1. Lecture 3/4 Middle English 30 Jan. 2017 Stefan Dollinger
The History of English
Lecture 3/4
Middle English
30 Jan. 2017
Stefan Dollinger

2. Social history and events
1066: A.-S. king Edward the Confessor dies childless. Dispute over succession.
1066: Battle of Hastings. William of Normandy defeats the English army. Crowned king of England on Christmas Day
Profound social and sociolinguistic changes. Languages before conquest: Latin & English. Languages after the conquest: Latin, French & English, but socially restricted
Court: became a French court; abbeys & monasteries: shut down, English leaders replaced with Norman ones
1204: Loss of Normandy (King John)
1215: Magna Carta. Limiting the powers of the king
: the Black Death in England

3. Population of invaders
1066: England had a population of c million
Norman invaders: perhaps 20,000
Only 2% of clergy were French
But 18 of 21 abbots were French (by 1087)
Norman minute part in rural areas, NEVER the majority in towns
C. 95% English speakers (lower class) and 5% French (Norman French & Central French) speakers
Influence of French: largely limited to vocabulary
Other changes, beyond voc, already on the way in OE

4. French/English: an uneven situation
Names for animals.
Names for meat of these animals.
cow, pig (swine) sheep, game (deer)  from OE (Germanic)
beef, pork, mutton, venison  from French
THINK BREAK: why would this be the case?
Illustrates the social divide: the English took care of the animals as (serf) farmers, the French ate the meat

5. The Linguistic Situation
1066 to c. 1250: in government, law and church Latin is used with French
Anglo-Norman French vs. Central French (Parisian)
: period of greatest lexical borrowing from French
: Hundred Years War (England and France)  English victories and sense of nationalism  positive effect on the status of the English language
As of 1250 French nobility begins to learn French as a second language (textbooks as of 1300!). First signs of a return of English among the nobility.
1258: first official use of English since Proclamation of Oxford (Henry III)
As of 1350, English had basically reestablished its position as a language of the nobility. Henry IV (1367 – 1413) was the first native-speaking English kings since the Norman Conquest. At the same time, guild and city records were written in English.
Black Death ( ): kills up to 40% of the population  labouring classes in demand  political power  rise of a Middle Class. This Middle Class spoke English
English for in-group solidarity among artisans/labourers

6. Contempt for English, praise for French
Selden was for ani chance Praised Inglis tong in France (Cursor Mundi, c. 1300) RiȜt is, þat Inglische vnderstond Þat was born in Inglond Freynsche vse þis gentilman Ac euerich Inglische Inglische can (Of Arthour and of Merlin, before 1325) Vor bote a man conne frenss. Me telþ of him lute. Ac lowe men holdeþ to engliss. & to hor owe speche Ȝute ‘For but a man know French, men count of him little. But low men hold to English and to their kind of speech yet’ (Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle, c. 1300)

7. Vocabulary: semantic domains of French open class borrowings
Government: e.g. parliament, authority, statute
Military: battle, archer, army
Law: attorney, arrest, felony
Economy: tax, revenue, estate
Art: sculpture, painting, art
Architecture: cathedral, vault, porch
Music: melody, dance, music
Literature: volume, prose, poet

8. Open class borrowings cont.
Medicine: surgeon, ointment, physician
Learning: grammar, rhyme, logic
Fashion: pleat, button, collar
Food: biscuit, bacon, dinner
Furnishings: lamp, blanket, couch
Social life: conversation, recreation, tavern
Family: niece, nephew, uncle, aunt
Trades: grocer, tailor, mason

9. French loanwords in ME: c. 10,000 words
French loanwords in ME: c. 10,000 words. Here a sample of 1000 (pre-1050 to 1900)
Date
Number
number
Before 1050 2
120 69
180 34 1 70 24 15 76 16 64 84 23
127 91
Sample by O. Jespersen (1905) – loanwords

10. How to Spot French Loanwords in Middle English (Mats Moberg)
1) Rhyming patterns, rhythm (one before the last, or last syllable stressed – French pattern)
And bathed every veine in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
At night was come into that hostelrie
Wel nine and twenty in a compaignie
In a somer sesoun, whan softe was the sonne,
I shope me into shroudes, as I a shep were, In abite as an heremite, unholy of werkes, ...

