ch can no longer be thus expressed. _Le fils Roi_ was clearly the son
of the King; _il fil Roi_, the sons of the King. Again we find _li roys_,
the King, but _au roy_, to the King. Pierre Sarrasin begins his letter on
the crusade of St. Louis by _A seigneur Nicolas Arode, Jehan-s Sarrasin,
chambrelen-s le roy de France, salut et bonne amour_.

But if we apply the same principle to nouns of the first declension, we
shall see at once that they could not have lent themselves to the same
contrivance. Words like _corona_ have no _s_ in the nom. sing., nor in any
of the oblique cases; it would therefore be in French _corone_ throughout.
In the plural indeed there might have been a distinction between the nom.
and the acc. The nom. ought to have been without an _s_, and the acc. with
an _s_. But with the exception of some doubtful passages, where a nom.
plur. is supposed to occur in old French documents without an _s_, we find
throughout, both in the nom. and the other cases, the _s_ of the
accusative as the sign of the plural.

Nearly the same applies to certain words of the third declension. Here we
find indeed a distinction between the nom. and the oblique cases of the
singular, such as _flor-s_, the flower, with _flor_, of the flower; but
the plural is _flor-s_ throughout. This form is chiefly confined to
feminine nouns of the third declension.

There is another very curious contrivance by which the ancient French
distinguished the nom. from the acc. sing., and which shows us again how
the consciousness of the Latin grammar was by no means entirely lost in
the formation of modern French. There are many words in Latin which change
their accent in the oblique cases from what it was in the nominative. For
instance, _cantator_, a singer, becomes _cantatorem_, in the accusative.
Now in ancient French the nom., corresponding to _cantator_, is
_chantere_, but the gen. _chanteor_, and thus again a distinction is
established of great importance for grammatical purposes. Most of these
words followed the analogy of the second declension, and added an _s_ in
the nom. sing., dropped it in the nom. plur., and added it again in the
oblique cases of the plural. Thus we get--

SINGULAR. PLURAL.
Nom. Oblique Cases. Nom. Oblique Cases.
_chantere_ _chanteor_ _chanteor_ _chanteors_
From _baro, _baron_ _baron_ _barons_
baronis_
(O. Fr. _ber_)
_latro, _l