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ME: Norman French/Middle English (1100-1500)

A historical event -- the Norman Invasion of Britain -- signaled a radical change in English and marks the transition from Old English to Middle
English (1100-1450). Middle English is the long period of accommodation between the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons (Old English) and
the Latin-based language of the Norman French.
The Norman Invasion
The end of the Anglo-Saxon period was ushered in abruptly with the Norman French invasion under William the Conqueror in 1066 at the
Battle of Hastings. William, The Duke of Normandy, sailed across the British Channel. He challenged King Harold of England in the struggle for
the English throne. After winning the Battle of Hastings where he defeated Harold, William was crowned King of England. A Norman Kingdom
was now established. The Anglo-Saxon period was over.
The Norman invasion naturally had a profound effect on England's institutions and its language. The Norman French in 1066 differed more
strikingly linguistically as well as culturally from the Anglo Saxons than did the Danish conquerors of a few centuries earlier. Unlike the
situation with the Norse invasions, the Normans looked upon the conquered Anglo-Saxons as social inferiors. French became the language of
the upper class; Anglo-Saxon of the lower class. The Norman French spoken by the invaders became the language of England's ruling class.
The lower classes, while remaining English-speaking, were influenced nevertheless by the new vocabulary. French became the language of the
affairs of government, court, the church, the army, and education where the newly adopted French words often substituted their former
English counterparts. The linguistic influence of Norman French continued for as long as the Kings ruled both Normandy and England.
New Words: Consequently, the Norman invasion initiated a vast borrowing of Latin-based words into English. Entire vocabularies were
borrowed from Norman French:
1) governmental: count, heraldry, fine, noble, parliament.
2) military: battle, ally, alliance, ensign, admiral, navy, aid, gallant, march, enemy, escape, peace, war (cf. guerilla).
3) judicial system: judge, jury, plaintiff, justice, court, suit, defendant, crime, felony, murder, petty/petit, attorney, marriage (AngloSaxon wedding), heir.
4) ecclesiastical: clergy, altar, miracle, preach, pray, sermon, virgin, saint, friar/frere.

5) cuisine: sauce, boil, filet, soup, pastry, fry, roast, toast.

6) new personal names: John, Mary (Biblical Hebrew and Greek names) and Norman French (Charles, Richard)
About ten thousand French words had been taken over by English during the Middle English period, and most of them have remained in the
language until the present day. Aside from the already mentioned new vocabulary, many words relating to food and fashion were introduced as
well. In some fields an original English terminology did not exist. Therefore, many French terms were borrowed. As a result, after the Norman
invasion, many Anglo Saxon words narrowed in meaning to describe only the cruder, dirtier aspects of life. Concepts associated with culture,
fine living and abstract learning tended to be described by new Norman words. One example is the names of animals and their meat. Whereas
the names of the animals remained the same, their meat was renamed according to the Norman custom. This correlated to the sociological
structures: the farmers that raised the animals were predominantly English natives and could afford to keep using their own vocabulary while
farming -- those serving the meat at the dining room table to the mainly French upper classes had to conform to the French language.
animal (Anglo Saxon)
sheep
cow
swine
deer
calf

meat (Norman French)

mutton
beef
pork
venison
veal

As Anglo-Saxon and the Norman French gradually merged throughout the later Middle Ages and the Normans and Anglo-Saxons became one
society, the speakers of English tried to effect some linguistic reconciliation between the older Anglo-Saxon words and the newer Norman
French words. Many modern English phrases and sayings still include a word from Norman French alongside a synonymous Anglo-Saxon: law
and order, lord and master, love and cherish, ways and means. These doublet phrases capture this attempt to please everybody who might
need to be pleased.
The Norman French influence was so extensive that even the grammar of English was affected. The changes were mainly confined to the
borrowing of derivational affixes. All native prefixes dropped out or became unproductive during this time; the few that survive today are
non-productive: be- inbesmirch, or for- in forgive, forstall; they were replaced by Latin: ex-, pre, pro, dis, re, anti- inter. Many Norman
French suffixes were borrowed: -or vs. -er; -tion, -ment, -ee, -able as a suffix.
Grammar: As far as grammar is concerned, the exclusive use of the pattern SVO (subject - verb - object) emerged in the twelfth century and
has remained part of English ever since.
Phonology: Norman French influence on phonology of English was relatively minor. Initial [v] and [z] were adopted into the language: very is
a Norman word. Initial [z] is still considered marginal in English.

Spelling: Much of the French vocabulary remains. Today, 40% of our words are of French origin (although many of these came originally from
Latin). However, most of our common words derive from Old English.
One big problem that resulted from mixing English and French has been that our spelling system has become a mix of the two. Whereas Old
English spelling was fairly consistent, and modern French spelling is also fairly consistent, modern English is a real mix-up. Curiously enough,
Norman French borrowings into English haven't changed in pronunciation for 800 years, whereas the French pronunciation changed.
The letter c: For example, the use of the letter "c" to represent the [s] sound is a French habit which was not used in Old English. So now we
have the word cinder instead of the OE 'sinder'; ice instead of OE 'is'; and mice instead of OE 'mys'.
But some words still use the letter "c"to represent the [k] sound. The [s] sound is represented by "c" only before "i" or "e" - so "c" can still
represent the [k] sound before other letters - as in cat, cot, cut, climband crust. In the 1200's the [k] sound before "i" and "e" came to be
represented by "k" - as in king andkeen. But the rules are not consistent, such as the recent word kangaroo (1770) uses "k" before "a".
The letter h: Also, French words do not pronounce an initial [h]. So in English we have the word ablefrom the French 'habile'; but we retain
letter "h" in words where it is not pronounced, as in heir, honest, honour, hour. We now pronounce initial [h] in words where Middle English did
not pronounce it, as inhorrible, hospital, host.
The letters qu: In Old English the sound "qu" as in queen was spelt "cw". The "qu" spelling was adopted in Middle English. But borrowings from
French included many words where the sound [k] was represented by "qu" - as in quay, picturesque.
The letters ou: French borrowings also caused inconsistencies related to the letters "ou". Words derived from French include group and soup.
But "ou" is more commonly pronounced in English as in house andloud.
The letters gh: The problem of "gh" also stems from this period. Middle English words which were pronounced with the sound as in the [x], the
hard "h" of the Scottish word loch (or German ich) came to be written with a "gh", as in night, high, ought, bough. These spellings have been
retained even though the hard h sound has disappeared. In some words this same sound has not been entirely lost but has come to sound like
[f], as in cough, laugh, tough.
The letters ch: The spelling "ch" appeared in the 1200's. However the application of "ch" has not been consistent. Words borrowed from
modern French like chauffeur, champagne, and machine use "ch" to represent the [S] 'sh' sound. Words borrowed from Latin such
as chorus and archive use"'ch" to represent the [k] sound. Old Norman French borrowings have [tS] 'ch' sound: Charles, choice, check. And
words from Italian such as cello and concerto represent the "ch" sound with a "c". When new words were borrowed into English from French
over the past few hundred years, lexical doublets were created: chief/chef.
When King John (1167 - 1216) lost Normandy in the years following 1200, the links to the French-speaking community subsided. English then
slowly started to gain more weight as a common tongue within England again. In 1399, King Henry IV became the first king of England since the

Norman Conquest whose mother tongue was English. By the end of the 14th Century, the dialect of London had emerged as the standard
dialect of what we now call Middle English.

