ENG – 2030 LANGUAGE CHANGE AND THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
MIDDLE ENGLISH: PERIOD OF GREAT CHANGES
Lia Berti
“The Middle English period was marked by signifcant changes in the English language, and these changes were of a more extensive and fundamental type than those that have taken place at any time before or since that”.
Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable; A History of the English Language.
History of English Language
Three periods:
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Old English (the erarly form of English language spoken and written by the Anglo Saxons) Middle English: 1150-1500 Modern English:
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Why 1150 is considered the Middle English starting point?
Synthetic aspects start manifestly to develop in an analytic way.
From an hystorical point of wiew
Middle English begins with the Norman invasion of 1066: King Edward the Confessor died without heirs so William, Duke of Normandy, believed that he would become the next king. Learning that Harold was crowned king, William invaded England, killed Harold and crowned himself king during the Battle of Hastings. Yet William spoke only French. As a result, the upper class in England began to speak French while the lower classes spoke English. But French was destined to lose its prestige: in fact King John lost Normandy to the French in 1204, and after him, King Edward I spoke only English. In this period Old English was accepted as the written form of English but given the new socio-political scenario, West Saxon (Old English) become just a dialectal form of Middle English.
A foundamental step in the acknowledgment of English as official language:
1362: prince Edward III opened Parliament in English.
Grammar Features
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More simple system of infections for nouns and adjectives, with a tendency to blur the distinction between vowel sounds in the unstressed syllables of words (increasing the pronunciation of the sound /ǝ/ heard) Second, word order and the role of prepositions increase in relevance as...