Middle English Period
Middle English Period
The Norman Conquest of 1066 had a
greater impact on English language than any other historical event in the
course of British history. It changed the whole course of the English language.
It was an event of far reaching consequences. The Norman Conquest marked the
end of the Old English period and the beginning of the Middle English period.
The changes of the period affected English in both its grammar and its
vocabulary. Changes in grammar reduced English from a highly inflected language
to an extremely analytical one. Changes in the vocabulary involved the loss of
a large part of the Old English word stock and the addition of thousands of
words from French and Latin.
Middle English Dialects
Middle English had a variety of
dialects, more numerous and more divergent than those of Old English. Out of
these, the four prominent dialects were Northern, Southern, East Midland and
West Midland. During the Middle English period, the East Midland dialect
attained supremacy. There are many reasons for the popularity of the East
Midland dialect.
1.
It
was spoken in and around London and London became increasingly important as the
centre of English life and affairs.
2.
The
universities of Oxford and Cambridge also used it. Hence it became the language
of scholarship.
3.
Chaucer
and a number of contemporary prominent writers employed it. Thus it was
established as a literary dialect.
4.
Caxton
printed his earliest books in the East Midland dialect.
Middle English Grammar
In Grammar, the Middle English
period is marked by a great reduction in the inflectional system inherited from
Old English and so the Middle English period is often referred to as the Period
of Leveled or Weakened Inflections. There were several reasons for it. One was
the mixing of English with Old Norse. Another important reason was the loss and
weakening of unstressed syllables at the end of words which destroyed many of
the distinctive inflections of Old English.
1.
There
was a tendency to level all the vowels
of the final unstressed inflectional system under ‘e’. For example, the Old
English endings, -an, -n,-un, -um all became ‘en’ which in late Middle English
was further reduced to ‘e’. A greater degree of uniformity was thus achieved.
2.
Nouns
In most dialects ‘en’
became a stock plural marker, for the majority of nouns no matter to what
declension they had previously belonged. But the Midland dialects showed a
preference for ‘es’ and as the East Midland dialect gained supremacy, this
became the more ususal form. Thus the number of nouns ending in ‘en’ gradually
declined though a few like oxen, brethren, children etc still survive.
3.
Gender
Another important
development in Middle English was the substitution of natural gender for
grammatical gender. In Old English, there was no relation between the gender of
a noun and the sex of the thing it represented, but now gender became depended
purely upon sex.
4.
Cases
In the course of the
Middle English period the total number of cases was reduced to three. One for
Nominative and Accusative singular, one for the Genitive singular and one for
all plural cases. The Genitive case marker ‘es’ was one of the few inflections
which survived in Middle English. It was later simplified to ‘’s’. Owing to
French influence there came into being an alternative method of indicating the
genitive case with the preposition ‘of’.
Eg: Father of John. (This
is called a periphrastic construction)
5.
Adjectives
The same process of loss
of case distinctions took place in adjectives. In adjectives, the trend was
towards the use of only two forms- the normal form (eg: fair) and a form with
the ending ‘e’ (eg: faire) which was both used for the plural and as a weak
form. When the final ‘e’ was lost towards the end of the Middle English period,
these two forms became the same and the adjective became indeclinable.
6.
The Definite Article
In Old English, the
definite article showed three genders- sē (m), sēo (f) and þœt (n) and was
inflected through all cases- singular and plural. In the course of Middle
English, the other forms gradually disappeared and ‘the’ came to be used for
all of them.
7.
Verbs
A parallel development
is seen in the verns, Old English had many inflections, but only two tenses-
the present and the past. In Middle English, a complicated system of tenses was
built up with the help of auxiliary verbs like ‘be’, ‘have’ and ‘shall’ (compound tenses). The future tense with
‘shall’ and ‘will’ was established in Middle English.
The infinitive also
underwent changes. ‘en’ became the regular ending for the infinitives of verns
in the early Middle English period. Later it was preceded by the preposition
‘to’. Since this came to be looked upon as the sign of the infinitive the
ending ‘en’ was felt to be unnecessary and was finally dropped.
8.
Pronouns
An important development
in the Middle English period was the introduction of the personal pronoun ‘she’
which first appeared in the middle of 12th century in the East
Midland dialect and later spread to others. The corresponding Old English word
was hēo.
9.
As
the inflectional system decayed, other devices were increasingly used to
replace it. Word order became more
important and more rigid. Another device was the increased use of prepositions to perform the functions
formerly carried out by inflections.
Middle English Spelling
The Norman Conquest introduced new
spelling convention, the Norman scribes disregarded traditional English
spelling and simply spelt the language as they heard it using the conventions
of Norman French. Consequently, many changes that had not been reflected in Old
English spelling or that had only appeared in occasional spellings now emerged
clearly. The new orthograph (study of spellings) gave English quite a new look.
The following are the changes in spelling.
1.
ū→ou
hūs-
hous, mūs-
mous
2.
ō→oo
hōm- hoom
(home), foo (foe), coomen (to come)
3.
ē→ee
or ie
cween, field
4.
ŷ→u
or ui
fur and fuir
(fire)
5.
y→u
kunn(kin)
and busi (busy)
6.
i→y
or i
body, king
7.
Hard
‘C’ – became ‘k’ before front vowels e, y, i and retained before back vowels a,
o, u. cyining→king, cēne→keen, cēpan→keep
8.
C
in native words became ch
cīld→child
9.
C
before front vowels →s
city, receive
10.
g(pronounced
/j/ in OE)→y
gearu- year
11.
soft
g introduced as /dζ/ before front vowels
gentle and
gesture
12.
hard
guttural ‘g’ respresented as ‘gu’
guest, guild
13.
þ
and ð replaced by th
14.
‘sc’
→sh
Scip-ship
15.
cw→qu
cwēn- queen
16.
v
or u for /v/ and f for /f/ (In OE, the letter ‘f’ was used to represent both
/v/ and /f/)
17.
‘z’
introduced
18.
Initial
‘e’ dropped in certain words.
Comments
Post a Comment