Grammatical categories of the Noun in me

The category of Gender disappeared with the reduction of the noun endings and the loss of the adjective inflections which had been the main formal support of this category. Gender became a ________ category, “natural gender”: “he” and “she” denoted human beings, “it” – __________ objects.

The category of Number is the most stable of all the nominal categories. In LME the ending –es won the competition over the ending –____ and became the prevalent marker of ____ forms.

The category of Case halved the number of its members by the end of ME.

In EME ____ case forms fused with _____ case or _____ case forms fused with _____ case in different declensions due to the homonymy of the endings. By LME the three cases – _________________ – merged into the ______________ case.

Development of the noun case system in me

OE	EME		LME
Nom.	Nom.	Common case	Common case
Acc.	Acc. + Dat.
Dat.		Dat.
Gen.	Gen.		Gen.

As OE _________ declension became a major one in ME, its ending –___ for the Gen.Sg.(see Table 12) spread to the other declensions, but its ending –__ (OE –__) for the Gen.Pl. wasn’t at all distinctive. So the Gen.Sg. inflection –___ through analogy extended to the Gen.Pl. and the formal distinction between the Nom.Pl. and the Gen.Pl was lost.

The ME Common case assumed all the functions of the former _____________________ and also some functions of the Gen., so it had a very general meaning which was specified by the context (prepositions, word order, the meaning of the predicate). The use of the Gen. case became more limited: it was used only attributively, to modify a noun and could be replaced by the prepositional of-phrase.