Major Morphological Changes from Old to Middle English - Coursework Example

Major Morphological Changes from Old to Middle English This paper is concerned with analyzing the major changes in morphology or form from Old English to Middle English. Old English is a very synthetic and inflecting language. The Middle English change or rather evolution consists principally in a shift towards an analytic structure that eventually approaches that of contemporary language. The change, except from the some verb and noun residues and pronouns is close to isolating. Isolating or analytic refers to a language that indicates an organization through words that are separate in a given order rather than one through word affixes, which is synthetic. More lovely is analytic as compared to lovelier which is synthetic in nature. This explanation bases on simple rules of grammar that govern the manner in which issues are formed in the essence of. The examples below show some of the changes that have occurred from Old to Middle English. Genitive singular principally –(e)s, from the strong masculine some disparity with new of­-phrases zero-genitives tend to be relics of other Old English classes §       e.g. MW 175 Hevene Kyng (Old English heofone, -an) It is easy to note that the –s moving into the genitive plural but is this from the other plural instances or from the G.singular. Dative In early Middle English, it is obvious to frequently get –e as “a general post-prepositional marker”, but it’s ‘available’ but not ‘a must’ MW 162: i burtherne of bearne    In late Middle English, it’s practically disappeared: if it survives it tends to be at line ends in verse: to ship-e, fro yer to yeer-e Once final –e has stopped being a grammatical inflection, it is accessible for other functions For instance, Old English on lífe (-e D. singular.) -> alive (at the present a diacritic) Personal pronouns    Personal pronouns remain to be the sole word class that has consistently maintained inflection for no genitive and for other cases such as gender also. This happened due to the introduction of new pronouns like they/them/their, and she. Secondly, the eventual number loss distinction for second person in the event that ye is used as in the polite singular. The dative and accusative distinction disappeared; this is usually put or leveled as dative. More so, the three statements below give a clear distinction between Old and Middle English Old English ðæt middan-eard sy gehæled þurh hine Middle English that the world be sauyd by hym (MW 142-3, v. 17) new forms of the genitive: their … their(e)s Context for new pronouns o      in Old English, remember that hī has a possibility of being plural: nominative or accusative singular: as feminine accusative For instance, in Old English, remember that feminine singular. héo masculine singular. Hé During the Middle English era, feminine héo would have an opportunity to converge with masculine hé What sound changes in Middle English additional eroded noun morphology?  When considering sound changes from Old English to Middle English, one can consider final stressed syllables in words. The changes in sound eroded the morphology of nouns from old English to Middle English (Treharne, 2004).        collapse of vowels to –e (and consequent disappearance)        merging of final /n/ and /m/   It is obvious that in case any distinctions are to be made and maintained, the natural candidates in the less that are likely to maintain their phonetic stability and perceptual saliency. as –en, the – an of the stems of n (‘weak’ nouns) did not completely die out as –(e)s, the –as/- es of the a-stems (‘strong masculine’ nouns) ultimately triumphant ancestor of PDE –s (plural, possessive) The table below shows how the erosion of inflections affects the a-stem or the strong masculine class of nouns with some distinctive inflections (Treharne, 2004). Case functions Old English masculine a-stem Early Middle English Late Middle English Singular. Acc/Nom stān ston stoon Singular. Dative stān-(e) ston-(e) Singular. Genitive stān-es ston-(es) stoon-(e)s Plural. Acc/Nom stān-as Plural. Dative stān-(um) Ston(en), -es Plural. Genitive stān-(a) Ston(e), -es Table from Lass, p. 109  Still there are perceptible variations in Middle English between –s and –n as a marker in the plural perspective. Nouns: mostly plurals No matter what their Old English noun class, most Middle English nouns have plurals in –es        the –s ending was “phonetically stable and perceptually distinct”        the masculine a-stems were the most common noun class in Old English o      Old English word ‘words’ becomes Middle English wordes o      Old English bec ‘books’ becomes Middle English bookes       swikes 14 and sterres 3 were both weak nouns in Old English (swican steorran)        landes 6 was a sturdy neuter long-stem (plural. land) Changes from Old English genitive to ‘possessive adjectives’   o      In Old English the genitive could come about as o      object of verbs: fanda mīn ‘try me’ o      object of partitives: ān hiora ‘one of them’   o      ultimately they “became exclusively attributes of nouns” ‘my son’ mīn sunu o      “new forms of min and þīn also formed from the changes from Old to Middle English created by deleting of final n now syntactic: Give me my hat! That hat is mine! distinction first phonological: thin enemyes … thi fyngris Your(e)s, our(e)s, her(e)s, are new forms of the genitive myn hous … or elles … your-es, al this good is our-es (Ch) Adjectives In Old English adjectives belonged to two declensions, ‘weak and strong’ It depends on the how definite the noun-phrase and the adjective appears in is the ‘weak’ declension was used where categorical information was intended or brought about by