Transcription
Welcome back. So, for this final lecture in Middle English, we're going to focus on morphology. And we'll notice that there's a lot of changes during the Middle English time period regarding our morphology. This is due in part to the influence of French. This is due in part to some of the other sound changes that took place that we discussed in previous lectures. But we'll see a really big change happening. And the biggest thing that we'll notice is that in our morphology system, there's an extreme loss of inflection during this time. So, Old English had lots and lots of inflectional morphology, and we're going to see a lot of that fall by the wayside and disappear during this time period. So, the phonological changes that we saw in the previous lecture are relatively minor compared to the major changes that took place during morphology.
So, some of the notable things that took place as a result of this and during this time period is that we lost grammatical gender and replaced it with social gender during this period of time. Something we already saw starting to take place in the Old English time period, but this really finalizes itself during Middle English. We see a reduction of our nouns to just two cases, and so we have possessive markers and we have non-possessive nouns. We see a loss of pretty much all of the inflection, um, and we see a strong distinction in our adjectives. We see a reduction of personal endings, a blurring of mood distinctions in verbal morphology. We see a disappearance of dual and plural number in personal pronouns, um, despite remaining relatively intact as a system of pronouns.
So, there's a lot of major changes that are taking place. And so, what is happening during this time period is that we're changing the kind of language that we really are. We're going from what would have been a synthetic language to a more analytic language, like what we see in English today. So, English is changing from a synthetic language that has lots of inflections, is marking a lot of things, to an analytic language, which is something that is dependent on word order and different sort of words and particles to indicate the relationships that are happening in a sentence. So, if you have a more synthetic language with lots of inflections, those markers are giving you that relationship in a sentence in the morphology. And what we're doing is we're losing a lot of that morphology and starting to have to rely more heavily on syntax in order to come to explain those relationships between different parts of a sentence.
There's lots of different explanations for how this happened, and no single explanation is really sufficient, um. There's no really single reason for why this happened, but there's a lot of sort of partial reasons that can kind of contribute as a whole. So, while there is no single, uh, reason, there is a combination of many factors, such as the exposure of English to various other inflectional systems. So, we had our English, Old English inflectional system. We had a different one that we see in French, a similar but different one in Scandinavian. So, we're starting to see this process of inflectional loss already happening in the end of the Old English time period before the Norman Conquest. There is some Scandinavian influence in certain areas of the English-speaking world at this time. But the Scandinavian inflectional system looks relatively similar to English, even though the French one was very, very different.
The reduction of unstressed vowels that we mentioned in the phonology lecture is also one of those influences. This, however, can't fully explain it. It kind of explains how this happened in English because it ended up making all of our inflections look identical or similar, making them much less useful and less needed to be pronounced. But reduction of unstressed vowels didn't lead to a loss of inflection in languages like German. So, this can't fully explain for everything.
There was also, as far as other Indo-European languages go, a relatively rigid word order in Old English, even though there was a lot more freedom than what we see today. So, this rigid word order wouldn't itself cause a loss of inflection, but it would tend to explain why it's being substituted, why we're seeing an increase in rigidity in our syntax system, um, and in our word order because we have a loss of inflection. So, they may be doing a little bit of influence on each other rather than one causing the other, um. We also see an increased use of prepositions during this time. That's also helping to sort of carry some of the weight with our loss of inflection. So, a lot of the prepositional phrases that we see in present-day English, we use because we don't have those inflectional endings any longer, like we would have had in Old English.
If we look at some particular word classes and some of the features we see, if we start with nouns, by late Old English, the dative ending, um, is already becoming, and all of the vowels in inflectional endings during this time are reducing to schwa. So, things like, um, and on, and on, are all becoming on, which means that there's several different endings that are all ending up sounding exactly alike. And later on, we start losing that final 'n'. So, we end up with just an, uh, ending. And then late in the Middle English period, as we mentioned in the phonology lecture, we're starting to lose that 'a' or the, uh, sound at the end because it's in an unstressed syllable, and especially at the end of words in those unstressed syllables. So, even though we're still spelling it, we're not really pronouncing it by the end of the Middle English time period. So, we can see how various sound changes are sort of making a lot of the noun distinctions fall by the wayside.
