The Historical Background
to Middle English

Part IX:  Conclusions

As its very name suggests, "Middle English" is indeed a mid-way stage between the somewhat incomprehensible (without specialist training) Old English, and Modern English. A few concluding comments may help to emphasize its transitional nature.

Old English was an inflected language: different word-functions had different endings. It still possessed grammatical gender, whereby gender was apparently given in an arbitrary way to objects and persons. It was however itself slightly transitional, being not so highly inflected as Greek, Latin or (of the Germanic languages) Gothic. Whilst a few early Latin loan words appeared in the language, it was basically Germanic in its vocabulary.

Factors of history (the Scandinavian invasions, the Norman Conquest) occurred since the Old English period, for although the earliest Danish invasions occurred chronologically within the Old English period, the linguistic effects did not make their influence felt until the Middle English period. These factors, linguistically, were felt less in the basic grammatical and syntactic structure than in vocabulary. Factually, the Scandinavian influence, albeit limited both geographically and in the quantitative vocabulary contribution, was greater grammatically than the French. Third person plural pronouns in English come from Scandinavian, for example. Significantly, too, several of the verbal forms which have simplified the English verbal system spread from the North to the South in this period, again inferentially because of Scandinavian influence. But most of the main grammatical alterations (the loss of grammatical gender, the simplification of inflexions) came from factors inherent to the English language - not least its inherited stress-system which leads to weak stresses at the end of words. The French influence expresses itself mainly in vocabulary, prosody, genres and rhetoric - the main elements of literary sophistication. Old constructions still exist, there are still some inflexions no longer present in Modern English, but the alteration in language was fairly dramatic (partially caused through the cessation of the West Saxon literary dominance, so that already developed dialects had their fair say in Middle English).

 

	The Beginnings
	The Viking Invasions
	The Norman Conquest
	Old English
	Middle English
	Latin in The Middle English Period
	French Influences
	The Enrichment of English