MIDDLE ENGLISH

OUTLINE
 Background: when? Who?
 Major features: phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, semantics.

Middle English it’s not the same as Medieval. By Middle we mean the period between OE and
Renaissance modern English. In this period crucial developments took place, like the change of
English from synthetic to analytical language, and SOV to SVO.

WHEN?
The ME period started in the 1100 (12th c) until 1500 (16th c). In 1066 Britain was invaded, in
the Battle of Hastings, when William the conqueror defeated Harold. This is told in the Bayeaux
tapestry. There are two periods:
 early ME: 1100-1250.
 late ME: 1250-1500

EJERCICIO (pedir)
What did William the Conqueror argue to support his claim to the English throne?
What was his connection with Edward the Confessor?
Who was Harold Godwinson?
How did he become King?

What is the Bayeux Tapestry? (Pedir)

Who commissioned it?
In which was was the commissioner related to William the Conqueror?
What positions did the commissioner occupy in English after the Conquest?

EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH

It is the period when the Normans, from Normandy, settled down on the island. The Norman
kings were French noblemen. Including kings like Richard the Lionheart, they didn’t speak a
word of English. France was very important for England in this period, including the language.

There are a lot of loan words from French in this period. The most important element of
influence of French and the most important consequence has to do with the shift of the basis
for the future standard. West Saxon dialect? stopped being the most important. The sentence
of power was shifted from Winchester to London, Cambridge, Oxford…the Mercian dialect.

LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH

It was a period of social and financial turmoil. There was a great famine in Europe between
1315-1317. There were millions of deaths, mostly because of the Black Death. It lasted 1346-
1353. The Hundred Years War was also devastating.

English Gothic appeared in art. In Literature we have Chaucer. It was a dark period because of
all of these things, but luminous for culture and art.

In this second part we find in the written texts many substantial changes that had happened in
speech couple of centuries ago. In this period, Linguistic change happens first in speech, and
then those changes are reflected on language once they have settled. It’s not always the case
though.
DATES
In England, in political terms, what marked the end of the period is the War of the Two Roses,
in which Richard III (York) lost at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, while Henry VII (Tudor) was
the winner. The image we have of this king is the one given by Shakespeare, who was in favor
of Henry VII, of the Tudors.

But the crucial milestone that separates the Middle Ages from Renaissance is the introduction
of the printing press in England by William Caxton in 1476. The printing press changed the
world, and in order to find something comparable we have to wait until the appereance of
Internet. La primera obra fue?.

WHO
For the whole ME period we are speaking about a trilingual country. We must take into
account that they were employed by different types of people and that they were employed in
different contexts and situations, they had different roles and functions. Very few people, like
Chaucer, could employ the three of them.

a. Latin
It was not spoken, except in religious contexts, because it was the language of the church, and
in the universities. Graduation in Oxford and Cambridge are still done in Latin. It was the
language of academia, where important words were included. Newton’s works are written in
Latin. It was the language for religion. There were three parameters.
Continental practice
- Legal record: for OE the legal record were written in OE, but after the invasion many
documents were written in Latin, since it was the practice in France. Domesday Book,
1087 (record of all property/land owners, continued by William the Conqueror with
the purpose of taxes). Magna Carta, 1215 (closes thing to a Constitution in England, it
was an agreement signed by King John, brother of Richard Lionheart, barone and
archbishop of York to not interfere with each other, written in Latin and French).
- Knowledge: Roger Bacon, Opus Maius, 1267. He spoke about the study about the
principles behind glasses. It’s written in Latin, not English. William of Ockham, Summa
Logica, 1323 (the simplest explanation tends to be the right one).

b. French
The first thing we need to take into account is that it was not a general variety of French.
Medieval France had the same dialectal situation we described for England. There was not a
standard language for France either, because standard is a very modern notion. It had a
number of different dialects with different features in different regions.

The French that was liken and that arrived with the invaders was the Norman French, spoken
in Normandy, which later evolved in what we know as Anglo Norman, which had differences
from Norman French and French in general. French decaded as a language because the minor
elite, knights and land owners had married English women, and their sons and daughters
learned French because it was convenient.

The role of French can be considered in three aspects or areas:

- Ruling elite: the royal court, the noblemen, etc. French became the language of the
ruling elite. Even when many of the nobility abandoned French as their native
language, since they married English women, their sons were bilingual. The kings, high
nobility, French was their language. Kings until Henry IV, born in 1367, did not speak
English as their native language. The coat of arms of the English monarchy has a motto
 in French, as do some decorations. The nobility and the church also employed French.
The nobility abandoned French as their native language when they married English
women. French became a must in cultivated discourse, you could not aspire to
anything without being proficient in French. In the prologue of Canterbury Tales, we
are told about a prioresse, a nun, who spoke French with an accent of Stratford atte
Bowe, because she didn’t know French from Paris, central French, based upon
Francien.
- Employed for Official business: used as the language for pleading until 1362. This
implied that for a long time those terms have been employed in the legal registered
and remain as technical words in modern English, such as malice. It also implied the
Parliament (the ceremony was held in French until 1363). The protocol words that
appear at the end of each law they add soit baillé aux Seigneurs. When the law is
approved or denied, it appears in medieval French. The Royal Assent is also in French.
 Malice: borrowing from old French malice. The legal meaning still employed is a design
or intention of doing mischief to another without justification or excuse. In Spanish is
translated to dolo
- Literature: it was fostered by the Plantagenet kings, such as Henry II. Chanson de
Roland, the epic poem of the French language, the oldest manuscript that has been
preserved was copied in England, it’s in Oxford, from the 12th century, implying that
this tradition was already important by the time the invasion had taken place. One of
the most important poetic works in England are the Lais of Marie de France, copied in
England as well. Also Fabliaux.