So, if we look at an example of some different words between Old English and Middle English, you'll notice that in the Old English columns for things like hund and nama, hound and name, that the Old English one still has several different markers that are all different. And then we have in Middle English, really only things that we still see today. So, we see hund as just the plain form for nominative, for accusative, for dative. So, both kinds of objects and our subject areas are all exactly the same. We see an ending on the genitive, which is our possessive marker. And then we see the same ending regardless of case on the plural. And then if we look at the word for name, you see the same kind of thing happening where there's some variation in some of them, and that all falls by the wayside and ends up looking almost identical to that strong masculine word where we don't have any endings in our subject or in either of our object cases. But we do see an 's' ending in our genitive or possessive case, and we see an 's' ending in our plural regardless of the case. So, this is already looking nearly identical to what we end up seeing in present-day English.
So, what ends up happening is that this system looks very close to what we have today. We see a reduction of case to just possessive or non-possessive. So, that apostrophe 's' is all that's left of our genitive case for that refers to possession, and we still use that today. There wouldn't have been an apostrophe during the Middle English time period, but we see that the sound is nearly the same. We see a reduction of those class distinctions where almost all of the nouns are generalizing to that strong masculine form. And so, any of those other differences that we saw in all of those different kinds of noun classes and noun categories in Old English are all sort of becoming much more similar and generalizing into the same kind of pattern.
A few of them retained some of their distinctions. So, we still have a couple of examples today, things like child versus children, ox versus oxen, where we still have that 'n' plural ending. And Middle English still retained a few distinctions, um, that had a different genitive form that wasn't an 's', especially in what were the feminine nouns, but we don't see any examples of that today any longer. There's a few unchanged neuter plurals of Old English, and we still actually see a few of these left today. So, things like deer for wild animal, now deer; shape for sheep; sween for swine. We can still use those as plurals and as singulars in present-day English. And we start seeing the pattern of unmarked plurals on this, if these animals continue, as we just mentioned, and it starts to spread from Middle English and beyond. So, we actually see an increase in the use of some of these unmarked plurals, um, when we're borrowing in certain words. So, borrowing in buffalo, for instance, or moose, we end up sort of borrowing them in as unmarked plurals where the singular or the plural are the same exact form, because we already had other animal names that followed that kind of pattern.
With adjectives, we're going to notice a huge, huge, ancient adjectives. Adjectives suffered the greatest inflectional loss by far compared to Old English to Middle English. And we see that adjectives in Old English were the most highly inflected class, and they're pretty much just uninflected or very barely inflected in Middle English. We've lost all of the case and gender markings that are corresponding with the nouns. Possessive endings are lost, um. We see just a very faint bit of some strong and weak distinction, but most of this is lost, except for in monosyllabic adjectives that end in a consonant. And with this distinction, it's only that the singular and plural weak ones and the plural strong one have a final 'e'. The singular strong doesn't have any marking. So, we're already seeing the markings. This is the entire adjective chart. If you remember the Old English adjective chart, you remember that there were lots and lots of differences between strong, between weak, between different cases. There were all sorts of different markers. And by the time we get to Middle English, this, this one, this chart is all that we have left of adjectives, and it's only in monosyllabic adjectives ending in a consonant. So, a word like blind for blind, um, would have an 'a' ending in the weak cases and in plural cases, but not anywhere else. And we wouldn't see any endings in any other kinds of adjectives.
So, we end up with comparative and superlative forms that are developing. This is something that happened sort of predictably and wasn't really a sort of remarkable kind of thing. We'll see some changes to that over time as we move into Early Modern English. We see the use of "one" as a sort of way to use adjective descriptions, um, developing Middle English. But the Old English pattern is still able to function where adjectives can be used as nouns. So, things like Alfred the Great is still allowed in Middle English, but we're seeing this less commonly compared to something like "he is a great one." We can't just say "he is a great." We can't use that as a noun any longer, um, in those ways like we were able to in Old English. We see that reduction in loss of final vowels that ultimately destroys the inflectional distinctions in adjectives. French couldn't really enforce any of these distinctions because their plural marker was an 's' in French as well. So, similar to what we see in our nouns today, and borrowed French words tended to retain this 's', but more as a marker that they were not native words. So, we see this in some of the borrowings in adjectives, still not just in nouns, but only in certain cases.
So, if we look at some examples from Chaucer, you see in "plagueis," "principles," "principle regions," "steres," "fixes," "fixed stars." You see this when you have the adjective after the noun. But if the adjective is before the noun, which is what we do in present day English, it has no 's'. So, "diverse languages," "celestial bodies," "principally divisions." So, we see some differences where we're only seeing that 's' being retained when the adjective is following the noun, not when it's before the noun. So, this is already leading us to losing that because we ended up sticking with the pattern of keeping adjectives before nouns, and we weren't adding that 's' ending in that case.
