It was also during this period when English was
the language mainly of the uneducated peasantry that many of the grammatical
complexities and inflections of Old English gradually disappeared. By the 14th Century,
noun genders had almost completely died out, and adjectives, which once had up to 11
different inflections, were reduced to just two (for singular and plural) and often in practice
just one, as in modern English. The pronounced stress, which in Old English was usually on
the lexical root of a word, generally shifted towards the beginning of words, which further
encouraged the gradual loss of suffixes that had begun after the Viking invasions, and
many vowels developed into the common English unstressed “schwa” (like the “e” in taken,
or the “i” in pencil). As inflectons disappeared, word order became more important and, by
the time of Chaucer, the modern English subjectverbobject
word order had gradually
become the norm, and as had the use of prepositions instead of verb inflections.