Chaucer (1300's)
By the late 1300's when Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, more than half of the English vocabulary consisted of Norman French words.
Writer, poet, and intellectual Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 - 1400) is often called the Father of English literature. His most famous work is the
wonderful Canterbury Tales, written sometime around 1387 and published in 1400, the year he died.
Having recently passed the six hundredth anniversary of its publication, the book is still of interest to modern students for several reasons. For
one thing, The Canterbury Tales is recognized as the first book of poetry written in the English language. Before Chaucer's time, even
poets who lived in England wrote in Italian or Latin, which meant that poetry was only understandable to people of the wealthy, educated
class. English was considered low class and vulgar. To a great degree, The Canterbury Tales helped make it a legitimate language to work in.
Because of this work, all of the great writers who followed, from Shakespeare to Dryden to Keats to Eliot, owe him a debt of gratitude. It is
because Chaucer wrote in English that there is a written record of the roots from which the modern language grew. Contemporary readers
might find his words nearly as difficult to follow as a foreign language, but scholars are thankful for the chance to compare Middle English to
the language as it is spoken now, to examine its growth.
In the same way that The Canterbury Tales gives modern readers a sense of the language at the time, the book also gives a rich, intricate
tapestry of medieval social life, combining elements of all classes, from nobles to workers, from priests and nuns to drunkards and thieves. The
General Prologue alone provides a panoramic view of society that is not like any found elsewhere in all of literature. Students who are not
particularly interested in medieval England can appreciate the authors technique in capturing the variations of human temperament and
behavior. Collections of stories were common in Chaucers time, and some still exist today, but the genius of The Canterbury Tales is that the
individual stories are presented in a continuing narrative, showing how all of the various pieces of life connect to one another.
The Great Vowel Shift (1400)
During the Renaissance (1400's and 1500's) the Latin language became important in England, such as in the church and in medicine. So English
acquired many Latin words in this period.
The mixture of English and Latin also caused inconsistencies in spelling. For example, late Latin developed the practice of using "o" in place of
"u". So now we have words like come, some, monk, son, tongue, wonder, honey, above, done and love, none of which are pronounced like [^]
and not the [o:] 'o' written.

But the biggest change linguistically developed over many years: The Great Vowel Shift.
The Great Vowel Shift (GVS) was a major linguistic rearrangement which took place in English in the century or two during and after Chaucers
lifetime: perhaps 1350-1550. The GVS was perhaps the most important process in the change from Middle English to Modern English.
Basically, the long vowels shifted upwards; that is, a vowel that used to be pronounced in one place in the mouth would be pronounced in a
different place, higher up in the mouth.
The easiest way to understand the changes is to hear the changes. Listen carefully to the vowels. The long vowels in the (it might help to
review the ASCII Phonetic Alphabet vowels you learned in Mod 3.
[a:] became [o:]
ME
[sta:n]
[hla:f]
[ra:p]
[ha:li:g]

Stan
Half
Rap
Halig

>
stone
loaf
rope
holy

[u:] became [au]

ME
mouse
house
out
south
our
[i:] became [ai]

[mu:s]
[hu:s]
[u:t]
[su:th]
[u:r]

> ModEng
[maus]
[haus]
[aut]
sauth]
[aur]

ModEng
{sto:n]
[lo:f]
[ro:p]
[holi]

ME
mice
like
wide
sight

[mi:s]
[li:k]
[wi:d]
[si:t]

> ModEng
[mais]
[laik]
[waid]
[sait]

[e:] became [i:]

ME
geese
bee
beet
me

[ge:s]
[be:a:]
[be:t]
[me:]

> ModEng
[gi:]
[bi:]
[bi:t]
[mi:]

Many of today's spelling inconsistencies are traceable to Middle English. Our spelling system still reflects the way words were spelled and
pronounced before the GVS of 1500.
For example: name Chaucer [na:m^] Shakespeare [ne:m] and clean Chaucer [kle:a:n] Shakespeare [kli:n]
The GVS was limited only to English: contemporary and neighboring languages like French, German, and Spanish were entirely unaffected. The
shift affected words of both native ancestry and borrowings from French and Latin, and the many pairs of words in each category which for
morphological reasons had a short-long alteration in Middle English thus have quite radically differing pronunciations in Modern English. The
GVS has had long-term implications for, among other things, spelling, the teaching of reading, and the understanding of any English-language
text written before or during the Shift.

End of the Middle English period

By 1450 - 1500, English had reached a form somewhat similar to that of today, so
that we say that Modern English was in use from about that time. The two
languages of Norman and Anglo-Saxon had merged into a single linguistic form.
Actually, what happened was that the more numerous Anglo-Saxon speakers
triumphed over the Norman French, who came to adopt English in place of French.
But the English of 1500 contained a tremendous number of Norman French words.

Norman Conquest

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The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English
was the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror
(Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England) invaded the island
of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his
new acquisition along with his nobles and court. William crushed the
opposition with a brutal hand and deprived the Anglo-Saxon earls of
their property, distributing it to Normans (and some English) who
supported him.
The conquering Normans were themselves descended from Vikings
who had settled in northern France about 200 years before (the very
William the Conqueror (from Bayeux Tapestry)
word Norman comes originally fromNorseman). However, they had
(from History of Information)
completely abandoned their Old Norse language and wholeheartedly
adopted French (which is a so-called Romance language, derived originally from the Latin, not Germanic, branch of IndoEuropean), to the extent that not a single Norse word survived in Normandy.
However, the Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences, usually called AngloNorman or Norman French, which was quite different from the standard French of Paris of the period, which is known as
Francien. The differences between these dialects became even more marked after the Norman invasion of Britain,
particularly after King John and England lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France in 1204 and England
became even more isolated from continental Europe.

Anglo-Norman French became the language of the kings and nobility of England for more than 300 years (Henry IV, who
came to the English throne in 1399, was the first monarch since before the Conquest to have English as his mother
tongue). While Anglo-Norman was the verbal language of the court, administration and culture, though, Latin was mostly
used for written language, especially by the Church and in official records. For example, the Domesday Book, in which
William the Conqueror took stock of his new kingdom, was written in Latin to emphasize its legal authority.
However, the peasantry and lower classes (the vast majority of the population, an
estimated 95%) continued to speak English - considered by the Normans a lowclass, vulgar tongue - and the two languages developed in parallel, only gradually
merging as Normans and Anglo-Saxons began to intermarry. It is this mixture of Old
English and Anglo-Norman that is usually referred to as Middle English.

French (Anglo-Norman) Influence

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The Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English (about three-quarters of

which are still in use today), including a huge number of abstract nouns ending in the
suffixes -age, -ance/-ence, -ant/-ent, -ment, -ity and -tion, or starting with
the prefixes con-, de-, ex-, trans- and pre-. Perhaps predictably, many of
them related to matters of crown and nobility
(e.g. crown, castle, prince, count,duke, viscount, baron, noble, sovereign, heraldry);
of government and administration (e.g. parliament,government, governor, city); of
court and law
(e.g. court, judge, justice, accuse, arrest, sentence, appeal,condemn, plaintiff, bailiff,
jury, felony, verdict, traitor, contract, damage, prison); of war and combat
(e.g.army, armour, archer, battle, soldier, guard, courage, peace, enemy, destroy); of
authority and control
(e.g. authority, obedience, servant, peasant, vassal, serf, labourer, charity); of
fashion and high living
(e.g.mansion, money, gown, boot, beauty, mirror, jewel, appetite, banquet, herb, spi Henry II, King of England from 1154-1189
(from English Monarchs)
ce, sauce, roast, biscuit); and of art and literature
(e.g. art, colour, language, literature, poet, chapter, question). Curiously, though, the Anglo-Saxon
words cyning (king), cwene (queen), erl (earl), cniht (knight), ladi (lady) and lordpersisted.

