The History of English: Middle English

Middle English and the influence of French

The year 1066 marks the beginning of a new social and linguistic era in Britain, what with the small matter of the Norman Conquest and the subsequent installation of William I on the English throne.

However, the Norman Conquest doesn't actually identify the boundary between Old English and Middle English. It's not as if the incomprehensible language of Beowulf suddenly morphed into Chaucer overnight. Language change is, for the most part, continuous and gradual. It's true that English has changed massively over the last millennium, but people did not speak Old English one day and wake up the following morning speaking Middle English!

Middle English becomes different enough from Old English to be classified as a separate stage of the language by 1200 AD, a considerable amount of time after the Norman Conquest.

While it is true that French had a massive influence on English following the Norman Conquest, it took some time before English began to feel the effects of Old French, the language of the Normans. In fact, even a century after the Norman Conquest, texts were still being composed in the West Saxon variety of Old English, little changed from the kind of texts that had been written a couple of centuries previously.

In fact, it is difficult to separate Middle English from Old English at one end, and Modern English at the other end. So, in order to build up a clear picture of the ways in which Old English gave way to Middle English, I will describe the changes that the language underwent.

 

French and Latin influence

Another reason why Old English seems so unintelligible to us is the fact that it has few borrowed words from Latin, and none at all from French.¹ Now, however, it is estimated that over 70% of the current English vocabulary comes from French or Latin.

Following the Norman Conquest, French words didn't appear in English straightaway. We cannot be sure exactly when English began to borrow words from French because there are very few surviving written documents in English from the beginning of the last millennium to the 1200s.

Written records in Middle English show a progressive increase in borrowed words from Norman French and, later, from Latin and Parisian French (the standard variety of French.) Influence from French becomes especially noticeable in English manuscripts of the 13^th century. It has been estimated that over 10,000 French words came into English at that time - many previously borrowed from more distant sources, such as alkali from Arabic (Crystal, 2003). 

It can be difficult to know whether a word was borrowed straight from French, or via French from Latin. This is because French is a Romance language; it's descended directly from Latin, so many French words closely resemble the equivalent word in Latin.

It is telling that almost all English words relating to the aristocracy and their servants are French in origin. Examples are: baron, count(ess), courtier, duke, duchess, marchioness, marquis, noble, peer, prince(ss), servant and viscount.  The exceptions are king, queen, lord, lady, knight and earl, which are Anglo-Saxon in origin.

The Norman Conquest saw the replacement of Old English as the language of the government and the court with Norman French. The nobility and even some of the first Norman kings spoke French, often with a very limited grasp of English. Latin tended to be used for administrative purpose, and was of course the language of the Church.

I don't think William the Conquerer dressed like this.

I am not going to give a list of all the 10,000 or so words borrowed from French for obvious reasons, but to give you some idea of the extent of the French-derived vocabulary in English, here is a far from exhaustive list of French words that are now fully adopted into English, broken down into several categories:

Law - accuse, arrest, arson, bail, blame, convict, crime, decree, estate, evidence, felon, fraud, indictment, jail/gaol, jury, justice, legacy, plea, prison, punishment, sue, trespass, warrant

Religion - abbey, baptism, cardinal, cathedral, chaplain, communion, confession, divine, faith, friar, heresy, mercy, miracle, parson, penance, prayer, religion, repent, saint, salvation, sermon, temptation, trinity, vicar

Military -  ambush, archer, army, battle, captain, combat, defend, enemy, guard, lance, navy, peace, retreat, sergeant, siege, soldier, spy

Fashion - apparel, attire, brooch, button, cape, cloak, diamond, dress, emerald, ermine, frock, fur, garment, gown, jewel, lace, mitten, ornament, pearl, petticoat, robe, tassel, veil, wardrobe

General nouns - action, age, air, city, coast, courage, debt, deceit, error, face, flower, flour, hour, joy, manner, mountain, noise, number, ocean, opinion, people, person, power, reason, river, task, vision

General verbs - allow, carry, change, close, cry, delay, enjoy, enter, join, marry, move, pass, pay, please, prove, push, quit, refuse, reply, save, search, serve, trip, wait, waste

As you can see, some of these words from French are now normal, everyday terms. English also borrowed a number of prefixes and suffixes from French, such as con-, trans-, pre-, -ance, -tion and -ment. About three quarters of all words borrowed from French in the Middle English period are still in use today (Crystal, 2003.)

Porky pig

As new French words arrived into Middle English, there were many cases where they duplicated words that already existed in English. In such cases, there were two outcomes. 

Either one word would supplant the other, or both words would co-exist, but one would adopt a different meaning.

Hundreds of English words were lost in this way, but there are many such word pairs of French and English words that originally had an identical meaning. 

Examples include begin and commence, child and infant, freedom and liberty, help and aid, hearty and cordial, wish and desire. There is even a word triplet of kingly (from Old English), royal (French) and regal (Latin), all having roughly the same meaning but different connotations.

There's also a curious phenomenon in English where the names of certain edible animals come from Old English, while the word for the corresponding meat is from French. Consider pig and pork. Pig is Old English in origin (though its further origins are a mystery), while pork is borrowed from French porc, and ultimately comes from Latin porcus, meaning 'pig.'