In many ways, the role of French could be compared with English today as a lingua franca.
Norman French from Normandy. There’s a reason why that region was called like that. Norman
meant men from the north, the Vikings. Hrold Ganger was the viking who invaded Normandy
and made pacts with the king. He was called Ganger because he was so big that he had to walk
since he could not use a horse.

EXERCISE
Defendant: acusado, old French
Witness: testigo, witnes in OE
Warrant: the noun before the verb, autorización
Plaintiff: demandante, plaintif Old Anglo French derived
Felony: delito, old French

c. English
It was never out of use in England. It was the language of the bulk of population (4 billion in
1066, before the Normans arrived), although English has a less regarded status in court circles,
because the queens, kings and noblemen spoke French and not English. It regained importance
with the statute of pleading (protocols for trials, for lawyers), it demanded that the language
that should be employed was English in 1362.

The Parliament opening was done in English in 1363. Henry IV was the first English king whose
mother tongue was English and not French, although he was proficient in French. His
coronation oath taken for the first time in English since the conquest took place in 1399. His
son Henry V was the one who defeated the French in the Hundred Years War. In the battle of
agincourt this is described by Shakespeare. The office of the king's private secretary, for the
first time the documents came out in English (signet office) because he needed to ask the
English parliament for money after the Hundred Years' War.
WRITTEN SOURCES IN ENGLISH
For the most part what we have in ME are manuscripts, like in OE. The vast majority are
manuscript, they might have been for noblemen, like a copy of the Canterbury tales; a
historical chronicle, like Peterborough; or a book of recipes, like the forme of cury, employed
by the master of cooks of Richard II.

They are manuscripts so they had mspistakes, but they are unique objects. All problems of
textual transmission are preserved.

The end of the period is marked by the printing press. We have a few printed books, just at the
very end of the period, and we call it incunabula. The meaning has been extended to every
book which is very ancient.

Even when ME was not particularly relevant for official documents in the early ME period, we
have many more texts in ME than the whole OE period, since there were more people in
England and more needs for writing.

Many more text types as well, for the first time the texts related to private affairs (like private
letters, they were not intended to be read. The Paston Letters, 1422-1509, rich families kept
family letters, not coloquial language, formal writing) and for the first time literary
representations of vulgar speech, like the Miller’s Tale. Chaucer was the first author to imitate
everyday speech to characterize his characters.

EXERCISE
What are the Paston Letters? Collection of letters from 15-16th century from the Paston
family
What kind of information are they a primary source for? Magnificent record of a family
correspondence
Where is the collection mainly preserved today? Original copies still in Oxnead, and the original
collection in the British Museum

—————————
CARACTERÍSTICAS MIDDLE ENGLISH
 SPELLING
 PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS: phonological changes, phonetics changes, accent
 MORPHOLOGY: NP, VP, Grammatical categories
 SYNTAX: genitive, ‘dummy’ subjects, mood and modality, voice
 LEXICON AND SEMANTICS: borrowing, other word formation processes, semantic
changes

SPELLING
ME spelling was far less consistent and included many more variants than the spelling we had
for OE. A word in ME documents could be written in many more different ways than in OE.
Reasons?
- We have more texts, and since we have more written texts, we have more possibilities.
- In OE, specially at the end of the period, the scribal traditions had become very
consistent, very stall. There were also schools to be trained in a specific way, that way
many paleographers are able to identify the place of provenance of a document,
because we know there were certain traditions. It was a strong scriptoria tradition in
OE, but it disappeared in ME.
- There’s a huge amount of spelling variants. William brought them with many monks,
priests. They did not speak OE, but French. They needed to copy OE documents,
 especially charters. When Norman scribes were copying that texts in OE, they wrote in
a language they didn’t master, with conventions and rules they were not familiar with.

The consequence for many historians of the English language who wrote histories of English in
the mid century, they felt that all those variant spellings proved that in ME linguistic change
was happening more quickly than in OE. They speak of ME as a period of accelerated change,
they felt that in ME things were changing more quickly than in OE. That spelling, all those
differences in spelling, was the first evidence for that.

However, that is not clear, because all those scriptural traditions were broken, many of the
changes that were already in the language suddenly appeared in writing. Maybe OE/ME?,
English was subject to historical circumstances that helped to make linguistic change a bit
quicker, like the invasions, bilingual families, contact with other modern languages that were
spoken like French. Many of the changes that were happening in OE, in ME suddenly surfaced.