While humble trades retained their Anglo-Saxon names (e.g. baker, miller, shoemaker, etc), the more skilled trades
adopted French names (e.g. mason, painter, tailor, merchant, etc). While the animals in the field generally kept their
English names (e.g. sheep, cow, ox, calf, swine, deer), once cooked and served their names often became French
(e.g. beef, mutton, pork, bacon, veal, venison, etc). Sometimes a French word completely replaced an Old English word
(e.g. crime replaced firen, place replaced stow,people replaced leod, beautiful replaced wlitig, uncle replaced eam, etc).
Sometimes French and Old English components combined to form a new word, such as the French gentle and the
Germanic mancombined to formed gentleman. Sometimes, both English and French words survived, but with significantly
different senses (e.g. the Old English doom and French judgement, hearty and cordial, houseand mansion, etc).
But, often, different words with roughly the same meaning survived, and a whole host of new, French-based synonyms
entered the English language (e.g. the French maternity in addition to the Old
Englishmotherhood, infant to child, amity to friendship, battle to fight, liberty to freedom, labour to work, desire towish, co
mmence to start, conceal to hide, divide to cleave, close to shut, demand to ask, chamber to room, forest to wood, power
to might, annual toyearly, odour to smell, pardon to forgive, aid to help, etc). Over time, many near synonyms acquired
subtle differences in meaning (with the French alternative often suggesting a higher level of refinement than the Old
English), adding to the precision and flexibility of the English language. Even today, phrases combining Anglo-Saxon and
Norman French doublets are still in common use (e.g. law and order, lord and master, love and cherish,ways and means,
etc). Bilingual word lists were being compiled as early as the 13th Century.

The pronunciation differences between the harsher, more guttural Anglo-Norman and the softer Francien dialect of Paris were also carried over into
English pronunciations. For instance, words like quit, question, quarter, etc, were pronounced with the familiar kw sound in Anglo-Norman (and,
subsequently, English) rather than the k sound of Parisian French. The Normans tended to use a hard c sound instead of the softer Francien
ch, so that charrier became carry, chaudron became cauldron, etc. The Normans tended to use the suffixes -arie and -orie instead of the
French -aire and -oire, so that English has words like victory (as compared to victoire) and salary (as compared to salaire), etc. The Normans,
and therefore the English, retained the s in words like estate, hostel, forest and beast, while the French gradually lost it (tat, htel, fort, bte).
French scribes changed the common Old English letter pattern "hw" to "wh", largely out of a desire for consistency with "ch" and "th", and despite
the actual aspirated pronunciation, so that hwaer became where, hwaenne became when and hwil became while. A "w" was even added, for no
apparent reason, to some words that only began with "h" (e.g. hal became whole). Another oddity occurred when hwo became who, but the
pronunciation changed so that the "w" sound was omitted completely. There are just some of the kinds of inconsistencies that became ingrained in
the English language during this period.

IMAGE

During the reign of the Norman King Henry II and his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in the
second half of the 12th Century, many more Francien words from central France were
imported in addition to their Anglo-Norman counterparts (e.g. the Francien chase and
the AngloNorman catch; royal and real; regard and reward; gauge and wage; guile and wile;guar
dian and warden; guarantee and warrant). Regarded as the most cultured woman in
Europe, Eleanor also championed many terms of romance and chivalry
(e.g. romance,courtesy, honour, damsel, tournament, virtue, music, desire, passion,
etc).
Many more Latin-derived words came into use (sometimes through the French, but
often directly) during this period, largely connected with religion, law, medicine and
literature,
including scripture, collect, meditation, immortal, oriental, client, adjacent, combine,expe
dition, moderate, nervous, private, popular, picture, legal, legitimate, testimony,prosecut
e, pauper, contradiction, history, library, comet, solar, recipe, scribe, scripture,tolerance
Manuscript of "Sumer is icumen in",
, imaginary, infinite, index, intellect, magnify and genius. But French words continued to
oldest known English song (c. 1260)
stream into English at an increasing pace, with even more French additions recorded
(from UCL)
after the 13th Century than before, peaking in the second half of the 14th Century,
words
like abbey, alliance, attire, defend, navy, march, dine, marriage, figure, plea,sacrifice, scarlet, spy, stable, virtue, marshal, esquire, retreat, park, rei
gn, beauty, clergy,cloak, country, fool, coast, magic, etc.
A handful of French loanwords established themselves only in Scotland (which had become increasingly English in character during the early
Middle English period, with Gaelic pushed further and further into the Highlands and Islands), including bonnie andfash. Distinctive spellings like
"quh-" for "wh-" took hold (e.g. quhan and quhile for whanand while), and the Scottish accent gradually became more and more pronounced,
particularly after Edward I's inconclusive attempts at annexation. Scottish English's radically distinct evolution only petered out in the 17th Century
after King James united the crowns of Scotland and England (1603), and the influence of a strongly emerging Standard English came to bear
during the Early Modern period.

IMAGE

Middle English After the Normans

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During these Norman-ruled centuries in which English as a language had no

official status and no regulation, English had become the third language in its
own country. It was largely a spoken rather than written language, and
effectively sank to the level of a patois or creole. The main dialect regions
during this time are usually referred to as Northern, Midlands, Southern and
Kentish, although they were really just natural developments from the
Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish dialects of Old English.
Within these, though, a myriad distinct regional usages and dialects grew up,
and indeed the proliferation of regional dialects during this time was so
extreme that people in one part of England could not even understand
people from another part just 50 miles away.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1167 and 1209
respectively, and general literacy continued to increase over the succeeding
centuries, although books were still copied by hand and therefore very
expensive. Over time, the commercial and political influence of the East
Midlands and London ensured that these dialects prevailed (London had
been the largest city for some time, and became the Norman capital at the
beginning of the 12th Century), and the other regional varieties came to be
stigmatized as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education. The
14th Century London dialect of Chaucer, although admittedly difficult, is at
least recognizable to us moderns as a form of English, whereas text in the
Kentish dialect from the same period looks like a completely foreign
language.

A page from the late 12th Century Ormulum

(from Wikipedia)
It was also during this period when English was the language mainly of the
uneducated peasantry that many of the grammatical complexities and inflections of Old English gradually disappeared. 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 usually on the lexical root of a word,
generally shifted towards the beginning of words, which further encouraged the gradual loss of suffixes that had begun after the Viking invasions,
and many vowels developed into the common English unstressed schwa (like the e in taken, or the i inpencil). As inflectons disappeared, word
order became more important and, by the time of Chaucer, the modern English subject-verb-object word order had gradually become the norm,
and as had the use of prepositions instead of verb inflections.

