Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...
that was spoken after the
Norman conquest
The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Norman, Breton, Flemish, and French troops, all led by the Duke of Normandy, later styled William the Conque ...
of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the ''
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a com ...
'' specifies the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500.
This stage of the development of the English language roughly followed the
High
High may refer to:
Science and technology
* Height
* High (atmospheric), a high-pressure area
* High (computability), a quality of a Turing degree, in computability theory
* High (tectonics), in geology an area where relative tectonic uplift ...
to the
Late Middle Ages
The Late Middle Ages or Late Medieval Period was the Periodization, period of European history lasting from AD 1300 to 1500. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period (and in much of Eur ...
.
Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and
orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...
. Writing conventions during the Middle English period varied widely. Examples of writing from this period that have survived show extensive regional variation. The more standardized Old English language became fragmented, localized, and was, for the most part, being improvised.
By the end of the period (about 1470) and aided by the
invention of the printing press by
Johannes Gutenberg
Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (; – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor and Artisan, craftsman who introduced letterpress printing to Europe with his movable type, movable-type printing press. Though not the first of its ki ...
in 1439, a standard based on the London dialects (Chancery Standard) had become established. This largely formed the basis for Modern English spelling, although pronunciation has changed considerably since that time. Middle English was succeeded in England by
Early Modern English
Early Modern English or Early New English (sometimes abbreviated EModE, EMnE, or ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle E ...
, which lasted until about 1650.
Scots developed concurrently from a variant of the
Northumbrian dialect
The Northumbrian dialect refers to any of several English language varieties spoken in the traditional English region of Northumbria, which includes most of the North East England government region. The traditional Northumbrian dialect is a ...
(prevalent in northern England and spoken in southeast
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...
).
During the Middle English period, many Old English grammatical features either became simplified or disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective and verb
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
s were simplified by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of most
grammatical case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In vari ...
distinctions. Middle English also saw considerable adoption of
Norman
Norman or Normans may refer to:
Ethnic and cultural identity
* The Normans, a people partly descended from Norse Vikings who settled in the territory of Normandy in France in the 10th and 11th centuries
** People or things connected with the Norm ...
vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive diction. Conventional English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with
Old Norse
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...
influences becoming more apparent. Significant changes in pronunciation took place, particularly involving long vowels and diphthongs, which in the later Middle English period began to undergo the
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through ...
.
Little survives of early
Middle English literature
The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English b ...
, due in part to Norman domination and the prestige that came with writing in French rather than English. During the 14th century, a new style of literature emerged with the works of writers including
John Wycliffe
John Wycliffe (; also spelled Wyclif, Wickliffe, and other variants; 1328 – 31 December 1384) was an English scholastic philosopher, theologian, biblical translator, reformer, Catholic priest, and a seminary professor at the University of ...
and
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He wa ...
, whose ''
Canterbury Tales
''The Canterbury Tales'' ( enm, Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's ''magnum opus ...
'' remains the most studied and read work of the period.
History
Transition from Old English
![Middle English Dialects](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Middle_English_Dialects.png)
The transition from Late
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
to Early Middle English occurred at some point during the 12th century.
The influence of
Old Norse
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...
aided the development of English from a
synthetic language
A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express Syntax, syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the ...
with relatively free word order, to a more
analytic or
isolating language with a more strict word order.
Both Old English and Old Norse (as well as the descendants of the latter,
Faroese and
Icelandic) were synthetic languages with complicated inflections. The eagerness of
Vikings
Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden),
who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...
in the
Danelaw
The Danelaw (, also known as the Danelagh; ang, Dena lagu; da, Danelagen) was the part of England in which the laws of the Danes held sway and dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons. The Danelaw contrasts with the West Saxon law and the Mercian ...
to communicate with their Anglo-Saxon neighbours resulted in the erosion of inflection in both languages.
Old Norse may have had a more profound impact on Middle and Modern English development than any other language.
Simeon Potter notes: "No less far-reaching was the influence of Scandinavian upon the inflexional endings of English in hastening that wearing away and leveling of grammatical forms which gradually spread from north to south.".
Viking influence on
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
is most apparent in the more indispensable elements of the language. Pronouns, modals, comparatives, pronominal adverbs (like "hence" and "together"), conjunctions and prepositions show the most marked Danish influence. The best evidence of Scandinavian influence appears in extensive word borrowings, yet no texts exist in either Scandinavia or in Northern England from this period to give certain evidence of an influence on syntax. However, at least one scholarly study of this influence shows that Old English may have been replaced entirely by Norse, by virtue of the change from the Old English syntax to Norse syntax. The effect of Old Norse on Old English was substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic character.
Like close cousins, Old Norse and Old English resembled each other, and with some words in common, they roughly understood each other;
in time the inflections melted away and the analytic pattern emerged.
It is most "important to recognise that in many words the English and Scandinavian language differed chiefly in their inflectional elements. The body of the word was so nearly the same in the two languages that only the endings would put obstacles in the way of mutual understanding. In the mixed population which existed in the Danelaw these endings must have led to much confusion, tending gradually to become obscured and finally lost." This blending of peoples and languages resulted in "simplifying English grammar."
