The state of the language in England between Old English and Middle English. - page 1
Keywords: Middle English, Old English, History of English Language, Peterborough Chronicle
By elliot5200 on 17/02/2007 16:27:00
Level: Bachelor Honours Degree (BA, BEng, BSc etc)
Page Number: 1 of 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
This article will attempt to uncover the various forms of language being used in England in the transitional period between Old English and Middle English. Particular attention will be paid to how and why Old English evolved and also, how language varied across dialects. Focus will also be paid to when these changes in language actually occurred and how long it took for them to be widely used amongst people in England. In light of Sweet (1874), who claimed that ‘…Middle English [is the period] of levelled inflexions…’, this article also will try to argue that many characteristics of Middle English were actually present in the late Old English period
The Peterborough Chronicle is believed by Whitelock (1954) to be ‘the most substantial piece of English writing from the post-Conquest period’. The analysis of morphology in the Chronicle is significant in identifying the state of the language in this transitional period. Noun declension is very advanced compared to Old English. In the First Continuation, there are many instances where the Old English genitive plural is replaced by the -s form, as in preostes and earcedæcnes. Moreover, accusative or uninflected forms are used to express the indirect object, whilst the dative case is generally abandoned, for example, þone abbotrice an munec. Both these characteristics later became associated with Middle English.
In the Second Continuation, orthographical changes are apparent, some of which, resemble Latin and French. However, Clark (1958) criticises some of the borrowed orthography for being ‘unsystematic’. For example, the dentals þ and ð, were now represented in the twelfth century Norman form as either t, d or th. In the Chronicle, the letters t or d occur word-finally, such as in wart, maket and wyd, whilst th occurs either word-initially or medially, as in the, throte and nouther. Thus, there were now many different ways of representing the dentals.
Furthermore, although in French and Latin, f and v were separate phonemes, in Old English, they would both be represented by f. This led some late Old English scribes to replace the medial f with u in order to distinguish it from the f that appears word-initially and word-finally. This orthographic change is illustrated in the Peterborough Chronicle, where forms such as neue and seolure appear in the First Continuation, whilst in the Final Continuation, these are even more common as French influence increased.
The Middle English characteristics are also demonstrated in the vocabulary
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