11. 2) Morphology: French affixes
-age: corage, pilgrimage
-ion: condicioun, informacion, nacion, mencion, translacion
-ure: nature, aventure
-our: licour, flour
-ment: chastisement, gouvernement
cons. + -re: tendre, chambres (but OE wondres)
3) Spelling: French conventions
<c> for [s]: perced, space, pace
con-, trans-, pre-, ex-, de-, re-, etc.
[v-]: veine, vertu, devout, aventure, devise, merveylousliche (but everichon [‘everyone’] from OE æfrig-)

12. Anglo Norman (AN) and Central French (CF): borrowings in English
Norman French [k-]
Central French [tʃ-]
carry
charity
carrion
chair
carpenter
charge
carriage
chariot
cauldron
challenge
Norman French [w-]
Central French [g-]
waste
garment
warren
garrison
wicket
garland

13. AN/CF doublets in English
cattle vs. chattel
cant vs. chant
warranty vs. guarantee
reward vs. regard

14. Latin, French and OE cognates today
From Old English
French
Latin
rise
mount
ascend
fire
flame
conflagration
fear
terror
trepidation
holy
sacred
consecrated
kingly
royal
regal
English
French
hut
cottage
hearty
cordial
help
aid
feed
nourish
child
infant
wedding
marriage
THINK BREAK:
Level of formality & source language?

15. Semantic change (Singh 2005: 1.4)
Cultural change: Lat carrus ‘horse-drawn chariot’ > Engl. car ‘motor vehicle’, 18th c. torch ‘open flame’ > 20th c. ‘pocket lamp’
Semantic narrowing (specialization), e.g. OE dēor ‘animal, Gm. Tier, Sw. djur’ > deer ‘a type of undomesticated animal’
Semantic generalization, e.g. mill ‘place where meal, flour, is ground’ > mill ‘steel mill, cotton mill’
Metaphors and metaphorization, e.g. the foot of a hill (in analogy to the human body), mouth of a river (likewise), a social butterfly
Metonymy: a part stands symbolically for the whole, e.g. Washington is unhappy (the US government), new faces are here ‘new people’
Synecdoche: a greater unit is used to refer to a subunit. I’m calling Austria (my family in Austria), Sweden beat Denmark in the finals (the Swedish soccer team)
Amelioration: social meaning improves, e.g. OE cniht ‘boy’ > ME knight ‘noble man’, silly ‘blessed’ (OE sælig) > ‘stupid’
Pejoration: social meaning deteriorates, e.g. ME mistress ‘female master’ > ModE mistress ‘casual lover’
Euphemisms and taboos: go to the loo/bathroom ‘excecrate’, to pass away ‘to die’, bear originally meant ‘the brown one’; collateral damage ‘civil victims of war’

16. Sound changes in ME

17. Open Syllable Lengthening (from c. 1st half of 1200s onwards)
Two syllable words, first syllable lengthened if open
V-CV(C), e.g. æcer ‘acre’; æ lengthened  [æ:]
CV-CV(C), e.g. talu ‘tale’; a lengthened  [a:]
The long vowels would later, post-ME, be changed drastically.

18. Loss of final <e>s and medial <e>s
Vowel reduction
Old English
Middle English
talu
tale
modor
moder
banas
bones
heafod
heved
gladost
gladest
Short vowels: a, o, u, e  schwa ə
Loss of final <e>s and medial <e>s

19. Final e’s were lost First in unstressed grammatical words:
whanne > whan,
þanne > þan
Then, 13th century in the North, 14th century in the South and Midlands, in all other words, whether native or foreign,
frendschipe > frendschip
solace > solas
Retained in poetry
Where the inflectional ending was only an –e, that ending was lost and created pressure on word-order principles.
Why were final e’s lost? A reorganization of stress and syllable patterns that was hastened by large-scale French borrowings

20. Medial e’s were lost next
mægester > maister
sawol > soul(e)
monaþ > monþ

21. Why is vowel reduction triggering other sound changes?
English, German, Swedish, are stress-timed languages
A stress-timed language is a language where the stressed syllables are said at approximately regular intervals, and unstressed syllables shorten to fit this rhythm. Stress-timed languages can be compared with syllable-timed ones, where each syllable takes roughly the same amount of time.
Italian, Spanish, French are syllable-timed languages
When you shorten vowels in unstressed positions, or delete word-final and word-medial vowels, other sounds need to be lengthened/inserted.
Therefore: Open Syllable Lengthening and vowel reduction stand, among other sound changes, in a causative relationship.