a determiner”        þā ealdan ceorlas o      “the ‘richer’ declension that is strong tended to be used after … items not rich in number/case/gender information, or when the adjective lacked pre-modifiers §       ealde ceorlas In Middle English, this distinction was lost;    by late Middle English, there were inflections only on adjectives that are monosyllabic in nature boiled down to an opposition between forms with and without –e in attributive plurals: long-e shoures, nyghtes, sot-e   One of the last native adjectives to inflect for number was Old English enoh, enow, enog-e -> enough after determiners: the cold-e steele, this good-e wyf texts often show forms that are ‘incorrect’ sometimes exploited for metrical purposes some adjectives of French origin are or could be inflected for number: letters patents  o      postposed: knight errant (governor general)   Strong Weak Singular. blind blinde Plural. blinde blinde   So: Adjectives in old English were weak if After a determiner (demonstrative, possessive, definite article, pronoun or noun) In direct address Adjectives were deemed strong in Old English if they appear Without a determiner In predicate position of an adjective (“the woman is old”) Gender: Changes from ‘grammatical’ in Old English to ‘biological’ in Middle English Gender: predicts what adjectives and pronouns will occur with the noun Concord: Old English: þæt wīf ‘the woman Anaphora: PDE: the wife … her… Old English: þæt wīf … his ‘its’… Biological gender in Middle English: It was a system where sex or the lack of sex became the sole determinant: SEX (M or F) versus a neutral NON-SEX. As early as the 10th century the evolution begun in the north towards the south and the change was primarily from the interference from Latin and French during the evolution. From Old English se, sēo, þæt, ‘that’ and þis ‘this’ to Middle English the, that, and this. It changed to Middle English that, the, and this. The changes from Old English also included sē, sēo, þæt PDE demonstrative pronoun those, that (number) PDE definite article the (indeclinable) ‘THAT’ Singular     Plural   Masculine Feminine Neuter (all genders) N sē -> þe sēo þæt -> þat þā -> þō, þo-s-e A þone þā þæt þā G þæs þære þæs þāra D þām þære þām þām   ‘THIS’ Singular     Plural         (all genders) Old English Nom þēs (masculine.) þis (neuter) þēos þās after C13th Middle English þes (south) þis (north)   þas, þos even later Middle English   this (everywhere)   þis-e þes-e Now   this   these There are some very exciting developments in the change from Old to New English. For instance, it is exciting to try and check out how –s is used in or as a plural in the word those Check how plural ending in adjectives –e functions in thise, those, and these        how ðá changes to thó and then later to tho-s-e        how this and these competed with each other to come up with the meaning ‘this’        And finally how plurals that are formed from them (these and thise) competed with each other to mean ‘these’ The inflection of verbs in Middle English The Middle English verb in diverse syntactic contexts could take a finite (inflected) or a non-finite (uninflected) form. The finite forms were inflected by means of suffixation, ie. the addition of inflectional morphemes to the end of the stem of a word, for the subsequent verbal sub-categories: mood: indicative, imperative, subjunctive; tense: past; present number: singular, present; person: first person, second person, third person The non-finite forms that are unmarked for person, tense and person, were: past participle, infinitive, present participle, and gerund. From the time of Chaucer the two obtained in the last time more or less regularly having the same –ing ending and started to indistinguishable formally though still different functionally ( ). Syntactically, the gerund and the infinitive functioned as nouns while the participles acted as adjectives. Basing on inflections, verbs in the Middle English have a three category structure. They are strong, weak and highly irregular. The basic difference between them in the manner in which they form their past participle and past tense, strong verbs built by means of alternation of the root vowel and the marker of weak verbs in a dental suffix. This is usually –t, -ed or –d that are attached to the root of the word after which the ending that is inflectional marks the number or the person added. The shift of verbs from a category to another got accompanied by the enhancement of the number of irregularities within the system of the strong verb, which in turn ensured that it accelerated the process. The disintegration of the system called ablaut, which attempts to fit most verbs that are strong into a weak paradigm entirely changed the perception to irregularity from the ablaut feature that is systematic. Consequently, during the 14th century any chance of productivity of a category that is strong that is lost and the distinction should rather be put between productive and unproductive or regular and irregular verbs with some groups added from other categorical sets like some modals (Krygier 1997). a)    Irregular verbs – that form the past by means of ablaut or by adding of a dental suffix or by the transformation of a stem-vowel and, in other cases, of a stem-consonant, for example. kepen to kept, cachen to kaught. The latter originate from a distinctive sub-group of Old English weak verbs. This group was a source for the modern irregular verbs. b)    Regular verbs - forming the past participle and past tense by the productive rule of the accumulation of a dental suffix. They are ancestors to regular verbs in Modern English. c)    MAD verbs - the remains of Old English anomalous and preterite-present verbs and