular than in the plural. In the 14th c. the ending -es of the Gen. sg had become almost universal, there being only several exceptions -nouns which were preferably used in the uninflected form (names of relationships terminating in -r-, some proper names, and some nouns in stereotyped phrases). In the pl the Gen. case had no special marker - it was not distinguished from the Comm. case as the ending -(e)s through analogy, had extended to the Gen. either from the Com case pl or, perhaps, from the Gen. sg. The formal distinction between cases in the pl was lost, except in the nouns which did not take -(e,)s in the pl. Several nouns with a weak plural form in -en or with a vowel interchange, such as oxen or men, added the marker of the Gen. case es to these forms: oxenes, mennes. In the 17th,18thc. a new graphic marker of the Gen. case came into use: the apostrophe -e. g. man's, children's: this device could he employed only in writing; in oral speech the forms remained homonymous.
The reduction in the number of cases was linked up with a change in the meaning and functions of the surviving forms. The Comm. case, which resulted from the fusion of three OE cases assumed all the functions of the former Nom., Acc. and Dat., and also some functions of the Gen. The ME Comm. case had a very general meaning, which was made more specific by the context: prepositions, the meaning of the verb predicate, the word order. The main function of the Acc. case -to present the direct object was fulfilled in ME by the Comm. case; the noun was placed next to the verb, or else its relations with the predicate were apparent from the meaning of the transitive verb and the noun.
The history of the Gen. Case requires special consideration. Though it survived as a distinct form, its use became more limited: it could not be employed in the function of an object to a verb or to an adjective. In ME the Gen. case is used only attributively, to modify a noun, but even in this function it has a rival -prepositional phrases, above all the phrases with the preposition of. The other grammatical category of the noun, Number proved to be the most stable of all the nominal categories. The noun preserved the formal distinction of two numbers through all the historical periods. Increased variation in Early ME did not obliterate number distinctions. On the contrary, it showed that more uniform markers of the pl spread by analogy to different morphological classes of nouns, and thus strengthened the formal differentiation of number. In Late ME the ending -es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the pl. In Early NE it extended to more nouns - to the new words of the growing English vocabulary and to many words, which built their plural in a different way in ME or employed -es as one of the variant endings. The pl ending -es (as well as the ending -es of the Gen. case) underwent several phonetic changes: the voicing of fricatives and the loss of unstressed vowels in final syllables. The ME pl ending -era, used as a variant marker with some nouns lost its former productivity, so that in Standard Mod E it is found only in oxen, brethern, and children.