22. No sounds added from French in ME
No sounds added from French in ME! One allophone of /f/ was promoted to its own phoneme /v/
Despite heavy lexical borrowing, but oneexceptions: Word-initial [v-]
OE heafod – [heavod] [v] as allophone
OE feond – [feond]
ME verrai, virtue, venesun ‘venison’
Since then, e.g. vat vs. fat, van vs. fan, …= phonemic distinction

23. Compare two invasions in England
Category
Danelaw (late 9th/10th centuries)
Norman Conquest ( )
Location
North, Northeast
South, Southeast
Ratio English vs. Intruder
Not known, but likely greater percentage than in Norman Conquest
95% English, 5% French
Social relationships
Intimate, inter-marriage
Separate: class distinction (E-low, F-high)
Linguistic behaviour
Widespread bilingualism (Old Norse – OE)
Code-switching and langauge mixing
 Creation of a koiné (compromise dialect)
In the beginning clearly separate spheres of English and French;
Later bilingualism limited to (some parts) of the upper classes
Types of borrowing/language contact
Open class borrowings
Closed class borrowings
Everyday words were borrowed (e.g. husband, take, dirt, sky, bread)
Only open class borrowings
(more formal register borrowings often associated with upper class/culture
Outcome
OE-ON koiné that influenced the southern English varieties (e.g. them, their, they; are)
Abandonment of French
Revival of an English with heavy French lexical influence

24. Middle English Case System
NOUNS
Singular
Plural
Nom.
hound (-Ø)
hound(e)s (-(e)s)
Acc.
Gen.
houndes (-es)
Dat.
hound(-e) (-Ø/-e)
ADJECTIVES
Strong
Weak
singular -Ø -e
plural

25. Personal Pronoun System
1st person
2nd person
case
singular
plural
nominative
ich, I, ic wē
Þū, þou, thou, þow
Ȝe [je], yē
objective
(acc + dat) mē us
Þē, thee
eow, Ȝow, you
genitive
mi(n), my
ūre, our
þī(n), thy
eower, Ȝower, your(e)
3rd person
masculine
feminine
neuter
nom.
hē, ha (a)
Schō, schē/shē, he, ho, hēo
hit, it
Þei, þai, thai, they/hi, hy
obj.
him
hire, hir
Þeym, thaym/hem, hom, ham
gen.
his
hire, here
Þair(e), thair, ther/hyr, here

26. Morphological change (Singh 2005: 1.5)
Changes in word structure (morphemes are changed)
Analogy – four part analogy: an existing pattern, usually a more frequent one, is used to regularize inflectional patterns, e.g. OE 1 boc – 2 bec (plural), is changed to book – books, in analogy to stan – stan(a)s ‘stone – stones’ (masculine a-stem). Or cow – kine (old plural). Four-Part Analogy: book to books is like cow to …?
Analogy applies to verbs as well: walk – walked; google – googled. Form the past tense of the new verb shnumpf - …
Analogical levelling: affects paradigms of inflected words, e.g. Singh (2005: 27, Example 1.2) for OE cēosan.
Sturtevant’s Paradox: Analogical change is irregular as a process, but creates regularity. Sound change is regular (e.g. Grimm’s Law), but creates irregularity

27. More syncretism = fewer inflections = more fixed word order

28. More syncretism = fewer inflections = more fixed word order & development of periphrastic constructions
inflections
word order
& periphrase
word order: compensates often for declensions – The man loves the woman.
periphrase: compensates often for conjugations – The man shall see the woman tomorrow.
Also periphrases that compensate for case loss: ‘given to the church’
OE þæm circe (dat. sg.) – ME to þe circe (to + det + noun)

29. Periphrase “roundabout way of expressing a grammatical notion”: analytically composing grammatical function
Periphrase with shall + see
The man shall see the woman tomorrow.
Rather than
OE þæt wif se man gesiehð to-mergen
OE þæt wif (acc.sg. Neuter) se man (nom.sg. masc.) gesiehð (3rd p. pres. t. singular) to- mergen (Adjunct circum.)

30. Fixed word order and periphrase
A reaction to inflectional loss
Periphrase: the combination of words, most often auxiliary verbs and prepositions, to mark semantic relationships
Nom and Acc no longer marked – word order: S now obligatorily left of the verb, O right of the verb
Dat distinction lost:
periphrastic construction with to
þe fadir seide to hise seruantis
word order: placement of indirect object after the verb and before the direct object
gyve me the porcion of catel

31. Word order changes: object position
Accusative
object
1000
1200
1300
1400
1500
Before verb
52.5%
52.7%
40%
14.3%
1.87%
After verb
47.5%
46.3%
60%
85.7%
98.13%
(Fries 1940, qtd. in Hopper & Traugott 1993:60)

32. Spelling/Writing
The late OE Standard (West Saxon) was abolished with the closure of English monasteries, replacement of English abbots with French ones
Great diversity in spelling

