Middle English Linguistic Shifts and Standardization
Middle English Morphological Simplification
Explain the grammatical effect of the morphological simplification that took place in Middle English.
The influence of French in this process was very significant. English underwent a morphological simplification due to the weakening of unstressed vowels in ending syllables:
- As a result, prepositions came to have a more relevant role in expressing the relationship between words.
- The order of elements in the sentence became more rigid and strict.
- The grammatical morpheme of gender disappeared.
Multilingualism in Middle English England
Why is England considered to be a multilingual context in Middle English?
Medieval Britain had many languages. English continued to be in contact with Celtic languages on many of the internal frontiers within the British Isles. It also continued to be in contact with Scandinavian languages until their use in mainland Britain died out. And, crucially, it was in contact with Latin and French.
After the Norman Conquest, the ruling elite in England were French speakers. Before the Conquest, England had been relatively ‘advanced’ in the extent to which the vernacular language, rather than Latin, was used in writing. After the Conquest, English was pushed out of these functions almost entirely. Latin predominated in most types of writing in the immediate post-Conquest period. Later, a flowering of vernacular writing emerged in a number of different text types and genres. It was French, not English, that generally vied with Latin in a wide range of technical and official functions until very near the end of the Middle English period. The French used in Britain during this period is referred to as ‘Anglo-Norman’.
Up until about the middle of the fourteenth century, our surviving written records for Middle English of any variety are patchy and can be characterized as a number of more or less isolated ‘islands’ of usage, reflecting the English of particular communities. In a very few cases, we can identify mini-traditions of English writing; but what we do not have are clear, well-established, persistent traditions of writing in English.
From the later fourteenth century, our records became more plentiful, especially for London, as the use of English increased in literary contexts and in a variety of different technical and official functions. English increasingly began to be the default choice for major literary works. Substantial literary works continued to emerge from parts of the country far removed from London, reflecting very distinct local varieties of English.
In this same period, religious writings in English became more common; these included the first complete English translation of the Bible, the Wycliffite Bible.
As English came to share and eventually take over various functions from Latin and French, it was hugely influenced by these languages, affecting its word forms, meanings, phrases, and structures.
The Middle English Creole Hypothesis
Describe the Middle English Creole Hypothesis.
The Middle English Creole Hypothesis consists of considering English as a creole, that is, a language developed from a pidgin, resulting from the mixture between Anglo-Saxon dialects and French.
According to Schumann’s Pidginization Hypothesis, English could be considered a pidgin due to:
- The extreme reduction in inflected forms from Old English to Middle English.
- The noun declension system was radically simplified.
- The verb system also lost many Old English conjugation patterns.
- Syntax was also simplified somewhat, with word order patterns becoming more rigid.
However, according to some linguists, the reduction of unstressed vowels to schwa, due to a fixed stress location, also contributed to this process—a pattern common to many Germanic languages.
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary and Standardization
Explain the relevance of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in the standardization of English.
Samuel Johnson wrote the following in the introduction to his Dictionary of the English Language:
His dictionary was an attempt to impose the paradigm of Rationalism on English. It was considered essential to establish rules and provide a framework for the English language to prevent errors and ensure stability, so that future generations could still use and understand it.
For this reason, having a finely elaborated grammar and an exhaustive dictionary was deemed urgent to regulate language usage. This was the challenge undertaken by Samuel Johnson. He aimed to offer adequate and complete examples of word usage based on the best authors, thereby providing stability for the future use of the language.
This concern about language purity had already led to the establishment of various academies on the Continent:
- 1582: Italy, Accademia della Crusca.
- 1635: France, Académie Française.
- 1700: Germany, Deutsche Akademie.
- 1713: Spain, Real Academia Española de la Lengua.
Pronunciation Changes in English Words
Explain the pronunciation changes for the following words:
Talk > Simplification involving the consonant /l/, which was dropped between /ɔː/ (historically /aː/) and the consonant /k/.
Fasten > Simplification involving the consonant /t/, which is dropped in the consonant cluster /stn/.
Weather > The voiced dental plosive /d/ became the voiced dental fricative /ð/ (intervocalic lenition).
Wing > Development of the velar nasal phoneme /ŋ/; the sequence /ŋg/ simplified to /ŋ/ word-finally or before a consonant.
Bus > Later changes included the unrounding and lowering of short /ʊ/ to /ʌ/ in many environments (distinct from the main Great Vowel Shift).
Walk > The sequence of short vowel /a/ + /l/ + consonant often resulted in changes like /a/ > /ɔː/, with l-vocalization or loss, leading to modern /ɔːk/.
Tree > Part of the Great Vowel Shift where the long close-mid front vowel /eː/ raised to the long close front vowel /iː/.
Write > Part of the Great Vowel Shift where the long close front vowel /iː/ diphthongized to /aɪ/.
Origins of Irregular Plurals in Modern English
Explain the origin of irregular plural forms in Modern English.
Some groups of nouns retained their older plural forms:
- Weak declension ending in ‘-n’: e.g., oxen, children (double plural).
- I-mutation plurals (umlaut): e.g., foot > feet, goose > geese, man > men.
- Uninflected plurals (often from Old English neuter nouns): e.g., sheep, deer.
- Borrowed plurals from Latin or Greek: e.g., criterion > criteria, datum > data, analysis > analyses.