Слайд по дисциплине История языка на тему Middle

Слайд по дисциплине «История языка» на тему: Middle English Language

ПЛАН ЛЕКЦИИ 1. Middle English Dialects. 2. Middle English Written Records. 3. Middle English Phonetics. 4. Middle English Grammar.

Middle English Dialects EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH DIALECTS The following dialect groups can be distinguished: q The Southern group included the Kentish and the South-Western dialects. q The group of Midland (“Central”) dialects – corresponding to the OE Mercian dialect – is divided into West Midland East Midland. q The Northern dialects had developed from OE Northumbrian.

Middle English Dialects LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH DIALECTS The dialect division which appeared in Early ME was on the whole preserved in later periods. Yet, the relations among them were changing. The most important event in the changing linguistic situation was the rise of the London dialect as the prevalent written form of language.

Middle English Written Records EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH WRITTEN RECORDS q For a long time there were two written languages in England: Latin and French. q English was regarded as a tongue used only by common illiterate people and not fit for writing. q There are very few samples of Early ME written records. The earliest samples are the new entries made in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in the 12 th

Middle English Written Records LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH WRITTEN RECORDS The flourishing of literature in the second half of the 14 th c. , apart from its cultural significance, testifies to the complete reestablishment of English as the language of writing.

Middle English Written Records LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH WRITTEN RECORDS This period of literary florescence is known as the “Age of Chaucer”, the greatest name in English literature before Shakespeare. Other writers are referred to as “Chaucer’s contemporaries”.

Middle English Phonetics q The sound system of the English language has undergone profound changes. q The changes affected the pronunciation of words, word accentuation, the system of vowel and consonant phonemes. q The way of word accentuation, characteristic of OE, was considerably altered in the succeeding periods.

These changes were connected with the phonetic assimilation of thousands of borrowings (especially from French) adopted during the ME period.

Middle English Grammar The grammatical type of the language has changed from a synthetic, with well developed morphology, English has been transformed into a language of the ‘analytical type’, with analytical forms and ways of word connection prevailing over synthetic ones.

The division of words into parts of speech has proved to be one of the most permanent characteristics of the language. The only new part of speech was the article which split from the pronouns in Early ME.

Middle English Grammar The main direction of development for the nominal parts of speech in all the periods of history can be defined as morphological simplification.

Middle English Grammar The number of verbal grammatical categories increased: • the verb acquired the categories of Voice and Aspect; • the Future Tense developed; • in the category of Mood there arose new forms of the Subjunctive.

The main changes at the syntactical level were: the rise of new syntactic patterns, the development of the complex sentences and of diverse means of connecting clauses.