anomalous described in more detail in the previous section of this chapter. Changes in the constitutent changes and order in pronouns One of the major structural changes in English from old English is the disappearance of the order of OV. The current order was VO, where new lies in scare quotes since it is already common in old English. In the main clauses for instance, with subjects in the initial places; it is significant to remember that one reason is the exception that the object remains to be a pronoun, secondly, displays the OV order where instead of the subject, the negator comes in the position that was initial. In other historical descriptions Old English constituent order is shown by an organized as Subject Object and verb or the SOV. This is a considerable a two respect over-simplication. First of all the position of subjects. Old English exhibits patterns of word order which are a reminiscent of the Second Verb (V2) phenomenon that is found in many modern Germanic languages. Therefore, fronting of a number of ten leads to inversion of subject verb and hence to an order of words in which the verb that is finite occurs in the second position. The situation in Middle English in the early stage is comparable to Old English in a number of ways. Kroch and Taylor (2010) discuss the frequencies of inversion of subjects in seven texts from the early 13th century. The frequencies show that, as it is the case in Old English, inversion is still predominant fully. . The Old English dative form him for the masculine 3rd person singular personal pronoun that is singular was diverse from the accusative form (used for direct objects) hine (recognizable from the above example so prepositions were not used as much to carry out this function. When studying the history of a language such as English it is easy to fall into the trap of treating the earliest attested stage in this case Old English as the prelude point of developments one has interested in. But Old English did not happen out of the blue, and although we have no through documentary evidence of its ancestral language, by using evidence from related Germanic languages and other information of how languages tend to transform with time, we can piece together a fairly good picture of what the proto-language would have appeared like. The oldest Germanic language for which we have documentary proof is Gothic. Gothic is in many respects very analogous to Old English but it retains even more inflectional morphology. As a descendent from Proto-Germanic, it started out as a language that relied heavily on inflectional morphology to indication grammatical distinctions. As the result of a stress shift, however, the seeds had already been sown, in a manner of speaking, for the collapse of this system. The influx of the Vikings, and the language make contact with circumstances that OE speakers found themselves in as a consequence, contributed significantly to this collapse. (It is significant to realize that the weight budge alone would not necessarily have led to this: compare present-day German, where the system of inflectional morphology is still intact to relatively high degree.The morphological changes impacted on constituent order, and we have seen how with the vanishing of the OV prototype, the order progressively became more inflexible. The increased reliance on prepositions has also helped make up for the approximately complete thrashing of inflections. Pronoun system in Old English The pronoun system is more intricate in Old English as compared to other period sof language growth and evolution. The pronouns underwent inflection according to the accusative, normative, genitive, dative and instrumental case. The singular pronouns in the 3rd person correspond to the existing three genders of grammar. These are the neuter, the masculine, and the feminine. The 3rd person singular always begins with the grapheme (Gelderen 2006) There is some correspondence between old and modern pronouns however, this does not apply to the third person plural hi (Ælfric) and they (NASB), where the likeness is non-existent. The explanation below shows the possessive and personal pronouns found in texts that are compared. The pronouns appearing in bold display the form of the word that is normative, the italic typeface is the possessive pronoun, and the words placed after the slash is accusative. The dative or instrumental case depends on the function it has in the sentence where it is got from. This entirely applies to Old English as this was reduced in Middle English into the common or nominative, the case of the objective, and the genitive case. There lacks a correspondence between old and Middle English pronouns but this fails to apply to they (NASB) and hi (Ælfric), where the likeness is does not exist. In conclusion, many morphological changes have taken place between the old and the Middle English. Most of the changes have been changes in pronouns, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and general inflection as explained in the paper. The changes ensured that the Middle English was easier and had a corresponding flow and organization as compared to Old English. References Kroch, A. S., Randall, B., Santorini, B., Taylor, A., & University of Pennsylvania. (2010). Penn-Helsinki Philadelphia, PA: Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. Krygier, M. (1997). From regularity to anomaly: Inflectional i-umlaut in Middle English. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang. Gelderen, E. . (2006). A history of the English language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Treharne, E. M. (2004). Old and Middle English c.890-c.1400: An anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Read More