SPELLING CONSONANTS
When comparing texts in OE and in late ME, you notice that there are no runic symbols. They
disappeared gradually. Less and less runic symbols are employed as time goes by, with whynn
being the first one to go, and the last one being thorn, because it was employed as an
abbreviation to ‘that’ in many manuscripts. That’s why we find thorns even in Chaucer, but it’s
not used the same way it was used in OE. At the end of the period we don’t have any runic
symbols, not even æ. This was because many scribes didn’t have them in their own language.

French influence. There are many spelling rules that were changes because of this influence.
There was not a declared order, but the French scribes were writing English texts. Something
that happened is that they were writing by being dictated, especially in late ME. The way to
produce many copies of a book was to have four or five or more scribes copying the book and
somebody dictating it. That’s why they pronounce the [v], and because in French they had the
letter <v>?. They wrote the letter v for whenever they heard the sound. They also had [tf] <ch>
in Middle French, so they employed their symbols for that. Also qu-, instead of cw in OE.

French habits were leaked into ME writing. They were writing what they heard. Once th was
adopted for thorn, and they got used to this, there was a digraph which remained slightly
different, which was ‘hw’, and scribes transformed it into ‘wh’ (hwær - where). The same
happened with ‘scip’. In the texts we have all sorts of combinations to represent this sound,
and at the end of the period we find ‘sh’. This is one of this digraphs that had lots of variants all
across the country, in the different documents and periods.

EXERCISE

SPELLING VOWELS
For OE, we had long and short vowels. The same happens in ME. In OE, in Modern times and
for students of OE we used the macron to distinguish long from short vowels, but the real
thing were manuscripts without any mark for length, there are no symbols for that.

In ME, vowel length, whether short or long, started to be marked. We find different methods
in ME to represent vowel quantity. The most typical was the reduplication of letters, at the
beginning of the period we find double vowels, <ee> <oo> only survived to mark that they are
long vowels. In sound changes, short vowels tended to appear before double consonants.
The same sort of mechanism. French scribes writing in many occasions things they were being
dictated, they wrote what they heard, this was the French influence. It is shown in the
representation of rounded vowels. In OE <y> was pronounced [ü]. A French scribed heard here
ü, and in his language the letter that represented that sound was u. In certain dialects, we find
that u sound (bury, OE byri3, ME burien).

When an OE word contained u and was followed by m, n (nasal), u, v or w, they substituted it

for o in ME (cuman>come). Another sound whose representation was changed was the long
[u:], <u>, in ME they substituted it because of the French influence by the double letter ou (hūs
> house, spurious <e>).

MIRAR HOJA PADRENUESTRO

PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS

We need to distinguish between phonology and phonetics, because we will find substancial
changes in the inventory phonemes of the English language. We will get new phonemes, new
diphthongs and a series of constants that did not change in pronunciation but whose status
changed form allophones to phonemes.

The first important phonological change is the simplification of double consonants in

pronunciation. In OE, you had to learn to pronounce double consonants. We have double
consonants in PDE, but they are not read differently. In PDE, double consonants mark the
difference between a short vowel and a long element. Once they were no longer pronounced
differently, people found them useful to mark vowel length. There was an additional mark to
distinguish length, which is doubling consonants. In the case of offeren ME and offrian OE, we
know that the vowel is short, it remained like that.

EXERCISE EVOLUTION RUNIC SYMBOLS (pedir)

EXERCISE FRENCH INFLUENCE (pedir)

PHONOLOGICAL CHANGES
Loss of long consonants (double)

Phonologization of the fricative set. This means that there’s no change in actual pronunciation.
The fricative set [f/v, s/z, ], which were allophones, became phonemes, /f, v, s, z, /
meaning that in OE the difference voiced or voiceless was irrelevant in terms of meaning,
because they could never appear in the same position. The different sound changes in ME
created the possibility for all these consonants to distinguish meaning.

The presence of many loan words from French which had voiced fricatives in initial position
(veal, very. They are Middle French loan words. From verie). It’s a new position that can be
occupied in ME by a voiced fricative consonant.

Another important sound change is the loss of final vowels in final position. This placed voiced
consonants for the first time at the end of the word, another position that could not be
occupied by unvoiced consonants in OE. (ME love < OE lufu).

The loss of long consonants. If we don’t distinguish between a double consonant and a simple
consonant in pronunciation, there’s no distinction in the case of offer ME between these verb
written with two F, and over, for example. The thing that distinguishes them is the middle
consonant, which may be voiced or voiceless.

PHONETIC CHANGES
Many consonants disappeared in the general simplification of declensional system and in the
conjugational system. They collapsed in the ME period, and the general reason were the sound
changes that happened, among them the loss of long consonants. They disappeared because
whenever they were at the end of a word and in non accented position, so they were placed in
a very weak position.

The first and most outstanding change is the loss of nasal consonants in unaccented final
position, due to the Germanic accent.

The second change is revealing of a number of dialectal developments. It is the [h] dropping.

Loss of nasals: the infinitive of verbs for instance, they had the suffix IAN, so OE luffian in Early
ME loven, we still have that N, then it disappears, in PDE love. The N remained in unaccented
grammatical words before vowels (OE ān, ME ōn, o, PDE one, an, a). This is the origin of OE
nān, ME nōn, no, PDE none, no. Also in OE mīn, mī, PDE mine, my. This last specialization came
after the Renaissance.

