A period characterized by variation

The majority of later Old English texts are written in a fairly uniform type of literary language, based on the West Saxon dialect. The linguistic forms employed show considerable regularity, as do the spellings used to represent them.

The political and cultural upheavals of the Norman Conquest completely changed this situation: people who chose to write in English in the early Middle English period typically had to improvise, in order to find ways of representing a particular local variety of Middle English in writing. To do this they often had to draw upon spelling traditions that were more typically used in writing Latin or French. Variation reigns supreme. Some groups of manuscripts show very similar language represented in very similar orthography, but in the broader picture these appear isolated pockets.

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.

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.

London English of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries showed a wide variety of inputs, among which a number of features from the central and east midlands figured strongly. It is in no way an interrupted continuation of the predominantly south-western Old English literary language, and in many key respects it reflects the language of parts of the country for which we have little or no evidence from the Old English period.

There also continued to be a great deal of variation within London English, in written forms as well as spoken. The focused usage of a number of official documents, often referred to as ?Chancery English?, had a significant input into the practices of early modern English printers, but this is only one aspect of a very complex story, which is still subject to considerable uncertainty and debate.

This complicated picture is complicated still more by the nature of our surviving documents, which is discussed in the following section.

Conclusion

The historical changes in the grammatical structure of the English language from the OE period to the present time are no less striking than the changes in the sounds. Since the OE period the gramatical type of the language has changed: from what could be termed a largely synthetic or inflected language into a language of the analytical type, with analytical means of word connection prevailing over the synthetic ones. The syntax of the word group and of the sentence came to play a more important role in the language than the morphology of the word.

The majority of later Old English texts are written in a fairly uniform type of literary language, based on the West Saxon dialect. The linguistic forms employed show considerable regularity, as do the spellings used to represent them. One other factor marks out the bulk of our Middle English evidence from the bulk of our Old English or early modern English evidence, although it is less directly a matter of change in the language than in how it is represented in writing

Finally, knowledge of traditional and experience studying a foreign language can provide the student with helpful skills for learning Middle English. Unfortunately, our education system today rarely gives students skills of this sort. However, studying Middle English grammar can help us pick up the knowledge we may have missed out on.

References:

? Scott Kleinman, Department of English, California State University, Northridge (2009)

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

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

? Philip Durkin ??Mixed? etymologies of Middle English items in OED3: some questions of methodology and policy?, in Dictionaries 23 (2002)

? The History of the English Language: A Source Book. New York, Longman.Claiborne, R. (1990).

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 5