33. Example: ME spellings for virtue/s
ME vartu, ME verertues (plural, transmission error), ME vertewe, ME verti, ME vertiwe, ME vertou, ME vertow, ME vertueus (plural), ME vertuhs (plural), ME vertuos (plural), ME vertuous (plural), ME vertuouse (plural), ME vertush (plural), ME vertuus (plural), ME vertuwe, ME vertwe, ME vertywe, ME vetu (transmission error), ME veu (transmission error), ME wartu, ME wertewe, ME wertu, ME–15 uertu, ME–16 uertue, ME–16 verteu, ME–16 vertew, ME–16 vertu, ME–16 (17– regional and nonstandard) vartue, …
Not 2 forms (one singular, one plural), but 27 forms…
From the Conquest till 1260s/70s: no written standard.

34. Grammatical changes in ME
The progressive aspect
He wæs huntende
He wæs on huntunge
The perfect aspect: with be and have
He havede this pleinte maked ‘he had this complaint made’
Quanne hi weren alle set ‘when they had all set’
Sumer is icumen in ‘summer has come’
Over time (into EModE) is was pushed back in the perfective and have was used alone
Reason? High functional load of to be.
Why a periphrastic tense, e.g. present perfect?
“compound tense form is longer and therefore more emphatic than the simple preterite. […] A more emphatic verb form is desirable for indicating the completion of an action” (Mustanoja 1960: 504)

35. The progressive started to develop in ME, yet use was quite low for a long time
In Polychronicon (1387) 5 in a 100,000 words had the progressive
Yet by 1476 (1500), the progressive showed “a clear increase” and it “sky-rocketed at the beginning of the EModE period” (Gramley 2012: 81)

36. The S-Curve of linguistic change
Likely position of the progressive at the end of ME

37. Ic can Englische (ME full verb)
Modal auxiliaries
Shal, wil, may, mote ( must), can
Ic can Englische (ME full verb)
new form: Ic can speak Englische (ME modal verb + lexical verb)
Shal, wil  for the periphrastic future tense
May  permission
Mote  obligation
Negation: multiple negation did not cancel the negative content, e.g.
I don’t want a drink = no drink
I don’t want no drink = a drink please
In ME, the more negative particles, the stronger the negation (Chaucer, the Friar’s Tale, triple negation):
Ne was I nevere er now, wydwe ne wyf, [Never was I, till now, widow or wife]
Ne nevere I nas but of my body trewe [Nor ever of my body was I untrue!]

38. Periphrastic do Do in Old English:
used as a full verb in ME as in OE (e.g. he does lots of things…)
Used as a causative, e.g. Ilome Þu dest me grame ‘Ilome, you cause me harm’
used as a substitute form to avoid the repetition of a verb:
This pardoner hadde heer as yellow as wex,
But smothe it heng, as dooth a strike of flex
(Chaucer, General Prologue)
Avoid repetition of “heng” ‘hung’

39. Emphatic imperative:
Do, dame, telle forth youre tale, and this is best (Do tell me your story)
The last meaning assisted in the establishment of periphrastic do, a semantically empty do as placeholder that was used in negative questions:
Periphrastic do:
Don’t you come?  rather than Come you not?
Why? Negative-first Principle (Mazzon 1994) With do, the negator can precede the lexical verb  easier to process
This process started in Middle English, but ran most of its course in Early Modern English.

40. Is Middle English a Creole language?
No, because…
Bailey and Maroldt’s (1977: 21) definition of creolization as “the gradient mixture of two or more languages” is too vague.
Creoles develop from Pidgin languages. Pidgins are created as ad-hoc simplified languages, where no lingua franca is available. These pidgins become the input for children’s language learning. These children expand the pdigin into a fully-fledged language, a Creole (e.g. Haitian Creole, Tok Pisin on Papua New Guinea)
Social separation of E and F speakers. F = High, E = Low, should have made English much more like French than it is
Viking invasions in Danelaw as pre-stage to creolization. Problem: Vikings were in the North, French speakers in the South.
Little evidence for allegedly creolized features of English in Bailey and Maroldt (1977), see Singh (2005: 130)
Bailey and Maroldt (1977) claim “universal loss of inflections”, when ME showed reduced inflections, not a complete loss.
“no reason to assume that the processes of levelling and reduction in ME were anything but a continuation of tendencies already clearly observable in preceding stages” (Singh 2005: 131).
Socially, there were both educated French and some educated English speakers, written texts in both langauges (other than in Creole settings)
Creoles are restructured European languages (superstrates), influenced by a substrate language (ME includes three European languages)
Features of Creoles, Singh (2005: )