Lecuture………..

Lecture 8 & 9

The year 1066, the date of the Norman Conquest of England, is shrouded in mystery and
mythology. What did the Norman Conquest do to English? Did the Normans really conquer the
English language? How can we see the effects of this political upheaval on the history of English
and in our own study of the language today? In this lecture, we’ll review some of the major
effects that the Norman Conquest had on the English language, but we’ll also see that the
language was changing long before the conquest and continued to change throughout the
British Isles in spite of the influence of the French-speaking Normans.

Let’s begin with some of the natural changes in Old English that took place from its
earliest times. Recall that our best evidence for language change is the writing of the barely
literate. In several texts from the 10th and 11th centuries, we can see that the complex system
of noun case endings was gradually being lost. As mentioned earlier, Old English had an
inflectional system, in which special endings were used to distinguish whether a noun was the
subject of a sentence, the direct object, the indirect object, the object of possession, or the
instrument of an action. The term that describes the falling together of the old system of case
endings is “syncretism.” In this process, endings collapse into smaller and smaller groups, until a
limited collection of sounds comes to represent a larger set of grammatical categories.

In addition to noun endings, adjective endings (such as those that delineated number or
gender) were lost in this period of Old English. Verb endings were maintained, but simplified.
Old English, like other Indo-European languages, had a dual pronoun in addition to the singular
and plural (I and we). This third pronoun signaled two people, but this distinctive feature of the
language was also lost in this period. Grammatical gender disappeared, to be replaced by
natural gender. Nouns were no longer masculine, feminine, or neuter. Why did these changes
take place? Some theories have been proposed that hinge on stress, form, and function. Old
English, like all Germanic languages, had fixed stress on the root syllable of the word. In other
words, regardless of what prefixes or suffixes were added to the word, the stress remained on
the root syllable. Examples include come, become; timber, betimber (to build); swerian,
answerian (answer). Some scholars believe that this insistent stress tended to level out the
sounds of unstressed syllables. Any sound or syllable that did not take the full word stress, such
as a grammatical ending, would not have been pronounced clearly.

Theories that focus on form and function assert that as final endings became harder to
distinguish, new ways of establishing meaning were necessary. Let’s walk through an example.
Old English had a fully developed set of prepositions: of, with, before, on, and to. These were
used to signal relationships among words in various kinds of phrases, but case endings still
served the same function. Thus, a noun in the dative case did not need a preposition. A line
from Beowulf reads: Him tha yldesta word-hoard unleac, or To him, the eldest unlocked his
word hoard, meaning he unlocked his words or spoke. The line contains no preposition, but him
is in the dative case so the sentence should be understood to mean The oldest one spoke to
him. In Late Old English and Middle English, these grammatical categories lost their distinctions
and prepositions took over. Patterns of word order also became regularized as syntax (rather
than case endings) became the way of expressing grammatical relationships in a sentence.
Certain patterns, such as subject-verb-object, became standard.

What is the evidence for this kind of change? As we’ve noted, linguists look for written
evidence showing a level of literacy high enough to record sounds and forms but not so well-
developed as to use conventions of writing apart from speech. Linguists also look for texts that
can be dated and localized to a particular region. During the Anglo-Saxon period, monks,
teachers, and scribes kept year-by-year histories in prose called “annals.” An excellent example
is the Peterborough Chronicle, kept by monks until the year 1154. This document records
language change in ways that are at times subtle and significant. Because Peterborough was
somewhat geographically removed from the initial impact of the Norman Conquest, its records
illustrate few effects of Norman French. Each chronicle entry is the set of events of a given year,
and each one begins with a phrase meaning in this year.

It’s important to note that the chronicle was not necessarily kept year by year. Instead,
our evidence tells us that every 20 years, or 10, or five, a scribe would copy out what had
happened in the preceding years. In this way, blocks of text highlight—in gross form—the ways
in which the English language was changing during the transitional period right after the
Norman Conquest.

Let’s look at the following examples:

Year Phrase Notes

1083 on þisum geare The endings “-um” and “-e” signal a dative masculine singular.
This is classic Old English.
1117 on þison geare The “-um” ending has been replaced with “-on.” The adjectival
ending seems to have been replaced with an indiscriminate
vowel plus an indiscriminate nasal (“-m” or “-n”). This may be
the scribe’s attempt to preserve a grammatical ending or
preserve the sound of speech.
1135 Onþis geare The adjectival ending of this has been lost, but the “-e” at the
end of geare still signals a dative. Concord in grammatical gender
is obviously gone by this time.
1154 on þis gear The endings have completely disappeared. We are no longer in
the world of inflected Old English.

We can trace several other changes in the period after the Norman Conquest. As
mentioned earlier, word order patterns were regularized. The order of subject-verb-object
became the standard for the simple declarative sentence. Other word order patterns were used
for special kinds of expression; for example, in asking a question, the standard word order
would be inverted to verb-subject-object: Know I the way? Both Shakespeare and the King
James Bible preserve this archaism in asking questions. Other archaisms, such as methinks,
meaning it seems to me, survived until the time of the Renaissance. Over time, the sound of the
language also changed. Again, let’s look at a few examples: Old English began to lose some of
the characteristic consonant clusters that gave it its distinctive sound. The hl-, hr-, hn-, and fn-
clusters leveled out to l-, r-, n-, and sn-. Compression of syllables occurred in such terms as hlaf
weard, guardian of the loaf, which was shortened to become Lord. Certain Old English words
underwent a special sound change called “metathesis.” This is the inversion of sounds in order.
We hear this when we identify certain regional dialects by the pronunciation “aks” for ask.
During the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods, certain words permanently
metathesized their sounds: brid → bird; axian → ask; thurgh → through; beorht → bright. Some
strong verbs (need, help, wax) changed to weak ones.

The system of making meaning was changing at the same time that newer French words
were inflecting the language. Let’s close again with poetry. As we saw when we looked at
“Caedmon’s Hymn,” Old English poetry was constructed with a certain number of strong
alliterative stresses in each line. The number of total syllables in the line was not relevant, nor
was rhyming important. In France, however, the organization of the poetic line was determined
by the absolute number of syllables in the line. An eightsyllable iambic line would have four
beats or stresses (iambic tetrameter). A 10-syllable iambic line would have five stresses (iambic
pentameter). The French brought this new structure for poetry to the British Isles. “The Owl
and the Nightingale,” written about the year 1200, is the earliest English poem composed in
sustained octosyllabic rhymed couplets. It is essentially a French poem written in English:

Ich was in one sumere dale;

In one suþe di3ele hale

Iherde ich holde grete tale

An Hule and one Ni3tingale.

I was in a summery dale;

In one hidden, pretty dark nook,

Where I heard there being held a great tale [or discussion]

Between an Owl and a Nightingale.