23. The Norman Conquest and French linguistic influence.

William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England and the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 AD. The new overlords spoke a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman. The Normans were also of Germanic stock ("Norman" comes from "Norseman") and Anglo-Norman was a French dialect that had considerable Germanic influences in addition to the basic Latin roots.

Prior to the Norman Conquest, Latin had been only a minor influence on the English language, mainly through vestiges of the Roman occupation and from the conversion of Britain to Christianity in the seventh century (ecclesiastical terms such as priest, vicar, and mass came into the language this way), but now there was a wholesale infusion of Romance (Anglo-Norman) words.

The influence of the Normans can be illustrated by looking at two words, beef and cow. Beef, commonly eaten by the aristocracy, derives from the Anglo-Norman, while the Anglo-Saxon commoners, who tended the cattle, retained the Germanic cow. Many legal terms, such as indict, jury , and verdict have Anglo-Norman roots because the Normans ran the courts. This split, where words commonly used by the aristocracy have Romantic roots and words frequently used by the Anglo-Saxon commoners have Germanic roots, can be seen in many instances.

Sometimes French words replaced Old English words; crime replaced firen and uncle replaced eam. Other times, French and Old English components combined to form a new word, as the French gentle and the Germanic man formed gentleman. Other times, two different words with roughly the same meaning survive into modern English. Thus we have the Germanic doom and the French judgment, or wish and desire.

In 1204 AD, King John lost the province of Normandy to the King of France. This began a process where the Norman nobles of England became increasingly estranged from their French cousins. England became the chief concern of the nobility, rather than their estates in France, and consequently the nobility adopted a modified English as their native tongue. About 150 years later, the Black Death (1349-50) killed about one third of the English population. And as a result of this the labouring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance, and along with them English increased in importance compared to Anglo-Norman.

This mixture of the two languages came to be known as Middle English. The most famous example of Middle English is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Unlike Old English, Middle English can be read, albeit with difficulty, by modern English-speaking people.

By 1362, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was largely over. In that year, the Statute of Pleading was adopted, which made English the language of the courts and it began to be used in Parliament.

For almost three hundred years French was the official language of administration: it was the language of the king’s court, the church, the army and others. The intellectual life, literature and education were in the hands of French-speaking people. For all that, England never stopped being an English-speaking country. The bulk of the population spoke their own tongue and looked upon French as foreign and hostile. At first two languages existed side by side without mingling. Then, slowly and quietly, they began to penetrate each other. The three hundred years of the domination of French affected English more than any other foreign influence before or after. The early French borrowings reflect accurately the spheres of Norman influence upon English life; later borrowings can be attributed to the continued cultural, economic and political contacts between the countries.

List of the main lexical fields - with a few examples - of loan words from French which appeared at the Middle English period: English administration (gouvernement, état, royal, cour, parlement), religion (sermon, prière, clergé, abbaye, piété), law (justice, jurée, juge, preuve, verdict, prison, pardon), martial arts (armée, ennemi, armes, combat, défense), fashion (chic, façon, col/collier, bouton, botte, satin, ornement), cooking (dîner, souper, sole, saumon, boeuf, veau, mouton, porc, saucisse, pigeon, biscuit, orange, pêche, huile, vinaigre, moutarde, etc), arts (art, musique, image, peindre, cathédrale, colonne, pilier).

Such words as servant, prince, guard - (connected with life of royal families) were borrowed. With life of church - chapel, religion, prayer, to compess; with city life - city, merchant, painter, tailor. Because the English underclass cooked for the Norman upper class, the words for most domestic animals are English (ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, deer) while the words for the meats derived from them are French (beef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, venison).

The Germanic form of plurals (house, housen; shoe, shoen) was eventually displaced by the French method of making plurals: adding an s (house, houses; shoe, shoes). Only a few words have retained their Germanic plurals: men, oxen, feet, teeth, children.

Aside from borrowing and word formation, French considerably influenced English phrasing. The loan translations range from polite turns of speech, such as at your service, do me the favour, to engage somebody in a quarrel, to make (later: pay) a visit, to idiomatic phrases like by occasion, in detail, in favour of, in the last resort, in particular, to the contrary.

Vocabulary. During the Norman occupation, about 10,000 French words were adopted into English, some three-fourths of which are still in use today. This French vocabulary is found in every domain, from government and law to art and literature. More than a third of all English words are derived directly or indirectly from French, and it's estimated that English speakers who have never studied French already know 15,000 French words.