H dropping:
The earliest of all the losses of H were those words that started with cluster + C.
 hnacod > naked. Earliest loss. The semi consonant W, we have a difference between
certain dialects, southern geographical varieties vs Scottish, USA…before [w] (OE
hwær, hwīle). It was never lost in those dialects.
 In the 14th century we find <h> [h] dropping in syllable codas (second part of the
syllable). OE cniht > PDE /naIt/
 Pre-vocalic [h], which is the most controversial. The losses of H before a vowel started
by the 12th-13th century. The theory explaining this is controversial. Jim Milroy and
Santiago Corugedo developed this theory. According to them, the H started to be not
pronounced by the 12th or 13th century, and the loss was spread to most dialects of
ME. We pronounce for example house or home, and this is because of the rise of
Standard English, the appearance of standard variety and the accent with which it is
pronounced. By the 13-14th century it was not pronounced, it was a late restoration,
by the 15 century the H was not pronounced in almost any dialect before we get a
standard dialect. In the Early Modern English period, the Renaissance, spelling
pronunciation became the usual kind of pronunciation in the case of H, in schools and
school teachers. It was the pronunciation advocated by the first books that taught
English, and a kind of pronunciation that was adopted by school teachers. Not every in
the early modern period had the possibility to access school, read or write, so the H
was restored in the standard dialect. In the case of Scotland, there was no need of
restoration because the H was never lost.

PHONETIC CHANGES IN VOWELS

Quantity:
Among the many changes that can be mentioned we have two. They both depend on the
nature of the Germanic accentuation patterns. The fact that OE had stress accent is what
provoked in ME the open syllable lengthening.

 Open syllable lengthening: it’s a change in vowels which happened in disyllabic words.
Words accented on the first syllable. Also with the -VCV sequence (OE wicu). In this
words, the vowel lengthen, it became long, and if it was not already a low vowel, it
was lowered. (ME we:k schwa). This implied that two new vowels appeared in the
system of long vowels of ME, we have words like mete (m3:t > meat). The sounds were
3: and c:
 Shortenings of vowels that used to be long in OE but which appeared in more than one
consonant, before consonants clusters (OE cēpton > ME kepte). Or in syllables that are
 not accented, so they tend to be shortened, weakened…(OE -dōm, -līc). Līc also made
the affricate disappear. That why have -ly. Dōm was shortened, that’s why it’s
pronounced 3:. The pattern is still at work in PDE.

Quality:
OE <y> [ü(:)]
In the different dialects of OE and then ME, this vowel changed in different ways. In the
northern and East Midlands dialects of ME that vowel changed to <y>, <I> [i(:)]. OE synn>sin,
OE mys>mice.

Diphthongs
They either disappeared because they suffered a monophthongization (smoothing), or new
ones appeared in the language.
 Smoothing: it affected long and short diphthongs of OE. We are talking about the
Mercian dialect, specifically the Midlands (East). OE ea/ēa, eo/ēo (they were long
because the onset is a long vowel). These diphthongs smoothed. At least the short
ones were already monophthongs, one vowel by the end of the OE period. At least for
the medieval period, spelling tends to be conservative on the sense that they go on
writings words in a way they were no longer pronounced. Probably scribes kept writing
ea and eo although the historians believe that the pronunciation was already just a for
ea and e for eo, in ME. In the case case of the long ones, we are not sure, they were
probably smoothed but already in the ME period. Ēa was smoothed to 3:, and ēo to e:.
Open e appears as a consequence of smoothing. A new vowel, long open 3:, has two
source in ME (smoothing OE ēa, and open syllable lengthening).

 New diphthongs: ai, ei, oi, ui, au, eu, iu, ou. They have two sources that are mixed up.
They may come from the vocalization of semivowels or consonants like yog (ME Wei <
OE we3). The other source are the very numerous borrowings, especially from French
(OF poysoun). Also the borrowing ‘they’ from Scandinavian.

Levelling and loss of unaccented vowels

The most important development in sound change. The consequences for the morphology and
the syntax of English were huge. That is why is so important. The suffixes were unaccented, so
the language is simplified.
 Process of levelling, merging OE /a, e, I, o, u/ to ME [ ] <e>/ [i] <i>
 Loss of final ME [ ] <e> / [i] <i>. First they were leveled, and then they disappeared.

The most crucial development in ME phonetics and phonology is the loss of suffixes containing
cases, gender, person, number…they were unaccented. This lead to the simplification of the
morphological system.

The letter <e> in final position was preserved in lots of words. Like in love < OE lufu. The fact
that it was preserved in those words that used to have a vowel lead to the addition of this
letter to words that didn’t have it, like horse < OE hors, house < OE hūs. It’s called spurious <e>
(added to words in which never was). It was called scribal <e>, it was pronounced at some
point (words in which the pronunciation was lost but remained orthographically).

ACCENT
The ME period preserved the Germanic accent. Stressed accent, like french. For most words,
remained with the Germanic pattern, meaning that the accent was at the beginning of the
word.
But French loanwords were a lot, and entering in such a short span of time, what happens is
that many kept their original patterns, and many words preserved the accent in the syllable
they had in French. Not only because of this, because of other two factors very important. (1)
Many of them are verbs, like import, which is a French borrowing, and verbs in Germanic had
the primary accent on the stem because the verb has a prefix. What was affected was the
noun. (2) They knew French.