While the influence of Scandinavian languages was strongest in the dialects of the
Danelaw
The Danelaw (, also known as the Danelagh; ang, Dena lagu; da, Danelagen) was the part of England in which the laws of the Danes held sway and dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons. The Danelaw contrasts with the West Saxon law and the Mercian ...
region and Scotland, words in the spoken language emerge in the 10th and 11th centuries near the transition from the Old to Middle English. Influence on the written language only appeared at the beginning of the 13th century, likely because of a scarcity of literary texts from an earlier date.
The
Norman conquest of England
The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Normans, Norman, Duchy of Brittany, Breton, County of Flanders, Flemish, and Kingdom of France, French troops, ...
in 1066 saw the replacement of the top levels of the English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by
Norman
Norman or Normans may refer to:
Ethnic and cultural identity
* The Normans, a people partly descended from Norse Vikings who settled in the territory of Normandy in France in the 10th and 11th centuries
** People or things connected with the Norm ...
rulers who spoke a dialect of
Old French
Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligib ...
known as
Old Norman
Old Norman, also called Old Northern French or Old Norman French ( fro, Ancien Normant, nrf, Ancien Normaund), was one of many varieties of the '' langues d'oïl'' native to northern France. It was spoken throughout the region of what is now call ...
, which developed in England into
Anglo-Norman Anglo-Norman may refer to:
*Anglo-Normans, the medieval ruling class in England following the Norman conquest of 1066
* Anglo-Norman language
**Anglo-Norman literature
* Anglo-Norman England, or Norman England, the period in English history from 10 ...
. The use of Norman as the preferred language of literature and polite discourse fundamentally altered the role of Old English in education and administration, even though many Normans of this period were illiterate and depended on the clergy for written communication and record-keeping. A significant number of words of
Norman
Norman or Normans may refer to:
Ethnic and cultural identity
* The Normans, a people partly descended from Norse Vikings who settled in the territory of Normandy in France in the 10th and 11th centuries
** People or things connected with the Norm ...
origin began to appear in the English language alongside native English words of similar meaning, giving rise to such Modern English synonyms as ''
pig
The pig (''Sus domesticus''), often called swine, hog, or domestic pig when distinguishing from other members of the genus '' Sus'', is an omnivorous, domesticated, even-toed, hoofed mammal. It is variously considered a subspecies of ''Sus ...
/
pork
Pork is the culinary name for the meat of the domestic pig (''Sus domesticus''). It is the most commonly consumed meat worldwide, with evidence of pig husbandry dating back to 5000 BCE.
Pork is eaten both freshly cooked and preserved; ...
,
chicken
The chicken (''Gallus gallus domesticus'') is a domesticated junglefowl species, with attributes of wild species such as the grey and the Ceylon junglefowl that are originally from Southeastern Asia. Rooster or cock is a term for an adult m ...
/
poultry
Poultry () are domesticated birds kept by humans for their eggs, their meat or their feathers. These birds are most typically members of the superorder Galloanserae (fowl), especially the order Galliformes (which includes chickens, quails, a ...
,
calf
Calf most often refers to:
* Calf (animal), the young of domestic cattle.
* Calf (leg), in humans (and other primates), the back portion of the lower leg
Calf or calves may also refer to:
Biology and animal byproducts
* Veal, meat from calves
* ...
/
veal,
cow
Cattle (''Bos taurus'') are large, domesticated, cloven-hooved, herbivores. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae and the most widespread species of the genus ''Bos''. Adult females are referred to as cows and adult ma ...
/
beef
Beef is the culinary name for meat from cattle (''Bos taurus'').
In prehistoric times, humankind hunted aurochs and later domesticated them. Since that time, numerous breeds of cattle have been bred specifically for the quality or quantity ...
,
sheep
Sheep or domestic sheep (''Ovis aries'') are domesticated, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Although the term ''sheep'' can apply to other species in the genus ''Ovis'', in everyday usage it almost always refers to domesticated s ...
/
mutton
Lamb, hogget, and mutton, generically sheep meat, are the meat of domestic sheep, ''Ovis aries''. A sheep in its first year is a lamb and its meat is also lamb. The meat from sheep in their second year is hogget. Older sheep meat is mutton. Gen ...
, wood/
forest
A forest is an area of land dominated by trees. Hundreds of definitions of forest are used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land use, legal standing, and ecological function. The United Nations' ...
, house/
mansion
A mansion is a large dwelling house. The word itself derives through Old French from the Latin word ''mansio'' "dwelling", an abstract noun derived from the verb ''manere'' "to dwell". The English word '' manse'' originally defined a property l ...
, worthy/valuable, bold/courageous, freedom/
liberty
Liberty is the ability to do as one pleases, or a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant (i.e. privilege). It is a synonym for the word freedom.
In modern politics, liberty is understood as the state of being free within society fr ...
, sight/vision, eat/dine''.
The role of Anglo-Norman as the language of government and law can be seen in the abundance of Modern English words for the mechanisms of government that are derived from Anglo-Norman: ''
court
A court is any person or institution, often as a government institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance ...
'', ''
judge
A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as a part of a panel of judges. A judge hears all the witnesses and any other evidence presented by the barristers or solicitors of the case, assesses the credibility an ...
