Changes in the system of the adjectives in ME and NE.

The paradigm of the adjective in Middle English is simplified drastically. The endings become scarce. The category of gender is lost, for the nouns no longer have it. The adjective no longer agrees with the noun in case, the only remaining endings being- the plural form having the ending -e and the remains of the weak declension, the weak form (the one preceded by an article) -e:

young knihit / the younge kniht

younge knihtes / the younge knihtes

But some of the adjectives had the very ending -e as a result of levelling of the vowels at the end, and so such adjectives as grene were already unchangeable; in the plural the .strong and the weak forms also coincided.

The forms of the suffixes of the degrees of comparison were reduced lo -er, -est

glad - gladder – gladdest; greet - gretter - grettest

Some adjectives retained a mutated vowel they had had in Old English:

old - elder - eldest

long - lenger - lengest

strong - stregner -strengest

Some preserve former suppletivity, and their degrees of comparison look like this:

good - bettre - best

evil (bad) - werse - werst

muchel - more — most, mest

litel - lasse — lest

Some adjectives, especially of foreign origin, are found in a form that came into wider usage only later, that is, they may be associated with the adverb moore/most

Phonetic Changes in the Early New English Period

The changes in the sound system of the period were significant. The process of the levelling of endings continued, there were positional and assimilative changes of short vowels, and a significant change in the whole system of long vowels, called the Great Vowel Shift. During the period the process of simplification of consonant clusters and loss of consonants in certain positions continued. The changes were as follows:

Lass of unstressed e. The process of levelling of endings led to total disappearance of the neutral sound 9 marked by letter e in the endings (it was preserved and even pronounced more distinctly like [i] only when two identical consonants were found in the root and in the endings), though in spelling the letter might be preserved: no vowel is found in kept, slept, crossed, played; walls, pens, bones, stones - but it is preserved in stresses, dresses^ wanted, parted; watches, judges; wicked and crooked.

The sound e before r changed into a:. This change in many cases (but not always) was reflected in spelling: ME -> NE

sterre — star

herte — heart

bern – barn

sterven – starve

kerven - carve

clerc - clerk

Some place-names changed the pronunciation, though this change is not reflected in their spelling.

It is due to this change that the alphabetic reading of the letter r [er] began to be pronounced as [ar].

Long Vowels. Beginning in the 15 th century, all long vowels that existed in Middle English change their quality. This change was a fundamental one, changing the entire vocalic system, and the essence of it is as follows. All long vowels narrowed, and the narrowest of them turned into diphthongs. The shift resulted in the following changes:

i: —> ai time, like, rise, side

e: —> i: meet, see, keen, deep', in borrowed words chief, receive, seize

з: (e: open) —> into e: closed, then -» i: east, clean, speak, sea

a: —> ei (through the stage x, xi) take, make, name, grave, pave, sane

o (o: open, from Old English a) —> ou stone, bone, home, oak, go, moan

o: closed (from Old and Middle English d in native words as well in the borrowings)—> u: tool, moon, stool, do, root, room

u: —>au house, mouse, out, noun, down, how

The changes were gradual, of course, and in Shakespearean times the vowels were somewhere halfway to its present-day stage. This explains why the rhyme in some sonnets is not exact in present-day system of reading.

The Great Vowel Shift affected all long vowels in native as well as borrowed before it words; table and chamber, doubt and fine, appeal and tone developed in full accordance with the development of the English sound system. Some borrowed words preserve [i:] or [u:] in the open syllable if they were borrowed from French in the later period: some other, though taken during this process still resisted the change and remain phonetically only partially assimilated: police 1520-30, machine 1540-50 etc. Latin borrowings that were taken from written sources, however, usually have a vowel that was changed in the course of the shift.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1915