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Why did english have such loose grammar until ~1700
>no grammatical genders
>no grammatical cases
>no subjunctive
>no hard and fast rules about word order
Aside from the last one this also applies to modern english but it seems like the writers back then were making it up as they went.
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>>8481425
>no grammatical cases
>no rules about word order
How is it possible for both of these to be true?
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>>8481425
You need to learn OE then you'll understand what happened through the ME period into early modern English
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>>8481425
There was a hard word order rule, dufus, it's just changed since then. The word order in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) was SOV (subject-object-verb).
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>>8481483
This. English has some of the strictest word order rules of any language on Earth
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>>8481425
1066 and all that, dude. English is the bastard child of Germanic and Old French grammars. Besides, just because most native speakers learn the rules intuitively, even unconsciously, doesn't mean they don't exist.
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