'', ''
jury
A jury is a sworn body of people (jurors) convened to hear evidence and render an impartiality, impartial verdict (a Question of fact, finding of fact on a question) officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a sentence (law), penalty o ...
'', ''
appeal
In law, an appeal is the process in which cases are reviewed by a higher authority, where parties request a formal change to an official decision. Appeals function both as a process for error correction as well as a process of clarifying and ...
'', ''
parliament
In modern politics, and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government. Generally, a modern parliament has three functions: Representation (politics), representing the Election#Suffrage, electorate, making laws, and overseeing ...
''. There are also many Norman-derived terms relating to the
chivalric
Chivalry, or the chivalric code, is an informal and varying code of conduct developed in Europe between 1170 and 1220. It was associated with the medieval Christian institution of knighthood; knights' and gentlemen's behaviours were governed b ...
cultures that arose in the 12th century; an era of
feudalism
Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structur ...
,
seigneurialism
Manorialism, also known as the manor system or manorial system, was the method of land ownership (or "tenure") in parts of Europe, notably France and later England, during the Middle Ages. Its defining features included a large, sometimes forti ...
and
crusading
The First Crusade inspired the crusading movement, which became an important part of late medieval western culture. The movement influenced the Church, politics, the economy, society and created a distinct ideology that described, regulated, a ...
.
Words were often taken from
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
, usually through French transmission. This gave rise to various synonyms including ''kingly'' (inherited from Old English), ''royal'' (from French, which inherited it from Vulgar Latin), and ''regal'' (from French, which borrowed it from classical Latin). Later French appropriations were derived from standard, rather than Norman, French. Examples of resultant cognate pairs include the words ''warden'' (from Norman), and ''guardian'' (from later French; both share a common Germanic ancestor).
The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not result in immediate changes to the language. The general population would have spoken the same
dialects
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...
as they had before the Conquest. Once the writing of Old English came to an end, Middle English had no standard language, only dialects that derived from the
dialects of the same regions in the Anglo-Saxon period.
Early Middle English
Early Middle English (1150–1300) has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (with
many Norse borrowings in the northern parts of the country), but a greatly simplified
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
al system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by the
dative
In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a ...
and
instrumental case
In grammar, the instrumental case (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the ''instrument'' or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. The noun may be either a physical object or an ...
s are replaced in Early Middle English with
preposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
al constructions. The Old English
genitive
In grammar, the genitive case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can al ...
- survives in the ''-'s'' of the modern
English possessive, but most of the other case endings disappeared in the Early Middle English period, including most of the
roughly one dozen forms of the
definite article
An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech.
In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ar ...
("the"). The
dual personal pronouns (denoting exactly two) also disappeared from English during this period.
Gradually, the wealthy and the government
Anglicised
Anglicisation is the process by which a place or person becomes influenced by English culture or British culture, or a process of cultural and/or linguistic change in which something non-English becomes English. It can also refer to the influen ...
again, although Norman (and subsequently
French) remained the dominant language of literature and law until the 14th century, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the
English monarchy. The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
that also occurred in other Germanic languages (though more slowly and to a lesser extent), and therefore it cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population: English did, after all, remain the
vernacular
A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...
. It is also argued that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that, although Norse- and English-speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other due to similar morphology, the Norse-speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced Middle English's loss of inflectional endings.
Important texts for the reconstruction of the evolution of Middle English out of Old English are the ''
Peterborough Chronicle
The ''Peterborough Chronicle'' (also called the Laud manuscript and the E manuscript) is a version of the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicles'' originally maintained by the monks of Peterborough Abbey in Cambridgeshire. It contains unique information abo ...
'', which continued to be compiled up to 1154; the ''
Ormulum
The ''Ormulum'' or ''Orrmulum'' is a twelfth-century work of biblical exegesis, written by an Augustinian canon named Orm (or Ormin) and consisting of just under 19,000 lines of early Middle English verse. Because of the unique phonemic orth ...
'', a biblical commentary probably composed in
Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire (abbreviated Lincs.) is a county in the East Midlands of England, with a long coastline on the North Sea to the east. It borders Norfolk to the south-east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south-west, Leicestershire ...
in the second half of the 12th century, incorporating a unique phonetic spelling system; and the and the
Katherine Group
The so-called ''Katherine Group'' is a group of five 13th century Middle English texts composed by an anonymous author of the English West Midlands, in a variety of Middle English known as AB language.
The texts are all addressed to anchoresse ...
, religious texts written for
anchoresses, apparently in the
West Midlands
West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth.
Etymology
The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some ...
in the early 13th century. The language found in the last two works is sometimes called the
AB language In English philology, AB language is a variety of Middle English found in the Corpus manuscript, containing ''Ancrene Wisse'' (whence 'A'), and in MS Bodley 34 in Bodleian Library, Oxford (whence 'B'). The Bodley manuscript includes what is known a ...
.
More literary sources of the 12th and 13th centuries include ''
Layamon's Brut
Layamon's ''Brut'' (ca. 1190 - 1215), also known as ''The Chronicle of Britain'', is a Middle English poem compiled and recast by the English priest Layamon. Layamon's ''Brut'' is 16,096 lines long and narrates the history of Britain. It is the ...
