WHY ENGLISH LOST ITS TAIL

Oh, it’s a long story. Ignorance and hesitation did it.

English originated from Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to England in the 5^th to 7^th centuries AD by Germanic invaders and settlers from northwest Germany, west Denmark and the Netherlands.

Eventually Old English developed from them. It was a very complex language with inflections, declensions, first written using a runic script. Luckily  Irish missionaries introduced the Latin alphabet  in the 9^th century.

The Norman Conquest in 1066 brought the French language to England. French, with a flourishing literature, was the language of the court, the aristocracy, the church  and the administration. Whereas, English was relegated to the common people, mainly uneducated. This, eventually, resulted in lost of inflexions, declensions and to the SVO word order.

Long words were shortened for the same reason. The need to communicate led speakers to put the emphasis on the lexeme syllable, while relaxing the pronunciation of the rest of the vowels to a shwa [E], which caused the lost of the tail, and abundance of monosyllables.

Luckily, that creole spoken by commoners simplified English.

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