ON THE FORMA1'ION 
OF THE PLURAL IN SIN ENGLrnH. 
Marsh, in his Origin and History of the English Language, repeating a state­ment of Latham's, asserts (p. 46) that English was influenced by Norman­French, not only in its vocabulary, but also in its grammar. He ascribes to Norman-French influence: the periphrastic comparison of the adjective, the periphrastic genitive, the use of the preposition before the Infinitive, and the formation of the plural of nouns in s. (lectures on the English Languo.ge, p. 384.) Earle, among a host of others, repeats Marsh's asser­tions, except however, in regard to the periphrastic comparison of the adjective which he ascribes to Danish influence. But he goes farther even than Marsh, for he maintains (The Philology of the English Tongue, p. 433) that English has borrowed from Norman-French: all the analytical case­forms of the personal pronoun, as well as the use of the interrogative pro­nouns as relatives (p. 441 ). 
From these assertions it would be logical to infer that English Grammar is a hybrid. But, is it not evident, on the other hand, that the grammatical influence of one cognate language upon another is of so delicate a nature that a student of language cannot be too guarded in his conclusions, and that nothing but the most incontrovertible scientific proof can warrant him in making assertions like the above? The only proof offered in this case is the mere existence of parallel forms in the two languages, and this cannot be considtired satisfactory, for parallel forms have been found in languages that could not, by any possible chance, have ever come in contact with one another; how much more frequently, then, are we not expected to meet them in langu ges of the same family that have undergone, side by side, the transformation from the synthetical to the analytical stage. 
It is well known that all the Romance languages, instead of developing 
the Latin Future, have formed that tense analytically from the Infinitive of 
the prmcipal verb followed by the Pres.ent Indicative of the auxiliary "to 
have," yet it would never occur to any scholar to assert that French bor· 
rowed that tense from the Italian or from the Spanish, and yet the cases are 
similar. 
My object in this paper is to consider whether we are justified in ascrib· 
ing the formation of the plural of nouns bys to Franco-Norman influence. 
"The Saxon noun had several modes of forming the plural according to 
gender and declension. One of these declensions only made the nomina­
tive plural in s. This agreed with the Norman grammar, which, like 
Modern French, used s or z (and in a few cases x) as the sign of the plural, 
and it was natural that this coincidence should have been seized upon and 
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adopted as a general rule.for the construction of all plurals." (Marsh, Lee· tures on the English language, p. 384.) 
Before proceeding, I wish to correct two errors in the above quotation from Mr. Marsh: The Anglo-Saxon masculine declension in a formed not only its nominative, but also its accusative plural-the two most important cases-in s; and, there are no substantives in Modern Fnmch having z as sign of the plum.I ; but perhaps Mr. Marsh meant z as a sound, and not as a sign. If so, x should not have been mentioned. 
'l'he masculine a declension to which Mr. Marsh refers is perhaps the most important in Anglo-Saxon, and it is certainly not strictly true that this declension only formed its plural (nom. and acc.) in s, for the following nouns had the same forrnat10n: all the masculine proper nouns declining strong, the greater number of nouns in nd from present participles-/re· ondas and feondas, by the side of frynd and /:ynd,-nearly all the mascu· line nouns of foreign origin introduced and naturalized in Anglo·Saxon before the conquest: abbod. aposto~ bisc~p. calend, calic, carcern, easer, chor, circul, Christen, diacon, disc, diabu~ discipul, ele, fefer, g(qant, gimm, rnonec. etc. 
Nor is this plural formation restricted to the a declension ; the masculines in i and u frequently present similar forms. In other declensions we have faeder-a~, and even feminines, e. g. sae-s and ae-s. 
This shows evidently that even from the earliest time there was a well 
·marked tendency in A .-S. to make s (as) the regular plural ending, at least 
for masculines, long before the Semi-Saxon period. 
This plural formation in Anglo-Saxon has nothing anomalous, when we 
remember that while the Teutonic branch of the Indo-European family had 
generally lost the ending of the nominative singular in .; (sa), the s (sasa­
sas-as) of the nominative plural had persisted. ln Gothic it is the rule for 
all declensions but two-out of ten-(Grimm's Classification); in Old Norse 
it is rhotacized and the r joined directly to the stem, wl1ile it is most com· 
pletely preserved in Old Saxon and Anglo·Saxon; Old Higb German alone 
has lost the s and kept the a. 
If, on the other hand, we examine the fate of the original case endings 
(sing. sa; plur. sasa) in the Italic branch of the same family,-or rather in 
Latin, its principal representative and the progenitor of French, we find 
