middle english - mikroprojekat

8/10/2019 Middle English - mikroprojekat

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English was the language for communication among the common people - the

peasantry and lower classes (about 95% of the population). The Normans

considered English as a low-class, vulgar tongue.

English language was the third language in its own country. Besides that,

English did not disappear, it survived well established in written literature and

strong oral tradition. It was reintroduced in the Parliament (in mid 14thcentury)

and it was widely used by the early 15thcentury.

LITERATURE

Middle English texts were in Latin and French, but from the 13thcentury also

in English.

The Owl and the Nightingalewas a debate poem and it was probablycomposed in early 13thcentury; the long historical poem Brut (also known as

The Chronicle of Britain), from around the same period, written by the English

priest Layamon.

Other important poems written in around the same time, if not earlier, include:

William LanglandsPiers Plowman, religious poems Pearl, Patience and

Purity written my the same person we call The Pearls Poet, andSir Gawain

and the Green Knight(we dont know who wrote it)

Canterbury Talesfrom Geoffrey Chaucer is usually considered as the first

great work of English literature. Chaucer began writing his famousCanterbury

Talesin the early 1380s. He introduced many new words into the language,

around 2,000 according to some counts.

In the late 14thcentury, John Wycliffe (Wyclif) produced his translation ofThe

Biblein vernacular English. This challenge to Latin (as the language of God)

was considered a revolutionary act of daring at the time, and the translation

was banned by the Church in no uncertain terms (however, it continued to

circulate unofficially).

Letters of the Paston familyis a large collection of letters, state papers and

documents belonging to the members of noble English family the Paston

family, written between 1422 and 1509.


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CHANGES IN MIDDLE ENGLISH:

When we compare Old English and Middle English, we can say that OE was

highly inflected and in ME there was a gradual decay of the inflectional system.

As inflections disappeared, word order became more important and, by the timeof Chaucer, the modern English subject-verb-object word order had gradually

become the norm.

By the 14th century, noun genders had almost completely died out, and

adjectives, which once had up to 11 different inflections, were reduced to just

two (for singular and plural) and often in practice just one, as in modern

English.

The pronounced stress, which in Old English was fixed to the root of a word,

moved to the beginning of words.

Prepositions and postmodifying genitive had their breakthrough in Middle

English. They were rarely used in Old English, which had a lot of different

inflections and endings. TO instead of ending an for infinitive (to write

writan) and DO as an operator for questions and negations were also used for

the first time in Middle English.

Spelling:

Spelling had significant changes. Norman influence (influence of Norman

scribes) brought a lot of changes in Middle English and its spelling, which

became, in the beginning of 15thcentury, a mixture of Old English and French

spelling. Some of the most important changes:

qu - cw (queen cwen)


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gh - h (night niht)

ch - c (church cirice)

sh - sc (ship scip)

dg - cg (edge ecg)

ou - o (house hous)

consonant doubling (sitting - siting)

long vowels marked as two vowels (see se)

final e gradually disappeared

Pronunciation:

When it comes to pronunciation, there was a restructuring of the Old English

vowel system.

H before a consonant at the beginning of many Old English words was lost

this process is called H dropping (hring ring).

A fundamental change was The Great Vowel Shift a massive sound change of

the vowel system of the English language during 15th 18th century. Long

vowels changed into other vowels or diphthongs. Some examples:

Middle English Modern English

a: name name ei

e: deed deed i:

i: lyf life ai

o: hoom home ou

u: hous house au

Lexicon:

Major influence on Middle English had French over 10.000 French wordsentered English.

Words for:food and drink, court, law, administration, military, religion, art,

fashion etc.

Sometimes French words replaced Old English words (people leod) or

both survived words (mansion house).


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Other languages which had influence on English in this period: Portuguese,

Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Dutch etc.

middle english - mikroprojekat

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