Today a pig, tomorrow a delicious sandwich

Other such pairs exist - cow/beef, deer/venison, chicken/poultry, calf/veal and lamb/mutton all spring to mind. The common explanation for this is that the English peasants had to raise the farm animals and prepare them for their French lords; thus, the Anglo-Saxon words for the name of the animals stuck, but the French words for the cooked animal supplanted the native English words, because it was the French who had the luxury of eating meat.

This explanation has never fully convinced me. After all, English people would have eaten some meat too. It's more likely that the French aristocracy continued to use their own words for types of meat, because they considered French to be a more prestigious language than English. To them, food would have fallen within the domain of topics that are only worthy of being spoken about in French.

Spelling changes

It's important to mention that a few spelling conventions used in Modern English are due to the influence of French scribes. Old English <sc> is gradually replaced by <sh> or <sch>, so scip becomes ship, which is the spelling we still have today. The runic symbols <þ> and <ð> are supplanted by <th>, a process which was hastened by the advent of the printing press at the end of the 1400s.

Decay of inflections

As I mentioned in my last article, one of the biggest differences between Old English and present-day English is the fact that Old English had so many more inflections (word endings to mark tense, gender, number, noun case, etc.) Inflections on nouns, verbs and adjectives were becoming increasingly rare in as the Middle English period progressed.

The gradual loss of inflections was already happening long before 1066. Because most Old English words had their emphasis on the first syllable of each word, it meant that similar sounding word endings were often confused. It would have been difficult to distinguish -en, -on and -an at the end of a word in rapid speech, for example, so over time, inflections began to decay (Baker, 2003.)

That said, we cannot disregard the influence of Old Norse on English either. How easily the Anglo-Saxons would have been able to communicate with the Vikings is a matter of debate, but the point is that their languages were very close. As I mentioned in my last article, many Vikings settled in England, so the level of contact was very deep.

As a result, it's likely that the situation of intense contact was a catalyst for loss of inflections; they probably hindered communication between the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes, so they began to disappear. The fact that inflections were lost quicker in the North of England than in the South gives credence to this idea; after all, the North was where the majority of the Vikings initially invaded and settled.

Examples of Middle English

Here is an extract from the Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer some time between 1370 - 1400. How much of it can you understand?

Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne

And smale fowules maken melodye

That slepen al the nyght with open eye

So priketh hem nature in hir corages

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

Well, it's not easy to understand, that's for sure, but it's not completely incomprehensible. Some words have not changed their spelling in the last 600 years; examples are pilgrimages, open, nature, half, which, bathed, March. Some words are spelled differently but are still recognisable, like thanne (then), yonge (young), sonne (sun), nyght (night), droghte (drought), priketh (pricks).

But do bear in mind that even similar-looking words would have been pronounced differently. Melodye and eye would have rhymed in Chaucer's time; both words would have ended in the 'ea' sound as in 'rhea'. This is before the Great Vowel Shift, so the letter <a> in Aprille and bathed would have been pronounced like the <a> in 'father', not as in 'fate'.

Also, final written <e> was not always silent as it is in Modern English. Consider the word cane. We don't pronounce the final <e>, but it is there to indicate that the <a> is 'long'. If there was no final <e>, it would be pronounced with a 'short a' sound, as in can. 

At the start of the Middle English period, final <e> would have been pronounced as a schwa sound (the indistinct vowel sound as in 'other' or 'collect')

By Chaucer's time in the 1300s, final <e> was beginning to disappear. When Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, it is likely that older speakers would have held on to the final <e>, while younger speakers would be likely to drop it. The youth of today!

In terms of vocabulary, the extract above contains a number of borrowed words from French and Latin that were not used in Old English. An exhaustive list of borrowed words in the passage is as follows: Aprille, March, perce, veyne, licour, vertu, engendre, flour, Zephirus (ultimately from Greek, meaning 'west wind'), inspire, tendre, cours, melodye, nature, corages, pilgrimage.

You will notice that the word order is distinctly archaic in places. Sometimes the verb appears before the noun: priketh hem nature (nature pricks them); longen folk to goon (folk long to go). 

There's even an example of an adjective occurring after its noun; shoures soote (sweet showers). In Modern English, this noun-adjective word order is only found in a few stock phrases, such as time immemorial, though it is of course the norm in French. Shoures soote rather than soote shoures almost certainly shows influence from French.

Conclusion

To sum up, Middle English marks the transition from the highly inflectional Old English with a fluid word order to the early forms of Modern English which have few inflections and a more rigid word order.

Middle English also saw a massive influx of borrowings from French and Latin, although even in Chaucer's Time, the majority of English vocabulary is still of Anglo-Saxon origin.

But by about 1500, texts begin to look very much like the Modern English we all know and love. By this time, they resemble Modern English to such an extent that they can be read without much difficulty. The era of Early Modern English has begun.

Footnotes

1 - Bear in mind that French as a separate language from Latin didn't really exist in 500 AD. At that time, the forerunner of French would have been just one of several local dialects of Latin. It wouldn't have been different enough from Classical Latin to be regarded as a separate language.

References

Baker, P. (2003) Introduction to Old English: Pronunciation. Available at:
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/pronunciation.html [Accessed 24/10/13]

Crystal, D. (2003) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.