SOUND CLIP
The Ormulum, a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern
Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century, is an important resource in this regard. Concerned at the Passage from "Ormulum" (late 12th Century) (17
way people were starting to mispronounce English, Orm spelled his words exactly as they
sec)
were pronounced. For instance, he used double consonants to indicate a short preceding
(from Palgrave Macmillan)
vowel (much as modern English does in words like diner and dinner, later and latter, etc); he
Click here for transcript and translation
used three separate symbols to differentiate the different sounds of the Old English letter
yogh; and he used the more modern wh for the old-style hw and sh for sc. This unusual phonetic spelling system has given philologists an
invaluable snap-shot of they way Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the 12th Century.
Many of Orms spellings were perhaps atypical for the time, but many changes to the English writing system were nevertheless under way during
this period:

the Old English letters (edh or eth) and (thorn), which did not exist in the Norman alphabet, were gradually phased out and
replaced with th, and the letter 3 (yogh) was generally replaced with g (or often with gh, as in ghost or night);

the simple word the (written e using the thorn character) generally replaced the bewildering range of Old English definite articles, and
most nouns had lost their inflected case endings by the middle of the Middle English period;

the Norman qu largely substituted for the Anglo-Saxon cw (so that cwene became queen, cwic became quick, etc);

the sh sound, which was previously rendered in a number of different ways in Old English, including sc, was regularized as sh or sch
(e.g.scip became ship);

the initial letters hw generally became wh (as in when, where, etc);

a c was often, but not always, replaced by k (e.g. cyning/cyng became king) or ck (e.g. boc became bock and, later, book) or ch
(e.g.cild became child, cese became cheese, etc);

the common Old English "h" at the start of words like hring (ring) and hnecca (neck) was deleted;

conversely, an h was added to the start of many Romance loanword (e.g. honour, heir, honest, habit, herb, etc), but was sometimes
pronounced and sometimes not;

"f" and "v" began to be differentiated (e.g. feel and veal), as did "s" and "z" (e.g. seal and zeal) and "ng" and "n" (e.g. thing and thin);

"v" and "u" remained largely interchangeable, although "v" was often used at the start of a word (e.g. (vnder), and "u" in the middle
(e.g. haue), quite the opposite of today;

because the written "u" was similar to "v", "n" and "m", it was replaced in many words with an "o" (e.g. son, come, love, one);

the ou spelling of words like house and mouse was introduced;

many long vowel sounds were marked by a double letter (e.g. boc became booc, se became see, etc), or, in some cases, a trailing "e"
became no longer pronounced but retained in spelling to indicate a long vowel (e.g. nose, name);

the long "a" vowel of Old English became more like "o" in Middle English, so
that ham became home, stan became stone, ban became bone, etc;

short vowels were identified by consonant doubling (e.g siting became sitting, etc).

The -en plural noun ending of Old English (e.g. house/housen, shoe/shoen, etc) had largely disappeared by the end of the Middle English period,
replaced by the French plural ending -s (the -en ending only remains today in one or two important examples, such
as children, brethren and oxen). Changes to some word forms stuck while others did not, so that we are left with inconsistencies
like half and halves, grief and grieves,speech and speak, etc. In another odd example of gradual modernization, the indefinite article a subsumed
over time the initial n of some following nouns, so that a napronbecame an apron, a nauger became an auger, etc, as well as the reverse case
of an ekename becoming a nickname.
Although Old English had no distinction between the formal and informal second person singular, which was always expressed as thou, the
words yeor you (previously the second person plural) were introduced in the 13th Century as the formal singular version (used with superiors or
non-intimates),
with thou remaining as the familiar, informal form.
SOUND CLIP
"Sumer is icumen in" (c. 1260) (35 sec)
(from Glen D. Wheeler)
Click here for transcript and translation

Resurgence of English

IMAGE

It is estimated that up to 85% of Anglo-Saxon words were lost as a result of

the Viking and particularly the Norman invasions, and at one point the very
existence of the English language looked to be in dire peril. In 1154, even the
venerable Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which for centuries had recorded the
history of the English people, recorded its last entry. But, despite the shakeup the Normans had given English, it showed its resilience once again, and,
two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, it was English not French
that emerged as the language of England.
There were a number of contributing factors. The English, of necessity, had
become Normanized, but, over time, the Normans also became
Anglicized, particularly after 1204 when King Johns ineptness lost the
Spread of the Black Death
French part of Normandy to the King of France and the Norman nobles were
(from RiverStyx.net, originally from Encyclopaedia Britannica,
forced to look more to their English properties. Increasingly out of touch with
1994)
their properties in France and with the French court and culture in general,
they soon began to look on themselves as English. Norman French began gradually to degenerate and atrophy. While some in England spoke
French and some spoke Latin (and a few spoke both), everyone, from the highest to the lowest, spoke English, and it gradually became the lingua
franca of the nation once again.
The Hundred Year War against France (1337 - 1453) had the effect of branding French as the language of the enemy and the status of English
rose as a consequence. The Black Death of 1349 - 1350 killed about a third of the English population (which was around 4 million at that time),
including a disproportionate number of the Latin-speaking clergy. After the plague, the English-speaking labouring and merchant classes grew in
economic and social importance and, within the short period of a decade, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was
largely over. The Statute of Pleading, which made English the official language of the courts and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written
in French), was adopted in 1362, and in that same year Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in English, a crucial psychological
turning point. By 1385, English had become the language of instruction in schools.
The following passage is taken from a late 14th Century work called Mandeville's Travels about travels in foreign land:
In at lond ben trees at beren wolle, as ogh it were of scheep; whereof men maken clothes, and all ing at may ben made of wolle. In at
contree ben many ipotaynes, at dwellen som tyme in the water, and somtyme on the lond: and ei ben half man and half hors, as I haue seyd
before; and ei eten men, whan ei may take hem. And ere ben ryueres and watres at ben fulle byttere, ree sithes morean is the water of the
see. In at contr ben many griffounes, more plentee an in ony other contree. Sum men seyn at ei han the body vpward as an egle, and
benethe as a lyoun: and treuly ei seyn soth at ei ben of at schapp. But o griffoun hath the body more gret, and is more strong, anne eight
lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this half; and more gret and strongere an an hundred egles, suche as we han amonges vs. For o griffoun ere
wil bere fleynge to his nest a gret hors, 3if he may fynde him at the poynt, or two oxen3oked togidere, as ei gon at the plowgh.

There are clearly many more recognizable words in this sample than in the Old English
SOUND CLIP
passage, especially once the continued use of ("thorn") to represent the sound th is
accepted. Another now obsolete character 3 (yogh, more or less equivalent in most cases to
Beginning of the "Sir Gawain and the Green
the modern consonantal y as in yellow or sometimes like the ch in loch) is also used in this
Knight" (late 14th Century) (61 sec)
passage, and the letters v and u seem to be used more or less interchangeably
(from Norton Anthology of English Literature)
(e.g. vpward for upward, ryueres for rivers, treuly for truly). The indications of a language in a
Click here for transcript and translation
state of flux are also apparent in the variety of spellings of the same words even within this
short passage (e.g. contr and contree, an and anne,water and watres). Some holdovers from Old English inflections remain (e.g. present tense
verbs still receive a plural inflection, as in beren, dwellen,han and ben), and many words still have the familiar medieval trailing e
(e.g. wolle, benethe, suche, fynde, etc), but the overall appearance is much more modern than that of Old English.
IMAGE would have
Throughout the Middle English period, as in Old English, all the consonants were pronounced, so that the word knight, for example,
been pronounced more like k-neecht (with the ch as in the Scottish loch) than like the modern English knight. By the late 14th Century, the final
e in many, but not all, words had ceased to be pronounced (e.g. it was silent in words like kowthe and thanne, but pronounced in words
like ende, ferne,straunge, etc).

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tury, with works such as the debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale (probably composed around
e latter part of the 14th Century, is of unknown authorship.

rucially he chose to write it in English. Other important works were written in English around the same time,
great works of English literature, and the first demonstration of the artistic legitimacy of vernacular Middle

anwards occur, and by some estimates, some 20-25% of Chaucers vocabulary is French in origin.
r introduced many new words into the language, up to 2,000 by some counts - these were almost certainly
all from French roots, but when he wanted to portray the earthy working man of England (e.g. the Miller),
restless, wifely,willingly, etc. The list of words first found in Chaucer's works goes
omfit, digestion, examination, finally, flute, funeral, galaxy, horizon, infect, ingot, latitude, laxative, miscarry,
vulgar,wallet, wildness, etc, etc.

