At the end of the Old English period (end of the 11th century), the word endings

(containing inflectional markers) became less articulated:

Inflection vowels such as -a, -e, -u, and -an appeared to be uniformly
reduced (weakened) to -e, (pronounced [], or schwa).
Word-final -n after -e apparently lost in unstressed syllables. With the course
of time, the remaining -e was abandoned as well.
For example, Middle English drinken (from OE drincan) became first of
all drinke and then drink (ref. Baugh and Cable, 1993; Burrows and Turville-Petre,
1992).
The same source claims that the example word drink got to its final stage in the
North by the 13th century, but spread to other regions by the 15th century.
It is said that the same effect has occurred to in most dialects of Old English.

David Crystal (ref. 1995:32) suggests a possible explanation why such reduction
may have occurred. Through the evolution of the Germanic languages, in most
words the articulatory stress fell on the first syllable. He suggested that such
stress pattern may introduced some difficulties to the audibility of the inflectional
endings, especially in day-by-day conversations, especially with phonetically
close -en, -on, and -an.
One should also consider one of the potential implications of Chomskyan
linguistics, suggesting thatall human languages are equally complex. This
means, in particular, that a language with a simplermorphology would more likely to
have a more complicated and non-straightforward syntax. This implies that OE has
gradually developed a more complex syntactic structure to replace the obsolete
inflectional endings.

At the end of the Old English period (end of the 11th century), the word endings
(containing inflectional markers) became less articulated:
Inflection vowels such as -a, -e, -u, and -an appeared to be uniformly
reduced (weakened) to -e, (pronounced [], or schwa).
Word-final -n after -e apparently lost in unstressed syllables. With the course
of time, the remaining -e was abandoned as well.
For example, Middle English drinken (from OE drincan) became first of
all drinke and then drink (ref. Baugh and Cable, 1993; Burrows and Turville-Petre,
1992).
The same source claims that the example word drink got to its final stage in the
North by the 13th century, but spread to other regions by the 15th century.
It is said that the same effect has occurred to in most dialects of Old English.

David Crystal (ref. 1995:32) suggests a possible explanation why such reduction
may have occurred. Through the evolution of the Germanic languages, in most
words the articulatory stress fell on the first syllable. He suggested that such
stress pattern may introduced some difficulties to the audibility of the inflectional
endings, especially in day-by-day conversations, especially with phonetically
close -en, -on, and -an.
One should also consider one of the potential implications of Chomskyan
linguistics, suggesting thatall human languages are equally complex. This
means, in particular, that a language with a simplermorphology would more likely to
have a more complicated and non-straightforward syntax. This implies that OE has
gradually developed a more complex syntactic structure to replace the obsolete
inflectional endings.