Introducing English Linguistics

ular verbs
,  be has the most different forms (e.g. is, are, was, etc.). In Old
English, it had even more different forms. In line (2), Si is a subjunctive verb
form. In Modern English, subjunctive forms of be can be found in hypo-
thetical clauses such as if I were you to mark contrary-to-fact assertions. In
Old English, Si is a subjunctive form expressing a desire or wish. Finally,
the verb gehalgod in line (2) contains a prefix, ge-, commonly found on par-
ticiples
(i.e. verbs in English following the auxiliary have, as in have driven
or had walked). Of course, there are many other grammatical features of Old
English evident in the prayer, but the examples described here point to
how truly different Old English is from Modern English.
It is important to note that during this period, English was purely a spo-
ken language: the only literate people of the era were monks in monas-
teries, a consequence of St. Augustine’s conversion of England to
Christianity in the sixth century AD. One of the more famous pieces of
English literature of this period, Beowulf, was part of the oral-formulaic
style of this period and was written down by some unknown scribe or
scribes who heard someone tell the story.
Middle English.
Old English continued being spoken in England until
approximately 1100. What precipitated the change from Old English to
Middle English was a significant historical event: the Norman conquest of
England in 1066. The Normans came from the Normandy region of France
and ruled England for approximately 300 years; they spoke a variety of
French called Anglo-Norman. There were two significant changes to
English during this period that have led to debates about the extent to
which the Norman Conquest affected the English language: the addition
of many words of French origin to the English lexicon, and the continuing
decline in the number of inflections found in Old English.
To see these trends, it is worthwhile to view the opening stanzas of the
General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:
PROLOGUE
Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury.
Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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Words such as perced (‘pierced’), veyne (‘vein’), licour (‘liquor’), and vertu
(‘virtue’) are of French origin and entered the English language during the
Middle English period. Only remnants of the inflectional system from the
Old English period survive in the Middle English period. Plural -(e)s can be
found on words such as shoures; adjectives such as swete (‘sweet’) do not
contain the elaborate system of declension found in Old English but mere-
ly the ending -e. In fact, Middle English has more in common with Modern
English than its immediate ancestor Old English.
The influx of French vocabulary into English as well as the simplifica-
tion of its inflectional system have led some to claim that English under-
went creolization during this period as a result of contact with French.
However, as Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 308) argue, this is a rather
extreme position: “There were never many speakers of French in England”
during the Middle English period, the borrowing of words and affixes into
English was “no more extreme than the kinds found in many other nor-
mal cases in history,” and ancestral Normans became bilingual in English
“within no more than 250 years of the Conquest.” Thus, the linguistic
changes to English during this period followed the natural course of lin-
guistic change. Of course, other Germanic languages of this period, such
as German, did not change to the extent that English did. But this merely
illustrates that the paths that languages take are often unpredictable.