Beginning of The Knight's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

(from Wikipedia)

s of words were often used interchangeably, even by the same author, and this flexibility (or inconsistency) in spelling is quite
nt scribes, and we have no original in Chaucers own hand, different manuscripts have different spellings, none of which are

SOUND CLIP
Beginning of the "General Prologue" to Chaucer's
"Canterbury Tales" (67 sec)
(from GeoffreyChaucer.org)
Click here for transcript and translation

sh. 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 (how
stance), Wycliffes Bible was nevertheless a landmark in the English language. Over 1,000 English words were first recorded in it, most of them Latin-based, often via French, inclu
ty, glory, injury, justice, lecher, madness, mountainous, multitude, novelty, oppressor, philistine, pollute, profession, puberty, schism,suddenly, unfaithful, visitor, zeal, etc, as well as

h would probably have been almost as incomprehensible to Chaucer as it is to us today, even though the language of Chaucer is still quite difficult for us to read naturally. William Ca

Historical period
The chronological boundaries of the Middle English period are not easy to define, and scholarly opinions vary. The dates that OED3 has
settled on are 1150-1500. (Before 1150 being the Old English period, and after 1500 being the early modern English period.) In terms of
external history, Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the arrival
in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the 1530s onwards) and of
the ideas of the continental Renaissance.
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The most important linguistic developments

Two very important linguistic developments characterize Middle English:

in grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical information. (If we
put this in more technical terms, it became less synthetic and more analytic.)Change was gradual, and has different outcomes in different
regional varieties of Middle English, but the ultimate effects were huge: the grammar of Englishc.1500 was radically different from that of
Old English.Grammatical gender was lost early in Middle English. The range of inflections, particularly in the noun, was reduced drastically
(partly as a result of reduction of vowels in unstressed final syllables), as was the number of distinct paradigms: in most early Middle

English texts most nouns have distinctive forms only for singular vs. plural, genitive, and occasional traces of the old dative in forms with
final -eoccurring after a preposition.In some other parts of the system some distinctions were more persistent, but by late Middle English
the range of endings and their use among London writers shows relatively few differences from the sixteenth-century language of, for
example, Shakespeare: probably the most prominent morphological difference from Shakespeares language is that verb plurals and
infinitives still generally ended in en (at least in writing).

in vocabulary, English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and Scandinavian.
Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the stylistic register of those words which
survived from Old English. Eventually, various new stylistic layers emerged in the lexicon, which could be employed for a variety of different
purposes.
One other factor marks out the bulk of our Middle English evidence from the bulk of our Old English or early modern English evidence,
although it is less directly a matter of change in the language than in how it is represented in writing:

the surviving Middle English material is dominated by regional variation, and by (sometimes extreme) variation in how the same
underlying linguistic units are represented in writing. This is not because people suddenly started using language in different ways in
different places in the Middle English period, but because the fairly standardized late Old English literary variety broke down completely,
and writing in English became fragmented, localized, and to a large extent improvised.
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A multilingual context
Medieval Britain had many languages. English continued to be in contact with Celtic languages on many of the internal frontiers within the
British Isles. Until the use of Scandinavian languages in mainland Britain died out (the precise date of which is a matter of uncertainty), it
continued to be in contact with these also. And, crucially, it was in contact with Latin and with French.

After the Norman Conquest, the ruling elite in England (in church as well as state) were French speakers. Before the Conquest, England
had been relatively advanced in the extent to which the vernacular language, rather than Latin, was used in writing. After the Conquest,
English became pushed out of these functions almost entirely. Latin predominates in most types of writing in the immediately postConquest period. When, quite soon afterwards, we find a flowering of vernacular writing in a number of different text types and genres, this
is in French, not English. Likewise it was French, not English, that generally vied with Latin in a wide range of technical and official functions
until very near the end of the Middle English period. (What to call the French used in Britain in this period is a difficult scholarly question.
Traditionally the term Anglo-Norman has been used, notably in the title of The Anglo-Norman Dictionary. In fact, the present-day editors of
that dictionary note that in many ways Anglo-French is a more appropriate term, since it better reflects the wide variety of inputs shown by
the French used in medieval Britain. OED3 retains the term Anglo-Norman largely to maintain consistency with the title of The AngloNorman Dictionary.)
Up until about the middle of the fourteenth century, our surviving written records for Middle English of any variety are patchy, and can be
characterized as a number of more or less isolated islands of usage, reflecting the English of particular communities or even individuals
who felt motivated, for various different reasons, to write something down in English. We have some substantial literary texts, such as
the Ormulum or the Ancrene Wisse (both of which we will look at more closely below); in a very few cases, like the Ancrene Wisse and a
small group of texts in a very similar language apparently from a very similar milieu, we can identify mini-traditions of English writing; but
what we do not have are clear, well-established, persistent traditions of writing in English (whether for literary or non-literary purposes) from
which any sort of standard written variety could grow.
From the later fourteenth century our records become more plentiful, especially for London, as the use of English increased in literary
contexts and in a variety of different technical and official functions. English began more and more to be the default choice for major
(broadly metropolitan) literary writers such as, in the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower (who still also wrote major
poems in French and Latin), and (although his milieu was rather different) William Langland. We also continue to find substantial literary
works from parts of the country far removed from London, and reflecting very distinct local varieties of English, such as Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight.
In this same period religious writings in English become more and more common; these include the first complete English translation of the
Bible, the Wycliffite Bible, which emerged from the circle of followers of the reformer John Wyclif. We also find increasing numbers of
scientific and medical texts written in English.

As it came to share and, eventually, take over various functions from Latin and French, English was hugely influenced by these languages,
in its stock of word forms, in the meanings these words showed, and in the phrases and structures in which they were used. Thus the
vocabulary of such fields as law, government, business, and religion (among many others) became filled with words of Latin or French
origin, as people began using English to express technical matters which had previously been the domain of Latin or French.

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Borrowing from early Scandinavian

The long succession of Viking Age raids, settlements, conquests, and political take-overs that played such a large part in Anglo-Saxon
history from the late-eighth century onwards resulted in many speakers of varieties of early Scandinavian being found in Britain. In
particular, there were areas of significant Scandinavian settlement in the east and north east of England (chiefly of speakers of East Norse
varieties) and in the north west of England (chiefly of speakers of West Norse varieties), as well as in parts of Scotland. We speak of early
Scandinavian in this context because we are dealing with the antecedent stage of the later Scandinavian languages, Icelandic, Norwegian,
Swedish, Danish, etc. (As regards the divisions among the Scandinavian languages, Icelandic and Norwegian are both West Norse
languages, while Swedish and Danish are East Norse languages; however, very few of the Scandinavian loanwords in English can be
assigned with any confidence to specifically East Norse or West Norse input.)

Gradually, over the course of generations, the use of early Scandinavian died out in England, but not without leaving a significant impact on
the vocabulary of English. When most borrowings occurred is a matter of some uncertainty; Old English texts up to about the year 1100 are
estimated to contain only about 100 Scandinavian loanwords, many of them in isolated examples. Most of these words come from semantic
areas in which there was significant cultural influence from the Scandinavians, such as seafaring, warfare, social ranks, law, or coins and
measures. Many, many more Scandinavian borrowings are first recorded in Middle English texts, but it is very possible (and indeed likely)
that most of these first entered some varieties of English in the Old English period. One major indicator of this is that very early Middle
English texts from areas of high Scandinavian settlement are full of Scandinavian borrowings.

