Readable, eatable, unbearable.
One of the consequences of the borrowings from French was the appearance of the etymological doublets.
- from the Common Indoeuropean:
native borrowed
fatherly paternal
- from the Common Germanic:
native borrowed
yard garden
ward guard
choose choice
- from Latin:
Earlier later
(Old English borrowing) (Middle English borrowing)
Mint money
Inch ounce
Due to the great number of French borrowings these appeared in the English language such families of words, which though similar in their root meaning, are different in origin:
native borrowed
mouth oral
sun solar
see vision
There are calques on the French phrase:
It’s no doubt Se n’est doute
Without doubt Sans doubte
Out of doubt Hors de doute
The chronological boundaries of the Middle English period are not easy to define, and scholarly opinions vary. The dates that OED3 has settled on are 1150-1500. (Before 1150 being the Old English period, and after 1500 being the early modern English period.) In terms of ‘external’ history, Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the arrival in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the 1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance.
Two very important linguistic developments characterize Middle English:
in grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical information. (If we put this in more technical terms, it became less ‘synthetic’ and more ‘analytic’.)Change was gradual, and has different outcomes in different regional varieties of Middle English, but the ultimate effects were huge: the grammar of English c.1500 was radically different from that of Old English. Grammatical gender was lost early in Middle English. The range of inflections, particularly in the noun, was reduced drastically (partly as a result of reduction of vowels in unstressed final syllables), as was the number of distinct paradigms: in most early Middle English texts most nouns have distinctive forms only for singular vs. plural, genitive, and occasional traces of the old dative in forms with final –e occurring after a preposition.In some other parts of the system some distinctions were more persistent, but by late Middle English the range of endings and their use among London writers shows relatively few differences from the sixteenth-century language of, for example, Shakespeare: probably the most prominent morphological difference from Shakespeare’s language is that verb plurals and infinitives still generally ended in –en (at least in writing).
in vocabulary, English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the stylistic register of those words which survived from Old English. Eventually, various new stylistic layers emerged in the lexicon, which could be employed for a variety of different purposes.
During this period there appear analytical forms of the verb. In Old English the only ways to make the forms of the verb were suffixes/vowel interchange/using another stem + inflections; in Middle English there arise the forms now very common in Present-day English but absent in Old English.
The Tense In present day English the temporal paradigm of the verb contains two synthetic and one analytical form. This means that this form was absent in Old English, and this form is the Future tense.
The use of such verbs as shall/ will referred the action to the future as such which was desirable but not yet realized, or obligatory. In Middle English these become the true auxiliaries for the future tense. Chaucer uses them freely:I shal make us sauf for everemore (I shall make us safe forever). The same auxiliary was also used in the already appearing analytical forms of future in the past:
For shortly this was his opinioun,That in that grove he wolde hym hyde al day, And in the nyght thanne wolde he take his way (His opinion was that he should hide himself in that grove all day and then at night should take his way)
The Present and the Past Perfect equally came into the Middle English, both using as auxiliary the verb to haven in the Present or the past tense + Participle II
The passive voice expressed by the combination ben + PII expressing a state as well as an action is widely used in Middle English.
A new form - the continuous was rising, but in Middle English it was considered an ungrammatical form of the verb, and it was not allowed into the good literary English We may observe that even more complicated forms of the Continuous, such as Perfect continuous may be found in late Middle English:
We han ben waitynge al this fourtenyght (We have been waiting all this fortnight...)
The category of mood was enriched by analytical formations wolde + inf and sholde + inf; the newly arisen form of the past perfect readily supplements the range of meanings of the old synthetic subjunctive: sire, if that I were ye, Yet sholde I seyn ...(Sir, if I were you I would say)
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