MIRAR PADRENUESTRO
 phonologizatiom
 Loss of nasals at the end of words. It disappeared if followed by a word starting by
consonant (thi Name). We also have the loss of N in words with a suffix in an
unaccented position. (Heofonum > hefene)
 Shortening?. There are doubts about this (kyngdoom)
 Evidénciale textual de que este texto es de la zona donde la u del OE había pasado a Y.
No se distinguía la pronunciación entre I latina e Y griega. Gyve, for3yf, forgyven, yvel,
delyvere.
 We have examples of smoothing of the short diphthongs. (Eart>art,
heofonum>hevenes, eordan>erthe)
 Vocalization. 3rhal3od>Halewid, dæ3>dai
 Retraction. Fæder>fadir, dæ3>dai. This letter, which a runic name, ash, although the
letter was not runic, changed to ‘a’, the change of spelling corresponds to a change in
pronunciation. It changed from front to back vowel, and we call that retraction
 Leveling. Heofonum>hevenes, nama>name, 3ehal3od>halewid, willa>wille,
eordan>erthe,
 /i/ <i: fadir, dettis, dettouris
 The only real vowel loss we have in this text is yfele, which in OE was the dative, it
disappears in ME yvel. The rest are spurious <e>, letters that shouldn’t be there but
they are, like forgyve, lede, delyvere

MORPHOLOGY
NOUN DECLENSIONS (preguntar)
The system was affected by all the sound changes. If we place them in a list:
 ø
 u
 a
 e
 an
 um
 as
 es
This in OE. But in ME because of the levelling, we have:
 ø
 -e/-i [schwa/i]
 -en [ n]
 -es/-(i)s [ z/ iz]

We go from eight noun inflectional endings to three. In late ME we have:

 ø
 -es [schwa/iz]
ARTICLES AND DEMONSTRATIVES
Probably because of an analogy the fact that OE se is the only form without Thorne in the
whole article, the nominative singular masculine changed into ‘the’, it’s just a substitution, not
really an evolution. This will be the only definite article that will remain as an article. aet
‘that’ comes from the neuter singular article, and the contraction of æ is shown. It now
functions as a demonstrative.

ās ‘those’ comes from the plural demonstrative. We have another vowel change OE ā [a:]
evolved in the southern dialects of ME in c:, PDE schwa u (u con cuernos). The demonstrative
‘these’ comes form the neuter nominative accusative. It was created by analogy, mixing up
between des-e and dēos with dis. Othe is the only for, for singular and plural masculine and
feminine and neuter. All cases disappear in ME. The and that were stablished forms in Chaucer
times?.

ADJECTIVE DECLENSIONS
If we observe all the possibilities of the strong and weak declension of adjectives, we see that
there are many declensional endings, but most of them are pretty much the same. The
simplification was radical. By Chaucer time we only have -ø and -e, and it has to do with
wether the adjetive appears with a plural or singular noun, or in a definite context. We have to
count with a lot of spurious and scrival <e>. Only in writing. Probably by Chaucer time, the e
was not pronounced at all.

PRONOUNS
There a lot of simplifications for the personal pronouns. The neuter for the first and second
person disappeared. Then we have a merge of the dative and accusative case. The dative and
the accusative merged into one case, the object case. The dative occupies the whole slot of the
object case.

Instead of four cases in pronouns now we have three, and this still remains in PDE. The third
person feminine in the early ME, we have forms like scho, sche, but at end of the period this
changes. We don’t know why. But we know why hi, hio…they’re borrowings from
Scandinavian, and are now ‘they’. The importance of Scandinavian for the English language are
evidenced here. We have texts with they and their, and at the end of the period we have
them. It was gradual towards the south.

ME WEAK VERBS
The first change, caused by all the sound changes, is that the two productive classes of OE (I
and II of weak verbs) with -ed- and -od- suffixes, because of the leveling and loss of unaccented
vowels, this leads to having just one type of weak verbs containing ed in the past in writing and
pronounced [-id]. This pronunciation will remain until the end of the 17th century.

The weak verbs were the only productive ones in OE. They were simple resources to
remember. The root remained unchanged and a suffix was added. This is the regular resource
to form past in English today.

Weak verbs were many more than strong verbs, they were numerically preponderant. The
weak verbs were the natural target for the basis of regular verbs. Weak verbs of OE are not the
regular verbs of PDE, but the basis for the regular verbs in PDE.

PDE English regular verbs are formed by original weak verbs of OE (lufian), but also b many
original strong verbs which analogically shifted to the weak category (helpan).
Loanwords entered the English language after the OE period, during ME period, the Early
Modern English, Late Modern…any loanword from a foreign language (suffocate) follows the
regular pattern. All neologisms (x-ray, fax).

Weak verbs part of the whole category. The provide the resource.

STRONG VERBS
They followed the reverse. They were no longer productive in OE. It was easy to recognize
their patterns, but they were not productive. In OE there were around 300 strong verbs. In PDE
strong verbs are frequently employed in no more than 60.

