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Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the
English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...
that was spoken after the
Norman Conquest The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Normans, Norman, French people, French, Flemish people, Flemish, and Bretons, Breton troops, all led by the Du ...
of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the
Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...
period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the
University of Valencia The University of Valencia ( ), shortened to UV, is a public research university in Valencia, Spain. It is one of the oldest universities in Spain, and the oldest in the Valencian Community. It is regarded as one of Spain's leading academic i ...
states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the
High High may refer to: Science and technology * Height * High (atmospheric), a high-pressure area * High (computability), a quality of a Turing degree, in computability theory * High (tectonics), in geology an area where relative tectonic uplift t ...
and
Late Middle Ages The late Middle Ages or late medieval period was the Periodization, period of History of Europe, European history lasting from 1300 to 1500 AD. The late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period ( ...
. Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and
orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...
. Writing conventions during the Middle English period varied widely. Examples of writing from this period that have survived show extensive regional variation. The more standardized Old English literary variety broke down and writing in English became fragmented and localized and was, for the most part, being improvised. By the end of the period (about 1470), and aided by the invention of the printing press by
Johannes Gutenberg Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg ( – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor and Artisan, craftsman who invented the movable type, movable-type printing press. Though movable type was already in use in East Asia, Gutenberg's inven ...
in 1439, a standard based on the London dialects (Chancery Standard) had become established. This largely formed the basis for Modern English spelling, although pronunciation has changed considerably since that time. Middle English was succeeded in England by
Early Modern English Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModEFor example, or EMnE) or Early New English (ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transit ...
, which lasted until about 1650. Scots developed concurrently from a variant of the
Northumbrian dialect Northumbrian dialect or Northumbrian English is any one of several traditional English dialects spoken in the historic counties of Northumberland and County Durham. The term ''Northumbrian'' can refer to the region of Northumbria but can also ...
(prevalent in northern England and spoken in southeast
Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...
). During the Middle English period, many Old English grammatical features either became simplified or disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective, and verb
inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
s were simplified by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of most
grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...
distinctions. Middle English also saw considerable adoption of Anglo-Norman vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive diction. Conventional English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with
Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...
influences becoming more apparent. Significant changes in pronunciation took place, particularly involving long vowels and diphthongs, which in the later Middle English period began to undergo the
Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift was a series of English phonology, pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), begi ...
. Little survives of early
Middle English literature The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, ...
, due in part to Norman domination and the prestige that came with writing in French rather than English. During the 14th century, a new style of literature emerged with the works of writers including
John Wycliffe John Wycliffe (; also spelled Wyclif, Wickliffe, and other variants; 1328 – 31 December 1384) was an English scholastic philosopher, Christianity, Christian reformer, Catholic priest, and a theology professor at the University of Oxfor ...
and
Geoffrey Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer ( ; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He w ...
, whose ''
Canterbury Tales ''The Canterbury Tales'' () is a collection of 24 stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. The book presents the tales, which are mostly written in verse (poetry), verse, as part of a fictional storytellin ...
'' remains the most studied and read work of the period.