'' and ''
The Owl and the Nightingale
''The Owl and the Nightingale'' ( la, Altercatio inter filomenam et bubonem) is a twelfth- or thirteenth-century Middle English poem detailing a debate between an owl and a nightingale as overheard by the poem's narrator. It is the earliest exa ...
''.
Some scholars have defined "Early Middle English" as encompassing English texts up to 1350. This longer time frame would extend the corpus to include many Middle English Romances (especially those of the ''
Auchinleck manuscript
The Auchinleck Manuscript, NLS Adv. MS 19.2.1, is an illuminated manuscript copied on parchment in the 14th century in London. The manuscript provides a glimpse of a time of political tension and social change in England. The English were conti ...
'' ).
14th century
From around the early
14th century, there was significant migration into
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, particularly from the counties of the
East Midlands
The East Midlands is one of nine official regions of England at the first level of ITL for statistical purposes. It comprises the eastern half of the area traditionally known as the Midlands. It consists of Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Li ...
, and a new
prestige
Prestige refers to a good reputation or high esteem; in earlier usage, ''prestige'' meant "showiness". (19th c.)
Prestige may also refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media Films
* ''Prestige'' (film), a 1932 American film directed by Tay Garnet ...
London dialect began to develop, based chiefly on the speech of the East Midlands, but also influenced by that of other regions.
The writing of this period, however, continues to reflect a variety of regional forms of English. The , a translation of a French confessional prose work, completed in 1340, is written in a
Kentish dialect
English in Southern England (also, rarely, Southern English English; Southern England English; or in the UK, simply, Southern English) is the collective set of different dialects and accents of Modern English spoken in Southern England.
As of ...
. The best known writer of Middle English,
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He wa ...
, wrote in the second half of the 14th century in the emerging London dialect, although he also portrays some of his characters as speaking in northern dialects, as in the "
Reeve's Tale
"The Reeve's Tale" is the third story told in Geoffrey Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales''. The reeve, named Oswald in the text, is the manager of a large estate who reaped incredible profits for his master and himself. He is described in the ' ...
".
In the English-speaking areas of lowland
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...
, an independent standard was developing, based on the
Northumbrian dialect
The Northumbrian dialect refers to any of several English language varieties spoken in the traditional English region of Northumbria, which includes most of the North East England government region. The traditional Northumbrian dialect is a ...
. This would develop into what came to be known as the
Scots language
Scots ( endonym: ''Scots''; gd, Albais, ) is an Anglic language variety in the West Germanic language family, spoken in Scotland and parts of Ulster in the north of Ireland (where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots). Most commonly ...
.
A large number of terms for abstract concepts were adopted directly from
scholastic philosophical Latin (rather than via French). Examples are "absolute", "act", "demonstration", "probable".
Late Middle English
The Chancery Standard of written English emerged in official documents that, since the Norman Conquest, had normally been written in French.
Like Chaucer's work, this new standard was based on the East-Midlands-influenced speech of London. Clerks using this standard were usually familiar with
French and
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
, influencing the forms they chose. The Chancery Standard, which was adopted slowly, was used in England by bureaucrats for most official purposes, excluding those of the Church and legalities, which used Latin and
Law French
Law French ( nrf, Louai Français, enm, Lawe Frensch) is an archaic language originally based on Old Norman and Anglo-Norman, but increasingly influenced by Parisian French and, later, English. It was used in the law courts of England, be ...
(and some Latin), respectively.
The Chancery Standard's influence on later forms of written English is disputed, but it did undoubtedly provide the core around which
Early Modern English
Early Modern English or Early New English (sometimes abbreviated EModE, EMnE, or ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle E ...
formed. Early Modern English emerged with the help of
William Caxton
William Caxton ( – ) was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England, in 1476, and as a printer (publisher), printer to be the first English retailer of printed boo ...
's printing press, developed during the 1470s. The press stabilized English through a push towards standardization, led by Chancery Standard enthusiast and writer
Richard Pynson
Richard Pynson (c. 1449 – c. 1529) was one of the first printers of English books. Born in Normandy, he moved to London, where he became one of the leading printers of the generation following William Caxton. His books were printed to a high ...
. Early Modern English began in the 1540s after the printing and wide distribution of the
English Bible
Partial Bible translations into languages of the English people can be traced back to the late 7th century, including translations into Old and Middle English. More than 100 complete translations into English have been written.
In the United S ...
and
Prayer Book
A prayer book is a book containing prayers and perhaps devotional readings, for private or communal use, or in some cases, outlining the liturgy of religious services. Books containing mainly orders of religious services, or readings for them are ...
, which made the new standard of English publicly recognizable, and lasted until about 1650.
Phonology
The main changes between the
Old English sound system and
that of Middle English include:
*Emergence of the voiced
fricative
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
s , , as separate
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s, rather than mere
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...
s of the corresponding
voiceless
In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...
fricatives.
*Reduction of the Old English
diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
s to monophthongs, and the emergence of new diphthongs due to vowel breaking in certain positions, change of Old English post-vocalic , (sometimes resulting from the allophone of ) to offglides, and borrowing from French.
*Merging of Old English into a single vowel .