The long homiletic poem entitled the Ormulum is the work of an Augustinian canon called Orm (a name of Scandinavian origin) who
probably lived in south Lincolnshire; the dating is controversial, but Orm may have started work on the text as early as the middle of the
twelfth century and continued well into old age. It contains well over a hundred words of either certain or likely Scandinavian origin,
including some which are of common occurrence in modern English such as to anger, to bait, bloom, boon, booth, bull, to die, to flit, ill, law,
low, meek, to raise, root, to scare, skill, skin, to take, though, to thrive, wand, to want, wing, wrong. Perhaps most interestingly of all, it
contains some of the earliest evidence for one of the most important Scandinavian borrowings, the pronoun they and the related object
form them and possessive their.
The example of they, them, and their is very instructive about the nature and extent of Scandinavian influence on English. It is very rare for
pronouns to be borrowed; the fact that these forms were borrowed probably reflects both the very close contact between Scandinavian and
English speakers, and the close structural and lexical similarities between the two languages. Because so many words, forms, and
constructions were already either identical or very similar, this made it much easier for even grammatical words to be borrowed.
Something else illustrated by they, them, and their is the long process of internal spread, from variety to variety, shown by many words of
Scandinavian origin after they entered English. Orm uses theyinvariably, but them and their vary in his text with the native
forms hem and her. In later northern or eastern texts them and their quite quickly become the normal forms, but this takes much longer in
other varieties: the most important early Chaucer manuscripts, from London in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, have
typically they for the subject form but still hem and her for the object and possessive forms.
The inherited similarities between English and early Scandinavian also make it extremely difficult to be certain in very many cases whether
a word actually shows a Scandinavian borrowing at all, or an Old English word which is simply poorly attested in our surviving sources. The
Scandinavian component in the total vocabulary of Middle English perhaps amounts to somewhere in the region of 2 or 3 per cent, but any
figures must be treated with a good deal of caution. In spite of the relatively small total, many of the words occur with quite high frequency,
especially in texts from more northerly and easterly areas. Some Scandinavian borrowings which were doubtless borrowed in either Old
English or Middle English are first attested much later; this is especially the case with words preserved only in regional use.

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Borrowing from Latin and/or French

The Latin component in the vocabulary of Old English was small, only amounting to a few per cent of the total of surviving Old English
words, and many (but by no means all) of these words were doubtless of very rare occurrence, confined to very occasional use by
scholars. The securely identified pre-Conquest borrowings from French amount to barely a handful, and even in very late, post-Conquest
Old English not many more are recorded.

In Middle English this picture changes radically. If we look at the vocabulary of Middle English as a whole, the evidence of dictionaries
suggests that the number of words borrowed from French and/or Latin outstrips the number of words surviving from Old English by quite a
margin. However, words surviving from Old English (as well as a few of the Scandinavian borrowings, especially they) continue to top the
high frequency lists (as indeed mostly remains the case even in modern-day English).
The formulation French and/or Latin is an important one in this period. Often we can tell that a word has come from French rather than
Latin very clearly because of differences of word form: for instance, English peace is clearly a borrowing from Anglo-Norman and Old
French pais, not from Latin pac-, px. Some other pretty clear examples are marble, mercy, prison, palfrey, to pay, poor, and rule. It is often
much more difficult to be certain that a Middle English word has come solely from Latin and not partly also from French; this is because, in
addition to the words it inherited from Latin (which typically showed centuries of change in word form), French also borrowed extensively
from Latin (often re-borrowing words which already existed in a distinct form). Some typical examples areanimal, imagination, to
inform, patient, perfection, profession, religion, remedy.
Given these factors, any figures for the relative proportions of French and Latin borrowings in the Middle English period have to be hedged
about with many provisos. However, the broad picture is clear. In Middle English, borrowing from French is at least as frequent as
borrowing from Latin, and probably rather more frequent.

By 1500, over 40 per cent of all of the words that English has borrowed from French had made a first appearance in the language,
including a very high proportion of those French words which have come to play a central part in the vocabulary of modern English. By

contrast, the greatest peak of borrowing from Latin was still to come, in the early modern period; by 1500, under 20 per cent of the Latin
borrowings found in modern English had yet entered the language.

The greatest peak of first examples of French borrowings in English comes in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This probably
largely corresponds to the realities of linguistic change, since we know that this is the period in which English was taking on many technical
functions from Latin and, especially, French, at least so far as written records were concerned. However, this is precisely when our volume
of surviving Middle English material also goes up dramatically, and so we cannot always rule out the possibility that words existed in
English rather earlier. Certainly, some much earlier texts, such as the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, show considerable borrowing from
French at an early date, and we cannot always be certain that an absence of earlier attestations necessarily means that a word did not
exist in at least some varieties of English at an earlier date.
Mixed language texts pose many difficult challenges. One quite common pattern is for accounts, records, and other official documents to
have Latin as the matrix language, but to switch freely to a vernacular language to name particular things or concepts. Whether the
vernacular language in question is French or English can be very difficult to tell, or in many cases plain impossible. In fact, many scholars
who have spent time working on such documents take the view that the writers themselves probably did not always distinguish very clearly
between one clearly defined vocabulary as English and another as French; the considerable overlap, of words belonging to both
languages (as a result of earlier borrowing), in a context in which new words were being borrowed all of the time, would indeed have made
it almost impossible to make such a clear distinction, especially in many areas of technical vocabulary. For some examples of some of the
implications for OED data see the entries for oillet n., pane n., pastern n., pullen n., rack v., russet n. and adj.
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Pronunciation
Since our surviving Middle English evidence is so characterized by regional variation, it is very difficult to summarize typical Middle English
pronunciation, just as it is difficult to summarize typical Middle English morphology, or grammar.

As a general rule of thumb, anyone entirely unfamiliar with Middle English who wants to be able to pronounce Middle English word forms is
better off trusting the Middle English spelling, rather than making assumptions on the basis of the modern English pronunciation. In
particular, vowel letters normally have values much closer to what is typical in modern continental European languages, than to the values
that they have in modern English.

for example, the i in fn fine represents a long monophthong similar to that in modern Englishmeet, while the e in mten to meet
represents a sound more similar to that in modern Englishmake (but a monophthong, not a diphthong).
See Edmund Weiners piece on early modern English to see how the Great Vowel Shift changed this situation. See also the OED entries
for A n., E n., I n., O n., U n. for much more detail on the development of the various sounds represented by these letters.
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A period characterized by variation

The majority of later Old English texts are written in a fairly uniform type of literary language, based on the West Saxon dialect. The
linguistic forms employed show considerable regularity, as do the spellings used to represent them.

The political and cultural upheavals of the Norman Conquest completely changed this situation: people who chose to write in English in the
early Middle English period typically had to improvise, in order to find ways of representing a particular local variety of Middle English in
writing. To do this they often had to draw upon spelling traditions that were more typically used in writing Latin or French. Variation reigns
supreme. Some groups of manuscripts show very similar language represented in very similar orthography, but in the broader picture these
appear isolated pockets.

In later Middle English spelling habits typically become rather more stable, and we generally find more consistency in the strategies used
for representing particular sounds in writing. However, a considerable degree of spelling variation remains the rule rather than the
exception, and it is quite typical to find the same word spelled in slightly different ways within a single page of a single manuscript. If we

look at the full repertory of surviving spelling forms, the situation can still seem quite bewildering; for instance, the Linguistic Atlas of Late
Mediaeval English records around 500 different spellings for through.
As well as showing variation in how to represent sounds in spelling, our surviving late Middle English writings also continue to reflect a wide
variety of different regional varieties of English. Although London and its dialect became of increasing importance in official functions and in
literary production, and many of the major late Middle English writers were based in or near the capital, the real dominance of a
metropolitan variety over all others in literary use comes only in the early modern period.

London English of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries showed a wide variety of inputs, among which a number of features from the
central and east midlands figured strongly. It is in no way an interrupted continuation of the predominantly south-western Old English
literary language, and in many key respects it reflects the language of parts of the country for which we have little or no evidence from the
Old English period.

