Old English replacement of the letter ƿynn with w. This is a proclamation from King Cnut the Great to his earl Thorkell the Tall and the English people written in AD 1020. Unlike the previous two examples, this text is prose rather than poetry. For ease of reading, the passage has been divided into sentences while the pilcrows represent the original division. The earliest history of Old English lexicography lies in the Anglo-Saxon period itself, when English-speaking scholars created English glosses on Latin texts. At first these were often marginal or interlinear glosses, but soon came to be gathered into word-lists such
Grammatical number ("He goes" versus "They go"). English treats zero with the plural number. Old English did contain dual grammatical numbers. The Finnish language has a plural form of almost every noun case (except the comitative, which is formally only plural). However, when a number is used, or a word signifying a number (monta- many), the singular version of the partitive case is used. and where no specific number is mentioned, the plural version of the partitive case is used and in the possessive (genitive) In modern Romance languages, nouns, adjectives and articles are declined according to number (singular or plural only).