The Middle English Period

The importance of text analysis

All that remains of earlier forms of English is to be found in surviving written documents. Linguists use these to build up a sense of what English was like. By analysing lexis, syntax and graphology, it is possible to chart how and why English changed. Some assumptions can also be made about the phonological structure of English, but until the age of recording, this can only be informed guesswork.

The Old English to Modern English Periods will be represent here by prose texts. Close analysis of the examples high-lights characteristic features of each key period, providing concrete evidence of the ways in which English was used. Inevitably, written examples can only hint at the nature of the language of everyday communication and literary language in particular is more likely to be manipulated and crafted to achieve certain effects. The constrains of poetic structure, for instance, can mean that word order is changed to achieve the right number of syllables in a line or to create a rhyme. Although poetic language has all the characteristic features of the period in which it was written, additional alterations may be linked to prosody (distinctive features of verse) rather that the nature of English at the time. By concentrating on prose, therefore, it is possible to understand more precisely the characteristic features of the language.

Surviving Old English poems like “Beowulf” and “The Seafarer” are marked by distinctive poetic features like half-line divisions and alliterative patterns These features make Old English poetic language quite different from the English used in prose and speech. Non-fiction prose like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is not consciously crafted. It recorded events in the form of a year-to-year diary. Early entries are list-like and are more likely to resemble everyday usage.

Middle English poems like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Early Modern English plays by Shakespeare provide that linguists with crucial information about literary language. It is prose texts, however, that highlight linguistic features of English at each stage of its development.

1. The Scandinavian conquest and its influence on the development of the English language.

2. The Norman conquest and its influence on the further development of the English language.

3. Lexical influence of the French language.

Two historical events were of great importance for the further development of the English language. They are the Scandinavian and the Norman conquests. The Scandinavian conquest began in the 8^th century and ended in 1042 with the restoration of the independent English state. The Scandinavians were two different peoples, two Germanic tribes. In England both of them were called the Danes. In the second half of the 9^th century the Scandinavians had occupied the whole of the English territory north of the Thames. In 878 king Alfred made peace with the invaders (the so-called Wedmore peace). The Scandinavians, in their turn, recognized the nominal supremacy of the king of England.

The Scandinavian were allowed to stay in East-Central and Northern parts of England. The territory inhabited by the Scandinavians was called Danelag. In the 10^th century the England kingdoms united with Danelag which resulted in the assimilation of the Danes with English people. In 1016 England was completely conquered by the Scandinavians and the Spanish king Knut (or Canute) became ruler of England. The Scandinavian influence grew stronger. The influence continued even after the annihilation of the England political power was restored under the king Edward the Confessor. The Scandinavian who had settled in England continued living there after the restoration of the English power in England. The process of assimilation of the 2 peoples was followed by the assimilation of the two languages. The result of the language assimilation was that English, the conqueror retained its grammatical system and its vocabulary and continued its development according to its inner laws. The vocabulary of the English changed greatly as the stock of words increased. This increasing was due to the fact of many borrowings made from the Scandinavian language. The whole stock of Scandinavian words in MnE is about 650. They greatly enriched the English vocabulary. The Scandinavian dialects belonged to the group of North Germanic languages and were historically related to English therefore the Scandinavians and the Englishmen understood each other without difficulty. The only difficulty was in understanding. The result was that those flexions came to be pronounced indistinctly and soon showed the tendency of levelling:

Scandinavian English

domr dom

sunr sunu

In many cases the word borrowed from the Scandinavian dialects was an English doublet of one and the same root and meaning. In other cases the Scandinavian words didn’t coincide with the English words. In these cases real borrowings took place. These borrowings reflected all the spheres of life of the Scandinavian. Jesperson wrote about such borrowings: «An Englishman cannot thrive or live or die without a Scandinavian word. They are for him as bread and eggs for his dairy fair». Among the Scandinavian words in MnE we find the following: law, wrong, husband, sister, to call, to follow, fellow, sky. But not only lexical units were borrowed from Scandinavian but also grammatical elements. That fact shows the deep penetration of the Scandinavian elements in English. Thus the personal pronoun they with its Genitive case their and its Objective case them were borrowed from Scandinavian. The Scandinavian conjunction ƥo substituted OE ƥeih > through.

The influence of the Scandinavian dialect in the North was much greater than in the center. The Scandinavian conquest lasted till 1042 and the power of the Old English nobility was restored under king Edward the Confessor. The Scandinavian influence was of a great importance for the history of the English language. First of all stock of the words increased. Some auxiliary elements were borrowed and this conquest helped the development of the analytical forms in the language. The further development of the English language is connected with the Norman conquest.

In the second half of the 11^th century (1066) the Norman conquest of England began. In 1066 king Edward the Confessor died. Duke of Normandy, who had long claimed the English throne, assembled an army with the help of Norman barons, landed on the Southern shores of England. The well-armed Norman knights met the Anglo-Saxon troops gathered by the English king Harold at Hastings on October, 14. The battle raged all day, but finally the Anglo-Saxon nobility vanished completely. King Harold was killed and the Normans won the battle. William became the king of England and was called William the Conqueror. He promised to grant the old rights and customs of the Anglo-Saxon nobility. The real intentions of William the Conqueror became clear when he began confiscating the lands of the English barons and replacing the Saxon nobility by Norman barons who became the ruling class. The Normans became masters of the country. The ruling class of the English nobility disappeared. Some of the English noblemen were killed in battles, some of them left England. The French barons took English nobility’s place and certainly they spoke only French, namely, the Norman dialect of the French language. Thus as a result of the Norman conquest the English ruling class was destroyed. William the Conqueror (1066-1087) confiscated the lands of the English noblemen and distributed them along the French barons. The Frenchmen took all the posts in the church. They were the representatives of different professions and those who had no special occupations came to England as teachers. The influx of Normans into England continued for more than two centuries. The French language became the official literary language. But the native English people living in towns and villages continued to speak their mother-tongue. The relations between French and English were not like those between English and Scandinavian because French was the language of the ruling class. In the 13^th century Robert of Glaucester wrote that the Normans couldn’t speak any other language but their own. They spoke French as if lived in France and they taught their children French from their very childhood. The noblemen of the country also taught their children French because if a person didn’t speak French people thought that his was of low origin. But the people of the low origin spoke their native language. This language situation resulted in the fact that the written literature in English almost disappeared during the 12^th -13^th centuries. This was the period of flourishing of the literature in French. During these two centuries no one wrote any literary work in English. Te struggle between two languages ended in the 14^th century with the victory of the English language, but English changed greatly. The crossing of two languages enriched the vocabulary of the English language but it had no influence whatsoever on the grammatical structure of English.

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