There also continued to be a great deal of variation within London English, in written forms as well as spoken. The focused usage of a
number of official documents, often referred to as Chancery English, had a significant input into the practices of early modern English
printers, but this is only one aspect of a very complex story, which is still subject to considerable uncertainty and debate.

This complicated picture is complicated still more by the nature of our surviving documents, which is discussed in the following section.

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Our surviving documents

We have much more surviving Middle English evidence than we have for Old English, but still far less than we have for the developing,
London-based standard language of the sixteenth century and later. The information that we do have is patchy and uneven: we have a

pretty good record for London and the surrounding area from about the end of the fourteenth century onwards, but for most parts of Britain
throughout the period we have only isolated flashes of illumination.

Our surviving evidence for Middle English also poses a number of interesting challenges for historical lexicography. The overwhelming
majority of our information comes from hand-written manuscripts. (From the last quarter of the fifteenth century onwards there are also
printed books, and of course there is also some written text on coins, paintings, memorials, etc.) Manuscript evidence can present many
difficult challenges for dating and interpretation.

Many (but by no means all) collections of functional records, e.g. recording business transactions, are in hands which are either
contemporary or very nearly contemporary with the information being recorded. But this is much more rarely the case with literary works
(taking this in a broad sense, to include e.g. technical or religious treatises); these are often recorded only in much later manuscripts, and
even when the manuscripts are contemporary or nearly contemporary, they may show extensive departures from the language of the
author.

In a very few cases, we have manuscripts surviving in the hand of the author, known technically as holograph manuscripts. Pretty certain
cases include: the Ormulum (see above); from the fourteenth century, the Ayenbite of Inwyt by Dan Michel of the Northgate; and, from the
fifteenth century, various works by Thomas Hoccleve and John Capgrave. Most literary works survive in copies by non-authorial hands.
These pose various interconnected problems.
Firstly, we need to assign a date to the manuscript in which our evidence occurs. This is often not a simple matter. Some manuscripts are
dated on the basis of pieces of internal evidence, such as a dated inscription in one of the scribal hands, or a reference to a particular
historical event. Other manuscripts contain no clear indication of date themselves, but are dated on the basis of careful comparison with the
hands of other manuscripts which can be dated more confidently on other grounds. In this way, palaeographers have built up a careful
picture of the development of the various different scripts that scribes used in medieval Britain. However, very many hedges, provisos, and
qualifications are necessary at every stage in this process: even datable manuscripts can often only be dated very approximately, and
dating to a particular year can only rarely be relied on as 100 per cent secure; the palaeographical dating that builds on these foundations

is dependent on the skill and judgements of palaeographers, who will rarely claim precision for a particular dating, and who will often differ
from one another in their judgements. Normally, palaeographical datings are expressed as an approximate date range. In some cases,
palaeographers may only feel confident in assigning a manuscript to somewhere within a period of as much as a hundred years (this is
quite often the case with fifteenth-century manuscripts).

Once we have a date for our manuscript, we then have the problem of trying to decide whether it is reflecting the contemporary language of
the scribe, or the language of the original author, or of an earlier stage in a chain of copying, or whether it shows some sort of mixed
language, with features from various different points in the chain.

Modern work on the habits of medieval English scribes suggests that their behaviour can be divided into three types:

scribes who translate consistently into their own dialect

scribes who copy more-or-less precisely, letter-for-letter, from their exemplar

scribes who translate only partially, replacing some words or forms with those from their own dialect, but leaving others unchanged
Since our surviving manuscripts sometimes stand at the end of a long chain of copying, in which successive scribes may have adopted
different approaches, the possible permutations become very complex indeed.

All of this has some important implications for historical lexicographers, including:

it is only quite rarely, and in very special circumstances, that we can be absolutely certain that the precise reading we find in a
manuscript is authorial.

but equally, we cannot normally assume that the language of a manuscript precisely reflects the contemporary usage of its scribe,
especially as regards vocabulary: even a consistent translator may have left in some words or forms which he would not have selected in
his own day-to-day linguistic usage.

comparison between different manuscripts of a work often indicates that a particular word is very likely to have been used by the
original author, but various scribes have made their own choices about spelling; the different spellings adopted may well correspond to
different pronunciations, and leave us in doubt about the authorial form.

thus, dating of words and forms from the Middle English period is often hedged around with uncertainty not only do we have only
a very partial reflection of actual linguistic use, but we also cannot be certain that we even have a faithful snapshot of a particular moment
in time.
1.0 Periods in the History of the English Language

1.1 Basic Concepts of Linguistics:

Languages are continually changing; it might even be said that change is as inherent in any language as is variation.
Consequently, pronunciations, grammatical rules, words and much more get out of use and are replaced by what the
speakers of a community may accept as more adequate pronunciations, or rules, or words etc. When we look at the
development of a given language like English over a very long stretch of time, we will be able to observe quite a
number of significant and striking changes which took some time to complete, apart from very many minor ones
which have occurred and occur all the time. By thus comparing, for example, English as it is used today with its use
in earlier centuries (which can, of course, only be done for the written uses), we are enabled to write the history of
a language. However, as languages are constantly changing, it is not easy to write such a history, unless you
concentrate on the most important change phenomena, and leave the less important out: this is what a linguist
would call the idealization of data; abstracting the major developments and results from a wealth of detail is a
precondition for writing the history of a language.

Saussure made a sharp distinction between the language as a system (langue) and the actual use speakers make of
it (parole). The English equivalents for Saussures French terms are system and speech. (In German Sprache and

Gebrauch.) The system is the total set of rules according to which a language functions; the speech is the actual and
concrete use an individual speaker makes of the system at a given time and place. You will immediately realize that
describing the history of a language in terms of speech is next to impossible: you will get lost in the details of the
often contradictory and somewhat confusing uses speakers make of their own language. Historical linguists,
therefore, concentrate on language as a system: they describe the development of a language as a sequence of
such systems, that is the set of rules which govern the language at a given time, and they describe the changes
which you may observe when you compare at least two stages in the development with each other. This brings us to
a second distinction of Saussure which you should keep in mind: he also distinguished between the diachronic and
the synchronic approach to language study.

System and speech

"The system is in your head and the way you speak is what you make of it."

The diachronic approach looks at language as a continually changing medium of communication

(diachronic=development through time). The synchronic approach looks at the system of rules at a particular
moment in time (synchronic= the co-existence of all linguistic features at the same time). The distinction is helpful
for historical linguistics: on the one hand, the development of a specific change, or the changes as a whole, can be
analysed and described diachronically, and on the other hand, analysing the language at a given time within the
development leads to the synchronic description of the rules.

Please note and keep in mind that in historical linguistics we use both aspects: a comparison of two synchronic
descriptions brings changes to light in the first place; the diachronic approach helps to explain the development of
these changes.

Diachronic
and
synchronic

"A diachronic approach implies to see and compare, whereas the synchronic approach implies to
see and describe."

1.2 The idea behind periodisation

The concept of system and speech helps to reduce the mass of data you may find; that of synchronic descriptions
and diachronic comparisons helps to describe the development of major changes. However, using the concepts
simply raises another important question: where do you make the synchronic cuts in order to analyse the systems
which you then compare in order to describe the development and results of changes? The answer to this question is
the distinction of periods in the development over a long stretch of time: the establishment of major stages in the
history of a language. For English, it has become a convention to distinguish between the following stages:

Old English from c.450 (700) to c.1100

Middle English from c.1100 to c.1500

Early Modern English from c.1500 to c. 1700 (or 1750, 1800)

Modern English from c.1700 (or 1750, 1800) onwards

As with all conventions, the dates should not be understood too literally. Obviously, Old English did not end on the
31st of December 1099, and Middle English did not begin on the next day.

