Middle English

Middle English abbreviated to ME was a defecate of a English language spoken after the Norman conquest 1066 until the behind 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations together with developments coming after or as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of. the Old English period. Scholarly theory varies, but the Oxford English Dictionary specifies the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English Linguistic communication roughly followed the High to the Late Middle Ages.

Middle English saw significant adjust to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, as alive as orthography. Writing conventions during the Middle English period varied widely. Examples of writing from this period that clear survived show extensive regional variation. The more standardized Old English language became fragmented, localized, together with was, for the almost part, being improvised. By the end of the period approximately 1470 and aided by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, a standard based on the London dialects Chancery specifications had become established. This largely formed the basis for sophisticated English spelling, although pronunciation has changed considerably since that time. Middle English was succeeded in England by Early Modern English, which lasted until approximately 1650. Scots developed concurrently from a variant of the Northumbrian dialect prevalent in northern England and spoken in southeast Scotland.

During the Middle English period, numerous Old English grammatical atttributes either became simplified or disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective and verb inflections were simplified by the reduction and eventual elimination of near grammatical case distinctions. Middle English also saw considerable adoption of Norman vocabulary, particularly in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as alive as poetic and emotive diction. Conventional English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with Old Norse influences becoming more apparent. Significant remake in pronunciation took place, particularly involving long vowels and diphthongs, which in the later Middle English period began to undergo the Great Vowel Shift.

Little survives of early Middle English literature, due in element to Norman controls and the prestige that came with writing in French rather than English. During the 14th century, a new breed of literature emerged with the works of writers including John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales submits the most studied and read work of the period.

Morphology

Middle English keeps only two distinct noun-ending patterns from the more complex system of inflection in Old English:

Nouns of the weak declension are primarily inherited from Old English n-stem nouns, but also from ō-stem, wō-stem and u-stem nouns,[] which did non inflect in the same way as n-stem nouns in Old English, but joined the weak declension in Middle English. Nouns of the strong declension are inherited from the other Old English noun stem classes.

Some nouns of the strong type have an -e in the nominative/accusative singular, like the weak declension, but otherwise strong endings. Often these are the same nouns that had an -e in the nominative/accusative singular of Old English they, in turn, were inherited from Proto-Germanic ja-stem and i-stem nouns.

The distinct dative effect was lost in early Middle English. The genitive survived, however, but by the end of the Middle English period, only the strong -'s ending variously spelt was in use. Some formerly feminine nouns, as well as some weak nouns, continued to make their genitive forms with -e or no ending e.g. , horses' hoves, and nouns of relationship ending in -er frequently have no genitive ending e.g. , "father's bane".

The strong -es plural form has survived into Modern English. The weak -en form is now rare and used only in oxen and, as element of a double plural, in children and brethren. Some dialects still have forms such(a) as eyen for eyes, shoon for shoes, hosen for hoses, kine for cows, and been for bees.

Grammatical gender survived to a limited extent in early Middle English, ago being replaced by natural gender in the course of the Middle English period. Grammatical gender was indicated by agreement of articles and pronouns, i.e. "the-feminine owl" or using the pronoun to refer to masculine nouns such as "helmet", or phrases such as strong shaft with the masculine accusative adjective ending -ne.

Single syllable adjectives increase -e when modifying a noun in the plural and when used after the definite article , after a demonstrative , , after a possessive pronoun e.g. , , or with a name or in a form of address. This derives from the Old English "weak" declension of adjectives. This inflexion continued to be used in writing even after-e had ceased to be pronounced. In earlier texts, multi-syllable adjectives also get a-e in these situations, but this occurs less regularly in later Middle English texts. Otherwise adjectives have no ending, and adjectives already ending in -e etymologically get no ending as well.

Earlier texts sometimes inflect adjectives for issue as well. Layamon's Brut inflects adjectives for the masculine accusative, genitive, and dative, the feminine dative, and the plural genitive. The Owl and the Nightingale adds a-e to all adjectives non in the nominative, here only inflecting adjectives in the weak declension as refers above.

Comparatives and superlatives are ordinarily formed by adding -er and -est. Adjectives with long vowels sometimes shorten these vowels in the comparative and superlative, e.g. great greater. Adjectives ending in -ly or -lich form comparatives either with -lier, -liest or -loker, -lokest. A few adjectives also display Germanic umlaut in their comparatives and superlatives, such as , . Other irregular forms are mostly the same as in modern English.

Middle English personal pronouns were mostly developed from those of Old English, with the exception of the third-person plural, a borrowing from Old Norse the original Old English form clashed with the third person singular and was eventually dropped. Also, the nominative form of the feminine third-person singular was replaced by a form of the demonstrative that developed into modern she, but the alternative remained in some areas for a long time.

As with nouns, there was some inflectional simplification the distinct Old English dual forms were lost, but pronouns, unlike nouns, retained distinct nominative and accusative forms. Third-person pronouns also retained a distinction between accusative and dative forms, but that was gradually lost: the masculine was replaced by south of the Thames by the early 14th century, and the neuter dative was ousted by it in most dialects by the 15th.

The coming after or as a a thing that is said of. table shows some of the various Middle English pronouns. many other variations are noted in Middle English direction because of differences in spellings and pronunciations at different times and in different dialects.

As a general rule, the indicative first grown-up singular of verbs in the made tense ends in -e , 'I hear', theperson in -est , 'thou speakest', and the third person in -eþ , 'he cometh/he comes'. þ the letter 'thorn' is pronounced like the unvoiced th in "think", but, undercircumstances, it may be like the voiced th in "that". The following table illustrates a typical conjugation pattern:

Plural forms vary strongly by dialect, with Southern dialects preserving the Old English -eþ, Midland dialects showing -en from about 1200 and Northern forms using -es in the third person singular as well as the plural.

The past tense of weak verbs is formed by adding an -ede, -de or -te ending. The past-tense forms, without their personal endings, also serve as past participles with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: i-, y- and sometimes bi-.

Strong verbs, by contrast, form their past tense by changing their stem vowel becomes , a process called apophony, as in Modern English.