Describe major features of middle English:

As far as grammar is concerned,

quite a lot of changes occurred
during that time. Noun
genders, for instance,
disappeared. This probably
happened because there were
nouns that were
masculine in English but
feminine in French, which may
have caused confusion, thus
finding it
easier to drop the genders at all.
Also, adjectives were left with
only two inflections (singular
and
plural), which in practice were
reduced to only one (just like in
Modern English). The Old
Norse
use of prepositions instead
of verb inflections had
already become a norm.
With the
disappearance of inflections, the
importance was laid on the
word order, which created the
SVO
(subject - verb - object) word
order managing to break
through time into Modern
English.
As far as grammar is concerned,
quite a lot of changes occurred
during that time. Noun
genders, for instance,
disappeared. This probably
happened because there were
nouns that were
masculine in English but
feminine in French, which may
have caused confusion, thus
finding it
easier to drop the genders at all.
Also, adjectives were left with
only two inflections (singular
and
plural), which in practice were
reduced to only one (just like in
Modern English). The Old
Norse
use of prepositions instead
of verb inflections had
already become a norm.
With the
disappearance of inflections, the
importance was laid on the
word order, which created the
SVO
(subject - verb - object) word
order managing to break
through time into Modern
English.
As far as grammar is concerned,
quite a lot of changes occurred
during that time. Noun
genders, for instance,
disappeared. This probably
happened because there were
nouns that were
masculine in English but
feminine in French, which may
have caused confusion, thus
finding it
easier to drop the genders at all.
Also, adjectives were left with
only two inflections (singular
and
plural), which in practice were
reduced to only one (just like in
Modern English). The Old
Norse
use of prepositions instead
of verb inflections had
already become a norm.
With the
disappearance of inflections, the
importance was laid on the
word order, which created the
SVO
(subject - verb - object) word
order managing to break
through time into Modern
English.
 Grammar: reduced English from a highly inflected language to an extremely
analytic one.

 Vocabulary: involved the loss of a large part of the Old English word-stock and
the addition of thousands words from French and Latin.
e.g: English has 3 words meaning roughly “of or relating to a king”:

Kingly-OE, royal-French, regal-Latin

 Pronunciation: no standardised system of spelling. Pronunciation was changing

with vowels becoming shorter
e.g: leef→life, teem→time

The changing from Old English to Middle English: Grammatical changes

 Decay of Inflectional Endings.

* General reduction of inflectional Endings
* Final –m to –n (e.g: modum→modun)
* Vowel /a,e,u,o/ to /e/.
 Changes in parts of speech.
Noun:
* Termination in both (singular and plurals)
* -(e)s and –(e)n (plurals)
Pronoun:
* reduction in demonstrative
* not in personal
* them, their (plurals)
Verb:
* Serious loses
* Half of OE verbs died
* Many strong verbs with weaker form knowed, teared died
 No grammaticsl gender
* Loss of grammatical gender
* Gender distinguishing words reduced.