All those sounds changes provoked a massive simplification in the category of strong verbs.
Many classes and subgroups merged together, the distinctions disappeared, there were no
marks for number. Of the two forms many verbs had for the past, only one remained. In some
cases the singular, in others the plural. There were also verbs that mixed in the past/past
participle, with important variations in the different dialects

1-IV
2-V
3-weak
4-VII
5-IIIA
6-IIIB
7-I
8-anomalous
9-IV
10-weak
11-II

Irregular full verbs have at least 260 approximately. Sources:

 OE original string verbs (rīdan)
 OE original weak verbs which undergo sounds changes (crēpan, brin3an)
 OE anomalous verbs: 3an, don
 OE bēon, Wesan
 Certain OE original class III weak verbs (habban, sec3an)

VERBO BE
Because of the influence of pronunciation changes, it was the most frequently employed verb
in every language that makes it able to remember everything that happens to it.

Present:
Indicative: singular am, art, is; plural earen, ben (Scandinavian loanword)
Subjunctive: no singular, plural be, Ben (the final n was lost in pronunciation)
Past:
Indicative: singular was, were, was, plural weren
Subjunctive: singular weren, plural weren
Imperative
Just plural be, be

GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES
PERSON
Third person singular present indicative.
In OE exactly the same dialect which has eoron for the plural present of be, they had -as for
third person singular present. This reveals the importance of the Scandinavian languages, the
old Norse. In ME this -as changed to -es [-iz]. This happened in the north.

In the south, third person singular present was a consequence of that change, and it led to -
eth. It remained like that until the end of the period. If we study the different texts from the
north, the areas in the border…we find more -es forms in the north and more -eth forms as
you approach the south. In Chaucer times, we just had -eth.

GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES: GENDER

It is one of the categories devoted to classifying nouns in the language. The word gender in OE
is a borrowing from French, whose etymon is Latin is genus, which means class. The criteria to
classify nouns in the languages are very diverse.

In English, the way to decide to which group each noun belongs has to do with grammatical
agreeement within the NP in OE, that is to say the agreement of determiners, possessives,
adjectives…with the noun, which is the head, and outside the phrase, in anaphoric reference,
cataphoric reference, referring to personal pronouns.

3ōdne mōnan GMD

æt blinde wīf neuter
eos blinde lufu GFD

In Middle English, part of the basis to recognize that class disappears. We know that monan is
masculine because of 3odne, whose only possibility is masculine. If in the adjective declension
we have no clue, then part of the agreement system that sustains this disappears.

Determiners, the article and demonstratives disappear as well. The only thing we have are be
and bese, bis and bēos, but no gender differences. If you add the fact that all the suffixes in
nouns indicating declension, number, etc disappear as well because they belong to the last
part of the word, which is non accented. In ME we have:

3ōd mōn (good moon)

blind wīf (the blind wife)
blind lufu (this blind love)

It’s true that anaphoric or cataphoric reference could have helped to sustain this classification,
which is grammatical. If the system had operated as well in anaphoric and cataphoric
reference, no reason why moon should have remained masculine, etc. The thing is that the
anaphoric and cataphoric reference, that system outside the NP, didn’t operate in the same
way. The criterion as far as non animate nouns operated semantically, within the NP the
demonstrative was the neuter, but outside the NP the pronoun selected is the feminine
pronouns (in bæt wif)

The labels masculine, feminine, neuter are labels inherited from the Protoindoeuropean. In
that protolanguage the criterion to classify nouns was basically animacy. To this criterion many
more criteria have been added.
All this implies that the shift of gender from OE to PDE with ME is from a grammatical gender,
based upon the form of a word, to a semantic way to classify things, based upon meaning.
What happened in the change from OE to ME was that these two slots were emptied, there
was nothing that sustained this system. The semantic way the classify nouns extended to the
whole language in ME. In most works, they explain this shift as something that shifted from
grammatical to natural, but it’s not correct. Why?. Because genus is a classifying system (se va)

Definition of gender in PDE

The grammatical category of gender in PDE is
- Covert: it is based upon anaphoric or cataphoric reference. It’s not evident from the
word, or the adjective accompanying that noun within in the NP. In the case of PDE,
based upon the reference in pronouns (reflexive, personal…), possessive determiners
- Semantic: the criteria to classify nouns in PDE are on the one hand the meaning of the
noun (a wider meaning that what is usually referred to in grammars) and the use (the
perspective from the speaker, it had to do more with pragmatics and modality, than to
the context of the noun. In OE modality is a category in which the speaker presents the
evaluation they have of the action or the state conveyed by the verb, whether they
want it to present as real or they are lying. In this sense, gender in PDE, especially in
what refers to the use of pronouns for objects whether physical or abstract, has much
to do with how the speaker wants to present the relationship with that object. This has
to do with the simpler view presented by many contemporary grammars of English,
like the Internet Grammar of English)

The definition for the anaphoric reference is when the notion of sex does not applause, when
we refer to inanimate objects for instance, we use the pronoun it. What happens with the
anaphoric and cataphoric reference of personal pronouns in PDE when we refer to inanimate
objects is that some of this objects may appear in some texts with an assigned gender.

Poem by Archibald Lamphan?. Natura in minima maxima. Latin has a strong influence on
literary traditions in Dngland. Natura is a feminine noun in Latin. Es una marca de registro,
formal y poética.