History


Transition from Old English

The transition from Late
Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...
to Early Middle English had taken place by the 1150s to 1180s, the period when the
Augustinian canon The Canons Regular of St. Augustine are Catholic priests who live in community under a rule ( and κανών, ''kanon'', in Greek) and are generally organised into religious orders, differing from both secular canons and other forms of religious ...
Orrm Orrm, also known as Orrmin ( ; fl. 1150s–80s), was an Augustinian canon from south Lincolnshire who wrote the ''Ormulum'', a collection of verse homilies that is the oldest English autograph and one of the most significant records of Middle En ...
wrote the ''
Ormulum The ''Ormulum'' or ''Orrmulum'' is a twelfth-century work of biblical exegesis, written by an Augustinian canon named Orrm (or Orrmin) and consisting of just under 19,000 lines of early Middle English verse. Because of the unique phonemic o ...
'', one of the oldest surviving texts in Middle English. Contact with
Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...
aided the development of English from a
synthetic language A synthetic language is a language that is characterized by denoting syntactic relationships between words via inflection or agglutination. Synthetic languages are statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio relative to an ...
with relatively free word order to a more
analytic language An analytic language is a type of natural language in which a series of root/stem words is accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles and modifiers, using affixes very rarely. This is opposed to synthetic languages, which synthesi ...
with a stricter word order, as both Old English and Old Norse were synthetic languages with complicated inflections. Communication between
Vikings Vikings were seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe.Roesdahl, pp. 9� ...
in the
Danelaw The Danelaw (, ; ; ) was the part of History of Anglo-Saxon England, England between the late ninth century and the Norman Conquest under Anglo-Saxon rule in which Danes (tribe), Danish laws applied. The Danelaw originated in the conquest and oc ...
and their Anglo-Saxon neighbours resulted in the erosion of inflection in both languages; this effect was characterized as being of a "substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic" manner. Like close cousins, Old Norse and Old English resembled each other, and with a lot of vocabulary and grammatical structures in common, speakers of each language roughly understood each other, but according to the historian Simeon Potler, the main difference lay in their inflectional endings, which led to much confusion within the mixed population that existed in the Danelaw, thus endings tended gradually to become obscured and finally lost, "simplifying English grammar" in the process, leading to the emergence of the analytic pattern. The dramatic changes that happened in English contribute to the acceptance of the hypothesis that Old Norse had a more profound impact on the development of Middle and Modern English than any other language. Viking influence on Old English is most apparent in
pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not con ...
, modals, comparatives,
pronominal adverbs A pronominal adverb is a type of adverb occurring in a number of Germanic languages, formed in replacement of a preposition and a pronoun by turning the former into a prepositional adverb and the latter into a locative adverb, and finally joinin ...
(like ''hence'' and ''together''), conjunctions, and prepositions show the most marked Danish influence. The best evidence of Scandinavian influence appears in extensive word borrowings; however, texts from the period in Scandinavia and Northern England do not provide certain evidence of an influence on syntax. However, at least one scholarly study of this influence shows that Old English may have been replaced entirely by Norse, by virtue of the change from Old English to Norse syntax. While the Old Norse influence was strongest in the dialects under Danish control, which approximately covered
Yorkshire Yorkshire ( ) is an area of Northern England which was History of Yorkshire, historically a county. Despite no longer being used for administration, Yorkshire retains a strong regional identity. The county was named after its county town, the ...
, the central and eastern
Midlands The Midlands is the central region of England, to the south of Northern England, to the north of southern England, to the east of Wales, and to the west of the North Sea. The Midlands comprises the ceremonial counties of Derbyshire, Herefor ...
, and the
East of England East is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sunrise, Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fact ...
, words in the spoken language emerged in the 10th and 11th centuries near the transition from Old to Middle English. Influence on the written languages only appeared from the beginning of the 13th century onwards; this delay in Scandinavian lexical influence in English has been attributed to the lack of written evidence from the areas of Danish control, as the majority of written sources from Old English were produced in the
West Saxon dialect West Saxon is the term applied to the two different dialects Early West Saxon and Late West Saxon with West Saxon being one of the four distinct regional dialects of Old English. The three others were Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian (the l ...
spoken in
Wessex The Kingdom of the West Saxons, also known as the Kingdom of Wessex, was an Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, kingdom in the south of Great Britain, from around 519 until Alfred the Great declared himself as King of the Anglo-Saxons in 886. The Anglo-Sa ...
, the heart of Anglo-Saxon political power at the time. The
Norman Conquest The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Normans, Norman, French people, French, Flemish people, Flemish, and Bretons, Breton troops, all led by the Du ...
of England in 1066 saw the replacement of the top levels of the English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by
Norman Norman or Normans may refer to: Ethnic and cultural identity * The Normans, a people partly descended from Norse Vikings who settled in the territory of Normandy in France in the 9th and 10th centuries ** People or things connected with the Norma ...
rulers who spoke a dialect of
Old French Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th -4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ...
, now known as Old Norman, which developed in England into Anglo-Norman. The use of Norman as the preferred language of literature and polite discourse fundamentally altered the role of Old English in education and administration, even though many Normans of this period were illiterate and depended on the clergy for written communication and record-keeping. A significant number of Norman language">Norman Norman or Normans may refer to: Ethnic and cultural identity * The Normans, a people partly descended from Norse Vikings who settled in the territory of Normandy in France in the 9th and 10th centuries ** People or things connected with the Norma ...
words were borrowed into English and used alongside native Germanic words with similar meanings. Examples of Germanic/Norman pairs in Modern English include ''pig'' and ''pork'', ''calf'' and ''veal'', ''wood'' and ''forest'', and ''freedom'' and ''liberty''. The role of Anglo-Norman as the language of government and law can be seen in the abundance of Modern English words for the mechanisms of government that are derived from Anglo-Norman, such as ''court'', ''judge'', ''jury'', ''appeal'', and ''parliament''. There are also many Norman-derived terms relating to the
chivalric Chivalry, or the chivalric language, is an informal and varying code of conduct that developed in Europe between 1170 and 1220. It is associated with the medieval Christian institution of knighthood, with knights being members of various chival ...
cultures that arose in the 12th century, an era of
feudalism Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of legal, economic, military, cultural, and political customs that flourished in Middle Ages, medieval Europe from the 9th to 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of struc ...
,
seigneurialism Manorialism, also known as seigneurialism, the manor system or manorial system, was the method of land ownership (or "tenure") in parts of Europe, notably France and later England, during the Middle Ages. Its defining features included a large, ...
, and
crusading The crusading movement encompasses the framework of ideologies and institutions that described, regulated, and promoted the Crusades. The crusades were religious wars that the Latin Church initiated, supported, and sometimes directed during th ...
. Words were often taken from Latin, usually through French transmission. This gave rise to various synonyms, including ''kingly'' (inherited from Old English), ''royal'' (from French, inherited from Vulgar Latin), and ''regal'' (from French, which borrowed it from Classical Latin). Later French appropriations were derived from standard, rather than Norman, French. Examples of the resulting
doublet Doublet is a word derived from the Latin ''duplus'', "twofold, twice as much", Plural forms vary strongly by dialect, with Southern dialects preserving the Old English ''-eþ'', Midland dialects showing ''-en'' from about 1200, and Northern forms using ''-es'' in the third person singular as well as the plural. The past tense of weak verbs was formed by adding an ''-ed(e)'', ''-d(e)'', or ''-t(e)'' ending. The past-tense forms, without their personal endings, also served as past participles with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: ''i-'', ''y-'', and sometimes ''bi-''. Strong verbs, by contrast, formed their past tense by changing their stem vowel (e.g., became , a process called
apophony In linguistics, apophony (also known as ablaut, (vowel) gradation, (vowel) mutation, alternation, internal modification, stem modification, stem alternation, replacive morphology, stem mutation, or internal inflection) is an alternation of vowe ...
), as in Modern English.


