Appunti lingua inglese II

MIDDLE ENGLISH LEXIS AND SEMANTICS

Middle English is the period when the English vocabulary underwent a thorough change: French, Latin and Old Norse were the major factors of influence, while limited influence was exercised by Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

THE INFLUENCE OF FRENCH

In the first decades after 1066 those who spoke Norman French were the Norman invaders. From approximately the middle 12th century most members of the aristocracy were bilingual; it's unlikely there would have been many monolingual Anglo-Norman speakers by that point.

13th - 14th centuries: we find educational treatises which provide instructions in French; The target audience of these treaties are not only the aristocracy, but members of the middle classes as well.

MANIERES DE LANGUAGE

A group of French conversation manuals dating to the first half of 15th century. 13 surviving texts in ten different manuscripts, possibly deriving from three manuals produced between 1396 and 1415.

MIDDLE ENGLISH LEXIS AND

lord, lady and earl, most designation of rank and titles were borrowed from French: princess, prince, duchess, duke, count, sir, Madame. Art, painting, sculpture, music, beauty, colour, image. Cathedral, castle, palace, ceiling, cellar, chimney, porch. Fashion, dress, gown, coat, lace, embroidery, button, mitten, boots. Blue, brown, scarlet – not only nouns but adjectives and verbs were borrowed as well.

WHAT ABOUT THE GERMANIC ORIGIN WORDS? Many Anglo-Norman and Central French words already had Germanic equivalents in English and continued to exist, leading to a stylistic splitting of the vocabulary of English. Thus a word like work is a Germanic word and the normal everyday word whereas labour is a Romance loanword which is regarded as being on a higher level. In other cases the Romance loanword has come to have a slightly different meaning to the Germanic base word, cf. ask and demand where the latter (Romance) word has the implication of insisting on something. Among the various types of

Changes which took place in the period in which Middle English borrowed from French through direct contact, are those which led to a mixing of Germanic and Romance elements. Thus there are cases of assimilation in which an English word was created on the basis of a similar sounding French word. E.g. the French form complementing the English one. For example, the English verb choose obtained a noun choice on the basis of a borrowing of French choix.

In some cases it is not possible to decide whether the Germanic or the Romance form of a word survived into Modern English. Thus in the case of the adjective rich one cannot tell whether it is a continuation of the Old English rice or the later French borrowing riche.

However, in many cases we see a contamination of the morphology of words due to French borrowing. With the previous adjective one can see the Romance suffix in the noun formed from it: richess as opposed to Old English richdom with the Romance ending -ess.

The form of a word may have been

changed without its meaning having been affected. With the Old English word iegland / iland (cf. German Eiland) the later spelling of onear arrives at the later spelling island under the influence of French isle. Note that the s here is unetymological, i.e. was never pronounced in English. Some French loanwords were influenced by changes later than Middle English. This is for example the case with Old French viage which was borrowed into Middle English but where the later French form voyage was borrowed into English and adapted in its pronunciation. The same is true of the Middle English noun flaute which was changed under the influence of later French flute.

CHRONOLOGY OF BORROWING

The form of many French loanwords can be used to date borrowing. Essentially 2 strands of French influence: an early Anglo-Norman one and a later Central French one. catch These can be identified phonologically as can be seen in the word pairs and and chase, cattle and chattels, captiare and capitale or and (from and in Latin).

In the first word we can see Middle English which was borrowed from Norman French as the retention of the /k/ before /a/ was a feature of Norman French. After 1250 the influence of Central French was predominant in England. In this variety of French the original /k/ retained in Norman French was shifted to /tʃ/ which is reflected in the writing where c was changed to ch. Thus we have the Central French verb being borrowed into ME as chase.

However, the later borrowing did not replace the earlier one - if two variant forms come to be distinguished semantically their continuing existence in the language is as good as guaranteed. Not the case with a number of other Norman French borrowings which were replaced by the later Central French ones: cancel; chalice, charite, chancel.

