Middle English (ME)

The Middle English period can best be described as an era of a transition between Old English and early Modern English. It was said to have begun somewhere between 1100 and 1500. According to history, this period was marked by the coming of the Normans from northern France to Britain in 1150 under William, the Duke of Normandy, who later became William I of England (Algeo, 2010; Hoad, 2006). The term ‘Norman’

according to Irvine (2006), was derived from the word ‘Northman’ a group of people who had been granted a territory in northern France in the early tenth century. The

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Normans were said to have descended from the Vikings who settled in northern France;

hence, they spoke Old Norse, but were said to have given up their Old Norse as early as the eleventh century. Thus, forgetting their Old Norse, they adopted a rural dialect of French, normally called Norman French believed to be completely different from the standard French of Paris which was popularly known at that time as ‘Francien’.

The Norman French however developed later into Anglo-Norman, and then became the language of the kings and nobles of England used, for example, in the court, administration and culture; whilst Latin, the language of the ruling class, was used as the written language, especially by the Church and for all official records (Algeo, 2010).

At the same time, English was used by the majority of the country’s population, that is, the peasantry and the lower classes, continued to use English, although it was heavily stigmatised by the Normans as a low-class, vulgar tongue. The account, however, shows that there was a sign of relief after the Black Death of 1349 and 1350 which killed about a third of the English population and a number of Latin-speaking clergy.

After the plague, the English-speaking labouring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance, and within a short period, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners disappeared, therefore reducing the class division.

The English language, consequently became the official language of the courts and parliament, and it was used as the instructional language in schools. The Normans, according to the account, became ‘Anglicized’ after King John lost the French part of the Normandy to the King of France. English therefore became the lingua franca of England even though French and Latin were still spoken. The influence of the Norman French on English can be seen in several words such as: prince, duke, count, majesty, mayor, minister, state, accuse, crime, defend, judge, justice, prison, etc. (for details of this see Baugh & Cable, 2002). That is, in spite of all the shake-up the Normans had given English, French could not emerge as the language of England. Note that during the Middle English period, Latin continued to exert an important influence on the English vocabulary (see Algeo, 2010: 250-1). A lot of the words borrowed from the Old Norse became readily apparent in Middle English (see Algeo, 2010: 253-4), however the major new influence, and ultimately the most important, was French. Some

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examples are: attorney, chancellor, country, court, judge, jury, mayor, noble, and royal, army, captain, lieutenant, beef, mutton, pork, and veal, beef, mutton, pork, (p254–6).

Middle English period has also witnessed a massive change in grammar, autography, phonology, and to some extent in vocabulary. Although several of the OE vowels were said to have remained unchanged in ME, quite a number of them have seen some changes. According to Algeo (2010: 123), the Old English long vowels: ē,ī,ō, and ū remained unchanged in ME though differ sometimes in spelling. Thus, the OE fēt was ME fēt, ‘feet’;rӯdan in OE became the ME rīden or rӯden‘toride’; while fōda‘food’

and hūs‘house’ in OE became fōde and hous in ME.

However, Old English ӯ [ü:] according to Algeo was unrounded to ī [i:] in the North and also in East Midland areas. But not until the 14^th century it was ӯ [ü:] also in most part of West Midland and in the whole of Southwest, though written ۦuۧ or ۦuiۧ. It was said to have changed again to ē [e:] in the Southeast; the OE word hӯdan‘tohide’ was pronounced in ME in these dialects as hīden, hūden and hēden (p, 123). Similarly, the OE y was said to be unrounded to [ɪ] in the Northern and East Midland areas, just like ӯ [ü:] being unrounded to [i:] in the same areas. In the Southeast it was said to have become e.

The Old English vowels æ and a were said to have merged into a single central vowel a; hence, the word glæd ‘glad’ in Old English became glad ‘glad’ in Middle English. But words that had short æ in Old English were said to have been written with ۦeۧ, in Southwest Midland and Kentish during Middle English period, e.g. gled. The coalesced a (i.e. the merged æ and a, was believed to have been fronted later to æ during the same period in most environments. It was however later raised to [ ː], which was also raised to ē[eː] in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example hame [heːm]

‘home’, rape [reːp] ‘rope’, and stane [steːn] ‘stone’ mostly in Modern Scots, but ā remained central in Northern England, as in hām ‘home,’ rāp ‘rope,’ stān ‘stone’

(Wells, 1982). The raising of [ ː] to [eː] was believed to be due to the fact that during the late Middle English, before the Great Vowel Shift, [eː] was used in some dialects, e.g. in words like ‘heath’, ‘beast’, and ‘grease’ instead of [ ː]. In late Middle English,

‘heath’, ‘beast’, and ‘grease’ thus had two possible pronunciations [ ː] and [eː]. The [eː]

was subsequently raised to [i]. The ā became [ɔ:] and was spelled ۦoۧ or ۦooۧ exactly

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like the [o:] that remained from Old English, as in foۦoۧ)de (Algeo, 2010, Millward &

Hayes, 2012).

The reduced vowel [ə], written as ۦeۧ was believed to have disappeared in Northern, Midlands and Southern dialects respectively. It later disappeared also in the plural and genitive ending-es. It was said to reappear again and was used only in unstressed syllables (Millward & Hayes, 2012). All these have therefore left an asymmetric system consisting of five short vowels a, e, i, o, u and six long vowels ā, ē, ī,ō, ū, ɔː, in the Middle English, that is, the ā was later restored (see Algeo, 2010 for discussion on the ME diphthongs).