Los barcos a veces aparecen en los textos referidos como it, pero en otros textos podemos
encontrar she. En algunos casos the object is within the speaker’s area of interest. In the
register of sailors, sails are referred to with the pronoun she. The author is nos expressing
affection towards the ship. The association of she, being a sailor, is so established that man-of-
war is also referred to as she. It’s an specific register, having to do with professional jargon. En
los textos que aparece como it, se trata de un registro scientific, which is detached and
objective. The author is not attached to the object, and he shows it by keeping the neuter
pronoun for the noun.

Poema de una niña. Primero se refiere al gato como it, pero luego le da un nombre y utiliza el
pronoun him, porque sabe que es un macho y es importante para ella. The register is personal
and affectionate.

Artículo científico de la reproducción de las belugas. Primero dice que es una female calf, pero
en todo el texto se refiere al animal como it. La diferencia es el registro. Ambos animales están
within the speaker’s area of interest. The register is scientific, detached and objective.

In the case of other babies, the situation is reversed. In the case of family members, it for
babies tends to be employed as a term of endearment.

MIDDLE ENGLISH SYNTAX

A general basic idea. It’s the linguistic level of morphology which directly affects syntax. All
those leveling and losses caused the disappearance of suffixes and therefore declension.
Because of this, they had effects on the syntactic structure:

 The use of prepositions increased. This implied that we get more phrases, like
prepositional phrases.
 Word order and sentence element order tended towards fixed patterns. Jim (hater)
hates John (hated). We know it because of the order of elements. In declarative
sentence in English the usual order is SVO, if you want to emphasize it would be like ‘it
is John who hates Johny’. In OE, this fixed order is not necessary because of the
declensional system. With the decay of declesionsal endings, we need more fixed
patterns in element order so that we know the meanings.

THE GENITIVE
<es> [-iz] it’s the only morphological mark. This is at the end of the period. Once it settled as
the only mark, it began to be used for new syntactical contexts:
 “Group” genitive: the evolution from OE malcomes cynin3es dohtor (king Malcom’s
daughter) in ME this was King Malcomes dohter. The suffix of the e it’s attached only
to the last word of the NP. This implies that that the scope of genitive of OE has to to
with individual words, while the scope of genitive in ME and onwards is the whole
noun phrase. It shifts from being a property of each individual word into becoming a
phrasal property, of the whole NP. It’s a very important structural change. It allows us
to place in PDE the mark for the genitive at the end of the last word in the whole NP
(the wife of Bath’s tale; John and Mary’s house; John’s and Mary’s houses). The
genitive is now a property of the NP, not of each individual word as it used to be OE.

 Genitive without a head word: Saint Martin’s Church. It is one of the origins. For the
whole ME period it became usual to eliminate the word church, and it was understood
that Saint Martin’s were churches (it was just said Saint Martin’s). It became very
frequent and it extended to all sorts of this kind places (Harrod’s, for example). It used
to be very popular in Spain a couple of years ago to use ‘s for pubs, bars…

 Double genitive: a friend of mine. Of mine es pronombre genitive (significa de los

míos). Es el antiguo partitivo.

DUMMY SUBJECTS
They are a consequence of one of those general changes in the history of English in which
most suffixes for verbs disappeared, including suffixes for person and number. They become
frequent at the end of the ME period.

The idea of a lexical subject must be present in all cases becomes grammatical. The moment
when those suffixes disappear, we need to know who does the action (I, you, she…). The
moment the slot subject becomes obligatory for all verbs, these kind of dummy subjects
become obligatory as well. This happens at the end of ME period. The moment the word order
becomes SVO the usual clause element order.

It rains
There is a book here

MOOD AND MODALITY

Mood
Modality is the older expression of a particular attitude in the speaker’s mind towards the
action or the state conveyed by the verb. Overt. The way to convey modality in OE was mood
and also modal auxiliaries.

In ME , it is a period when the major changes in syntactic and morphological structure happen,
and also the loss of mood and the expansion of modal auxiliaries. The reason why mood is lost
in the ME period is that these syntactic change is a consequence of morphological changes,
which are a consequence of the sound changes that took place.

The difference in OE for mood for lufodon and lufoden is one vowel. The only thing we have
left for them after the sound changes is loved. Formally, the subjunctive mood disappears in
ME, because we have ni suffixes conveying that. Even in PDE we have special forms of the
subjunctive which are special usages in some registers, especially for formal registers (god save
the Queen). That’s the only thing we have in PDE. Formally, we have no mood in PDE.

This doesn’t imply that modality cannot be expressed in English. The modal auxiliaries is the
only productive resource we have from ME onwards we can use to express modality (doubt,
wish…). The modal auxiliaries in ME give the first steps towards gramaticalization, to become
what we know as modal auxiliaries. This means the loss of non finite forms (willan > will) and
the exclusively temporal distinction is lost (may/might)

VOICE
The book was selected by the committee (most common/typical, only one in Spanish)
The people was given the opportunity to protest (the subject of the passive structure is the IO
of the active sentence). It derives from OE verbs which took a single object in the dative case
(swican)

His plans were laughed at (transitive phrasal verbs)

The library was set fire to by accident (connected with the emergence of phrasal verbs, such as
give up).

