History of the English Language

There are two groups of consonants affected by the change.
1. Consonants that change their pronunciation.
The sound [x] existing in Middle English was represented by writing h or gh in initial or final position.
Ex.| riht (OE) > right (ME)
In final position there is a strange development and the [x] sound becomes an [f]. Ex.| rough, enough, laugh, tough

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We have several matters of concern in the Early Modern English Period (EMEP). Educated people were concerned mainly about the prestige of their language compared to other European languages. English was not considered to have an adequate vocabulary, and there was a concern about the necessity of a spelling reform, and a necessity of fixing and regulating the language. There was a strong discussion about these topics. At the beginning of the period the arguments about the suitability of English are typical, while the spelling reform belongs to the second part of this period.
The first book to be printed in English is the translation of a French book. Caxton affirms that French language was a fair language compared to English. Also in England Italian and Spanish were considered to be much better languages because of their literature.

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It is a time of tremendous importance due to the political, economical, and social changes. In the last period of the Middle English Period (MEP), the language and the emergence of many different spelling systems emerged. One of these is the Chancery English. This is the language used in the Chancery Offices (Chancery Lane, London). Little by little, because of the importance of the documents written there, it began to be considered as the standard. This form of English began to be spread in 1415. The scribes belonging to these offices used it. The basis of Chancery English is not Southern, but taken from the Central and East Midlands. A lot of literary men go to London to live there and bring some documents

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As of today there is a mirror to this blog here:

http://hel.cafe150.com/

In the past few days I have been experience some server problems here that did not let me update the blog. This, together with the fact that I've also switched to Wordpress made my mind up. This blog, however, will still be updated, but I recommend you to update your bookmarks to the mirror. Thanks

Although it is difficult to set a borderline between them, the four principal dialects of Middle English are: Northern (North of the river Humber), East Midland, West Midland, and Southern. However one could say there is one more dialect, the Kentish dialect, that would later be of great importance.
The most common feature used to tell different dialects apart is the ending of the plural, present indicative of the verbs:

- Northern -> -es (They loves)
- East Midland -> -en (They loven)
- West Midland -> -en (They loven)
- Southern -> -eth (They loveth)

In the Southern dialects of Middle English -ing was the suffux marking the present participle. The equivalent suffix in the Northern dialects was -ande or -ende.

Another important feature is that of pronunciation. Thus f and s were often voiced in the south to v and z. This way we find words like fox in the North and vixen in the South.

See this link [ling.upenn.edu] for information on the evolution of each dialect.

When a Norman-French word was adapted into English, the loanword usually appears different than the modern French word in spelling and/or pronunciation. There are mainly two reasons for this. First of all is the developments that both languages have suffered. The second and most important reason is that the language the Normans spoke was very differet to that spoken in Paris. Words like carry and cauldron corresponded to the Central French words charrier and chaudron. Sounds like w were not much seen in Central French, but they were in Anglo-Norman, maybe due to the proximity to Flemish and Dutch. Thus, words like wicket, correspond to the Central French guichet.

Regarding pronunciation, vowels also behaved differently in the two languages. In Old French the dipthong ui was accented on the first element. In Anglo-Norman the i dissappeared, leaving just the u [y]. In ME it became either u or iu. That is the explanation of how the word fruit for example (same graphical representation in both MdE and MdF) is pronounced differently in English and French.

Most authors like Baugh (1993) have set the start of the Middle Age period in 1150, but many others like wheeler (2006) agree that the starting point must have been marked by the breaking point of the Battle of Hastings, that is, 1066. Although none of the two dates is accurate enough, that would be a good start to understand the circumstances that lead us to assure a change in the language.

Analogic ways of phonetic changing resulted on reduction of inflections. Number, case, and gender inflections were lost because of an alteration in their pronunciation. This is also true of the verb. A number of endings like -a, -u, -e, -an,and -um were replaced by what is called the 'indeterminate vowel', that is, they were all reduced to te ending -e.

Middle English to the detail:

The Noun
In early Middle English there were two ways of making the plural: -s or -es for the strog declension and -en for the weak. Up until the 13th century, the -en ending was the most used in the south, but not in the north. By the year 1200, the -s ending had taken over. The reason for this change may have been the similarities between the -s ending , and the plural ending of Anglo-Norman, which was also -s.

The Adjective
The nominative singular form was extended to all cases of the singular, and the form of the nominative plural to all the cases of the plural. That also made the ending -e for both the singular and the plural, so there was not a difference between them anymore.

The Pronoun
The loss of inflections meant that one could not depend on the formal indications of gender case and number, so it made it necessary to rely on word order. this made a drastical change on syntax (word order).

Another simplification to take into account is that of the loss of the dual number.

The Verb
The main changes in theverb during this period were the losses suffered by the strong conjugation. Many of the verbs that survived the assimilation of Anglo-Norman changed over to the weak inflection. Nearly a third of the strong verbs in OE were lost in the ME period. They either dissappeared or became weak.

During the course of writing the last article, I had some problems using the right font so that what I wrote was actually what you read here on the site. That was also the main reason why the article was divided into two parts (the second part is quite short). The problem was that the Old English fonts that I was using were not a standard, and to properly see the characters, every computer accessing the site should have the same fonts I used installed. The fonts I used were a few years old (yes, I had a backup copy and installed them every time reformatted the windows partition). The solution was quite easy to obtain however, since just a quick Google search led me to this site, where I could get the Junicode Standard font. This should make the article visible in all computers, although I’m missing some characters, this should be enough for this part of the course.