that the very reverse of the above process of elimination has taken place. 
The ending in s for the nominative singular has persisted, is found in every 
declension, and is the most frequent ending of that case; while in the nomi­
native plural, though we occasionally find s under some changed form, it 
has been more frequently dropped, this being especially the case in the first 
and second declensions, and in all the neuters. 
Again, it is hardly conceivable that a specific grammatical influence 
should have preceded one upon the vocabulary. Now, we know that the 
earliest text of Layamon (beginning of the 13th Century) "did not contain 
so many as fifty words of Norman origin, to which the later text added 
rather more than forty, so that about ninety words in more than 56,800 
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lines, may be presumed to afford a fair estimate of how little English had been influenced by French, even so iate as t.he middle of the 13th Century, the presumed date of Layamon's later text." (Madden.) Now, in Laya­mon, although the endings es, en and e are found side by side for all the cases in the plural, es often assumes the places of all other terminations, ~wen in words which formed their plural by umlaut: thus by the side of boc, boec, we have boc, bo'lc,es. 
In other authors of the periud the tendency to form the plural of nouns uniformly in s is even more marked than in Layamon. Does this not show that in the struggle for existence the survival of the· fittest was already as· sured beyond a peradventure 7 
Turning to Mr. Marsh's Origin and History of the English Language, p. 139, we read: "Norman·Frencb, which was the language of the schools, dis· turbed the inflexions and articulation of English, while English contributed no inconsiderable number of words to the vocabulary of Norman-French, modified its grammar in s-0me pa.rticnlars,-for instance, it overthrew the Norman-Frl'nch law of the formation of the plural in nouns-and thus created the language known as Anglo-Norman." 
Now the law of which Mr. Marsh speaks was simply the Latin declension 
reduced LO its simplest form before developing into the purely analytical 
stage. 
N om. Singular Norn. Plural 
s withouts 
Oblique Singular Oblique Plural 
withouts s 
So that until the middle of the 14th Century s was quite as much the sign 
of the singular as of the plural, in all the French dialects spoken on the 
continent, while -0n the other hand Anglo-Norman, that is the French dia­
lect spoken in England, had already given up its declension at, the begin· 
ning of the 13th Century, so that we find, e.g. in Josaphaz, Set Dormanz and 
Petit Plet by Uhardry, an Anglo-Norman trouveur who wrote in the first 
quarter of the 13th Century, that s is no longer a case sign. but is almost 
uniformly used in all the cases of the plural. John Koch, the editor of 
these poems ( Altfranzosische Bibliothek), says: "That the state of the sub· 
stantive declension was already such in the language of the poet as the 
MSS. give us, is shown by numerous rimes. S as sign of the nominative 
singular is found but seldom. The plural is generally formed with the 
suffix s." 
This proves that Marsh was much nearer the truth in the last quotation 
than in the first, and that the formation of the Anglo-Saxon a declension 
brought about a change in Anglo-Norman which did not take place in the 
other French clialects until at least one hundred years later and preciselj at 
the time when the English invaded France in the Hundred years' war. 
Besides, if French influence was so potent with the substantive, it is, to 
say the least, improbable that it should have been nil with adjectives, which 
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formed in Norman·French their plural in an identical manner, and yet it has not left the least trace in English. 
Another argument against Marsh's theory is, that whereas the endings as, es ands are always sounded as a separate syllable in Anglo-Saxon, Semi­Saxon and Old English, the ending 8 is generally silent in French, unless followed by a word beginning with a vowel. 
To sum up the above, Mr . . \farsh's theory should be rejected, because­
1. 
Of the two branches of the Indo-European family the Teutonic had best preserved the s ending in the plural, while in the Italic that s had gen­erally disappeared. 

2. 
A large number of nouns in Anglo-Saxon and a_majority of foreign naturalized nouns already formed their plural in s before the Conquest. 

3. 
At the beginning of the 13th Century, when the vocabulary had not yet shown ,any marks of French influence, s was already the almost uni_ versa! plural ending for nouns. 

4. 
S did not become a plural ending in the Continental French dialects until the middle of the 14th Century. 


5. The adjective shows no sign of French influence. 
6. Fmal s is generally silent in French, while it is generally sounded in English. 
I hope at some future time to take up the other points mentioned on the first page of this paper, and prove conclusively that English Grammar is not a hybnd. 
H. TALLIOHET_ 
U NIVERSlTY OF 'l'EXAS, t 
January, 1886. \