*Raising of the long vowel to .
*Rounding of to in the southern dialects.
*Unrounding of the front
rounded vowel
In phonetics, vowel roundedness is the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. It is labialization of a vowel. When a ''rounded'' vowel is pronounced, the lips form a circular opening, and ''unrounded'' vowels are pron ...
s in most dialects.
*Lengthening of vowels in
open syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "b ...
s (and in certain other positions). The resultant long vowels (and other pre-existing long vowels) subsequently underwent changes of quality in the
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through ...
, which began during the later Middle English period.
*Loss of
gemination
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from s ...
(double consonants came to be pronounced as single ones).
*Loss of weak final vowels (
schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...
, written ). By
Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for '' The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He w ...
's time this vowel was silent in normal speech, although it was normally pronounced in verse as the
meter
The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its pref ...
required (much as occurs in modern
French). Also, non-final unstressed was dropped when adjacent to only a single consonant on either side if there was another short in an adjoining syllable. Thus, began to be pronounced as , and as .
The combination of the last three processes listed above led to the spelling conventions associated with
silent and
doubled consonants (see under
Orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...
, below).
Morphology
Nouns
Middle English retains only two distinct noun-ending patterns from the more complex system of
inflection in Old English:
Nouns of the weak declension are primarily inherited from Old English ''n''-stem nouns, but also from ''ō''-stem, ''wō''-stem and ''u''-stem nouns, which did not inflect in the same way as ''n''-stem nouns in Old English, but joined the weak declension in Middle English. Nouns of the strong declension are inherited from the other Old English noun stem classes.
Some nouns of the strong type have an ''-e'' in the nominative/accusative singular, like the weak declension, but otherwise strong endings. Often these are the same nouns that had an ''-e'' in the nominative/accusative singular of Old English (they, in turn, were inherited from
Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branc ...
''ja''-stem and ''i''-stem nouns).
The distinct dative case was lost in early Middle English. The genitive survived, however, but by the end of the Middle English period, only the strong ''-'s'' ending (variously spelt) was in use. Some formerly feminine nouns, as well as some weak nouns, continued to make their genitive forms with ''-e'' or no ending (e.g. , horses' hooves), and nouns of relationship ending in ''-er'' frequently have no genitive ending (e.g. , "father's bane").
[Burrow & Turville-Petre 2005, p. 23]
The strong ''-(e)s'' plural form has survived into Modern English. The weak ''-(e)n'' form is now rare and used only in ''oxen'' and, as part of a
double plural
A double plural is a plural form to which an extra suffix has been added, mainly because the original plural suffix (or other variation) had become unproductive and therefore irregular. So the form as a whole was no longer seen as a plural, an i ...
, in ''children'' and ''brethren''. Some dialects still have forms such as ''eyen'' (for ''eyes''), ''shoon'' (for ''shoes''), ''hosen'' (for ''hose(s)''), ''kine'' (for ''cows''), and ''been'' (for ''bees'').
Grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns ...
survived to a limited extent in early Middle English,
before being replaced by natural gender in the course of the Middle English period. Grammatical gender was indicated by agreement of articles and pronouns, i.e. ("the-feminine owl") or using the pronoun to refer to masculine nouns such as ("helmet"), or phrases such as (strong shaft) with the masculine accusative adjective ending ''-ne''.
[Burrow & Turville-Petre 2005, p. 38]
Adjectives
Single syllable adjectives add ''-e'' when modifying a noun in the plural and when used after the definite article (), after a demonstrative (, ), after a possessive pronoun (e.g. , ), or with a name or in a form of address. This derives from the Old English "weak" declension of adjectives.
[Burrow & Turville-Petre 2005, pp. 27–28] This inflexion continued to be used in writing even after final -e had ceased to be pronounced.
[Burrow & Turville-Petre 2005, p. 28] In earlier texts, multi-syllable adjectives also receive a final ''-e'' in these situations, but this occurs less regularly in later Middle English texts. Otherwise adjectives have no ending, and adjectives already ending in ''-e'' etymologically receive no ending as well.
Earlier texts sometimes inflect adjectives for case as well.
Layamon's Brut
Layamon's ''Brut'' (ca. 1190 - 1215), also known as ''The Chronicle of Britain'', is a Middle English poem compiled and recast by the English priest Layamon. Layamon's ''Brut'' is 16,096 lines long and narrates the history of Britain. It is the ...
inflects adjectives for the masculine accusative, genitive, and dative, the feminine dative, and the plural genitive.
[Burrow & Turville-Petre 2005, pp. 28–29] ''The Owl and the Nightingale'' adds a final ''-e'' to all adjectives not in the nominative, here only inflecting adjectives in the weak declension (as described above).
[Burrow & Turville-Petre 2005, p. 29]
Comparatives and superlatives are usually formed by adding ''-er'' and ''-est''. Adjectives with long vowels sometimes shorten these vowels in the comparative and superlative, e.g. (great) (greater).
Adjectives ending in ''-ly'' or ''-lich'' form comparatives either with ''-lier'', ''-liest'' or ''-loker'', ''-lokest''.