English pronunciation owes a lot to French as well. Whereas Old English had the unvoiced fricative sounds [f], [s], [θ] (as in thin), and [∫] (shin), French influence helped to distinguish their voiced counterparts [v], [z], [ð] (the), and [ʒ] (mirage), and also contributed the diphthong [ɔy] (boy).

Grammar. Another rare but interesting remnant of French influence is in the word order of expressions like secretary general and surgeon general, where English has retained the noun + adjective word order typical in French, rather than the usual adjective + noun used in English.

24. Middle English dialects and rise of the London dialect.

The dialect division which evolved in Early ME was on the whole preserved in later periods. In the 14th and 15th c. we find the same grouping of local dialects: the Southern group, including Kentish and the South-Western dialects, the Midland group with its minute subdivisions and the Northern group. And yet the relations among them were changing. The extension of trade beyond the confines of local boundaries, the growth of towns with a mixed population favoured the intermixture and amalgamation of the regional dialects. More intensive interinfluence of the dialects, among other facts is attested by the penetration of Scandinavian loan-words into the West Midland and Southern dialects from the North and by the spread of French borrowings in the reverse direction. The most important event in the changing linguistic situation was the rise of the London dialect as the prevalent written form of language.

The history of the London dialect reveals the sources of the literary language in Late ME and also the main source and basis of the Literary Standard, both in its written and spoken forms. The history of London extends back to the Roman period. Even in OE times London was by far the biggest town in Britain, although the capital of Wessex - the main OE kingdom - was Winchester. The capital was transferred to London a few years before the Norman conquest The Early ME records made in London - beginning with the PROCLAMATION of 1258 - show that the dialect of London was fundamentally East Saxon; in terms of the ME division, it belonged to the Southwestern dialect group. Later records indicate that the speech of London was becoming more mixed, with Fast Midland features gradually prevailing over the Southern features. The most likely explanation for the change of the dialect type and for the mixed character of London English lies in the history of the London population. In the 12th and 13th c. the inhabitants of London came from the south-western districts.

In the middle of the 14th c. London was practically depopulated during the "Black Death" (1348) and later outbreaks of bubonic plague. It has been estimated that about one third of the population of Britain died in the epidemics, the highest proportion of deaths occurring in London. The depopulation was speedily made good and in 1377 London had over 35,000 inhabitants. Most of the new arrivals came from the East Midlands: Norfolk, Suffolk, and other populous and wealthy counties of Medieval England although not bordering immediately on the capital. As a result the speech of Londoners was brought much closer to the East Midland dialect. The official and literary papers produced in London in the

late 14th c. display obvious East Midland features. The London dialect became more Anglian than Saxon in character. This mixed dialect of London, which had extended to the two universities (in Oxford and Cambridge) ousted French from official spheres and from the sphere of writing.

25.The rise of the article system.

Causes:

1.loss of strong & weak declensions of adjectives - articles were employed to show definiteness & indefiniteness.

2.word order: It is a book. The book is interesting.

Definite articles -> mascul, singular "se"

Indefinite article -> an (= one)(numeral). It had 5 case declension -> in

Middle English cases were lost, 13th century an > oon/one -> a/an

Определенный

в СА группа указ местоимен. se, sēō, Þæt распадается. Супплетивная форма склонения м.р. se выравнивается по аналогии с ков.падеж.. Þу, the. До серед. XII еще встреч. остатки склонения – Þen, Þōn в В.п, затем они исчезают – остается форма The - артикль.

форма И.п. ср.р. that закрепляется как указ.мест.

В Тв.п. ср.р. Þy гласный редуцировался => совп. с арт. the. Стала компон. словосоч. со сравн. степенью прил. в этой ф-ции и сейчас.

Форма мн.ч. Þā сохран в теч-е СА

Неопределенный

В СА из числ ān стоящего в безуд. позиции обособл. неопр.артикль. Обособление формы вызвано сокращением /a:/ вне ударения; /n/ сохран. перед гласными, перед согл. отпадает.

Неопр. артикль, вводящ. не названный ранее денотат, всегда неанафоричен, опред артикль в осн. значении анафоричен. Кроме смысловой ф-ции важна структурная ф-ция артиклей, являющихся показателями имени.

26. The rise of Gerund.

Gerund: it refers to the usage of a verb (in its -ing form) as a noun. In English, the gerund is identical in form to the present participle (ending in -ing) and can behave as a verb within a clause (so that it may be modified by an adverb or have an object), but the clause as a whole (sometimes consisting of only one word, the gerund itself) acts as a noun within the larger sentence. For example: Editing this article is easy.

The Late ME period witnessed the growth of a new verbal known in modern grammars as the Gerund.