Orthography

With the discontinuation of the
Late West Saxon Late or LATE may refer to: Everyday usage * Tardy, or late, not being on time * Late (or the late) may refer to a person who is dead Music * ''Late'' (The 77s album), 2000 * Late (Alvin Batiste album), 1993 * Late!, a pseudonym used by Dave Groh ...
standard used for the writing of Old English in the period prior to the Norman Conquest, Middle English came to be written in a wide variety of scribal forms, reflecting different regional dialects and orthographic conventions. Later in the Middle English period, however, and particularly with the development of the
Chancery Standard Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English pe ...
in the 15th century, orthography became relatively standardised in a form based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London. Spelling at the time was mostly quite
regular Regular may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * "Regular" (Badfinger song) * Regular tunings of stringed instruments, tunings with equal intervals between the paired notes of successive open strings Other uses * Regular character, ...
. (There was a fairly consistent correspondence between letters and sounds.) The irregularity of present-day English orthography is largely due to pronunciation changes that have taken place over the
Early Modern English Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModEFor example, or EMnE) or Early New English (ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transit ...
and
Modern English Modern English, sometimes called New English (NE) or present-day English (PDE) as opposed to Middle and Old English, is the form of the English language that has been spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England England is a Count ...
eras. Middle English generally did not have
silent letter In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. In linguistics, a silent letter is often symbolised with a null sign , which resembles the ...
s. For example, ''knight'' was pronounced (with both the and the pronounced, the latter sounding as the in German ). The major exception was the silent – originally pronounced but lost in normal speech by Chaucer's time. This letter, however, came to indicate a lengthened – and later also modified – pronunciation of a preceding vowel. For example, in ''name'', originally pronounced as two syllables, the /a/ in the first syllable (originally an open syllable) lengthened, the final weak vowel was later dropped, and the remaining long vowel was modified in the
Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift was a series of English phonology, pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), begi ...
(for these sound changes, see
Phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
, above). The final , now silent, thus became the indicator of the longer and changed pronunciation of . In fact, vowels could have this lengthened and modified pronunciation in various positions, particularly before a single consonant letter and another vowel or before certain pairs of consonants. A related convention involved the doubling of consonant letters to show that the preceding vowel was not to be lengthened. In some cases, the double consonant represented a sound that was (or had previously been)
geminated In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
(i.e., had genuinely been "doubled" and would thus have regularly blocked the lengthening of the preceding vowel). In other cases, by analogy, the consonant was written double merely to indicate the lack of lengthening.