A few adjectives also display
Germanic umlaut
The Germanic umlaut (sometimes called i-umlaut or i-mutation) is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel ( fronting) or a front vowel becomes closer to (raising) when the following syllable conta ...
in their comparatives and superlatives, such as , .
Other irregular forms are mostly the same as in modern English.
Pronouns
Middle English
personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
s were mostly developed from
those of Old English, with the exception of the third-person plural, a borrowing from
Old Norse
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...
(the original Old English form clashed with the third person singular and was eventually dropped). Also, the nominative form of the feminine third-person singular was replaced by a form of the
demonstrative
Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...
that developed into (modern ''she''), but the alternative remained in some areas for a long time.
As with nouns, there was some inflectional simplification (the distinct Old English
dual forms were lost), but pronouns, unlike nouns, retained distinct nominative and accusative forms. Third-person pronouns also retained a distinction between accusative and dative forms, but that was gradually lost: the masculine was replaced by south of the Thames by the early 14th century, and the neuter dative was ousted by ''it'' in most dialects by the 15th.
The following table shows some of the various Middle English pronouns. Many other variations are noted in Middle English sources because of differences in spellings and pronunciations at different times and in different dialects.
Verbs
As a general rule, the indicative first person singular of verbs in the present tense ends in ''-e'' (, 'I hear'), the second person in ''-(e)st'' (, 'thou speakest'), and the third person in ''-eþ'' (, 'he cometh/he comes'). (''
þ'' (the letter 'thorn') is pronounced like the unvoiced ''th'' in "think", but, under certain circumstances, it may be like the voiced ''th'' in "that"). The following table illustrates a typical conjugation pattern:
Plural forms vary strongly by dialect, with Southern dialects preserving the Old English ''-eþ'', Midland dialects showing ''-en'' from about 1200 and Northern forms using ''-es'' in the third person singular as well as the plural.
The past tense of weak verbs is formed by adding an ''-ed(e)'', ''-d(e)'' or ''-t(e)'' ending. The past-tense forms, without their personal endings, also serve as past participles with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: ''i-'', ''y-'' and sometimes ''bi-''.
Strong verbs, by contrast, form their past tense by changing their stem vowel ( becomes , a process called
apophony
In linguistics, apophony (also known as ablaut, (vowel) gradation, (vowel) mutation, alternation, internal modification, stem modification, stem alternation, replacive morphology, stem mutation, internal inflection etc.) is any alternation wit ...
), as in Modern English.
Orthography
With the discontinuation of the
Late West Saxon
Late may refer to:
* LATE, an acronym which could stand for:
** Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy, a proposed form of dementia
** Local-authority trading enterprise, a New Zealand business law
** Local average treatment effect, ...
standard used for the
writing of Old English in the period prior to the Norman Conquest, Middle English came to be written in a wide variety of scribal forms, reflecting different regional dialects and orthographic conventions. Later in the Middle English period, however, and particularly with the development of the
Chancery Standard in the 15th century, orthography became relatively standardised in a form based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London. Spelling at the time was mostly quite
regular (there was a fairly consistent correspondence between letters and sounds). The irregularity of
present-day English orthography is largely due to
pronunciation changes that have taken place over the
Early Modern English
Early Modern English or Early New English (sometimes abbreviated EModE, EMnE, or ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle E ...
and
Modern English eras.
Middle English generally did not have
silent letter
In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. In linguistics, a silent letter is often symbolised with a null sign . Null is an unprono ...
s. For example, ''knight'' was pronounced (with both the and the pronounced, the latter sounding as the in German ). The major exception was the
silent – originally pronounced, but lost in normal speech by Chaucer's time. This letter, however, came to indicate a lengthened – and later also modified – pronunciation of a preceding vowel. For example, in ''name'', originally pronounced as two syllables, the /a/ in the first syllable (originally an open syllable) lengthened, the final weak vowel was later dropped, and the remaining long vowel was modified in the
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through ...
(for these sound changes, see under
Phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
, above). The final , now silent, thus became the indicator of the longer and changed pronunciation of . In fact vowels could have this lengthened and modified pronunciation in various positions, particularly before a single consonant letter and another vowel, or before certain pairs of consonants.
A related convention involved the doubling of consonant letters to show that the preceding vowel was not to be lengthened. In some cases the double consonant represented a sound that was (or had previously been)
geminated
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from s ...
, i.e. had genuinely been "doubled" (and would thus have regularly blocked the lengthening of the preceding vowel). In other cases, by analogy, the consonant was written double merely to indicate the lack of lengthening.
Alphabet
The basic
Old English Latin alphabet The Old English Latin alphabet generally consisted of about 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 8th to the 12th centuries. Of these letters, most were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters ( ...
had consisted of 20 standard letters plus four additional letters:
ash
Ash or ashes are the solid remnants of fires. Specifically, ''ash'' refers to all non-aqueous, non- gaseous residues that remain after something burns. In analytical chemistry, to analyse the mineral and metal content of chemical samples, ash ...
,
eth
(colloquially)
, former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule
, image = ETHZ.JPG
, image_size =
, established =
, type = Public
, budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021)
, rector = Günther Dissertori
, president = Joël Mesot
, a ...