The Central French /tʃ/ underwent the further change to /ʃ/ in the course of the post-Middle English period and later loans reflect this.

Thus we have champagne and aschef Middle English loans from Central French with /tʃ/ but words like and with /ʃ/ are of a later origin. Similar differences in pronunciation can be used to date other loanwords from French. For example the relationship of /dž/ and /ž/ shows the relative chronology of borrowing: siege, judge, age. The older loans such as rouge show the affricate /dž/ whereas newer loans from the Early Modern English period have the simple fricative typical of Modern French as in /ru:ž/; with the word there still exist two alternative pronunciations /ˡgærɪdʒ/ and /gəˡrɑ:ʒ/.

THE INFLUENCE OF ANGLO-NORMAN AND CENTRAL FRENCH

Food-related discourse: one of the semantic fields which was highly influenced by French in the Middle English period.

Food and cooking: boil; fry; roast; mince; dine; dinner; supper; appetite; flour; grease; sugar; spice; vinegar; bacon; victuals; lard, pork; beef; mutton; veal; venison; sausage; sauce; gravy; jelly; salad; juice; cabbage; cream; biscuit;

fritter; cider; cucumber; onion.

THE INFLUENCE OF CENTRAL FRENCH

On the one hand, the influx of these terms reflects the role of Central French as the new international prestige variety, on the other hand it shows that English was expanding its range of functions in new official and formal contexts.

MIDDLE ENGLISH LEXIS AND SEMANTICS

With the arrival of thousands of new French words, many native Germanic words were lost: an estimated 85 per cent of the OE lexemes are no longer in use.

Not the case for all languages spoken in Britain:

Scots - a West Germanic language variety spoken in Scotland (and parts of Ulster in the north of Ireland); ken, kirk, mair.

Many Germanic words remained in usage

In some cases both native and loan word coexisted, forming pairs with more or less synonymous senses: hearty vs cordial, house vs mansion, doom vs judgement, child vs infant.

In early ME about 90 per cent of the words are estimated to be native; towards the end of the 15th century this share is reduced to 75 per cent.

cent.THE SIZE OF ENGLISH LEXICONOE – circa 30.000-50.000 words

ME – circa 100.000-125.000 words

Modern English – over half a million words

THE INFLUENCE OF LATIN th thMost Latin loans can be dated at 14 and 15 centuries; these reflects languagecontact in the written medium and language use dominated by men.

Major fields of borrowing include law, theology, Bible translation, medicine, scienceand literature: allegorie, historie, meditacioun, tract.

THE INFLUENCE OF OLD NORSE thHer lid gv[n]ni eorles feolaga – an inscription on an early 11 century grave-makerfrom the Old Minister, Winchester, which apparently commemorates a Scandinavian ofthe time of Cnut. This means either “Here lies Gunni, Eorl’s Companion” or “Here liesGunni, the earl’s companion”.

1. Gunni – a Scandinavian personal name
2. Feolaga – a loanword from ON meaning “companion” (a Modern English“fellow”)
3. Earl (influenced by ON)

“jarl”) – a term of rank

4) Her Lid – modeled on the Latin memorial formula Hic iacet (“here lies”)

Loans from Norse include fellow, husband, ill, knife, leg, skill, skirt, sky, take, though, want, wrong, and (very importantly) the pronouns they, them, and their.

MARKED ON LEXICON IN SCOTS

http://fig.cox.miami.edu/~burgess/norse/words.html

https://www.polyglossic.com/ o dric-treasure-nordic-languages

THE INFLUENCE OF FRENCH, LATIN & OLD NORSE

Not all parts of speech are equally represented as loanwords: nouns and adjectives are by far the most frequently transferred word-classes, followed by verbs and adverbs, and far ahead of “grammar-words” such as conjunctions and pronouns.

MIDDLE ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY

Most of the important changes which transformed English from a mainly synthetic to a predominantly analytic language occurred during the ME period.

The decline/decay of inflectional endings:- Step 1: the full quality of the vowels /aː ɔː uː