Alphabet

The basic
Old English Latin alphabet The Old English Latin alphabet generally consisted of about 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 8th to the 12th centuries. Of these letters, most were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters ...
consisted of 20 standard letters plus four additional letters:
ash Ash is the solid remnants of fires. Specifically, ''ash'' refers to all non-aqueous, non- gaseous residues that remain after something burns. In analytical chemistry, to analyse the mineral and metal content of chemical samples, ash is the ...
,
eth Eth ( , uppercase: ⟨Ð⟩, lowercase: ⟨ð⟩; also spelled edh or eð), known as in Old English, is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called ), and Elfdalian. It was also used in Sca ...
, thorn , and
wynn Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, win, ƿynn, ƿyn, ƿen, and ƿin) is a letter of the Old English Latin alphabet, Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound . History The letter "W" While the earliest Old English texts ...
. There was not yet a distinct ''j'', ''v'', or ''w'', and Old English scribes did not generally use ''k'', ''q'', or ''z''. Ash was no longer required in Middle English, as the Old English vowel that it represented had merged into /a/. The symbol nonetheless came to be used as a
ligature Ligature may refer to: Language * Ligature (writing), a combination of two or more letters into a single symbol (typography and calligraphy) * Ligature (grammar), a morpheme that links two words Medicine * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture us ...
for the digraph in many words of Greek or Latin origin, as did for . Eth and thorn both represented or its
allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...
in Old English. Eth fell out of use during the 13th century and was replaced by thorn. Thorn mostly fell out of use during the 14th century and was replaced by . Anachronistic usage of the scribal abbreviation (, "the") has led to the modern mispronunciation of ''thorn'' as in this context; see '' ye olde''. Wynn, which represented the phoneme , was replaced by during the 13th century. Due to its similarity to the letter , it is mostly represented by in modern editions of Old and Middle English texts even when the manuscript has wynn. Under Norman influence, the continental
Carolingian minuscule Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome's Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one ...
replaced the
insular script Insular script is a Middle Ages, medieval script (styles of handwriting), script system originating in Ireland that spread to England and continental Europe under the influence of Hiberno-Scottish mission, Irish Christianity. Irish missionaries ...
that had been used for Old English. However, because of the significant difference in appearance between the old insular ''g'' and the Carolingian ''g'' (modern ''g''), the former continued in use as a separate letter, known as
yogh The letter yogh (ȝogh) ( ; Scots: ; Middle English: ) is a Latin script letter that was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing ''y'' () and various velar phonemes. It was derived from the Insular form of the letter ''g'', Ᵹ ...
, written . This was adopted for use to represent a variety of sounds: , while the Carolingian ''g'' was normally used for Instances of yogh were eventually replaced by or and by in words like ''night'' and ''laugh''. In
Middle Scots Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 15th century, its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtual ...
, yogh became indistinguishable from cursive ''z'', and printers tended to use when ''yogh'' was not available in their fonts; this led to new spellings (often giving rise to new pronunciations), as in ''McKenzie'', where the replaced a yogh, which had the pronunciation . Under continental influence, the letters , , and , which had not normally been used by Old English scribes, came to be commonly used in the writing of Middle English. Also, the newer Latin letter was introduced (replacing wynn). The distinct letter forms and came into use but were still used interchangeably; the same applies to and .Salmon, V., (in) Lass, R. (ed.), ''The Cambridge History of the English Language'', Vol. III, CUP 2000, p. 39. (For example, spellings such as and for "wife" and "paradise" can be found in Middle English.) The consonantal / was sometimes used to transliterate the
Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
letter
yodh Yodh (also spelled jodh, yod, or jod) is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''yōd'' 𐤉, Hebrew ''yod'' , Aramaic ''yod'' 𐡉, Syriac ''yōḏ'' ܝ, and Arabic ''yāʾ'' . It is also related to the Ancient Nort ...
, representing the
palatal approximant The voiced palatal approximant is a type of consonant used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ; the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is j, and in the Americanist phonetic notation i ...
sound (and transliterated in
Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
by
iota Iota (; uppercase Ι, lowercase ι; ) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Ї, ї), and J ...
and in Latin by ); words like ''Jerusalem'', ''Joseph'', etc. would have originally followed the Latin pronunciation beginning with , that is, the sound of in ''yes''. In some words, however, notably from
Old French Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th -4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ...
, / was used for the affricate consonant , as in (modern "joy"), used in
Wycliffe's Bible Wycliffe's Bible (also known as the Middle English Bible ''MEB Wycliffite Bibles, or Wycliffian Bibles) is a sequence of orthodox Middle English Bible translations from the Latin Vulgate which appeared over a period from approximately 1382 to ...
."J", ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989) This was similar to the gemination, geminate sound , which had been represented as in Old English. By the time of Modern English, the sound came to be written as / at the start of words (like "joy"), and usually as elsewhere (as in "bridge"). It could also be written, mainly in French loanwords, as , with the adoption of the
soft G In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, the letter is used in different contexts to represent two distinct phonemes that in English are called hard and soft . The sound of a hard (which often precedes the non-front vow ...
convention (''age'', ''page'', etc.)


