Seminar-8: The Middle English period of History of English Group: 1814 Aziza Abdumalikova

seminar-8: The Middle English period of History of English

Group:1814

Aziza Abdumalikova

Plan:

• 1. Main features of ME
• 2. Linguistic developments of ME
• 3. Phonetic structures of Middle English (vowel monophthongs;diphthongs; consonant system )
• 4. Middle English lexicon and Word buildings
• 5. Latin/French/Scandinavian borrowings

Main features of ME

• Middle English marks the middle period between Old English and Modern English. There is given some important features of ME:
• Historical peri( 1066- 1476)
• The most important linguistic developments( changes in grammar and vocabulary)
• A multilingual context
• Borrowing from early Scandinavian(to anger, to bait, bloom, boon, booth, bull, to die, to flit, ill, law, low, meek, to raise, )
• Borrowing from Latin and/or French'(animal, imagination, to inform, patient, perfection, profession, religion, remedy.)
• Pronunciation
• A period characterized by variation
• Our surviving documents(the Ormulum , the Ayenbite of Inwyt by Dan Michel of the Northgate; , various works by Thomas Hoccleve and John Capgrave)

Linguistic developments of ME

• 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.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 Shakespeare’s 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.

PhonePhonetic structures of ME

• Phonetic changes : 1. Vowel 2. Consonant

1. Vowels:

Monophongs: - shortening of vowels in the closed syllable

- linghtening of vowels in open syllable

- reduction of unstressed vowels

Diphtongs : - the appearance of now diphtongs

- old english diphtongs changed into monophtongs

2. Consonant:

- the completion of the palatalization of consonants

- the vocalvocalisation and omissions of consonant before other consonants

- the formation of the consonant [x] in the position of [h] after vowels.

Thank you for attention !