In the development of the English language the Middle
English is the stage during the High and
Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th
and the late 15th century. Middle English developed out of Late Old English in
Norman England (1066-1154). The Middle English period ended at about 1470, when
the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become
widespread, a process aided by the introduction of the printing press to England
by William Caxton in the late 1470s. At the beginning of the period English is
a language that must be learned like a foreign tongue; at the end it is Modern
English.
The
Middle English period (1150–1500) was 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. Some of them were the result of the
Norman Conquest and the conditions which followed in the wake of that event.
Others were a continuation of tendencies that had begun to manifest themselves
in Old English.
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Decay of Inflectional Endings
The
changes in English grammar may be described as a general reduction of
inflections. Endings of the noun and adjective marking distinctions of number
and case and often of gender were so altered in pronunciation as to lose their
distinctive form and hence their usefulness. To some extent the same thing is
true of the verb. This leveling of inflectional endings was due partly to
phonetic changes, partly to the operation of analogy. The phonetic changes were
simple but far-reaching.
Loss of Grammatical Gender
Another
feature of the middle English is the Loss of Grammatical Gender. Old English
had grammatical genders (m., f., and n.), like the modern continental languages.
And like its modern counterparts, Old English sometimes exhibited a disparity
between grammatical and biological gender. Hence þæt wif, “the woman” (n.), se
stan, “the stone” (m.), or seo giefu, “the gift” (f.). But starting in the
tenth century, we begin to see the loss of grammatical gender in Old English.
This loss begins in the north of England and over the next few centuries
spreads south, until grammatical gender is completely gone from the language by
the middle of the fourteenth century. The loss of grammatical gender is pretty
much complete in Northumbria by the beginning of the eleventh century. By the
middle of that century the loss becomes apparent in texts from the Midlands and
is largely complete there by the beginning of the thirteenth century, although
some Midlands dialects retain vestiges of grammatical gender until the end of
the thirteenth century. The south of England loses grammatical gender over the
course of the late-eleventh through thirteenth centuries, and Kent is the last
holdout, maintaining grammatical gender into the middle of the fourteenth
century.
Middle English Syntax
For
the most part, Middle English syntax (or sentence structure) is similar to
Modern English. The default, or basic, word order is Subject-Verb-Object. The
most direct way to avoid this kind of ambiguity is through limiting the
possible patterns of word order. The process of development from the highly
synthetic stage of Old English (see § 40) to the highly analytic stages of Late
Middle English and Modern English can be seen in the Peterborough Chronicle.
Written in installments between 1070 and 1154, this text of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronide spans the period from Old English to Early Middle English. Within the
continuations of the text it is possible to trace first a significant loss of
inflections and afterwards a corresponding rigidity of word order, making clear
the direction of cause and effect.
French Influence on the Vocabulary
French influence is much more direct and
observable upon the vocabulary on the middle English. Where two languages exist
side by side for a long time and the relations between the people speaking them
are as intimate as they were in England, a considerable transference of words
from one language to the other is inevitable. The number of French words that
poured into English was unbelievably great. There is nothing comparable to it
in the previous or subsequent history of the language.