Some verbs in OE have attached inseparable particles:

 preceding them: for-3iefan
 Following them: 3iefan uppan
 fixed position
 Transitive in OE - semantically transitive in PDE

THE SENTENCE
Relative clauses:
 In OE the only relative participle was e. It gave place to ‘that’, which remained the
only relativiser for the most part of ME
 Wh- interrogative pronouns: they were very rarely used as relative pronouns at the
beginning of the period, before the 15th century.

Interrogation/negation:
 DO structures: they were not fully established until the 17th century.
 OE ‘ne’ before the verb: it was the only negator in OE. It very often occurred with naht
(>PDE not) after the verb. With most modal meanings, they eroded gradually in time,
so ne dropped after that. In a development like French ne…pas. Not remained as the
only negative particle for the whole ME period.
 Double negation: in OE we had a very frequent double negation (ne + verb + nābin3,
næfre). It was perfectly grammatical in OE. It remained like that in ME (ther nas no
 man nowher so vertous…; I never was nor never will be). Up to a certain point in
English, double negation was grammatical, but the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason,
en esta época se aplicó la lógica formal al lenguaje, por lo que los dos negativos se
convertían en un positivo. Grammarians decided that double negatives were wrong,
and this became very successful. It became standard English.

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LEXICON AND SEMANTICS

We focus on Chaucer’s time.
Lexicon:
The English lexicon in this time consisted in a mixture of forms. The vocabulary is more mixed
during ME than in OE. The reason was that the English was into contact with many more
foreign people and we have more texts, so we have more lexical evidence.

The mixture consisted on all those words inherited from OE, with the relevant changes, but the
same words; more important now, the borrowings from languages the speakers of ME came
into contact with, like Scandinavian, French, Latin; new words derived from processes of
composition and derivation.

The core lexicon remains basically Germanic, because no language remains pure all the time, in
particular languages with a long history. If the language has been spoken by fourteen
centuries, it’s obvious that those people have got in contact with people speaking other
languages, and if cultures are mixed up you incorporate new elements. It remained Germanic
rather than ‘purely OE’, because of the Scandinavian influence, which is very frequently
disguised because of the similar shape of the words.

BORROWINGS
Two main points:
 ME is more hospitable to foreign words than OE. We have more new words in ME
coming from foreign languages than the number of words we had in OE coming from
foreign languages.
 Source languages ME borrows from. They are:
 * Old Norse
 *Latin
 *French
 *Other languages
It is more hospitable because:
 large scale contact between English speakers and users of other languages
 Less inflectional endings (less suffixes). The consequence is that foreign words are
easier to adapt.
Source languages:
 Old Norse: the borrowings had started already in OE. But they do not appear in writing
until the ME period. This is the moment when they surface massively, we start getting
lots of words we know come from Old Norse. This is because most of them are daily
life words (window, egg, bag), and if they are daily life words this implies that in their
journey from Old Norse into ME they have been incorporated basically via speech in
the spoken languages. These words are the result of communities living together. The
words go from the Viking speech into the English speech, and they appear in writing
later on because writing is conservative. It is a very difficult skill to learn.
 Latin: the massive stock of words form Latin entered in the English language through
the Latin Renaissance of the 12th century. This monastic Renaissance implied the
 widespread use of Latin for many kind of texts that in OE had been written in OE. Since
Latin was more and more often being used and in more texts, we get a bigger leakage
from Latin to ME. Words like ascend, confer, question…This implies that the journey of
word form Latin to ME was made by means of writing, in written texts. And also by
means of speech.
 French: it gave the largest number of loan words in ME. It entered a English in two
phases. (1) Norman French, the most important of those varieties of French employed
in English. (2) Central French.
 (1) it brought daily life words (mushroom, pottle, hotchpot…the French cuisine had a
lot of influence on England at that time). The way the journey of those words from
Norman French to ME is more complicated. It started in speech, the language of the
invaders, and it transferred to writing.
 (2) the influence of central French started form 14th century onwards because we get
lots of words entering the language at a greater rate than ever before, because it was
fashionable (high class status marker). The journey started in writing, because of the
literature, and went to writing in general
 Other languages: they had much smaller impact on ME than the other ones. The most
remarkable is Dutch. It’s the other foreign language that has a growing impact in this
period because of the increasing commercial links between England and the great
commercial ports of the Low Countries. The range of vocabulary tends to be limited to
seafaring and trading (cork, skipper)

Derived from composition and derivation

COMPOSITION
Germanic way of forming words by excellence. Frequent resource in poetry. ME texts continue
to use the most productive kinds of OE composition (bagpipe, sweetheart, nightmare).
Nightmare comes from OE mære (íncubo)

DERIVATION
Adding prefixes and suffixes. What is most interesting is how certain suffixes from French
became so integrated, so incorporated into the English language in a productive way that we
now consider them purely English resources.
French profitable, reasonable > -able (English eatable)

SEMANTICS
Semantic change: OE sæli3. In OE it meant holy, also associated with it ‘innocent’. It became
‘simple’, and we have PDE ‘silly’. Es un préstamo del Latín nescius ‘ignorant’. En OF nice, que
dio PDE ‘nice’.

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