Middle English declension

Okay kiddo, so you know how when we talk or write, we use different words to describe things? Like, we might say "dog" or "happy" or "big", right? Well, in Middle English (which is a very old way of speaking and writing English), they used to have different endings on words to show things like whether the word was the subject of a sentence or the object, and whether there was only one thing or more than one thing.

For example, let's say we have the word "dog" in Middle English. If we want to say "the dog is big", we might say "hund is big". But if we want to say "I see the dog", we might say "Ich see hunden". Do you see how the word "dog" changes slightly at the end? That's called declension.

It might sound kind of confusing, but back then it was just how people talked and wrote. Nowadays, we don't really use declension in English anymore, but we still have some similar things like adding an "s" to the end of a word to show there's more than one (like "dog" versus "dogs").

Overall, declension was just a way for people to make sure they were using the right words in the right way, and it helped them communicate better in a time when writing and reading weren't as common as they are today.