Other symbols

Many
scribal abbreviation Scribal abbreviations, or sigla (grammatical number, singular: siglum), are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek language, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern Textua ...
s were also used. It was common for the
Lollards Lollardy was a proto-Protestantism, proto-Protestant Christianity, Christian religious movement that was active in England from the mid-14th century until the 16th-century English Reformation. It was initially led by John Wycliffe, a Catholic C ...
to abbreviate the name of
Jesus Jesus (AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and many Names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament, other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the Jesus in Chris ...
(as in Latin manuscripts) to ''
ihc IHC may refer to: Medicine * Immunohistochemistry * Intrahepatic cholestasis Science and technology * Cathode#Hot_cathode , Indirectly Heated Cathode, a type of hot cathode used in vacuum electronics tubes * Intelligent Home Control, home autom ...
''. The letters and were often omitted and indicated by a
macron Macron may refer to: People * Emmanuel Macron (born 1977), president of France since 2017 * Brigitte Macron (born 1953), French teacher, wife of Emmanuel Macron * Jean-Michel Macron (born 1950), French professor of neurology, father of Emmanuel ...
above an adjacent letter, so for example, ''in'' could be written as ''ī''. A thorn with a superscript or could be used for ''that'' and ''the''; the thorn here resembled a , giving rise to the ''ye'' of " Ye Olde". Various forms of the
ampersand The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram , representing the grammatical conjunction, conjunction "and". It originated as a typographic ligature, ligature of the letters of the word (Latin for "and"). Etymology Tradi ...
replaced the word ''and''. Numbers were still always written using
Roman numerals Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, eac ...
, except for some rare occurrences of
Arabic numerals The ten Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) are the most commonly used symbols for writing numbers. The term often also implies a positional notation number with a decimal base, in particular when contrasted with Roman numera ...
during the 15th century.


Letter-to-sound correspondences

Although Middle English spelling was never fully standardised, the following table shows the pronunciations most usually represented by particular letters and
digraph Digraph, often misspelled as diagraph, may refer to: * Digraph (orthography), a pair of characters used together to represent a single sound, such as "nq" in Hmong RPA * Ligature (writing), the joining of two letters as a single glyph, such as " ...
s towards the end of the Middle English period, using the notation given in the article on
Middle English phonology Middle English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative since it is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large text corpus of Middle English. The dialects of Middle English vary greatly over both time and plac ...
. As explained above, single vowel letters had alternative pronunciations depending on whether they were in a position where their sounds had been subject to lengthening. Long vowel pronunciations were in flux due to the beginnings of the
Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift was a series of English phonology, pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), begi ...
.


