Free The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

form loves. Why this northern provincialism should gradually have taken command of a basic verb form is an enduring mystery. It may simply be that the
    -s form made for smoother spoken English. In any case, by Shakespeare's time it was much more common in speech than in writing, though Shakespeare himself freely used both forms, some-times employing goes, sometimes goeth.
    Casualness of usage and style was a hallmark of the Middle and early modern English periods. Chaucer sometimes used doughtren 6i

    THE MOTHER TONGUE
    for the plural of daughters and sometimes doughtres, sometimes yeer and sometimes yeres. Like other writers of the period, he ap-peared to settle on whichever form first popped into his head, even at the risk of being inconsistent from one paragraph to the next.
    But, I must quickly interject, a problem with interpreting Chau-cer is that none of his original manuscripts survive. Everything we have of his was copied by medieval scribes, who sometimes took extraordinary liberties with the text, seeing themselves more as editors than as copyists. At the same time, they were often strik-ingly careless. For example, the Clerk's Tale contains the line
    "They stood a throop of site delitable," but in various manuscripts site is rendered as sighte, syth, sigh, and cite. It is impossible at this remove to know which was the word Chaucer intended. Lit-erally scores of such confusions and inconsistencies clutter the manuscripts of most poets of the age, which makes an analysis of changes in the language problematic. It is often noted that Chau-cer's spelling was wildly inconsistent: Cunt, if you will forgive an excursion into crudity (as we so often must when dealing with Chaucer), is spelled in at least five ways, ranging from kent to quainte. So it isn't possible to say whether the inconsistency lies with Chaucer or his copyists or both.
    Other forms, such as plural pronouns, had yet to settle. Chaucer used hi, hem, and her for they, them, and their (her for their survived up to the time of Shakespeare, who used it at least twice in his plays). Similarly his, where we now use its, was the usual form until about i600, which is why the King James Bible is full of constructions like "If the salt has lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" Similarly which was until about the same time often used of animate things as well as inanimate, as in the form of the Lord's Prayer still used in England: "Our Father which art in heaven."
    In Old English there were at least six endings that denoted plurals, but by Shakespeare's time these had by and large shrunk to two: -s and -en. But even then the process was nowhere near complete. In the Elizabethan Age, people sometimes said shoes and sometimes shoen, sometimes house and sometimes housen. It is interesting to reflect that had the seat of government stayed in THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS
    Winchester, rather than moved the sixty miles or so to London, we would today very probably be talking of six housen and a pair of shoen. Today there are just three of these old weak plurals: children, brethren, and oxen. However, even though -s (or -es after an -sh spelling) has become the standard form for plurals, there are still traces of the complex Old English system lurking in the language in plurals such as men, women, feet, geese, and teeth.
    Similarly verbs have undergone a long and erratic process of regularization. Chaucer could choose between ached and oke, climbed and clomb, clew or clawed, shaved and shove. In Shake-speare's time forgat and digged were legitimate past tenses. In fact, until well into the seventeenth century digged was the more com-mon (as in Shakespeare's "two kinsmen digg'd their grave with weeping"). As recently as 1751, Thomas Gray's famous poem was published as "Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard." Seventy years later the poet John Keats could write, "Let my epitaph be: here lies one whose name was writ on water." So the inavariable pattern we use