_Sing._ _Plural._ 1. nám. námon. 2. náme. námon. 3. nám. námon. Of all the inflections in the above, only two still remain, _st_ in the second person singular, and _th_ in the third person; and even these two inflections are nowadays hardly used at all. 7. =FRAGMENTS OF NOUN INFLECTIONS.=--Although our language, in the course of its history, has lost almost all of its inflections, there still remain, here and there, in our grammar, fragments of inflections which are often curiously disguised, and therefore difficult to recognise. Thus, at first sight, it is not easy to see that _vixen_ is the feminine of _fox_. But _vixen_ is simply the same as _fixen_, or _fyxen_, and it was one of the laws of Anglo-Saxon vowel-change that _o_ became _y_. It was very usual to make the plural of nouns in _en_. Thus we said _shoon_, _hosen_, _tren_, _been_ (for _bees_), _toon_ (for _toes_), _flon_ (for _arrows_), and _fleen_ (for _fleas_). But, of all these and other similar plurals, we now possess only one--_oxen_. The plurals _children_ and _brethren_ are really double plurals. The oldest plurals were _cildru_, afterwards _childer_; and _brether_. It was then forgotten that these were real plurals, and an _en_ was added. 8. =FRAGMENTS OF ADJECTIVE INFLECTIONS.=--We have the comparative _rather_ (rightly pronounced in Ireland rayther); but we have no _rathe_ or _rathest_. An old writer, speaking of a star, says: ‘It rose rather and rather (earlier).’ =Nighest= becomes _next_; because the =g + s= is equal to an =x=. So there was in our country an old proverb, ‘When bale is hext, bone is next’--that is, ‘When evil is highest, boon is nighest.’ _Over_ is now only used as a preposition. But it is really the comparative degree of the old adjective _ov_, which is a form of _up_ or _off_. 9. =FRAGMENTS OF PRONOUN INFLECTIONS.=--The _t_ in _it_ (which was formerly _hit_, as the neuter of _he_) is simply the sign of the neuter gender, and is the same _t_ that is found in _tha-t_, _wha-t_ (the neuter of _who_), etc. Hence the true possessive of _it_ is _his_; and this is the form in use in Shakspeare and Bacon, and even down to the middle of the seventeenth century. _Its_, as we have already seen, is a blunder. _They_ is not the true plural of _he_; but really of the old definite article _thaet_.