MIDDLE ENGLISH

Grado en Estudios Ingleses

GH-102521

Prof. Pilar Sánchez García

1100-1500
The transition from Old to Middle English

Middle English (ME) is the historical variety of English

that was spoken and written in the British Isles from the
twelfth century to the fifteenth.
¨  Sharp reduction of differences among inflectional

endings.
n  Vowelsin unstressed syllables are reduced to /ə/, and many
final consonants are deleted.
n  OE <rɑ̄pɑs> /rɑːpɑs/ ‘ropes’ develops to <ropes> /rɔːpəәs/
n  OE <gōdɑn> to <gode> ‘good.’
Reduction of case distinctions
¨  Diminution, in most categories of words, of
grammatical distinctions formerly expressed in the
inflectional morphology, such as case and gender.
n  The Commonest Noun Inflections of Old English
A comparison of OE /ME inflectional endings

The Commonest Noun

Inflections of Old English ME Inflections
¨  Some nouns of high frequency maintained characteristics of
their original class affiliation throughout the period: e.g., in
texts of the fifteenth century
¨  the plural of <eie> ‘eye’ may still be
n  <eighen> (OE ēagan),
n  beside analogical <eies>
¨  the mutation plurals <fet, teþ, men> remained, though other
mutation plurals had been mostly regularized, e.g., <bokes>,
<gotes> ‘goats.’
¨  But most nouns acquired the endings of what were originally
strong maculine nouns: -es in the possessive and throughout
the plural, otherwise null inflection.
(Fulk 57)
Elimination of grammatical gender

¨  Reduction of inflectional vowels to /ə/

also led to the elimination of gender as
a grammatical category.
¨  In early texts from the southernmost dialects, archaisms
inherited from OE can be found.
¨  A number of minor declensional types persisted in OE
merely because of the high frequency of certain nouns.
In all dialects of ME there are preserved some
declensional irregularities.
¤  Althoughmost so-called mutation plurals were regularized:
bokes, notes ‘nuts,’ okes ‘oaks’, several continued to indicate
the plural by a change of root vowel: man, womman, fot,
toþ, goos, lous, mous, brok (pl. brech ‘trousers’), cou (pl. ki, ky
beside kyn), got (pl. get beside gotes).
¤  Anotherarchaic type, recessive already in OE, was the
so-called s-stems, which could add -ru in the nominative
and accusative plural in OE. A further suffix –en (<OE
weak ending –an), could then be added in the Southern
dialect of ME:
n  plurals such as calvren, eiren ‘eggs,’ lombren ‘lambs,’ children
beside childer. In the northern dialects, however, only children,
childer was formed this way, the other words having acquired
normal plurals in -es.
Old English Middle English

¨  By the late OE period, ¨  ME texts display a

a fairly uniform West
Saxon dialect was in
use throughout England
as the literary
standard.
great deal of linguistic
variation based in both
regional differences
and varied textual
history.