HISTORY OF THE ENGLSIH LANGUAGE

Mr. Alan Bautista, PhD

MIDDLE
ENGLISH
___

By Zilla Rozzi H. Javier

INTRODUCTION
Scholarly perspectives on the Middle English period's borders are divided, making a clear
definition difficult. OED3 has decided on the years 1150–1500. In terms of "external" history,
Middle English is framed at its beginning by the effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at
its end by the arrival of printing in Britain (in 1476) as well as by the significant social and
cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the 1530s onward) and of the ideas of the
continental Renaissance.

Middle English changed from relying on inflectional endings to relying more on word order to
convey grammatical information. This had a huge effect on grammar, with gender lost, reduced
inflections, and fewer distinct paradigms. By late Middle English, verb plurals and infinitives
still generally ended in -en.
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English's vocabulary started to become far more diverse, with many borrowings from French,
Roman, and Scandinavian languages. Large-scale word borrowing frequently had negative
effects on the semantics and aesthetic tone of Old English terms that survived. The lexicon
eventually developed a number of new stylistic layers that could be used in a number of
different ways.

Another characteristic distinguishes the majority of our Middle English evidence from the
majority of our Old English or early modern English evidence, albeit it has less to do with
changes in the language itself than with how it is written down:

Regional variety and (often significant) difference in how the same underlying language units
are expressed in writing characterize the remaining Middle English content. In fact, writing in
English became fragmented, localized, and to a large extent improvised during the Middle
English period as a result of the complete breakdown of the fairly standardized late Old English
literary variety rather than because people suddenly began using language differently in
different contexts.

Period Characterized by Change

A largely consistent literary language based on the West Saxon dialect is used in the majority of
later Old English works. Both the spellings used to symbolize them and the language forms
utilized exhibit a fair amount of uniformity.

The Norman Conquest dramatically altered this scenario, forcing anyone who decided to write
in English throughout the early Middle English period to innovate in order to discover ways to
accurately reflect a specific local variant of Middle English in writing. They frequently had to
utilize spelling conventions more commonly used in writing Latin or French to accomplish this.
The key word is variation. The spelling in some collections of manuscripts exhibits languages
that are very similar, but in a more general sense.

In later Middle English spelling habits typically become rather more stable, and we generally
find more consistency in the strategies used for representing particular sounds in writing.
However, a considerable degree of spelling variation remains the rule rather than the exception,
and it is quite typical to find the same word spelled in slightly different ways within a single
page of a single manuscript. If we look at the full repertory of surviving spelling forms, the
situation can still seem quite bewildering; for instance, the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval
English records around 500 different spellings for through.
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As well as showing variation in how to represent sounds in spelling, our surviving late Middle
English writings also continue to reflect a wide variety of different regional varieties of English.
Although London and its dialect became of increasing importance in official functions and in
literary production, and many of the major late Middle English writers were based in or near the
capital, the real dominance of a metropolitan variety over all others in literary use comes only
in the early modern period.

A number of traits from the central and east midlands were prominent in the London English of
the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, among a wide range of other inputs. In many
important ways, it reflects the language of regions of the nation for which we have scant or no
Old English-period evidence. It is in no sense an interrupted continuation of the mostly
south-western Old English literary language.

However, there was still a lot of variance in spoken and written versions of London English.
Early modern English printers' techniques were significantly influenced by the concentrated use
of a number of official documents, commonly referred to as "Chancery English," although this is
only one component of a highly complex story that is now the subject of great dispute and
debate.

The nature of our remaining documents, which is covered in greater detail in the following
section, further complicates an already complex picture.

New-ish Words

With the exception of a few poetic constructions and minor spelling variations, readers of
current English will be familiar with Milton's (1608–1674) vocabulary. Throughout the early
modern era, between 10,000 and 25,000 new words, mostly loan terms borrowed from Latin and
other languages, were added to the English language. As a result, numerous early modern
authors serve as the first sources for many words in the Oxford English Dictionary. Shakespeare
has been cited as the first source for a word 1495 times as of May 9, 2017, while Thomas Blount
(1618-1679), Randle Cotgrave (d. 1634? ), and John Florio (1553-1625) are cited as the first
sources for 1466, 1350, and 1201 words, respectively. John Milton has been cited as the first
source for a word 556 times.

Many of Milton's early OED citations are for words that have been changed into new parts of
speech. With a few changes, something that was once a verb or noun may change into an
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adjective in Milton's hands. A few of the earliest "e" terms mentioned in Paradise Lost include
the nouns vastness and effulgence, as well as the adjectives charming, echoing, and enslaved.
Anarch (n. the leader of a revolt), emblazonry (n. heraldic devices collectively), horrent (adj.
bristling; rising up as bristles), and stunning (adj. that stuns or stupefies), among other words,
are used for the first time in Book Two of this 1688 illustrated edition of Paradise Lost.

But in an era where early modern publications have been digitalized and made keyword
searchable, OED workers and academics in general are constantly finding earlier citations for
words. These are being progressively added when entries are updated. The number of "initial
evidence for word" citations Milton has in the OED has decreased from 556 to 547 between May
9, 2017, the day this label was first written, and its publication in the online exhibition on
January 30, 2017, serving as evidence of the altering landscape.

To conclude, the real importance of the Middle English period was the way in which this
additional vocabulary became the primary means of introducing new concepts and new domains
of discourse into the language, as well as giving novel ways of expression to familiar concepts
within old domains of discourse.

References
Simon Horobin and Jeremy Smith, An Introduction to Middle English (2002)

Roger Lass, ‘Phonology and morphology’, in Norman Blake, ed. The Cambridge History of the
English Language, vol. ii: 1066–1476 (1992), 23–155.

Roger Lass and Margaret Laing, A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English,1150–1325:
Introduction.

Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval
English (1986)

Philip Durkin ‘“Mixed” etymologies of Middle English items in OED3: some questions of
methodology and policy’, in Dictionaries 23 (2002), 142–55.

Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology (2009)