Why do we have such plural forms as teeth for tooth, feet for foot, etc?

In English, this happened to many normal plurals because of the E in the regular plural suffix -es. That E was pronounced in Old English and Middle English, but not in Modern English; however the root vowel had been changed already and is maintained in some, but not most, of the nouns.

I-mutation is particularly visible in the inflectional and derivational morphology of Old English, since it affected so many of the Old English vowels. Of 16 basic vowels and diphthongs in Old English, only the four vowels ǣ, ē, i, ī were unaffected by i-mutation. Although i-mutation was originally triggered by an /i/ or /j/ in the syllable following the affected vowel, by Old English times the /i/ or /j/ had generally dropped out or been modified (usually to /e/), with the result that i-mutation generally appears as a morphological process that affects a certain (seemingly arbitrary) set of forms. The most common forms affected are:

The plural, and genitive/dative singular, forms of consonant-declension nouns (Proto-Germanic (PGmc) *-iz), as compared to the nominative/accusative singular – e.g., fōt "foot", fēt "feet"; mūs "mouse", mȳs "mice". Note that many more words were affected by this change in Old English vs. modern English – e.g., bōc "book", bēc "books"; frēond "friend", frīend "friends".

48. In Modern English you cannot find a lot of inflections. Can you enumerate them? Why didn’t the inflections of the Old English and Middle English language reach the Modern English language?
There is a generalization about the development of English morphology which holds true particularly for the Middle English period: inflections are reduced and then lost with other mechanisms arising which compensate for this. This gradual shift from a synthetic language type in Old English to an analytic type in Modern English has been known as drift ever since the term was introduced by the American linguist Edward Sapir at the beginning of this century. Three reasons for drift in English: 1) Simplification, lack of redundancy in bilingual situations (Old English and Scandinavian in the north of the country) 2) Infection of Old English through contact with British Celtic which already had inflectional decay due to phonetic attrition. 3) Long-term effect of the initial stress-accent of Germanic. Certainly there was a high degree of bilingualism in the north as of the 9th century when the Scandinavians established a firm foothold there. Furthermore, it is true that the north of England has been more innovative in morphology than the south, in keeping with the assumption that mixing leads to change, given that when speakers of one language are dealing with those of another then they tend to leave out unnecessary, redundant elements which are not required for conveying meanings.

There may well have been a further powerful force behind the demise of inflections in Old English. It is known that the Celtic languages which were in England before the arrival of the continental Germanic tribes showed considerable weakening in the articulation of consonants — a phonetic process known as lenition — and that this led to the ultimate loss of many inflections in these languages (Modern Welsh and Cornish and Modern Irish in Ireland). Now the Germanic tribes mixed with the Celts once they had subdued them. They did not banish them out of the land they conquered, as shown by the Old English word wealh which means both ‘Celt’ and ‘slave’. The assumption here is that the ‘soft’ pronunciation of consonants in British Celtic infected the pronunciation of Old English — in the north as much as elsewhere in the country as Celtic was spoken over the entire country and not just in the west and south-west as was later to be the case with the retreat to these areas. This is not an unreasonable assumption as it is known from other regions that linguistic features — particularly low-level ones, such as lack of aspiration with consonants or the use of extra vowels to break up groups of consonants — tend to cluster in geographical areas. The advantage of the hypothesis of an influence of Celtic on Old English is that it gives a greater time depth to the decay of inflections.

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