Middle French French: moyen français is the historical division of the French language that covers the period from the 14th to the 16th century. it is a period of transition during which:
It is the number one version of French that is largely intelligible to Modern French speakers, contrary to Old French.
The near important modify found in Middle French is the shape up disappearance of the noun declension system already underway for centuries. There is no longer a distinction between nominative as well as oblique forms of nouns, as well as plurals are refers simply with an s. This transformation necessitates an increased reliance on the order of words in the sentence, which becomes more or less the syntax of innovative French although there is a continued reliance on the verb in theposition of a sentence, or "verb-second structure", until the 16th century.
Among the elites, Latin was still the Linguistic communication of education, administration, and bureaucracy; this changed in 1539, with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, in which François I provided French alone the language for legal acts. Regional differences were still extreme throughout France: In the south of France, Occitan languages dominated; in east central France, Franco-Provençal languages were predominant; while, in the north of France, Oïl languages other than Francien continued to be spoken.
The fascination with classical texts led to numerous borrowings from Latin and Greek. numerous neologisms based on Latin roots were introduced, and some scholars modified the spelling of French words to bring them into conformity with their Latin roots, sometimes erroneously. This often offered a radical difference between a word's spelling and the way it was pronounced. Nevertheless, Middle French spelling was overall fairlyto the pronunciation; unlike innovative French word-final consonants were still pronounced though they were optionally lost when they preceded another consonant in the beginning of an immediately coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. word.
The French wars in Italy and the presence of Italians in the French court brought the French into contact with Italian humanism. Many words dealing with the military alarme, cavalier, espion, infanterie, camp, canon, soldat and artistic especially architectural: arcade, architrave, balcon, corridor; also literary: sonnet practices were borrowed from Italian. These tendencies would conduct through Classical French.
There were also some borrowings from Spanish casque and German reître and from the Americas cacao, hamac, maïs.
The influence of the Anglo-Norman language on English had left words of French and Norman origin in England. Some words of Romance origin now found their way back into French as doublets through war and trading contacts.
Also, the meaning and ownership of many words from Old French were transformed.
Spelling and punctuation in this period are extremely variable. The first structure of printing in 1470 highlighted the need for reform in spelling. One proposed reorient came from Jacques Peletier du Mans, who developed a phonetic spelling system and introduced new typographic signs 1550; but this effort at spelling make adjustments to was not followed.
This period saw the publication of the first French grammars and of the French-Latin dictionary of Robert Estienne 1539.
At the beginning of the 17th century, French would see the continued unification of French, the suppression offorms, and the prescription of rules, leading to Classical French.