One of the only word classes that still maintained a lot of its distinctions from Old English would be pronouns, and especially personal pronouns. This would be the most well-maintained word class that we still see. Almost all of the Old English inflectional distinctions remain, except for dual number. And so, we still see some gender changes as well. So, gender is starting to shift from being grammatical because Old English had nouns that were grammatically gendered, and everything had a particular gendered pronoun. And we see this turning into a social distinction in the Middle English time period. So, we see a maintenance in gender in third person singular, something we still see today with things like he, she, it, they. But there was confusion with this. There was variation. There were some unexplained sound changes and some of the words that happened. We'll see a lot of variation on the chart, as we saw when we were looking at some different dialect variations. And some scholars will argue that it's sort of strange to maintain gender here if you're not also maintaining it in the nouns and the adjectives and other pronouns. It's sort of weird to leave it in only in this area. So, it's kind of strange that English has maintained a social gender in this area, even though it hasn't maintained gender in other areas. It's also argued that gender isn't really necessary here. We're seeing some examples of changes in pronouns even today where there is a less of a reliance or less of a need to rely on specific sort of social binary gendered ideas of social gender. And Chaucer doesn't make a gender distinction in third person singular and just uses the equivalent of something like "it" for all third-person, uh, pronouns.
Um, we also see a shift in the second person pronouns. And this is probably one of the biggest changes that took place during the Middle English period. We start seeing the plural, uh, form of the second person used increasingly for politeness, something that originated from French. So, French and Spanish are languages that will frequently do this. The polite usage of the second person plural remained a feature, but then it eventually just completely replaced the plural. So, um, our "you" form that we have today was originally our second person plural marker, and is now used as our second person singular because that polite usage ended up sort of taking over and becoming the sole usage for that second person marker. So, if we look at this, we'll notice that the dual category is missing from the Old English chart, but we still have most of those other distinctions still being maintained where we have different subject, object, possessive markers. And this is something we still see in present-day English. So, the pronunciations of these words would be different, but a lot of them look relatively similar to, um, already. So, we can see in the second person some of those changes where things like thou and thee and thine, um, would have fallen by the wayside by the end of Middle English. And those second person plural ones like yay and you and your are ones that we're going to see sort of replace them. And then in the third person, you see that in the masculine forms, um, hey, him, he's, um, look very similar to our present day one, so just pronounced a little bit different. It is coming from that neuter option. And then you see in the feminine and in the plural, lots and lots and lots of variation. There's not anything that's easily, um, seen that is completely aligned. So, the subject pronouns, she is one of the options, her is one of the options. So, some of these sort of went out over the others, but there's a lot of variation during this time in those particular forms.
Especially with verbs, we're going to see a lot of changes as well. So, with all of these changes, Middle English is retaining the verbal categories of tense, of mood, of number, of person. We're seeing a few of those still maintained in present-day English today, but we've lost a lot of that as well. They still also preserve the basic distinction between strong and weak verbs. But then we start seeing a new type of verb introduced that becomes more and more common as time goes on, where we have a two-part verb, such as something like "take over" or "pick up." And we have a lot of those in present-day English. So, we're starting to see this complex system of paraphrastic verb phrases found that we see in present-day English. So, using auxiliary words, using additional words in, of, to create a more complex verb phrase is beginning during this time period, but not nearly as fully fleshed out as what we see today.
There are still strong and weak verbs in Middle English. The strong verbs were the biggest casualty in proportion, since there were more weak verbs to begin with and strong verbs, um. So, the strong verbs that there weren't all that many of, they're very strongly affected by this. They still maintained those seven different classes that we had in Old English, um, but the sound changes sort of blurred some of the distinctions in the classes, so they're not as easy to see those distinctions. And a lot of these verbs had strong and weak forms that tend to sort of fall together and just become weak verbs in Middle English. And then most of our loan words that we borrowed, most of our French loan words are entering as weak verbs for the most part. So, this is something that was not really sudden. Some of these things are actually still in existence and still changing today. So, the loss of strong verbs is very slowly changing over time, and we still actually see a few examples of this, uh, remaining. So, in Old English, we mentioned that class three verbs are the ones that were best preserved, and some of those are still sort of going from strong into weak. So, what we now consider those irregular forms are still in the process of regularizing in some ways. So, "thrive" versus "throat" or "thrive" versus "thrived" is something that within the last hundred years, the sort of preference for "throve" versus "thrived" has already changed, um. So, we're still seeing some of these undergo changes, um, even in the present day, as we're continuing to sort of regularize that pattern into those weak forms.
