Middle English Overview

In relation to the Conquest, Burnley (2000) suggests that innovations linked to the birth of Middle English were nevertheless broadly related to the arrival of the Norman French. He claims that, in many instances, idiom manuscripts of the period merely reveal that variation and change was already go byring in octogenarian English, a moment of the substantial linguistic influence of the Scandinavian invaders in the 9th and tenth centuries.

Further more than, Baugh and Cable (1993) observe that these changes were not only phonological barely also grammatical and lexical. However, such changes did not all occur all at the same time but materialized oer hundreds of years and at disparate rates in the assorted Middle English dialects (see below).

Features of Middle English

Burrows and Turville-Petre (1992) highlight three features which specifically distinguish Middle English from Old English:

·The inflectional system was much simpler (see Loss of Inflections), particularly with regard to adjectives and nouns.

·Relationships in the midst of words in a sentence relied more and more on prepositions and word order.

·English vocabulary was progressively more heterogeneous. That is to say, whilst Old English was predominantly Germanic, Middle English was a linguistic mixture of Scandinavian, Latin and French.

Middle English Dialects

The accepted dialect divisions of this new form of English (see map) equate approximately with those of Old English.



However, Northumbrian is now designated Northern whilst Mercian is described in terms of every the East Midlands or West Midlands dialect. The suggestion is that the majority of the inhabitants of Yorkshire would cook spoken the Northern form but that West horseback riding speech would have belonged to the West Midlands group. Barber (1993) adds that Northumbrian, due in part to political division, separated into northern English and the English of the Scots.

In relation to these dialects Baugh and Cable (1993) observe that diversity...

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