The gerund can be traced to three sources: the OE verbal noun in -um and -inz, the Present Participle and the Infinitive. In OE the verbal noun derived from transitive verbs took an object in the Gen. case, which corresponded to the direct object of the finite verb. The syntactic functions of the verbal noun, the infinitive and the participle partly overlapped.

In ME the Present Participle and the verbal noun became identical: they both ended in -ing. This led to the confusion of some their features: verbal nouns began to take direct objects like participles and infinitives. This verbal feature - a direct object as well as the frequent absence of article before the -ing -form functioning as a noun - transformed the verbal noun into a Gerund in the modern understanding of the term.

The disappearance of the inflected infinitive contributed to the change, as some of its functions were taken by the Gerund. The earliest instances of a verbal noun resembling a Gerund date from the 12'h c. Chaucer uses the -ing-form in substantival functions in both ways: with a prepositional object like a verbal noun and with a direct object.

In Early NE the -ing-form in the function of a noun is commonly used with an adverbial modifier and with a direct object- in case of transitive verbs. Those were the verbal features of the Gerund. The nominal features, retained from the verbal noun, were its syntactic functions and the ability to be modified by a possessive pronoun or a noun in the Gen. case. In the course of time the sphere of the usage of the Gerund grew: it replaced the Infinitive and the Participle in many adverbial functions; its great advantage was that it could be used with various prepositions.

27. Introduction of printing in English.

Early Mn.E. started in the 16th century and took place until mid 17^th century. Later Mn. E. lasted from middle 17^th century until 19^th century and the reason why we divide the Mn.E. period into 3 periods: Early Mn, later Mn, contemporary present day English because we need to understand the borders between M.E. and early Mn.E. and other stage of the language development. Early Mn. E. presents a natural form of middle English development into the Mn. E. language. So the early Mn. E. is such a stage of language development where at which main changes of M.E. anto Mn.E. occurred.

Sometimes to describe early Mn.E. we sometimes allude to the social events that happened at the very end of the M.E. time which was very close to the early Mn.E. because that events molded Mn.E.

1474 connected with William Caxton who started printing in Westminster and this revolution step had very serious impact on further development. 9 years later the Tudor Dynasty was established which was very important for Britain because this was the start of social, political stability. Somewhere 8 years before 1500 printing was started in London which became capital. Person connected with printing in London was Richard Pinson. Certainly all these serious event influenced further development , though they belong to M.E. period

For the early Mn.E. political and social changes included Tyndale Bible translation (1525) Richard Prinson becomes king’s official printer in 1509.

First officially authorized bible in English based of Tyndale’s translation starts to be published from 1539.

1549 publication of first book of Common Pray in English T.Crammer.

1603 James I ,son of Mary Stuart.

1611 Bible based of Tyndale’s translation Bible of king James.

1590 -1612 Shakespeare in early Mn. E. revolution 1640 social upheaval in England,civil war Oliver Cromwell. Later Mn.E. язык подчищается.

It is very important to know that THE 1^ST SECCESSFUL PERMANENT COLONY OF England was set in 1607 in Jamestown,VA and that gives the start of the American English.

28. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished frame narrative The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather thanFrench or Latin.

Works.

Chaucer's first major work, The Book of the Duchess, was an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster (who died in 1369). It is possible that this work was commissioned by her husband John of Gaunt, as he granted Chaucer a £10 annuity on 13 June 1374. This would seem to place the writing of The Book of the Duchess between the years 1369 and 1374. Two other early works by Chaucer were Anelida and Arcite and The House of Fame. Chaucer wrote many of his major works in a prolific period when he held the job of customs comptroller for London (1374 to 1386). His Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde all date from this time. Also it is believed that he started work on The Canterbury Tales in the early 1380s. Chaucer is best known as the writer of The Canterbury Tales, which is a collection of stories told by fictional pilgrims on the road to the cathedral at Canterbury; these tales would help to shape English literature.

The Canterbury Tales contrasts with other literature of the period in the naturalism of its narrative, the variety of stories the pilgrims tell and the varied characters who are engaged in the pilgrimage. Many of the stories narrated by the pilgrims seem to fit their individual characters and social standing, although some of the stories seem ill-fitting to their narrators, perhaps as a result of the incomplete state of the work. Chaucer drew on real life for his cast of pilgrims: the innkeeper shares the name of a contemporary keeper of an inn in Southwark, and real-life identities for the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Man of Law and the Student have been suggested. The many jobs that Chaucer held in medieval society—page, soldier, messenger, valet, bureaucrat, foreman and administrator—probably exposed him to many of the types of people he depicted in the Tales. He was able to shape their speech and satirize their manners in what was to become popular literature among people of the same types.

