In Reply to: I could be wrong, but I don't think that's what he was posted by ej on March 17, 2025 at 12:03:54
and the reduction of the vowels at the end eventually led to loss of the whole person/number agreement paradigm shown for the verb "sing" (sorry, I'm not sure where this extra space is coming in. I tried to reformat the table from the source linked below):
| infinitive | (to) singen, singe | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| present tense | past tense | ||
| 1st-personsingular | singe | sang | |
| 2nd-person singular | singest | sunge, sange | |
| 3rd-person singular | singeth | sang | |
| subjunctive singular | singe | sunge, sange | |
| imperative singular | — | ||
| plural | singen, singe | sungen, sunge, sangen, sange | |
| imperative plural | singeth, singe | — | |
| participles | singynge | sungen, sunge | |
This may not be the best example in terms of the whole chart but it gives you an ideea how the loss of final syllables ended up giving English the simplified person/number forms we have, as opposed to German and Dutch, who have retained those endings (after some changes, of course).
This is Middle English, btw, meaning, it's Chaucer's English. A smaller subset of this makes it to early modern English, IIRC, which is Shakespeare's era.