said _ð=a g=odan giefa_, inflecting "the" and at the same time
changing the case ending of "good."

The Norman Conquest helped to lop off these endings, which German has
never entirely lost. We, however, no longer decline articles or
ordinary adjectives. Instead of having our attention taken up with
thinking of the proper endings, we are left free to attend to the
thought rather than to the vehicle of its expression. Although our
pronouns are still declined, the sole inflection of our nouns, with
the exception of a few like _ox, oxen_, or _mouse, mice_, is the
addition of _'s, s,_ or _es_ for the possessive and the plural. Modern
German, on the other hand, still retains these troublesome case
endings. How did English have the good fortune to lose them?

Whenever two peoples, speaking different languages, are closely
associated, there is a tendency to drop the terminations and to use
the stem word in all grammatical relations. If an English-speaking
person, who knows only a little German, travels in Germany, he finds
that he can make himself understood by using only one form of the noun
or adjective. If he calls for "two large glasses of hot milk,"
employing the incorrect expression, _zwei gross Glass heiss Milch_, he
will probably get the milk as quickly as if he had said correctly,
_zwei grosse Gläser heisse Milch_. Neglect of the proper case endings
may provoke a smile, but the tourist prefers that to starvation.
Should the Germans and the English happen to be thrown together in
nearly equal numbers on an island, the Germans would begin to drop the
inflections that the English could not understand, and the German
language would undergo a change.

If there were no books or newspapers to circulate a fixed form of