Chaucer's works are sometimes grouped into first a French period, then an Italian period and finally an English period, with Chaucer being influenced by those countries' literatures in turn. Certainly Troilus and Criseyde is a middle period work with its reliance on the forms of Italian poetry, little known in England at the time, but to which Chaucer was probably exposed during his frequent trips abroad on court business. In addition, its use of a classical subject and its elaborate, courtly language sets it apart as one of his most complete and well-formed works. In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer draws heavily on his source, Boccaccio, and on the late Latin philosopher Boethius. However, it is The Canterbury Tales, wherein he focuses on English subjects, with bawdy jokes and respected figures often being undercut with humour, that has cemented his reputation.

Chaucer also translated such important works as Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (extended by Jean de Meun). However, while many scholars maintain that Chaucer did indeed translate part of the text of Roman de la Rose as The Romaunt of the Rose, others claim that this has been effectively disproved. Many of his other works were very loose translations of, or simply based on, works from continental Europe. It is in this role that Chaucer receives some of his earliest critical praise. Eustache Deschamps wrote a ballade on the great translator and called himself a "nettle in Chaucer's garden of poetry". In 1385 Thomas Usk made glowing mention of Chaucer, and John Gower, Chaucer's main poetic rival of the time, also lauded him. This reference was later edited out of Gower's Confessio Amantis and it has been suggested by some that this was because of ill feeling between them, but it is likely due simply to stylistic concerns.

One other significant work of Chaucer's is his Treatise on the Astrolabe, possibly for his own son, that describes the form and use of that instrument in detail. Although much of the text may have come from other sources, the treatise indicates that Chaucer was versed in science in addition to his literary talents. Another scientific work discovered in 1952, Equatorie of the Planetis, has similar language and handwriting compared to some considered to be Chaucer's and it continues many of the ideas from the Astrolabe. Furthermore, it contains an example of early European encryption. The attribution of this work to Chaucer is still uncertain.

Influence.

Linguistic: Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed since around the twelfth century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentameter, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him. The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, first seen in his Legend of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a satirist is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, apparently making its first appearance in The Reeve's Tale.

The poetry of Chaucer, along with other writers of the era, is credited with helping to standardize the London Dialect of the Middle English language from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects. This is probably overstated; the influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy—of which Chaucer was a part—remains a more probable influence on the development of Standard English. Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer's poems owing to the effect of the Great Vowel Shift some time after his death. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience, though it is thought by some that the modern Scottish accent is closely related to the sound of Middle English. The status of the final -e in Chaucer's verse is uncertain: it seems likely that during the period of Chaucer's writing the final -e was dropping out of colloquial English and that its use was somewhat irregular. Chaucer's versification suggests that the final -e is sometimes to be vocalised, and sometimes to be silent; however, this remains a point on which there is disagreement. When it is vocalised, most scholars pronounce it as a schwa. Apart from the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary is recognisable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for common speech, is the earliest manuscript source. Acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc,artillery and aspect are just some of the many English words first attested in Chaucer.

Literary

Widespread knowledge of Chaucer's works is attested by the many poets who imitated or responded to his writing. John Lydgate was one of the earliest poets to write continuations of Chaucer's unfinished Tales while Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid completes the story of Cressida left unfinished in his Troilus and Criseyde. Many of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works contain material from these poets and later appreciations by the romantic era poets were shaped by their failure to distinguish the later "additions" from original Chaucer. Seventeenth and eighteenth century writers, such as John Dryden, admired Chaucer for his stories, but not for his rhythm and rhyme, as few critics could then read Middle English and the text had been butchered by printers, leaving a somewhat unadmirable mess. It was not until the late 19th century that the official Chaucerian canon, accepted today, was decided upon, largely as a result of Walter William Skeat's work. One hundred and fifty years after his death, The Canterbury Tales was selected by William Caxton to be one of the first books to be printed in England.

English

Chaucer is sometimes considered the source of the English vernacular tradition and the "father" of modern English literature. His achievement for the language can be seen as part of a general historical trend towards the creation of a vernacular literature after the example of Dante in many parts of Europe. A parallel trend in Chaucer's own lifetime was underway in Scotland through the work of his slightly earlier contemporary, John Barbour, and was likely to have been even more general, as is evidenced by the example of the Pearl Poet in the north of England.

Although Chaucer's language is much closer to modern English than the text of Beowulf, it differs enough that most publications modernise his idiom.