,
thorn
Thorn(s) or The Thorn(s) may refer to:
Botany
* Thorns, spines, and prickles, sharp structures on plants
* ''Crataegus monogyna'', or common hawthorn, a plant species
Comics and literature
* Rose and Thorn, the two personalities of two DC Com ...
and
wynn
Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, ƿynn, and ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound .
History The letter "W"
While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph , ...
. There was not yet a distinct ''j'', ''v'' or ''w'', and Old English scribes did not generally use ''k'', ''q'' or ''z''.
Ash was no longer required in Middle English, as the Old English vowel that it represented had
merged into /a/. The symbol nonetheless came to be used as a
ligature
Ligature may refer to:
* Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure
** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry
* Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...
for the digraph in many words of Greek or Latin origin, as did for .
Eth and thorn both represented or its
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...
in Old English. Eth fell out of use during the 13th century and was replaced by thorn. Thorn mostly fell out of use during the 14th century, and was replaced by
. Anachronistic usage of the scribal abbreviation
![EME ye](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/EME_ye.svg)
(, i.e. "the") has led to the modern mispronunciation of ''thorn'' as in this context; see ''
ye olde''.
Wynn, which represented the phoneme , was replaced by during the 13th century. Due to its similarity to the letter , it is mostly represented by in modern editions of Old and Middle English texts even when the manuscript has wynn.
Under Norman influence, the continental
Carolingian minuscule
Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome's Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one reg ...
replaced the
insular script
Insular script was a medieval script system originating from Ireland that spread to Anglo-Saxon England and continental Europe under the influence of Irish Christianity. Irish missionaries took the script to continental Europe, where they found ...
that had been used for Old English. However, because of the significant difference in appearance between the old
insular ''g'' and the
Carolingian ''g'' (modern ''g''), the former continued in use as a separate letter, known as
yogh
The letter yogh (ȝogh) ( ; Scots Language, Scots: ; Middle English: ) was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing ''y'' () and various velar consonant , velar phonemes. It was derived from the Insular G, Insular form of the letter ...
, written . This was adopted for use to represent a variety of sounds: , while the Carolingian ''g'' was normally used for
Instances of yogh were eventually replaced by or , and by in words like ''night'' and ''laugh''. In
Middle Scots
Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 15th century, its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtually ...
yogh became indistinguishable from cursive ''z'', and printers tended to use when ''yogh'' was not available in their fonts; this led to new spellings (often giving rise to new pronunciations), as in
''McKenzie'', where the replaced a yogh which had the pronunciation .
Under continental influence, the letters , and , which had not normally been used by Old English scribes, came to be commonly used in the writing of Middle English. Also the newer Latin letter was introduced (replacing wynn). The distinct letter forms and came into use, but were still used interchangeably; the same applies to and .
[Salmon, V., (in) Lass, R. (ed.), ''The Cambridge History of the English Language'', Vol. III, CUP 2000, p. 39.] (For example, spellings such as and for ''wife'' and ''paradise'' can be found in Middle English.)
The consonantal / was sometimes used to transliterate the
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
letter
yodh
Yodh (also spelled jodh, yod, or jod) is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Yōd /𐤉, Hebrew Yōd , Aramaic Yod , Syriac Yōḏ ܝ, and Arabic . Its sound value is in all languages for which it is used; in many l ...
, representing the
palatal approximant
The voiced palatal approximant, or yod, is a type of consonant used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is j, and in the Americanist phonetic no ...
sound (and transliterated in
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
by
iota
Iota (; uppercase: Ι, lowercase: ι; ) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin alphabet, Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Cy ...
and in Latin by ); words like ''Jerusalem'', ''Joseph'', etc. would have originally followed the Latin pronunciation beginning with , that is, the sound of in ''yes''. In some words, however, notably from
Old French
Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligib ...
, / was used for the
affricate consonant
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. ...
, as in (modern "joy"), used in
Wycliffe's Bible.
["J", ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989)] This was similar to the
geminate sound , which had been represented as in Old English. By the time of Modern English, the sound came to be written as / at the start of words (like ''joy''), and usually as elsewhere (as in ''bridge''). It could also be written, mainly in French loanwords, as , with the adoption of the
soft G
In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, the letter is used in different contexts to represent two distinct phonemes that in English are called hard and soft . The sound of a hard (which often precedes the non-front vowel ...
convention (''age'', ''page'', etc.)
Other symbols
Many
scribal abbreviation
Scribal abbreviations or sigla (grammatical number, singular: siglum) are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek language, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern manuscrip ...
s were also used. It was common for the
Lollards
Lollardy, also known as Lollardism or the Lollard movement, was a proto-Protestant Christian religious movement that existed from the mid-14th century until the 16th-century English Reformation. It was initially led by John Wycliffe, a Catholic ...
to abbreviate the name of
Jesus
Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious ...
(as in Latin manuscripts) to ''
ihc
IHC may refer to:
Medicine
* Immunohistochemistry
* Intrahepatic cholestasis
Science and technology
* Indirectly Heated Cathode, a type of hot cathode used in vacuum electronics tubes
* Intelligent Home Control, home automation and control s ...
''. The letters and were often omitted and indicated by a
macron above an adjacent letter, so for example ''in'' could be written as ''ī''. A thorn with a superscript or could be used for ''that'' and ''the''; the thorn here resembled a , giving rise to the ''ye'' of "
Ye Olde". Various forms of the
ampersand replaced the word ''and''.
