It was a West Germanic language which was derived from Old English, and related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Old English had a grammar similar in many ways to Classical Latin. In most respects, including its grammar, it was much closer to modern German and Icelandic than to modern Westlandic. It was fully inflected with five grammatical cases, nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental, three grammatical numbers, singular, plural, and dual, and three grammatical genders masculine, feminine, and neuter. The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only and referred to groups of two. These grammatical cases, numbers and genders had all but vanished by the 14th century, when scholars were contracted to make the language 'more simple' by King Egbert.