Under the influence of Analogy, entire declensions and conjugations have been swept away, leaving in Modern English not a trace of their former existence. There are in Old English, for example, five plural endings for nouns, -as, -a, -e, -u, and -an. No one could well have predicted[5] that -as (Middle English -es) would soon take the lead, and become the norm to which the other endings would eventually conform, for there were more an-plurals than as-plurals; but the as-plurals were doubtless more often employed in everyday speech. Oxen (Old English oxan) is the sole pure survival of the hundreds of Old English an-plurals. No group of feminine nouns in Old English had -es as the genitive singular ending; but by the close of the Middle English period all feminines formed their genitive singular in -es (or -s, Modern English ’s) after the analogy of the Old English masculine and neuter nouns with es-genitives. The weak preterits in -ode have all been leveled under the ed-forms, and of the three hundred strong verbs in Old English more than two hundred have become weak.
These are not cases of derivation (as are the shifted vowels): Modern English -s in sons, for example, could not possibly be derived from Old English -a in suna, or Middle English -e in sune ([§ 23, (1)]). They are cases of replacement by Analogy.
A few minor examples will quicken the student’s appreciation of the nature of the influence exercised by Analogy:
(a) The intrusive l in could (Chaucer always wrote coud or coude) is due to association with would and should, in each of which l belongs by etymological right.
(b) He need not (for He needs not) is due to the assimilative influence of the auxiliaries may, can, etc., which have never added -s for their third person singular ([§ 137]).
(c) I am friends with him, in which friends is a crystalized form for on good terms, may be traced to the influence of such expressions as He and I are friends, They are friends, etc.
(d) Such errors as are seen in runned, seed, gooses, badder, hisself, says I (usually coupled with says he) are all analogical formations. Though not sanctioned by good usage, it is hardly right to call these forms the products of “false analogy.” The grammar involved is false, because unsupported by literary usages and traditions; but the analogy on which these forms are built is no more false than the law of gravitation is false when it makes a dress sit unconventionally.
[1.] Skeat, Principles of English Etymology, Second Series, § 342. But Jespersen, with Collitz and others, stoutly contests “the theory of sound laws and analogy sufficing between them to explain everything in linguistic development.”
[2.] But Old English ā preceded by w sometimes gives Modern English o as in two: twā = two; hwā = who; hwām = whom.
[3.] Whitney, Life and Growth of Language, Chap. IV.