Numbers were still always written using
Roman numerals
Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, eac ...
, except for some rare occurrences of
Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write Decimal, decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers ...
during the 15th century.
Letter-to-sound correspondences
Although Middle English spelling was never fully standardised, the following table shows the pronunciations most usually represented by particular letters and
digraphs towards the end of the Middle English period, using the notation given in the article on
Middle English phonology
Middle English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative, since it is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large text corpus of Middle English. The dialects of Middle English vary greatly over both time and pla ...
. As explained above, single vowel letters had alternative pronunciations depending on whether they were in a position where their sounds had been subject to lengthening. Long vowel pronunciations were in flux due to the beginnings of the
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through ...
.
Sample texts
Most of the following
Modern English translations are poetic
sense-for-sense translation
Sense-for-sense translation is the oldest norm for translating. It fundamentally means translating the meaning of each whole sentence before moving on to the next, and stands in normative opposition to word-for-word translation (also known as ...
s, not
word-for-word translation
Literal translation, direct translation or word-for-word translation, is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately, without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence.
In translation theory, anoth ...
s.
Ormulum, 12th century
This passage explains the background to the
Nativity (3494–501):
Epitaph of John the smyth, died 1371
An epitaph from a
monumental brass in an Oxfordshire parish church:
Wycliffe's Bible, 1384
From the
Wycliffe's Bible, (1384):
Chaucer, 1390s
The following is the very beginning of the
General Prologue
The General Prologue is the first part of ''The Canterbury Tales'' by Geoffrey Chaucer. It introduces the frame story, in which a group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury agree to take part in a storytelling comp ...
from ''
The Canterbury Tales
''The Canterbury Tales'' ( enm, Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's ''Masterpiece, ...
'' by
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He wa ...
. The text was written in a dialect associated with London and spellings associated with the then-emergent Chancery Standard.
Translation into Modern U.K. English prose: When April with its sweet showers has drenched March's drought to the roots, filling every capillary with nourishing sap prompting the flowers to grow, and when the breeze (
Zephyrus
In ancient Greek religion and myth, the Anemoi (Greek: , 'Winds') were wind gods who were each ascribed a cardinal direction from which their respective winds came (see Classical compass winds), and were each associated with various seasons an ...
) with his sweet breath has coaxed the tender plants to sprout in every wood and dale, as the springtime sun passes halfway through the sign of
Aries
Aries may refer to:
*Aries (astrology), an astrological sign
*Aries (constellation), a constellation of stars in the zodiac
Arts, entertainment and media
* ''Aries'' (album), by Luis Miguel, 1993
* ''Aries'' (EP), by Alice Chater, 2020
* "Aries" ...
, and small birds that sleep all night with half-open eyes chirp melodies, their spirits thus aroused by Nature; it is at these times that people desire to go on pilgrimages and pilgrims (
palmers) seek new shores and distant shrines venerated in other places. Particularly they go to Canterbury, from every county of England, in order to visit the
holy blessed martyr, who has helped them when they were unwell.
Gower, 1390
The following is the beginning of the Prologue from ''
Confessio Amantis
''Confessio Amantis'' ("The Lover's Confession") is a 33,000-line Middle English poem by John Gower, which uses the confession made by an ageing lover to the chaplain of Venus as a frame story for a collection of shorter narrative poems. Accord ...
'' by
John Gower
John Gower (; c. 1330 – October 1408) was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and the Pearl Poet, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works, the '' Mirour de l'Omme'', '' Vo ...
.
Translation in Modern English: (by J. Dow)
See also
*''
Medulla Grammatice'' (collection of glossaries)
*
Middle English creole hypothesis
The Middle English creole hypothesis is the concept that the English language is a creole, which is typically a language that developed from a pidgin. The vast differences between Old English and Middle English have led some historical linguis ...
*
Middle English Dictionary
''The Middle English Dictionary'' is a dictionary of Middle English published by the University of Michigan. "Its 15,000 pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1175–1500, based on the analysis of a collection of ...
*
Middle English literature
The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English b ...
*
A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English
''A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English'' (LAEME) is a digital, corpus-driven, historical dialect resource for Early Middle English (1150–1325). LAEME combines a searchable Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT), an Index of Sources, and dot maps ...
References
*Brunner, Karl (1962) ''Abriss der mittelenglischen Grammatik''; 5. Auflage. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer (1st ed. Halle (Saale): M. Niemeyer, 1938)
*Brunner, Karl (1963) ''An Outline of Middle English Grammar''; translated by Grahame Johnston. Oxford: Blackwell
*
*
Mustanoja, Tauno (1960) "A Middle English Syntax. 1. Parts of Speech". Helsinki : Société néophilologique.
External links
A. L. Mayhew and Walter William Skeat. ''A Concise Dictionary of Middle English from A.D. 1150 to 1580''* With grammatical introduction, notes, and glossary.
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Anglic languages
English, Middle
History of the English language
Middle English
Languages attested from the 11th century
11th-century establishments in Europe
Languages extinct in the 15th century
15th-century disestablishments in Europe