Middle English

Middle English

Middle English
The Norman Conquest of 1066 is considered to mark the beginning of the Middle English period. The invaders came from Normandy but spoke a dialect which was quite different from the standard French because it contained a considerable amount of Germanic influence. Even the name Norman comes from Norseman. This is due to the fact that the Normans were descended from Vikings who had settled in northern France about two centuries before and who had abandoned their own language and embraced French very easily.
The Normans established also their language when they conquered Britain. Norman French was the language of kings and nobility of England for more than 300 years. However, it was mostly verbal which was used in court, administration and culture, and Latin was mostly used in written. On the other hand, the peasantry and lower classes continued to speak English.
Considering the fact that both Norman French and Anglo-Saxon were spoken, they gradually started merging, thus developing an Anglo-Norman language, which is usually referred to as Middle English.
Anglo-Norman influence can be seen especially in the borrowings, which were terms belonging to different fields: crown and nobility (crown, castle, prince, duke, baron), government and administration (parliament, government), court and law (court, judge, justice, arrest), war and combat (army, armour, battle, soldier, destroy), authority and control (servant, peasant, charity, authority), fashion and high living (money, beauty, jewel, mansion), art and literature (colour, literature, poet, chapter), high rank trade names (mason, painter, tailor). Interestingly, though, a few words belonging to the crown and nobility field, cyning, cwene, erl, cniht, ladi and lord, managed to survive even though they are Anglo-Saxon.
An interesting fact is that although animal names remained in English (sheep, cow, ox) once they were cooked they got a French name (beef, pork, mutton).
In some cases French words completely replaced the English ones (crime replace firen, place replaced stow). However, in most cases French words entered the language as synonyms: OE: friendship, wish, ask, work – NF: amity, desire, demand, labour (respectively).
In the second half of the 12^th century, during the reign of the Norman king Henry II and his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, a lot of central French words, as opposed to Norman French, were imported into English, thus creating a whole new set of doublets: Norman: catch, warranty, reward; Parisian: chase, guarantee, regard.
It was not only the French that influenced the language during this period. In fact, a lot of Latin loanwords came to be used in the language. These were mostly connected to religion, law, medicine and literature.
During the Norman period, English lost its character as an official language, which meant that it was only spoken and only by the lower classes. English still continued to have four dialects (Northern, Midlands, Southern and Kentish) which were the dialects that naturally developed from the four dialects of Old English (Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish) but with a huge difference: they were so distinctive that speakers of one dialect could not understand the speakers of the other dialects.
As far as grammar is concerned, quite a lot of changes occurred during that time. Noun genders, for instance, disappeared. This probably happened because there were nouns that were masculine in English but feminine in French, which may have caused confusion, thus finding it easier to drop the genders at all. Also, adjectives were left with only two inflections (singular and plural), which in practice were reduced to only one (just like in Modern English). The Old Norse use of prepositions instead of verb inflections had already become a norm. With the disappearance of inflections, the importance was laid on the word order, which created the SVO (subject - verb - object) word order managing to break through time into Modern English.
A lot of changes occurred also as far as spelling and pronunciation systems are concerned. These were elaborated in the “Ormulum”, a biblical text written by a monk called Orm in the late 12^th century. Orm used a spelling system which corresponded one to one with the pronunciation of the words because he was concerned with the mispronunciation of the English words of the time. This new system might have been seen as unusual at that time. Nevertheless, a lot of changes in the writing system took place: 1) letters ‘ð’ and ‘ϸ’ were replaced with ‘th’; 2) ‘Ȝ’ was replaced with ‘g’ or ‘gh’; 3) the definite article ‘the’ came to be used instead of many OE definite articles; 4) ‘cw’ was substituted with Norman ‘qu’ (cwene – queen), 5) the ‘h’ at the start of OE words was deleted (hring – ring) but added to the start of many Romance borrowings (heir, honest); 6) phonemes /f/ and /s/ which had the allophones [f] and [s] when used initially and finally and [v] and [z] when used between voiced sounds became separate phonemes with the introduction of French words such as veal and zeal; 7) ‘v’ and ‘u’ remained largely interchangeable (‘v’ was used at the start of a word while ‘u’ in the middle); 8) the marks denoting vowel length were discarded, thus changing [ū] to [ou] in words such as: hūs – hous; 9) ‘hw’ came to be written as ‘wh’ (which); 10) ‘ċ’ was replaced with ‘ch’ (ċild – child); 11) ‘sh’ or ‘sch’ took the place of ‘sc’; 12) ‘u’ was replaced with ‘o’ in some words because it was similar to ‘v’, ‘n’ and ‘m’ (son); 13) consonant doubling was used to identity short vowels (sitting); 14) the long ‘a’ vowel became ‘o’ (ham – home); 15) many long vowel sounds were identified by a double letter (see) or the ‘e’ at the end of the word was not pronounced anymore (nose).
As for the literature, there are some important works that belong to the Middle English period, such as Layamon’s “Brut”, William Langland’s “Pierce Plowman”, some with unknown authorship like “The Owl and the Nightingale” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. The first great work, though, in English is considered to be the “Canterbury Tales” by Geofrey Chaucer, where one could understand that the reformed English of that time was a complete, flexible and confident language. Chaucer introduced a lot of spoken words into writing and also reintroduced a lot of words which had almost died out. There is one other work that is considered to be a landmark in the English language, the translation of “The Bible” by John Wycliffe in 1384, which contains over 1000 first recorded English words (most of them Latin-based)
The Middle English period saw a huge fall but also a great rise of the English language. From a vulgar language, as considered by the Normans, to the official language again, English, though with a lot of changes, managed to overcome all the obstacles. Three factors played a deep role. Firstly, the loss of Normandy to the French made the Normans turn to their English homes. Secondly, the Hundred Years War against France made the French language be seen as the enemy language (now that the Normans were ‘Anglicized’). Finally, the Black Death, during which about a third of the population died, thus leaving the English speaking laboring and merchant classes grow economically, which eventually wiped out the class differences. This way English regained its power in its own country and became the official language of the courts and Parliament (according to the Statute of Pleading which was written in French in 1362).

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