The Auchinleck Manuscript: Middle English Language - Book Report/Review Example

The Auchinleck manuscript is one of the most famous manuscripts surviving from the medieval period. It is an extensive collection of Middle English that contains forty-four texts including seventeen romances. It was compiled around 1330-40 and copied by six scribes in some kind of "bookshop" in London. Sir Orfeo is one of the romances found in this Manuscript. "Sir Orfeo occurs at folios 299 recto to 303 recto in the Auchinleck manuscript, immediately after the romance Sir Tristrem, and followed the Four Foes of Mankind." The text itself might have been composed in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. It is present in variant versions in two other manuscripts, London British Library, Harley 3810, a manuscript dated to the fifteenth century with an origin in WarWickshire; and Oxfored, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 61, a late fifteenth- and early sixteenth- century volume, possibly of Northeast Midlands origin. The first thirty eight lines of the romance are missing in the Auchinleck manuscript; however, they are repeated later in the manuscript as an introduction to another Romance, The Lay le Freyne. The poem belongs to the Breton Lay sub-genre of Romance. The Breton Lay written Format was first adopted by a twelfth century poet, Marie de France. That genre is usually sang by a minstrel and accompanied by music. Indeed, this is the case in Sir Orfeo. The lyrical nature of the text is proven by its composition as it is arranged in rhyming couplets. The theme of Sir Orfeo revolves around an arthurian knight;"Sir Orfeo is a mediavlized account of the classical legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, told by Virgil and Ovid, and later recontextualized by Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy". This version of the romance transforms the classical version favouring a happy non allegorical resolution rather than the tragic classical style. There are many proposed sources for parts of Sir Orfeo including a non-extant french lay about the hero. The narrative composition in inspired by Celtic sources particularly in the account of fairies and the otherworld. 1 The language of the Sir Orfeo text has traits of Middle English. The scholarly title "Middle English" represents a transitional level between Old and Modern English. However, Middle English can be considered by itself a new language. It is characterized by its low status as well as by the impact of Danish, French and Latin. Middle English came to end around 1450 with the emergence of standardizing government usage and the publishing of first European press. The preceding factors led to the creation of a more elevated English, early modern English. 2 Middle English, being the element of the tripartite that precedes and introduces modern English, can be approach in two different ways. On one hand, Middle English has inherited many traits of the Old English language. On the other hand, Middle English can be looked at as a link to Modern English. In fact, Middle English conatains a lot of words spelled the same way as they are in present time English although meanings may not be the same. Throughout the Sir Orfeo romance, we can find words that are still used in the everyday English language of the twenty-first- century, of those we can mention: Fairy, Love, Himself, melody, king, precious and a lot of others. All the latter words are used in their modern meaning. 3 Middle English is characterized by its blending of Germanic and Romance in sound, spelling, and vocabulary. In San Orfeo, "The word fairy here and elsewhere in the poem means "land of the fays" or the "fays" themselves. The word fay comes from Old French fe derived from the Latin fata, "the Fates". Many other words of French origin can be detected, of which we can point some examples: layes, auentours, meruailes and sir. A notable feature of present-day English vocabulary first emerged in Middle English: parallel pairs of Germanic and French-cum Latin words, such as freedom/liberty, hearty/cordial, knight/chevalier, lawful/legal". We notice the usage of the word "Knighte" in Sir Orfeo favouring the Germanic language. 4 In fact, Middle English was considered throughout its history lower than French and Greek. However, many factors combined to help increase its status and to give it a social and political prestige. The following factors cover three aspects: spelling, pronunciation and Morphology. As far as Orthography is concerned, for several centuries, the written Middle English retained many of the features of Old English orthography when both script and style eventually changed under the influence of French. The visual results, however, were radically different, making it hard for later readers to sort out any continuity of pronunciation between the two writing systems. 5 Notably, the script lost its distinctive rune-based letters, thorn being the last to go. The Old English letters , and runed 'wynn' transformed in Middle English into a/e, th/ and w respectively. We notice that the entire Sir Orfeo poem contains no other letters than the ones of the actual English alphabet. It comes as a fact that Middle English is a lot more understandable to the present time readers than Old English. Whereas, Old English spelling was relatively stable and regular, Middle English spelling varied greatly from place to place, person to person, and period to period, offering many variants for the same words: thus, Old English le/macron/af (Modern English leaf) had the Middle English forms life, lieif, leif, leue, leuue, leaue, etc. 6 Sometimes, in the same poem we can find the same word written in two different spellings. Like with Old English, analysis of the pronunciation of Middle English poses many ambiguities. However, one rule might make it easier to analyze Middle English phonetically, almost every letter, excepting very few cases, in a given text, is pronounced. The pronunciation of the Old English sounds/letters cn-, as in cnawan, continued for centuries, but with such new spellings as know (indicating in this instance the loss of infinitive ending -an) the link between the two forms was no longer obvious. Furthermore, when the pronunciation of the k at length died out, the present day language was left with such fossil written forms as know, knee, knight and knot. Comparably, pronunciations like that of the ch in german ach and nacht continued for most of the middle English period in England and continue in the present time for certain purposes in Scotland, but were represented in middle English by gh, which also survives as a fossil in present day spelling, either unpronounced, as in such words as light, height, and night, or pronounced as "f" in such words as rough, tough, and laughter. In San Orfeo, we notice the words "Heighte, anought, nought, neighe, heighe, seighe, eighe,". Old English classified monophthongal vowels in two categories: long and short. In Middle English, on the contrary, long vowels were not marked with macrons like they were in Old English. Middle English is marked by the tendency to blur the distinction between the vowel-sounds in the unstressed syllables of words reducing them to (-e) the sound heard in the unstressed, second syllable of the word "China". As an example to what precedes we can mention from Sir Orfeo the words: wite, gile, name, alle, bore, knighte, ..etc. However, we can distinguish the latter examples from the word Pit, a French inspired word signifying sorrow. The e in Pit is pronounced like the a in gate.In the Owl and the Nightinale, the unstressing of syllable is extremely visible as we can find rhymes between the words tipinge/singe. 