A history of the English Language

participles like 
ride—ridden
.
 Tug
and 
drug
(like 
dug
) are sometimes heard for 
tagged
and 
dragged
but are not in standard use. A few verbs like 
show
have developed past participles on the analogy of 
know
. 
11 
The second person singular had the vowel of the plural. 
Middle english 153

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121.
Loss of Grammatical Gender.
One of the consequences of the decay of inflections described above was the elimination 
of that troublesome feature of language, grammatical gender. As explained in § 42, the 
gender of Old English nouns was not often determined by meaning. Sometimes it was in 
direct contradiction with the meaning. Thus 
woman
(OE 
w
ī
f-mann
) was masculine, 
because the second element in the compound was masculine; 
wife
and 
child,
like German 
Weib
and 
Kind,
were neuter. Moreover, the gender of nouns in Old English was not so 
generally indicated by the declension as it is in a language like Latin. Instead it was 
revealed chiefly by the concord of the strong adjective and the demonstratives. These by 
their distinctive endings generally showed, at least in the singular, whether a noun was 
masculine, feminine, or neuter. When the inflections of these gender-distinguishing 
words were reduced to a single ending for the adjective, and the fixed forms of 
the, this, 
that, these,
and 
those
for the demonstratives, the support for grammatical gender was 
removed. The weakening of inflections and the confusion and loss of the old gender 
proceeded in a remarkably parallel course. In the north, where inflections weakened 
earliest, grammatical gender disappeared first. In the south it lingered longer because 
there the decay of inflections was slower. 
Our present method of determining gender was no sudden invention of Middle English 
times. The recognition of sex that lies at the root of natural gender is shown in Old 
English by the noticeable tendency to use the personal pronouns in accordance with 
natural gender, even when such use involves a clear conflict with the grammatical gender 
of the antecedent. For example, the pronoun 
it
in 
Etað þisne hl
ā
f 
(masculine), 
hit is m
ī
m 
l
ī
chama
(Ælfric’s Homilies) is exactly in accordance with modern usage when we say, 
Eat this bread, it is my body
. Such a use of the personal pronouns is clearly indicative of 
the feeling for natural gender even while grammatical gender was in full force. With the 
disappearance of grammatical gender sex became the only factor in determining the 
gender of English nouns.