Chet tilari fakultei ingliz tili kafedrasi

Conclusion

Middle English was a form of the English language spoken after the Norman conquest (1066) until the late 15th century. English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the Oxford English Dictionary specifies the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500.[2] This stage of the development of the English language roughly followed the High to the Late Middle Ages. During the Middle English period, many Old English grammatical features either became simplified or disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective and verb inflections were simplified by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of most grammatical case distinctions. Middle English also saw considerable adoption of Norman French vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive diction. Conventional English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with Old Norse influences becoming more apparent. Significant changes in pronunciation took place, particularly involving long vowels and diphthongs, which in the later Middle English period began to undergo the Great Vowel Shift. Viking influence on Old English is most apparent in the more indispensable elements of the language. Pronouns, modals, comparatives, pronominal adverbs (like "hence" and "together"), conjunctions and prepositions show the most marked Danish influence. The best evidence of Scandinavian influence appears in extensive word borrowings, yet no texts exist in either Scandinavia or in Northern England from this period to give certain evidence of an influence on syntax. The change to Old English from Old Norse was substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic character.[5][6] Like close cousins, Old Norse and Old English resembled each other, and with some words in common, they roughly understood each other;[6] in time the inflections melted away and the analytic pattern emerged.[8][11] It is most "important to recognise that in many words the English and Scandinavian language differed chiefly in their inflectional elements. The body of the word was so nearly the same in the two languages that only the endings would put obstacles in the way of mutual understanding. In the mixed population which existed in the Danelaw these endings must have led to much confusion, tending gradually to become obscured and finally lost." This blending of peoples and languages happily resulted in "simplifying English grammar."[5] Increasingly seen as an old-fashioned form, thou thus became largely confined to Biblical and religious contexts or other specialized instances of address. It can often be found in literary contexts into the nineteenth century, particularly those which, as in Ruth, above, are associated with intimate relationships (“Were I with thee . . .” muses the speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!”). The older usage can still be found in certain dialects; West Yorkshire, for example, retains the use of tha/thee (Hogg 144). Number has also been nearly universally lost, although in certain dialects plural forms such as youse and y’all (especially in the southern United States) exist.

The development of the second-person pronoun has generated much critical debate. Studies cluster largely around the middle Early Modern period; the frequent employment of pronoun switching in Shakespearean texts renders them a common site of analysis and hypothesis. Brown and Gilman’s 1960 study and their subsequent development of “politeness theory” (1989) marks landmark work in this area.