7 In addition, Nouns, adjectives and determiners are no longer marked for grammatical gender; the distinction between Masculine and Feminine was lost. In Old English, the grammatical gender was determined through inflectional differences. 8 When it comes to Morphology, the difference between Old English and Middle English is most visible. Besides the simplification of inflections, the syntax of the sentence was simplified. Middle English relied mostly on word-order and prepositions to mark the relations between words in a sentence. Unlike Old English that distinguished the nominative form from the accusative form, it is in most cases the word order that permits the distinction between subject and object in Middle English. Writers in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries generally wrote the English they spoke. The scribes who copied their work either preserved the writers' language or used their own. In some cases a single scribe seems to have translated from an original into his own dialect. Other texts,however, are composite, two or more copyists seem to have worked on the text. Of the later theory, the Owl and the Nightingale is a very well known example. . In the Owl and the nightingale, the northern dialect can be easily detected. The poem is divided into two passages, clearly each one written by a different scribe. If we compare two passage of this poem, one from the beginning A and the other from the end B, we will notice a clear difference. Passage A : in eyen beo colblake & brode, Ryht so hi weren ipeynt myd wode; u starest so u wille abyten Al at u myht myd clyure smyten; i bile is stif & sarp & hoked Passage B Wi heore kunne heo beo [m]ildre, & yeue rente lutle childre: So heore wit hi deme a-dwole, at euer abit Mayster Nichole. Ah vte we ah to hym fare, By examining the above passages, we notice two different spellings for the same word: bop in passage A and boep in passage B.9 From the literary point of you, an examination of the following passage of Sir Orfeo would be revealing. In Breteyne this layes were wrought, First y-founde and forth y-brought, Of aventours that fel bi dayes, Wherof Bretouns maked her layes. We notice that San Orfeo is basically composed of octosyllabic lines forming couplets. Unlike Old English that opted for monosyllabic words, Middle English words are in multisyllabic in most cases. That is certainly due to the inflexional disappearance. We can notice a parallelism in the phrases structure . We notice the rhyming words: wrought/brought, dayes /layes.10 Middle English as a unity was not perfectly uniform. John Trevisa, a scholar, distinguished between Southeron, Northeron and Mydell speche. That distinction was expanded by many scholars that tended to differentiate south eastern from south western and west midland from east midland. Chaucer noticed three main types of features that permitted to differentiation between regional dialects: -Phonological: The northern tended to preserve Old English. When London English had an open o in the words bathe twa wha, northern English wrote them as follows, bothe two who. In the line 585 from Sir Orfero, we notice he used the word "bathe" with the a being pronounced as an open o: And bathed him and schaved his berd However, in line 83, he used two spelled the "northern way": The two maidens hir biside That can be justified by the fact that two scribes might've copied the text so we can distinguish the dialect variation. One way or another, it is hard to pull out any strict grammar rules in Middle English. San Orfeo represents the London usage of the language before Chaucer, we notice the use of "aski" for ask. -inflexional: the northern and north midland's marks of third person -e(S) spread in the middle English period to substitute the southern -th form. 468 And nedes thou most thi word hold. -Lexical: There are many scandinivian words used in northern dialects that are alien to London English like for example the words heythen 'hence', ille 'bad' and hope 'except'. The York play of the Crucifixion is an example of the Northern dialect.11 The period of Middle English was unstable. It was caught both in speech and writing between two very different languages types (Germanic and Romance) and subordinated to French in a time of great and rapid change. In this, its condition was much like that of subordinated languages worldwide at the present time . Many such languages are in the shadow of world standard English., and they exhibit the same fluidity and tendency to absorb usages of all kinds from more influential languages, again notably English. In some cases hybridization has been so great that some languages are changing towards English such as Middle English became half Romance especially in lexical terms. 12 Sir Orpheo Manuscript. Sir Orpheo Manuscript 2 References A Book of Middle English, John Anthony Burrow, Thorlac Turville-Petre, Blackwell Publishing, 1996. The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700: 1300 - 1700, Julia C. Crick, Alexandra Walsham, Cambridge University Press, 2004. The Cambridge History of the English Language: 1066-1476, Richard M. Hogg, Norman Francis Blake, Suzanne Romaine, Roger Lass, R. W. Burchfield, John Algeo, Cambridge University Press, 1992 Rereading Middle English Romance: Manuscript Layout, Decoration, and the Rhetoric of Composite Structure, Murray James Evans, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1995 Essentials of Early English: Old, Middle and Early Modern English, Jeremy J. Smith, Routledge, 1999 Old and Middle English: An Anthology, Elaine M. Treharne,Blackwell Publishers, 2000. The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Tom McArthur,Oxford University Press, 1992 http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/orfeo.htm Read More