Task 1

1.3 From Old to Middle English

Two important linguistic features and one important historical event may justify to set Old English as a period apart,
and to distinguish it from Middle English.

The beginning of the OE period is connected with the settlement of Germanic tribes who conquered Britain in the 5th
century. Their language was the variety of Western Germanic used in the north of modern Germany and Holland
(Schleswig-Holstein, Niedersachsen, Friesland). However, we have to wait until the late 7th and early 8th centuries
to get the first written evidence of a language which then developed differently from the varieties used on the
Continent.

The Old English Period comes to an end with a linguistic development which led to the most important distinction
between Old and Middle English: The shift in language typology. Next in importance is a tremendous change in the
lexicon of the language, which is the effect of the Norman Conquest of 1066: some scholars have calculated that
almost 95% of the Old English lexicon was lost in the development from Old to Middle English. The reason for that
lies in the fact that the upper class became almost completely French speaking and among the upper class we find
those who were responsible for sponsoring the production of written texts and documents. Whereas English in the
late Old English period had been used in almost any area of written communication (e.g. literature, theology,
historiography, law, administration), it was replaced in most of these areas by first Latin and then French after the
Conquest.
Please keep in mind: 1100 as the end of the Old English period is just a convention; the language developed
continually, it did not change from a synthetic to an analytic type from one day to the next.

OLD ENGLISH

Norman Conquest
Loss of a most of the lexicon
From Synthetic to Analytic

MIDDLE ENGLISH

1.4 From Middle to Early Modern English

Again, linguistic features and historical events help to distinguish ME from the later periods, and single it out as a
period in the history of the language.

The Great Vowel Shift

(c.1400 - c.1800)

Linguistically speaking, the transition from Middle to Early Modern English is mainly characterized by the
development of a major sound change: The Great Vowel Shift was a systematic sound change during which all long
vowels came to be raised to closer positions; the first phase of the change was nearly completed by 1500, as were a
few other sound changes, such as the muting of unstressed inflectional vowels. In the long run, this change led to
that striking feature of English which have produced a continuous flow of proposals for a spelling reform since 1600,
and which still bothers young native speakers when they first come to school: the pronunciation of ModE is so
markedly different from its spelling (e.g., the written representation of the vowel [i:] in: see, sea, believe, machine).

Linguistic Features

The rise of a standard

At the same time, the London variety of English came to be considered as a form of the language adequate for
supra-regional communication; the written standard used in the royal chancery (Chancery Lane in London) was first
used in all scriptoria all over England; its use gradually extended to all written documents, such as merchant letters
or literary texts. Whereas to about 1450 you can indicate the regional provenance of a literary text by its use of
regional features, you can no longer do so after about the middle of the 15th century.

The use of a supra-regional standard form of the language was also enhanced by a historical event, namely by the
introduction of the first printing press in England in 1476 by William Caxton, who set up his press in Westminster.

Caxton was not only a printer; he also translated from Latin and French into English, and revised and published
Thomas Malorys Morte Darthur. Printed books from London became available all over the country, and with their
distribution, a written standard was further established. But please keep in mind: this written standard was far from
uniform. Indeed, the immediate consequence of introducing the printing press was rather greater variation than
standardization: on a single printed page, the word cony, for example, could appear as connie, cony, coni, conie,
conye etc., depending on whether the printer needed more or less space to fill the line.

Historical Events

The printing press

Historical Events

Just as the Norman Conquest led to a huge influx of words from the French language, the Renaissance of the late
15th and early 16th centuries with its re-discovery of Antiquity and the Reformation of 1534 led to another huge
extension of the English lexicon. This extension came about mainly by borrowing from Latin via translations into
English which became available in the first half of the 16th century. English gradually began to replace Latin in areas
of written communication in which Latin had been predominant for centuries (e.g. theology, medicine, sciences).
Again, then, we can point out linguistic and historical aspects which help justify a completed stage in the
development of English, a phase ending somewhere around 1500. Please remember again, that the development
continued beyond that date, and that changes were not completed by the end of 1499. Singling out Middle English
as ranging from 1100 to 1500 is no more than a mere linguistic convention.

Renaissance and Reformation

Historical Events

Middle English

The Great Vowel Shift (GVS)

The rise of a standard

The printing press

Renaissance and Reformation

Early Modern English

1.5 From Early Modern to Modern English

A justification for setting OE apart from the rest of the periods is so easy because of the typological change and the
Norman Conquest as significant events. And though it is already more difficult to argue for a period switch around
1500, the attempt to distinguish between Early Modern and Modern English is almost doomed to fail. Because of the
Civil War and the Restoration, some linguists would prefer c.1650 but lack linguistic arguments to back their
proposals. Others would favour c.1700 because of speakers such as Swift or Defoe who propagated the idea of an

English Academy which was meant to exercise a kind of censorship over the use of the language, but again there are
no linguistic data which support this proposal. Still others would like to propose c.1750 because of Dr Johnsons
Dictionary of 1755 which was a milestone in lexicographical development, and because of those grammars which
appeared shortly after 1750 and were (finally!) adequate descriptions of English. You will notice that all these
proposals lack a reference to important changes in the language; indeed, almost nothing of importance can be
pointed out. The major consequences of the Great Vowel Shift were completed by c.1600, though it took another 200
years until we come close to the modern pronunciation; and although there were some peaks of borrowing from
other languages (e.g. after the Restoration when King Charles II came back from France), there is nothing
comparable to the linguistic consequences of the Norman Conquest, nor the Renaissance and Reformation.

No Major Change

"Houston, we have a problem!"

As the language, by the use of its speakers, developed less quickly, and a supra-regional standard was gradually
established, though not yet codified. From c.1600 to c.1800, attitudes become more important than actual change
phenomena. From 1600 onwards, grammars and dictionaries, which attempted to standardize and to prescribe
usage (written and spoken), were published. With regard to the dictionaries, despite many innovations in the
development they tended to remain "hard words lists" [Fremdwrterbcher] throughout the 17th century; it is only
in the 18th century with Johnsons dictionary that we get something like a modern standard [though Johnsons
standard is a literary one, the use of "our best authors"]. Nevertheless, and despite their shortcomings, all these
dictionaries contributed to the distribution of a written standard, by codifying the spelling of words. As regards the
grammars of English, they were poor stuff from c.1600 to c.1750 because they tended to impose the structure of
Latin (a synthetic language) on English (an analytic type); it is only after 1750 that grammars become adequate
descriptions, by finally taking account of the different type of language they are dealing with.

Dictionaries and
grammars

Standard as prescription

Nevertheless, all grammar writers and writers of pronunciation manuals contributed to the gradual establishment of
a standard by prescribing what they thought to be "the language of the court and the fashionable world", though
very often with little consistency in their own use. It was the 18th century with its doctrine of correctness which
finally brought about the establishment of a standard as we know it today. The use of the standard became a mark
of social distinction: "Purity and Politeness of Expression ... is the only external Distinction which remains between a
Gentleman and a Valet; a Lady and a Mantua-maker" [Withers, 1788].

It is also towards the end of this century that we finally see the regular uses of the do-periphrasis, the expanded
form, and the present perfect established, as well as the use of you and your regularized. The last stages of the
Great Vowel Shift are completed by c. 1800.
In terms of linguistic and socio-historical developments, then, the period of Modern English, properly speaking,
begins about 1800.

Modern uses of present perfect etc..

Early Modern English

Publishing of Grammars and Dictionaries

Standard as a mark of social distinction
Regular use of "do", establishment of the Present perfect, ect

Modern English