ngs, due to the fact that it was difficult to assimilate the new words into a highly inflected language. However, English had already lost some of its inflections before the Normans landed on English shores, and therefore there must have been multiple contributors to the simplification of English. Because French nouns were borrowed without their own native inflections, they were adapted to English strong male declension, contributing to a more regular noun declension system as the sheer number of loan nouns increased. French verb loans, however, entered English as part of the existing weak verb class. Weak verbs were characterized by their regularity of tensed forms, whereas the strong verbs were those which were irregular. Because all of these new verbs were regular in the language they supported the form regularity and the majority of the irregular forms were dropped from use. French adjective loans were borrowed into English along with their inflected endings for number. Adjectives in Old English had also carried this distinction, however, the singular form came to be used more regularly in the Middle English period. At the onset of the borrowings, French adjectives were borrowed with the French noun-adjective construction (houres inequales) but as English word order became more rigid and the French terms were modified to fit the English adjective-noun construction, the inflected number endings were dropped from the adjectives (dyverse langages). The French language contributed many new affixes to the English language during the Middle English period. Many of PDE’s most common prefixes and suffixes appeared in the language after the Normans appeared on English soil. Prefixes such as re-, de- and in- and suffixes like -able, -ist, -ify and -ment are all relics of the period of French rule in England. Several less productive, but recognizable, affixes also entered English from French during Middle English. Prefixes counter-, inte...