Sample texts

Most of the following
Modern English Modern English, sometimes called New English (NE) or present-day English (PDE) as opposed to Middle and Old English, is the form of the English language that has been spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England England is a Count ...
translations are poetic
sense-for-sense translation Sense-for-sense translation is the oldest norm for translating. It fundamentally means translating the meaning of each whole sentence before moving on to the next, and stands in normative opposition to word-for-word translation (also known as ...
s, not
word-for-word translation Literal translation, direct translation, or word-for-word translation is the translation of a text done by translating each word separately without analysing how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. In translation theory, anot ...
s.


Ormulum, 12th century

This passage explains the background to the Nativity (3494–501):


Epitaph of John the smyth, died 1371

An epitaph from a
monumental brass A monumental brass is a type of engraved church monument, sepulchral memorial once found through Western Europe, which in the 13th century began to partially take the place of three-dimensional church monument, monuments and effigy, effigies carve ...
in an Oxfordshire parish church:


Wycliffe's Bible, 1384

From the
Wycliffe's Bible Wycliffe's Bible (also known as the Middle English Bible ''MEB Wycliffite Bibles, or Wycliffian Bibles) is a sequence of orthodox Middle English Bible translations from the Latin Vulgate which appeared over a period from approximately 1382 to ...
, (1384):


Chaucer, 1390s

The following is the very beginning of the
General Prologue The "General Prologue" is the first part of '' The Canterbury Tales'' by Geoffrey Chaucer. It introduces the frame story, in which a group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury agree to take part in a storytelling ...
from ''
The Canterbury Tales ''The Canterbury Tales'' () is a collection of 24 stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. The book presents the tales, which are mostly written in verse, as part of a fictional storytelling contest held ...
'' by
Geoffrey Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer ( ; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He w ...
. The text was written in a dialect associated with London and spellings associated with the then-emergent Chancery Standard.


Gower, 1390

The following is the beginning of the Prologue from ''
Confessio Amantis ''Confessio Amantis'' ("The Lover's Confession") is a 33,000-line Middle English poem by John Gower, which uses the confession made by an ageing lover to the chaplain of Venus as a frame story for a collection of shorter narrative poems. Accor ...
'' by
John Gower John Gower (; c. 1330 – October 1408) was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and the Pearl Poet, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works—the ''Mirour de l'Omme'', ''Vox ...
. Translation in Modern English: (by J. Dow)


See also

*''
Medulla Grammatice ''Medulla Grammatice'' or ''Medulla Grammaticae'' ("the Marrow of Grammar") is a collection of fifteenth century Latin–Middle English glossaries in the British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history ...
'' (collection of glossaries) * Middle English creole hypothesis *
Middle English Dictionary The ''Middle English Dictionary'' is a dictionary of Middle English published by the University of Michigan. It comprises roughly 15,000 pages with a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 11751500, based on the analysis of o ...
*
Middle English literature The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, ...
*
A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English ''A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English'' (LAEME) is a digital, corpus-driven, historical dialect resource for Early Middle English (1150–1325). LAEME combines a searchable Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT), an Index of Sources, and dot maps ...


References

*Brunner, Karl (1962) ''Abriss der mittelenglischen Grammatik''; 5. Auflage. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer (1st ed. Halle (Saale): M. Niemeyer, 1938) *Brunner, Karl (1963) ''An Outline of Middle English Grammar''; translated by Grahame Johnston. Oxford: Blackwell * * Mustanoja, Tauno (1960) "A Middle English Syntax. 1. Parts of Speech". Helsinki : Société néophilologique.


External links


A. L. Mayhew and Walter William Skeat. ''A Concise Dictionary of Middle English from A.D. 1150 to 1580''
(archived 22 February 2012) * With grammatical introduction, notes, and glossary.
Middle English encyclopedia
on Miraheze {{Authority control Anglic languages English, Middle History of the English language Middle English Languages attested from the 11th century Languages extinct in the 15th century