So, if we compare the Old English ones, you notice that each of those classes has very distinct, different sounds that sort of show us what the sound change internally is between the different forms that are helpful for us, um. So, looking at the infinitive, the preterite, the plural, and the past participle. And then by the time we get to Middle English, you'll notice that a lot of these are conflating. We don't see the same diphthongs anymore. We see a lot of overlap between some of the other ones. Seven has sort of conflated into just one form as opposed to two forms, and there's not as much distinction between them in by this point. And a lot of this distinction is just going to continue to fall. A lot of these words are going to end up just becoming more like weak verbs as time goes on.
The weak verbs themselves, we also lost a lot of them, more so than strong verbs, but this is largely because we just had so many weak verbs to begin with that in terms of raw numbers, we lost more weak verbs, but in terms of the proportion of verbs, strong verbs were more affected than weak verbs. A lot of our Old English verbs during this time period were replaced and lost, and then replaced with loan words, um. And so, most of the words that were replaced were replaced with other weak verbs. So, we got some from Scandinavian languages, some from French. So, words like "cover," "join," "language," um, words like "blather," "call," "cast," many others are coming in. And these are coming in primarily as weak verbs. And during this time period, we had two classes of weak verbs that could be found. We had an 'ed' preterit and a 'd', 'de', or 'te' preterit. This distinction also goes by the wayside in Middle English, and we just end up having either a dental preterit for the weak verb or an irregular verb.
Some of the other word classes that did have some changes as well. We have prepositions, and prepositions are probably the one word class that really, um, picked up and were used more. We see an increase in usage of prepositions to fill that gap in inflection. So, most of our Old English prepositions survive through Middle English. A few of them we end up not really seeing anymore. So, "mead" for "along with" was replaced with "with." So, that one that was very Germanic, um, "umba" for "around" or "about" ended up going by the wayside. We also lose things like "for," "width," "even," "long," "on," "under." Some French ones that we had borrowed also sort of stop being used by the end of the time period. And we're seeing some new prepositions formed in a couple of different ways. We can compound two or more existing prepositions. We see a conversion of other words into prepositions, and we also just borrow some prepositions from other languages during this time as well. So, some of the new compounds are things like "above," "out of," "unto," um, where we're seeing things sort of squish together. We see some conversion, so "a long," um, which was an adjective in Old English, "among," which was, uh, used as an "among in a crowd," "behind," and "beneath" were adverbs that we sort of turned into prepositions. And then lots of borrowings, things like French "according to," "round," "during," the Norse "till," Latin "except." So, we're adding lots of prepositions during this time because we're losing so much of that inflection.
With conjunctions, most of the Old English conjunctions survive into Middle English and even today, um. So, "and," "for," "ack" for "and," "or" were still found in Middle English. The most frequent subordinating conjunction was "that," and we still use that frequently for subordination in present-day English. Some others included "yif" for "if," "thea" for "though," "era" for "before," and "as." Subordination became more widely used, we end up seeing an increase in some of the conjunctions that were necessary as well. Most of these were compounds that included other pronouns, so things like "how that," "which that," "after that," "because that," "also," "soon as that," "for as soon as." Um, so we see some of those more phrase-level conjunctions starting to come into play as well.
And then finally, a couple of the other word classes that we don't have a lot to talk about, but do, uh, have some things to mention. Demonstratives, by the end of the Middle English period, has a pretty simple, similar system to what we see today. Um, so we have two demonstratives for numbers, so "this" and "these" versus "that" and "those." And we established the single definite article "the," as opposed to all the other ones that we saw in Old English that also weren't used all that frequently. We get some interrogative distinctions. So, the distinction between "who" and "whom" is already starting to be confusing, um, by the end of the Middle English time period. Most writers don't even really make that distinction. Some people that are sort of more into prescriptive grammar might still for focus on a distinction. The actual distinction is just a subject versus object distinction, but knowing exactly where the subject or object is when there are pronouns involved is something that's already starting to confuse writers in Middle English and continues even up until the present day. So, we see "who," "whom," "who's" in the masculine and feminine, so thinking of that as a person marker, and then a non-person marker of things like "what," um, or "who's" during Middle English. So, things that are still relatively similar to what we see today. And then interjections were things that were starting to show up in writing. So, they're trying to reproduce some of those actual expressive articulations in the form of different sorts of interjections. So, we get "ah" for surprise, "ho" for triumph, "haha" for laughter. And we see a lot of this continue, and we'll see over time those sort of expand and, uh, become more and more common as we move further along into English.
So, that covers a lot of the morphology changes and a lot of the things we lost during this time period. As always, if you have any questions, you should send me an email, schedule some office hours, bring questions to class, as we practice all of this together.