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Middle English a Period - Coggle Diagram
Middle English a Period
Middle English a Period of Great Change
The Middle English period (1150–1500)
Marked by momentous changes in the English language
Changes more extensive and fundamental than those that have taken place at any time before or since.
Decay of Inflectional Endings.
reduction of inflections
Endings of the noun
adjective
marking distinctions of number and case and often of gender
The Noun
inflectional endings were disturbed
was extended by analogy to the nominative and accusative singular
the only distinctive termination is the -s of the
possessive singular and of the nominative and accusative plural.
the -s came to be thought of as the sign of the plural and was extended to all plural forms.
Only two methods of indicating the plural remained fairly
distinctive: the -s or -es from the strong masculine declension and the -en
The Adjective
The form of the nominative singular was early extended to all cases of the singular, and that of the nominative plural to all cases of the plural, both in the strong and the weak declensions
The result was that in the weak declension there was no longer any distinction between the singular and the plural: both ended in -e.
singular and plural only in certain monosyllabic adjectives which ended in a consonant in Old English.
The Pronoun
Depend less upon formal indications of gender, case, and (in adjectives) number, and to rely more uponjuxtaposition, word order, and the use of prepositions to make clear the relation of words
The loss was greatest in the demonstratives.
other forms indicative of different gender, number, and case disappeared in most dialects early in the Middle English period.
the personal pronoun the losses were not so great
The normal development of the Old English
pronouns would have been hi (he), here, hem, and these are very common
The Verb
The principal changes in the verb during the Middle English period were the serious losses suffered by the strong conjugation.
Some of the most important verbs in the language, was relatively small as compared with the large and steadily growing body of weak verbs.
Those that survived were exposed to the influence of the majority, and many have changed over in the course of time to the weak inflection.
The French influence on Middle English
Each of the major literary works of the Middle English period provides evidence of the impact of French.
By the time we reach The Canterbury Tales (c. 1400), the French lexical content is a major linguistic feature: eight of the 13 content words in the above quotation are from French – April, March, pierced, vain, liquor, virtue, engendered, flower.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, by the end of the Middle English period around 30 per cent of English vocabulary is French in origin.
Vocabulary was especially affected in important fields such as ecclesiastical architecture, where French architects in England adapted Continental sources for their cathedral designs.
Pronuntiation System
Several consonants and vowels altered their values
new contrastive units of sound (‘phonemes’) emerged
In particular, the distinction between the /f/ and /v/ consonants began to differentiate words (e.g. grief vs grieve), as did that between /s/ and /z/ (e.g. seal vs zeal).
The ng sound at the end of a word also became contrastive (in Old English the g had always been sounded), so we now find such pairs as sin vs sing.
The growing influence of Latin
Latin words would eventually have a much greater impact on English than French.
Today, just over 30,000 words (excluding derived forms) have French identified as part of their history in the OED; for Latin, the corresponding figure is over 50,000.
The real importance of the Middle English
Was the way in which this additional vocabulary became the primary means of introducing new concepts and new domains of discourse into the language, as well as giving novel ways of expression to familiar concepts within old domains of discourse.
The period was offering people a much greater linguistic choice.
It is a time of transition between two eras that each have stronger definition: Old English and Modern English